DILEMMAS: A Response to DHW (Evolution)

by dhw, Wednesday, November 12, 2014, 17:11 (3662 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

TONY: DHW, three posts in a row now I have EXPLICITLY stated the purpose of earlier life forms, yet you keep saying I have not answered you. Why? So, since it seems to get missed in all the clutter:-The primary purpose for earlier life forms was the preparation of the environment for future life forms. They set up the environmental variables.-For some basic examples of tasks that had to be completed:
•	Atmospheric Conversion
•	PH Balancing
•	Soil Production and Conservation
•	Early Plants to Conserve soil produced above.
•	Early Plants as oxygen producers
•	Early reptiles help speed up atmospheric balance
•	Decomposition of early animal bodies for soil enrichment
•	Initiation of the Carbon Cycle
•	Early Plants as Climate Modifiers
Dinosaurs are easy to understand. As reptiles, they would have needed far less oxygen and still would have produced carbon dioxide for early fauna. This would be the catalyst for the earths early atmosphere along with the initial build up of workable soil needed to support later creatures (i.e. Mammals). Yet, due to their size and nutrient requirements, Dinosaurs would have been incompatible with the advancement of life. Further, the oxygen rich new atmosphere likely would have been toxic to the early flora and fauna. So, after they completed their purpose, they were destroyed to make way for the next step.-My apologies for so sorely trying your patience, but language is not always the most efficient means of communication. I will observe in passing that nearly all your examples concern plant and microbial life, and you can have decomposing bodies without the mass extinction of whole species of fauna, which has been the subject of my questions. However, my main interest here is what, in the one example you do give of mass extinction, you call the “advancement of life” (previously called “future developments” and here also “future life forms”). This is what some of us would call evolution. If mass extinctions were random occurrences, you would still move from one stage to another, with surviving organisms adapting and innovating in accordance with prevailing conditions (advancement of life). The purpose? Life as an end in itself: to survive, to propagate, and to improve the quality of life where possible (hence innovations, in which I would include human inventions and advancements). That's it. (N.B. Such a scenario need not be atheistic.)-But you mean more than that, don't you? When pressed, you came up with this: “What if the end goal was not one lonely planet with a few million species in the middle of a vast and otherwise empty universe? What if the plan was a vast universe teaming with near infinite variety of life?” And so I asked why “it was necessary for God to create and kill off millions of species on Earth in order to prepare the way for life elsewhere in the universe”. You have not explained the connection. If, then, life on Earth is not an end in itself, as described above, perhaps you will tell us in your own words: advancement of life towards what?