GOOD QUESTION: Are We Humans a Privileged Species or an Accident of Nature?
(FIVE-MINUTE VIDEO) — Here’s one of the most basic questions anybody could ever ask of themselves or any other human being: Are we the product of a purposeful will or an accident of nature?
Bill Nye, the “Science Guy,” insists we are nothing more than “specks” (screenshot from YouTube).
Why is that so important an issue? Think about it: If, as Science Guy Bill Nye argues, we are merely the product of an accident of nature, then what difference does it make when or how any of us will live our lives or die quickly or in great suffering when they end?
Sure, nobody wants to suffer pain or hunger or loneliness or any of the other thousand ills that man is subject to, but if we are only here by accident or nature, then why, other than our own temporary self-preservation and comfort, does it matter how we live or die?
On the other hand, if we are products of purposeful will in creation, then it very much matters that we have the ability to think abstractly, to understand complex inter-relationships, to feel emotions of all kinds, to plan for tomorrow, and the innumerable other ways in which we display non-material characteristics in our existence.
With such a context for our existence, it becomes logical to expect us to make distinctions such as better and worse, good and bad, longer and shorter, simple and complicated, and so forth.
In the following 5:23 second video from the Discovery Institute’s “Privileged Species” series, geneticist and author Michael Denton makes the case that, rather than being a mere accident of natural processes that could just as easily not produced human beings, we live in a universe replete with evidence of purposeful will. And that makes a huge difference to all of us: