Why'd you do it that way, God?

Have you read or come across the ideas of James N Gardners book "Biocosm"? I obtained a copy of this book and it's a great read! Not sure I can fully accept his 'Selfish Biocosm' thesis, but it's perhaps the most mind-blowing and ambitious physical hypotheses I've ever come across!

I've lent it to a number of friends, both atheist ad deist. Most approached it with knowing smirk, but once they were into it became highly enthusiastic about the depth of the ideas.

He looks at evidence for the universe being "bio-friendly" eg physics paprameters which appear to be specifically tweaked for evolution of life and intelligence to occur, and hypothesises what this would mean in a cyclic universe.

His idea - an evolutionary process like the one we see around us could have occured in the previous universe cycle(s), and over billions of years of technological development the inhabitants gained the knowledge and control over inanimate matter to be able to 'tweak' the physical parameters themselves.

So in this theory the universe itself is not designed so much as it is terraformed, and evidence for this terraforming is indistuinguishable from evidence for design.

His idea is naturalistic and also darwinian in that terraformed universes are subsequently more likely to give rise to intelligent life which can further terraform and guarantee the stability of the universe, his title 'self biocosm' is drawn from Dawkins 'selfish gene'. So universes with intelligent life have a selective advantage, yet there isn't any mystical sense to the theory.

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And then there's the fact that knowing what the outcome might be is different than seeing it happen before your eyes. Perhaps God started from the Big Bang just to see what kind of life would arise.

An omnipotent and omniscient God could have created the universe as-is 5 minutes ago with all memories etc intact.

For such a God, imagining something would be as good as creating it (perhaps he is imagining us right now).

Therefore he could have already divined the lifetimes of all sentient beings worthy of going to Heaven and actually created them in Heaven to start with. No need for hell or suffering, no need to separate the wheat from the chaff when you can create the wheat full-grown with false memories of the life they would have led, had you actually created them. We can only divine that he did things the way he did because he wanted them to happen like this, so if there is a Hell it's because God wanted there to be a Hell.

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Take our moon for example. All of the brightest minds in the world have reached no conclusion on how it was formed. And that's after hand delivery of 100's of pounds of surface and core samples. No, if the group you call "Science" can't reach agreement on how our moon was formed with samples in their hands, I'm not going to give them ANY credit for theories on how anything else came into being.

Scientists in general seem to be happy with the impact hypothesis, and as the scientist near the end of the video states it's in all the textbooks and I haven't heard any reputable scientist really disputing the model or having an alternative (maybe I'm wrong though). Also, it's well backed up by computer simullations originally developed to model impacts between Saturns moons, but if there's anything less than total 100% agreement by "All of the brightest minds in the world" you won't accept the theory and say we must posit magic as the only rational cause?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibV4MdN5wo0&NR=1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_impact_hypothesis

BTW : The rings of Saturn seem to be about 100 million years old, not 1 billion, so what you say is a a straw man argument about the age of the moons being wrong.

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10 days ago this fact had FOUR results in a google search. All from one website. I spread the word a little, and now science is peeking out from under the snowball with 80 results. You likely don't care about the global warming muck...but it's valid proof to me. "Especially astonishing are the very short times needed for major warmings. A temperature increase of 5C can occur in a few decades. "

I typed your quoted phrase into google, as you did not provide the exact search terms used to get the 80 hits referenced before and got only 1 hit, an article titled "Local view: Scientific fact shows that global warming is real ..." and it required a subscription.

Can you tell us the exact search term(s) used for the 80 hits, so we can check out the source of the info ourselves? Or is that a secret?

"Indeed - it shows that you, -Sky-, are making the baseless assumption that another debater has not engaged in research on teh topic. You are, in effect, attacking the person, not the argument." You call that an attack? You must be a mighty thin skinned dung weasle. But I appreciate your view. I'll keep that in mind.

Throwing poo is the best you can come up with ? And you don't believe you are decended from a monkey?

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To reiterate : I typed your quoted phrase into google (including the quotes) and it's sourced to ONE particular article dated Jan 1st 2010. Without the quotes I get over 31000 unrelated hits.

Results 1 - 1 of 1 for "Especially astonishing are the very short times needed for major warmings. A temperature increase of 5C can occur in a few decades."

Article title: "Local view: Scientific fact shows that global warming is real ..."
http://www.duluthnewstribune.com/.../event/article/id/156254
The site requires a registration and for me to provide a valid U.S. or Canadian zipcode (I'm still awaiting a confirmation email of my registration, where I lied about my zipcode '90210'). UPDATE : Never got my registration email
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UPDATE : Is this the research you meant?

http://www.theresilientearth.com/?q=content/arctic-aeroso...

NASA researchers report that much of the atmospheric warming observed in the Arctic since 1976 may be due to changes in tiny airborne particles called aerosols. Though greenhouse gases are invariably blamed for global climate change, and the shrinking Arctic ice cover in particular, this new research indicates that as much as half the warming in the Arctic can be attributed to short lived particulate pollution—basically soot. Unlike the dreaded gas, CO2, aerosols do not stay in the atmosphere very long, suggesting that the effects of any warming caused by aerosols would quickly be reversed if their emissions ceased.

So it's still human pollution causing the problem, but because only half the warming is due specifically to CO2 per se that means scientists are liars and the warming/melting isn't 'really' happening ? BTW doesn't this actually imply that any predicted arctic warming needs to be doubled to take into account the effect of man-made aerosols? And there's no indication at all that the emissions of the aerosols are going to cease (it's not even on the agenda, unlike CO2 emissions).

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