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Politics : Should God be replaced? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Solon who wrote (729)	9/7/2000 3:26:18 PM
From: TigerPaw	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 28931

. Just work God into it for me, please Well unless I come up with a definition of God that is really vague, I can't. The traditional sense of an intelligent being who exerts some kind of control over the outcome of the universe violates several tenants of information theory. Due to chaotic results of uncertain actions the kind of control necessary to even remotely produce intelligence would require either a deterministic universe or would leave a noticable signature of corrections. I can't rule out that the big bang was some kind of laboratory experiment. The outcome of that experiment was either random, or completely controlled (i.e. fate). TP

To: Solon who wrote (729)	9/7/2000 9:38:43 PM
From: cosmicforce	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 28931

I liked the cosmic commode. I'm going to integrate his metaphor into my foam metaphor. The dimensionality of the "whole universe" (including that we can't see) has always fascinated me. Today I was thinking about how chaos and uncertainty are coupled. The macroscopic version of Shroedinger's Cat is the game of "I shot an arrow in the air". All players within the chaotic circle of the arrow's return path live on in a state of living/nonliving or injured/uninjured existance until the arrow hits ground and loses it potential to kill or mame. In a very real way, with all the air currents aloft, birds flying by, density differences, subtle tremors in the hand of the person letting the arrow go, all add up to a highly uncertain situation in which there is macroscopic uncertainty that extends forward into the future. I think we, as humans, recognize the probablistic nature of the situation to be unusual and almost mystical. Herein lies the physiological, psychological and physical reality shift that causes people to take risks. We are programmed to risk. Our perception of risk/reward is frequently at a disconnect with the probablistic or "actual" risk. In one of my web searches I came across a well-documented case from the annals of medical history where a patient in 1957 Los Angeles was kept alive by his belief in a placebo. He was stage 4 and had orange size tumors melt after the injection of a placebo (a last ditch effort involving the injection of horse serum perpetrated by the family and doctor), only to reappear after he found out that there was doubt in the efficacy of the treatment he thought he was being given. The doctor persuaded him to try again with "higher dose", this time a saline solution. Again the tumors went away for 2 months until the patient had found a definitive article that demonstrated that the serum he thought he was getting was a fraud. He died a few days later.