Problems with this section (Agnosticism)

by Frank Paris , Friday, November 13, 2009, 00:17 (5489 days ago) @ dhw

'I've been trying to find out whether you think God knew or did not know that he was creating the mechanisms for life and evolution when he created the "fundamental particles".'-I don't think the answer to that question matters much. The important thing is realizing that what God is looking for is advanced life forms that can know him and (eventually) respond to his lure with, so to speak, zero inertia.-Maybe God tries an infinite number of experiments, tossing out fundamentals in infinite variety to see how good each different set of fundamentals are at creating life. Or maybe the fundamentals in every single universe are exactly the same. Maybe that's something that science will figure out some day, and as such, is hardly a subject for theological speculation. Basically, it utterly doesn't matter whether I think God knew or did not know that he was creating mechanisms for life, only that that is perhaps his ultimate goal. (BTW, I think "life and evolution" are redundant. You can't have one without the other, at least in our universe.) He may also enjoy tossing out experiments just to see what happens, for his own amusement. But his "serious business" is looking for advanced life forms.-Even if fundamentals are exactly the same in every universe, we just don't know whether they imply our genetic code. That's a question for science, not theology. In any case, even if the fundamentals are exactly the same in every universe, there's still room for an infinite number of different forms of life and it could mean that God simply doesn't need the "extra variety" of different sets of fundamentals to satisfy his basic desire to see himself reflected in advanced stages of evolution. In any case, whether there are an infinite variety of universes based on an infinite variety of the fundamental properties of the fundamentals (the "constants" of nature) is absolutely not a theological question, at least any theology that doesn't beg to be refuted by further progress in science.