Sloshed right now on the back porch burning 1, when piss sets in. Walk to the fence and do my thing, when I realize there's a little hose on my body to expel fluids. It's kinda funny if you think about it: are we all just random trial and error, or is the great architect taking the piss at our expense?
trial and error mostly. there is strangeness, but it doesn't require a mind to create, just to appreciate seeing it. could be all sorts of things. not because they or we need to exist, but because there's no reason why they couldn't.
we are born into a universe that gets along just fine without us. that is not the choice. what we choose is how much we participate in it, and the manor in which we do so. statistically this has a profound effect on what and how it is for each of us to experience. these are apples and oranges. rocks and trees and galaxies, and what you bump your toe on in the middle of the night, are one kind of thing. our emotional and communicative interaction with each other, our perceptions of the social-verse, is entirely and completely another. physical reality and social/perceptual reality can easily be distinguised by the non-dependence of non-social perceptual reality, on communication and perception. and yes, i'm sorry but there really is a reality, what i consider to be the real reality, physical and not both, which is untouched by communication or perception.
When my son was in 7th grade and we went off to Hawaii for my sister-in-laws wedding and he fell behind in school I helped him catch up. He had this Biology project that had to be turned in and it was last minute, so while he worked on other things, I ended up doing that project. It was actually pretty amazing and I tried to teach him what I was learning. He was supposed to document the evolutionary changes as you work up through the tree of life--the breakdown by phylum and so forth as you move up through the categories of pant life, then animal life all the way up to invertebrates and beyond. It was pretty amazing as, for example, sex (and fertilization of eggs) actually began in the lowest plant forms, and evolved through the plants, and into the animals. There is the change from cell membranes to exoskeletons to skeletons. Changes as fins became arms and legs and hands and feet developed, and so forth. It provided an amazing explanation as to why my in-laws have low foreheads and do not have opposable thumbs. (Just kidding!) It became very clear doing this that there was a clear and obvious trend as life evolved into ever higher life forms, branching off as it did. I would say the real trial and error, mistakes and breakthroughs, came with the irrational process of the human mind and emotions. If absurdity to life, as the existentialists speak of, is there, it is at this point where the search for meaning, particularly in a postmodern materialist world, becomes relevant.
meaning is really not the point and never has been. what even is the meaning of "meaning"? what is the point is that the kind of experience we have of living is, is created by the statistical combining of how considerately or otherwise, all of the each of us choose to live. whether the whether or the gods, whatever there may be of them, what is up to us is up to us. not all things are of course, but many more are statistically then individually, except of course, that those statistics are the adding up of each of us together. this isn't the only thing we live in though. it varies for each of us how much of what we experience and notice is the social environment, and how much is nature's wonderful diversity. we usually get to choose where we look, the annoying exception being the demands of the inconsiderate for attention. seldom is the reality of nature and its diversity as inconsiderate as our fellow humans. we can also create, not as easily as a god perhaps, but to give physical form to our imaginations is the only observable distinction between sapience and sentience. assuming of course, that there even is such a distinction of kind, and not merely one of degree.
I hardly think we could be "all just trial and error." And if you really delve into it, you might notice that about half of us don't have that little hose but accomplish the task by different means. I'm sure randomness played a part, but it was also a result of a long process of natural selection going back at least three and a half billion years. Some of your ancestors might have developed other equipment, but it didn't work or work well and they died out from health problems caused by urinary retention. Bacteria may build up and cause infection, which can be a big problem if it spreads to your kidneys (assuming they've evolved). Anyhow, besides purely random processes, your wee wee is the product of natural selection, which gets rid of mistakes the hard way. Gene flow, genetic drift and non-random mating may also play a part (the latter occurring because the ladies may prefer mates with dicks). I wouldn't rule out the Great Architect either, but the other processes can explain a lot.
i believe the level of diversity of successfully living forms, not to mention mineral and immobile vegetation, strongly suggest something other then a single self aware creator. not necessarily the absence of any, but rather something other then a single one. nor is the centrality of our own species suggested by anything observable in the context of an entire universe, rather then limited to what we can observe or our single planet. the ego doesn't like to admit the unknown being unknown, that anything, let alone everything, is perfectly capable of existing without being known by it, but the universe our tiny little egos are surrounded by, isn't greatly impressed by what they are unable or unwilling to accept.
