More Denton: A new book (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, March 08, 2016, 21:29 (3182 days ago) @ dhw


> dhw: (As an ignorant layman, I must confess that despite all the scientific pronouncements on the subject, I still don't understand how energy can exist independently of matter, or matter independently of energy.)-Pure energy is what the LHC and other atom/matter busters pull apart: electrons, protons, positrons, quarks, gluons, photons, are pure energy and are a portion of the particle zoo. Virtual particles at the quantum level are also part of this group, which I have not presented completely. Put back together they make up matter. Could God be an eternal group of these particles as a pure plasma of energy? Why not? I don't know where to let my imagination take me. God could be simply pure energy with consciousness. I've mentioned that religious thinkers have described God as pure simplicity. I don't know how they know that, but that is close to my concept.-> dhw: I don't know of any “body” which is not material. Hence “disembodied”. So now we have eternally conscious energy AND matter (God) consciously creating all the energy and matter that exists.-What I presented above can explain to you the possibility of a plasma of energy, no matter formed. Thus disembodied and immaterial just as conscious thought is immaterial.-> dhw: But can we say energy and matter have always been conscious of themselves? Why is that more logical than to claim that at some unknown time, energy and matter BECAME conscious of themselves?-Because eternal consciousness cannot appear de novo, it must pre-exist everything else and is first cause.
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> Dhw: ...you “view God as a tough-love parent.” How anthropomorphic can you get? Furthermore, “we should solve problems by ourselves, by being self-reliant”.-I use the 'tough-love parent' as a metaphor, not as a real parent. -> 
> dhw: You are right that we only have loose ends with no explanation, which is why I remain agnostic. Your God is one explanation riddled with loose ends, and your anthropocentric explanation of evolution's higgledy-piggledy history is another: humans “arising from the struggling organisms”, has been countered a thousand times by the fact that ALL multicellular organisms are beyond the necessity of functionality. And yet you believe in your hypotheses with all their loose ends, and reject any other possible explanation because....well, presumably because it has loose ends. Double standards.-I agree there is no need for multicellularity. There is no need for the enormous jump to conscious humans. Therefore we must look to teleology. There must be a driving purpose behind an evolutionary process that consistently advances beyond necessity.