DAVID: Cosmology: milky way size is enormous (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, July 05, 2019, 14:40 (1969 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

dhw: Your God, if he exists and if we accept common descent, would have decided in one way or another to create ALL life forms through the process of evolving them from bacteria, and indeed you have him specially designing them ALL by preprogramming or dabbling them. So in your version he says to himself: “I only want to specially design H. sapiens, and so I will specially design the whale’s flipper, the cuttlefish’s camouflage, the monarch’s lifestyle and the weaverbird’s nest etc. so that they can all eat or not eat one another, and then I will specially design lots of hominins and homos before I specially design the only thing I want to design, which is H. sapiens.” And you find this logical.

Tony: I haven't read the full discussion yet, but I would love to sink my teeth into this passage here, if I may. It's been a while and I'm rusty.

For starters, I am assuming, for the sake of this argument, that God exists. I think designed, dabbled, perhaps even played with evolution, albeit carefully and wondrous attention to detail. Now, here is a subtle difference in the way I view the issue. There is no logical need for humans specifically to have been the end goal from the beginning, but that doesn't exclude them from having been planned for long before they arrived on the scene. I'm a designer. It's what I do, regardless of my day job. I design games, programs, businesses and business models. All sorts of garbage. I would never, ever, in a million years think of trying to implement something as complex as, say, Artificial Intelligence, without having practiced on something far, far less complex.

Perhaps we are seeing the result of the most cosmic learning curve imaginable, and we are part of it. You can hardly deny the symmetry in systems at scale. Our brains are incredibly similar to the universe in structure. Why is it not possible they are also similar in nature?

The idea of humans may not have been completely formed in the beginning, but when the time was right, the idea was developed into a reality, complete with start up bugs.

Your God is not as purposeful as mine.