Far out cosmology (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, January 29, 2014, 14:49 (3740 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

DHW: The design we know may come from within the materials themselves, and whatever degree of awareness is necessary for each design may have evolved within individual collections of matter. -TONY: Not until those materials themselves exist and have some measure of awareness, which in turn requires something to design them.-I have no problem with the concept of energy transforming itself mindlessly into materials. It is awareness which is the problem for me, and once again I do not see an answer to it in the claim that lesser degrees of awareness require design, whereas your God's super-awareness did NOT require design!
 
TONY: Actually, I only say that it is more likely that a single entity became self-aware and eventually grew to the point that it could begin to create. Now, I will freely admit that it is an unknown, and is unknowable. However, I did admit that faith is a requirement for any of these solutions.-And that is the reason why your question ("How many lines of evidence would be required to meet the criteria of a 'convincing explanation'...?") seems to me to collapse in on itself. It's not a matter of "how many", but of whether an individual can subjectively view any "evidence" as convincing enough for him to abandon his own rational awareness that the answer is unknown and unknowable, and then to take a blind leap of faith. On this forum we have pursued every "line of evidence" we can think of, and I have extrapolated from these lines three possible sources of life ... a conscious designer, a huge stroke of luck, countless mini-designers (matter containing different degrees of intelligence). I do not find the "evidence" for any of them convincing enough to enable me to take the leap. Perhaps it would be more fruitful for our discussion if you were to tell us why you are sufficiently convinced by the first hypothesis to ignore your own awareness of unknowability, and to conclude that there is more "evidence" for your single entity than there is for multiple entities or for the huge stroke of luck!-************ -DHW (to David): I'm also surprised that since human consciousness is so complex as to defy all our scientists' attempts to understand it, you should consider divine consciousness to be utterly simple. If this is so, do please explain how pure energy can "simply" be conscious of itself, whereas the consciousness of energy in the form of matter is beyond our understanding.-TONY: Have you ever noticed how most things in physics and biology, once we actually understand them, become so utterly simple that we are amazed that we never realized it before?-Have you ever noticed how people with strong beliefs see what they want to see? Some folk still talk of "simple" forms of life, but the more science delves into life, the more complex even these "simple" forms appear to be. The cell has proven to be amazingly complex. Do you see the human brain, the seat and perhaps also the source of our consciousness, as being simple? The argument for design actually rests on physical and biological structures being too complex to have arisen by chance. And yet David's theologians tell us the consciousness that designed them is "utter simplicity". How the heck do they know? And what does it actually mean?