I actually created an account to reply to this, because this is routinely overlooked and I feel this is an extremely important issue:
it is very difficult for many people to believe that the world and people as they are came about because of chance.
This is a fallacy that is all too often believed, even by people who "believe" in the theory of evolution. The theory of evolution does not, and I repeat this for enough emphasis cannot be added: it does not state that current life forms came about by chance. The best analogy I can come up with is the following: imagine that you'd create a sequence of "heads" and "tails" by repeatedly throwing a fair coin, but then manually removed all the tails. The resulting sequence is not random, it's deterministic, for christ's sake: it consists of only heads. Even though the underlying generating process was random.
Evolution also works like that: mutations may be random, but natural selection is almost fully deterministic (and the higher the concentration of individuals, the closer it gets to being fully deterministic). The results are very much optimized, and have nothing to do with chance. They might even (fancy that!) look designed to the uninformed or uncritical eye.
But please, please, don't spread this inane fallacy of equating evolution with a random process. As long as you don't understand that natural selection counteracts the randomness of mutation, you have no valid reason to prefer the theory of evolution over any fairy tale and then, yes, you may "believe" in evolution, but you really shouldn't.
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G-Day, the landing in Ormandy.
it is very difficult for many people to believe that the world and people as they are came about because of chance.
This is a fallacy that is all too often believed, even by people who "believe" in the theory of evolution. The theory of evolution does not, and I repeat this for enough emphasis cannot be added: it does not state that current life forms came about by chance. The best analogy I can come up with is the following: imagine that you'd create a sequence of "heads" and "tails" by repeatedly throwing a fair coin, but then manually removed all the tails. The resulting sequence is not random, it's deterministic, for christ's sake: it consists of only heads. Even though the underlying generating process was random.
Evolution also works like that: mutations may be random, but natural selection is almost fully deterministic (and the higher the concentration of individuals, the closer it gets to being fully deterministic). The results are very much optimized, and have nothing to do with chance. They might even (fancy that!) look designed to the uninformed or uncritical eye.
But please, please, don't spread this inane fallacy of equating evolution with a random process. As long as you don't understand that natural selection counteracts the randomness of mutation, you have no valid reason to prefer the theory of evolution over any fairy tale and then, yes, you may "believe" in evolution, but you really shouldn't.