Cofty/Tel
When I talk about life here on Earth, words are not enough to describe its diversity and its beauty. When I talk about what man has achieved in terms of science, art, music and literature, words fail because they are things that are beyond mere words.
However, none of this implies a plan or purpose or a 'creator' and that, I have found, is what religious people can't or won't accept. They can't or won't accept that life evolved here on Earth. They can't or won't accept that god doesn't exist. They can't or won't accept that god didn't create the heavens and the Earth and Man and all other life forms. They can't or won't accept that Man's achievements happened without god's help. They can't or won't accept that there is no life after death. They can't or won't accept that Man has no purpose whatsoever. Why?
Because they can't see how something as biologically complex as an eye or a brain, let alone a whole Man, could have evolved quite naturally. Therefore, god must exist and must have created Man.
What is not clearly understood, or even addressed, is the question of who created god? The invention of god only serves to put the central question back one step. What is also not understood is that they have replaced one set of difficult questions with a set which is equally difficult, if not more so. However, they repeat the mantra that god exists, has always existed, always will exist, that he is all knowing, all seeing and all powerful. They believe their mantra. This, then, means that they don't actually have to "THINK" about the implication of these statements and can simply accept them as fact without question. Once they do that, they can forget about science and evolution and simply accept the illogical nonsense that god did it all.
So. how did life on Earth evolve?
The first thing to understand is that life was not inevitable.
The second thing to understand is that there was no plan. Life did not evolve according to a pre-determined template.
The next thing to understand is that there wasn't a pre-determined end point. Life is not evolving in order to to arrive at a pre-determined end point which represents 'perfection'. Life evolves even today in order that it can better cope with its environment.
The next thing to understand is that life was accidental in that the conditions and elements necessary for life just happened to occur here on Earth.
My belief is that for what we refer to as 'life' to evolve somewhere in our universe, a special set of conditions such as temperature, pressure and chemical content must occur. The creation of 'life' may even be a staged process where conditions need to change in a given way at a given time in a given sequence.
The Universe is a place containing trillions of celestial bodies. It is also ever changing. It is also almost 14 billion years old. Given all of this, it comes as no surprise to find that life evolved in at least one place in this universe. We may find that life only exists here on Earth or we may not. Who knows. Until we understand the exact conditions needed for life to evolve, we can't even estimate how many other places in our universe are likely to contain life.
When I talk about 'attempts' at the creation of life, I am not talking about conscious and discrete efforts on the part of an 'intelligence' (AKA god). I am talking about an unplanned, natural, random and continuous process that takes place in all parts of the universe at all times which, in the vast, vast, vast majority of 'attempts' may not result in life or may result in 'near-life' which then fail.
