Evolution v Creationism (Part II Responses) (Evolution)

by Balance_Maintained , U.S.A., Sunday, September 21, 2014, 14:53 (3714 days ago) @ dhw

DHW: Correct me if I'm wrong: you advocate separate creation, and argue that life's history is geared to the purpose of creating humans to be “stewards” of the earth. The millions of species that he created separately and then killed off were necessary for him to achieve this purpose. -Yes, you are mistaken. I never claimed that everything was created towards the purpose of creating humans. Humanity was created for a purpose, that of being stewards of the Earth. Everything else also has a purpose. Most of the time it is simply maintaining homeostasis by serving as an resource source/drain/converter/preserver, but other times it is as an active participant in the development of the world. Humanity was seen as the crowning achievement, not the end goal. That type of racial narcissism is a frustrating side effect of humanities inability to see beyond their own narrow existence. -
>DHW: As an example, I have asked why you personally believe that God could not have created humans without first creating and killing off trilobites (as one example among millions). What's unrealistic or unscientific about such a question? If I am to follow your logic, I need an answer to it.
>-Could have? Yes. The creation of humanity likely would not have required the Trilobite. However, I should point out that even the human body is not purely human. Other life forms were required to create even the most multi-cellular organism, much less humanity. All of that being said, the rebuttal of your extremely narrow question is, "What happens after a human is created without all the precursor world building event?" Creating a human with no air to breath, food to eat, ground to stand on, water to drink, or any of the millions of other things that we need to live would have been foolish. That is why your question is unscientific. It is no different than asking could CD's (Compact Discs) have been created without the precursor of a a speaker. Sure, it could happen, but to what end?
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>DHW: My current thinking is that it makes no sense for your God to have had to specially create and kill off vast numbers of species in order to make humans, especially if he made humans separately and so they have no antecedents. (No problem with useful live creatures such as bacteria, which clearly played and play a vital role and have of course survived.) Since I can't see any logical reason for the separate creation and subsequent extinction of, say, the trilobites, I look for other explanations as to why things are as they are (not for how I think God “should” have done it.) Since the entertainment hypothesis offends you, let's forget it, because it's irrelevant to the evolution debate. Let's just say God created the universe and life, and millions of species have come and gone. We don't know why. If God created them separately (e.g. trilobites), he must have had a reason for doing so, but we can't think of one. And there is actually no evidence that he did create them separately. So maybe he didn't. Maybe he devised a mechanism or a system or a programme to set life moving in lots of different directions. And maybe he also devised a mechanism or a system or a programme to vary the environment in which organisms exist, so that they could evolve into lots of different forms according to the needs and possibilities created by the changing environment. We don't know why, but that would explain the vast variety and the extinctions, which are not explained by separate creation geared to the production of humans. 
>-Trilobites are suspected scavengers/filter feeders, which would have made them ideal for helping to keep the early ocean waters clean. The oceans being critical to life on this planet, a clean ocean sounds pretty darn useful. So, perhaps you can't think of a reason, but I certainly can, and without much heavy thinking involved at that. When you stop looking at humans as a separate end goal, things are much easier to reason on. We are caretakers, or at least that is what we are supposed to be, not the final goal, a point made especially clear throughout the bible.

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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.