Contingent evolution (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, July 01, 2014, 19:52 (3581 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

dhw: (to David:) 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.-TONY: Ahem. Now class, can anyone point out the logical gap in the counter argument posed by DHW? 
Dhw: "..(I) am proposing an alternative, which is billions of "intelligences" cooperating from within, because balance is essential to their survival.-TONY: 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.-Your questions are what inspired the atheist Higgs in the first place. He and many others are looking for answers. One is an infinite, eternal, (almost) omniscient, (almost) omnipotent form of energy that acquired its consciousness and its knowledge from nowhere as if by magic. To believe in such a power you must have faith, because science can't reveal it except by theoretical speculation. And the same objection can be raised against all other theories of origins relating to the universe and to life. All theoretical speculation. -TONY: 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.-And you could be absolutely correct that the "something" is an eternal, conscious form of energy you call God. And folk like Higgs and Hawking could be absolutely correct that, for instance, "all the complicated structures that we see in the universe might be explained by the no boundary condition for the universe together with the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics" (Brief History of Time). I don't understand most of these theories, including how first cause energy can be eternally conscious etc., but I have sufficient respect for those who cling to their own favourite version (which just like David they all call "the best") not to dismiss those explanations that sound in any way feasible to me. I also continue to search for ways of reconciling the various beliefs, but have yet to find one that convinces me. That's why I remain agnostic!