On Fri, Feb 17, 2012 Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > It's not trying to explain how God did it though, it gets around that by > collapsing all whats and hows into a single overarching Who and Why. Exactly, religion takes everything we don't understand and puts it into a box, it then writes "God" on a label and sticks it on the box and decrees that the problem is now solved. This is progress? If the physicists at CERN announced that all life including human life was created by the Klogknee Field but didn't even attempt to explain how it had done this miraculous thing would you be satisfied? I wouldn't be. When Charles Darwin wrote his book in 1859 he didn't just say Evolution is the key to understanding life he explained how, he explained how it could lead to the origin of species; and that's why he was the greatest scientist who ever lived and that is the difference between science and religion. > The mechanemorphic model is certainly a tremendous improvement over the > anthropmorphic but it is still half wrong. [...] The biggest problem for me > with the God idea is that it is arbitrarily humanoid. I don't dislike the God theory because of anthropomorphism, although I'm not a big fan of long white beards myself I feel than any being should have a right to facial hair if He fancies that sort of thing. The reason I dislike the God theory is that it explains absolutely nothing. > > If we were to take the worldview of mechanism literally, we would have > no idea who we were, nor would we care. > I don't know what this means. > I don't see that it would be a problem for God to make physics Great, so how did He do it? I'm all ears! > I can make a castle out of sand, so God can make a universe out of physics > I don't know about you but I can explain how I made a castle out of sand, so why can't God do what I can. If' you're puzzled how something as marvelous and complex as X came to be and someone tells you that Y made it but cannot even begin to explain how it did so and also cannot explain how Y came to be in the first place then that "explanation" has not really rendered you any the wiser. It's often said that science can't explain everything and that's true, but religion can't explain ANYTHING. > I don't see that the universe has any particular preference for > simplicity over complexity, it seems to make good use of both. > Yes but explanations do have a preference for simplicity over complexity; that's what a explanation is, describing something we don't understand in terms of something we do understand. > You must understand that spirituality is an anthropological universal: we > have never, ever come > in contact with any culture which does not have spiritual concepts. > And what things have all those millenniums of spirituality produced? 1) Lots and lots of fancy tombs built with backbreaking effort by people who would have preferred to be doing something else. 2) Some good paintings. 3) Poetry that nobody reads if they're not teaching or taking a class in it. 4) Ridiculous philosophy. 5) Lots and lots of cadavers manufactured in bloody holy wars. > > This cannot be brushed aside I think I just did. > > randomness becomes another name for God. Yet another example of someone willing to abandon the idea of God but not the 3 letter word "G-O-D". > Causality magically appears from randomness. Why? > I don't know, but I do know that given enough time even astronomically unlikely things will happen, in fact they will happen a infinite number of times if infinity is at your disposal. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
