[MD] Dawkins a Materialist (is watching?)

[Arlo Bensinger]

[Platt]
Gee, I must have missed it. What are the answers other than "Oops. We 
got lucky?"

[Arlo]
You can view the archives as easily as I.

[Arlo had offered this]
As for our consciousness being "lucky", assuming you mean the breadth 
and depth of human consciousness, I'd say we are incredible "lucky". 
Imagine how many biological patterns, from fish to dinosaurs, lived 
on this earth for millions and millions of years, and would still 
were it not for some random climatological and environmental events, 
and even afterwards how many different creatures came and went, and 
still the biosphere exhibits such diversity... and in all this 
"consciousness" (meaning "consciousness as humans have") has only 
been able to emerge from one particular biological pattern, the 
biological pattern of the human brain, which like all other 
biological patterns was itself the result of a long period of 
evolution and growth in complexity BEFORE any type of consciousness 
could emerge from its fabric.

[Platt]
No doubt "luck" explains it all, at least in your mind.

[Arlo]
And what explains it in yours? A God planned and implemented the whole thing?

[Platt previously]
So what's your reason for the universe and consciousness?

[Arlo then]
Quality. (And not "Quality plus a transcendent intelligence")

[Platt]
You mean Quality created the universe and consciousness? So which is 
it, luck or Quality? I'm confused. If it's Quality, perhaps we have 
room for some agreement.

[Arlo]
Quality. But not in a preplanning and predesign sense. "Human 
consciousness" was not planned ahead of time. It emerged only after 
millions of years, and after responses to random climate and 
environmental events, after a series of "AHA!" latchings allowed 
increasing complexity to a point where from these complex biological 
patterns something new was possible (from their collective activity).

[Arlo previously]
So you're saying the meteor was sent by a God to deliberately destroy 
the dinosaurs and bring climate change, with the intent of making people?

[Platt]
No. "People" could have been "created" with or without dinosaurs.

[Arlo]
Not likely. Given the millions and millions of years dinosaurs ruled, 
primates were pretty much a nothing group. Had the climate gone 
unchanged, and the dinosaurs continued, there is no evidence that 
primates would occupy any different part of the ecosystem then they 
did for all that time.

And even after that one random event, and the climate cooling, and 
the mass extinctions that set the stage for primates to blossom, it 
was took 65 MILLION years for homo sapiens to arrive on the scene. 
_BUT_ because of a unique evolutionary pattern, not planned, not 
predesigned, but enabling of an emergent leap in evolution, it has 
been only 60,000 years from early man to space flight.

3.8 billion years of life on this planet. Around 150 million years of 
dinosaurs and no people. Only in the last sixty thousand years have 
"people" existed. I'd say that's evidence that people were not 
"preplanned" but the result of a fortuitous evolutionary leap. If 
not, why not put people on the planet 3 billion years ago? Why waste 
time with 150 million years of dinosaurs? Why wait nearly 65 million 
years from the end of the dinosaurs to the first people?

[Arlo]
Who made God? How does a God, whose always existed, jibe with our 
"experience of how things are made"?

[Platt]
Now that you seem to have changed your tune, who made Quality?

[Arlo]
Its a metaphor made by man.