Causality and Thomism

Well, MJ asked me to ask about this here, so here it is, in the Off Topic list.

This is me asking MJ for his take on the whole Unmoved Mover / Uncaused Cause thing.

He asked me to do a bit of research on the topic, and so I did. And I was interested to learn that Thomas Aquinas didn't make up either idea. It originally came from Aristotle's Metaphysics, which I had never realized. What he did do was include that idea in an explanation of the nature of the divine - the idea that the existence of God (or gods, or so on) can be determined by reason, which seems logical now that he's explained it but was apparently nigh unheard of before then. (Oddly enough, the part of this that I have the hardest time explaining to people is the part about how time cannot be infinite without an infinite number of moments having had to pass before coming to the present and thus present never occurring.)

Without using wording that is likely to cause an argument: MJ (and other philosophers and fellow philosophers-aspirant), what is your take on all of this? The idea of trying to use reason and logic to prove the existence of the divine?

Reason and logic are only going to get you to ideas. Being able to think abstract, as we are, we can reason in many ways or directions.

As I'm imagining it right now, reason and logic are to a man in his searching for the divine as what walking is to somebody wanting to get from his cottage in the woods to the market in town.

At each crossroads this man will need to make a choice. Will he go this way or that?

Comparing the search for the divine with this allegorical image, the walking is reason, and the choice is an act of faith. (The fact that in the allegory, the man has to choose intellectually does not really play part in this allegory.)

The thing is, reasoning often needs a point from where to start, a direction to go in. Even science has it's axioms and theories which are not proven (yet), but taken for true based on what is seen. An act of faith, in a way. In the same way, man, at the crossroads, chooses which way to go, on what he thinks is right.

Now, to get Christian about it, I think I could say that at these crossroads in our lives, the signpost has been severely damaged throughout the ages, and a lot of possibilities present themselves. Some (road)ways seem more attractive than others, but the only road to God is this very hard looking road, giving prospects of pain and humiliation. Yet, being told it is the way to God, some do take it, and they discover grand things as they find God in a way they would have never dreamed of meeting Him!

@nikolaj: I don't think that it is the always the road that is the hardest you must travel, but only the road where you are needed most. Look to the horizon before you choose.

For a rough example off the top of my head, say a small child is floundering in the ocean 30 meters out, and an old man is also drowning, but he is 60 meters out. No one else but you is around to save them. It would be nigh impossible to save them both; I would chosse the child first, both becasue the child can be saved faster (leaving a msall chance for the other guy afterward), and because the child has longer to live, more to experience. The hardest route would probably be saving both in one trip, but that is also the most risky one, even if you have a flotation device and lifegaurd training.. What do you do? Yes, I know it's not a perfect example, but you see what i mean right? Naturally, it doesn't always have to be life or death, i'm just saying the hardest route is not always the most feasible.

At the risk of sounding offensive: I think the route you take in life shouldn't be based on the expectations of any being other than yourself. If you happen to agree with the expectations of a particular deity, then cool, be friend with that deity. But in the end, it is ultimately up to you.

Good points though.

@0'sevens: "...time cannot be infinite without an infinite number of moments having had to pass before coming to the present and thus present never occurring."

You just did explian it pretty well. But isn't that common sense? How can there be a present when time never stands still?

I think the term 'present' or 'now' actually encompasses a span of several seconds before and after it is said, in practical usage, by the way. To eliminate just such confusions.

Brock - I like the way you think.

Likewise at the risk of offending pretty much everyone: This is why I could never be Christian any more. The idea that there is only one deity, who feels only one way, and will accept only people who agree with that one way, and will torture for all eternity everyone who disagrees, is in my mind cruel. So I have chosen a set of gods to be friends with who talk a bit more sense. Then again, this could be, as my Muslim friends say, a problem of 'text vs taught.' It could be that the Bible says something else entirely and the entire Christian world is just getting it wrong, but I don't know. It's been years since I've read it and even then it would've been tainted by reading into it what I had been taught. Whereas Heathenry I am coming to with no background - the text is all I have, and I can ask very specific questions to people I trust to answer with as little bias as possible.

And as for explaining it that way, that's pretty much the exact wording I use in real life and the universal answer I get is "no." Not in disbelief, but in disagreement. From people who then cannot refute my point but still refuse to believe it.

But... this is straying far away from a discussion on Causality. A discussion MJ has yet to weigh in on.

I learned this as the Kalam Arguement and later as the Cosmological Arguement.

Axioms.
1. All things that have a beginning have a cause.
2. The earth has a beginning.
Thus...the earth has a cause. We call this Cause God.

This is straightforward logic, but the common idea is more along the lines of Eternal Universe. Edit: Or people just don't think through it. You guys have more faith in the logical abilities of normal people than I do...but I suspect people would be better, but the teachers don't want them to be because this points to some serious flaws in our secular understanding. Also, people are scared that logic will lead them to bad places, so they avoid logic.

In fact, when the Big Bang theory came out, it was resisted quite a bit because of Edit: Its support for God.

Now there seemed to be five counter-arguements to this one. None seemed worthy to my mind.
1. But God needs a start.
The counter-counter to this is 'God doesn't have a start', and 'you're not paying attention to the axioms.'
2. The universe is too vast and complicated and over our heads to understand. 'Its a mystery'...I watched a 'movie' which had the hero claiming to be ten thousand years old or something, to be Jesus, and to not know the answer to the beginning. 'Its a mystery'.
The c-c is 'this Arguement is pretty straightforward stuff, any elementary student can understand it. You're engaging in false modesty.'
3. Its not usually phrased this way, but diagnosing it the arguement means 'the universe is irrational'.
The c-c is 'Science works. Science is based on reason. Therefore reason works.'

There were a couple more typical arguements, but I've forgotten them. And yah, this Typ ical Five and the C-C's was my stuff, but I got the Kalam stuff from reading Strobel or Stroble.

Edit: And no, you're not likely to offend me with your objections.

As far as the notion of using logic to prove the divine, I'd say that the jury is still out. It's interesting to note that Aquinas' Aristotelian cosmological argument was advanced because Aquinas had rejected Anselm of Canterbury's Platonic ontological argument, and oddly about half the great thinkers accept the ontological argument (Augustine, Descartes, Hegel) and half reject it (Aquinas, Scotus, Kant).

I find the moral argument considerably more compelling; but that's not the issue at stake here.

There is a fundamental problem with the statement that "X" can be proved logically, and that is that logical proofs inherently require axioms. It cannot be proved even that one plus one always equals two without establishing a shared set of assumptions, what constitutes one, what constitutes two, what function is intended by "plus", and the general nature lf the world. For example, most people would assert that it is impossible to make a square circle, and I can argue persuasively that this is not so. My solution to making a square circle is to do it in three-dimensional space, in which a cylinder is both a circle in two dimensions and a square in a different two dimensions. But when the problem was posed the assumption was made that the problem had to be solved in two dimensions, not three; I simply refused to accept the unstated limitation.

In something of the same way, you cannot prove anything without a shared set of presuppositions. In most cases, you have to agree to accept certain rules of logic--e.g., if A then not non-A, if all A are B and all B are C then all A are C. Most people here probably accept these principles without even being able to state them formally; not everyone in all history has accepted them.

Yet there is something compelling about a cosmological argument, particularly in its negation. Jean-Paul Sartre is quoted as having stated that the biggest problem with his entire (existentialist) philosophy lies in the question, 'why is there something, rather than nothing?' The cosmological argument answers that, but it's an adductive rather than a deductive answer. There is nothing inherently wrong with adductive reasoning--we use it all the time, and it frequently gives us the right answers. For example, you hear the doorbell ring, you open the door, no one is there, and you conclude either that whoever rang the bell didn't wait, either because they thought you weren't coming or they were playing tricks on you. You might be wrong, though: it might be that your doorbell shorted, or that the wind through a walnut that happened to hit the bell, or someone practicing his golf swing very improbably drove the ball to that exact spot. What you've got at that point is the most probable answer as the one that commends itself, because it explains all the known information. But you haven't really reasoned from basis to conclusion; you've reasoned the opposite direction, from outcome to cause.

The same problem plagues all the arguments for the existence of God (except perhaps deus e homo malus): we are taking what is and postulating that the best explanation is the existence of God. The classic formulation of the teleological argument (the argument from design) was advanced by William Paley, who said that if you find a watch, you know that somewhere there must be a watchmaker, and so when you look at the universe and see its intricate design you know there must be a universe designer. In response, David Hume claimed that given infinite time, matter, and space, pure chance would mean that somewhere a watch would come into existence entirely by chance--the million monkeys typing theory (which it is joked has been disproved by the Internet). You then face the question, what really are the odds that this could have fallen into place accidentally, as opposed to the complexity necessitating a designer? Antony Flew, one of the most eminent athiests of the twentieth century, became a theist when the human genome project published its results, saying that DNA was too complex to have happened by accident, so there must be a designer, some kind of god who put it together.

So in a sense we're asking whether it requires more faith to believe that the universe just happens to exist, containg matter, energy, motion, following rules that have no source but simply are the way matter and energy interact, or whether it requires more faith to believe that someone outside the universe is responsible for its existence, form, and movement. Roll the pair of decillion-sided dice enough times and they will eventually come up snake eyes. Could it have happened? Is there a more reasonable alternative?

This is why I could never be Christian any more. The idea that there is only one deity, who feels only one way, and will accept only people who agree with that one way, and will torture for all eternity everyone who disagrees, is in my mind cruel.

Funny, I have this discussion with another guy who was raised in a conservative Christian church but has sort of walked away from it--except that I'm a problem for him. He says (I hope I can repeat this without seeming immodest) that I'm the smartest person he knows, so the fact that I believe the Bible shakes his belief that the Bible is not credible. But I don't expect you to accept the Bible as true on my authority; I hope rather to show that the faith is not necessarily guilty as charged.

• There is a problem in the question of whether there is "only one deity" as opposed to many. That problem runs so deep that Plato and Aristotle had largely abandoned the polytheism of their culture due to the philosophical problems it raised. One of the big ones is, what is "good"? Interestingly you have accused the Christian God of being "cruel", as if there were a moral standard to which you could hold the gods. This was a problem in Greek mythology, because the gods seemed to be little more than superhuman men, doing much the same as men, none of them truly good, some of them very evil, and yet making that statement required that there be some concept of "good" and "evil" that was itself greater than the gods. If we assume that there is a single "God above the gods" who made everything with a specific purpose and intending for specific rules to apply, then suddenly "good" and "evil" have a meaning that applies universally, based on what beings, be they gods, humans, or animals, "should" do within the purposes for which we were created. Take that away, and "good" becomes a matter of your personal opinion, which might differ from my personal opinion. Ultimately absent a unified singular origin of all things, there is no basis for a common conception of "good"; yet we all share such a common concept. I can agree with you that what you describe is cruel, even though I would not consider similar treatment "cruel" if applied to pancake batter, because somehow pancake batter is different from human beings. But the very fact that you think that human beings ought to be treated "better" than pancake batter means you believe that there is an overriding moral concept which is either valid because it originates with the same single being that created all things, or is nothing more than your opinion. If it happens to be nothing more than your opinion, then you cannot condemn God on the basis of your opinion, because He might have an entirely different opinion, and your opinion is not more valid than his, it's just the one you prefer.
• I think it a minor point, but I don't think that the Bible actually says that there's only one deity. There seems to be something very real in the persons of such ancient deities as Dagon and Chemosh, at least, and the "magicians" of Egypt fully expected that they would be able to call upon their own gods for power, so they must have done so before facing Moses' challenge. The same would probably be true of the priests of Baal who faced against Elijah, that they had power which they had used, it just was no match for the power of The God. So I'm not arguing that other gods don't exist; I'm only arguing that they are all secondary, created by the One God just as the world also is.
• While I'm on that subject, it raises another problem: how do we know which gods we can trust? That is, if we start talking to spirits, how can we know which ones are telling us the truth, and which ones have other motives which we, not being residents of the spirit world, can't possibly understand? Talking to a spirit is a bit like talking to someone in an Internet chatroom: you only know about that person what that person wants you to believe about himself. We've all heard the horror stories, the pedophiles pretending to be kids to lure kids to meeting places, the guys pretending to be girls, the girls pretending to be young and beautiful, the guys pretending to be young beautiful girls. How can you know that the spirits with whom you communicate are telling you the truth about themselves, about their intentions, about the world in which they live, about your own life? What God has, really, is a track record. He spoke to Abel and Seth and Enoch, and when he spoke to Noah he claimed to be the same God who spoke with Abel, Seth, Enoch, and Methuselah--and actually, some of those people were still alive when Noah was (Methuselah died the year of the flood--I did the math myself). Abraham heard from the same God that spoke to Noah, and God took time to prove to Abraham that He was trustworthy. He then connected the dots down through history, and in appearing on Earth as Jesus, and in dying in the cross, He said, in bold text, "I have your best interests at heart, and am willing to suffer greatly for your sake." He was willing to do that for us; I think we can trust Him.
• Which brings us to that part about "accept only people who agree with that one way." Well, let's start with what that "one way" is. It must be the way that Jesus taught, the way that Paul taught, but it must also be the way agreed by Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and so on. The "one way", as it appears throughout scripture, is whether you are willing to trust the Creator, or whether you need to protect yourself against Him and distance yourself from Him. What Cain had with his sacrifice was a bargaining chip: God said that man should grow his food as crops from the soil, and Cain came to God saying, "I have kept your commandments, and you owe me." Abel was a meat-eating butcher, whose sacrifice said, "I haven't done anything you commanded, but I come to you because I trust that you really are a good God who cares about me and won't destroy me simply because I'm not perfect." That's the same message that comes through in the gospel: God is not interested in people making ourselves good enough to be acceptable, but is offering to accept us as we are if we are willing to trust Him and believe that He really does care.
• So what about that part about the eternal torture of those who disagree? Well, I hope I'm not out of my depth, but I do know that Jesus (like all good teachers of his time) taught in hyperbole. We see it when He says that anyone who doesn't hate his entire family isn't worthy of Him. He doesn't mean that we should hate our family; He means that the love we have for God should be so great that every other love pales so by comparison that it is as if it were hatred. So look at heaven and hell in terms of opportunity costs. In fact, let's say that heaven is like winning the lottery. Someone sent you a letter with the winning lottery number on it. You did one of three things. If you bought the ticket with that number, then you won, you are thrilled; it is absolutely wonderful for you. Or maybe you glanced at it and threw it away, and then the lottery drawing was held, but you didn't have a ticket--but you didn't know that it was that number anyway. Then of course there's the middle possibility, in which you kept the number but didn't buy the ticket, and then when the number was drawn you were upset with yourself that you didn't buy the ticket. So now notice that there's no difference between those who didn't look at the number and those who didn't buy the ticket, but that the latter group knows what they're missing. So now let's take the difference between the winners and the losers. The winners have something so great, that by comparison the lives of the losers are dreadful. The difference between a wonderful eternity in an ongoing loving relationship with the Creator who made us for Himself and an eternity completely excluded from such a relationship is like the difference between the best life you can imagine and (because it is so much better than the best you can imagine) being tortured for eternity. It is the worse if you realize what you've missed; but it doesn't have to be torture to be "like torture by comparison". It isn't even cruel to say that those who are terrified of the prospect of facing their Creator should not be forced to spend eternity in His presence, and those who have learned to trust Him are invited into that relationship, any more than it would be to say that it would be cruel to tell people who are afraid of rollercoasters that they don't have to go on the rides.

This is probably a lot of "off topic" stuff, but I figured I'd give you as much of an answer as I could to start, and you can tackle whatever parts of it you like from here.

--M. J. Young

The problem with rolling the decillion sided dice is that there is not enough time in the current theories. Yeah, fifteen billion years, and 10 to the 1086 (or something) elementary particles is not enough. Roll 10 to the 1086 dice every second for fifteen billion years, and its still mind-boggling odds. You're still left with a number so large that winning the lottery is easy by comparison.

At some point you say 'ok, that's enough.'

And of course, we don't have infinite time. Modern science says we don't, and some of the precursor posts to mine consider this to be an obvious point that you can't get to the present moment with infinite time.

The movie Clash of Titans is coming out, and it seems to be about humans objecting to the behavior of the Greek gods.

Thanks Mark, good explanations! (some big words, but nothing I couldn't handle)

@Brock:
I was more thinking in my little imperfect allegory that the roadways would be a way of life. Then your example has only 4 paths that apply to it, as I see it. (in immediate reply)

1. You save one and go for the other after that. Doing the best you (think you) can, while trying to be safe.
2. You save both, whether or not you die.
3. You stand at the side watch and go away. It's not your problem.
4. You enjoy their suffering.

While 3 is how most people on this planet seem to think, 1 and 2 would seem heroic. That is because we don't suspect it happening often, because we won't.

The difference between 1 and 2 is the sacrifice you are willing to make. Christ offers still another alternative. Saving your (mortal) enemy. Unfortunately, I cannot find the quote for you. I am pretty sure that it is in one of the letters from the apostles. I'm also pretty sure it was in one of Paul's, but I'm not sure.

PS: I am not offended.

The problem with rolling the decillion sided dice is that there is not enough time in the current theories.

Whether it is my theological or my legal training, I somehow can't resist responding to a flaw in an argument.

The problem here is that despite the fact that the odds of the pair of decillion-sided dice coming up snake eyes is one in ten to the one thousand eighty-ninth power,

1. it could have happened on the first roll, and
2. the fact that things exist mean that somehow they had to have come into existence.

I face this all the time with time travel movies: the odds of time stabilizing are very much against, but since we have every indication that time did stabilize, then whatever had to happen for it to stabilize, no matter how improbable, must have happened. Sarah Conner must have escaped from a Terminator without Kyle Reese' help long enough to give birth to her child, or Kyle Reese never would have been sent to the past, so no matter how improbable it seems that she would have done so, that must be what happened. In the same way, it might be absurdly improbable for the universe to have happened as it has, but the universe is as it is, and so if it is possible for it to have happened, we must have been that lucky.

So what it comes to, really, is whether you personally would rather trust that something extremely improbable happened to happen or that a Creator/Designer is behind it all. I think it takes less faith to believe in the Creator, but it is also more demanding--if indeed He made us, then it might well be that He had a purpose in doing so, and in that case we probably ought to find out what that purpose is.

--M. J. Young

Somehow things came to be here.

My reply that I haven't used to this for lack of opportunity has long been "You're right. We're here, therefore the Earth was formed from Ymir's body. After Odin killed Ymir the Frost Giant, he wadded up the body, and it became the Earth."

I figured that pointed out the absurdity of the 'well we're here' arguement as proving Random Chance.

Oh, it certainly does not prove random chance; what it does is counter the argument from improbability.

The odds of a coin flip landing heads (assuming a fair coin and a fair throw) is 50%. The odds of it happening five times in a row is 3.125% (three and an eighth). However, once it has happened once those odds become 6.25%, and when it's already happened twice it's 12.5%, and when there are three successes behind you it's 25%, and when you have four successes the odds of the fifth also succeeding are now 50%--and once you have succeeded five times consecutively, the odds become 100%.

In the same way, the odds that the universe could have happened as it has in the time available are incredibly against if it has not happened yet, but become a certainty once it has happened. Your chance of rolling 00 on the percentile dice might be only 1% before you roll it, but if the first die comes up 0 they become 10% and if the second comes up 0 they become 100%. Odds of what happened happening are always 100% after the fact, regardless of how improbable they were before the fact.

Also, the statement that the odds are so incredibly against this world having simply happened assumes that this world is the desired or intended outcome. We do not know how many other die roll results would have meant the existence of alternate viable universes. If there are a billion possible permutations of events of which only one creates a viable universe, the odds of a viable universe are one in a billion; but if a million of those permutations are various viable universes, the odds drop to one in a thousand, and if all permutations are viable universes we have odds of one in one.

The argument thus is always against the unknown alternative: if it had not been this universe, what universe would it have been? If we say that this is the only viable permutation because this is the only one that would have resulted in this universe, we inherently infer intent or purpose, that this is the only viable universe and any other outcome would be failure. To those who argue for randomness in origins, that argument fails because this outcome is not the necessary result but merely the actual result. It is remarkably fortuitous, in this view, that intelligent creatures able to debate the question happened to come into existence, but had they not done so it would simply have been a different outcome.

I agree that it is a bit like Fry answering the question of why the code for traveling through time happened to be tattooed on his buttocks that "it had to be somewhere", but it is not quite as absurd as that. The real issue, as Jean-Paul Sartre recognized, is "Why is there something, rather than nothing?" Given that "something" exists, it has to take some form, and if we begin with the presupposition of randomness the form becomes irrelevant to any argument about the existence of the form--this happens to be the form, and it could have been any of more different things than we can enumerate even with scientific notation, but it had to be one of them, and this is the one we got.

Much more problematic is why there is anything at all, and particularly why is there something that is apparently ultimately "temporary", in the sense that it will have an end (the expansion of the universe probably will never be checked, and the energy will eventually be exhausted, and the universe will "die") and it did have a beginning (the evidence for the Big Bang Theory is quite compelling, to the point that no other their competes with it any longer). If it has a beginning, it must have come into existence, and that's a problem, because there is no basis for matter and energy to have come into existence "by chance" absent something beyond matter and energy which might have been the source for it.

And once you've admitted that there is something beyond matter and energy which is the source for it, you raise the question of what can be known about it, and the answers are either

1. we can know nothing because we cannot look beyond matter and energy; or
2. we have the ability to discover this by means that look beyond the edges of the time-space continuum; or
3. Someone or something from that something has communicated answers to us.

The first is Deistic materialism, that there must be a god or something like him but it is not interested in us and is undiscoverable by us and therefore irrelevant to us. The second expresses itself in various forms of mysticism and mythology. The third inherently means revealed religion. Only the third can be considered a reliable means of discovering the source of everything.

Of course, that's more complicated than a lot of people are ever going to consider. Most of the arguments are thus inconclusive--there is no inherent reason why the creator or creative power behind the universe must care about its creation (and just because we care about our creations is not proof, but anthropomorphosizing which can only be justified if we know a priori that that creative power is like us). There is no inherent reason why it must be discoverable, or why it must reveal itself. Either it does or it is, or it doesn't and it isn't.

Personally, I think it much more persuasive to point to the historical record of Jesus of Nazareth, including the entirely reliable reports of His resurrection (over five hundred eye witnesses) and His claims that He was the revelation of God to man. That focuses the problem on something that can be examined: was He or was He not, and if not, what was He? Ultimately, Jesus proves God; all the other proofs force us to choose between a Christian conception of reality and nihilism, but they do not necessarily make nihilism an invalid choice.

--M. J. Young

I don't think this matters (your first arguement about flipping coins.) The fact is that if we rolled the dice, there is not enough time and material in the universe if we assume every elementary particle in the universe interacting once per second for it to be an at all reasonable chance for it to happen.

Thus we know, evidentially, that chance did not cause it. Thus design had too as design is substantially less improbable. Its not proven in the sense of a mathematical proof, but any court in the land would accept those odds as proof.

It is certain that the universe exists. It is practically impossible for it to be by chance. Chance is considerably less probable than Odin.

Most, probably the vast other of universes, don't even yield elementary particles. One of these Basic Numbers, the Universal Constants, is such that you could have about 30 billion different answers. Its thought that almost, or perhaps all of the others, won't yield a universe that can have sentient life.

Also, the Kalam Arguement does prove Design and its assumptions are totally reasonable.

Its not as absurd? How about more absurd, a LOT MORE absurd. Fry's impossibility is only a small one compared to the universe.

I forget who used this: The Bread Machine Theory. A universe exists. Wow. Very complex. Kind of like finding a loaf of bread in your oven you did not bake. Very wow. That's one universe. Now we have trillions of universes, and so we need a universe maker device, a random process. Now, you not only have a random loaf of bread you did not bake in your oven, you also have a bread machine you did not buy on the counter...In other words, it just makes the problem worse for the Randomists.

I have neither the time, the energy, nor (anymore) the inclination to hold up my side of this argument on this board, so I'll just state one more time for the record that I think Tad is wrong on this (in nearly every way it is possible to be wrong) and leave it at that.

"In the same way, the odds that the universe could have happened as it has in the time available are incredibly against if it has not happened yet, but become a certainty once it has happened. Odds of what happened happening are always 100% after the fact, regardless of how improbable they were before the fact"

^This^. Perfectly reasonable for everything that has happened to be random, and also reasonable that it could have been design. Figuring out which one it is for sure with the information at humanity's collective disposal=impossible. So no point in arguing about it.

now exiting the thread.

Brock,
I'm going to go with Counter-Counter Arguement #2 in the Kalam Arguements for the body of my reply. Let me add that to 'know for sure' may indeed be impossible, but to know enough to make a reasonable judgment and stand for it is not at all impossible. The evidence seems to heavily favor the existence of Jehovah.

Wodium,
If we were arguing about the rules of Multiverser, I would be heavily inclined to defer to your judgment. You know and understand a great deal more about MV's system than I do. Likewise, to a lesser degree, let me reccomend you defer to my judgment on this subject. :) In my not very humble opinion.

Recommendation rejected with minimal civility.

Edit: I thought to try for subtle enlightenment, but instead let me point out that you can go to Lulu.com, and buy a copy of 'Darwin's World: A Comedy of Evolution', a sixty thousand plus (I think) comedic SF novel which does a fairly good job in my opinion of debunking evolution.

The author is, of course, me. The idea that I might know more about these topics than the Average Joe is not a delusion borne of too many late night pizzas.

You are, of course, welcome to ignore my posts where I state my opinion on matters of politics and religion forthrightly. I can do no less than be myself. I refuse to be a 'good conservative' afraid of his own shadow.

I do not wish to lose your friendship. I will be happy to help you in world-making even if said world is made with Darwinist assumptions (to me they are less ridiculous than Steampunk assumptions, I guess, and I've made a few Steampunk worlds.) However, you have to decide if my being unapologetic about my views, and honest about relative skill levels is too offensive to be borne. And yes at times, I am arrogant as I was in the preceding post, but I've always found Dizzy Dean's comment 'it ain't arrogance if you can do it' to be a good point.

Are you expecting a "yes" or a "no", or are you expecting to have made a rhetorical point by asking the question?

And now I've ninja'd myself. I was hoping for subtle enlightenment, to hold up a mirror, and see if you recognized anything.

Thank you for the edit. I take much more kindly to the suggestion that I seek out the book you wrote on the subject than I would have to the suggestion that I simply trust you because in your opinion you know better than I do.

However, you have to decide if my being unapologetic about my views, and honest about relative skill levels is too offensive to be borne.

This is interesting phrasing. The items you cite are never offensive to me. Hypothetical example: if you viewed me as an idiot, I would not expect you to apologize for this view. If you were asked about it, I can't imagine that I would be offended if you were honest in your response; I'm a bit of a zealot about honesty. Strangely enough, it would still be a bit of a breach of etiquette for you to volunteer the information.

It comforts me that you changed your mind about that post, and I'm glad you consider me a friend. I don't think we could collaborate on a world built under "Darwinist assumptions" because I suspect we have very different ideas about what those assumptions would even be (to say nothing of their logical consequences), but that's ultimately a logistical difficulty, and I appreciate your willingness to make the attempt. (I would extend the same willingness to you, if I could figure out what the converse sort of world would be, exactly.)

A lot of fantasy worlds are based on the idea of being created by a pantheon of deities or a singular deity. Middlearth, Narnia, The Belgarriad by the Eddings (there latest series, The New Gods????, has a mix of gods and evolution), much of the D&D sub-genre, the Deed of Paksennarrion. Those would be your converse worlds.

Its not really that hard.

A while back, one other player challenged me to make a French positive world since I was spending some time bashing the French. It wasn't that hard. You just say to yourself 'I know this is not true, but if it was, what would be the logical consequences of it? Or what would be the positive logical consequences of it?'

I hate Communism, something to do with a pile of skulls a hundred million thick, but if asked, I could create a positive Communist verse without that much difficulty. At one time, I had to talk to MJ about this issue of how to do that, but since then, I've mostly gotten past it.

Obviously I thought of that, but it's not a good parallel. I've got no problem with Bah Ke'gehn or Narnia or any of those. I also don't see why evolution couldn't take place in Bah Ke'gehn. It doesn't, because there is no reproduction there (every life form is created), but it's not ruled out in principle.

My point is that (I think you're saying that) you would have to operate under a different set of assumptions to design a "Darwinist" universe, but you're still willing and able to. My willingness and ability to design a created universe does not require me to operate under a different set of assumptions, so it doesn't mean as much for me to offer it.

I would offer something equally meaningful if I could think of it, though. Perhaps a world in which DNA does not exist. That wouldn't be any more problematic than a world that operated under an alternate physics.

Not sure I'm getting this, but...

What about a world in which each creature is a Special Creation, either by the Reigning Deity, or by some sort of Sub-creator (I think thats a Demiurge).

One way is thus...

On Talma, the Lifeplant is an enormous gourd plant that spreads from the Northerly Isles to the Midlands to the Edge of the World. Every few days, one of the gourds matures, and another sentient adult creature exists.

Each creature is totally unique. They have no DNA, and no potential for children, but love of various kinds does exist for some of them. Some are bizarre enough that the concept of 'romance' is beyond their comprehension.

The one other factor that is common to these creatures than being born of the Demiurge, the Lifeplant, is that they all face some sort of moral challenge. Some fail, and Fall into evil, others don't. Some of the Fallen seek redemption by various means, others seek to overthrow the Gardener who is said to be on a long trip to another galaxy.

Not a problem for me. Of course, my assumption is that if a verser opened a magical gate to Earth and introduced a few hundred pairs of rabbits to this universe, that population of rabbits would, millions of years later (assuming they had not died out by then), have undergone evolution - which is to say (and only to say) that the relative allele frequencies of the new population would differ from the old one.

You see, I don't view the kind of world you describe as logically impossible. Just because I don't think this world consists of supernaturally created ecosystems doesn't mean another world couldn't easily be that way.

However, my perception is that you think macroevolution, as a process, makes no sense and could never work. Thus, you think that not only isn't this world that way, but that another world could not be that way either without some serious alterations to the workings of reality - on the order of steampunk alterations-to-the-workings-of-reality.

Do you see the difference?

My mother reports that in the months before I was born, my father would talk about his anticipated son. He spoke of this son so frequently that my mother began to worry. Finally she said to him, "It could be a girl, you know."

She says he thought about that for a moment, and then very seriously replied, "It could be--but it isn't."

I think that is probably a better description of Eric's attitude about evolution. Theoretically it would be entirely possible for a world to exist in which evolution worked; but since in reality this world is the only world that truly exists, and evolution is not (to his understanding) the factual origin of the diversity of life in this world, there is no world in which it actually is true.

At least, in my experience, most "Creationists" agree that God could have used evolution to create the world as we know it, but object that He did not do so. Objections are based in part on an understanding of the material purporting to be the revelation of how it actually was done and in part on a sense that the evidence for evolution is at least inadequate and potentially self-contradictory. Thus the position really amounts to "evolution could be true, but it isn't."

Now, I could be misrepresenting Eric, but that's my impression of the matter.

For my part, as I told my son last year, I'm glad that I am not in the biological sciences because that means I don't have to be able to answer that question. There are several recognizably Christian viewpoints on creation, and I am not persuaded that there is enough information to declare any one conclusively correct. I do not separate my theology from my science, but nor do I allow either to dictate the conclusions of the other. I am not uncomfortable not having answers to questions for which the answers do not really impact my daily life; God gives me enough for what I need to know.

--M. J. Young

Steampunk and MJ's explanation understate my objections to evolution although both are heading in the right direction.

Let me toss out an interesting world I came up with before MJ's explanation. I may go back to his ideas later.

Mutant Casino
=============

In the Alyn, Balys, and Cadras Galaxies, and their surrounding environs, there is only one planet that everyone knows about for the last billions years, at least everyone with the capability of intergalactic travel. Some call it the Cursed World, others Bad Mojo, others Goldmountain, and the Platinum Door, and still others call it the Last, but in most languages, whether clicks, or telepathies, or pheromones, its known by some variation of Mutant Casino.

There are other ways to travel between the Three Galaxies. Hyperdrive takes a few years from Alyn to Balys and half a decade from Alyn to Cadras and two years from Balys to Cadras. There are also natural gates from each galaxy to another specific spot in another galaxy. And there are created gates made by the Transcended Races which have left material reality behind. And even two of the current Elder Races have their own Hypertunnels which can get you from galaxy to galaxy in a mere week. But none of this compares to the 'natural?' gates of Mutant Casino. From here, you can jump to any gate, even undiscovered ones if you're willing to risk it, in the Three Galaxies.

Boiling around the Mutcas System are dozens of permanent gates oscillating on their individual cycles. And there are thousands of less permanent gates that may actually be permanent, but only on longer cycles, but no one has deciphered everything about the gates around the Mutcas System. All that is known is that instantaneous travel is the gift, or the curse of the Mutcas System.

Most think it a bizarre natural phenomenon. Some of the Elder Races are skeptical. A simple mathematical formula will show that there is a Goldilocks Zone about twice the size of the Human Goldilock's Zone for ninety percent of the species in the Three Galaxies, if you subtract the Hydrogen Planet Peoples who are strange enough that even most Elder Races don't understand them. This simple math shows that the Mutant Casino planet is as close to the center of this Goldilock's Zone as it can be without impinging on the planet destroying gates in outer space.

There are trillions of spaces the Mutant Casino could be in its system, but only 200,000 planetary diameters it could be in, and survive for more than ten thousand years. Since its been here for nearly a billion years according to the translated records of dead races which were themselves translations of dead races of more dead races back to the Beginning of Time approximately an eon ago, some races feel this was deliberate.

There are speculations of the Makers, an unknown race that preceded even the most ancient of the Transcended Ones, and while supposed Maker artifacts fetch planet sized ransoms, no one has been proved to be so more than 'suggestive' or 'possibly'. But some claim that the Makers made Mutcas. There are odd things about the Mutcas sun which are not explainable by any theory of stellar fires.

In the recent past, aka the last eighty thousand years, there have been seventeen races or coalitions of races that held Mutant Casino. Eleven of those were driven off, or abandoned the planet, or exterminated. As probably the most valuable piece of real estate in three galaxies with hundreds of trillions of sentients, there naturally have been vast wars fought about Mutant Casino. Only the most powerful, most desperate, or most creative (and frequently all three) have dared to lay claim to this prize.

The Yngstr Insectoids, the Tair Colony Mind, the Plasion Globules all staked everything they had to grasp it, only to find someone willing to commit racial genocide to take the property away. Three races died for it, but we haven't yet grasped the thistle.

Heightening the suspicions of Makers is the fact that such a warred after planet still exists. While not easy, most interstellar polities with a thousand or so planets, manage to develop a way to shatter a planet to dust, or to create a supernova. Despite a billion years of war, this hasn't happened.

The true thistle is that all those gates are not good for any race so far exposed to them. Exposure to one gate or two is not a problem, but hundreds creates a vast mutational burden. DNA, or similar structures, rapidly mutates on the Mutant Casino. In the space of a ten years, a thousand years of mutation can occur, and thats if you're lucky and safe.

Remember, there have been wars upon wars, some with very exotic weapons which left all sorts of bizarre particles and side effects behind. There's one valley in which time has moved at 150% of normal for the last twenty thousand years. Its called the Last End of the Yngstr. Many of these effects have their own strong mutational effects as well. Simply by walking through a wandering field effect of some kind, you may find your mutation rate shot up by a thousand percent. And if you seek high paid work, you almost certainly are going to be some place where mutations are more common.

The Sharvix were a noble, self-controlled race of great logicians and ferocious warriors. They came to the Mutant Casino, and the first thing that happened was the local Sharvix used their wealth to become the rules of the Sharvix Studiorium, the name of their interstellar empire. And then as the mutations kicked in further, their logic centers decayed, and all they were left with was ferocity and fusion weapons. Civil war drove the Sharvix back to chipping flint.

I'll do more later. But the case is that their is a vast rate of mutation. And there are vastly more damaging mutations than any beneficial ones (no one is sure they have found a beneficial one that increases information). Its a simple matter of math in a casino. Gamble your DNA at 51% favoring the house and eventually the house wins. On Mutant Casino, the house has far better odds than 51%.

More later...

Okay, I've already decided to never argue evolution with you again. Just letting you know, in case you were expecting a response to any arguments along that line.

That's fine. How about instead creating some of the background of the Mutant Casino? I think that would satisfy your requirement. For if you dropped a hundred rabbits on to the Mutant Casino, in ten or twenty thousand years, they'd all be...worse than Montgrenized.

Approximately sixty thousand years ago, the Montgren were very powerful, intensely creative and thoughtful, and deeply sincere. As a result nearly thirty percent of the shipping in the Three Galaxies went in Montgren hulls (they didn't build engines, or navigation, or weapons, just hulls, very good ones. Even now, sixty thousand years later, its not uncommon to run into a truly ancient hull on a tramp freighter). In fact, some thought the Montgren might be on the way to the never achieved goal of creating one stable polity for the whole Three Galaxies.

They were grey-skinned, bulbous, humanoid with one strong arm on the left, and two fine arms on the right.

Against the advice of some Elder Races they took the Mutant Casino and named it Golden Mountain. From here, they planned to rule forever.

The Rori, a lizard like race once known for their ethical stringency had owned Mutant Casino at the time, but they had lapsed into decadence and degeneracy due to the effect of too much easy money, and mutations. When the Montgen showed up with their armadas, the Rori didn't even have the spine to fight. Still, the Exiled Rori are known throughout the galaxies today. Anywhere there is a lowlife, scummy, cowardly snot its proverbially said 'he's as slimy as Rori'. Even the slime based races say that. The point is the Rori live, and the Montgren well...

But mutations started showing up in the Montgren gene pool, much more than they had been used too. It was not a problem. Vast wealth allowed the creation of splendid medical facilities.

More problems developed. Some were so widespread and so subtle that the signs were not caught for generations. Montgren IQ started a slow decline as Montgren judgement and devotion to right faded into implacable stubborness. By this point, those few who sounded the alarm were accused of being reactionaries, and glorifying the 'good old days', and were thorougly shunned.

It became something of a religious thing. And the Montgren began to pull back, to find new untainted gene pools in their colony worlds and depots. Mostly they had depots as they were typically a minority (a very rich one) on hundreds and thousands of worlds. Just enough to have a trading port on a world was their typical way.

The new blood helped, but it grew corrupted as well.

Eventually, the Voriktue, a nearly insanely creative race, in a very deft attack took over the system. But the Montgren refused to leave. Eventually, the fearful Voriktue left, and the Montgren, now chipping rocks if they remembered how too, had the system to themselves for several thousand years.

Then the Borslab came. The Borslab saw a world devoid of sentients and moved in. Perhaps the Borslab were not the most perceptive of races. In any case, they saw a gray-skinned crawling creature with one useless arm and two nearly useless with an IQ about that of a dog, and found they made good eating. So the Borslab farmed the Montgren for a thousand years until the Tair Colony Mind came and took the planet away from the Borslab.

There are still Montgren on Mutant Casino. A highly defective crab-like creature with an IQ about that of a mouse, hides in the rocks near the shore and tries to snag fish from the oceans. They are nearly extinct as a type of hunting bird enjoys their tender flesh.

Wodium,
There have been a lot of races going through the Mutant Casino. Nobodies had a good time. Everyone has evolved...downward. I think this fits your requirements as I said. Just invent some weird race or three with tentacles and a bizarre outlook, and ...

Tad, can you make a world where beneficial macroevolution exists or do you think that kind of world cannot exist?

Do you think certain environment or surrounding can induce the process of beneficial macroevolution?

Max,
I can make that kind of world, and I don't think it could exist with the physical laws of our reality. But I've made unrealistic worlds before.

As to your third question: No.

Now I think its fair for me to ask a question. I've proven my ability to understand other points of view. Now I think would be a good time for other people to demonstrate their ability to understand my point of view.

So, Max, can you make a world in which beneficial macroevolution is an impossibility, and the only kind of evolution that happens is downward and simpler? I say this Max, not because you've been offensive, but because I've proven my abilities over and over in the past, and no one seems to want to pick up the gauntlet. Its always 'you prove yourself, Tad.' People act like I can't understand their arguements, and then when I prove I can, they don't ever think to themselves 'y'know, maybe, just maybe that Tad fellow is right.'

Ah well. That's life, I suppose.

I don't think it could exist with the physical laws of our reality.

What kind of laws would make it possible to exist?

can you make a world in which beneficial macroevolution is an impossibility, and the only kind of evolution that happens is downward and simpler?

A direct creationist world?
Your example world seems like a good candidate too because you said that "vastly more damaging mutations than any beneficial ones (no one is sure they have found a beneficial one that increases information)" but I did not know if that counts as impossible for beneficial macroevolution or more to improbable.
If you asking for all kind of evolution including microevolution then probably that world does not have microorganism just like my sprite world.

Do you think certain environment or surrounding can induce the process of beneficial macroevolution?

As to your third question: No.

Even if the Creator create such an environment for that purpose?

not because you've been offensive

I am sorry if I sound offensive. I did not intend it to sound offensive. I just want to know what you believe in regarding the matter and gauge if you can make up a world where beneficial macroevolution exists as realistic as possible (which means it can differ from our physical laws of reality).

'y'know, maybe, just maybe that Tad fellow is right.'

I always try keep an open mind so do not worry about that.

I'm not clear on why you think a world without beneficial macroevolution is extra hard to create. Most worlds in any setting are actually mostly unaffected by the existence or non-existence of evolution, because that is largely in the background. The only difficulty is that any new species being introduced requires a slightly more complicated backstory. I've never been much for actually working out much of an original story background, personally, but working out a full background for a world without macroevolution would just require replacing instances of "long series of changes in zebras led to sentient bipedal zebras" with "God X created sentient bipedal zebras for reasons beyond mortal comprehension."

I've proven my abilities over and over in the past, and no one seems to want to pick up the gauntlet

Um, no, that is not what has happened. John convinced us to break off the last debate, because it threatened to become a flame war. It also involved me discovering that you did not actually know anything about dark matter besides it being 90% of the universe and having been advanced as an explanation for galactic megastructures.

Tad:

but that's ultimately a logistical difficulty, and I appreciate your willingness to make the attempt. (I would extend the same willingness to you, if I could figure out what the converse sort of world would be, exactly.)

Let's consider the Mutant Casino "the converse sort of world" and consider my willingness extended.

Eric, I don't think it's really the way you perceive it. That is, these people are all fantasicists, capable of imagining and creating all kinds of "impossible" worlds and giving them a semblance of sense. You are one of the best in that regard--you devise worlds in great detail. No one doubts your ability to create a world that you regard impossible, and no one thinks it proves anything when you create worlds anyone thought were impossible but that you are that good at creating plausible impossible worlds.

Obviously, I created a world in which evolution appears to be impossible: Bah Ke'gehn is such a world. The Bah each individually spring from the grass, each one as much the same as any two humans, possibly as any two identical twins. No other life forms exist save the grass itself from which they spring, which is less than life; no one has ever inquired as to how their biology works, and the low tech bias makes it nearly impossible to determine the kinds of answers that would be wanted to such questions. (Would there be any point to something like DNA in creatures that do not reproduce themselves?)

However, I am more interested in cultural evolution--Post-Sympathetic Man, The Industrial Complex, and "The Death of John" scenario in Sherwood Forest are all very much about what happens to history and culture given specific events. For the vast bulk of my worlds, whether or not macroevolution occurs is completely irrelevant--there are humans, or there are "not humans", or there are both side-by-side, but how it came to be thus is not really part of the story. In my own mind, the sprites, elves, and humans of the world in which Maxx is presently playing are all "special creations". In my Vampire Philadelphia series, the werewolves are the biological descendants of Lilith (mixing human and lupine lines through millennia) while the vampires get their curse from Cain, so it would seem that evolution is not part of the story--but it's not really covered in any detail. There are humans; how they got to be human is not generally asked or answered.

And if there aren't humans, as in The Web, there isn't really much consideration of whether those creatures evolved or were created; they just are there forming a reasonably coherent ecosystem.

I could create worlds that address these evolutionary questions, but I don't find the evolutionary questions terribly interesting from a player perspective. That is, what difference do the evolutionary forces of Mutant Casino have to do with the issues that are going to matter to the typical player character? He is not going to mutate; the millennia or even centuries it will take for the race currently holding the planet to do so will grind past so slowly that it won't be more than an incidental backdrop to whatever he is doing elsewhere in the universe (there is not much reason for him to stay on that planet for more than a few decades, that I can see). If evolution is occurring, it is a story slow enough that it would only be of interest to someone who particularly wanted to know whether or not it is, and in the nature of the multiverse proving it one way or the other in any particular world doesn't really answer questions about the rest of the multiverse.

The only way you could change this would be to so vastly accelerate evolution that it happened visibly over the course of not more than years, and/or made the verser susceptible to it. The former has the problem that either the indigs are themselves mutating as individuals or the generations are being born and dying so quickly the verser can't really connect with individuals for more than a short time; the latter that it arguably does irreversible damage to a player character based on referee decisions outside the player's control.

Omni once had a one-page short story entitled "The Longest Story Ever Told" or something like that, in which the central character was born, lived, and died, and the universe ceased expanding and coalesced back to a singularity and there was another big bang and again the universe developed to the place where the same central character was again born to live his life again. It was a good joke, and an interesting story, but it's completely useless as a Multiverser world: how does the verser become part of the story? That's how I feel about Mutcas and pretty much any story about evolution: the scale of events is too big for them to matter to the verser. Sure, the "guided evolution" of humanity and society in Starsong was fascinating, but it assumed that I knew what the world was like a mere millennium before, and most of it was just background to how the world came to be as it is, not really significant to how do I live in this world as it is now.

--M. J. Young

Would there be any point to something like DNA in creatures that do not reproduce themselves?

It's nice to have the recipes on hand in every cell for all those day-to-day proteins you need made. I'm sure it could be done another way, though. (Magic comes to mind.)

Ah, yes--assuming it is a protein-based life form. I'm also aware that replication is essential to healing processes, so assuming our non-reproducing life form can be injured it might want DNA to aid its recovery.

But as noted there might be other ways to accomplish these outcomes; proteins are not necessarily necessary, and something like a Dralasite or the Blob might legitimately be a single-celled protoplasmic organism which if it does not need to replicate itself does not need DNA to repair itself either.

--M. J. Young

All,
I'm back. My computer and my internet connection had some difficulty for a bit. It turned out to be very simple to fix. Blush.

Max,
I wrote 'Darwin's World: A Comedy of Evolution' that answered that question in full, if not in serious. Things like the 'One In A Million Chance Law' made the safest way to debark a plane was to jump out sans chute over a thunderstorm over an active volcano.

More seriously, you'd have to 1) Mess with probability. 2)Make the problem a good bit simpler (Darwin thought cells were indivisible, effectively 'black boxes') AND/OR 3)Introduce some other effect. Evos have tried with self-ordering, and with a few other ideas.

I just read 'Resonance' a SF novel in which what happened in other parrallel dimensions was very mildly encouraged to happen in all the other dimensions. So that the last dimension to have mammals occur would see it happen as on a direct line with no mistakes, and this would happen repeatedly until there was land for the mammals to live on.

Sure the Creator could. Then 1)He would use one of the above three ideas. Or 2) He's being so subtle that I've missed the signs. Also possible. I've made a mistake or two here and there.

I know you didn't mean to sound offensive as I had said. Its just I have a history, and so I tend to see or suspect I will see certain things whether they are there or not.

JTM,
Your first sentence is exactly correct. But if you have a world where such a factor is an important part of the world rather than mere background, it might be a bit harder. Also I have people who've come to me and basically asked me to participate in a consciousness raising exercise, to open poor Tad's closed mind, and I was just trying to flip that back, probably unneccessarily.

Dark Matter. I know four things. 1. 90%. 2. If it were spread throughout the galaxy it would impede sight. If it were concentrated, it would cause gravity effects. Neither happens. Thus... You claim something different, but I'm not convinced. 3. It sounds like a massive fudge factor. It smells like seven day old fish. Maybe intuition is not science, but I don't trust DM. Just like when the string theorist says 'we won't be able to verify my theories for a hundred years'...at which point, I'm wondering why we're paying the guy's salary. 4. I am not a Dark Matter Specialist of any sort. I am a Creationist. That is a very broad (enormously so) multi-disciplinary field. I know a little about fossils, and erosion, and geology, and alternate theories of universal formation (Steady State, Big Bang, Many Little Bangs, Starlight and Time, Cyclical), and hominids, and Neanderthals, and hoaxes in evolution, and on and on.

Wodium,
Considering MJ's point about making a world that is interesting to play in and not just a world to prove a point, I suggest creating the current state of the world as it is now. Consider most of what's been written as part of the back history.

In my opinion, this should be a world dimly lit, with sudden, strange dangers, and a world in which Indiana Jones would be ecstatic because off all the weird history and dark secrets piled up all over the place. A world in which vast knowledge exists and enormous wealth...beings who know deep secrets and can buy moons, and beings who don't neccessarily know of the existence of the three galaxies because they are falling into primitiveness and are concerned where their next meal comes from. It should have perhaps some major races, and remnants of others like the Last Near-Immortal of some race, and ruins that do bizarre things like ...."the black towers on the north side of town, on the first night of the century, they glow, and anyone in them gets their heart's desire, or dies screaming...Some people say they are a weapon, and others a temple built by the Tair Colony Mind, but others think a race of four legged beasts built them, but no one has a name for them..."

Something like that....but cooler????

MJ,
Perhaps so. I think I've already addressed this issue in the light of what you've said.

I do agree that with the vast bulk of my worlds, evolution is irrelevant.

For most worlds, the evolution question is not important. It was important in Starsong because I think a world based on the view of a created world is more positive, more cheerful, more rational minded, and more moral minded. It changes the culture in other words.

It also was important because almost every SF future I've seen has been evolutionist, and I wanted to do one that was not. Although that's more of a personal goal than a player goal.

You're right and you're wrong about Mutant Casino. What I did, at Wodium's prompting, was to create a world based on a strong idea. You can do this with lots of other strong ideas that have nothing to do with evolution. It creates a strong theme to that world. Mutant Casino has an atmosphere to it, a theme.

(It also pushes the designer's mind in new directions.)

If you go to Mutant Casino, and the gamemaster does it correctly, there should be a feel that keeps popping up. Great wealth, but decay, decay, and more decay. Entropy wins. In the end money means nothing, money is just one more bait to get you in the trap. The sky is dirty and dust with strange lights, and you step over a broken stone brought from five hundred thousand light years away...

The new directions thing...it gives you a background and an explanation for all the weird, jumbled bits of history tossed together.

And the aliens who live there, at least some of them know, at least on some level, and it informs their behavior.

And lastly, this is a world in which there would be a LOT of hooks to get the player interested in past history. Just tell the power crazed player....'you want power, well there's these old ruins and this one-armed cyborg lizard living in a shack out in the dessert who has a scroll from, he claims the Makers, and he says....'

I think a world based on the view of a created world is more positive, more cheerful, more rational minded, and more moral minded. It changes the culture in other words.

What actually changes the culture is what the people believe, not what the facts actually are.

I think that a lot of modern educational foundations are undermining ethics and values; I've even written a song about that under the intentionally ironic double entendre title I Use to Think. But what has changed is not whether the world was created by God or happened by accident, but whether people believe the one or the other.

Further, noting this is ultimately a thread about Thomist Cosmological Causality, what matters as far as values are concerned is whether we believe that God is behind all that is, and not whether we agree as to how it was accomplished. If I don't believe in God, then I wind up in a moral morrass in which the argument for any individual to do anything one way rather than another is that it is in his own best interest. That best interest might become "because the rest of us have decided that this is how it will be done, and we'll kill you if you fight us on this," but it's still a self-interest basis. It always means that I should do whatever is to my personal advantage, to the best of my understanding, and if something I can do benefits me enough that it outweighs the chance that I'll be caught and punished for it, that's the right thing for me to do. It also makes a complete mockery of the concept of "justice", which really does become "what the majority wants". There can be no real "human rights"; there is only "what the majority wants" and "what is best for me" and the point at which I can get what I want without incurring the wrath of "the majority".

But I don't necessarily need to embrace six-day creationism to believe that athiestic naturalism is a lie. I can base my morality and values on the existence and expectations of a Creator God and hold to a day-age theory or theistic evolutionary theory or a gap and cataclysms theory or even a simple acceptance that God made it all for a purpose, I know not and care not how and am only interested in why.

That's probably pretty close to where I am. I'd be curious to know how, but it doesn't seem to have much impact on me, particularly as compared with why. And what bothers me most about the creationist argument is that it seems to be all about how and not at all about why, as if knowing how were the whole point when it is the least important part of the story. Anyway, that's how I see it.

It also was important because almost every SF future I've seen has been evolutionist, and I wanted to do one that was not. Although that's more of a personal goal than a player goal.

I'll agree that this is a good point; but to some degree, Starsong is a novel in which the player character encounters the back story more or less, and although I was in that world for a reasonably long time and met quite a few people in many walks of life, I don't think I as character or player was ever really aware that evolution was not at work in that universe. It wasn't ever relevant to play, that I could see. But then, I don't expect a thousand years to have that much impact.

There's a line in The Lake House where Alex, writing from 2004, asks Kate, in 2006, what it's like "in the future", and she answers with something silly about how it's really pretty much the same but that we all around in metal jumpsuits in our flying cars and don't talk anymore because we communicate telepathically--her point being it's only been two years. Well, in Starsong it had only been one millennium, and I would not have expected humanity to have changed more in that millennium than it had in the previous several, even with full-court press environmental factors encouraging evolutionary development. I don't know what it was about that world that was supposed to scream creationism, but I never noticed it. Maybe, though, it was just that there was too much else happening--technology had made humanity entirely different, and between the blood pumps in skulls and the tree people and the genetically developed intelligent animals and the lengthy ones, I don't think I noticed the absence of genuine evolutionary development.

If you go to Mutant Casino, and the gamemaster does it correctly, there should be a feel that keeps popping up. Great wealth, but decay, decay, and more decay. Entropy wins. In the end money means nothing, money is just one more bait to get you in the trap. The sky is dirty and dust with strange lights, and you step over a broken stone brought from five hundred thousand light years away...

The new directions thing...it gives you a background and an explanation for all the weird, jumbled bits of history tossed together.

I overspoke about that. I agree that the backstory of Mutant Casino provides a wonderful basis for a very strange planet, and that it would make a very interesting world in some way if you have a player interested in why these things are the way they are. I think the majority of my players would never notice that the broken stone walkways are of stone imported from another part of the galaxy, and would never ask why this creature in the tower is unique--but maybe it's my fault, for having run at least a few worlds in which unique creation is quite acceptable, and stone is just stone. But indeed, having a world that inspires a lot of different directions is good, and I can see how Mutant Casino does that, assuming you either start the player character there or start him somewhere where people are talking about going there.

--M. J. Young

I agree with your point about Starsong. And, it does not scream creationism or evolution.

But its only been about 466 years in the future, not a millenium.

2. If it were spread throughout the galaxy it would impede sight. If it were concentrated, it would cause gravity effects. Neither happens.

This statement is entirely wrong. I pointed that fact out last time, which is part of why I am unwilling to bother attempting it again.

Well, not entirely wrong, it is concentrated and does cause gravitational effects.