Epigenetics, revisited (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, September 21, 2011, 23:00 (4790 days ago) @ David Turell

Dhw: I agree, as usual, that it requires inordinate faith to believe that a mechanism capable of such astonishing creativity could fashion itself out of nothing. Exactly the same objection, however, applies to a UI.
 
DAVID: My philosophy accepts a First Cause. Something or someone started all of this. Did this come from nothing? How? In our experience, everything has a cause. To say that the universe is eternal is a cop-out. Why is anything eternal? Back to the same old question: why is there something rather than nothing?-You have presented an excellent argument for agnosticism. If it is a cop-out to say that the universe is eternal, it is no less a cop-out to say that there is an eternal universal intelligence.
 
Perhaps, though, we should try to describe this "first cause" you believe in. In other posts you have talked of everything being "energy" in one form or another, so let's say the first cause is primal energy. Perhaps this would even be acceptable to all theists, atheists and agnostics alike. But the theist says that primal energy is conscious of itself, the atheist says it's unconscious. The theist says that life and our universe are deliberate creations by conscious primal energy; the atheist says that unconscious primal energy has come up with life and our universe by chance after an eternity and infinity of accidental combinations. The agnostic says hmmmerrrummmphhh. The theist and the atheist are copper-outers because both explanations leave a multitude of unanswerable questions. However, it might also be argued that the agnostic is also a copper-outer because he refuses to believe in any answer to unanswerable questions. A fair summary?