The Big Bang, Abiogenesis, and Evolution

Welcome aboard Buckets. I think that the responses so far are a bit detailed and aren't covering a particular issue very well.The ideas about the origin of the universe, the origin of life and the origin of species are all being lumped together by creationists. Here we find that they can't seem to remember what they are talking about for a whole paragraph.Of course, knowledge about one thing may be connected in some way to all knowledge about everything but to not compartmentalize things to a reasonable degree is very silly and inefficient.It is always useful to "chunk" knowledge so I can concentrate on one issue without being overwhelmed by details that don't matter to the task at hand. We all do this all the time.Do I worry about electronic engineering while I type at my computer? Do most users know anything about what is going on while they type? Does it matter a darn?If I am a chip designer I worry a lot about details of the electronics. But do I worry about where the atoms of the chips came from? Do I care (or know) that they came from a supernova?I can make progress in any one field of knowledge while ignoring a lot of details that are considered to be in another one. I can also be utterly wrong about one area and still get another one very right.Of course, I have to "chunk" things in a useful way. I need to have pretty clean boundaries or I might be ignoring things in one area that do need to be considered. As an electrical engineer I don't care where the atoms came from but I do have to understand how they behave at a higher level. I may not need any quantum mechanics which accurately explains the behavior of the electrons I work with but I do have to understand that the electrons are there and what their properties are.In a similar fashion an auto mechanic understands the need to gas, air and a spark to get together to create an explosion in the cylinder. She/he has absolutely no need to know the detailed chemistry. One can have the zaniest ideas about what is going on in there but still do a good job of diagnosing and fixing a stalled car.So someone interested in the biological evolution of living forms can think that the original cells were dropped off by an alien space craft 3.68 billion years ago. It is probably utterly wrong but it makes absolutely no difference to anything about how life evolves after that.Someone interested in just how life did arise on earth may believe that the Christian God created the universe and the big bang is how he did it (and many chemists do believe just that) but that makes no difference whatsoever to the questions about abiogenesis.The knowledge we have today is immense compared to only decades ago and may be a tiny slice of what we will know in a century. In order to advance this knowledge one can not be a Francis Bacon and attempt to know all there is to know. One must focus on carefully bounded slices of knowledge. If one focuses too closely important things may get missed. If one attempts to focus too broadly then you will get your 8th PhD on your death bed and never have time to contribute much new.I hope this is semi comprehensible.

So you believe God created everything? Well, so does Jar. What is the problem? Well, actually they do change. The colloquial meaning of a "fact" is just something that we are very, very, very sure is true.Once many people thought the earth was flat. Later they thought it was a sphere. Those were facts.In the limited context of the times both those facts were correct and still are!You can live your life in a small village in Africa (or a couple of hundred years ago in England) and take the earth as a flat plate as fact and it works perfectly well.Later we took the earth as a sphere and explored it by sailing ship. That "fact" worked perfectly well and still does for most of us.However the earth is neither a flat plate or a sphere. Now sometimes we have to know that or things don't work. It is a much more complicated shape than a sphere.In "fact" the earth isn't anything like we perceive it to be but taking it as a solid, oblate spheroid works very well most of the time.Fact is, as jar pointed out, simply something that we have a high degree of confidence in. Sometimes that turns out to need modification.