Kevin,
Not even in a billion years? Why not?
whole books are written about why not. Like I said to David, you probably aren't interested, and there's nothing wrong with that. But to try to explain it in my way would require a huge amount of work, and even that wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for my experience that it is unlikely to do any good. No matter the quality of evidence or of my arguments, little progress is made. These things are pre-decided, and the evidence is filtered through the individual minds, and you know what that means.
Why not go to telic thoughts, or uncommon descent, (a heavily cencored forum, unfortunately) and look at the articles they present on the latest discoveries. Or why not read a couple of books by evolution refuters? The books I am talking about make no references to God or religion. Some of the authors are religious and some are not.
So it's more believable that each species was manually placed here on earth, fully formed, by some kind of alien being?
Well, I wonder if you read what I wrote..because I said that I do entertain evolution occuring via some sort of innate intelligence or consciousness within life. It would occur in spurts, and most things in nature do. I do think there is strong evidence for intervention here, but it is hard to say how much. Here we are, talking about terraforming mars or venus, and suddenly it is so ludicrous to think that in our universe might exist beings older than us who would do that? It's possible they use panspermia deliberately, sending cometlike things our way with the appropriate bacteria to build oxygen in the atmosphere, for example, then soil and so forth.
As to creatures being manually placed here fully formed - at any rate that doesn't answer the question that interests me, which is how did life get started? But the cambrian explosion does give one pause.
Suppose we were to consider Kevin a universe
You mean a All?
Unfortunately, this is a contradiction in terms, and so we cannot proceed with it.
Yes, I mean a All, and as a concept, I see no reason why we can't use it, despite knowing it isn't the case. We are talking about a reality in which God is everything. So we can imagine Kevin being everything. Your skin and the hairs coming out of your skin are the extent of existence.
You need to demonstrate how the All can have a mind. Keep in mind that the All is infinite, unlike myself.
I think it is easier to imagine one understands infinity than to actually understand it. For example, infinite in what dimension? When I imagine eternity, I imagine time that just goes on and on. Or I might imagine timelessness as being like when I can go to the back cover of a book to find out how it ends. But what, really, does it mean to be outside time?
Is the All infinite in spatial extent? We don't actually know that. Whether or not the universe is spatially infinite we do not know, although Big Bang theory (to which I do not subscribe) would tend to refute its being infinite in extent.
Because a mind is that which is aware of "self" and "other" (duality). In the case of the All, there is no "other", and therefore no "self" either.
Is that what a mind is? Does even a self require a not-self? Unless, of course, all is self. You are saying there cannot be a mind in a nondual state.
And even if that is so, about which I am unconvinced, it would still be possible for the godhead to divide itself just enough to have a will and a mind. This may be the real meaning of the Tao passage about the Tao giving birth to one, and the one to two, and the two to three, and thus the ten thousand things. Or of the xian trinity, for that matter.
So nature just happens to have mind-boggling self-organizational properties that just happen to be inherent.
Science, very wisely, doesn't say that such things are "inherent".
Science is not a unified entity, thank God, and scientific thinking is not done by consensus, oh, wait, it often is but that is the social-herd aspect that gets in the way of science. But some evolutionary scientists are talking a lot about self organization properties of matter and they are quite famous.
How "self-organizational" do you think we'd be if had no food, oxygen, space, genetic history, etc. In truth, our "self-organization" is entirely dependent on things other than ourselves.
I'm not sure of your point.
That's your misunderstanding of evolutionary theory that is showing. Evolution doesn't depend on "chance", but on cause and effect. In sexually reproducing species such as our own, genetic diversity is brought about both by the recombination of genes, and also by mutation (perfectly natural mistakes during the copying of complex sequences of genes).
Yes, that's basic level evolution theory, although it certainly does depend on chance. Using cause and effect is out of place here. Sure, everything is cause and effect. So what. Winning the lottery depends on cause and effect too, but it ain't bloody likely.
By the way, (not that you're sufficiently interested!!) if you want to read a book by a truly innovative, outside-the-box scientist who has some ideas to assist greatly in making origin of life more plausible, try reading The Deep Hot Biosphere by Thomas Gold.
Here we are in the middle ages, bleeding sick people and believing angels dance on pins. And the vast majority of scientists are taking part in the debates about whether to bleed someone at the full moon or the new moon. Reading a book by a guy like him makes it a privilege to be alive at such a wonderful time.
If the offspring are better able to survive because of the gifts that the new combination of genes has given them, then they will naturally outcompete those around them. Chance doesn't have anything to do with it.
Humanity has not changed. This is one of the biggest mistakes modern people make - whether they are modern in 1492, 867, or 1200 BC. People live mostly by fairy tales. Which they don't examine.
You might try Stephen C. Meyer, The origin of biological information and the higher taxonomic categories. It's a reasonbly short essay which goes into some detail about the difficulties in supposing that random mistakes can really generate useful new information. Biological things fit together like nuts and bolts, the precision is extreme, there has to be assembly instructions, not just parts lying around. But I'm pretty sure I could find something shorter and maybe better. But really, you either have to love the topic enough to read about it or forget it.
http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB ... ew&id=2177
By all accounts, those "spurts" take millions of years.
It's a supposition that fits the theory but not the evidence. That's the problem which caused Gould to launch his punctuated equilibrium theory. Actually, the above paper goes into it, too.
In the case of a catastrophe, if a species did not survive it, then the species was "unfit". That's what "unfit" means - unable to survive whatever environment Nature throws at it.
At the end of the last ice age we had one of the biggest mammal extinctions ever, and it was large land mammals, mostly north American and some south american. It looks like huge sheets of melting water, called something like a glacial wave, hundreds of miles wide, swept north to south and killed everything in its path.
Truth is a pathless land.