If evolution is the truth and we argue that the qualities living things possess are the result of evolution, then can we say that qualities we do not like such as hatred, jealousy and greed serve or have served a useful purpose?

Even if all living things did come to be as they are through evolution, it doesn't follow that every particular trait of a living thing contributed to its ancestors' fitness. Indeed, there can be traits which confer a selective disadvantage, but which evolution hasn't managed to weed out: perhaps it is currently slowly being weeded out; perhaps the genetic changes that would produce an organism lacking the trait (and able to pass that lack on) are so unlikely that they haven't happened often enough, or at all; perhaps the changes that, together, would be needed to eliminate the trait don't confer selective advantage when they arrive one at a time; perhaps the trait is the homozygote flip-side of a beneficial heterozygote trait; perhaps the trait is just an inevitable by-product of another trait or traits that have increased fitness . . . One can readily generate plausible-sounding explanations of just how tendencies towards hatred, jealousy, and greed would have conferred selective advantages...

Is it more probable that a universe that looks designed is created by a designer than by random natural forces?

Here's something we might agree on, at least for the sake of argument: the chance that a (sufficiently powerful, etc.) designer would produce a "designy" universe is higher than the chance that a random selection of natural laws and initial conditions (i.e., "no designer") would do so: Prob( designy universe GIVEN designer) > Prob(designy universe GIVEN no designer) But you are wondering about a different comparison: Prob (designer GIVEN designy universe) ??? Prob(no designer GIVEN designy universe) But these latter probabilities seem much more problematic to estimate. Are we to imagine being "given" a universe "at random" with no information about it except that it is designy? But what does that even mean? How is this "random" selection made among all the possible designed and undesigned universes? Are we to assume that there is some objective fact, for instance, about what the odds are of a universe being designed rather than undesigned? This matters greatly, for if in general...

What makes an object living? Scientists have a number of qualities that an object needs to have to be considered living: Self-replication etc. What qualities do philosophers associate with living objects?

Philosophers might put the question like this: what constitutes being a living thing? And we might hope for a non-circular definition that spells out exactly what it takes to be a living thing. Among the strategies for answering this sort of question, a common one is conceptual analysis . This strategy is applicable when we think competence with the concept in question (in this case, the concept of a living thing) gives us a kind of seat-of-the-pants knowledge of what it is for the concept to apply to a thing, so that what's left is to turn our commonsense expertise with the concept into a careful definition. We propose a definition, and then test it by trying to imagine an example of a sort of thing that meets the proposed definition but where the concept doesn't really apply (according to our commonsense expertise), or vice versa. Suppose we try that with the concept of a bachelor . Someone proposes the definition unmarried male human . But a newborn boy is surely not a...