Chukka

This is a forum! This is HoL! I reserve the right to blatantly derail things and detract from all purposeful Conversations!!

Oh, and Grimm, I must commend you. You've argued your standpoint far better than I would've expected.

I suppose my big issue with God is the fact that I know people who're dead, and really didn't deserve to die. I refuse to believe that an all-knowing all-powerful diety would willingly kill or allow to die people who were good people. Thus, I refuse God as a whole. I believe there's something out there, but I don't think that God is half what people him make him out to be.

 

I'm sorry to hear you have than conundrum, man. I derive what peace I have with death from the Buddhist part of my philosophy, but a better Christian than I might say this: All people must die, and so you cannot truly be upset that these good people have died, but rather by the way they've died, because I'll assume you're not some child incapable of grasping death as a concept. That said, God's plan is a strange one, one we cannot comprehend. Perhaps their deaths were meant to teach greater lessons to those alive that the virtues that made them such good people are to be treasured, just as life should be, for the first are rare, and the second fleeting.

In any event, you assume death is a horrible thing, but perhaps, perhaps, if they are as good as you remember them as, they are having a far more peaceful afterlife than was afforded them in the here-and-now. I wish I had more to say.

Now, Grimm, this will take awhile, lol.

A few of your facts are wrong, no doubt due to the time you've spent away from the subject. You're forgetting a key part of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit. The 'divine mystery' as the Church calls it, is that God, the Father, Jesus Christ, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, or more commonly in certain circles, the Holy Ghost, are all the same entity, and yet separate. They are all part of the Triune God, or Trinity, and yet each represents a separate facet. While God has not interacted with humans anymore, and neither has Jesus, the Holy Spirit has been accounted for numerous times since the times of the Bible, as an inspiring force or a force that grants direction or strength in times of duress. Reading the Bible, these passages are omitted, because the Bible is considered sacrosanct. If I think I see God tomorrow, and write a whole dissertation on it, it's not getting put into the Bible. The Bible, as a book, is complete, nothing else will be added, and so it can't really be used as a source to account for the times after it references.

That said, you are completely correct, there is no overseer that ensures the information in the Bible is completely accurate, only the church in their 'benevolence'. Your comments about the various councils, however, are slightly off. These stemmed out of massive religious debates, and in very few instances was the 'official' decision cleanly and neatly sorted out. Debates about the precise nature of the interactions between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit played a major role in the Great Schism which created the Greek Orthodox Church, so you can't fairly imply that these decisions were come to lightly.

There is a seemingly great contradiction between the actions of God and the statement, 'God is infallable.' I'm not really trying to defend Christian dogma, there are a great many points where all I can do is shrug. That said, God's actions can largely be seen as reactionary to human actions. God gave us free will, our free will lead us to the knowledge of good and evil. Stemming from this knowledge, evil sprung, took root, and flourished. God attempted to save the one good man on Earth and his family, but once Noah and his family survived the flood the evil in them sprung back too. (Noah's daughters got him drunk and 'laid' with him so they could get pregnant to repopulate the Earth.) That said, God wasn't so much wrong, as he failed to do what He sought to accomplish.

This said, the concept of an omnipotent God has always had one major stipulation, at least in my mind. God cannot save the unwilling. If you have an evil heart and are unwilling to repent, God can't make you good. And so, God's attempts to stamp out evil were unsuccessful because men and women were unwilling to free it from their hearts.

I don't propose to understand why God exists now in such compelling silence, but I will refer to the scripture to say that this is not all that uncommon for Him. God has ADD, or at least He seems to. When the 12 tribes of Israel go to Egypt in Genesis under Joseph, God is with them. Then life is good, and God disappears. Fast-forward to Moses, and now the Israelis are slaves. God isn't a good babysitter when there isn't a crisis, either that or He prefers to leave us to our own devices for whatever divine reason. The Israelis need help, God shows up again.

In Judges this happens over and over, Israel starts off pious, fights a war, wins, takes land, and everyone's happy. God takes a break. Twenty to a hundred years later, Israel gets enslaved, or the Philistines start raiding, or everyone just up and forgets and starts worshipping Baal. God comes back, annoints a general, smites a few heathens, reiterates a few ground rules, and gets the ship in working order again, then goes back to whatever it is He does when He's not Jew-sitting. This happens OVER and OVER again. God takes His time, and so you can't assume that the fact that He hasn't interacted with us recently means that He's given up on the practice.

Your indictment of the Catholic Church as corrupt is dead on. They were about as bad as Republicans are now (how suprising they both abuse/d religion). That said, one small point is that the Children's Crusade was not sanctioned by the Catholic Church, it was actually a rather unscrupulous priest who engineered the whole things, and it was less gruesome than absolutely tragic. The participants of the Children's Crusade saw no battle; their stated intention was actually that they would just show up and the Muslims would throw down their arms at the sight of these children's faith, but that didn't happen either. Instead the priest lead a few thousand children on a march across Europe, most of them died, then the surviving ones followed the priest to a seaport where he sold them all into slavery.

Your use of this as evidence is faulty, since it wasn't Papal sanctioned, but your resulting premise is wholly correct. Indeed, when analyzing the actions of men, EVERY interpretation and rule should be questioned, to ensure that those judgments correspond with the logic supporting them. The entire premise of the crusades was a case of skewed logic, and such mistakes can never be allowed again.

Humans have a profound tendency for trying to explain that which we don't fully understand, and a very easy way to do this is to say that there is a god of some such thing, or a spirit which controls some force. This has been a practice for longer than recorded history, the supernaturalization of our world to answer questions we are incapable of answering ourselves. That said, I think you go too far in your statements of the biological AI.

I hate to refer to what I consider old arguments, but I'll ask you to explain one thing for me. Why do the reactions seek to replicate themselves? If we are to assume that all human life is merely an extrodinarily complex chemical reaction, then I suppose we could make a reasonable jump to say that the simpler the life, the simpler the reaction. So let's look at single-celled organisms, an ameoba for instance.

A chemical reaction follows the basic formula A + B --> C + D. Let's assume A is the ameoba and all the parts it needs to live, B is food, C is a nourished ameoba, and D is waste products. Our little ameoba swims along a petri dish with its cillia, basing its movements off stimuli it receives, some stimuli good, like food, some bad, some form of danger. So the ameoba swims around and eats a few things, gets all fat and happy, this follows your plan. Soon, however, when our ameoba gets enough food, enough stored energy it reproduces. Stop.

So what is our reaction again? To reproduce, or to live? Because in a simple chemical reaction like Na + Cl => NaCl, the chemicals simple respond to each others presence, the reaction has no motive force driving it towards self-perpetuation. I can see if the ameoba would simply swim around and absorbed that which reacted with it as food would, but now the ameoba is doing this for a purpose above it's original reaction, to build fuel for a second reaction. Purely chemical equations cannot think, cannot plan, and cannot act upon any other impetus than that which is their nature. If you need water, butane isn't going to automatically ignite so that water will be produced; indeed butane has no cognition of water, it only responds to those conditions which it is physically capable of responding to.

Perhaps this is where your 'AI' comes into play, but then what is the AI? Scientifically, there seems to be no purpose for intelligence at all. Why is life a desirable state? Physics doesn't give a fuck if you're alive, neither does chemistry. Risking the accusation that I to am imploring a supernatural explanation, I will offer my Buddhist perspective on this issue, involving the concept of Atman.

I have just looked at a clock, and realized I must be up tomorrow. I'll post this then, as I have class in just over 6 hours and 15 minutes from now, and I really don't think I can give the topic of Atman the elaboration it deserves.

 

DarkFool, ever heard of "God is the boy with the antfarm"?

Besides, the thought of and supernatural being is unlikley.

And again I would like to recommend Richard Dawkins book "The God delusion".

 

I never read 'The God Delusion,' I will, and likely I'll find a few good points in it. However, a debate cannot be settled by a book; no single source has all the answers.

The amalgamation of Buddhist and Christian ideas that I believe in states essentially this. There are three essential things that make up a human: the body, the physical form which is born and dies; the soul, the immortal spirit that belongs to God and returns to God, although this is what I think you're debating, Grimm; finally, Atman, which cannot be really be defined in specific terms, although I will try. Atman is the life force, part of Brahma, which is the creative energy of the world. The premise is that Brahma is the substance that God resides in, and Atman is a fragmentation thereof.

Atman, to Buddhists and Hindus, is described as the true self. It was never created, nor will it ever be destroyed, but it exists through all time. Socrates, in his arguments that the soul is eternal and privy to vast amount of knowledge and wisdom, spoke of this underlying spirit, which, when discovered in oneself, serves as a font of wisdom and peace.

This force, I believe, is what motivates us towards living, sort of a life energy that each being contains a fraction of. It is the only explanation I can honestly believe as to why life seeks to propogate itself, as self-perpetuation is not a phenomenon observable in nature, except in the living.

 

EDIT: Sorry Blinky. I hadn't yet read your most recent post until after I typed all of this, so most of it isn't really in reply to your comments on Atma, which are still interesting nonetheless.

Blinky: I'll grant you that you certainly have the facts about early church history down, whereas I didn't. As I mentioned, my memory of details was hazy, but my feelings that were derived from those details (which were as correct as you indicated at the time I recieved them over the course of my life) still hold fast. I like to think of myself as an open-minded individual, so maybe further down the line I'll grow to become more tolerant of the premise of God and religion. But for now, I'm sticking to my guns.

As far as your point on biology...that's a bit off. You took what you considered a simple biological creature and held it to the standards of very basic, general chemistry, which was wrong. In fact the majority of reactions that drive the organims through life are organic. The reason organic chemistry, and thus molecular biology, is the mechanism of life is due to the recycling of molecules from one reaction to the next that makes all of these life-stabilizing reactions repeatable. Take the Krebs Cycle, extremely important for cellular metabolism and key metabolic pathways studied in the field of Molecular Biology, as an example:

(rough description)
Eukaryotic cells use NAD+ and NADH as catalysts to "chop up" sugars and proteins for use as an energy source. The result is CO2 and H2O. This isn't done in one step though. Metabolic pathways require several steps, and using your gen chem example of A+B->C+D would imply that we would need a source of as much A & B as steps needed to complete the cycle. This is not the case. The reason the Krebs Cycle can continue with each step is because electrons from the enzymes NAD+ as well as the O in water are reused from the result of each step, which just happens to be more CO2 and H2O which can be used in subsequent steps that require more energy. Thus the reaction can repeat for as much sugar/protein available (acquired by feeding) for cell to supply itself with enough energy to function normally.

This is just one of thousands of similar chemical reactions that occur in biological organsims from ameobas to humans. Now, one of the key fundamentals of biology is that organisms, by instinct, are driven to procreate. That is their main objective throughout their lives. This is evident in the Theory of Evolution. The organism better suited to adapt to its environment is the one that lives to pass its genes to future generations. This is sometimes difficult for people to understand because we don't thrive very much on instict, but rather reason. So the ameoba in your example, and this isn't really a good example to use as I'll mention in a bit, feeds, lives, and finally procreates (or divides). Under the rules of science, why should it be any confusing observation that it continues to live? It's still living in a world that must observe scientific rules, thus it still has chemical reactions occuring in its body that keep it alive. It still has an intact genome, therefore it still has genes to contribute to more members of the generation that follows it. But here's why I said this was a bad example. Technically, that ameoba ceases to exist, so maybe you answered your own question. The only things that remain from the parent ameoba are the two daughter cells it left behind when it divided. But if it makes anyone feel better, go back and substitute every mention of "ameoba" with "cat."

So you see, even if we really do have any purpose in life, just because that purpose has been served, doesn't mean we just stop living. The recyclable reactions in our bodies continue because of the applicable laws of physics, chemistry, and biology. To drive the point home a little more, chemistry is only even possible because of the random chaos that our world is built upon. If A+B->C+D, simply mixing two beakers, one of A and one of B, together won't necessarily give you a container of C & D. The molecules of A and B only react with each other when they phisically come in contact with each other, and in an "untouched" mechanism, this occurs purely at random as the molecules float unobjectively through space. Only outside interference (the Grace of God perhaps?) can stop this from happening. Now let's extrapolate this concept to a human being kept alive because of these reactions. Franky is born, he goes through life. He graduates from high school and college, gets married has a kid and lives well into his 70s till he dies of cancer (a chemical reaction). He accomplished all his goals in life, both instinctual (procreating) and personal (graduation/marriage/etc) yet he continued to live because science still had a role to play in the reactions that physically kept his body alive. It's not as if his body said "well you've succeeded in passing on you genes to your daughter, now it's time to shut down and call it a life, eh?" But now we have Tommy who is born, graduates high school, but then half way through college suffers a heart attack because of a blood clot in his leg (chemical reaction) and dies. He didn't meet all of his instinctual goals or personal goals. Yet his life is still over because scientific law.

The AI I was refering to is the enlightened difference between us, as humans, and the ameoba, or cat. You commented that intelligence serves no scientific purpose. I agree with that. But one thing you're missing is that science has no purpose to serve to begin with. Going back to my chemistry example, everything seemingly organized about science is result of random opportunities, some more extreme than others, such as The Big Bang theory or the observance of gravitational pull. You could say "How can this be random? I know that every time I jump up, I come down because of gravity. That's not random." Well it is actually. It just so happens that Earth is so huge and you're so small that it exerts a gravitation pull on you towards it. Due to the size difference, how could you miss it? But remove the rotation and revolution of the Earth and what happens? No gravity. We drift off wherever our momentum takes us, colliding with random things much like our A and B molecules in our reaction earlier. And why does the Earth rotate and revolve around the Sun. Sure there is a scientific explanation "why," but "how" it all came to be was random.

Now to relate this to the result of human intelligence...I don't know if this is more of an argument of abstraction, but put this to anyone not yet convinced. Does the cat know it is a cat? Does it care? Is it aware of its own mortality, and if so, is it afraid of its impending death? If so, does it seek out any form of comfort to ease this fear? If so, is this comfort in the form of prayer to God? This is where the complex biology of human's grants them a better understanding and self realization of themselves that other creatures lack. We know humans are physically and mentally different from other animals. We have different sized brains and brain activity. We have different genomes. We have different digestive systems and thus different forms of sustanence. So much is different, some of which is still unknown, that we are far more advanced, and thus, intelligent enough to question what we don't understand.

Now this could be refuted by the Christian who states that the law of science is a tool God uses to govern us and effect our lives. Fine. This is literally an argument that can concievably persist until the end of time. You're either for science, for God and religion, for some hybrid of both, or for neither at all. I just happened to choose the side of science because I firmly believe it based on my own life experiences and teachings.

 

The first part that's bolded was in response to you saying, "Congratulations! Advice, blah blah blah half your age." I'm paraphrasing, but c'mon. I'm not that old.
The second half was me figuring out what to drop after the ellipses, coming up with nothing, and then just writing out exactly what I thought at the time. I know how the people at this forum will act.
But seriously, if you're 10.5 and you have a girlfriend, good for you.

Huh...religious debate? I have no place here.

 

I will bow to your superior knowledge of biology, but I do believe my main point stands, based upon:

Ameoba or cat, my argument doesn't change: why doesn't the organism seek to reproduce? What scientific function does reproduction fulfill? What function does life itself fulfill? A cat is perhaps a better example, because it is far more evident that the cat desires reproduction. A simple chemical process, however, does not. Methane does not seek out fire to ignite. Chlorine is not magnetically attracted to chlorine, except by the forces of actual bonding once the two meet. Regardless of the specific nature of the chemical process you propose that life consists of, how do you explain life's drive towards self-perpetuation?

I'll agree that an individual's desires and dreams cannot keep them alive, but does that, in any way, imply that these desires don't form out of some sort of soul?

I never said intelligence serves no scientific purpose. I said life itself does not. There is no physical or chemical reason why a group of complex proteins and other carbon-based molecules should be possessed with the desire to do anything, least of all make more of themselves.

I actually was of the opinion that revolution had precious little to do with raw gravitational force. The Earth forms a depression in space-time, which we fall into constantly. The ground exerts a force to keep us out of it. That said, if the Earth did not rotate, it would not revolve around the sun, it would be sucked into it. The rotation of the Earth actually keeps us from getting crushed, it creates a centripetal force that would throw us off the Earth without gravity to hold us down.

Your idea that all of creation being as it is is the result of a seemingly random set of circumstances is plausible, but, as Einstein would say, "God does not play dice." The specific location of galaxies and stars may have to do with the minutest of factors at the time of the Big Bang, but no true scientist would argue that it's random. How it all came to be is simply 'unanswered.'

You have made very interesting points, but I'm afraid you have not answered my question of why the cat lives and breathes in the first place. If you wish to move onto it's self-awareness however, that I won't pretend to know the answer. I'm not a cat, I don't know if cats fear God. All I know is that chemistry doesn't, and so I don't know how you can explain the self with just chemistry.

 

First of all, to crush the Christian God YHWH: http://www.evilbible.com/Impossible.htm
That site (evilbible.com) has loads of good stuff, by the way. Feel free to read it through, and be amazed by the goodies it holds.

Second, science has succeeded in creating orcanic substances out of non-organic substances: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller-Urey_experiment

Life itself doesn't fulfill any scientific function. Life as we know it is simply an extremely complicated chemical reaction, which only came to be because of our extraordinary condition; the location of our planet, the size of our sun, the location of certain other planets in the solar-system and lots of other stuff. The first simple organisms did pretty much what molecules do; they randomly floated around, and in some cases fusioned (randomly, due to alteration by radiation). Then, some organizms learned to recreate themselves through cloning. Again, this was a reslut of alteration due to radiation. Do you know how evolution works? If not, I suggest that you look it up. Why does living organizms seek to reproduce themselves? It turned out to be a favourable mutation (favourable because the continued survival of the species/set of chemicals), and so the organizms who had learnt to reproduce survived whilst the others didn't. Our form of reproduction turned out to be even more favourable than cloning; two separate genepools means bigger variety and a larger chance of continued survival.

Free will, by the way, is bullshit. We don't have more free will than our brains and the chemicals they react to allow us. What is it that you define as the soul, by the way? Please explain it to me, if you can. Or is it one of those things that are "beyond human understanding" that religious people are so fond of using?

 

Scientist have found a planet wich have all the conditions that earth had. Wich means that in a million years, life may spring there

It's about 420 lightyears from here.

 

The origin of life is simpler, and yet disgustingly more complex, than you think. Some people seems to think that it all happened in one go; that life came to be in one simple reaction and then proceeded to excist. Of course this was not the case. It is all about probability, even the indeed increadibly fortunate position of our planet. What are the chances? So low that the human mind cannot comprehend the tinyness. But then again, how big are the chances of an unknown overseer, a "guide" of sorts? Even smaller. The idea of a creator states that the creator, in turn, must have come from somewhere. Where, then, and how? And why have we not been able to find a single trace of it? If you want to position God as our creator, then please show me (us) where he came from. You can't, can you? Can you even show me God? No? Then, scientificly, he does not excist.

About that girl scenario: If you meet her face-to-face, there are a multitude of other signals being sent between you than just her audible. Scent, warmth, movements, the look in her eyes; all these things make your react accordingly to how your body reacts to her signals. If she tells you the same thing over the phone, there are still more things going on than you hearing what she says. You hear the tone of her voice, you picture her saying it to you (perhaps in your subconscious), and so on. You see all this because you've been programmed and equiped with the right instruments to see it.

This inner self that you're talking about, is not in any way an supernatural being (a "soul"). It is your unique set of chemicals, genes (DNA, you know the rest) combined with your experiances. If I cloned you and faced that clone with an exact copy of your life so far, he would turn exactly like you. The same thing goes for this free will. If an individual is faced with the exact same situation (with the exact same circumstances) that individual will make the same choice over and over again. The free will can be altered with chemicals and psychologic treatment.

In conclusion, until proven, there is no such thing as supernatural beings. If you call me a fool for not believing in God, then I call you a fool in return for not believing in Her Royal Pinkness, or any and every of the other gods invented by man.

I will get back to you later and explain to you why religion is more dangerous than benefital.

 

Why? How did you arrive at that conclusion?

Why would the creator have to follow the rules of our world?

Key word being scientifically. I guess my question above counts here too.

Edit:
Troika created a whole world, of course on a smaller scale, when they made Arcanum. However, none of them live by the parameters that make up Arcanum life.

 

Maybe I'm mistaken then when I read the following in an earlier post...

I took that to mean that you thought there seems to be no purpose for intelligence, scientifically, as stated. But did you mean in general, or in relation to the intelligence of an ameoba/cat to a human being? Maybe the context is where my observation lies.
Anyway, I'm trying to understand what it is you're asking with this series of questions:

(1) I'm not really sure where this question comes from. I thought part of our mutual understanding is that the organism IS reproducing in the first place, unless you mean "why does it NOT seek to reproduce after it has already done so once?" If that's the case, I don't know why it would or would not continue to do so. In the example of the ameoba, it's literally a physical impossibility because as a Biologist would look at the results of the procreation and say the original parent no longer exists, only its progeny of two daughter cells. But in the case of a cat, well, I'm under the impression that most cats DO continue to reproduce after their initial time. After all, it's not rare for any one female cat to have several litters of kittens in one lifetime, nor is it just as improbable for any one male cat to sire several. Is it that you mean what purpose does this solve when you ask what function does it fulfill? I'm anticipating that the point of your questions, and thus, argument are to imply that it could be possible that this is where God's role comes in, as if he, or the force of Atman you mentioned earlier, places that ambition in each living thing to reproduce where science originally speculated it as instinct. If this is your implication, then you've made a better point than I have, because I simply don't have the knowledge to scientifically explain how instinct works or why it has a place in life.

(2) & (3) I can only quote myself for these since I believe I've already done all I can to answer them:

I literally mean that there is no purpose, or function, for science to serve in this world. The scientific principal to existence, or at least the one I believe to be true, is that this world is the way it is because it is the result of following the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology. We don't live and breathe because science is a personification charged with upholding that responsibility. That's more of a religious view. That's why I added my comment that at the end of my last post that a Christian would make the argument that God created science and bestowed upon it the task of making sure A always reacts with B, that 1+1 is always 2, that living things are urged to sexually reproduce and uses it as a tool to affect our lives. The reason we live and breathe is simply because science happens, not because it has chores to do or a purpose to fulfill. Therefore, life, as a product of science, has no purpose. It is merely a result, a byproduct. We, as human beings, have ambitions resulting from our higher states of consciousness and intelligence (I've made this argument before), but we do NOT have a purpose. Destiny is a myth. Fate is an illusion. Out of chaos (science) comes the order (existence) that we are familiar with and nothing more.

All along my argument behind science is that it is chaotic. It is random. I know this is a hard thing to accept for some people, made harder by my poor attempts to explain it, because they see something like a salt producing reaction of Na and Cl and say "Oh look! NaOH + HCl -> NaCl + H2O, how much less random can you get?" But let's build off something I stated earlier:

I'll try to use an analogy to better explain this. If you have a bag with 1 black marble in it, what are the odds of randomly reaching in and pulling it out? You'd say 1:1. Good odds, but the system was still done at random. Now add 1 white marble to the bag and the odds are 1:2. Add 1 green marble to the bag and it becomes 1:3. Your odds of randomly pulling out that black marble are getting worse. Now substitute the marbles for molecules of HCl, HBr, and HI. Your odds of randomly getting NaCl are worse (you'll also get NaBr and NaI) in our reaction above when the others are present. That's the randomness of science I'm talking about. So how does this relate to something as biologically and chemically complex as life and humans? The reason we can even exist today is because all of these molecules were moving about randomly on a very young earth. Suddenly, N, C, & O molecules randomly collided and the conditions were met to form the very first organic molecul e (the buiding block of life) ever: Urea. More and more molecules randomly collided and formed more organic molecules and eventually the right conditions were met where the first cell could sustain life. Fast forward a few billion years and here we are. Impossible you say? If I gave you that bag of marbles and asked you to pull out the black one in one try, you'd probably agree it's a tough but do-able chance. But what if I gave you 10 tries? What if I gave you 100 tries? What if these molecules had billions and billions of years to randomly collide and set the course for life as we know it? Not the whopping 6 days Christians claim it took God to divinely create the world. And we have fossilized evidence right in front of us of just how old the Earth really is and what conditions were like all those billions of years ago. Do you still think life, as a complex series of chemical reactions built upon the foundation of random genesis, has a function or a purpose? I don't. And that's why we're having this discussion. No methane does not actively seek out fire to ignite. No Chlorine does not seek out Chlorine to covalently bond to it. But when the conditions are met, it absolutely WILL happen. That's the law of science I'm refering to. That's the law that keeps us alive even when we're all done feeding and reproducing. And that's why I just don't accept religion or the belief in some invisible force giving me a soul.

Well, I never claimed to be an astro-physicist. So you have me there. But that doesn't change the point I'm making, only the method by which I make it.

Maybe Einstein believed in God. I don't. But since when do "true" scientists always agree with each other? That would be why it's called a theory. Since no one was there to witness the begining, there still is not enough proof to make it a law. And so we have this discussion. But let counter your point with this question. If the Big Bang was thought to be a massive explosion that caused everything to come into being, since when has an explosion behaved in a predictable pattern? Do you mean to tell me when you throw a frag grenade into a trench of Nazis you know every which direction and with what force each little fragment of that grenade will travel? Why is this any different from the explosion that caused the universe? Why is it so hard to believe that we really are here because our exact location in a sea of infinity is the perfect position and condition to support life as advanced and intelligent as ourselves? Isn't this a good reason why we find no signs of life whatsoever on any of the other planets of our solar system? Mercury is gaseous, that rules it out. I dont' know what's wrong with Venus. Maybe it is still too close to the sun to allow chemical bonds to remain stable in organic molecules or to allow a sufficient layer of ozone to form around the planet. Mars has "traces" of what could be water/life/early conditions of supporting life, but we have not yet found enough evidence there yet. Jupiter and on back...the environment begins to get too cold from a greater distance from the sun to, once again speculate since I'm no astrophysicist, that organic molecules can form or the planet can sustain a sufficient ozone layer. So yes, our position on Earth to sustain life is pure chance. That's what I believe.

To summarize:
(1) The organism does seek to continually reproduce due to instinct. I don't fully understand how instinct scientifically works so I can't elaborate any further. That doesn't mean there is no explanation. It just means I can't give you that information with my current knowledge.

(2) Science fulfills no function or purpose at all. That's the core of my argument in this post.

(3) Life fulfills no function or purpose at all. There is no soul. Only what results of the chemical reactions that follow science's laws which keeps us alive and, in the case of us humans, gives us the complexity to achieve a higher intelligence and self awareness that other organisms lack.

(4) We really are here due to a random occurance that happened billions of years ago on an immature Earth that started an epic chain reaction that puts us where we are now. Random. How do we know that there is not another location somewhere in the entirety of the universe, that is beyond our current ability to observe, that supports life through the same conditions we are a part of now? If all this did not occur on Earth, it would have occured on some other planet that we would be calling home, and we'd just be asking the same question: "Why here?" Because it's random.

I've done all I can to explain this. If it's not enough then I'm afraid I can't continue to contribute to the discussion anymore. If this brings up more questions, however, I'll do all I can to elaborate on those questions with answers I believe to be true.

 

Wolfs, that site has a number of contradictory statements in it, I could dissert them all if you want. The argument that God creating imperfection so clearly means that God is imperfect is a popular one, but it hold as much water as a collander. God created free will in men. Satan subverted free will by giving men the knowledge of good and evil, which thereby let them become imperfect. If you read Genesis, God created man in innocence, and man was thereby free from sin until Satan deceived Adam and Eve, or so the story goes.

His rebuttal of this argument is equally tenuous, for he's assuming that God has no reasons for his decisions besides human's arbitrary judgment. 'Well, if God had just decided for us to be happy with no free will...' is a course and unrefined statement, it assumes that God would have no other reason to give us free will than the promulgation of our own happiness. But take this hypothetical; if part of the reason of our existance is to serve God, then why would he create automatons? Surely programming your computer to say, "You are awesome!" is cool, and funny, but doesn't really mean anything. That's just a hypothetical example of a possible alternative reason for free will. He's arguing against a ridiculous argument that God's sole purpose of free will is to make us happy, for the sole reason of looking like he's making a more solid one.

I could go on, but I'm talking to you, not him. Your statement that humans have been able to create the basic building blocks of life out of inorganic matter is only evidence of the advancement of science, not an argument against the divine. Just because man can do something that God can do, does not mean that God didn't do it, or my personal favorite theory, that God formented the action that created life. I don't imagine God as a wizard that points his wand at things and poof, life. I imagine him as the creator and monitor of physics themselves; the laws of this universe were created by God, are monitored by God, and only supercedable by God. Man, according to the Bible itself, has all of the raw potential to achieve that which God can, except that he cannot deny physics, because man is worldly and not divine.

I know precisely how evolution works Wolfsbane, but what I don't know is how evolution makes an organism 'learn'.

Nothing else clones itself besides life, or has the desire to. You can keep pushing it farther and farther, but you keep returning to my initial question, what scientific property explains the desire to live, the survival instinct, OR the desire to breed, the reproductive instinct. Saying it's an instinct doesn't explain it; what is an instinct, and more importantly, WHY do instincts exist? Oh, and given all the reading assignments, read Socrates, the Crito if you're absolutely convinced of science's absolute knowledge based upon observation.

I won't be like other people and say that the soul is 'beyond human understanding' like you so sarcastically infer I will. However, I will duck that question temporarily on the grounds that I would like to give you a precise answer, or at least the most precise. Let's also not forget, language is a crude tool for explaining things of this nature, so it will take me some thought to express it into words.

Your argument has more holes than Swiss with bullet wounds, you say what are the 'chances' that God exists? There are no chances, yes or no. It is either a fact, or not a fact, probability doesn't come into play at all in that. Probability DOES come into play with evolution, since x must happen, then y, then z, then z', then x', ad infinitum. I love how you accuse the 'religious' of not answering questions, then when you get refuted you accuse the 'religious' of just not understanding enough about the subject.

You want traces of God's creation, I will pose another quandry for you: If God created the Universe, then God must have exists before the Universe, correct? If God existed before the Universe, then God must have the ability to exist outside of this Universe, and if God existed outside of the Universe before it's creation, then God's origins must be outside of this Universe as well, correct? So why is it impossible for God to have come from something other than this Universe?
(Tip, if you say nothing exists outside of this Universe you'll be slapping everything you've claimed to have stood for in the face, since you have no such evidence of that. In fact, given ALL the theories of alternative dimensions, and the expanding Universe, there is quite a bit of evidence to support my claim that something might reside outside of that which we know.)

You, who would harangue others for making unprovable statements come up with this? Surely you can do better than that? Prove it? Get a clone and put him in the EXACT situation, with the EXACT same rearing and the EXACT same background. That's a ridiculous argument, which denies reason. The only people I have ever found to not believe in a soul are those who spend too much time thinking, and I am absolutely convinced you will take that to mean something that it does not. Perhaps you will come to realize what I actual mean in time.

 

Who is the contradictionary one? Do you not see it yourself? You say that Satan, a creature that God supposedly created, made the perfect humans imperfect? A creature that the all-powerful and all-knowing God created? Firstly: If he was all-knowing, he would have known that Satan was going to ruin his creation. Second, if he was all-knowing and perfect, Satan would never have been able to do so. Secondly: the anger that God experiances is impossible; again he is all-knowing and clearly saw that coming. There is no need to be angry about your own, perfectly planned doing, right?

Did you understand what he wrote about perfection? A perfect creature needs nothing. If God was perfect, he could never have felt the "urge" to create everything. He would simply have remained perfect for the rest of eternity. But, as the writer so nicely put it, let's say that he did, for the sake of argument. Why would a perfect creature care about what's fun or not? Surely, programming mindless minions into obeying him in all eternity and at the same time feeling happy about it would've been the best solution for all? The minions would't care, and why should God? He needs nothing. If you want me to accept any possibility of a creator, you must first admit that it cannot have been perfect, all-knowing or all-powerful. The reasons are clear.

Writing "learn" was a mistake. These organizms didn't learn anything, radiation simply altered them into doing whatever they did. One thing that you must learn about the origin of life, is that it did not "desire" to do anything. Due to random mutations caused by radiation, these organizms simply came to have the ability to clone themselves. This increased their number, as you might understand, and the chances that they would recieve the next "favourable" mutation increaced. Why does life reproduce today? It's programmed to do so.

About God existing before the universe: Read above. I can't argue with the existance of anything before our universe, but I CAN argue with the Christian, all-knowing, -powerful, perfect being God even being able to exist.

It has already been proven, by experiments on rats. What do you mean by free will then? The ability to choose between right and wrong? The ability to choose at all? Please define your view of free will to me, and we will see who's logic it is that has got those holes.


@Vyenna: Your statement about Troika made me remember a certain philosopy, claiming that we all most probably are living in a simulation of sorts. Goes like this: As a civilization develops more and more powerful simulations, they will ultimately be able to simulate "reality". The simulations will be able to have a self-conscience. If this is true (it probably is) then the chances that we are living in a simulation is bigger than the chances that our "reality" is the right one. Interesting, isn't it?

[/i]

 

Grimm! My apologies, I forgot to reply to you after wolfsbane.

You are right, I said that intelligence has no physical purpose. The reason I did not remember is that it was only a subset of my larger point, and I apologize again, this time for my faulty recollection. My larger point, which intelligence is only a facet of, is that life seems to serve no chemical purpose, there is no reason found in nature for it to self-perpetuate.

(1) is a typo, why DOES the organism seek to reproduce. I type too quickly at times. I'll agree that we both understand that the organisms reproduce, my question however, is WHY? Your final conclusion is indeed correct, I am questioning the functional value of life and reproduction in scientific terms. I'm not going to assume that God is the only possible reason for this instinct, but it is a question that science has not been able to answer.

(2) & (3) Yes, I know science itself has no function other than to explain natural phenomenon. However, through science, meen make a presumption that God does not exist; I'm not asking what science's role in keeping life going in is. I'm asking what scientifically explicable reason life has for existing. All energy naturally flows from high to low, and yet a living organism works with and around the natural laws to pull certain nutrients, and energy into itself, sometimes using extremely complex membranes and organs to do so, and I ask you, for what reason? Living organisms have a self-preservation instinct, they view their own existance as good. And yet, why?

I actually do have a belief SIMILAR to that which you said your last statement was intended to head off, but not quite. I don't believe God created the natural laws of physics, chemistry, and mathematics to ensure that certain things happen, I believe he created these laws, and the Universe around them.

To claim that life does not has a purpose is science but is only a byproduct is itself unscientific. Of course it has a purpose, that's the principle of causation, something caused it. A valid argument that scientific rules need not necessarily allow life, but only so happen to, and conversely that life is allowed to exist only by its compliance to science, but that does still not explain life. There seems to be some yet unexplicable motivation to life that endures.

You may argue that WE (humans) have no purpose, but you cannot argue that life itself does not have a purpose. The purpose of life is to make more life. It is the iron rule of the living that they desire to procreate, and from your last statement, you make little attempt to explain this. If science lends no purpose to life, then what does?

Your salt and marble example seems a little confusing. You have HI, HCl, and HBr in a solution with NaOH. While your odds of getting NaCl might decrease, if the HCl hits the NaOH, you will. If the NaOH hits the HI, you'll get NaI. If the third hits it, NaBr. There is, in fact, little random in science, so much as it is unpredictable. There is a great difference.

We can never tell what is going to happen, we're not psychic. But we also know that if this happens, that will result, if that happens, this will result. The fact of randomness, or unpredictability, in science is vital for many things, but it seems to be a screen in this case.

My argument, allow me to clarify, is NOT that Urea could not form, or that all the other organic molecules couldn't form, or float together and become bound by an organic shell into the first cell, the first 'living' organism. My argument is, given the great amount of energy and randomness required to create the first cell... why would that cell duplicate itself? That seems completely unlike anything else in science. When NaOH and HCl meet in a test tube and for NaCl and H2O, the water doesn't begin humping each other and creating new water molecules. Nor does the NaCl undergo mitosis.

Oh, and I'd implore you to remember that I'm not a fucking idiot, I'm not one of 'those' Christians, who thinks that the world is like a rabbit and God pulled it out of his hat. The ever-more popular idea that God seems through all time makes me consider that maybe he has a poor concept of terrestrial timing. Being immortal and omniscient, you set a ball of molten gas spinning and call it the Sun, it's not that hard to say "ok, onto step two, making worlds", even though, in our time, step two took 2 or 3 billion years.

The fact is, cats don't just bump into each other, and make more cats. Nor are they pulled into each other by magnetic or atomic forces (although that actually sounds pretty funny). They fuck. They perform a relatively complicated procedure, from a scientific point of view, to do something that chemicals normally don't do. Reproduce.

Another example, I have not really metioned. Growth. Why do things grow? An organism already contains much more energy than the background, we give off considerable amounts of heat every second of every day. And yet, we feel the urge to take in even more energy so that we might become even larger or more complex, and give off even more massive amounts of energy. Why is THAT? Chemicals in nature degrade, unless they are infused with energy. Taken away from energy, humans too degrade, we burn up fat and then muscle, then even our organs because we burn energy constantly. And yet, we grow more and more, seemingly in complete spite of nature's basic law, that energy flows from high to low. A weaker point that I do not have time to fully elaborate on right now, but still a point I would like you to consider.


You make a valid point about Einstein. However, I know of no scientific theory that states that the behavior of an explosion itself is unpredictable, only that the intricacies of a particular explosion are unpredictable. We have been able to formulate computer models of explosions for some time, even supernovas.

We CAN indeed predict explosions, or COULD if we knew all the various factors. Take a stick of dynamite sitting on the ground. If we knew the air composition, temperature and air pressure, exact composition of the TNT stick, density of the soil and its composition, as well as other information, a computer could predict VERY accurately what will happen. The fact that practicality means we will probably never have the requisite information to predict an explosion doesn't mean that the explosions themselves are random.

There is a big difference between theoretical randomness and practical randomness that you are failing to grasp. The fact is, we don't know why the Big Bang behaved as it did, and yet, that doesn't mean there wasn't a scientific reason for each result. A frag grenade COULD be predicted scientifically. If every aspect of that grenades creation and deployment were documented, the second before it exploded, a computer could tell you where the shrapnel was going to fly and with what force.

The fact is though, and this serves as an example of most things on Earth, frag grenades are 'random' because a guy on the assembly line just dumped in some gun powder and a bunch of nails and metal shards. They aren't all made uniformly. The deployment as well, is not all standard. If I throw a grenade and it explodes in midair over the trench, the result will be very different than if it landed in the trench and then exploded. The metal shards will ricochet in far different ways.

As a minor point, you're confusing Mercury and Venus, Venus is gaseous and about 750 degrees. Mercury is right next to the sun, and has no atmostphere. This has little to do with your point, which is that life exists solely because conditions are right, but I would argue that just because conditions are right does not mean life should exist. Just because the Earth is able to support it does not mean it would form naturally on its own, and just because it forms naturally on it's own does not mean it would seek to grow, reproduce, and fight with amazing resiliency to survive.

(1) If you cannot explain the instinct to live and reproduce you cannot rebut the God argument. We will have to agree to disagree on this.

(2) Science itself fulfills no purpose no, but at the same time that does not mean that science is not used as a framework for a larger purpose, i.e. God's purpose.

(3) Life indeed DOES fulfill a purpose, i.e. the instincts you mentioned above. We can engage in a moralistic argument about how men have greater destinies, or how a specific man might have a purpose in life, but in fact, all life fulfills, or seeks to fulfill, the purpose of reproduction and survival.

(4) I will concede your use of the word random, because I'm beginning to see you use it in the practical sense. I can nitpick about how it's not really random, but that seems trivial. The fact remains, however, that just because something can happen does not mean it will. 'Random' chance might make Earth suitable for life, but it is a very great leap to say that because of that, life formed. Life seems too much of a scientific improbability due to the fact that molecules typical tend towards the least energetic form, not the most to assume there was no external force. That is my opinion, at least.

Despite you leaving the conversation, I will not presume to say that I won this argument. You debate well, and perhaps one or both of us will see differently in the future.

 

Blinky: I'd first like to admit that you bring up some extremely good points, and that I really wish you could have been there throughout my college career to bring these up to the professors that were teaching them. I, unfortunately, am not a very good debator or...I can't think of a better word than this..."questioner," so I my tendency was to accept the scientific theory/law behind whatever we were learning in class at the time because the professors explained well and were able to present us with the scientific data in the form of lecture notes, text books, and the very first hand experiences themselves in labs. There was no one like this around that could explain, with hard core facts with physical evidence, the premisese of God, the Bible, Christianity, or any other higher being or mysterious force that drives life to exist the way we observe it. I enjoyed reading your side of the discussion and it even made me realize that I once was asking the same questions, but since the answers I recieved were of the side of science and were made so much clearer to understand (and coupled with some personal and moral experiences throughout my life), that I felt no other choice could be made but to "side with science."

I don't really mean to leave the conversation, but I'm completely racked of every possible way I can think of to explain my points any further. I'm not convinced you understood them all because you're not rebutting with the questions I would expect someone to ask who has understood them. But I too admit that while I understand some of yours, others are completely over my head.

BTW: I don't consider you a fucking idiot. I'm not even sure why you would think that. If you took offense at me grouping you with those who follow the ideals of Christians and how long it took God to create the universe, rest assured that I was just using that classification generally since most of my argument was against people who support those concepts. I wasn't implying anyone is a fucking idiot. That's why I took the time and effort to voice my opinion as eloquently as I attempted to. If I thought you were too mentally inept to understand my explanations, I would have simply said "STFU retard!!111!!!!"

EDIT: Something did occur to me regarding the topic of explosions we discussed.

I never said explosions were unpredictable, I just said they were random. That doesn't mean you can't predict how the explosion will occur. Going back to the shrapnel of a frag grenade, I'm refering to the fact that the pattern of flight of the explosion is random, or maybe uniform would be a better term.

EDIT w/in EDIT: Acutally I did say they couldn't be predicted. My bad. I was trying to stress that, barring any outside interference, the uniform distribution of the shrapnel is random, as opposed to each piece always taking the exact pattern of flight which would be easily predictable.

I don't doubt this. You can use this equation all you want to "predict" the path of shrapnel that flies out of the explosion, but the explosion itself, when unhindered mind you...this means no air composition or soil density since we're relating this to the big bang, is not organized. I'm trying to draw a comparison to a higher power creating the universe and giving Earth the conditions it needs to sustain life. Earth had to be the 3rd planet from the sun. Why God, or whatever deity, created it tht way I don't know. But that is organized. The explosion from the Big Bang theory basically just threw cosmic particles every which way in the pattern of flight that would be consistent with an explosion. Nothing (planets, molecules, etc) was placed anywhere because it "had" to be that way according to a creator. Everything just settled where it did and where the conditions were beneficial to support life, that's where life originated and that's the relationship I'm trying to establish with the scientific part of my case.

I hope I've made whoever reads this consider some things they hadn't before. I would hate for my own lack of knowledge to answer the questions you have in rebuttal to ruin the integrity of the points I'm trying to make. But maybe that's beyond my control now. I know I can't explain something like "why does instinct exist in living things to make them do what they do," but that doesn't mean I lack the faith (ironic) of the scientific community to do so in my place....perhaps from someone who has done documented research on it first hand. If you're still curious, look it up. Maybe you'll find the answer you're looking for.

 

I do see more of what you're saying now, I was misinterpreting your point, I was assuming you were meaning something else by your comments about the Big Bang.

I think you argued quite well, and I'm thankful that I had the chance to debate with you. I do think that, in the end, you may be correct, but as of now it's beyond the knowledges of either of us.

 

I'll drink to that.