Evolution (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, May 21, 2009, 08:44 (5461 days ago) @ David Turell

David: As to why I think the agent is still present, I cannot imagine a conscious universal intelligence losing interest in what it created. - Thank you once again for your detailed response, and apologies for the delayed reaction, but I've been away for a few days. - I'm still trying to understand the thinking behind your panentheism, so I hope you'll allow me to go on "picking your brain". It has always been integral to your argument that a conscious agent is responsible for the creation of life, but we should not try to endow it with human qualities. "Losing interest" sounds pretty human to me and raises the question: what is it interested in? Over billions of years different forms of life have arisen, disappeared, evolved. This might suggest experimentation, but you don't think the agent experiments. You also think it doesn't intervene, in which case it must have set up the initial DNA/RNA codes of production, adaptation and mutation, and since then has sat back and watched evolution take its own course. - If you combine conscious creation of life, non-intervention, continued presence, billions of changes, interest in what it has created, and "freedom of choice", wouldn't you say the whole thing amounts to an experiment? It would hardly be of much interest if the agent already knew what choices were going to be made, and in any case you "don't think the agent is a deterministic force over life forms' decisions". - I'm coming back in a roundabout way to the idea that if there is an agent, the world as we know it is nothing but an entertainment. The difference, then, between panentheism and atheism is that the former provides the show with an audience, whereas the latter leaves us playing to an empty theatre. The presence of an author/audience, however, raises the problem of its nature and, in particular, its attitude towards the suffering of its creatures down through the history of life. But perhaps you have a different answer to my question: what is it interested in?