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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (234981)	5/31/2005 8:05:50 AM
From: zonder	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1573900

even if it was a time traveling descendant, would that not be considered supernatural by our understanding of science? No. It would just be the use of a scientific method that we have not yet mastered. Anyway, that is not the point. The point is that great coincidences that keep happening whenever you are in distress is no proof of the existence of God. I do know that there is a certain pain denying the existence of God. I have never felt this pain you are talking about. It is just that (1) there is no proof, and (2) I have trouble fooling myself into believing a deity called 'God' exists when there is no proof. After all, if one can accept that our solar system is one of billions in our galaxy and the galaxy is one of billions in the universe.......a concept nearly impossible to grasp, why can't we accept there may be a power much greater than us with whom we have a special connection? We can accept that there are loads of galaxies, because their presence is observed with powerful telescopes (= proof). It is not a concept "nearly impossible to grasp", it is just that our daily life provides reference for the gigantic scales necessary to picture a galaxy, let alone thousands or millions of them. On the other hand, "God" is an abstract theory, put together in ancient times when people didn't understand most of what was going on around them and had to put a human motive and a conscious will behind rain, snow, earthquakes, solar eclipses, and yes, their short and apparently rather meaningless lives. The difference between saying "there are galaxies" and "there is a God" is that you can actually see and otherwise verify the existence of the galaxies in space, whereas you can do no such thing with the concept of "God". You have to "believe" for no apparent reason than the assurance that pretty much everyone else "believes" as well. The last book of the famous & late Cornell University astronomist Carl Sagan is called "A Demon-Haunted World". There, he tells the hypothetical tale of the fire-breathing dragon in his garage. It goes something like this: You would of course like to check it out, see it for yourself. So you go down to the garage with him, look around, see no dragon. "So, where's the dragon?" you ask. He says "Oh, he's here. I forgot to mention that it's an invisible dragon". You suggest spreading flour on the floor to catch the dragon's footprints. He says "Good idea, but the dragon floats in the air". Then you'll use infrared detector to detect the invisible fire. "Good idea, but the invisible fire is also heatless". You'll spray-paint the dragon and make it visible. "Good idea, but it's an incorporeal dragon so the paint won't stick". And so on. To every test you propose, he has a special explanation of why it won't work. So the conclusion is: What exactly is the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there is no way to disprove his contention that there is a dragon in his garage, what does it mean to say that his dragon "exists"? The only thing his insistence has convinced you so far is that there is something funny going on in his head. You'd wonder, if no physical tests apply, what convinced him at all. Now suppose it's not just him. A majority of your neighbours and even people living in other cities you get to meet are claiming they have similar dragons in their garages who cannot be seen or otherwise verified. You would love to see what makes them think so, in fact you realize it is a lonely position to say "It is entirely possible that all of you are kidding yourselves, there are no dragons in your garages". But you can't bring yourself to believe they really have dragons in their garages, not until you see at least one little proof. That pretty much sums up my thoughts on the "existence of God" issue.

To: tejek who wrote (234981)	5/31/2005 1:01:22 PM
From: TigerPaw	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1573900

why can't we accept there may be a power much greater than us with whom we have a special connection? It may seem at first that these questions are unanswerable, but usually it is just a matter of asking the right questions. For example: Could anything overcome the combination of randomness inherent in a universe that does not already have it's future set, and the chaos that is a mathmatical outcome of events in time? The answer may not by able to tell you if there is anything "out there", but it can show the extent of influence that something out there can have. TP