FallentoReason 2.0

[Kirbmarc]

To counter it, I'd need to find a design feature that is beneficial and yet too indirect to be explained by natural selection alone. I've used my "homosexuality proves God" to be a counter-argument (homosexuality in both humans and animals creates stable families that can't have their own children that can adopt orphaned children). Even here though, atheists can still argue this is merely a fortunate by-product.

This is a good counterargument (and not one that I've heard before) but it's easy to argue against it: pure homosexuality is rare. Usually animals who engage mainly in homosexual behavior also copulate with the opposite sex. Therefore, they pass their genes.

Homosexual behavior in nature evolved to counter the "alpha male" phenomenon: beta males offer sex to the alpha, and in exchange also get a shot at being part to the community and possibly even have offsprings (since they're actually bisexual). Female homosexuality evolved to strengthen the bonds within the females and counter the dangerous effects of the competution for the males.

Furthermore, homosexuality limits the number of offsprings, which can be a good thing in cases of overpopulation (i.e. the population is reduced but there is no extinction). The adoptions by homosexual families are, indeed, a fortunate by-product.

The human society is diffferent, but the human society is also governed by culture. We've made possible for individuals with traits (like asthma) that would have been wiped out by natural selection to survive and thrive. Furthermore, homosexual behavior in the past was rarely the only sexual behavior that a person adopted in his life (in Ancient Greece people married, had children and engaged in homosexuality).

Pure homosexuals (like pure heterosexuals) are actually rare. The majority of the population is actually bisexual to a certain degree. And it's interesting to know that pure homosexuals can still have paternal or maternal instincts (evolution couldn't predict the invention of artificial insemination) and have become more prevalent in the last century, when overpopulation has become an issue.

The counter-argument is the law of infinite probability. Over infinite space and/or time, anything that can happen, however unlikely, will. Perhaps humans won the "cosmic lottery" which is why we're here to think about it at all. This is why "what-are-the-odds?" isn't hard evidence, at least not for our small sample size of 1.

I think thatn it's easy to prove that the odds for intelligent life are actually pretty good, in this universe (and probably in most universes stable enough to produce stars). I wouldn't be surprised if we discovered other sentient life forms, somewhere out there.

Opposable thumbs, walking upright to free up our hands, shedding our fur allowing us to make these chattering noises to communicate, our innate sense of empathy and community all came together to make our civilization possible.

You're being too anthropocentric. True, intelligent life just like ours is really unlikely. But who'sto say the path we have followed is the only one that leads to intelligence?

This is one of the reasons why I find the traditional depiction of humanoid aliens hard to swallow. Alien intelligent life is probably anything but humanoid.

The no-God hypothesis folk would have you believe that, despite all those eons and eons and eons and eons of perpetual motion, uncaused, past-eternal quantum fluctuating universe/multiverse, that no atheist life form from the past, has ever managed to work out a way of sending an atheist greeting message into the future to tell the theists here on earth that the supernatural being called God does not exist.

Theism is probably so specifically human (it's a very specific cultural by-product of some specific features of some homo sapiens species) that other life forms aren't concerned with it. They probably have their own ideas about the universe, different from both theism or atheism as we know them.

No theist life form has worked out a way to spread a theist greeting message, either, as far as we know.

Time and brownian motion dude. That's all.

Time, brownian motion and survival of the structures who can replicate themselves.