Friday, September 18, 2015

Randomness, Selection, Evolution and the Bible.

beliefnet
Having said that, I agree that the suggestion that four billion years of random mutations produced an organism as refined and sophisticated as a human being, is an absurd idea.  The ease w/which an ecological system can be destroyed evinces fine tuning, IMO.  The analogy of the likelihood of an explosion in a printing factory creating the largest edition of the Oxford English Dictionary seems apropos to describe the idea of a strict non-supernatural directed evolution of the universe. EOCjlb

If a bunch of people picked over the explosion debris in the printing factory and selected the parts that came from the OED and reassembled them it is not absurd at all.  It might take them four billion years, but that is a lot of time for selection to work. 

Evolutionary selection is not kind to random mutations that do not help the organism.  The organism is lunch for an organism that has more beneficial random mutations. If the printing factory also printed Lewis Carrol all the nonsense would be eliminated from the debris.  Scripture evolved in the same way.  Pieces of debris from destroyed myths were picked over and reassembled into the various versions of Sacred Texts we have now.  You may believe that God helps the sorters in all cases, but it is really not necessary for the sorting out to take place. 

As for humans, there were many failures along the line to the present iteration of humanity that may be a failure as we speak due to a mutation that encourages belief in the idea that humans "dominate the earth" which may be making the earth habitable only for cockroaches and perhaps dinosaurs whose genes are conserved in birds.  

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