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

To: Greg or e who wrote (3146)	11/5/2000 12:31:40 AM
From: epicure	Respond to of 28931

1) It is an indisputable and yet remarkable fact that many natural objects appear to have been designed for a purpose: the eye for seeing, the hand for grasping, etc. (2) The only reasonable explanation for this appearance of purpose is that natural things are ultimately the product of an immensely powerful supernatural intelligence, namely God. (IBE) If an hypothesis H is the only reasonable explanation of a remarkable fact F, then it is reasonable to believe that H is true. (3) Therefore, it is reasonable to believe is that God exists. .......................... Alas, when dealing with self ordering systems- as we observe in nature hypothesis H is not the only explanation. If everything complex requires a design- then who designed God? Does he need to have a designer? And if things can just always "be"- if you want to say God was just always "there" then why not cut God out, and say the universe was just always there? Why not indeed? It's merely one of numerous explanations. If the universe was always there, and there are infinite chances for things to fall into whatever design they happen to fall into, then any particular design is no longer so astounding. OF course you could always imagine a God who died, or merely went away- a God who pushed the whole thing to give it a start and then lost interest. That would certainly explain all the cruelty and horrible stuff in the world. THIS world certainly isn't the best any on the ball God could have come up with. On the other hand, perhaps all these rather bizarre human conceptions of God aren't the thing at all. Perhaps God, is just the various laws of the universe. The organizing principle(s)- without any intelligence as we understand that as humans, not a personal kind of intelligence, not a caring kind of intelligence. Just laws that lend themselves to certain types of atomic organization. That seems more probable than anything else. If the monolith in 2001 bore no tool marks and was made of crystals that could organize into smooth planes- there would be no reason those crystals couldn't organize into a monolith. There is only a problem because the film makers made clear that it wasn't "natural". Arguing the existence of God from a film made by men is certainly an interesting new wrinkle in bootstrapping philosophy.

To: Greg or e who wrote (3146)	11/5/2000 1:27:16 AM
From: average joe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 28931

There are no other life forms like us in the universe. If there were they would have contacted us by now. One more silly spineless notion that won't allow man to be the biped he was meant to be. The best science fiction movie is Forbidden Planet. sfstation.members.easyspace.com

To: Greg or e who wrote (3146)	11/5/2000 3:43:56 AM
From: Krowbar	Respond to of 28931

Greg, we have no way of knowing whether countless other Universes may have existed, and may still exist, where conditions did not favor life evolving that had the ability to analyze it's own existence. The person that wins the lottery feels that he wouldn't have won, if everything wasn't just right when he bought the quick pick ticket. He was just asked by his wife to pick up some milk for breakfast. He paused to hear the end of a news story. The phone rang, so he was delayed just the right amount of time, and so on. He fumbled for just the right amount of time to get that dollar out of his wallet. The clerk at the 7 Eleven had to momentarily dodge a bullet before punching the key that brought up the winning ticket. So? The newspaper doesn't interview the next door neighbor who has the losing ticket, even though his ticket combination was just as improbable to get. We are asking how we got here because we won the lottery. The failed Universes had no intelligent being to contemplate the failure. I have heard Steven Weinberg speak on his non-belief in God at a Freethought convention, and I can assure you that his remarks are being taken out of context and distorted. It's too late to give a lengthy rebuttal for now. Del

To: Greg or e who wrote (3146)	11/5/2000 2:37:27 PM
From: cosmicforce	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 28931

The film "2001: A Space Odyssey" contains a subtle message about probably the most important "I don't know" that issues forth from the lips of man. Man asks, "Is there a God?" There were many questions. What is the nature of Intelligence? How would an advanced civilization appear against our notion of God? Why, after 4.5 billion years, did something crop up on the Eastern African plains and start to think profound thoughts? Asking about God, to me, seems a little primitive considering all the baggage that notion is carrying. I doubt we have a clue what a higher intelligence would look or act like. Funny, we aren't supposed to feel sorry for the poor apes that didn't figure out tool making. Where did they go? They were bred out of existence by the more successful thinkers. But mammals had been around for more than 60 million years. What was it about these particular animals that allowed intelligence to evolve? The ecosystems we see today in California are largely unchanged from the Age of Mammals. I posed this question of intelligence to my friend and he talked about the intelligence of the blue jays darting about near us. But, I counter, those blue jays remained fundamentally unevolved for the last 10-20 million years. Why didn't their obvious intelligence develop exponentially like ours. It's not like a smarter blue jay would be less competitive, unless the brain size and other hardware limitations prevented it. So we still have 99.9% of the evolution of the Earth where nothing with a brain of any particular conceptual ability was ever developed. Only in the last 0.1% of the history of the Earth did the conditions arise to allow it. One hell of a fluke, I must say.

To: Greg or e who wrote (3146)	11/5/2000 3:57:31 PM
From: E	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 28931

Hi, Greg. Well, I think what I'd reply has already been said by X, Del and Solon, but I'll say something anyway. The argument from design, or "watchmaker" theory, is understandably appealing. I compare it to getting the feeling you've cleaned the house by stuffing all the dirty laundry and papers and other junk that's disturbing the orderliness of your environment into a closet. "Oh, good, everything's all neat now!" But putting aside the deficiencies of an answer to a question that merely enlarges the question and projects it into The Big Closet in the Heavens where we can't look very closely at it any more, so relaxingly reverential are we, I do want to point out that the Watchmaker is not, in that metaphor, necessarily the Christian God. He (or She) may be Allah, or one of the Gods of the Romans or Egyptians or Aztecs or a powerful prankster or sadist or psychopath or a power-mad, jealous, violent, cruel and inconsistent egomaniac. All that designer-metaphor does is say, "How could there be such a marvelous thing as a hand (or claw, I assume) without a designer?" Speaking of the etiology of claws, Richard Dawkins, the author of The Selfish Gene, does that here, giving the standard Darwinian explanation: Genes that are successful are the ones that have effects upon bodies. They make bodies have sharp claws for catching prey, for example. ...A gene changes, and as a consequence there's a cascade of effects running through embryology. At the end of that cascade of effects, the claws become sharper, and because the claws become sharper, that individual catches more prey. Therefore the genes that made the claws sharper end up in the bodies of more offspring...

To: Greg or e who wrote (3146)	11/5/2000 4:06:14 PM
From: E	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 28931

Here's another quote from an interview with Richard Dawkins. He is not sympathetic to religion, obviously. (I've never read his most influential book, The Selfish Gene, actually.) I'm considered by some to be a zealot. This comes partly from a passionate revulsion against fatuous religious prejudices, which I think lead to evil. As far as being a scientist is concerned, my zealotry comes from a deep concern for the truth. I'm extremely hostile towards any sort of obscurantism, pretension. If I think somebody's a fake, if somebody isn't genuinely concerned about what actually is true but is instead doing something for some other motive, if somebody is trying to appear like an intellectual, or trying to appear more profound than he is, or more mysterious than he is, I'm very hostile to that. There's a certain amount of that in religion. The universe is a difficult enough place to understand already without introducing additional mystical mysteriousness that's not actually there. Another point is esthetic: the universe is genuinely mysterious, grand, beautiful, awe inspiring. The kinds of views of the universe which religious people have traditionally embraced have been puny, pathetic, and measly in comparison to the way the universe actually is. The universe presented by organized religions is a poky little medieval universe, and extremely limited.

To: Greg or e who wrote (3146)	11/5/2000 10:50:06 PM
From: Krowbar	Respond to of 28931

Greg, I'm sure that there were times in the past that perfect crystals were found that, unlike the surrounding rock that was irregularly shaped, had perfectly square corners, 120 degree corners, and so on. The consensus probably would have been that they were shaped by a higher intelligence, because nobody knew how to create such a perfect object. In fact we now know that crystals assemble themselves under the proper conditions of heat and pressure. Those conditions occur randomly. It was only by using the scientific method that we gained an understanding of how crystals form. Invoking a higher intelligence to explain the crystals may have satisfied some, but others kept on searching for the real explanation. I prefer to keep looking for the real answers to life's riddles. Proteins and amino acids can assemble themselves under the right conditions also. They can also reproduce themselves. While that is a long shot from a complete organism, scientists are rapidly filling in the unknown blanks on how life arose. All of the evidence I've seen points to life also arising randomly. There is no need to invoke a designer. Del