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Thank you so much for your comments on that point!

I included the excerpt from Hawking's lecture and the article on Martin Rees to illustrate that the multi-verse motive is transparent, at least in those instances. But as you say, the meaning is in the eye of the beholder.

You have far more philosophical audacity than I do. I'm not even going to try to debate whether God had a beginning, or where God was before the universe began (I think of this as the "homelessness" issue, and it's quite beyond my limited powers to solve). Ditto for the Plato/Aristotle debate about the "reality" of abstractions. These are obviously outside of the limits of biological evolution. But they're delicious questions.

The biological development of consciousness is, in my opinion, still a good avenue for research; but I don't pretend to know any answers there. I may have something to say about the "free will" issue, if time permits (and if I'm not predetermined to ignore it).

I'm dazzled by the effort you've put into this. [Enthusiastic smooches!]

Schroeder reminds us of facts that the Evolutionists have not explained and cannot explain.

At the Cambrian explosion of animal life, 530 million years ago, some 50 phyla (basic body plans) appeared suddenly in the fossil record. Only 30 to 34 survived. The rest perished. Since then no new phyla have evolved.

Among the structures that appeared in the Cambrian were limbs, claws, eyes with optically perfect lenses, intestines. These exploded into being with no underlying hint in the fossil record that they were coming.

It is no wonder that Darwin himself, at seven locations in The Origin of Species, urged the reader to ignore the fossil record if he or she wanted to believe his theory.

Darwin based his theory on animal husbandry rather than fossils. If in a few generations of selective breeding a farmer could produce a robust sheep from a skinny one, then, Darwin reasoned, in a few million or billion generations a sponge might evolve into an ape. The fossil record did not then nor does it now support this theory...

But what is surprising, even astounding, is the similarity of the mammal gene the gene that controls the development of eyes in mollusks and the visual systems in worms. The same can be said for the gene that controls the expression of limbs in insects and in humans. In fact so similar is this gene, that pieces of the mammalian gene, when spliced into a fruit fly, will cause a wing to appear on the fly.

Somehow nature has selected the same combination of amino acids for all visual systems in all animals. That fidelity could not have happened by chance. It must have been pre-programmed in lower forms of life. But those lower forms of life, one-celled, did not have eyes.

And if Materialism and Reductionism are failing the physicists, why on earth should the biologists continue to put their faith in them?