Origin of Life: early land life (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, August 04, 2013, 20:02 (4130 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

TONY: From the beginning, my take has been that it was done in stages, and that it was absolutely critical that each stage ran its course in order to pave the way for the next stage. While you will likely (and have) assert that God should have just *poofed* it into existence all fully formed and ready to go, I counter that he is not wasteful (as evidenced by creation itself in all of its efficient, conservative, and recycling glory) and therefore would have started slowly, patiently making each step and not making another until the time was right for him to do so with the least expenditure of energy in a manner that would enable a self sustaining ecosystem.-And this is where our approach differs. You begin with the conviction that God has planned everything, and so you fit the world into your subjective vision of it: God is not "wasteful". My own equally subjective vision is different from yours. I see the exquisiteness and the miraculous engineering, but I also see endless wastefulness: stars coming and going, species coming and going (hence my harping on about dinosaurs and dodos), and a general randomness in the history of life and the universe as we know them. Then I test the different theories as to how life got this way: 1) There is no god. This would explain the randomness, but not the engineering. The alternative is a form of consciousness whose origin is inexplicable, and whose power is great enough to create and manipulate a whole universe. That for me is as incredible as believing in chance. However, if there is such a force, we have various possible concepts of it: 1) It planned everything, and nothing in life's history is random. This fits in with your vision of the universe (and with your delightful analogy of the roast turkey), but not with mine. 2) It built the machinery, and then let it run randomly, watching what happens. 3) It built the machinery and occasionally intervened, with a view to making life more interesting (e.g. through humans). 
 
I'm not sure what you think I've asserted should have been "poofed" into existence, unless you're referring specifically to humans. The point I've made repeatedly is that if God had set out with a view to making humans (as David believes), there's no accounting for the higgledy-piggledy evolutionary bush that preceded our species. Why the dodo? Randomness, yes. Experimentation if you like. But my subjective view of the history of life and the universe, as far as we know it, does not coincide with a god deliberately creating, manipulating, and destroying billions of stars, adjusting the climate and the environment of our own little planet, and organizing all the coming and going varieties of life, stage after stage, in order to arrive at humanity. I am therefore stuck, as you know on my picket fence, but if I did believe in a god of any kind, 1) would be the last of my choices.