A God That Makes Sense?

I participate with respect to the A2K mission statement 'ask an expert'. My expertise is familiarity with some of the literature, the lack of reading of which constitutes a glaring disadvantage to those genuinely wishing to participate in an informed debate. Unfortunately many here are content with just a facile statement of opinion.

Good bit of Freudian projection there! (References available on request )

BTW I suggest you get a physicist to explain those programmes to you.

True about the he/she thing. I use 'he' as a convenient shorthand. I type very slowly (never learned) and compose words even slower so I use all the shortcuts I can find.

The rest of your post is entirely plausible in the absense of more data except that I can't get my head around all that 'inevitability' encoded in the singularity being random (ID again, sorry) Yeah, I know the multiple universe speculation and the possibility that given enough of them, one of them might turn out like this but even in scientific terms I don't see any evidence beyond the 'need' for them in order to explain this one. Of course I could be accused of responding to that same 'need' is postulating a God.

Curious about how deeply you think that inevitability was encoded. Is it just the ecological niches that were inherent in it and Darwin's evolution took over from
there or were the species to fill them included as well? If it's pure 'Darwin' , a problem that occurred to me a few months ago still needs solving. Will have to think more about that to put into words but it's something like 'Why nothing like the ultimate survival creature (think movie Alien) never evolved. Or more down to earth, why no creatures with an eye in the back of their head. Would sure give them an evolutionary advantage.

Actually fresco, you are the one who should perhaps catch up with what the physicists and cosmologists have actually written, if you're depending only upon a television program as your source of information about cosmology. I've actually read what they've written on the topic and if you do the same you'd understand that colliding universe and big bounce theories are indeed expansions upon and dependent upon the big bang theory rather than contradictions of it, just as I said. Some specific references (rather than a hollow "references available on request")
Hiranya Peiris, cosmologist at University College, London
Erick Weinberg, physicist at Columbia University
https://www.quantamagazine.org/20141110-multiverse-collisions-may-dot-the-sky/
Abhay Ashtekar, Director of the Institute for Gravitational Physics and Geometry at Penn State
http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.109.251301
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/05/060515232747.htm
http://gravity.psu.edu/outreach/articles/bigbounce.pdf

I don't think an ultimate predator is necessarily more likely to survive, especially if it kills off all of its food supply! Regardless of whether eyes are in the back of a creature's head, several creatures have full 360-degree vision, so it would be a moot point. Case in point, the Dragonfly:

Funny, I thought about the dragonfly as I wrote that. Still, you would think more species would pick up on it.

Not finished with my thought about the ultimate predetor yet but the point of using up all its food supply shouldn't prevent it from evolving. Evolution has no forethought. The ultimate survivor would more likely be something like a poisonous slime mold able to consume any biomass or even non-bio energy sources. That's the kind of life form that I would expect after abiogenesis.

I honestly believe that biology is an inevitable outcome of the structure of the universe. Given matter and energy, and energy causing different types and states of matter and entropy mixing things up, it is a necessary outcome simply because that's what matter/chemicals and energy do when they get together within a certain range of conditions. Life very likely didn't arise just once on earth, but rather many times, which might explain for instance the differences between viruses as a proto-life form and cellular biology. I've come to this viewpoint on my own, but I've been told that Neil deGrasse Tyson has a similar viewpoint:

Thankyou for those. Try reading the last one again !

If I could see anything comparable to life arising out of matter and energy I could believe that too. Everything else in the universe arises out of a relatively few laws of physics and is 'easy' to explain once they are understood. Stars, galaxies, black holes, earth, quarks - all very simple in spite of the difficulty of uncovering the laws governing them. It's all amazingly simple.

Everything - except life.

Not everyone agrees with you on that. An increasing number of researchers find that the properties of carbon bonds, which is as basic a property of this universe as exists, may well have made life inevitable because of the carbon fixing processes that WILL happen in the presence of other elements, notably hydrogen and oxygen. These aren't exotic elements that appear nowhere else in the universe, they are the most common elements in the universe, and their interactions are the very backbone of biology.
See for instance the paper by Eric Smith and Rogier Braakman (Santa Fe Institute) published in the journal Physical Biology
http://phys.org/news/2012-12-life-inevitable-paper-pieces-metabolism.html
or MIT Physicist Jeremy England's comment based on a thermodynamic mathematical analysis of life processes:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/20140122-a-new-physics-theory-of-life/

That smacks of an a priori belief that it happened.

As atheists are so fond of saying, where is the proof? This has never been demonstrated in the lab. Not even close. Not even a theory on how such a thing as a string of DNA with the required coding for life could occur in such a way. That is the same sort of statement as Stephen Hawking made recently when he said "The universe is perfectly capable of making itself from nothing". It is a statement of faith unsupported by any evidence.

Crystals, new molecules according to the rules of atomic valence bonding, molecules breaking into their atomic component according to the same rules , electricity generated as a result of electrons knocked about, all that I see and understand but nothing on the order of life has ever been documented experimentally.

Can mr. England point to anything he has actually seen beyond easily explained molecules?

Far as I know, Jesus comes closest to that.

One thing I notice is that Jesus' ministry was out in the real world amongst ordinary people. There isn't a single thing in the NT about him flying to heaven on a magic carpet, sitting on some mountain top until he got "enlightened(TM)", or sitting in some cave until he started to hallucinate.

What was 'that' referring to?

Much of what makes life an inevitability is time; even a statistically rare event approaches a probability of 1.0 when time is expanded into the billions of years. Many organic chemical reactions (required for the evolution of life) can occur spontaneously, but take extremely long periods to do so. De novo biosynthesis of the pyrimidine nucleotides uridine triphosphate, cytidine triphosphate, and thymidine triphosphate for instance takes about 78 million years. That's far too long to wait for any laboratory experiment, but a blink of the eye compared to the age of the universe. But there's likely a domino effect in organic chemistry, as for instance once the enzyme Orotidine 5’-phosphate decarboxylase (OMP decarboxylase) exists, under its catalytic effect, the 78 million year reaction changes to 18 milliseconds.
Radzicka A, Wolfenden R (January 1995). "A proficient enzyme". Science 267 (5194): 90–3. doi:10.1126/science.7809611
Thus it's likely that nothing much happened for millions of years, then suddenly, bang zoom, no stopping us now, as organic chemicals and enzymatic catalytic reactions speed reaction times up to 10^17 fold.
As to evidence, short of waiting 78+ million years, the two most likely sources of evidence that could happen in our lifetimes (if ever) are 1) evidence of separate abiogenetic origins of life forms having evolved on earth and 2) evidence of non-earth life having existed on Mars. As I've already mentioned, (1) may be staring us in the eyes already, if it turns out that viruses evolved completely separately from cellular organisms. If you read the literature suggesting the idea of cellular biology evolving from viruses or both evolving from a common ancestor, you'll find there isn't much to go on. The fact that human DNA has many viral fragments is meaningless, since viruses are known to leave bits behind in any species they infect; that's simply what they do. In the scientific literature this is still an open question but one with huge ramifications. It might well be that each kingdom of life will one day be believed to have its own abiogenetic roots, which when considered along with the reproducing but not-quite-life forms such as viruses and prions, could give 8 or more known separate instances of abiogenetic evolution. Given the age of the earth at about 4.5 Billion years, 8 occurrences makes it a pretty darned frequent event relative to the age of the universe.

Although the universe is an incredible creation it is inanimate. I believe life is God's greatest creation. But our true purpose remains unknown in this life.

True, every piece of evidence we have now points to a sterile universe ( except for us), we are the pinnacle of creation. That being the case, there must be a purpose for us. I don't think that is unknowable though and I think we tend to overthink the question. Maybe he just wanted the obvious - company.

Did you mean what is our purpose in this earthly life? This life looks a lot like a 'crash test' to me. How well do these things hold up under difficult conditions? Can they figure out their own nature? Stuff like that.

This is hopelessly out of date anthropocentrism; and there ISN'T any evidence of a sterile universe. That's like looking at one drop of water and saying "there aren't any whales in this drop so the evidence says that whales don't exist."
The REAL truth is that our species has not really even begun to look for life elsewhere. A reasonable estimate of the number of earth-like planets in our galaxy alone is 20 BILLION.
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/11/04/243062655/scientists-estimate-20-billion-earth-like-planets-in-our-galaxy
and of course ours is but one of many billions of galaxies. Outside of a few third-rate graduate students (the better ones having gone into more "respected" endeavors) running a poorly funded and equipped radio receiver facility pointed pretty much randomly "out there," nothing has been done, and with good reason, as most of them are quite far away. Even the closest of them such as Gliese 667Cc at 22 lightyears are too far to ever visit or retrieve samples from and even if we want to direct simple radio/light signals at them (with the again anthropocentric assumption that they would use such means) and hope for them to be returned, we'll have to wait at least 44 years for the round trip of the signals if we start today. But you can do a far more meaningful experiment today. Try sending light and radio signals into the ocean and see what comes back. We KNOW there are intelligent species living in our oceans including whales, dolphins and octopi. Yet you would no doubt take their failure to return radio signals as signs of the ocean's sterility. Gotcha.

I said, "evidence we have NOW". Will we have some evidence of ET life later? I don't know that we won't but I'm guessing not. Some scientists claim that life is inevitable. I'm claiming they are wrong. We'll have to wait to find out who is right.

I'm impressed, also by your previous post on this thread.

So add Orotidine 5’-phosphate decarboxylase to the lab experiment. In fact, add every amino acid you need, optomize the temperature, stir the pot as often as you like, add any kind of energy to the sample you think is needed, do anything you think will increase the likelihood of a DNA string containing the required encoding for life (EXCEPT DESIGN INFORMATION) and see if you get it. The only reason this experiment is not done is because scientists know intuitively (or unconsciously) that it ain't gonna happen - ever in 13.8 billion years.

Better yet, model the naturally occurring molecular link likelyhood in a super computer and let it grind away on random combinations and see if speeding up things many orders of magnitude gets you anywhere. As a bench mark, we can use the simplest organism known (e-coli I think) and see if we get that. Remember, you can't use the old 'natural selection' here, no evolution takes prior to 'living thing one'.