Feeling Reality (General)

by dhw, Saturday, February 12, 2011, 16:30 (5031 days ago)

My thanks to David, who has drawn our attention to a wide variety of articles, most of which speak for themselves. The trillion year cosmology article might almost be a spoof, and I wonder if I could get a nice fat grant for forecasting what will happen in a zillion years. Bertrand Russell's teapot gets more real by the day.-The leaf-cutting ants who have lost their unnecessary genes surely reinforce what we were saying about the backward evolving worms. It seems that simplicity and complexity are tied in with the demands of the environment, though complexity remains a mystery, since we still don't know how living organisms can innovate (as opposed to adapt).-The more of these articles I read, and the more I consider the different mechanisms that have been combined in us animals, the more inclined I am to think that most of us don't actually feel (as opposed to know) the enormity of what is involved. I try to imagine starting from scratch. How would I set about creating something that could reproduce itself? That alone seems like an impossible task. Then consider the intricacy of sexual reproduction, locomotion, digestive and nervous systems, blood, a heart, a liver, a voice, a combination of materials that becomes conscious of itself...All of these mechanisms, and so many more, are supposed to have assembled themselves without any outside guidance, without any inner knowledge of what was possible, without any precedent for the very concepts of vision, hearing, taste etc. I can just about accept that chance might mix together a few chemicals that result in replication, but replication does not mean development, or adaptation, let alone innovation. We are perhaps inclined to throw in the intellectual towel at this point: oh, once you've got life, anything can happen, given enough time. Perhaps it's the same defence mechanism that helps us avoid feeling the inevitability of our own death. It goes too deep to register with us. Language is actually a barrier to these profound realities, because by formulating them in words, we trivialize them. Tell someone that life is a miracle, and they'll nod and agree. But do they FEEL the reality, the absolute extraordinariness of what lies behind the words?-I can't argue for design, because I can't argue for a designer. In any case, I see no reason at all why atheists shouldn't feel this sense of miraculousness (Dawkins says he does, and I believe him). But at the same time, it continues to baffle me that anyone can truly grasp the immensity of all these different wonders, and yet still gloss them over with language and place his faith in chance to produce them.