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

To: Travbfree who wrote (1975)	10/20/2000 5:00:52 PM
From: Don Pueblo	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 28931

I came from the dust, I'm going back to the dust. What in the world made you decide that? You should give yourself a little more credit!

To: Travbfree who wrote (1975)	10/20/2000 5:10:31 PM
From: cosmicforce	Respond to of 28931

Because we can see the results of ignoring or not understanding God's law of gravity, can / does lead to broken bones or death, we can understand that ignoring his moral laws also should have the same result. What about the world of the small where Quantum Mechanics (QM) dominates and this kind of absolutist dogma are provably false? Are you saying that unless something is small that God cares in absolutes but at the scale of the small, he can't or won't control the outcome? This kind of Determinist dogma was disproved 100 years ago. Maybe in 1850 you could say that, but not now. You are typing at the keyboard of a device whose very existence is driven by the uncertainty of QM. No, sorry, but God's laws are not absolute.

To: Travbfree who wrote (1975)	10/20/2000 6:37:10 PM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 28931

The Argument from Design You all know the argument from design: everything in the world is made just so that we can manage to live in the world, and if the world was ever so little different, we could not manage to live in it. That is the argument from design. It sometimes takes a rather curious form; for instance, it is argued that rabbits have white tails in order to be easy to shoot. I do not know how rabbits would view that application. It is an easy argument to parody. You all know Voltaire's remark, that obviously the nose was designed to be such as to fit spectacles. That sort of parody has turned out to be not nearly so wide of the mark as it might have seemed in the eighteenth century, because since the time of Darwin we understand much better why living creatures are adapted to their environment. It is not that their environment was made to be suitable to them but that they grew to be suitable to it, and that is the basis of adaptation. There is no evidence of design about it. When you come to look into this argument from design, it is a most astonishing thing that people can believe that this world, with all the things that are in it, with all its defects, should be the best that omnipotence and omniscience have been able to produce in millions of years. I really cannot believe it. Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan or the Fascists? Moreover, if you accept the ordinary laws of science, you have to suppose that human life and life in general on this planet will die out in due course: it is a stage in the decay of the solar system; at a certain stage of decay you get the sort of conditions of temperature and so forth which are suitable to protoplasm, and there is life for a short time in the life of the whole solar system. You see in the moon the sort of thing to which the earth is tending -- something dead, cold, and lifeless. I am told that that sort of view is depressing, and people will sometimes tell you that if they believed that, they would not be able to go on living. Do not believe it; it is all nonsense. Nobody really worries about much about what is going to happen millions of years hence. Even if they think they are worrying much about that, they are really deceiving themselves. They are worried about something much more mundane, or it may merely be a bad digestion; but nobody is really seriously rendered unhappy by the thought of something that is going to happen to this world millions and millions of years hence. Therefore, although it is of course a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out -- at least I suppose we may say so, although sometimes when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation -- it is not such as to render life miserable. It merely makes you turn your attention to other things.