ABEL\'S UNIVERSE (General)

by dhw, Thursday, November 17, 2011, 15:24 (4564 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

Once again, my thanks to Tony for his painstaking attempt to make sense of Abel’s Universe. (Incidentally, it’s best to call me dhw, as David = David Turell, and there’s enough confusion on this site as it is!) It’s clear from the swarm of posts that you’ve opened the gateway to a more targeted discussion of Abel’s ideas. I endorse all your comments and BBella’s concerning his mode of argument, but let’s hope we can now get on with learning from one another.

I’d like to focus on the abiogenesis/evolution theme here, which ultimately has interesting implications both for Abel’s universe and for other theologies. Abiogenesis requires a complex combination of materials that will lead not only to life but, if evolution is to take place, also to replication, adaptation and innovation. Low entropy will provide enormous advantages when it comes to survival (“entropy not tearing every macromolecule to shreds”). However, the same intricate engineering is required on both planets. I don’t care how many monkeys are bashing away on their typewriters, if I’m to believe in spontaneous generation on Planet X, I might just as well believe in the same thing on Planet Earth, and cut out the middle-gods. That is just the starting-point, though.

ABEL (28 Oct. at 23.22, describing evolution on Planet X): “It was the evolution of predators that created the intense selective pressure for greater intelligence. Not only did the predators have to become smarter to catch their prey, their prey had to become smarter to avoid their predators. The need for intelligence to survive in temporally saturated matter is MUCH greater than ours.”

I see no difference whatsoever between this evolutionary process and our own (or between brane-angle “intelligence” and, say, camouflage “intelligence”). However, on Planet X this led ultimately to the SPONTANEOUS evolution of the super-intelligent gods, whereas on Earth the gods had to DESIGN the evolution of us mere humans. I really can’t follow the logic here.

Now to my theological point. No matter whether you believe in Abel’s ET gods, David’s UI, Tony’s God, or George’s Chance, the evolutionary process – guided or unguided – led eventually to predators and then to humans. The need to kill or die, a pretty extreme form of self-interest, was therefore present long before us humans, although as any vegetarian will tell you, flesh-eating is not essential for survival. It was, however, deliberately introduced by the creator(s), unless the latter didn’t know what they were doing. In other words, self-interest as the key to survival was already established before we came on the scene, and if you believe as I do that self-interest is the root of evil (I’m open to other suggestions, of course), you are confronted with the question of why any creator(s) would invent predation in the first place. If Abel's theory is correct, and predatory self-interest is an essential precondition for greater intelligence, what does that tell us about the nature of the astonishingly intelligent being(s) that created us?