Before anyone comes for me, I grew up southern baptist – went to a private christian school & was homeschooled for a few years. The extent of my “science” education when it came to evolution & the origin of the universe was “if we came from monkeys why do monkeys still exist?” and “look at this galaxy that’s shaped like a cross, isn’t god amazing!!” I’m an atheist now and would like to have some sort of understanding of how our world came to be, but trying to figure it out as an adult with no real foundation has been incredibly difficult, and none of it’s making sense. I also know I’m asking a lot as all 3 of those subjects are pretty extensive, so if you know any good videos or books I’d love some recommendations!
In: Biology
Evolution, the Big Bang, and Abiogenesis are three completely different things.
The Big Bang is an idea built on our observations of the position and relative velocity of stars and galaxies that are very far away, from which we can figure out that around 13.7 billion years ago, quite literally everything in existence was compacted into a very small region of space and time. Extrapolating further back gets difficult as we have good reason to believe that physics functioned differently, and we don’t really know what happened in the first few moments where everything was **reaaaaaaally** hyper-compacted. The Big Bang is sort of discussed in two parts; the first part is the idea that everything was further compacted into a singularity that birthed the universe (which is the theory), and the second part is just the observation that everything was very very very compact in the immediate aftermath of some event (which is more or less an observed fact).
Abiogenesis is just that life originated on it’s own from a mix of chemical and electrical reactions, powered by heat from volcanic activity deep in the early Earth’s oceans.
Evolution is an observation that species change over time, and the changes that increase likelihood of successful reproduction tend to be selected by natural mechanisms.
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