Genome complexity: mechanism stopped evolving (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, May 12, 2016, 17:58 (3118 days ago) @ BBella

DAVID: And I still think God would not have bothered with all this without keeping an eye on it to be sure it worked out like He intended. All inventors have purposes in mind.
dhw: I had suggested he kept an eye on it because maybe he invented it precisely in order to keep an eye on it - i.e. as the hidden audience, the intention being an enjoyably unpredictable spectacle (see below), though he could always step in. You agree that he's hidden, but you don't like him being an audience - he apparently wants a relationship and that, mysteriously, is why he hides.
DAVID: Spoken like a playwright. What you miss is the obvious requirement of faith, the reason He stays hidden.-Why is faith an “obvious requirement”? Are you now saying that instead of having a “relationship” with humans, he just created them to see whether they would believe in him or not? Since you love asking “why” when we discuss evolution, perhaps you will tell us why God would want to play such a game.
 
BBELLA: In the bible story, God spoke directly to his creation and so no requirement of faith/belief was required from him. -Yes, at least the bible story gives God some sort of motivation: he wants humans to worship him and no other God (“All is vanity” - Ecclesiastes) and to smash up anybody who doesn't believe in him. In fairness, he also wants people to behave nicely to one another and live decently. But that really doesn't require faith in God, does it?-dhw: Or maybe there was just energy in the beginning, and energy kept and keeps transforming itself into all the forms we know and don't know, some of them conscious, some of them not. And that would explain why ATI is such a rich mystery, and why we spend so much time vainly trying to grasp the ungraspable.
DAVID: Your supposition sounds just like conscious energy from the beginning, not requiring much transformation to accomplish goals! 
BBELLA: But he said some of the forms are conscious and some are not.
DAVID: I simply think all eternal energy was conscious. I don't think consciousness can appear de novo from nothing. The original energy was conscious.

Thank you, BBella. My alternative proposal is the reverse of David's: that the beginning was unconscious energy from which eventually, through matter, consciousness emerged, thus leaving a mixture of the conscious and unconscious. But I do not offer it as a belief. I am an agnostic, and have as much difficulty believing consciousness can appear de novo as I do believing that it can simply have always existed without a source.
 
BBELLA: So if the first God, then his angels, then his son werent humans and doesnt sound like an all powerful creator God - what were they? The plot thickens: In walks the alien that fits neatly and perfectly into this scenario. What if I am right? Have you ever asked yourselves that?-Aliens as gods offer us an additional approach but not an alternative solution to the problem of origins. As we have said many times before, in the grand scheme of things the idea only take us one stage further back: how did these superpower aliens come into existence? But that does not mean the hypothesis should not be taken seriously. I think both you and Tony have offered us possible evidence of earlier civilisations, visits from outer space, strange experiences, and there are plenty more examples one can google.…We could even be the descendants of aliens who fled their own planet and settled here. The universe and Earth are so shrouded in mystery, and all proposed solutions are so riddled with uncertainties, that it takes a great deal of faith to choose one and dismiss the rest.