Honestly, I think evolution is the best “origin theory” when it comes to complementing or supporting Mormon theology. Does it not hint at a physical counterpart or physical half to the spiritual idea of eternal progression?

#69 TonyD
Wow. I don’t want to veer badly off topic, but where does God claim to have answers to logically ill posed questions? That’s to my mind a pretty strained interpretation of of statements such as “God knows all things” since my point is that position simply isn’t a property of a particle with well defined velocity.

That is an interesting argument to use against Calvinists, who formally maintain that everything that happens – good, bad, and ugly – happens in accord with God’s sovereign will. And certainly there is a healthy smattering of proto-Calvinism in both the Old and New Testaments.

However, LDS theology is thoroughly Arminian and free will oriented. There is no pretense that God dictates the outcome of every event. So that objection doesn’t apply.

Since I am an atheist of sorts, I’ll take up your question.

First of all, who says that it must confer and evolutionary advantage at all?

That said, a number of people have attempted to tackle your question. Two excellent books on the subject are Scott Atran’s “In Gods We Trust” and Pascal Boyer’s “Religion Explained.”

Clark, over at Mormon Metaphysics did a few reviews of Atran’s book if you wanna peruse some of the relevant ideas.

God can’t know the position of a particle with a precise velocity, not because of some ignorance, but simply because that particle has no position to know!

If God says he knows the position of a particle that doesn’t exist, then he does. If he says he doesn’t know, then he doesn’t. If he tells me he does and you he doesn’t, then that is true.

Where are all the readers with real experience of miracles to back me up?

Intelligent design/creationism is not only cherry-picked science, it is faulty theology as well. Startling as it may seem, by continually protesting that “blind” chance could only lead to “accidental evolution”, all denialist forms of creationism contradict the Bible’s clear teachings that chance occurrence in the universe (randomness), is always under God’s direct control!…Oops! It’s here:

http://open.salon.com/content.php?cid=34289

It’s called: “Intelligent Design Rules Out God’s Sovereignty Over Chance”

Dawkins would say that religious beliefs are “memes” — that is, they are self-perpetuating ideas that spread (like warts or non-lethal parasites) independently of whether they are advantageous to their hosts.

Given that the majority of the world’s human population has and appears to always have had a belief in a supreme, unseen power, from an atheistic point of view what fitness advantage does/did that belief confer? And do the conditions that made it advantageous to believe in ‘God’ no longer exist, such that evangelical atheists (Dawkins et al) can argue that a world with no belief whatsoever would be a better place?

I think if sentient beings lived on planets like ours, they would look much like us–limbs for both motion and tool-making, a large brain-to-body ratio, etc. I’m thinking they may resemble us like a dolphin resembles a shark–I’m sure a shark thinks it looks nothing like a dolphin, but to an outside observer, they do look quite similar. I think convergent evolution would apply, even on other planets.

Maybe, but I don’t think there would be any reason for those bodies to have a head-torso-four limbs arrangement, though. It may just have been an accident that that’s the arrangement a common ancestor of amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals had. Other arrangements might have been just as viable but failed because of random factors.

Sentient life on other planets might have seven limbs in a head-thorax-abdomen arrangement, or travel on their stomachs with limbs growing out of their heads, or who knows what.