There is a thought-provoking article by Fred Reed (“Fred on Everything),
, which gives a skeptical view of the neo-Darwinian account of evolution. I will be brief, as it is almost closing time at the community center where I type up this bullshit, and in any case, I am getting mighty close to my big afternoon crap. Fuck, you know that urgent feeling in your bowels that soon comes to dominate all of your thought processes, however “spiritual.”
Briefly, Fred makes the point that random mutations, selected by natural selection do not provide a mechanism for explaining irreducible complexity and the evolution of life from a primeval soup to humans. For example, the existence of consciousness remains to be explained in evolutionary and mechanistic terms:
So, do we just say that there is a god, and leave it at that, falling back into accepting one of the existing faiths?
Nothing of the sort follows, and in fact the opposite unflattering conclusion is more likely: humans are just unimportant animals lost on an insignificant planet.
First, even if life is not explicable mechanistically, the entire universe is full of natural evil, as we see it; entropy, inevitable decay, organisms preying on each other, viciousness, pain and misery. It is a real problem explaining this within a Judeo-Christian framework, accepting that natural evil pre-existed the mythical Adam. Some say that Satan was responsible, ultimately using the freewill argument back to the origin of the universe, so that evil came to soil God’s otherwise good creation. Thus, as I have heard it, the “meat-eating” dinosaurs would not have been meat eaters, but their claws and teeth used for loving caresses. Sure, just like guns are used today by gang bangers, to aid in cultural enrichment.
However, this is scientifically implausible since nature seems to be ordered, and systematic, not somehow thrown out of whack by Lucifer’s exercise of freewill. The meat-eating dinosaurs really are designed to tear creatures apart. Further, it is difficult to even contemplate what a world without increasing entropy would be like. How could there be an arrow of time?
See:
.
Thus, decay is inevitable. No omnipotent good God would stand for it; finite me doesn’t even want to sit for it.
If there is a God, it must be, if a higher intelligence, indifferent to the suffering of organic life. A being beyond good and evil, concepts that are biologically constructed, would not be subject to the theological problem of evil.
However, there need not even be an intelligent God. Maybe there is some sort of “spiritual process,” or something like the “Absolute,” (F. H. Bradley) which produced the multiverse, much as I now need to produce crap. Who know? We certainly will not, as we came from nothingness, briefly crawled over this decaying world, and then will be extinguished. If the quantum physic wankers are right, that mind produces the multiverse
(
, then given the omnipresence of death, the totality of what is, is certainly, doomed, doomed, doomed.
Chew on that Uncle Fred on Everything, you cranky old genius!