/sci/ - Science & Math

I have two questions:

can someone explain evolution to me? I'm not asking this as a passive aggressive assertion of my views btw, I just genuinely don't understand it so maybe someone can explain

how exactly is it possible for DNA to adapt to its environment in such complexity that a single celled organism managed to selectively mutate and breed itself from a cell to fish to dinosaurs to birds and dogs and humans and everything in between without any sort of consciousness or direction or design or programming, it just happened randomly for no reason out of thin air

how could the building blocks of life hold so much seemingly unlimited potential without intent? explain the sequence of events and the underlying mechanism that makes a single cell react to its environment in such a way that it mutates and over time becomes a radically different complex multi celled organism, what is the causation in this?

it always seems to lead back to "we dunno why, but we know how" which just leads me to think it makes far more sense to trace it back to creative design than just "THE BIG BANG AND NOTHING BEFORE THAT". religion has given it such a bad rep that it's precluded from even being considered, when it's basically a logical conclusion

which brings me to my second question -- isn't this whole latest trend of "dude we're in a simulation!" just gateway creationism for atheist? the idea that the laws of nature and physics and atoms and DNA etc are just the algorithms that comprise this universe and something must have programmed it that way, so how is that any different than any other form of creationism? it's just semantics, playing with words to make the same concept sound scientific