Kevin's Crap - If we didn't exist, then… well, we wouldn't exist

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If we didn't exist, then… well, we wouldn't exist

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monodelamuerte "You're not going crazy, you're going sane in a crazy world!"

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"I don't consider myself a pessimist. I think of a pessimist as someone who is waiting for it to rain. And I feel soaked to the skin." -Leonard Cohen

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If we didn't exist, then… well, we wouldn't exist	Sep. 5th, 2007 @ 08:53 pm

This is the best explanation of why we exist without theistic involvement.

I especially like her analogy. The below is a quote from the article:
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Here's an analogy. If your parents hadn't met, hadn't gotten together, hadn't had sex on exactly the day that they conceived you, in exactly the right way to make that one particular sperm out of thousands fertilize that egg... you wouldn't have been born. Ditto their parents, and theirs, and theirs... all making your birth even more unlikely, by several orders of magnitude.

Does that mean you were fated to be born? That everything about human evolution and reproduction was designed so that you could be born?

Or was it simply chance that you got born instead of somebody else? (Okay, chance plus adaptive descent with modification.)

The fact that you're here doesn't mean you were fated or designed to be here. It means that the million-sided evolutionary dice got rolled, and your number came up. You won the lottery. That doesn't mean the lottery was designed so you could win it. If you roll ten dice, the chances that they'll come up in the pattern 4636221434 is over 60 million to one... but the fact that this particular pattern is astronomically unlikely doesn’t mean it was designed to happen.

I get that it's extremely difficult to conceive of a world without you in it. Here you are conceiving it, after all; your presence is kind of implied in the imagining. But if you step back from your own life and look at the world from an outside perspective, logically you have to admit that you're not actually the one necessary lynchpin on which all of human existence turns. Sorry to be a buzz-kill (I'm pretty sure David Hume said that as well), but the human race could easily have happened without you.

And the exact same thing is true of life on this planet.
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Mood:

okay