"Without a doubt, the ultimate Black Swan is whatever it was that permitted merely genetic human beings to emerge into full humanness just yesterday (cosmically speaking), some 50,000 years ago.
Prior to this there was existence, but so what? There was life, but who cares? With no one to consciously experience it, what was the point? Without self-conscious observers, the whole cosmos could bang into being and contract into nothingness, and it would be no different than the proverbial tree falling in the forest with no one there to hear it.
One of the reasons why this is such a lonely and unpopular blog is that it takes both science and religion seriously. Most science and religion are unserious, but especially -- one might say intrinsically -- when they exclude each other.
A religion that cannot encompass science is not worthy the name, while a science that cannot be reconciled with religion is not fit for human beings. And I mean this literally, in that it will be a science that applies to a different species, not the one that is made to know love, truth, beauty, existence, and the Absolute. Science must begin and end in this principle -- which is to say, the Principle -- or it is just a diversion. ...."
AMEN!!! to that, dear Matchett-PI!
I suspect allmendream may be a little confused — AFAIK, neither Pope John Paul II nor Benedict XVI has ever said that human beings come "from pre-existent and living matter." Neither man is hostile to the idea of biological evolution. But that is not the same as saying that the origin of life is (tautologically) pre-existently living matter. If this is what Darwin's theory requires, then neither of the Holy Fathers could plausibly be called a Darwinist.
Matter is dumb and lifeless. It is not the "source" of the living body, but the "building blocks" of it....
The "dust of the earth" was pretty much nothing, until God breathed life into it....
Gagdad Bob hits it out of the ballpark yet again! Thanks, Matchett, for the ping!