Intelligence (Origins)

by Balance_Maintained , U.S.A., Friday, March 22, 2013, 10:07 (4262 days ago) @ dhw

DHW: My problem lies not so much in what you say as in what you don't and can't say. I believe that humans evolved from earlier forms of life that were not capable of the feats humans can achieve. When we see a machine or a building, read a novel, listen to a symphony, we marvel at the ingenuity of the human mind. How much more marvellous, then, must be the mind that you believe created the human mind, and created the mechanisms that led from bacteria to us. It is inconceivable to you that the great minds which created the complex, beautiful and elegant machines, buildings, novels, symphonies could be anything other than the products of deliberate design. And yet you seem to have no difficulty believing that the infinitely greater mind that created ours was NOT designed. Nebulous concepts like "first cause" do nothing to hide the total illogicality of this way of thinking. If you can believe in an undesigned SUPER-intelligence, why can't you believe in an undesigned and evolving lesser intelligence, or in an eternal lottery which eventually came up with the right numbers? There is no demonstrable evidence for any of these hypotheses, and although one must be closer to the truth than the others, none of them possess "sufficient explanatory power" to convince anyone without a large helping of irrational faith. That is why I remain an ignorant, but nonetheless marvelling, mind-boggled agnostic.-
But I can, and have said. It is far less of a stretch to think that one form, comprised entirely of energy, given an extreme amount of time, could organize into an intelligence that could then plot, plan and design than it is to think of a ton of pre-existing rules and laws that are all 'just so' randomly organizing into a myriad of self-sustaining stable unintelligent elements which then in turn reorganize again into a myriad of living elements all working together harmoniously in a unified existence. -When I look at something known to be design, I understand implicitly that the designer did not pull it out of then air. It took years of study in different fields in order to pull them all together into a unique, stable, arrangement. I have no issue with freely giving God all the time in eternity to think, learn, plot, plan, study, or anything else. Just because the Bible details the creation of our universe, it does not detail what happened before then, and in fact explicitly states that there was 'time indefinite" stretching out before the creation of the universe. -No, this doesn't tackle the nature of what formed God, or how God came into existence. I am as ignorant on that as it is possible to be. But, as I said, it is infinitely more reasonable to me for a single entity to come into existence unaided and grow to organization before creating something new than for all of creation to come into existence unaided and organised. It is infinitely easier to organize energy than it is to organize matter.

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What is the purpose of living? How about, 'to reduce needless suffering. It seems to me to be a worthy purpose.