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

by dhw, Saturday, July 16, 2016, 10:05 (3052 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: I would remind you the start of life and evolution are an inseparable continuum, so you are raising two questions in one continuous process. The ability to evolve must be coded into the beginning. I would also remind there must be a first cause. There has never been a true nothing.-dhw: When I asked how life and the evolutionary mechanism, whatever it may be, came into being, I did not separate them. When I asked what that evolutionary mechanism was (= how does evolution work), I went on to list three possibles: my autonomous inventive mechanism, your 3.8 billion-year-old computer programme, and your divine dabbling. How the mechanism came into being and what the mechanism consists of are two separate questions.-DAVID: Not really, if start of life and the mechanism of evolution all originated together in a 'first code' they are joined together. And this would include your AIM.-I joined them together myself! In my hypothesis the autonomous inventive mechanism IS the mechanism of evolution. In your hypothesis the mechanism is a 3.8-billion-year-old computer programme for every innovation and natural wonder in the history of life apart from those that God has personally dabbled. The NATURE of the evolutionary mechanism is a separate issue from how the mechanism - whatever it is - came into being.-dhw; I would also remind you that we have agreed a thousand times that there must be a first cause, and I have never proposed “nothing”. Your first cause is conscious “pure” energy, and my equally unlikely alternative is unconscious energy and matter eternally transforming themselves.
DAVID: In your energy proposal where does the impetus for transformation come from? Why should unconscious energy/matter do that? Does it have purpose? -In your energy proposal where does the consciousness come from? According to you it is already there as part of the first cause. According to me, the impetus for transformation is already there as part of the first cause. No, it does not have purpose. And I find the one hypothesis as unlikely as the other.