The Dodo Problem (Evolution)

by Balance_Maintained , U.S.A., Sunday, December 05, 2010, 03:11 (5101 days ago) @ dhw

For the sake of argument, however, I've accepted the UI scenario, but cannot see the logic in the view that evolution with its vast number of branches was geared right from the start to the automatic creation of humans. I have offered two alternative views: 1) God created life without a plan but through experimentation got to humans. 2) God did have a plan ... to create a reflection of himself ... but needed to keep experimenting in order to get closer and closer to what he was looking for. Both scenarios dispense with the need to find a purpose for the dodo, and the need to explain why God should have chosen such a roundabout route to humanity. Of course you can argue, as David does, that we don't understand God's logic, but with my two scenarios there is no such mystery. This brings me to the question which was central to my previous post but which you have ignored, and so I will ask it again: How do these two possibilities, both of which explain irrelevances and extinctions and also eliminate dependence on random changes in the environment, contradict the facts as we know them?
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Possibility 1) Contradict the very fact that even though things so random and unrelated they are in fact connected in such a myriad of ways that we humans with all of our technology, intellect, reasoning, creativity, and several thousand years worth of effort have yet to discover even a minuscule fraction of their interconnectedness. Every single species, be it plant or animal, and every single element and molecule functions in beautiful harmony. Does that sound like the work of a shoddy experimenter? Even the ancient creatures, dinosaurs, mastodons, bacteria, plants, all lived in a strange sort of symbiotic harmony together. Just to make sure that is perfectly clear. The VERY FIRST species of life on this planet, and every species that has EVER existed has lived in symbiotic harmony with each other. The only thing even remotely challenging that statement that I am aware of is Humanity itself, who by virtue of our lofty reasoning abilities manage to throw things completely out of balance. And I think that is an important feature in and of itself. Only the work of an intelligent creature has been able to de-harmonize the work of another intelligence. No major cataclysm ever managed to provide more than a momentary bump in this design. No virus, no meteor, earthquake, or volcano, not even the splitting of Pangaea. None of this strikes me as the work of a sloppy, inexperienced workman.-
The second scenario doesn't make sense in at least one fashion. Creating a Dinosaur, or a plant, or a platypus, is not even remotely close to creating something akin to human. In fact, there is no other creature in existence on this planet that comes even remotely close to what makes us human. Our reasoning, intellect, emotion, ascetic appreciation, imagination, self-awareness, creativity, and other fundamentally human traits. The closest they can come up with is a chimp or a gorilla which is indeed a poor approximation, no matter how much sign language they can teach it.-I hope that addresses the questions. I have not been intentionally ignoring them, but felt that directly answering them was rather unnecessary if I was able to make the point of harmonic symbiosis of all life clear.