Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Beam me up, Scotty

This is the 100th post of BNO.  A milestone.  Who would a thunk it?  Ok, let's get on with it.


Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer, SETI Institute, asks if we are a biological miracle.  I want to comment upon the following quote.  By the way, the story is on Huffington Post.  Here's the quote:
In Europe, some academics have recently weighed in on the side of the skeptics, claiming to find biological roadblocks that would stall the easy evolution of thinking beings.

The thing I want to comment upon is evolution.  Why assume that we evolved by accident?  Could our existence be only explained by a mere accident also known as the theory of evolution?  I only want to posit a different possibility.  After all, scientists claimed to have created life itself in a laboratory.  But that would not be any accident if it were to happen.  An intelligent life form would have created another life form itself.  But how would you reconcile the two?  If humans create life, then who created humans?  Does evolution happen all by itself?


This isn't a religious argument being put forward as a way to discredit the theory of evolution.  I don't consider creationism a science.  This isn't about creationism.  Nor of intelligent design.  It is only to suggest that evolution may not be asking the right questions and therefore you cannot get answers unless you ask the right questions.


Is the right question the one that Shostak asks?  It may be a miracle, but not the one he may be suggesting.  On the other hand, for an intelligent being, to create life routinely isn't any miracle.  Besides that, not all life is intelligent.  Intelligence itself has to be defined.


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

It is curious, to me at least, that the more liberal one's politics, the less one believes in God. European socialists (not counting the Vatican)have an unusually un-Christianlike Christianity. I guess if you believe Christ was married to Mary, it's okay to believe in evolution. I'm not sure how Islam approaches evolution, but I'm sure if they didn't like my view, I could look forward to being fatwa-ed or jihad-ed. It's a sensitive subject.