Confused on Religion! Need Insight

My bad guess! I shoulda known better.


Real Life, still waiting for you to provide that formula for "mathematical impossibility" of life without a creator.

S'ok, Eorl. I knew a woman once who turned out to be one of the "religious" atheists--which is to say, those who make science (which they usually little understand--my understanding is not great, but it does rise above the level of superstition) their dogma, and religion their mortal enemy. I fell into the middle of the constant warfare which goes on between "atheists" and paranoid theists.

I am an atheist only in that i am without god, which is all that word means, and only to the extent that others label me that way. These people wear their "atheism" as a badge, and prepare to wage holy war on the benighted theists. Hoyle is a lightening rod for both sides. Militant atheists decry him for a lack of moral courage, allege that he caved into theism for venal reasons (to get a good job, etc.) and that he was resentful about his steady state thesis being ridiculed. Theists countered with Hoyle as their archetype of an honest scientists, who arrived at theism as a natural result of an honest investigation into scientific cause and effect. On the whole, from a propaganda point of view, the theists had the better of the exchange, because their position allowed them to take the high road, and the atheists were reduced to smearing Hoyle's name. Ten years ago, i reached a point where the mere mention of Hoyle would lead me to leave the room.

My view of life and the universe was not changed by any of it. My cynicism about human nature and the extreme behavior of true believers ("atheists" or theists) was simply deepened.

I think there are three primary theories of the origins of the universe:
1) The Big Boss theory - God thought it up, waved His hand, and thus is came to be.
2) The Big Bang theory - an explosion some many mega billions of years ago put the pieces of the universe into their places and the force of that explosion is still pushing the pieces further away from the center.
3) The vacuum cleaner theory - if you put all the pieces of a vacuum cleaner in a sack, if you shake the sack given an eternity to do so, sooner or later all the pieces would come together into a working vacuum cleaner. (i.e., all the pieces of the universe have always been here and have come together as they are at this particular place in time.)

Where a theist can have deep religious faith without discounting one shred of science is that the "Big Boss" could have created things to be and work the way they do or if we go with the "Big Bang" theory, the original material that exploded came from something and something had to light the fuse, and with the "Vacuum Cleaner theory", something had to shake the sack.

There are problems with 2 and 3 there foxfyre, in that I don't think they represent the genenerally held views.

Big Bang was not uniform, it was lumpy, otherwise each bit of matter would be uniformally seperated.

I think the vacuum cleaner thing is just a bit silly.

But I like your final conclusion, I most understand the "fuse-lighter" theists.

..except of course the problem of where he came from...

Earl, I have had things explode in the microwave and can assure you the results in no way produced uniform pieces, and the pieces were quite lumpy.

And silly or not, there are many quite intelligent people who go with theory 3.

And though you didn't address it, I think we have to acknowledge there are definite problems with Theory 1 as well.

And it is possible to rationally incorporate all three theories too.

lol .... of the three theories, I find the first one the most accurate, and stable !

Probably because I don't understand theism at all.

(yeah, microwaves don't heat point sources or in a uniform way, so lumpy it is!)

The problem with going with Theory 1 on its face, with no knowledge of the Deity given credit for it, is that the Deity would have to be a) a viscious sadist who enjoys seeing the created suffer or b) a fool for creating so many things that don't work or c) an ignoranmous who didn't know how to make thngs work.

Those who have experienced the Deity and accept a concept of free will, however, come to accept the creatures' culpability for that which goes wrong along with confidence that there is no problem for which there is no solution. And most have come to the conclusion that there is probably no single one way that the universe was created or came to be and that nobody yet knows all there is to know about it.

For instance, if we go with the Big Bang theory, how did some of those pieces result in the almost perfectly eliptical or round shapes that occur in the universe? Lumpy I can imagine. But a round Earth? That's harder to visualize in that process.

Lorenz did that:


Essentially, Lorenz' Chaos Rule holds that the future state of a system - even a deterministic system - are in the long term inherently unpredictable. High energy processes continually yield to low energy precesses, thereby transforming into ever higher and higher rational orders. The work of Hawking, Penrose, Guth, Starobinski, Penzies and Wilson, and others has conclusively rendered Hoyle's Steady State of nought but historic interest. Hoyle was wrong.

Now, there is no reason some metaphysical entity apart from The Universe might not be responsible for establishing the conditions which resulted in The Universe, but by the same token, there is no reason to assume the existence of any such metaphysical entity. By Occam's Razor, argument against tends to prevail, but, of course, the issue remains unresolved.

Using the Occam's Razor school of reasoning, a diety behind the process of creation would be ruled out for many. However, also using Occam's Razor reasoning, those who have experienced such a diety would be given additional clout in the possibility of a "Big Boss" origin of the universe.

Using the Occam's Razor reasoning, a diety behind the process of creation would be ruled out for many. However, also using Occam's Razor reasoning, those who have experienced such a diety would be given additional clout in the possibility of a "Big Boss" origin of the universe.

Sorry you misunderstand, Steady State is a completely separate issue.

The math ( and it is usually singular ) refers to Hoyle/Wickramasinghe work calculating the probability of enzymes being produced by chance processes. For a summary of the odds Hoyle calculated had to be overcome see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hoyle

For more detail, their book Evolution from Space. He was a committed evolutionist who nevertheless did not accept the fantasy of random processes producing life.

Contradictory positions? Sure. But so has every evolutionist who maintains that complex systems built themselves by chance.

As I said, if he is so out there, then it ought to be easy to prove his math wrong. But you have to be working on the correct problem first, so I thought I'd point you in the right direction. It's over THERE.

Sorry, real life, Lorenz' Chaos Rule mathematically trumps Hoyle's "it couldn't happen" mathematics. That, BTW, is among the reasons Hoyle's "comparison", as you cited, is referred to as "infamously" ... had Hoyle been vindicated, not repudiated, his comparison would be "Famous", not "Infamous". Hoyle was wrong.

Now, mind you, all I'm saying is that YOUR ARGUMENT remains unsupported. No forensically sound validation for that argument has been presented.

OK - back to the point. Answer the questions. Thats all you have to do. Answer the questions, and you win. Don't play with the questions, don't circumnavigate the questions, don't return the questions, don't paraphrase the questions, don't obscure the questions, don't denigrate the questions, don't ignore the questions, answer the questions. That is the entire point. Answer the questions.

well of course reallife wont because he cant and he cant because the truth is that he has no more idea (and to be fair no less) about the Ultimate than anyone else on the planet.

Riddle me this: What kind of answer to the "does god exist " question is science ever likely to provide?

That is what hypothesis of God are you subjecting to scientific principles?

Fair enough physgrad - lets grant there is a diety. Now, why should the Abrahamic traditions have primacy of claim to that diety? And if even that is granted, why should primacy of claim fall to the Christian branch of that tradition? Now, supposing that is granted, why should the so-called Protestant sects of the Christian branch of the Abrahamic tradition have primacy of claim to the afore stipulated diety? Finally, supposing even that to be the case, by what means do we asign primacy of claim to which one of the competing sects which claim it to themselves?

A riddle indeed.

real life

Timber handled everything just fine in my absence except this:

I like the logic.
Interesting to note the number of assumptions one needs to end up with the God most of us believe to be a universal entity.

Hail Mary! your prayers are answered. No longer have you to dwell in the outer regions of confusion. After centuries of open hostilities and decades of reconcillation, Anglicans and Catholics have agreed to agree. Mary did ascend into heaven afterall. It had all been a terrible mistake due to something left out of the Bible but which should have been included. So include it! As I've always said, religion is best made up on the hoof. Expect new 'directors cut' version of Holy Bible anytime soon.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/religion/Story/0,2763,1485558,00.html

Interesting article..I'm Anglican but I never knew people picketed shrines to Mary..seems kind of ridiculous..what do they intend to achieve?