Origin of Life: early land life (Introduction)

by Balance_Maintained , U.S.A., Sunday, August 04, 2013, 22:53 (4130 days ago) @ dhw

DHW: 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.-Actually, that was not a basic assumption, but an inference from observations based on what I see in nature. Take a close look at nature and physics; little if anything is wasted. Even the gravitational pulls of all those 'wasteful stars' play into keeping everything in balance, aside from being ascetically pleasing. How many different types of energy do we get from the sun? How is it that so much is recycled naturally, whether we are talking about toxic gasses, poop, or even the very carbon in your body? -->DHW: 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. -Precisely.->DHW: 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). -You forgot number 4.-4) He engineered the system, its hardware, software, and interfaces, to work in harmony while allowing for the greatest flexibility and freedom. Also, it is freely given that he occasionally intervened, and in more ways than simply creating humans. --> 
>DHW: 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. -
*poofed* as in occurring randomly, spontaneously, or without any form of pre-planning or pre-programming. All of these innovations just *poof* into existence fully formed and operational. Of course, by your account, there is some cellular level of intelligence capable of spontaneously creating functionally perfect innovations in one shot guarantees that it will be passed on 'just so' to its offspring.-
>DHW: 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.-Why are you hung up on the dodo? I never hear you question the ostrich, emu, chicken, or other flightless birds. Because of humans, we will never really know what their role was in that ecosystem. But more to the point, I have never once said that each and every variation of a 'kind' was planned individually. Only that the groups were planned with constraints and allowed to go as they will within those constraints.

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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.