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

I rather like the quote "The Bible teaches us how to go to Heaven, not how the heavens go."

However I would love for the Church to release a Bible where the literal stuff is underlined in green and the metaphors underlined in red. Let´s have it settled once and for all. Was Moses a metaphor? Was the resurrection of Jesus a metaphor? If the Garden of Eden was a metaphor, where does original sin come from?

Moses (peace be with him) is clearly not a metaphor.
He is/was a prophet of Almighty God who led the children of Israel out of oppression in Egypt .. Pharoah and his army were drowned in the sea.

>> Was the resurrection of Jesus a metaphor?
Controversial .. Jesus himself (peace be with him) is clearly not a metaphor.

The garden of Eden is 'like a metaphor' in as much as it represents a state of paradise for mankind before eating from the 'tree of knowledge' (or forbidden tree) .. Maybe the tree is a metaphor..

>> Original sin?
Controversial .. dogmas of the sacrifice of Jesus, and original sin are deeply flawed.

Babies are born free of sin .. they are not accountable for their actions.
Mankind is responsible for their OWN sins .. why should a man dying on a cross change that? ( What's more, to say that God died on a cross is even more bizzare )

>>Scriptures are guidance of a spiritual nature, NOT science books.

Entirely reasonable, surely?

It is only reasonable if there are no claims of a scientifically testable nature in those Books. Unfortunately for the 'spiritual guidance' camp, they do make such claims. Neither the Old or New Testament nor the Koran were intended to be *only* books of spiritual guidance it would seem.

Big to NtM for seeing how belligerent and
unfair this bullying of warner often becomes.

Some people just jump down warner's throat
without considering the effort he is making
to be cooperative (as his tagline currently
says).

A couple of years ago (yes this argument has
been going at least that long) we would never
have seen warner admit to the possibility of
understanding paleontological timelines or the
possible metaphorical nature of scripture.

Trying to scare him with boogey-men like 'there
is no god, there is no after-life' is childish and
cruel and says more about the bully's need to
find refuge in dogmatic 'belief' in theoretical science
since we cannot know anything absolutely. Especially
such absolutes as death and life and the Bigga Banga.


~jwf~

anhaga:

>>It is only reasonable if there are no claims of a scientifically testable nature in those Books. Unfortunately for the 'spiritual guidance' camp, they do make such claims. Neither the Old or New Testament nor the Koran were intended to be *only* books of spiritual guidance it would seem.

No, I dont buy that. Granted their authors believed the science-like things in them. They used these not as metaphors but *analogies* to support their spiritual ideas. (See how the sun orbits the earth? Well...)

Granted the science bits turned out later to be true - no criticism to bedouins for not knowing that. But this in itself doesnt mean that the spiritual parts must be rejected a priori. If we wish to reject them as spiritual ideas we must reject them on that basis, not as the end-points of a chain of scientific evidence, This is also sensible if for no other reason that believers dont arrive at their beliefs through scientific argument (Recent quote by Rowan Williams to that end).

Admittedly we do have the inconvenient truth that some (but by no means all) believers insist on these things as scientific truth. But from others we can see that they are not a necessary component of belief.

Granted the science bits turned out later to be UNtrue

Squiggles:

Thanks for the praise. Bur I fear I have to disagree on...

>>Especially
such absolutes as death and life and the Bigga Banga.

OK. The Big Bang there is possible a theoretical limit to human understanding. Planck time and all that. Plus we cant truly understand whats beyond - if beyond is even the right word - the single 4D universe were trapped in. But thats equally true of religious as well as scientific understanding. Scientific understanding comes much, much closer in fact.

Death. No - sorry - we *do* know that everything just stops. It may be hard to imagine while the brain cells are still buzzing - but we do know its what happens.

What do do with this knowledge is a separate issue.

The sun does not orbit the earth (as nearly everybody knows)

The Qur'an does not clearly state that it does .. people might have misinterpreted verses as time has gone by (and continue to do so), but that's not particularly surprising .. I told you .. it's not supposed to be an accurate science book that tests whether it's true or not.

The Qur'an (and Bible) talks about this world in a general way that the layman can comprehend
eg. God made the world .. God made mankind .. God made the sun & moon .. God made food for us .. God made male & female etc.

Those that wish to pick holes in its scientific accuracy, by taking 'colloquial phrases' that apparently contradict modern scientific understanding do nothing except confound themselves

Totally reasonable, Id have thought. Even if Id quibble about the God bit.

1) From what I have read, ~jwf~, Fred Hoyle's coinage 'The Big Bang' was meant to be simply descriptive and not disparaging as you said.

2) Evolution is a somewhat unnatural thing for an individual human to understand because of our limited experience of time and space. Until one does something like contemplate how the Grand Canyon was formed, time appears too limited to allow for evolution to have significance. I recently was given best answer to the question 'Does one need much education to understand the Theory of Evolution at yahoo Answers (essentially, 'No', but indicating how much one needs for different levels of understanding).

3) I find belief in an afterlife as potentially the most destructive aspect of religious belief, though it can be a needed comfort for individuals. Makes it too easy to accept pointless deaths, too apparently pointless to pursue longevity or to pursue it for everyone possible and to pursue limits on fertility. Theoretically, life after death is possible, with a downloading of consciousness into nanoparticles that depart the body and rejoin coherently elsewhere, but it becomes a pretty unbelievable possibility when one considers that we have no evidence for it among the living and a god's motive for creating it seems so hard to come by rather than just allowing death to be death. It is also very difficult to see this life after death occurring with, say, Alzheimer's patients. What, are they part here and part there while still living or something?

4) A while ago I made a goofy prediction about a 26-year old immigrant becoming President of the USA in 2013. I can now make a more reliable prediction: I will continue sending her more money than I can actually afford, will eventually find out that a half dozen guys are doing the same thing when she has (probably false) excuses for not being at work, and that she makes more from us suckers when she isn't working than when she is (but I still won't be angry at her for some reason).

5) Still no book, but this week I have had a whole bunch of prime curios accepted. They mostly have significant coincidences attached and can be viewed by looking at the updated items at http://primes.utm.edu/curios/ByOne.php?submitter=Merickel

Rageh Omars ~The Life of Muhammed~ was excellent once more.

It got me wondering who the audience was. It was certainly of interest to non-Muslims wanting to know more about a significant historical figure. And inevitably there was an element of ~Maybe he wasnt quite the horror you assume.~ - although it didnt shy away from the hot button issues.

But also...Im guessing another intended audience was Muslims with retrograde understandings of Islam. For this audience there was a message that illiberal Islam represents a drift away from teaching.

For either audience, it was a damn sight more interesting than presenting him as just some quote nutbar unquote. Which would possibly also have been counter-productive for the second audience.

>> From what I have read, ~jwf~, Fred Hoyle's coinage
(of) 'The Big Bang' was meant to be simply descriptive
and not disparaging as you said. <<

The word disparaging is from the Wiki link
posted by torantoes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hoyle

"..his often controversial stance on other cosmological
and scientific matters—in particular his rejection of the
"Big Bang" theory, a term originally coined by him as a
jocular, perhaps disparaging, name for the theory which
was the main rival to his own."

Since the Bigga Banga is just a reductionist construct
of numbers based on current observable data projected
backwards it has about as much credibility as Genesis
with none of the human scale imagery or passion.


~jwf~

Ye other people's gods! - how much do I disagree with this:


>>"Since the Bigga Banga is *just* a reductionist construct
of numbers based on current observable data projected
backwards it has *about as much credibility* as Genesis
with none of the human scale imagery or passion. "



I have problems with the word "just" like it's somehow derisory to say, all human experience is "just" the operation of the brain/nervous system.

or

all musical harmonies are "just" pressure waves in a medium

or

The big bang is "just" a reductionist concept based on observable data."


no, no and thrice, no - That IS what things are to the very best of our understanding and it is AMAZING.

Why do people think actual verifiable understanding is so cheapening to experience vs "just" making stuff up?

------------


And what's with this 'genesis is credible?'


Snakes don't eat dirt or is that another "it doesn't make sense therefore it's metaphor / analogy"

The point is the big bang theory is being continually developed to take account of new and emergent data.

When it was first proposed by was it Lemaître, Hubble etc and so named by Hoyle, it was supported really only by the observation of the expanding universe.

Since then you, had the identification - and mapping - of the the background microwave radiation; and the large-scale-super-walls and super-cluster of universal formation (hence dark-matter) the unexpected observation that the universe is expanding and speeding up.

The puzzle now isn't really over whether the expansion event occured, it's over how it may have occurred and what, if anything, may have preceded it.

In short this knowledge is developing, there are some areas acknowledged, where that is difficult (beyond the plank time for instance) but compared to Genesis, who tale sits extraordinary and unalterable and definitely wrong by nearly ever conceivable measure of every science ever shown to work, from genetics, to dendrochronology.

What scale to possibly be larger than examining the the actual visible universe all 47 billion light years of it.

Squiggles, The Big Bang Theory as it is currently formulated is so far from being a reductionist construct that the suggestion is laughable to anyone capable of reading physics at all beyond simple popularizations. With requisite caveats included, it is about as solid as science gets.

And Hoyle was asked about the meaning of his coinage and insisted it was not meant to be disparaging. It was just cutesy. He wasn&#39;t at all an immediate adherent, but he didn&#39;t start off rejecting it either. He merely favored the older Steady State model in the absence of solid information at the time.

Oh, need to self-correct. While I am absolutely correct about the intended sense of the coinage, Hoyle did indeed stick fast to an idiosyncratic version of Steady State almost right up until he died in 2001. He did concede, however.

Clive, unless Scientific American goofed on its most recent cover, it&#39;s not [my age] billion years, but rather [you can guess] billion.

*light years [distance, not time,time being 13.7-8]

>>..it was supported really only by the observation
of the expanding universe. <<

As I said, the observable data. And as you said, since then
we have observed more data that seems to confirm the idea
of an expanding universe. I don*t argue these observations.

My point is that from these observations and by the clever
trick of reversing the observed data backwards from present
observations to the first observed data (Hubble, etc.) it
becomes mathematically possible to project that expansion
backwards until it compresses to a single magic moment.
Let there be light!

But several possibilities spring immediately to mind:

1. What if the universe is only temporarily expanding?
Yes it has been observably expanding since Hubble.
But that is far too short a period of observation to
jump to any long term conclusions.
What if we are only observing its exhaling phase and
it turns to draw itself in again? Maybe it's breathing,
really, really slowly. I don't think anyone has put
that into their calculations.

-sigh-
-jwf-

** And what's with this 'genesis is credible?' **

If you read more carefully you*d see I did not say that.
I said the Bigga Banga *has about as much credibility as Genesis*.
Which is an ironic way of saying, little or none.
Besides which it is *just* math, an abstraction with no sensibilities.
-jwf-