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To: Jill who wrote (19411)	11/25/2000 4:56:59 PM
From: bela_ghoulashi	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 65232

A typical reductionist ploy, resorting to poetry in the end...

To: Jill who wrote (19411)	11/25/2000 5:32:10 PM
From: bela_ghoulashi	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 65232

"the great monotheistic faiths are founded on miracle stories." In bland's view, miracle stories are symbolic, parables, metaphorical, poetry. They are products of the human imagination. Not figments, mind you, but products, creations in the positive sense. They are illustrative of what Jung would call "psychic events", core experiences of the individual human heart that must be expressed, and can only be expressed, figuratively. Personally bland is not a believer in exceptional miracles, only common everyday ones. Bland does feel, however, that if everything we see and experience around us as living beings in our lifetime is purely and simply and solely the result of blind, random, stupid chance...then that indeed would qualify as a miracle.

To: Jill who wrote (19411)	11/25/2000 5:38:12 PM
From: bela_ghoulashi	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 65232

'As Richard Feynman has said, when you look at the universe and understand its laws, "the theory that it is all arranged as a stage for God to watch man's struggle for good and evil seems inadequate."' That's still no argument against intelligence or design. That's an argument about purpose. And of course it's inadequate in that sense.

To: Jill who wrote (19411)	11/25/2000 5:42:52 PM
From: bela_ghoulashi	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 65232

"We don't know the final laws yet, but as far as we have been able to see, they are utterly impersonal and quite without any special role for life. There is no life force." We haven't seen everything, but we've seen enough to see what we want to see. "There is no life force." There is no Stephen Weinberg, either, then. Who actually wrote this article?

To: Jill who wrote (19411)	11/25/2000 5:49:26 PM
From: bela_ghoulashi	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 65232

"Above all, today we understand that even human beings are the result of natural selection acting over millions of years of breeding and eating." In bland's humble opinion, natural selection is every bit as much an orthodox dogma as the Trinity, or a heliocentric universe. Its time will fade, and it will be superceded by a more encompassing and marginally more accurate hypothesis, which in turn...