Contingent evolution (Introduction)

by Balance_Maintained , U.S.A., Monday, June 30, 2014, 22:42 (3600 days ago) @ dhw

Dhw (to Tony): "Pre-planning" and "complete knowledge" imply a creative intelligence with an overall view. I'm not discounting that, but am proposing an alternative, which is billions of "intelligences" cooperating from within, because balance is essential to their survival. All of life is made of single units combining, and that is the essence of my panpsychist hypothesis: no pre-planning, no complete knowledge, but a system that evolved through cooperation and natural selection, in the sense that whatever did not work perished, and only what did work survived. Even David now concedes the possibility of his God experimenting. This hypothesis offers the possibility of billions of organisms experimenting. [...] However, sooner or later, this hypothesis like all others, including that of a God, comes up against the brick wall of how such "intelligence(s)" originated. 
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> I have described how evolution might have proceeded without any intervention by your God. I have left open the question of origins, as that is not the subject of this thread. But since you insist, what I have described contains no evidence for or against the existence of God. Stay at the bottom of the class.-
Ahem. Now class, can anyone point out the logical gap in the counter argument posed by David(DHW)? -"..(I) am proposing an alternative, which is billions of "intelligences" cooperating from within, because balance is essential to their survival.-What are these intelligences balancing? What forces are acting to disrupt their balance that cause them to need to stabilize? What governs these forces? What designed them, these forces that are so critical that some that must be within many many decimal points of precision? -Note, even now I am not talking about the origins of life, but rather the forces of nature that govern it. Evolution by chance is, by mathematical definition, impossible. That leaves intelligence somewhere in the process. The question then is which part of the process required the first intelligence. To know that, we have to look at the rules that were designed. Which rules HAD to be in place first? Fundamental forces of physics? Quantum Mechanics? Without these rules, these laws, these mechanisms, your cellular intelligence would have never made it into the material world to even exist. The Higgs Boson particle is just ONE example of a single item that had to be precise to an extreme degree or matter would not even exist. -You could be absolutely correct about cellular intelligence, but even if you are, you can not escape the fact that something some where had to design the rules that govern them to an extremely precise degree.

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What is the purpose of living? How about, 'to reduce needless suffering. It seems to me to be a worthy purpose.