What is the nature and origin of the forces that; 1) led to the genesis of life? (a chemistry motivated to propagate copies of itself) and 2) caused one tiny branch of those life-forms to near-instantaneously acquire a profoundly superior intelligence, a profoundly unique knowledge of God a subsequent creation of cultural evolution?
1) There is no explanation why some primordial sludge should ever acquire an impulsive "desire", "need", or compulsion to reproduce and make copies of itself. (they stunk anyway) and then be motivated to go on and conquer the world (viz. movie "The Blob" LOL).
There is certainly some force driving it. Nothing happens in nature without a force changing the state. A life force is as good a term as any to describe the redirection.
2) It is not understood how one particular primate species instantaneously acquired a superior intelligence and a knowledge of God and soul, but those characteristics have been wildly successful in advancing the goals of evolution for that species.
Culture is at the heart of the success and God is responsible. All cultural advancements are driven by and because of the knowledge of God. Its also interesting to note that the fundamental moralities and motivations that come with God are common across all human societies, no matter how isolated they were from each other. Just as amazingly they all "evolved" within the same small time period.
The big question then, why did one particular primate species suddenly decide to get smart, stop being a "chimpanzee" and begin worshipping God(s)?
The belief in God is the singular greatest feature that distinguishes us from atheist animals and the single greatest reason why we have become so successful and achieved such abundance.
Also since these human traits are so fantastically successful it is statistically unreasonable that no other species have evolved any similar characteristics. Why not?
[None of the evolutionary, atheist leaders, like Richard Dawkins have been able to explain it and they do acknowledge the strangeness of it all.]
God has driven man to adopt strategies, moralities and contrainstictual behavioural modalities (ooh cool term, it may deserve its own acronym, LOL) not found in other life forms.
The very idea of living life to gain reward after death is completely antithetical to base evolutionary theories. This alone suggests the need for science to consider additional process perturbations outside the current realm of scientific knowledge, such as "God", aliens, martians, whatever...)
Define "near-instantaneously". It's probable that "modern" humans existed for 20-30 thousand years before any serious advances occurred. Even then, the advances were likely cultural, not genetically driven (and most of that was during the domination by religions other than Judeo-Christian theology, such as Ra worshipers in Egypt, and polytheistic faiths of the Greeks, Romans and whatever the Chinese believed then).
Culture is at the heart of the success and God is responsible.
Culture is at the heart of humanities success, but you are ignoring huge chunks of history to assert that your definition of God is responsible. The Chinese were far in advance of Europeans for thousands of years, and our history books largely ignores this fact. And "Western Civilization" itself was built, as I said above, on the polytheistic philosophies of Athens and Rome. When Christianity did take over Rome, it heralded it's decline for a millenia into the dark ages, until very recent centuries when a few were able to implement a philosophy of a separation between church and state, and an individual liberty of the people to judge their own relationship to God. It was this removal of God as central to culture that sparked the most recent huge advances in civilization.
Also since these human traits are so fantastically successful it is statistically unreasonable that no other species have evolved any similar characteristics. Why not?
Someone has to be first. The ability to pose an unanswerable question is not a positive indication of the existence of a God. Much less a positive indication that your particular God is correct over some other persons concept of God or gods.
Christianity is a minority faith on the planet you know.
God has driven man to adopt strategies, moralities and contrainstictual behavioural modalities (ooh cool term, it may deserve its own acronym, LOL) not found in other life forms.
Please explain how those Chinese did those things without God. Unless your point is that generic faith is the cause of these things.
The very idea of living life to gain reward after death is completely antithetical to base evolutionary theories. This alone suggests the need for science to consider...
There is zero scientific evidence to suggest life after death. It is a highly emotional subject and perhaps very hard for humans to imagine otherwise, but the bottom line is there is no physical detector for "spirits", or reincarnation, or even the existence of a soul. Please enlighten me if there is such detection hardware, or litmus strip test, or anything besides philosophy and good feelings to back up the idea of life after death.