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

Harold Bloom, the great literature professor and prolific author, is angry at God for not existing.

Still taking a great interest in this thread and the fascinating contributions.

Jab

It is easy to become side tracked, conversation by nature allows the composition to be held accountable , your initial train of thought can be easily ambushed by the unfortunate inclusion of an inappropriate word , God.
CERN I believe is the instrument that mankind has pinned unfortold energy in as a attempt not to answer, but give greater insight and hopefully give substance to a notion
We struggle with creation , does man need God as an excuse for the initial inertia , there after he stood back and let it go into freefall.
It is difficult to fight your corner when all you have to date is a two operating systems that seem to only to work independently.

I've never felt that God and science were necessarily in conflict with each other. I know a retired nun who wants to learn as much about science as she can in the years remaining to her. A few centuries ago, there was a bit of a contretemps between Galileo and the Pope. That is no longer an issue. True, there are other religions in the world, and you hear leaders of some of them embarassing themselves occasionally.

Ethics is just as important in science as it is in religion. No one benefits from experiments whose data are falsified. There was quite a storm of protest some years ago when a team of scientists announced a breakthrough in cold fusion, but no one else could replicate the success of their experiment.

There has been some protest in the past year about President Bush's muzzling of Mr. Hanson, the climate specialist who has been working on proposals to deal with Global Warming.

In this context, I'm a little concerned that the people running CERN waited a week before dislcosing that there had been a glitch forcing a temporary shutdown. This could have been a teaching moment. It could have been used to educate the public about the tricky aspects of getting such a project to work properly.

Prof logic
god is dog spelt backwards, dogs are animals, therefore Animal must be god

(I'm an atheist but respect all for their own none violent beliefs)

I'm with you on that, Prof.

Paul

I'm the world's only agnostic mystic .

I take exception to that claim! I think I am an agnostic mystic. I'm just not sure what that means, but you can't claim to be the only one just because I am too dumb to know what I am. A voice, crying in the wilderness perhaps. I used to empathise with that character in the Goon Show who declared, "Oim the Famous Eccles." Ah! to be so sure of your 'self' as that.

See the happy moron,
He doesn't give a damn.
I wish I was a moron.
My God! Perhaps I am.

I'd like to be able to attribute that, but I can't remember where I read it. Good though, eh?

great

and i also take exception to paul's claim

let's just agree there are no two agnostic mystics quite like paul, shall we?



ps: sorry for side tracking by the way. but it's more or less inevitable when dealing with stuff like this, init?

if a black hole is the centre and the event horizon the outer, then that's more like a doughnut. Therefore would it not be easier to look for doughnuts in space ?

with black current filling?

Just a thought.

Whilst we are all pondering the possible outcome our version of 'Deep Thought' (CERN).

When we look up at the sky, the the nearest star is around 4.3 light years away but the furthest (that we know about) are 14 billion light years away - and that's rather a long way in anyone's book.

That's not the point - we know this because we can (sort of) see it but what we are seeing actually happened 14 billion years ago. So, the universe is not just big, but has been around for an awfully long time.

Leaving aside the evolution vs creationist claptrap, we have 'developed' as human beings, and in terms of the 14 billion years that we 'see' when we look into deep space, it is less than the twinkle of an eye. Take the time since Einstein started playing around with relativity, it is is so infinitesimally short, that it doesn't even bear thinking about.

However, we have (in our own eyes) actually managed to stumble quite a long way along the (scientific) evolutionary path in a minute amount of time, even when compared to our own pathetic development.

So - logically - given that 'things' have been developing somewhere out there for (at least) 14 billion years, it is totally absurd to think that we are anything or know anything at all - our feet haven't anything like left the starting blocks in the 100m race of evolution.

thus follows that anyone saying god created us in his own image is a blasphemer?

I once saw a program on TV(not only one)and it said if you look at a clock face and imagine the earth formed at 12.00, then "man" appeared at 12.55, so in that 5 minutes, we've moved from Neanderthal to the present day. But as with the theories of Atlantis and WHO actually built the pyramids - in the other 55 minutes, there could have been many other civilisations here, flourished and gone with long time gaps in between

If people are hungry and you feed them Rice , if only for a moment their bellies are full, are they not content !.
No they hunger for more
God is liken to a bag of rice , it only feeds so many.
If your hungry , in what ever sense of the word , one can only live on what is given .
Time is not our captor it is the acknowledgement and experience of knowing.
Food feeds the body , knowledge feeds the mind, living comes first , freedom of mind is yet another bag of rice.

some say we're entitled to 15 minutes of fame

that's reassuring

if you believe it

Fame, I leave that to people like Astronauts, I try to keep my feet firmly on the ground.

Andy Warhol.

I just have posted this comment on another thread.

"Big Bang" eh.
The phrase seems to have been doing the scientific circuit for sometime now .
I think it needs replacing.

How about "Old Hat" until we find a suitable replacement.
Just so we do not accidentally misguide people into drawing the wrong conclusion. wah
If the human condition is so fickle,its about right that the only person they will listen to is a celebrity and a artist at that.