Ex, the odds you mentioned is a bit more infinitesimal than hitting Mega Millions.
Well yes, because you are here.
That’s the first law of thermodynamics. The second law concerns itself with the organization of matter and energy. :rolleyes:
Speaking of oceans…
Erwin Schroedinger, in his book What is Life?, relates an illustration by Lord Kelvin which is designed to give an impression of the smallness of atoms.
(Schroedinger’s words): “Suppose you could mark the molecules in a glass of water; then pour the contents of the glass into the ocean and stir the latter thoroughly so as to distribute the marked molecules uniformly throughout the seven seas; if you then took a glass of water anywhere out of the ocean, you would find in it about a hundred of your marked molecules.”
I just came back from Myrtle Beach and the above notion (if it is accurate), coupled with the visual of a small portion of the Atlantic Ocean, is overwhelming. (When I told my brother, a mathematician who works with probability and statistics, he looked at the ocean for a moment, then he asked me “How many ounces in the glass?”)
In any event the illustration should give an idea of the immense number of chemical reactions which were probably occurring when the Earth was an ocean of atoms being cooked by high energy waves.
Schroedinger was a pioneer of quantum mechanics. In fact he developed an equation upon which the mathematics of quantum mechanics is based.
He used the notion of the quantum jump to explain mutations in the molecule known as DNA. Roughly stated it means that molecules can change their configuration with the addition of energy (from x-rays for example) and thereby the same group of atoms can take on a different chemical property. Imagine the introduction of energy to an area of DNA during replication and altering the sequence of nuleotide bonding.
This is my belief: We are only a small part of a great whole. It is impossible for any part to comprehend the whole. What is incomprehensible is perceived as a great mystery. Some folk anthropomorphize the unknown and call it “Father”. Some people, like Einstein, choose to view the entirety of matter/energy and the physical laws it obeys as “God”.
It is an article of my faith that nobody knows and nobody will ever know all the workings of the universe. We have different ways of reifying the unknowable. But some conjectures are intelligent, and some are superstition. These are like discrete quantum states of the mind. You fall on one side of the fence or the other.
By the same token, G, there’s no argument available that ours is, by comparison to other planets, a complex system. The further we delve into the scientific creation of a world, and the sheer amount of random chance for that system to sustain life, evolve, et cetera, suggests to me that there is a sense of balance.
Balance, as any scientist will tell you, is not easily achieved, and certainly not on such a grand scale.
But now we’re getting into the argumentative stage of this conversation, and I’ve no wish to fight a land war in Asia. Let’s chalk it up to “I believe in God, and you don’t” and call it a day.
TVAA:
Oops, got my numbers mized up. No need for a roll-eyes on that.
Chaim Mattis Keller
“sheer amount of random chance” - Again, a human judgement.
“Balance, as any scientist will tell you, is not easily achieved, and certainly not on such a grand scale.” Again - an human observation about human capabilities. Also, what’s the balance here? Scientists will tell you that they don’t expect the universe to remain in this “balanced state” forever.
I never said I didn’t believe in God. But then, God is a vague term with various connotations. I don’t believe in an anthropomorphic entity. I’m undecided and shall probably remain so, as far as the question of a supernatural root entity is concerned. The concept of purpose, partly used to support the human God, is also, to me, the manifestation of a human process (consciousness) evolved for anticipation.
Perhaps. But using a gross misunderstanding of the second law in an attempt to prop up a religious belief certainly calls for one.
In fact, I think it calls for another. :rolleyes:
Hm. Seems to me that there’s considerable circular reasoning involved there.
You sound a little like a college student – all theory and no opinion. I was willing to let this one drop, and you show back up to dazzle us all with your impressive vocabulary. :rolleyes:
If you believe something, take a stand and explain it to us, instead of lashing out at my opinion with fifty-cent words.
Now you are falling into the trap explicitly described in the OP.
Just because I can not fathom the odds against this world (and I could find large chunks of it that you would be hard-pressed to describe as beautiful) coming into being through a natural chain of events, does not mean that it did not happen that way.
Supposed I hand you a deck of cards and ask you what the chance are of you blindly dealing them out as follows:
[symbol]ª[/symbol]K, [symbol]¨[/symbol]3, [symbol]§[/symbol]10, [symbol]¨[/symbol]A, [symbol]©[/symbol]6, [symbol]©[/symbol]8 [symbol]ª[/symbol]2, and so on until the entire deck was laid out face up in the particular order that I’ve described.
I think you’d agree with me that you’d have to shuffle and redeal a huge number of times before you got the exact “beautiful” series of cards I’ve requested. I bet you’d also agree that it probably would not even happen in your lifetime or the lifetimes of your children, should you assign them the task after you pass away.
But what would you say if I told you that I got my card order by dealing out a deck of 52 cards and writing down the order in which they were dealt. Clearly you can not call the sequence a virtual impossibility since it has just happened right here in front of me.
Hopefully now you can see why your “I can conceive if this happening”! argument is less than persuasive for most of us.
I wasn’t here to persuade anyone. I believe in God. You might consider my logic flawed, but pointing that out in no way sways my belief system any more than I would yours.
I can’t believe I’ve posted here 4 times. I honestly don’t care to have a religious argument with anyone about this.
I have faith in a higher power. If you don’t, that’s fine, too. Bygones and such.
TVAA said, “But that “right” to draw conclusions and have them considered valid based solely on experience is precisely the opposite of rational scientific thought.”
Correct. And I might add that “perceived” experience is frequently inaccurate. People “experience” Bad Guy doing a crime, only to find out that their perception of the actual event is flawed.
Hmmm…sounds to me like you’ve just disproved the scientific method – presuming there’s any truth to your assertions.
I concur that one’s understanding and recollection of one’s experience can be subject to a great deal of human and purposive editing – what you want to believe happened, ends up being what you remember happening.
Nonertheless, we give a great deal of credence to intelligent empiricism. While I have not personally ever examined the spectrum of a blue giant star, I’m inclined to give credence to what The Bad Astronomer, Angua, Podkayne, and a few others can tell me about the star from their own profssional expertise in analyzing it. I am disinclined to claim that there was no freak thunderstorm over Melbourne last week, even though I personally have no experience of it.
So when those of us who have experienced such pehenomena claim to have had things happen to us that closely match “conversion experiences” of the sort rcorded by Paul, Augustine, Wesley, etc., when we try to be honest with ourselves and examine them for the potential of the various non-divine-intervention explanations advanced by debunkers, and come up with the conclusion that the results we’ve experienced would call for less probable explanations than that of God causing them, why are we suddenly wrong?
As I’ve outlined in the past, I’ve found that the person I have transformed into over the past 20 years is a much more enjoyable person to be, and from reports of others a much more likeable person to know, than who I was at the start of this. But it involved changes that left me vulnerable to hurt, a substantially different worldview and values, and a major change in attitude, from who I was, and those changes are not ones that I would have willingly made, on a conscious level and so far as I knew myself on a subconscious level either, at the time of my major conversion experience. It involved meeting and falling in love with someone I had no idea existed, and whom I doubt I would have liked at the time of my conversion.
Now, by my sense of logic, I would have had to subconsciously realize the happiness I would experience from making those changes, which is objectively plausible though something I maintain was distasteful to the me of that time. But further, I would have had to have several subconscious precognitions of substantial detail to have taken the particular steps that I believed God to have been leading me through.
Now, here’s the kicker, from my perspective. There is abundant evidence of the actions of God in history. To be sure, the phenomena they describe are also consonant with delusional actions on the part of those who supposedly experienced them. The evidence is by no means conclusive of the existence and nature of God. But it does exist.
On the other hand, there is zero evidence of the sort of detailed precognitive ability that would have had to guide me in the absence of it’s being God leading me – unless you allow that I am so completely incompetent at managing my own behavior that I took what I knew to be severe risks to my own security and stability of mind for no good reason whatsoever. Either I followed God’s instructions, was subconsciously aware of the high-benefit end result, or just figuratively jmped off a cliff for the fun of it, and ended up in a bed of roses by sheer coincidence. Of the lot, a God of some sort with an interest in my welfare, guiding me, takes the least degree of low-probability assumptions.
Kindly note that the conclusions I’ve drawn about that God, and have discussed elsewhere, are my conclusions – I am not proselytizing for a God who dictated a literally true Bible, or anything of the sort. I believe in a God who acted decoisively in my life to make changes that have left me a happier and more likeable person – and the conclusions I draw about him are what I find reasonable.
> At some point the immensely unlikely creation of a self-replicating
> supermolecule becomes a mathematical certainty.
Not true. What if that very small chance of spontaneous life only exists because a creator has designed it that way?
To use your lottery example, there is only a winner because the people who designed the rules of the game did so so that there would actually be a winner.
If, instead, the designers of the lottery created the rules so that it was impossible for anyone to win (such as drawing only odd winning numbers, but requiring that everyone’s entry was only even numbers), there would never be a winner, no matter how many people entered or how many times the lottery was run. Never.
** Ah, even more evidence that our perceptions are generally irrelevant.
** For the same reasons that people to give credence to alien abduction accounts are wrong.
** There are several plausible explanations; the two most likely are “reductions in cognitive dissonance” and “presumption of a privlidged viewpoint”.
Firstly, are you certain you’re not simply convincing yourself you’re happy with those changes in retrospect? People are known to change their subjective judgments to keep them in line with the choices they made.
Secondly, how do you really have any idea that you’re better off than you’d be if you’d taken some other path?
No, there are abundant claims of evidence of the actions of God. Most if not all of it is highly doubtful.
** Evidence of what, exactly?
Drat. That should be “people who give credence to”.
Also, I misspelled “privileged”. Double drat. Why do I always think there’s a ‘d’ sound in there?
Poly, people with miserable lives find love and happiness every day. Everyone who falls in love enjoys a higher quality of life than they did before they fell in love. People trip and fall into it all the time. It’s the nature of the emotion to get a high from it. And it usually happens when you least expect it. But they don’t all go attributing it to god.
Where I come from, these revelations are called “growing up.” It happens to most people – miserable, happy, rich, poor, generous, selfish… we all (save for a few bad eggs) get to a point in our life where we start “getting it.” I know very few people who think their lives as young people can compare in value to their lives in middle age.
What boggles my mind is that you would find supernatural explanations more REASONABLE (I can’t believe you use the word “reasonable”) than simple explanations like “maturity”, “wisdom”, “better judgement as we get older” and the like. Why must this natural progression be ultra-inflated into a magic act; and a private “for Poly’s eyes only” magic act at that? Sigh…
I’ve sometimes wondered if the human tendency to believe in a god is the result of a selectiive effect, what might be called “the Survivor’s Perspective”.
By definition, all of us are the descendants of people who survived long enough to have children. If the only people who ever reproduced were the people lucky enough to win a lottery, then after N generations, wouldn’t they tend to believe that their existence was the result of some special quality? “Luck”, or “God’s Will”, or some such?
The people who prayed to and trusted their god or gods to preserve them, only to perish anyway, aren’t around to say “it was all a lie”.
And yet you’ll find that people in countries filled with great suffering tend to be religious and theistic, whereas nations which experience prosperity have a greater tendency to reject God. I think that undermines the whole “survivor’s perspective” theory.