Since I'm not spending so much time here anyway - I'll offer you one extra chance to engage in this discussion politely. You say, Nonhuman, non-sentient creatures don't consider such questions because their minds are not designed with an adaptive ability to conceptualize. Our ability to do that does not relieve us from emotional motives for our behavior, it only adds another input to the emotional weighing mechanism. However, conceptualizing and human reason has its faults as well. The emotional forces it produces are not always based on good logic or adequate data - and, we use it as often as not to logically justify the particular non-intellectual emotional signals that we'd prefer to follow. Much like proponents of ID do these days in their far-fetched arguments to insert a soul into the human mind.

When you say, "Nonsense", you are expressing an emotional response to my post. It is a borderline insult. It ususally signals stronger insults to follow in your posts. It is one example of what makes a discussion with you so useless, from my perspective.

When you say, I don't have a belief in randomness - except perhaps as a way to characterize the mutations that allow evolution to try many different designs and problem solutions as a species evolves. If that's what you mean, you are conflating proximate and non-proximate causation when you say that I believe that animal behavior is random - a high-school level debating tactic. (Note that this last phrase is emotionally driven. My emotions are aroused whenever someone tries to insert religious dogma into a scientific discussion.)

Animal behavior is not random. It is the result of seeking specific emotional payoffs - the ones each species is designed to seek by its nature. If it were random then there would be no canine or feline or human nature, different from the others.

When you say . . . we find the expected emotionally driven escalation in insults. Here, there is no attempt whatsoever to engage the substance of my post with that objective reasonableness that you claim is the higher human condition. Instead, you respond on a purely emotional level. This is obviously caused by the fact that your strong beliefs about a place for God in the human soul have been questioned by my premise.

You confirm this completely when you say, . . . you provide a revealing description not of the scientific reasonableness (or not) of my premise but a description of how my premise makes you feel, emotionally.

I suspect that pointing this out and questioning the sincerety of your motives will make you even more angry and therefore this thread is probably at an end as far as you and I are concerned. Que lastima.

Margaret