Problems with this section (Agnosticism)

by Frank Paris , Friday, October 30, 2009, 22:15 (5284 days ago) @ George Jelliss

"Excuse my intervention."-Oh my heavens. Do we have to make statements like that on this forum? I thought this was a free for all! I guess I don't understand the protocol.-'It occurs to me that your "God" must be the "string" out of which the particles are made according to string theory. The particles that they make depend on the way they vibrate, so its all just God humming to himself. '-LOL. Sort of!-Is there just one string in the multiverse? If there are strings in our universe, does this mean there are strings in all universes? Who knows, eh?-I wouldn't say that God is the string. Rather, if strings are the fundamental particles, then all that God creates are strings, each with its own nature which it receives from God, but it is so fundamentally simple that it isn't very conscious, and so God can't get in there and push it around by influencing it internally. Strings are like black boxes to God. He can watch them externally, but is completely powerless to influence them one way or another.-It's only when strings come together, or "stick" together in higher and higher organizations of them (organisms), that the individual experience of each string "adds up" or comes to a focus and eventually is bright enough to produce consciousness. That's when God can step in and push organisms around ("lure" them in this direction and that, in competition with all other "lures," or temptations, of the world), up from within the organism, not from without as an efficient cause.-Why does God create just strings, and not complete, higher organisms? Because that would be "cheating." God wants to be "surprised" and delighted by what his nature does. There is no surprise or delight in fashioning complete organisms from scratch, since God is all-knowing -- which means God knows everything that it is possible to know. But God can't know what a fundamental particle will do from one instant to the next. Quantum indeterminism is fundamental, even for God! All God knows is that, given enough time, organisms will evolve that will reflect more and more of his essence, but in what form, he has no way of knowing at the beginning.-Of course once things get going, God can make excellent guesses where what things might do in the short run, because "he's seen it all" through an infinite number of universes in the past. But ultimately, since organisms are free, he doesn't absolutely know, and so there will always be surprises. The multiverse will never run out of surprises and delights for God, and of course tragedies stemming from the behavior of species on the threshold of consciousness, like human beings.-But I believe the tragedies of humanity are just a passing phase. The object of the evolution of human beings isn't human beings as an end, but the development of conscious creatures that are just the beginning. Only now does the "fun" start.-This post wouldn't be complete, however, if I didn't point out the obvious. The fact that the arrival of human beings on the scene is not the final purpose of God is obvious from the very shakiness of the human presence on this planet. We may not make it! We could simply die out before we've evolved enough for God to completely take over our reigns -- and thus delivering us to complete freedom, I might add.-Does this mean that the divine enterprise is possibly a failure, if human beings utterly destroy themselves? Hardly! There are probably hundreds of millions of planets in our galaxy alone with higher forms of life on them -- not to speak of the billions of planets with nothing more than bacterial infections. All it takes is one intelligent, technological species arising on one planet in the history of our galaxy for that species to sweep through the entire rest of the galaxy in as short as ten million years, a blink of the eye compared to the life of the galaxy as a whole.-I'd be very surprised if this hasn't already happened, and happened multiple times in the history of the galaxy. I'd be shocked to learn that the galaxy isn't teeming with an interstellar civilization that is billions of years old.-Then the perennial question: where are they? I give a perennial answer: we on our primitive planet are a "designated wilderness area." If they don't want to be discovered, they won't be discovered, even if they are right under our noses (which they probably are). After all, technologically, they are billions of years ahead of us and if they don't want to be seen, there's no way in hell that we'd ever detect them!-Once we "prove our mettle,", then "all will be revealed." Until then, we're on our own, free to destroy ourselves. That's just "life in the big city."