Natural selection produces organisms that are better suited to their environment. There doesn’t need to be a “standard” (and there isn’t one), because natural selection isn’t on the road to the “perfect organism”; it simply weeds out the organisms that aren’t suited to the environment that they are in.

There is no rational way to proove [sic] or refute this…”

Seems like I just did. Regardless, who are you to even say such a thing? It seems to me that you’re asserting this in the hope of keeping a gap open that your God can reside in, away from rational thought. Quite disengenious, in my opinion.

Oh, and another thing. When you say there is no way to prove/refute an explanation that you give forth, that instantly disqualifies it as a valid statement. Instantly. Try not to do that.

Duh! Of course you don’t believe in God! You haven’t “made every though captive for Christ!”

Ah yes, of course – d’oh!

Drat those thoughts; they’re always trying to escape captivity!

“The amount of research necessary to discern this would be staggering. We don’t even have any good measures for determining rationality in a creature. (Hence the arguments over whether dolphins are sentient or not.)”

Actually, I have seen some rather interesting studies about animal self-awareness in recent years. Researchers have been using the “mirror test” – a test as to whether a creature is able to recognize that what they see in a mirror is their own image rather than another creature. So far, I have seen that all the great apes, dolphins, and asian elephants can all pass this test. (I’d love to see if an African Gray Parrot could pass. I have not seen this as a test.) So I think we have a starting point for which animals to look at as possibly sentient. I am definitely not sure that humans are the only sentient creatures on the planet. (And, of course, per Douglas Adams, dolphins are obviously smarter than humans!) I’d love to see more research on the subject.

But God isn’t nothing. Only your cosmology demands the absurd concept of creation ex-nihilo. From nothing. By nothing.

And these various models alluded to above such as the “vacuum fluctuation” or oscillating models of the origin of the universe have been largely abandoned:

http://www.rfmedia.org/RF_audio_video/Defender_podcast/20040502CosmologicalArgumentPart1.mp3
http://www.rfmedia.org/RF_audio_video/Defender_podcast/20040509CosmologicalArgumentPart2.mp3
http://www.rfmedia.org/RF_audio_video/Defender_podcast/20040516CosmologicalArgumentPart3.mp3
http://www.rfmedia.org/RF_audio_video/Defender_podcast/20040530CosmologicalArgumentPart4.mp3
http://www.rfmedia.org/RF_audio_video/Defender_podcast/20040606CosmologicalArgumentPart5.mp3

The history of twentieth century cosmology has largely been an attempt to disprove the Big Bang model, due to the ideological prejudices against supernaturalism. But fatal flaws have turned up in all these models.

sorry

The Law of Conservation of Mass/Energy which I think fairly summarizes that in a closed system the amount of mass/energy remains constant, it may be rearranged to create new forms of matter but nothing is added or subtracted from the system. To my mind’s eye in layman’s terms this means you cannot create something out of nothing.

First, who said you’re dealing with a closed system? Second, if energy cannot be created or destroyed, and you can’t create something out of nothing, then God violated the law. Then He left us to investigate (with our reasoning abilities) a universe that has laws, but you have to postulate violations of those laws in order to come up with God existing. Circular illogic again. The same thing that must be used to support all religious belief.

Also, if I were to accept that humans gradually gained self-awareness through time how come in all this time there has not been another species that has gained the same ability to be self-aware at the same level as us?

First, it takes a long time for any such thing to happen. Second, any trait coming into existence is a highly unlikely event. Third, the development of a trait in one species can then act to make it less likely for any other species to develop the same trait. Just a few, simplified statements of reasons for you.

Or much less made small progress towards becoming more self-aware given that this process takes a very long time?

The amount of research necessary to discern this would be staggering. We don’t even have any good measures for determining rationality in a creature. (Hence the arguments over whether dolphins are sentient or not.) Then consider that we’ve only been doing decent research on this planet for maybe a century. You conclude that if some creatures are becoming more sentient, we don’t know how to discern it, and we certainly haven’t been looking long enough.