near to death episodes (Endings)

by John Clinch , London, Friday, March 07, 2008, 15:22 (5884 days ago) @ dhw

I still think I am justified in my criticism because you have postulated the possibility of an interventionist diety to account for the origin of life on Earth. You would have had absolutely no need to do so were you to accept that scientific study could provide you with an explantion of the mechanics of abiogenesis. You say I am misreading you but I say you appear to want to have your cake and eat it too. My initial suspicions on this were that, because the reasons for your theological position appeared to be so thin, you must be a closet theist and that this was your intellectual portal back to True Belief. I don't know you from Adam and the internet is packed to the gunwales with God-botherers, and if I was wrong in that assessment, I take it back. But I still say that your reason for agnosticism doesn't convince. - As for panpsychism, panexperientalism etc, these are mystical concepts that by definition defy rational explanation. They are unknowable, untestable and we can say very little about them. Philosophical speculation on it may help pass the time, but it's a largely fruitless endeavour. - But I am quite sure that whatever features attach to the physical universe, they apply to the whole kit and caboodle - rocks, gases, elements, black holes, planets, life forms. A principle of uniformity operates throughout the whole of the known universe. Just as the two laws of thermodynamics seems to apply everywhere at all times to all processes, so the life-producing property of matter inheres in everything. I don't envisage a creature or being or cosmic leviathen, just this amazing property that matter has to develop from simple elements to complex organisms. We didn't need cosmic or numinous nudges on our way here - just the right set of circumstances for life to burst forth. The potential was right there at the Big Bang and pervades everything we know or could imagine. It is this aspect of what we know that leads me to what can only be termed a quasi-religious sensibility and, in that narrow sense (as well as the formal sense in which I defined it earlier), I accept the designation "agnostic".