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This photo was recently posted in an online science news website with a note by the editor:
We can't stop staring at the amazing natural geometry of the aloe polyphylla plant. So cool.
I smiled, and was like,,, and we have the intellect to say there is no creator.
That is way cool. Nature is...very cool indeed...when it isn't utterly horrible. That is a superb example of how humans can fool themselves into thinking there is a 'designer'. How could such an amazing pattern emerge at random. In the same way bees make hexagonal cells and whelk shells have a perfect spiral and Saturn has a set of amazing rings. It is a basic repeated pattern just getting larger and 'designed' by natural unplanned physical processes, whether just gravity or through the more complex evolved genetic coding.
It is a handy way of persuading people that there must be an invisible outsize human doing it, just as that was the only way lightning and volcanoes could be explained. We know better now and there is no excuse for such arguments from ignorance anymore.
Are you willing to say these things just happen? Natural just happens? Can you really call it natural, if it's really just an accident?
I don't understand your incredulity. We observe that things happen. We observe causal chains. Why is it necessary to decry observed events as "just" or "merely" happening? Why the intense need to superimpose some puppet master on top of these observations? Why the conflation of unfolding events with mere "accidents"?
It is not an accident that combining two chemicals produces a certain reaction and byproducts or that a gravitational field has regularity or that there are cycles in nature (most fundamentally, day/night). It has random and nonrandom elements. It is the result of known effects and interactions that are predictable and explicable from repeated observation.
Chaos theory and the study of fractals in nature have led to a pretty decent understanding of the counterintuitive fact that sometimes under the right conditions (not even necessarily rare), higher levels of order arise out of lesser ones.
So yes, I "can" say that things happen in nature.
Your final question is the least coherent of all. Everything is part of nature because everything is part of reality. SUPERnatural is an invented concept for which there is not only no evidence, but it is inherently irrelevant to any discussion you care to have. If a thing is supernatural it's outside of nature. If its outside of nature then it isn't amenable to observation, interacting with, drawing conclusions from, having opinions about, or even discussion. As soon as you claim to know something about a thing it's no longer supernatural, it's part of the natural world. As soon as a supposedly supernatural thing interacts with nature, it's become part of the natural world and is no longer supernatural, and very likely never was supernatural.
It's time for people to quit confusing their musings about things they imagine, with some special category of "supernatural". As you are doing here, to the extent that you think something is unnatural if it's mundane, and natural only if it's designed and controlled by invisible beings.
Indeed. "God" was never a valid explanation to replace Unexplained. It is far less valid an explanation when we actually have an explanation.
I anticipate a dismayed response along the lines of it too mundane and dull to make it just physics doing stuff rather than fairies waving magic wands. In fact the wonders of nature are so amazing that they make mere goddunnit look pretty dull as an explanation.
I don't understand your incredulity. We observe that things happen. We observe causal chains. Why is it necessary to decry observed events as "just" or "merely" happening? Why the intense need to superimpose some puppet master on top of these observations? Why the conflation of unfolding events with mere "accidents"?
It is not an accident that combining two chemicals produces a certain reaction and byproducts or that a gravitational field has regularity or that there are cycles in nature (most fundamentally, day/night). It has random and nonrandom elements. It is the result of known effects and interactions that are predictable and explicable from repeated observation.
Chaos theory and the study of fractals in nature have led to a pretty decent understanding of the counterintuitive fact that sometimes under the right conditions (not even necessarily rare), higher levels of order arise out of lesser ones.
So yes, I "can" say that things happen in nature.
Your final question is the least coherent of all. Everything is part of nature because everything is part of reality. SUPERnatural is an invented concept for which there is not only no evidence, but it is inherently irrelevant to any discussion you care to have. If a thing is supernatural it's outside of nature. If its outside of nature then it isn't amenable to observation, interacting with, drawing conclusions from, having opinions about, or even discussion. As soon as you claim to know something about a thing it's no longer supernatural, it's part of the natural world. As soon as a supposedly supernatural thing interacts with nature, it's become part of the natural world and is no longer supernatural, and very likely never was supernatural.
It's time for people to quit confusing their musings about things they imagine, with some special category of "supernatural". As you are doing here, to the extent that you think something is unnatural if it's mundane, and natural only if it's designed and controlled by invisible beings.
Causation makes much more sense that "casual chain" (code for accident).
Indeed. "God" was never a valid explanation to replace Unexplained. It is far less valid an explanation when we actually have an explanation.
I anticipate a dismayed response along the lines of it too mundane and dull to make it just physics doing stuff rather than fairies waving magic wands. In fact the wonders of nature are so amazing that they make mere goddunnit look pretty dull as an explanation.
Yes. It is a persuasive argument, but it is actually not in line with fact, logical reasoning or the way the evidence points. It is essentially a short -sighted view made deliberately so in order to make it look as though it supports Faith in an intelligent creator. It does not. Sorry.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jimmiej
What put physics in motion?
Ah. The first cause argument.
The Big Bang - according to evidence. So what caused the big bang and the matter it was made from? Nobody knows - not me, you, science or the Creationists. Unexplained does not mean 'Goddunnit' is the explanation.
It could be a god. Nobody can disprove that. Apart from showing that the universe doesn't actually support an intelligent creator. Which is really what the argument is about. That's the best answer I can give.
Last edited by TRANSPONDER; 01-26-2016 at 01:22 PM..
The Big Bang - according to evidence. So what caused the big bang and the matter it was made from? Nobody knows - not me, you, science or the Creationists. Unexplained does not mean 'Goddunnit' is the explanation.
It could be a god. Nobody can disprove that. Apart from showing that the universe doesn't actually support an intelligent creator. Which is really what the argument is about. That's the best answer i can give.
I think it was a giant turtle that caused the Big Bang. What created the giant turtle? An even bigger turtle, of course! And so forth. It's turtles all the way back.
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