Is our solar system weird? The current odds (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, July 14, 2016, 12:08 (3054 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: My argument is that the huge variety of life forms and wonders (e.g. the weird creatures in the Mariana Trench) suggests to me that there is no overall, controlled plan - as would be implied by God's specially designing every single one of them - but a free-for-all resulting from the autonomous ability (perhaps God-given) of organisms to adapt to and/or exploit (through innovation) all the different environments. I hope your thousands of fans will keep this in mind for all future articles!-DAVID: You have a major point here. We certainly have not explained the free-for-all development of living forms and lifestyles. Speciation is certainly innovation, and we don't know how it works or why it is so wildly proliferative of form and complexity. We always come back to God did it, or helped organisms do it, or without God life started and exhibits extreme inventiveness without help. The latter choice makes no sense to me.-As always, we have the two separate issues: 1) how does evolution work? 2) How did life and the evolutionary mechanism, whatever it may be, come into being? As regards 1), the wild proliferation is logically explained by an autonomous inventive mechanism that enables creatures to adapt to and exploit the vast range of environmental conditions. You prefer a 3.8-billion-year computer programme plus dabbling. As regards 2) it requires a colossal leap of faith to believe that chance could create life and the evolutionary mechanism - just as it requires a colossal leap of faith to believe that an almighty, universe-creating, universe-encompassing mind could simply exist without a source.