New Oxygen research; abundance and Cambrian (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, September 30, 2016, 13:22 (2976 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Clearly then, nobody should argue that humans are an improvement over bacteria, let alone that H. sapiens "is a perfect solution to the problem". I did ask you before, what problem? Whatever it is, we'd better not say it involves improvement, even if some of us might think that solving a problem is better than not solving a problem.-DAVID: The problem for me is the meaning of the existence of life with an evolutionary process involved. Where is it going? To make humans.-Why do you stop there? What is the meaning of the existence of humans? And what is the meaning of the existence of the duck-billed platypus, who is also here “”against all the odds”, to use your favourite expression? Why did your God create a process that involved complexity for complexity's sake, with 99% of species going extinct, if all he wanted to do was make humans? And if humans are the perfect solution to the problem of the meaning of the existence of life, whose problem was it in the first place? God's? Does this mean that when he designed every innovation and natural wonder just for the sake of complexity, complexity itself became a problem, and humans were the perfect solution because….because…?-Here's a theistic alternative to this befuddling scenario. God created life and gave organisms the means of engineering their own survival and possible improvements. And they came and went in a long higgledy-piggledy history, as conditions kept changing and some could cope and others couldn't. Currently, humans are here, as by far the most complex, conscious beings we humans are aware of. Nobody knows where the process of evolution will take us in the next few thousand million years, and nobody knows if God is still interested. If he is, he doesn't seem to be intervening, so presumably he's just watching.
 
The non-theistic alternative starts with chance creating life, and the rest is the same apart from the references to God. In neither case do we need to twist ourselves in knots with meanings, balance of nature, keeping life going till humans arrive, complexity for complexity's sake, all in order to explain why God specially designed murderous viruses, parasitic flies and especially my favourite, the weaverbird's nest.