Speaking about beliefs and belief networks, today being an appropriate reminder (both at MIT, and in a facility near you) - there was a post from a few days ago which deserves comment:
From: Blaze Spinnaker http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2014/03/20/does-the-big-bang-breakthrough-offe r-proof-of-god/?hpt=hp_t4 Is the Big Bang even remotely "proof" of God? Very doubtful... or definitely... depending on POV. The "proof" claim is beyond anything scientifically relevant, other than showing how years of indoctrination bleeds over - but this subject does tie into an expanded notion of the "sim meme" in a more basic (natural) way, which is the self-imposed sim. Anyway, to dispense with the article's claim - a steady state Universe (succession of little bangs) may offer more evidence of Divinity to logical thinking than does a Big Bang... since the latter implies annihilation of everything - physical and spiritual, between long cycles of expansion. A steady-state implies a persistent kind of continuity, one that true believers demand, at the top....In this perspective "universal expansion" is no more than a temporary blip in the local frame (local contraction). And yes, gravity waves can be better explained from the steady state POV. Surprisingly, from the sim perspective, one can certainly define Divinity itself as a gigantic sim in which the programmer or "player" is always the same old dude :-) If that characterization sounds disrespectful then, it is further proof that religion should be divorced from science - for this and almost every other reason. However, the sim-meme discussion, and the distinct possibility that some or us (or all of us) can be living in a "special" or computer generated reality (or alternatively a natural kind of information-processed reality)... in which individualized happenstance is based to varying extents on nonrandom input and even whim ... that discussion always breaks down to religion in the end- and to identifying the source of whim, karma or capriciousness in the behind-the-scene players (assuming the players are less than divine). Anyway, despite the possibility of one kind of natural sim being the only relevant reality, religion is not science, anti-science or anything in between - it is more the result of a human biological genetic trait, which goes back in prehistory to a "pack mentality." It is based on a survival imperatives from an earlier time where the pack (tribe, clan, or whatever) had to identify with leadership skills of the alpha male (as politically incorrect as that fact may sound to you in 2014). There is no fact or experiment - in all of science which cannot be rationalized either way - for or against the reality of God. Get over it. Darwinian evolution is fully compatible with Divinity, perhaps even better adaptable than the silly biblical pronouncement. Evolution represents the strategy of a God who simply chose this modality as a better way to created sentient beings than by fiat. He knows a thing or two about cars as well (Latin: "Let there be" as in Fiat Lux, "Let there be light" in Genesis). In the end, each human is either spiritual or not - and science cannot help much to alter that, nor can it hinder the basic orientation. The spiritual scientist has no problem at all with Darwinian evolution, nor even with an "evolved Divinity" in the sense of the Buddhist/Jainist notion of the sum of all souls. In this view, God evolves just as the sum of souls increases. Yet this is a state which is always "perfection" of a sort, at any single point in time. As a matter of coincidence, yesterday Mark Iverson sent me this video, which has a bit of deeper meaning over and above the obvious. It relates to one of the judge's comments (that this 9 year old girl is an "old soul"). It is just an aria, but it brings many non-opera aficionados to tears. https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZWpLfncliwU?rel=0 Can this kind of prodigy happen in anyone's personal reality-frame without some notion of the primordial "natural sim" (the one called karma, fate or reincarnation) which is espoused more in Buddhism, but which many Christians incorporate into their own spirit-package ... and in which the present life is somehow merged with a progression of former lives?
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