we are alone

Life on earth has been a continuous process of adapting to the local environment. The longer this round of life lasted (there’s been a few mass extinctions on Earth), the better adapted each species became adapted to its own environment. Our ancestors, however, crossed an intellectual threshold somewhere and adapted to the process of adapting. They became good at adapting itself, and they could do it in several places within a much shorter timeframe than most other life. Then they learned how to adapt by creating their own environment. Now we can make countless adaptations within a single lifetime.

Our lives begin largely of adapting to the reality of the universe and the environment around us (for most of us that means the cultural environment that our ancestors created). Very soon we each have the power to change the environment somewhat and this power grows with time. A lucky few gain immense power to change the whole world while many of us can only physically change our local environments and not much else. But even those lucky few only have reign over this planet; at most this solar system. But no one has a say in the laws of the universe and the 14 billion lightyears of space, so everyone still must adapt and this will never change. From our birth, we have to accept gravity, the necessity of food and water and sleep, the transportation system, the plumbing that our ancestors conceived, the level of education we are permitted, our parents’ social status, and infinite more restrictions. The longer we’ve had to live by them, the more efficient we get in living by them. This is how we adapt.

The point is that even creationists cannot deny that they’ve adapted very well to their own environment within their lifetime. From a philosophical perspective (I’m setting aside hard science for this post), if we can do it so well in a lifetime why is it hard to imagine that it’s taken all of life billions of years to do the same?