Laetoli footprints (Introduction)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Monday, April 12, 2010, 15:03 (5338 days ago) @ dhw

In your computer world, could the machine process memory, do calculations, provide information if those who designed its programmes couldn't even conceive what memory, calculations, information were? If the universe and life were designed, it seems reasonable to suppose that the designer knew what he was doing when he set up the original mechanism that produced life, reproduction, adaptability and innovation. It's equally conceivable that he didn't know where it was all leading (otherwise he'd have been bored), but it seems to me highly unlikely that the mechanism itself did not require intense planning and foresight ... e.g. that by sticking x, y and z together, he would enable the unit to reproduce, adapt etc. By the same token, the fact that we have memory, consciousness, imagination etc. seems to me to make it likely that if there is or was a designer, he would have the same faculties. Of course we can only go by our human experience, but that suggests that the more complex the invention, the more it requires consciousness, knowledge, planning and foresight. As for faults in the design, they are only evidence that the designer may not be the omnipotent, omniscient being of the main religions, unless he actually planned the faults, or didn't care about them so long as the general design worked OK. -With what we DO know about the universe, if God exists and is a concentrated being of some sort, meaning, at some point in its continuity it can be said to possess planning and a long memory--then it is clear that he had no discrete goal with life on earth. It either didn't know what it was really doing (just tinkering) or it knew everything in advance.-If it knew everything in advance, then there's a great deal of things it either decided not to care about (our comfort being one of them) or he deliberately made them "wrongly." If its the first, why should we care back? If its the second, well, still--why should we care at all? -If someone claims intelligence, tell me about this intelligence, please!-Can you name me any human design that will not eventually break down? That is the very nature of everything in the physical world that we know. 
> -Mathematics. (Unless you consider the death of man.) -> As for whether God "interfaces with life", that is indeed the big question following on from whether such "concentrated energy" actually exists/existed. From the history of life as we know it, I would say that technically he may do, in the sense of experimenting here and there (hence the astonishing physical complexities that David keeps drawing our attention to), but otherwise the sheer randomness of the pleasures and pains suggests to me, as it does to you, that a deist God is the most likely.
> -But David needs to demonstrate that the sudden shifts actually come from some force outside the organism for the claim that a deity is directing its growth. (Don't think he needs to worry about this under the umbrella of panentheism, but he needs it from my view.) -> Finally, putting on my sceptic's hat now, I'm at a loss to understand why the big bang smacks of intense planning and foresight. Since we don't know what went bang, and we don't know what the heck God was up to at the time (if he was there at all), the whole thing might just as well have been an enormous accident. God messing things up in his laboratory, perhaps? But then making the best of a bad job? I must say I find the intricacy of life a more straightforward example of planning and foresight.-We know a great deal more about the Big Bang than you seem to know about. I discussed some of this at length in the post dealing with Seth Lloyd's book. -The fine-tuned universe that David references resolves around the fact that many properties of the universe, had they gone one way or another would have resulted in a dead universe. (I and several cosmologists dispute this.) One problem that gets solved in a many-universes scenario is this one--if you have infinitely many universes you are guaranteed to get one like ours, no God required for direct intervention.

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\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"