echo

I have this tendency to click on your profile pic. I can't seem to resist your red hair and sweet expression.

I tend to regard God as mostly just a reification sculpted by humam emotional needs.

It seems to me that a lot of people do not see probablility's hand in sculpting the structure of the world. Probability is in a sense halfway between order and chaos, and it gives things shape and structure. If you look at a soap bubble floating in the air, it's shaped by the pressures of the random motion of molecules inside and outside, and by the cohesive fluidity of the soap and water. You have random particle motion, but some attraction between some of the particles, and it creates a very distinctive, non-random shape, or rather a shape formed by the evening out of the rndom motions of a great many interacting particles.

Evolution is similar, albeit far more complex process. Each creature is a walking question( or you cold say a walking answer to a question ) : can this creature, with this particular set of genetic instructions, and the physical and behavioral traits they generate, survive in this particular environment? The creatures and their environment interact and return a bunch of yes yes yes no no no yes no yes yes no no no yes no and the survivors, the yeses, mix their DNA together and generate a new generation of walking question/answers.
Probability shapes organisms by trial and error, sort of feeling out what works. Sexual reproduction works, and creates much more complex creatures than something like an asexually reproducing bacterium, because the combination of different genetic materials from different organisms creates variation in their offspring, and reduces the possiblity that the offspring will be wiped out by some environmental event that none of them are able to cope with. Again, here is probability; organisms take their shape from the set of genetic instructions that for whatever reasons in a given time and place have the highest probablility of survival. It is a random, non-directed process that produces non-random, highly structured results. Halfway between Intelligent Design and simple chaos. Evolution happens because the variation in each generation of new organisms allows new answers the question of survival to develop as environmental factors affecting survival change over time.

I'm a student of Buddhism and there's a lot of variation among differing sects as to whether there is something analagous to the Christian notion of a soul. It is central to the notion of becoming enlightened to dispel the notion of a distinct individual soul and the cognitive distortions and attachments that perpetuate that notion. Myself I have a feeling that mere matter energy and probability cannot account for certain aspects of conscious being, and by that I mean that they don't appear to me to account for colors. When a bunch of photons hit our retinas, an electorchemical impulse travels back along our optic nerves and bounces around in our brains in wondrous complex ways with one result being that we see colors. Thing is, those colors can only exist in our minds, as far as I can tell. A neuron in the brain has never been exposed to light, all it ever does is relay electrochemical impulses, it can never see. What then, are these colors? If differing neurotransmitters are associated wth different colors, what is this redness of chemical X and the blueness of chemical Y? How to they interact to allow me to see 16 million or more colors it I weren't somewhat color blind? It seems to me that this at least hints at a nonmaterial aspect of consciousness, wherein resides certain information that I don't think actually exists in the world of matter/energy/space-time. But then I don't know how the hell this field of universal consciousness, if we are to call it that, interacts with my electrochemical Neurons. Other than to suggest that somehow a weak force like Universal consciousness might be able to interact with matter becasue matter is itself made of probability. An electron in its orbital has no actual position, its orbital is just a probabliity field wherein the electron may exist, anywhere within it, at a given time. Given this certain lax of concrete fixity of fundamental particles, a force of universal consciouness, might be able to interact with them. And that's about as far as I can go with that notion at this time. I hope that all this was at least a little bit interesting.

God is complete bullshit fabricated to control you
evolution is at least an honest attempt to scratch the surface of how we came to be.
intelligent design..... Google flying spaghetti monster

"dogs fucked the pope no fault of mine"
HST RIP