“Universal acid” sounds suspiciously like somebody had heard of the “universal solvent” concept but misremembered what it was called.

First of all, I wasn’t saying that these issues necessarily apply to all Abrahamic religions–I can’t claim any kind of expertise over all of them, and Dan seems to be making a well-informed argument that they don’t over at least some. I was more pointing out that there are a lot of things that people associate with Religion that are actually Abrahamic Religion: the innate superiority of human souls over animal souls, for one small instance. I don’t think this is really a good thread for me to open an entire theological exposition on my own religion, which is the only one I can claim any true knowledge of, but basically, I would say the answer is, no, I don’t think they do. Any basically, my only point is this: the set of possible theological belief systems is very large, and by its nature flexible. Generalizing about them is difficult.

Peter’s problem is that this supposes that God (or presumably gods) have a chosen team in homo sapiens. Why exactly is this a problem? It’s not as if it’s a hidden assumption. If you’re an adherent of one of these religions, it would make sense to say, yes, of course; furthermore that God(s) have a chosen subteam of adherents to a particular religion or subset of religions, that God further typically only grants some prayers to some people some of the time.

Now, once you’ve titrated that down further to consider the subset of those prayers that directly or even indirectly bear on evolutionary descent and/or change — as opposed to prayers for patience, or for extraterrestrial favors (after all, a good deal of what most religions are interested in pertains to the fate of your soul, not your genes), than I think you could say that the impact of intercessory prayer on the evolution of the species is negligible. Nor, again, are most prayers concerned with such things.

But I find the more profound side of the theory is as outlined above. It’s not just that the results are very sensitive to starting conditions, it’s that the results can be chaotic despite very simple interactions within a very simple, deterministic system. And perhaps also worthwhile is the insight that a seemingly simple system can appear to behave nice and simply most of the time, but given certain input conditions it suddenly reverts to chaos.

I wonder if there is a popular trope that hits on these other aspects of Chaos Theory. The Butterfly Effect is just not doing it for me.