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Do you people envision this entity designing like, say, an architect, placing this here and that there and moving this atom over here so it won't collide with that one.....allowing for even a fraction of an inch or degree when a leaf falls on a Sept day that would cover up a seed that might grow into a tree or not...and on and on and on for all the innumerable possibilties or............
it just said "I'll just zap it and everything will just fall into place"?
I'm not trying to be facetious. I just can't wrap my mind around this concept.
I used to belive that the way God created everything was beyond human comprehension.
The introduction of a primary first cause agent provides a REASONABLE and LOGICAL explanation as to why anything exists rather than nothing. Science points to cause. Logic stipulates that from nothing comes nothing.
Well.... no... it doesn't, in fact. As Hueffenhart so eloquently put it (and you ought to read in particular his 3rd point in the other post he linked..), such complexity is absurd in effect. And far less likely than a set of simple natural interactions.
A specific "primary first cause" would far more likely be the existence of those few simple interactive reactions and "natural" laws that were just a consequence of their existence. Either things interacted, and thus this all came to be, or they wouldn't or couldn't, and none of this would have ever gotten off the ground. So ergo and QED: things did naturally interact.
And to put the icing on our cake, we have identified many of those processes, first by hypothesis, but then by good the old fashioned SM observation process. And durned if we didn't find EXACTLY what we'd predicted! That sorta puts it all to bed, don't it, tigetmax?
To speculate that it was all on a detailed, one-on-one sub-atomic-particle-at-a-time sort of hyper-micro-managed über fine (but also simultaneously macro-)-scaled -process is, well, too staggeringly complex to have possibly happened. Why bother with such a process after all? Just to give God something to occupy His time? And yet you guys all tell us He's absolutely omnipotent and none of this stuff would bother Him to do in a weekend, in fact, in a microsecond.
Why? Sounds like a faulty Argument from Convenience to me!
Just because we're here doesn't mean we were created. Rather it means things likely stewed along by various interactive means (btw, just as we can witness today in the observable universe...), and the unlikely result is our universe, our solar sysem, and indeed ... us! Unlikely yes, but impossible? Nope. Or... God-formed? Not only improbable, but causatively impossible, and thus highly unlikely.
It all could have just as easily gone some other way, i.e. to an essential nothingness. It may well have in previous versions. The necessity for a materialistic or non-materialistic [as in: it takes on whatever form it needs on a case-by-case basis, which is just too convenient for words...] entity is far more complex, and far less likely, by several dozen orders of magnitude, than the chance existence caused by a combination simple grav-pull and/or biochemical molecular interactions coupled with the absorption of heat or other passing forms of radiative energy. Again, we can duplicate and expand on this in our labs whenever we chose to.
We're just the result of a cosmic Lego™ set that doesn't require a kid, but instead falls into place by those previously mentioned interactive elements. The ones we've established ARE out there and even working today just as they did then! Simple, huh?
Maybe the OP should build a house. He/She might then understand creation. Or if you can't afford that, build a house of cards. Or to understand the absurdity of the world NOT having a creator, take 52 playing cards, throw them up in the air until they all come down and form a nice neat house. Of course that will not happen. Every house needs a builder. Consider a living one cell organism. Man, with all his technology cannot create one living cell that can reproduce, repair itself etc, yet I am supposed to believe that the wide array of life in this world all got here by chance. Take the human body itself. Science is still unlocking its mysteries, yet it all is just a happy accident?????????????????????
Maybe the OP should build a house. He/She might then understand creation. Or if you can't afford that, build a house of cards. Or to understand the absurdity of the world NOT having a creator, take 52 playing cards, throw them up in the air until they all come down and form a nice neat house. Of course that will not happen. Every house needs a builder. Consider a living one cell organism. Man, with all his technology cannot create one living cell that can reproduce, repair itself etc, yet I am supposed to believe that the wide array of life in this world all got here by chance. Take the human body itself. Science is still unlocking its mysteries, yet it all is just a happy accident?????????????????????
Ahhh yes; the "Tornado crashing through the junkyard cannot produce a 747!" argument, but just in another equally ludicrous version.
This is not how it works, but you don't know (or choose to not know... which is worse...) that, so you bleet out this standard (but completely erroneous) well-rehearsed talking point, thinking how smart it makes your argument, and how it can't be debunked.
Well, bleet on. Just know this: you obviously have NO IDEA how it works, do you? And, what's worse... you've never bothered to "Know Thine Enemy!", to read why this is a bunko argument. Apparently you don't want to know that part of it either. And why is that? Too humiliating to know the truth after all these years of dedicated denialism? Well OK then: proceed on, using proven rubbish to counter the facts.
BTW, Evolution has now been formally proven beyond any doubt. And we're hot on the tracks of proving the origins of biogenesis out of simple precursors. You wanna tell us, absolutely, that science will NEVER get that one to work in the lab? Go ahead, just mark your own words, time and date-stamped. And the amount of the big-$$$ bet you'll be making with me. let's start at, oh... $500, n'kay?
Evolution's completely evident in the fossil record, in DNA lineage tracking, in chronologically coherent geological sampling, in simple comparative animal morphology, in artifact dating chronologies and artifact layering, in behavioral observations, and in mRNA analyses. Not to mention it's logical, predictable and reliable.
Now then; by comparo, we have the completely improbable, the physically impossible, and to add insult to a badly done kiddies story, the outrageous claims that it was all done in just 6 days. All of which is obviously incorrect: the universe is HARDLY done.
But please; deny it! It makes for a target-rich environment.
Maybe the Bible story is too ingrained with some people and they envision evolution as only taking something like 6 days and animals as having popped up just as we now know them
I've done a couple of threads on this and don't propose to rehash it here.
The fact is that, once we clear the theological takes, doubtful analogies, physics and logic (otherwise dismissed as mere human speculation) cited as gospel truth because, in this case is looks like it supports, a First cause; on this matter, none of us really know. In a way, it's so open to question that we perhaps can agree to differ.
What then? The dividing line between matter and spirit and a plan or a natural procedure can become so blurred in the mind that 'god' and 'nature' become rather similar.
When I think of cosmos - sized mind behind a pretty big universe, I can see how persuasive the idea is and also can't deny the possibility that our consciousness is all part of that cosmos - sized mind. Oh yes, Mystic, I have indeed listened to you.
In the end I remain agnostic about it. I don't start investing belief in it. And i don't start calling it 'He'.
The idea that this cosmos - sized mind, concerned with colliding a few galaxies or having a sun go nova is concerned about whether I wear a bit of rubber or eat something or other or have to wear a funny hat or It will be annoyed I find absolutely ridiculous.
Thus, while I can be agnostic about this sorta - god, the very idea and contemplation of it makes all the man - made religions and their gods made in their own image (sometimes with a bit of animal added on) utterly ludicrous.
Last edited by TRANSPONDER; 11-09-2011 at 05:58 AM..
Haven't seen the rest of the conversation yet, but for me, I don't see it this way at all. I see it more as God setting everything into motion at the very beginning, putting the materials and natural laws into place, knowing how it will all turn out, and then letting the natural processes do the work. I do believe that God steps in now and then, but He certainly doesn't have to micro-manage things.
The only thing necessary is existence . . . not design. By existing . . . all the features of reality exist as components of God's life force. All the Omni's are human hubris mandating requirements for God to qualify to BE God . . . they are not actual requirements that MUST be true. God is not subject to our human requirements.
Dressing up a belief system in the trappings of seeminhly sophisticated language and jargon, as in ("All the Omni's are human hubris mandating requirements for God to qualify to BE God") means nothing without evidence, experimental testing, and corroboration. Because science has such a powerful mystique in our society, those who wish to gain respectability but do not have any evidence try to do an end run around the missing evidence by looking and sounding "scientific." Here is a classic example from a New Age Column in the Santa Monica News: "This planet has been slumbering for eons and with the inception of higher energy frequencies is about to awaken in terms of consciousness and spirituality. Masters of limitation and masters of divination use the same creative force to manifest their realities, however, one moves in a downward spiral and the latter moves in an upward spiral, each increasing the resonant vibration inherent in them." How's that again? I have no idea what this means, but it has the language components of a physics experiment: "higher energy frequencies," "downward and upward spirals," and "resonant vibration." Yet these phrases mean nothing because they have no precise and operational definitions. How do you measure a planet's higher energy frequencies or the resonant vibration of masters of divination? For that matter, what is a master of divination?
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