The Dodo Problem (Evolution)

by dhw, Monday, December 06, 2010, 14:08 (5100 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

TONY: You do not build a house without preparing the foundation unless you want it to fall down around your ears. And if you are busy 'experimenting' with your foundation, the final house will fall down around your ears. This is the point I am trying to make, and it directly addresses the flaws in both scenarios(as I perceive them)1) Life IS an end in and of itself, but it was not a purposeless or meaningless experiment. 2) Humanity was not an afterthought, but a part of the design plan from the beginning(though not necessarily imprinted on the first molecule). -As I have tried to make clear several times, this thread is entirely about whether the human design plan was imprinted on the first molecule. I have also acknowledged several times that if there is a UI, it laid firm foundations. That is not at issue. The experiment (Scenario 1) relates to the purpose. Although I agree that if there is a UI, it must have had a reason for creating life, no-one can state that the purpose was the creation of humans. I can well believe that a UI might have created life because it got bored and eventually hit on conscious, intelligent humans as the best possible entertainment. There is nothing apart from anthropocentric religions to contradict such a scenario. As always, I must stress that this is not meant to be offensive or to denigrate religion. I'm merely saying no-one knows, and the entertaining experiment is as logical an explanation as any.-TONY: If you, for example, took a close look at the biblical account (being one of the better known creation stories), humanity was created independent and AFTER all other life. So, your scenario 1, coupled with what I have been trying to say about prior life being preparatory to humanity, the various stages described and their apparent analog to the Cambrian explosion, and the fact that we can not find a genetic match closer than 60% or so to Human's all lends a bit more credence to at least some of that accounting being accurate. (At the very least more accurate than the evolved from amoebas and Chimps scenario).-We do not have evolutionary facts, we have evolutionary theories with more holes than OJ Simpson's alibi. Personally, I do not think that your ideas contradict evolutionary theory, other than evolutionist would say that we come from chimps. Which I couldn't disagree with more vehemently.-I don't know what you mean by "analog to the Cambrian explosion", we're told that the genetic match between chimps and humans is between 95%-98% (different sources give different figures), and just to set the record straight, evolutionists do not say we come from chimps ... they say we have a common ancestor (not important for our discussion). But you're right to take me up on "evolutionary facts", though I did qualify it with "as we know them". We agree that humans came after the rest, but if we accept the experiment scenario, it simply means that humans are the latest result. Whether we're the end product, no-one can say; the earliest known hominids are said to go back about 4.4. million years, and homo sapiens may have been around for about 200,000 years, whereas the UI was messing around with dinosaurs for about 160 million years, so it's a bit early to start predicting his intentions. "Created independent", as opposed to having evolved, means divine intervention, and the whole point of this thread is my suggestion that if there is a UI, it's more likely to have intervened than to have preprogrammed the first molecule (= automatic evolution). You regard this as trivial, but the issue is part of a much wider subject. If we take the plunge of actually believing in a UI, we then have to consider the nature of that UI, which involves its motives for creating life, as well as the possible limitations of its powers. It's a discussion that has no end, and I will try to draw these threads together when there's a lull, but it's difficult to keep up at the moment!