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Sally OConnor
Social climber
Canada
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I have been reading about the bear.
Someone actually suggested shooting them all?
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Sally OConnor
Social climber
Canada
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Fingerlocks,
Your Blablablob is working overtime on me. Can you get the pinkish giant pig to back off?
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pc
Trad climber
Thousand Oaks, CA
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hmmm...
'Piton Pete says shoot all the bears...
'Piton Pete is Canadian
Sally's Canadian
She immediately hits on the 'shoot all the bears...' comment in the mass of bear lore.
'Piton Pete = Sally
No?
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Ouch!
climber
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I don't kinow why people are still confused about evolution and religion. The matter was settled in Dayton, Tennessee, a few years back by these two fine gentlemen. The earth is 6000 years old and man is still a monkey. Case closed.
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Sally OConnor
Social climber
Canada
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Fingerlocks, what do you mean GB has faked the science on sex education?
Pc, I clicked a search after Ouch's comment and read some. Though I am Cdn I do not wish to be associated with this individual who seems obnoxious.
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Shack
Trad climber
So. Cal.
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John,
The question to me is not about "evolution" per se, everybody
knows about how species evolve etc....
The bigger question is where did the stuff come from
that formed that first cell?
Just one cell is so irreducibly complex that had Darwin
had any idea about DNA, RNA, Amino acids, proteins,
polypeptide chains etc, he would have had a completely different belief. He did believe in God BTW.
science, which fails miserably at answering the big questions, simply says it's all controlled by natural laws.??
Natural laws that just happen to be perfectly balanced in the universe? See "strong and weak nuclear forces".
Take a look at Dr. Behe's work.
He was a big evolutionist until he finally realized after the newer discovery of DNA etc. that there is no way that even a one celled organism of the simplest form could exist wthout
hundreds of complex parts already being created and then
assembled in the right order etc.
Has anyone ever seen something complex come into being just by random chance?
Basically what I'm saying is...intelligent design/God is the only explanation that comes close to making sense to me.
The thought that there's a God out there that I can't see,
can't hear, and he created everything etc....yea,
it is really hard to wrap my head around that. seems impossible. like somebody made it up.
But the other options seem to require even biggerleaps of faith and don't really make sense either.
ie. All the matter in the universe...where did it come from/
just "always been around" just that it was only the size of a pea? Hmmmm. "life just happened from a primordial goo" sure.
And don't get me started on the odds of a positive random genetic mutation!
John, as far as what I "want" to believe...
I guess I want to believe that there is a God who created all this...otherwise I've got alot more unanswered questions.
I think the "proof" is all around us.
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Sally OConnor
Social climber
Canada
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"Is it a requirement, an immutable law of existence, that humans are spiritual (in a religious context)? I don't mean, is it a requirement that some sort of god, or divine exists.
I'm refering to the human herself... is she by definition 'spiritual?'"
Could be that some are just more certain of their beliefs than others, DMT. I mean, I don't consider myself a more "spiritual" woman than you but I have a lot of faith in God. You look up at the stars and wonder. I think we are both spiritual in our own way.
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Sally OConnor
Social climber
Canada
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Yay! Shack said what I was trying to say earlier but in a wonderful way. Wish I could have put it so well.
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Sally OConnor
Social climber
Canada
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all this bear stuff is funny, poor bear
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Largo
Sport climber
Venice, Ca
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Phoey, Shack, you gonna make me think here or what?
I don't see things as being created, at least not in terms of an "efficient cause" according to the old Aristotle model. I'm a big fan of the infinite, with no beginning and no end, but a lot of that has to do with having those principals drummed into me by Zen masters I used to practice under--the practice was the effort to get an experiential grasp of this all lest it be just an idea or a belief, which they hold is basically worthless. Do I think there is divine intelligence in the universe--yes. Absolutely. But I don't separate the universe from that intelligence and set up a sort of divine family that oversees and orchestrates everything, which is surely just an extension of our basic human dynamics. But then again, perhaps our human dynamics are a reflection of divine goings on, although the regular hierarchy thing seems pretty paternalistic.
Frankly, I don't know. I do know that when I stabalize my breath and settle below my thoughts I don't experience a beginning or an end of anything, just a seamless process, perfectly balanced, ebbing and flowing like the eventide.
Ain't it something?
JL
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Ouch!
climber
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Sally, I think pc is having a problem with the language barrier.
Fortunately, I learned to speak Canadian when I lived in Montana and would be oot and aboot near the border.
Also picked up quite a lot from Dudley DoRight of the Mounties.
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Sally OConnor
Social climber
Canada
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Well sure
We all know Dudley.
We all know eachother in this one-moose town.
Off to bed to dream of being a merakan eh?
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Blight
Social climber
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Shack, thanks for the link to that excellent article. On a related note, you might like to investigate what's called the "fine tuning problem" in cosmology (the study of the universe as a whole).
Essentially, recent advances in our understanding of how the universe is made up have demonstrated that there are a number of values - the density of energy in the universe, the strength of gravity and so on, whose values must be set incredibly precisely for the universe to exist. As an example, the density of energy must be set to an accuracy of 1 part in 1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000. Any other value and the universe wouldn't exist at all.
Once again the implication is blunt: without some kind of conscious intervention, there would be nothing at all of any kind, let alone complex life forms.
Fascinating stuff.
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malabarista
Trad climber
San Francisco, Ca
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I don't know why people WANT to believe anything. Just let it be. What's wrong with not knowing? Why is that so scary? That's the mystery.
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Fingerlocks
Trad climber
where the climbin's good
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Topic Author's Reply - Aug 4, 2005 - 12:13pm PT
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Blight, you are rather badly wrong with your orders of magnitudes. We cannot measure ANYTHING to that precision. Here’s an example: if you measure the width of the visible universe (very very big) using the width of an electron (very very small) as your ruler, you get about 40 orders of magnitude—that’s 40 zeros—not 120. Perhaps you got the 120 from one (speculative) idea about what dark energy might be. They’ve got a number that big, but it doesn’t refer to anything physical. That’s a whole different pack of cards and a rather new unsettled theory.
There are, however, several constants that do seem to need to be in a narrow range. Many researchers are hoping to develop deeper theories that explain why they have those particular values. The work hasn’t been done yet, so it’s too early to say. It’s also too early to jump up and down claiming god did it. (I promise that my Blablablob didn’t do it. Or at least as much as I can promise about any of those non-physical things, you know.)
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Blight
Social climber
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I didn't make up that figure, Fingerlocks. It's from Prof Eli Michael's 1999 paper, "How physically plausible is the cosmological constant?" from the University of Colorado, Boulder.
If you'd like to query the figure, I'm sure he'll oblige you in his capacity as one of the world's leading cosmologists. Perhaps you are one too, in which case you'll be better off directing your criticism of his points to him not me.
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WBraun
climber
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Vedy interseting there is only one number in the "density of energy" accuracy, 1, one, with a bunch of zeros.
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Fingerlocks
Trad climber
where the climbin's good
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Topic Author's Reply - Aug 4, 2005 - 12:35pm PT
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So fingerlock, where did the universe come from?
All these "natural laws of science"...who established them...
just by chance?
If Darwin had known about DNA he would have never published
"Origin of the species".
Well Shack, “from” refers to a place, no? I would say that all places are IN the universe and there are not any places outside it—it’s pretty much what we mean by “space”. As to laws of science, do you happen to know something about these laws that requires somebody established them? I don’t. If the universe was capricious instead of law-like, then science would never have gotten off the ground and we might still practice alchemy and astrology (some do). But the big science project has worked out great—far better than the old mumbo-jumbo. I’m glad of it, but there is no argument here that somebody rigged the show to work out this way.
And I’m glad that you know Darwin’s mind so well that you know what he would have done. Please share this knowledge by writing a biography of him.
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Fingerlocks
Trad climber
where the climbin's good
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Topic Author's Reply - Aug 4, 2005 - 12:43pm PT
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Blight, I didn't suggest that you made the number up, I suggested you were confused about what that number is. I was right that you were thinking of the cosmological constant, and so I was right that you were confused.
There is a very simple idea for what the "dark energy" might be. But if the simple idea was true, then the resulting cosmological constant would be 120 magnitudes too big. So, everybody knows that the simple idea is either not true at all, or it is not quite as simple as that. They are working on the problem even as I write.
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WBraun
climber
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"I would say that all places are IN the universe and there are not any places outside it"
I would say that there are places IN the universe and there are places beyond the universe ..... so sorry ....
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