next topic idea: Atheists, if there is no god, are cats made of chocolate?
Athiests - If there is no God, is planet Earth itself a living entity?
by EndofMysteries 16 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
-
-
prologos
bohm, if one can not answer the hard questions, move on to the silly ones. the answer is: no, nuts.
-
Xanthippe
EoM it's ok really. Life is here and reality is what it is. We just have to deal with it. If you could just start from the premise that nobody is in charge you could set your mind free. You just have to stand on the edge of the void and say as far as we know there is just us - and that's ok. Try it.
-
cofty
On the Earth, everything has a purpose to promote healthy life and destroy unhealthy life.
No it doesn't.
The selfish gene is the key to understanding life. Sometimes cooperation and symbiosis is in the best interests of organisms, sometimes being a parasite is the way forward.
-
Xanthippe
sometimes being a parasite is the way forward
Words to live by. You made me smile.
-
prologos
is there not an article on New Scientist that shows that - Viruses (not the one in the very ancient permafrost) were catalysts in the evolutionary process?
or enemies helping us get here?
-
Apognophos
Aside from that, trees for example, we take in oxygen and give off carbon, they take in carbon and give off oxygen.
Not always. There wasn't any complex life until after the Great Oxygenation Event. What you are seeing around you today is the end result of increasing complexity and differentiation into available niches. In the beginning, the earth really was a formless void. Things got more interesting and complex over time.
As to your thread title, I have absolutely no idea what you're getting at. Of course it's true that the Earth could be considered a "living unit", just as our own bodies are host to tons of parasitic organisms. There are ten times as many of their cells in our body as there are homo sapiens cells. Similarly, some people believe that the Universe itself is a living thing that is developing on its own. In that context, I guess the stars and/or planets would be cells and we humans would just be tiny atoms in those cells.
Of course you're right that this can sound far-fetched, but no more than believing that a sentient creator came into being on his own.
If water always remained in liquid state and never water the earth, if it was always in a solid state, the same thing.
This is a tired old canard of creationists, the "Earth is in a special place" trope. Surely you know that there are plenty of planets out there which consist of massive amounts of ice, even water ice? So yes, our planet is in the Goldilocks zone and it has life. Others are not in the zone, and don't have life (though we're not so sure about Europa). This says nothing about a creator existing or not existing.