Andrew said:
"inevitable" is a word which is loaded in itself, and as to "outcome", I don't think we're quite at the end of the river yet.
Well, it seems to me that religious people talk quite a lot about "human dignity" and humanity being made in the image of God in some sense, and it seems that in the Islamic/Christian/Jewish religion God has some kind of special interest in humans (or perhaps He is also supposed to send prophets and messiahs to chimpanzees and squid and so forth...) and that humans have some centrality in God's universe. This being the case, it seems to me that these religions imply that humanity was supposed or intended to exist in the universe.
On the other hand, although one might make the case for certain traits such as intelligence or bipedalism being likely to arise, it's vanishingly unlikely that humanity would appear in its current form if evolution had had even a very slightly different starting point or been subject to very slightly different perturbations along the way.
The juxtaposition of the religious idea and the scientific idea suggest to me that people who believe that God started off life and then watched it unfold must also believe that God chose very, very specific initial conditions. This is what I was implying by my use of the word "inevitable". Which then further suggests the question: why would God bother with this rather elaborate scheme rather than creating humans directly?
I can't help but say that it looks to me like religious people struggling to hold onto vague and metaphorical versions of ideas whose exact and literal versions have been shown to be extremely unlikely indeed by the progress of science.
Rich _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
