Ah, yes, Frank. The great unknown, that bourne from which no traveller returns.
I have gone back to read this whole thread, not just the last half, and have a few comments.
Gelisgesti quoted Einstein:
Quote:The Stairway to Heaven "A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty... We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive." Albert Einstein
I just read a book titled From Science to God by Peter Russell which explores the connection between consciousness and light. Russell points out that modern philosophy and physics and medicine duck away from the issue of consciousness because no one has ever found a satisfactory description or explanation of what it is. In the course of his analysis, Russell quotes a Sufi teaching:
God sleeps in the rock,
dreams in the plant,
stirs in the animal,
and awakens in man.
One of the ideas that Russell puts out there is that there are many degrees of consciousness, from that of an ant to that of a human person.
I sent this book to my oldest son, who practices Zen meditation, and he found an interesting parallel between Russell's ideas on consciousness and those of Buddhist thought.
When Russell goes on to connect consciousness and light, and throws in space, time, and matter, and quantum theory, this book becomes absorbing.
Snood wrote earlier:
Quote: In a book Called The Church at the End of the Twentieth Century, the author talks about a question put to a high powered computer: "Beginning with chaos at any acceptable amount of time up to 8 billion years ago, could the present complexity of the universe come about by chance?" The answer was absolutely NO.
A British mathmetician and astronomer named Hoyle recently calculated that it would take ten to the forty thousandth power years for CHANCE to produce even the simplest cell. That is an unimaginable length of time - it's longer than 8 billion years, and few scientists will tell you that the universe is any older than that.
I am linking a review of Dean Overman's book on A Case Against Accident and Self-Organization. I have read Overman's book (well, I've tried to) and I find this reviewer's doubts compelling.
http://home.planet.nl/~gkorthof/kortho50.htm
Terry: I like these questions.
Quote: 1. Calculate the improbability of the universe and/or intelligent life arising from chance, but never calculate how unlikely it is that an intelligent creator with the knowledge and ability to create life, the universe, and everything "just happened" to have existed.
2. Assert that "something" absolutely could not have come from "nothing," but never question where God got the "stuff" from which he made the universe.
3. Never ask what God really intends to do with the billions of souls he collects.
In any case, even knowing that the universe was designed would tell us nothing about whether we have souls that survive death. The designer of the universe may not care about human beings or even know that we exist. (It is hard to believe that a god would create zillions of planets in billions of galaxies for the sake of life on just one of them!) The creator may no longer even exist or may have moved on to other universes. It may not have had any reason to design souls that could survive death. We just don't know.
c.i.
are you thinking of someone like the Dalai Lama who has evolved to a place where he can enter into his own unconscious?
