Laetoli footprints (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, April 13, 2010, 19:05 (5337 days ago) @ xeno6696

MATT: 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!-There's no difference between us here. If God doesn't care about us, why should we care about him? But if our object is to find out the "truth" about how we got here, the nature of God can only come after the existence of God. That, if I've understood David correctly, is the point he has been trying to make: 1) Life's complexity = the result of intelligence. 2) We have no way of knowing the nature of that intelligence. My rider to that would be that at least we can speculate, based on the evidence of Life on Earth.-I asked you to name any human design that would not eventually break down, and I went on to say "that is the very nature of everything in the physical world that we know." You answered "Mathematics". I had actually meant a material design ... machinery, buildings, gadgets etc. ... because you were attacking the design of us as physical beings. Nice answer, though! (Literature and music would be two more for your list. Sadly, art and sculpture are more vulnerable.)-Putting on my sceptic's hat, I challenged your statement that only the Big Bang (as opposed to life) "smacks of intense planning and foresight". In your response you argue against David's belief that our universe is fine-tuned for life, and you say an infinite number of universes would solve the problem, as we would be guaranteed to get one like ours. How does this support the possible planning and foresight behind the Big Bang? Many physicists argue that the bang was the beginning of the universe and of time ... i.e. there was nothing before it. If that theory is correct, and since planning and foresight can only come before an event, again how could there have been even a "smack" of it? If anything, I'd have thought your only argument for planning and foresight would be the same as David's: that the universe IS fine-tuned. Maybe I've missed something in your line of thought here.