Evolution and the drive for life.

[Danieltwotwenty]

Ok this is going to be a bit weird but bear with me. This is more aimed at secular evolution.

If we take God out of evolution, what drives the evolution of life to continue and reproduce, why would an unintelligent process start and why would it continue evolving itself, why would it compete with other life, if it has no purpose other than to just be.

I really can't wrap my head around a purposeless universe. If there was no purpose I wouldn't expect life to arise let alone reproduce. I wouldn't even expect a universe if there was no purposeful driving force.

[neo-x]

Evolution and purpose are not related, evolution has no inherent purpose as you have for eating a burger, its just a chain reaction forced by natural selection and chemical interaction.

Your question is a philosophical one.

Edit on second thought, some observations

1. Life and evolution will one day end on this planet, various outside factors, sun, cosmic accidents etc.

2. Why would you drive God out of it. I think God used evolution, not in a direct way but still. I do think you need God somewhere at the back, perhaps even before our universe was formed. The thing is evolution does not need God participating actively to run. The mechanism is self explaining, what isn't is orgins of the universe and of laws. And I think God designed those as such. Though I think all the rest just followed like a chain reaction.

[PerciFlage]

If we take God out of evolution, what drives life to continue and reproduce, why would an unintelligent process start and why would it continue itself, why would it compete with other life, if it has no purpose other than to just be.

First off, I think you're thinking of "competition" in anthropomorphic terms. When people compete - in sport, business, the arts, whatever - we make a conscious decision to be better than other people in the same field. If we observe, say, bacterial infections in people, then we find that over time certain strains of bacteria become dominant: they have beaten similar strains, and won the "competition" to infect humans. Except that this isn't really a competition in the way we understand it in conscious, human terms - bacteria don't choose to compete, but the environment they live in will be hostile to some strains and cause others to thrive, giving rise to our analogies with competitions, victors and losers.

As for why life reproduces, it is because the molecules that are the basis for life reproduce. In the same way that changing from ice, to water, to steam depending on temperature and pressure is a fundamental property of H²O molecules, so creating copies of themselves is a fundamental property of DNA/RNA molecules.

[Danieltwotwenty]

Interesting Perci thank you, you have sufficiently answered the question.

Neo I was only taking God out of the picture because I wanted a purely natural explanation.
But I do understand the point your making in point 2, God wound up the clock so to speak and let it run, he doesn't have to be involved in the whole process because he already knew the outcome. I could have asked the question without taking God out but I just wanted to make sure I got a purely natural process response. I think I was quite successful.

I find it interesting that our view of time (or our inability to think outside our frame of reference) has such an impact on how we view God being involved in the creation process.

I kind of see it like what took millions of years from our point of view was just bam and it's done from God's point of view, beginning to end was just there all at once. Blows my mind.