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

To: Greg or e who wrote (839)	9/14/2000 4:01:09 PM
From: cosmicforce	Respond to of 28931

Didn't Pasture demonstrate that maggots did not just spontaneously arise out of meat? Yet this is precisely what you want me to believe, that matter and then life itself just jumped up out of nothing No, I don't want you to believe anything. I will put all the pieces out on the floor and let you see how they all fit together. I'll show you (or the Chinese paleontologist) what is the simplest explanation, IMO, but guess what? Here is where belief and faith are different. In my model, we all take turns throwing darts at it... If it still holds together we'll keep it. If it doesn't we have to rethink or model. It's like "Lincoln in Dali-vision." You stand back and you see a pattern. We now know that life as we know it is infinitely more complex than anyone ever thought before. We reformulate our hypothesis to match the data. There are apparently important gold-ore forming "organisms" that coat themselves with gold foil in hydrothermal liquids. Life is simply the process by which order arises spontaneously out of disorder in the presence of thermal disequilibrium. What it is made out of is irrelevant. Now about maggots and meat. Well we can try a variety of experiments to establish how small a filter will trap the agents that "infest" the meat. We start with a canning process. Hey, it's still meat and no flies. Now we do the canning process, but replace the solid lid with a series of sieves that get larger and larger. At some point (around a few microns) we will start to get something happening. But as we get larger and larger openings, at some point the fly's will appear. Now we repeat the experiment this time inside another sterile jar and maybe with different gases. We get different results. The fact that we don't believe that maggots spontaneously arise from meat (and have the experimental data to support it) demonstrates that we have moved forward toward the truth by rejecting what is false. I the Chicago area a bacterium has found that can eat dioxin. Dioxin is rare enough in nature that its energy concentration is not very high. It would be hard for a creature to live on dioxin. However, in this area a bacterium has found the ability (probably through a random mutation) to react dioxin. If there is food, life will find it. It probably doesn't matter if we know that it life. But that's my working definition. Using this definition, it is possible to have artificial life or life that arises in a totally different environment.

To: Greg or e who wrote (839)	9/14/2000 4:06:06 PM
From: TigerPaw	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 28931

arguing in the ranks These articles miss the real transition from Darwin's slow gradual change theory to the more modern sudden change theories. The root cause is that Darwin did not know much about reproduction. Organisms mate and have babies, that's about as sophisticated as it got. The assumption was that it was some sort of analog process. The babies were imperfect copies of the parent and so variation occurred with every generation. It is now known that DNA is a digital medium and that reproduction can be carried out quite exactly. Mutations enter the picture slowly, but they can be stored without being expressed for very long periods of time. This is why finches can all grow long beaks, and quickly revert back when conditions change. The genes are not lost, they are just in the unexpressed library of genes. Humans still possess nearly all the genes of the chimpanzees, they occasionally get expressed as the hair-covered attractions in a side show, or curved spine individuals. They are available to the gene pool should conditions arrive that make them favorable. TP

To: Greg or e who wrote (839)	9/14/2000 7:20:02 PM
From: cosmicforce	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 28931

Boy, there were a lot of typos in my last post -- I was in a hurry because I was off to my design review!! The reason I mention this is because it is precisely the activity that I'm suggesting for one's philosophical inquiries. In a design review, ideally, one prepares a package of ideas and designs. This is then subjected to objective challenges by others of varying skills and disciplines. This process improves one's designs by forcing the incorporation of input other than one's own. It produces a better design. It probably improves one's philosophical clarity as well if used there. There seems to be a common misunderstanding between Creationists and those of scientific bent. Scientists aren't necessarily atheists. We are truth seekers. I don't know any scientist who wouldn't like to meet God, if such a deity presented itself. But I don't believe in a corporeal being as presented by the Bible - there just isn't any evidence. If I am in God's image, then we are discussing my mind, not my body. If I was only a living head in a jar, I think I would still be mostly me. If I was a living body in a jar without a head, I would mostly not. And in that mind, I have reason. That is really all the mind is for, producing reason and rationality. Otherwise we might as well have been born without it and just had reflexes. But what I assert, and this thread's charter statement suggests, is not that there isn't a God, but rather that his nature is not accurately depicted by the Bible. How do I know this? Well, your right, it IS through a belief. My first principle is a belief that the world is knowable through reason. It seems to make sense to me. But really that is only one belief, albeit, an all encompassing one. When dogmatic beliefs have been presented in the past, they tend to be wrong. If you want to read something heart-breaking, read the Recantation of Galileo. Here is a feeble man of 70 years (ancient in his day) telling the Inquisition that he didn't see anything that he saw through his telescope and that the Church was right. I, Galileo, being in my seventieth year, being a prisoner and on my knees, and before your Eminences, having before my eyes the Holy Gospel, which I touch with my hands, abjure, of the movement of the earth. Systems based upon belief seem to produce this effect more than systems based upon reason. Reason is testable. Belief is not. Reason is supported by objective fact, belief can exist in a vacuum. So what we have is something of a slippery slope. We all have to accept some things as given: "I think, therefore I am". That's really just a belief. Am I a man dreaming he is a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he is a man? Maybe neither. I just don't know. I lean more toward a man dreaming he is a man. If you choose to be swayed more belief, you are at odds with the data visible to others. My only belief is that my observations can be affirmed by others through objective experience. But there is a caveat: reason only takes you so far. Experiment can take you further, but ultimately, at the bottom of the well of reason and experimentation, lies the unknowable. The difference between those who choose reason and those who choose belief is that we have a bottom to our well of knowledge. We know it. Belief has no bottom and is infinite. But being unbounded, it is capable of great contradiction and arrogance. A kind of arrogance that would not stand the light of the scientific method.