https://bibleopia.wordpress.com/2015/05/28/did-god-create-our-universe-from-nothing-no/

Take your digestion of food. Pretty efficient system — until just one component goes awry. For instance, any number of little bugs can convince your intestinal fauna and flora to go on vacation, and that leaves you with massive diarrhea and vomiting. In some cases you dehydrate and die.

OR ecosystems. SO many are relatively delicately balanced. One major shock and boom! It goes away. For instance, change the pH or chemical balance of seawater by more than a bit and all kinds of bad stuff happens to a reef, or even a typical tide pool area (I am from Boston, and boy, did we get a lesson in that!)

SO many systems are jury-rigged and only work under a relatively narrow set of circumstances. God did a pretty poor job of things, it looks like.

Thus, some irony in the fact that we are talking about this at all.

I was under the impression that Type I (so-called “juvenile onset”) diabetes was primarily an autoimmune phenomenon,while Type II was the more genetically-linked form.

Since there are only five pages, I will take your comment as a complement. Thank you.

was a classic.

Then again, I started doubting at age 11 or 12.

There is still hope for her. She just has to learn that science is about learning and discovering–hypothesis testing–>trying to disprove your hypothesis. It is not about proving yourself right. (Well, you kind of do that by failing to falsify your hypothesis.)

I went to a Christian college and majored in biology. Nearly all of my science professors were great and professional. (A few were religious but only one was pushy about it, and even he was middle-of-the-road.)

It’s hard to argue that we make our own decisions when we are children and teenagers. We somewhat do, but we are very much conditioned by our upbringings. It’s tough to say whether or not her parents played a role in her decision to write this essay.

I also want to reiterate what someone else said above: evolution is not an -ism. An “-ism” is a belief system. Science is not a belief system. (Nor is atheism.)

ANd you have to ask why it is that scientists have had so many real-world successes. The treatment for your diabetes, for instance, would make no sense whatsoever outside of a theory of evolution. There would have been no way to test out anything.

“If the betta cells were absent or evolving, how could someone have survived?” is the question you ask. You are making the old creationist argument that a complex system can’t be built up from less complicated parts.

In the case of insulin and the sugar metabolism, all organisms (well, most of them anyway) metabolize sugars to make energy. The whole ADP to ATP sequence is a piece of that, IIRC.

In any case, your assumption form the question is that the whole system would have operated from scratch — as though there were some goal to evolutionary processes to get the end result. So, looking at that system, you’d say, “Well, how can that be as an incomplete system like it won’t work with those functions.”

An you’d be right if that were the only possible function. I’m no biochemist. But I do know that

a) the betta cell system could just as well have had a completely different purpose in creatures related to us but older lineages. For instance, humans use calcium for bones inside our skeletons. Molluscs use it for shells. We are actually descended from a common ancestor, which is why we use calcium compounds for structural integrity at all. Iron would be much better, and we can metabolize it, and you’d think a god creating things from nothing would do a better job, you know? Iron bones would be a much more efficient solution.

Anyhow, in the case of betta cells, one could certainly envision an imperfectly-operating system that allows you to live just long enough to reproduce. It’s worth noting that just because a genetic condition is rare and sometimes fatal, it doesn’t mean it will disappear because often the genes that do that to you are used in other things. For instance, sickle cell anemia genes confer resistance to malaria. Put them together and you get the disease, but carriers of the gene will thrive. (This is waaay oversimplified).

Diabetes genes could serve a similar function. Maybe there is some advantage to having one copy but not two. I don’t know enough about it to gie a detailed explanation, tho, and be sure it is correct.