I suppose it must seem to you that’s it’s an awful lot of trouble for a mountain to open its top up and spew molten lava all over the place. If I were to think of the mountain as a conscious agent, I might say that volcanoes erupt so they would have something to admire, but that would smack of the pathetic fallacy.

A mountain is just a bunch of rock, and it doesn’t take any “effort” for it to erupt. The eruption is the result of nature taking its course.

Sorry to be so glib about it, but your argument is really an excellent example of the pathetic fallacy (pathetic referring to pathos, not its meaning, pitiful). You argue that if the universe didn’t need to create life then why did to do it, but the universe, a bunch of space with stuff in it, doesn’t have needs at all. It’s as though the universe could have chosen either to make life or not, or, if it wasn’t the universe doing the choosing, then it must have been something. Since something made this choice, there must have been a reason.

By assuming that there was a choice, you assume some intelligent agent capable of creating life, but this was what you were presumably trying to prove.

I guess I am back to the “given enough time and enough universes magical things happen” argument.

If you’re interested in how life could have arisen without magical intervention, I recommend Talk Origins page on abiogenesis, which has lots of useful info. It’s worth pointing out that given enough time and enough universes, literally anything that’s physically possible will occur.

Posted: October 6th 2009

See all questions answered by George Locke

The universe did not “create life.” The universe existed and life, perhaps inevitably, arose on a planet where it was possible for life to arise. Your assumption that the universe is conscious gives rise to your question, but because the universe is not conscious, your question does not make any sense.

Posted: October 5th 2009

See all questions answered by Akusai

You might as well ask what’s in it for the sea when, over thousands of years, it shapes and erodes the coastline, creating cliffs and bays and arches and stacks and all the other typical features of coastal scenery.

The answer is, of course, nothing. The coastal scenery is not the result of any intention on the part of the sea: it is simply what happens as a result of the sea’s pounding action.

In exactly the same way, life is simply what results, given the physical properties of the universe.

Posted: October 3rd 2009

See all questions answered by Paula Kirby

A universe without a guiding intelligence has no desires, and no concept of what’s “in it” for itself. Life arose because out of the billion trillion plus stars, at least one of them had a planet around it in the right relative position and with the right proportions of chemical elements for abiogenesis to occur.

If you flipped that many coins you would actually expect at least one to land on its side. As unlikely as it is to happen on a given flip, the odds against it aren’t a billion trillion to one. What happened on Earth was unlikely to happen around any given star, but the number of opportunities was staggering.

I would adjust your argument to, “Given enough time and enough materials, things which seem so unlikely to happen that their actual occurrence looks miraculous are in fact so likely that they are to be expected.”

Posted: October 1st 2009

See all questions answered by SmartLX