h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

"...its not like your life means anything? (that is, if there is no God or eternal soul)"

why do you think i have to believe in a god in order for my life to have meaning?

It is relevent to the comments beforehand. If he does, then he is saying that his life is meaningful and special despite the fact that he is just a coincidental mass of chemicals. which doesnt seem a very sensible point of view.

sorry, simulpost. my last comment reffered to if you beleive in evolution. Without God, what meaning is there in life?

he is saying that you need a god for your life to be worth hanging onto. If there was no God then the end wouldn t matter much sence there was no risk of hell and no chance of heaven. I also believe in evolution however i think that the process must have been started by someone, God mayhaps?

Thats an interesting thought, however if you are going to accept that therew is God, then surely he is able to just create without needing things to evolve. At least it is more possible than things just 'happening' without anything but a large explosion (God knows where the explosion came from...) to explain the beginning.

True enough how ever there are too many signs in nature pointing towards evolution to jut ignore it.

BULLS**T!!!! the sheer complexity of it all contradicts the merest possibility of it all just coming together!! And what do you mean 'signs'? There is no stable evidence to support the claims of evolution.

I rather think that anyone who cant start a post without swearing at a mild comment from a fellow researcher maybe doesnt posses an intellect capable of understanding evolution.

If you show a bit more manners Im sure there's a researcher who'd be willing to explain it to you. Alternatively you could go to the front page and read one of the entries on the far right that explain exolutionary science.

Try these for a start.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/brunel/A885521

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/brunel/A706231

First off, if you read the backlog, you would see that i am quite able to start a post without swearing, secondly, i would not consider it such a mild statement. i have read the two articles you suggested, and i already knew all about mendels experiments from 6th form bio. His experiments show natural selection, which i view as differing from evolution, and i havce no problem with this. The second, was reasonable aside from one problem which is ironically outlined in the second paragraph of the article itself. It is viewing things subject to its own predjudice, assuming that man did indeed go through a developing stage where we started as apes and learnt to walk upright etc. This does not mean i agree with what is stated, however, if one makes such an assumption, then it is quite a sensible piece of writing.

steve k, good point!

looks like we're all roughly in the same boat, forceing religon on anyone is a bad thing. (no deep discussion on what exactly constitutes "bad", or we'll be here all day)

anyway, i'm away for a week and by the time i'm back i fully expect that all of you will have come to a complete conclusion about all matters religous!

I apologise for being deliberately rude.

Maybe now you know how it feels to have someone be rude to you, you will think twice before doing it to someone else.

On the subject at hand this is what I think:

Here is a link that puts the bigG (unsert your own favourite) at the start of space and time, beyond the reaches of science.

http://www.leaderu.com/truth/3truth11.html

I still dont like the Kalam though because it seems too clever for its own good. I'm not going all anti-intellectual here, what I'm trying to say is that it seems too sure of it self when it is nothing more than talk. Very clever talk about maths with different kinds of infinite that I had not considered before. Everything it says does hang together, plausibly, logically, reasonably. So that it ends up thus:

In conclusion, we have seen on the basis of both philosophical argument and scientific confirmation that it is plausible that the universe began to exist. Given the intuitively obvious principle that whatever begins to exist has a cause of its existence, we have been led to conclude that the universe has a cause of its existence. On the basis of our argument, this cause would have to be uncaused, eternal, changeless, timeless, and immaterial. Moreover, it would have to be a personal agent who freely elects to create an effect in time. Therefore, on the basis of the kalam cosmological argument, I conclude that it is rational to believe that God exists.


Now this is how I see that last paragraph bits in brackets)

Plausible (yes everything it says "holds water")

Intuitively obvious (accepting the plausible you will think this)

On the basis of our argument (sticking with what we have established so far)

It would have to be a personal agent (without cause there must be a motive)

It is rational to believe that God exists (first cause needs a motive only god can provide)

All very neat but so can any creation theory be most if not all do crumble once science is given enough time to establish scintific proofs by experiment and examination. When humanity looked at the heavens and earth with our naked eyes the creation stories all looked as sound as the Kalam.

Imagine a stone age non gender specific, ethnically ambiguous sexually unmotivated person.

All things he makes to serve his puposes out of stone, he makes to a design or plan. Yet there are many more things in his valley tha he is incapable of knowing the purpose of or design or plan for them.

It is PLAUSIBLE for him to think that another agent made them. IT IS INTUITIVELY OBVIOUS that this agent could have made the valley and him too. ON THE BASIS OF THIS ARGUMENT IT WOULD HAVE TO BE A PERSONAL AGENT with a purpose and plan beyond his cognition. IT IS RATIONAL TO BELIEVE THAT GOD EXISTS.


Standing on the shoulders of giants even I can see how the the moth ended up with "owls eyes" on its wings. Why we have seasons and even how valleys and I got to be here in the shapes we are in. Yet no one can see beyond the "singularity" much less talk with great certainty about the events shortly after the birth of "our" universe. So the temptation is there still to think of the hand of the bigG where we cant see or even begin to understand the answers.

The ancient egyptians believed that the universe was created by the first god masturbating catching his semen in his mouth, becoming pregnant and giving birth to the universe. the bible tells us that rainbows are a sign of Jehova's covenant with Noah. Try finding anyone who believes that those fairy stories are literally true. Experiment and observation have provided us with insight and real information about such things.

However we are left with a paradox the more we discover the less we understand. Each time our understanding of the universe around us looks like it might be complete we find yet more that is beyong our cognition and some peoples intuitive response is to say...this is the work of the bigG

si9mon, i understand that evoloution has a big impact on people's beliefs, but what does belief have to do with evoloution.

I think its a great theory/hypothesis/view (if anyone can supply better words that'd be great) and the proof for it, coupled with a common sense view of the world makes it difficult to doubt that it cannot be true.
But why would you want to "believe" in it. most people believe in god(s) or other supernatural phenomona, why are you lumping a well thought out, reasonable theory in there with these things?

I have to agree here evoloution as a theory or what ever, does not require belief it's a cientific theory for which there is supporting evidence (Whether or not you choose to accept it as true) .You do not need to believe in evoloution to accept it as a theory

"If you do not beleive in God who created the universe, and a heaven and hell where your eternal soul could end up, why bother being nice to people?"

Because if you're not nice to them, they won't be nice to you; and there's a s*d of a lot more of them than there is of you.

Si9mon:

"the sheer complexity of it all contradicts the merest possibility of it all just coming together!!"

What is your support for this statement?

What is your understanding of complexity theory, or thermodynamics, for example, as they relate to this question?

Also:

"i already knew all about mendels experiments [which] show natural selection,"

Is immediately contradicted by:

"which i view as differing from evolution,"

How, qualitatively, does natural selection differ from evolution, please?

Thank you.

Blicky,

The weakness here is the assumption that all events need causes. This is simply not the case - things happen through no cause at all.

All quantum events are essentially without cause. In empty space virtual particles are spontaneously and unpredictaby appearing and disappearing all the time. We know this is true because of two measurable phenomena: Casimir forces, which cause two objects close together in space to be pulled twoards each other and Hawking radiation, which is emitted at the event horizon of black holes.

Why couldn't the Big Bang have been a giant quantum event of some kind? We don't have any models in science that can explain this but we can't rule it out either. The question Kalam tries to exploit: "what caused the Big Bang?" may have the perfectly reasonable answer: "nothing."

F

member, thank you for asking si9mon his reasoning behind his statement that natural selection differs from evoloution.

si9mon, i look forward to being enlightened!

You say there are events that have no cause.

Well thats new to me I'm not the hottest on physics by a long shot.

Im more of an interested observer. the kind of guy who doesnt pay attetion at the cinema and spends the last half of the film going "who's she" and "what happend to his eye"? because I popped at for popcorn at an important part of the film. Actually I was taking drugs and drinking when I should have been doing my A levels then there was that nasty business with the fertilizer bombs, but I digress.

See these quantum events are the very things Im talking about. If science cant provide an answer, sometimes as our friend Si9mon demonstrated even when science can people of a certain persausion go thats the hand of the bigG.

I have also thought that the fact that everythings the way it is, was equally as satisfying as the thought of why should everything be the way it is? (why isnt there nothing?). Often people who said why isnt there nothing would get a smack around the head with something heavy just so I could be sure they knew there was "something". School really was the best time of my life.

>Often people who said why isnt there nothing would get a smack around the head with something heavy just so I could be sure they knew there was "something".

brilliant! if someone doesn't believe you, what better way to learn 'em.

ahem. i mean. no thats bad, don't hit anyone. (or you'll get no prezzies fomr santa!)

To an extent, we've been evolutionarily programmed to seek causes to events: the caveman who just accepted that there was a heavy breathing sound and footfalls behind him wouldn't be around to indulge his curiosity for long.

It can be quite hard to accept that sometimes the universe just doesn't fit our parochial preconceptions.