Problems with this section (Agnosticism)

by Frank Paris , Tuesday, November 03, 2009, 16:01 (5280 days ago) @ George Jelliss

This is the first post to me where George Jelliss stops joking around and gets serious, demanding a more serious response.-"My guess is that the evolution of life-forms with reasoning abilities to the extent that we have them is very rare."-Ah! A proponent of the "Rare Earth" viewpoint. I've found that there are two kinds of people attracted to this viewpoint:-1. Atheists, who prefer to believe they live in a universe devoid of purpose.-2. Religious fundamentalists, who believe that, however large the universe is, its primary purpose is to serve as a home for the human species and there would be no point for God to create other intelligent species.-So here we have another case where atheists and religious fundamentalists have something in common. Big surprise.-In any case, there is plenty of scientific disagreement about the arguments for a "Rare Earth" hypothesis. As has been pointed out, there's a big difference between baterial life and multi-cellular life. Once you make that jump, the sky seems to be the limit. Then question then is, exactly how rare is that jump? That's where there is scientific disagreement, and it may be aeons before humanity reaches the point where it can resolve the question by itself. But even if it is thousands of times more common to be stuck in the bacterial stage of evolution, that still leaves millions of planets in each galaxy with multi-cellular life forms. You obviously believe it is billions or even trillions of times more common. We are all welcome to our religious beliefs: whatever makes you happy.-"Possibly only one or two in a galaxy."-Sheer speculation, in the same category as my "they are everywhere." Well, this is a religious forum, and so it's not surprising to see you making religious speculations.-"And the galaxies are too far apart for communication to occur."-For that very reason, I "religiously" refrain from talking about intergalactic civilizations and only talk about interstellar civilizations.-"We could be the first of the type, because the earlier part of the evolution of the cosmos was concerned with the production of the higher elements (carbon, oxygen, etc) needed for life to evolve, so there hasn't really been that much time for our evolution to occur."-Full of flippant assumptions. Define "earlier part." So it took seven or eight billion years to evolve enough heavy elements to form stony planets. So what does that leave? Five or six billion years for intelligent, technological civilizations to evolve in the universe? I rest my case: intelligent life could have been around for two to three billion years, especially given the case that there has undoubtedly been a wide period of time where pockets of stony planets formed well before the "average."-"It is also a very unlikely event in view of all the accidents needed to bring us about."-That assertion depends on the highly controversial "Rare Earth" hypothesis. We're far, far from proving that hypothesis one way or the other, and as I pointed out in my previous post, believing in it one way or the other is currently more a matter of religious belief than scientific fact.