Guest wizzywig Posted May 25, 2000 Share Posted May 25, 2000 ShadeShifter-- My book comes out in the fall, and I'll post an announcement on this forum. (I've carried on dialogues here for months that have helped to challenge and refine the ideas in the book, and I'm grateful to everyone who has participated in that process.) Meanwhile, some books that can provide background on the Anthropic Principle and related ideas are: The Symbiotic Universe (1988) by George Greenstein (from an atheist p.o.v.) Cosmic Coincidences (1989) by John Gribbin and Martin Rees (I haven't read this one) The Mind of God (1993) by Paul Davies The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (1988) by John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler (ponderous and technical, but thorough) The Creator and the Cosmos (rev. ed., 1995) by Hugh Ross. Universes (1996) by John Leslie (I haven't read this one, but I've heard it is a very complete discussion of the AP) Thanks, ShadeShifter, for asking. chewie's hairbrush-- Just to clarify for my benefit. You believe that god is beyond the nature we perceive, extra-natural if you like (I believe in using at least one invented word per day) but not beyond the "whole" of nature. For precision's sake, I would say that God is not beyond the "whole of reality." The word "nature" suggests the created order (I realize I did borrow that term from C.S. Lewis' discussion of "Natures piled upon Natures, to any height God chooses.") I'm making a distinction now because, when you reflect it back to me, I realize that what I said could be mistaken for suggesting that God is within and part of the created order, and that is not the case at all. Clearly, the Anthropic evidence shows that time and space and the laws of physics all had their origin at the moment of Creation, so that God must be outside of Creation (what theologians call "transcendent") even though God is also involved in Creation (what theologians call "immanent"). Sorry to be so long-winded, but I want to be clear. My main point is that, based largely on the Anthropic evidence, I do not see the Cosmic Designer as a capricious and arbitrary God who breaks his own laws on a whim. It seems that there are laws and regularities at each level of reality, and that God operates in an orderly and purposeful and meaningful fashion in our own level of reality, suggesting an orderliness and purposefulness in the reality that is beyond our own. (Did I clarify? Or muddy it up?) Its the connotations of supernatural that's the problem. Yes, the connotations of irrationality and arbitrariness, the violation of natural order and reason that the term "supernatural" connotes. I think it is also common to connote "supernatural" with ideas like darkness, terror, fear, the occult, and superstition. Strangley, whilst I was typing this something occurred to me. I'm going to share it although I suspect I'll regret it. Though I've decided to post it in Kurgan's creed poll because it makes more sense there. Oops just tried and I can't coz it seems to have been pruned. I'll save it for another day. Now I am intrigued! By the way, the "Cult/Creed/Ideology Poll" thread hasn't been pruned. You just have to go to the top of the Cantina page, click on "Show topics from last 10 days," and you'll find it near the bottom of the page. (I point this out because I want to know what you were going to say that you suspect you'll regret! ) --wiz ------------------ "The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming." --FREEMAN DYSON <font color = gray><font size=1> [This message has been edited by wizzywig (edited May 25, 2000).] Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest chewie's hairbrush Posted May 26, 2000 Share Posted May 26, 2000 I'm going over there now. I do apologise my post can tend to become a little "stream of conciousness" at times. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Akuma Posted May 26, 2000 Share Posted May 26, 2000 Hello wizzywig. I was wondering if you had a website or homepage that you could send me. You have a very refined and skilled writing style that I admire. My email is above. Thank you. ------------------ Shoushi Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jedi Calypso Posted May 26, 2000 Share Posted May 26, 2000 yeah, wiz, i too believe you have a gift for this kinda stuff. like i said before, i think youve done a great job (but, also like i said, unfortunately, im not the one that you need to convince) so keep up the good work, the world needs more people like you. -Calypso Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest wizzywig Posted May 26, 2000 Share Posted May 26, 2000 Akuma and Calypso-- Many thanks --wiz Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jedi Calypso Posted May 26, 2000 Share Posted May 26, 2000 anytime wiz, i find all of this very intreging, do you have anything else along this line? ------------------ Say "hi" to Bango, Jo-Jo's friend and faithfull sidekick.He helps me bounty hunt. The Un-Council's Disgruntled Bounty Hunter -Calypso Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Akuma Posted May 26, 2000 Share Posted May 26, 2000 Thank you wiz. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest wizzywig Posted May 26, 2000 Share Posted May 26, 2000 Akuma and Calypso-- In a previous post, I mentioned three levels of "miracle"--I call it the "hat-trick" of creation: The three levels of "miracle" I'm talking about are: 1. First, a fine-tuned universe must be designed and intelligently created in order for life to be even remotely possible. The evidence of the Anthropic Principle is proof that this has occurred. 2. Next, a fine-tuned Sun-Earth-Moon system must be designed and intelligently created in order for life to be even remotely possible. Few people appreciate how finely tuned our Solar system is to produce life. I recommend a book that my friend Conor first brought to my attention. It is called Rare Earth, published in February of this year (authors: Ward and Brownlee), and it shows how incredibly fine-tuned our solar system is to nurture life. For example, it shows that if we did not have a moon of the precise size and properties of our Moon, life on Earth would be impossible. And again, if the planet Jupiter were not positioned where it is, life on Earth would be highly unlikely (due to collisions with space debris--the big gas ball patrols the edges of our solar system, sweeping asteroids and comets out of our way). And there are dozens of similar conditions. So our fine-tuned home planet is another hugely improbable condition for life. 3. Next, the origin of the first living organism is so statistically improbable as to be impossible. (I can go into that sometime, too.) In a future post, maybe we could take a closer look at #3. There's some fascinating stuff there. Meanwhile, I just found this quote this morning while I was doing some research, and I think it's a good statement of why I think religion/spirituality should be less about defending dogma and more about inquiring into what the truth really IS: "The central religious question is the question of truth. Of course, religion can sustain us in life, or at the approach of death, but it can only do so if it is about the way things really are." John Polkinghorne, Quarks, Chaos, and Christianity, p. 97. --wiz ------------------ "The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming." --FREEMAN DYSON Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest wizzywig Posted May 27, 2000 Share Posted May 27, 2000 Here’s the discussion of the miracle of life that I promised in earlier posts: We've all heard of the famous Miller-Urey experiment of 1952. A University of Chicago grad student, Stanley Miller, and his research advisor, Harold Urey, constructed a sealed glass tank filled with methane, ammonia, hydrogen, and water vapor, simulating conditions believed to have existed on the primordial Planet Earth. Over a week, a yellowish-brown sludge formed in the tank, containing two of the twenty amino acids used by living cells to form proteins. The media reported that Miller-Urey had created "the building blocks of life." To this day, biology students are taught that Miller-Urey "proves" that the origin of the first living cell was practically inevitable. This is nonsense. Here’s Robert Shapiro, professor of chemistry at New York University, from his book Origins: The very best Miller-Urey chemistry ... does not take us very far along the path to a living organism. A mixture of simple chemicals, even one enriched in a few amino acids, no more resembles a bacterium than a small pile of real and nonsense words, each written on an individual scrap of paper, resembles the complete works of Shakespeare. The problem is that a vast number of interlocking systems have to come together at the same moment in just the right way in order for life to come into existence by chance. Physicist Paul Davies, in The Cosmic Blueprint, observes that unless an incredibly improbable combination of chemicals come together in precisely the right way, it is impossible to spontaneously generate an organism as simple as a virus. Davies writes: It is possible to perform rough calculations of the probability that the endless breakup and reforming of the [primordial] soup's complex molecules would lead to a small virus after a billion years. Such are the enormous number of different possible chemical combinations that the odds work out at over 10^<font size=1>2,000,000</font> to one against. This mind-numbing number is more than the chances against flipping heads on a coin six million times in a row. ... The spontaneous generation of life by random molecular shuffling is a ludicrously improbable event. Sir Fred Hoyle and his partner, N. C. Wickramasinghe, once supported the idea of spontaneous generation of life in the Miller-Urey primordial soup of Earth's distant past--then they abruptly changed their minds. Why? Because, like Shapiro and Davies, they did the math. They found that the odds of randomly assembling all the chemical components in just the right way to make even the most rudimentary living cell would be one in 10^<font size =1>40,000</font>. Hoyle concluded that the likelihood of such an spontaneous event was roughly comparable to the probability that "a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein." I'm not suggesting (as the Biblical Creationists do) that the universe was created in six literal twenty-four-hour days back in 4004 B.C. It is a fact that our Earth is 4.5 billion years old. It is a fact that life first appeared on the infant Earth about 4 billion years ago. Yet the reality of God is also a fact. Therefore, evolution must have been the means God used to endow this planet with life--not blind-chance evolution, but guided evolution. Life did not begin (and human beings did not arise) by blind chance. The first living cell could not have been assembled by random chance. It was intelligently assembled by the same Cosmic Designer who fine-tuned the Big Bang. The reason evolution gives the appearance of being purposeful is that it was purposeful. Life arose by deliberate, intelligent design. --wiz ------------------ "A commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature." --Sir FRED HOYLE Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Starship Trooper Posted May 31, 2000 Share Posted May 31, 2000 just an observation-- interest in this thread seemed to be intense when the talk was rude and lewd and out of control... now that its gotten civilized, everybodys gone away... ------------------ "Do you know how fast population pressure could cause us to fill the entire universe shoulder to shoulder? The answer will astound you, just the flicker of an eye in terms of the age of our race. Try it--it's a compound-interest expansion. But does Man have any "right" to spread through the universe?" ROBERT A. HEINLEIN Starship Troopers Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Kurgan Posted May 31, 2000 Share Posted May 31, 2000 Oh, just thought I'd chime in, anybody on these forums who writes a good book about religion will have a first loyal customer. ; ) I am currently reading Lewis's Mere Christianity, and if I ever come across the Rare Earth book, I may just pick that up too. And it's good reading. Kurgan Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest wizzywig Posted May 31, 2000 Share Posted May 31, 2000 Hi, Kurgan! Hey, you can bet when a certain book comes out, somebody (wonder who?) is going to be posting about it around here. I'd say only about the last third of the book really deals with "religion," and not in what you'd call a religious way. My goal is to make it a good read--lots of stories and practical ideas that can be applied to everyday life. The working title is ANSWERS TO SATISFY THE SOUL. It's supposed to release this fall, but I'm a little past deadline, and I'm not sure if the publisher is going to have to move it back or not. MERE CHRISTIANITY is a great book. It deals with a lot of the kinds of concepts we were talking about in the old, original God thread. RARE EARTH is a different breed of cat. It doesn't really deal with God-implications, that I'm aware of, though I believe God-implications are implicitly embedded in the research these guys came up with. I found reading RARE EARTH a lot like reading Stephen Jay Gould--fascinating, at times even lyrical prose, though a bit technical (but not overly technical, nor difficult to follow--and it does contain the very latest on the state of evolutionary thought in science today). --wiz ------------------ "A commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature." --Sir FRED HOYLE Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jedi Calypso Posted May 31, 2000 Share Posted May 31, 2000 I just got around to reading you last two lenghthy posts, and, i must say wiz, you've out done yourself once again. Iv'e said it about acid_rain, and ill say it about you: your brain must weigh so much! Anyway, like i said, as soon as i get my new pc monitor, (i hope tonite)::crosses his fngers:: i'll start looking up some tings that i could post to add to what you have here, its just not possible to do it here in this class that i help teach, i cant really concentrate here, these kids are like rabid dogs! ------------------ Say "hi" to Bango, Jo-Jo's friend and faithfull sidekick.He helps me bounty hunt. The Un-Council's Disgruntled Bounty Hunter -Calypso Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest LukeFlyswatter Posted June 2, 2000 Share Posted June 2, 2000 **** YOU **** YOU **** YOU, OH YEAH, ONE MORE THING: **** YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jedi Calypso Posted June 2, 2000 Share Posted June 2, 2000 <font color = "blue">awwww, now that was'nt very nice, now you've gone and hurt my feelings! </font> ------------------ Say "hi" to Bango, Jo-Jo's friend and faithfull sidekick.He helps me bounty hunt. The Un-Council's Disgruntled Bounty Hunter -Calypso Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest ForceJediKnight Posted June 3, 2000 Share Posted June 3, 2000 If some people out there want to reject God and Christianity, then so be it. I think that you cannot convert the atheist. Only God can work in them. (I did not read the whole post, so if someone has already said what I just said or something similar, then I apologize.) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest LukeFlyswatter Posted June 3, 2000 Share Posted June 3, 2000 Sorry, I didn't direct that toward you! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jedi Calypso Posted June 3, 2000 Share Posted June 3, 2000 Really Flyswatter? than who was it directed to? Well, just the same, im sure who you directed it to didn't deserve such a strong repremand. (except if its that damn mouse from stuart little....i hate that little thing! ) ------------------ Say "hi" to Bango, Jo-Jo's friend and faithfull sidekick.He helps me bounty hunt. The Un-Council's Disgruntled Bounty Hunter -Calypso [This message has been edited by Jedi Calypso (edited June 02, 2000).] Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest LukeFlyswatter Posted June 3, 2000 Share Posted June 3, 2000 Sorry, the only reason I did that was because I wanted to see if they edited swears. (I agree about the mouse) ------------------ use the fork Luke! -Mom Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jedi Calypso Posted June 4, 2000 Share Posted June 4, 2000 <font color = "yellow"> Thats cool, flyswatter, i was just messing with you anyway. </font> Anyway, how is eveyone on this beautifull Sunday morning? (Well,at least its beautiful here in PA) i just thought that id make an addition to the church thread here and tell you guys that i have one more thing to thank GOD for today. Yesterday when i was rototilling the ground in order to start planting the summer crops, i started to get a little careless and i wasnt really watching what i was doing. (After 3 hours pushing a tiller, you wouldnt either) Anyway, i was walking along and the tiller stopped on me, so, i went to start it up again,(still not watching what i was doing, mind you) and i suddenly got the feeling that i should look down before i started it, so, i lookd down, and, sure enough, my foot was right under the tiller blades, if i would have started the tiller, it would have chewed up my foot like a strawberry in a blender. (mmmm.....) Well, i believe that GOD was watching out for me in the field yesterday, aand i felt limke i should post it here to show you guys that he is there, you just have to look. (or almost cut your foot off with a peice of heavy farm equipment) <font color = "orange"> GOD bless all of you! </font> ------------------ Say "hi" to Bango, Jo-Jo's friend and faithfull sidekick.He helps me bounty hunt. The Un-Council's Disgruntled Bounty Hunter -Calypso Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest wizzywig Posted June 5, 2000 Share Posted June 5, 2000 Yep, I've used a rototiller before. I think most accidents happen when people start to get tired. God was watching out for you real good. Congrats on still having a leg to stand on! And take care! --wiz ------------------ "A commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature." --Sir FRED HOYLE Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jedi Calypso Posted June 5, 2000 Share Posted June 5, 2000 Anymore stuff on proving the existence of everyone's favorite "Cosmic Designer" as you like to call him, Wiz? I've looked and looked, but theres not a lot out there that i've found. ------------------ Say "hi" to Bango, Jo-Jo's friend and faithfull sidekick.He helps me bounty hunt. The Un-Council's Disgruntled Bounty Hunter -Calypso Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest wizzywig Posted June 27, 2000 Share Posted June 27, 2000 Jedi Calypso-- I have checked this page several times recently and your message didn't show up. Apparently my computer was pulling this page up out of cache instead of loading it from the jediknight server. Dang. Didn't mean to ignore your question--it just wasn't coming up on my computer. I'll have to get back to you. --wiz Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Ray Park Posted June 29, 2000 Share Posted June 29, 2000 Fantasy and sci fi have always borrowed heavily from the religeous texts, and mainly the bible (because most other religeous texts borrow havily from the bible), and Darth Justin is a moron for not seeing that. I also think it's so blindingly obvious that there's really no point in talking about it. Anyone who thinks they've had a revalation and discovored the connection between fiction stories and religeon is a dork. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jedi Calypso Posted June 30, 2000 Share Posted June 30, 2000 Thats cool,Wizz,i understand, my computer likes to do that too sometimes. (Oh, and, by the way, my new computer moniter works great ) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.