Originally posted by MarkS
There are also some references to books and authors where some of that information was taken from at the bottom if you want to check those out too.
I'll definatly check those out then.
Where did the Earth come from? As our sun condensed from interstellar gas (which is how we are currently observing, in every stage, thousands of stars just like our sun doing right now), it naturally took on a spin, as all things in the universe have a tendency to do. The layers of matter striated, and there were several lesser vortexes in the outer regions of the cloud, away from the rapid fusion center. They did not fall inward because rotational momentum overcame gravitational pull, again like just about everything else in the universe. They condensed, but the pressure was nowhere near enough to create fusion, and so they were just left as relatively inert blobs of matter, i.e. planets.
You're right, accepting evolution on blind faith is a huge step. Luckily for us, there's no reason we have to use that kind of faith. It is not terribly difficult to observe. Amino acids form naturally all the time, in wide ranges of conditions. Proteins also form from amino acids in random configurations all the time. There are numerous forms of microbes (not even considered "life" that are little more than self-reproducing blobs of protein. RNA is very complex, but it can self-reproduce with only a tiny fragment (like in deep-sea microbes, much less complex than even a simple virus), and the probability of such happening over a period of a billion years on an entire planet with ideal conditions for it taking place is almost certain. In fact, it almost certainly happened thousands, even millions of times before one strand was finally successful. Mutation would be and still is rampant, and the slightly more adaptable variations would survive and produce more like them, becoming more and more complex until it became something like simple algae, which soon covered the entire planet. We know this happened about 3 billion years ago, because this is when the first layers of organic soil began to appear.
Ok so far?
From there it was a ridiculously complex journey. Algae become lichens, become simple plants (like seaweed), becomes protozoans. I say "becomes" like it's something simple, but it takes hundreds of millions of generations of selective reproduction. We HAVE the fossil evidence for this, the first multicelled plants. From there it is relatively easy to track life's progress, through a long series of steps up until you get invertabre animals. Keep in mind that for most of Earth's history, it was only plants, and only aquatic. From there it's the widely known story: jellyfish to shellfish, etc., until you get vertebrae fish. Even the leap from assexual to sexual reproduction had many intermediate steps, which I'll go into if you want. Competition becomes extreme in the oceans, and some fish find surprising refuge on the shoreline, which aside from the competition would be a much harsher place for life to exist than the oceans. There are still fish that can do this, slither onto land for short distances. From there you get amphibians like frogs (but of course not literally frogs, and of course terrestrial plants. Amphibians evolve slowly, with several documented intermediate steps, into cold-blooded reptiles. They build more and more resistance to climate and gain more adaptability and better metabolism, simply because those individual organisms with slightly of these traits are more likely to live and reproduce. Eventually you get extremely rudimentary mammal-like creatures, and dinosaurs. All of this, too, is obviously documented, and I assure you the giant skeleton fossils in the natural history museums are not fake. It is easy to see over time how the fossils changed, in a steady continuum consistent with what would logically be good survival traits in the changing conditions. Eventually you get rodents and the very first birds. Then, some natural disaster, that we believe was probably a meteor impact (there is a layer of rock from that period all over the world with high concentrations of minerals not naturally found on Earth), drastically changed the climate and caused almost all of the dinosaurs to die off. This was 65 million years ago.
Still ok? What I've talked about so far is about 99% of the Earth's history, by the way. Moving on...
Mammals, who were better adapted for such conditions, had a chance to become dominant, rapidly (a relative term, obviously) evolving to more and more complex and competitive forms. Once again I'd like to remind you that this is not just common sense, we can also see it happening fairly easily with fossil, geological, and chemical evidence. If you want to argue about why it happened, I'll win, but we can drag it out for a long time. If you want to argue if it happened, then it is extremely easy to prove you wrong.
Ok, now do you accept human beings can evolve from other complex mammals? Almost everyone does given the preceeding explanation, but if you really insist I am quite capable of explaining why it happened, how it happened, and how we know all about it.
As for the whole "where the universe came from" question, I can assure you there are several plausible explanations from people who actually know what they are talking about, for all of which the addition of some supreme being is needless, irrelevant, and a pointless complication.
