Which ones might they be, Formersnag?

>>Pericles, i see you are still avoiding answering simple questions in plain english.<<

I certainly don't recall any of those coming from you.

Enlighten me.

Squeers,

Please don't take offence, but I think you may be over-complicating some of your propositions. However, my bias is towards simplification to afford better understanding, and I may have misconstrued.

I tend to agree with Pericles, and would go a stage further to suggest that consciousness, awareness, sentience and intellect may reasonably be construed as degrees of development of the same foundational mental capacity, and that animals other than humans also display such capacity, to varying degrees. I conjecture this from the evidence of animal behaviour which may not otherwise be easily attributed to instinct or chance. Human behaviour of course also varies from sheer instinct and reflex, all the way through to pure contemplation, but I still think this is evidence of evolutionary kinship rather than radical separation. Animals learn from their environment, and many learn techniques uniquely useful in particular circumstances, pass knowledge/skills on to their group, and even use tools and cooperation (elephants, chimps, whales, porpoises, gorillas), and pass on hunting and food gathering skills and exhibit varying degrees of emotion. In the higher mammals intellectual capacity tends to be the rule rather than the exception.

I would contend that human evolution very well explains the development of the high human intellect (consciousness, awareness, reasoning) by way of the influence of natural selection. Man is a weak animal, slow and easily killed, but has the evolutionary advantage of ingenuity and inventiveness, resulting in the use of tools, weapons, defences, traps, machines and so forth - from chance mutation beginnings leading to a chosen course deviating from say animal Neanderthalism or such, by virtue of the development of abilities to exploit a more productive lifestyle in terms of survival and perpetuation of progressively superior genetic development. Mutation favouring adaptation and success, and in human development this has simply been more in favour of brains rather than brawn.

I would conjecture that the principal reason for humankind's superior intellectual development is explained simply by the circumstance of the biological structure of early primates/homonids - principally hands and fingers, and thence an opposing thumb. The ability to manipulate.

Cont'd:

As for any contention that our consciousness may be some sort of construct separate from our body or biological whole, I think it's purely erroneous speculation. Then again, maybe we don't exist in human form at all, but are actually some cerebral blobs hooked into a massively complex computer, mechanical or organic, and we are just imagining our existence and all that this entails?

Squeers, "Either a stupidly miraculous coincidence of elements and their improbable progeny, or some kind of purpose, seems indicated."

Not necessarily at all. I do however agree with your earlier proposition to the effect that a higher power, or God, may indeed represent a human need (for greater understanding perhaps). Neither proposition of course discounts the possibility of a higher being or higher intellect somewhere in the universe (or beyond). Of course it still remains that any such higher being would always remain beyond our comprehension or understanding, and so perhaps, we either give in to a fundamental human psychological need to envisage greater order and deeper meaning, or we don't.

Saltpetre,

Not offended at all and thanks for your thoughts. I'm just musing possibilities in my recent posts and not defending any position. Unfortunately a busy day today and will have to desist : )

“Evolution existed long before Darwin gave it common expression. It didn't just spring into being like Athena, fully formed from Zeus' brow.
In much the same way, atheists also existed before Darwin. They did not need a theory of evolution to convince them. After all, there is nothing in Darwin's theory itself that denies the existence of a deity. He simply described a process. It may have given the odd atheist here and there a warm glow, but it was not exactly a game-changer for them.”
(Pericles, 4/11/11)

"An atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume: "I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one." I can't help feeling that such a position, though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and that although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist" (Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker 1986)

Sounds like a 'game changer' to me. It seems, Pericles, you are disagreeing at least somewhat with what Dawkins said. In your ultimate quest to disagree with everything I say, you forgot to whom it was you were addressing, and you wanted to challenge him.

Yet we can agree that the Bible (like the Constitution) came about as a result of something occurring. As a result of Jesus appearing, men such as St Luke wrote “orderly accounts” of what he did.

I also agree with you that science does not oppose religion, or at least it does not oppose the Christian faith.

However, if you want to suggest that Dawkins doesn't oppose religion (the Christian religion especially) you should read more of him.

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all of fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak; a vindictive, blood thirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” (Dawkins)

Squeers,
Most of us here like to think ourselves sceptics most of the time. Though our bias leads us to applying our scepticism selectively.

I would think the reason why evidence against the evolutionary process is evidence for God is fairly obvious. Similar to why Dawkins feels evolution helps justify his atheism, the lack of a credible materialist explanation for our origins points us to a non-material one. If nature cannot create itself, then it must have had a non-natural creator (spirit, mind, or intelligence).

Generally, the processes we observe in biology are not creating new forms and functions. Natural selection is a conservative process, favouring the strong and healthy, while eliminating the weak, but it's not a creative process.

For real evolution to occur, that which could change a one cell organism eventually into something as complex as say, a pelican, large amounts of genetic information must be added to the genome, information that would program the forms and functions found in the higher life form, not found in the lower.

The problem for the evolutionist (and especially for the sufficiently sceptical who rely on evidence in preference to a favourably inclined belief system) is that the small changes we observe as living things reproduce do not involve increasing genetic information. If we observed information-increasing changes happening, even if only a few, this could reasonably be used to help support the argument that “fish may indeed become philosophers” given enough time. But the changes we see evident are not information-increasing. They are heading the other way.

This is just the bare bones of a theistic argument involving hard evidence. In 350 words or less I'm probably never going to write something to convince a solid sceptic. But others out there have availed us of more fully detailed arguments.