# Cultural grievance is not a governing agenda! **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [March 5, 2021, 6:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cultural-grievance-is-not-a-governing-agenda/937288 "2021-03-05T18:34:50Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 9\ **Page:** 12
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [April 16, 2021, 1:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cultural-grievance-is-not-a-governing-agenda/937288/221 "2021-04-16T01:15:19Z")
> [@RickJay](#): > > If God created the universe you cannot say he didn’t have a hand in creating life on Earth; No _direct_ hand. The point is, one can accept every facet of evolution, and also believe that the reason it all works like that is because God wanted it to work like that, and those two positions are not in any way in tension with each other. ---
**Author:** ![Dr.Strangelove](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dr.strangelove/32/6613_2.png) [@Dr.Strangelove](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Strangelove)\ **Post date:** [April 16, 2021, 1:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cultural-grievance-is-not-a-governing-agenda/937288/222 "2021-04-16T01:43:41Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > Noting that the universe is really, really big is a good argument against special creation for us - the ancients tiny universe makes a lot more sense in that context. Well, once you include god, who knows what the motivations are? But with regards to the low-entropy singularity at the start of the Big Bang, that’s exactly right. It is vastly more probable (unimaginably so, in fact) that the entropy would be _just low enough_ to support life. There’s certainly no need for billions of galaxies; one would be enough. And really, the Milky Way is vastly bigger than it needs to be to produce the conditions for our solar system to form with the right combination of metals, etc. In fact, you can follow this logic all the way down, where the most probable anthropic universe is the one where you’re just a single brain floating in space that happened to be assembled by chance particle collisions. Who knows, maybe it’s actually true… ---
**Author:** ![RickJay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bb73d2/32.png) [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)\ **Post date:** [April 16, 2021, 4:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cultural-grievance-is-not-a-governing-agenda/937288/224 "2021-04-16T04:39:23Z")
> [@Miller](#): > > The point is, one can accept every facet of evolution, and also believe that the reason it all works like that is because God wanted it to work like that, and those two positions are not in any way in tension with each other. Well, sure, because the latter position is meaningless and unfalsifiable; it cannot contradict any objective truth. ---
**Author:** ![FlikTheBlue](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/fliktheblue/32/10972_2.png) [@FlikTheBlue](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FlikTheBlue)\ **Post date:** [April 17, 2021, 12:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cultural-grievance-is-not-a-governing-agenda/937288/225 "2021-04-17T00:37:49Z")
> [@RickJay](#): > > If God created the universe you cannot say he didn’t have a hand in creating life on Earth; he would therefore have created the laws of physics that led to life arising. An omnipotent universe-creating God created life on Earth, you cannot avoid that. You’re only arguing over when he last nudged the model; was it 13 billion years ago or 3 billion? I mentioned in an earlier post that I’m using the term god in a very different sense than the Abrahamic and other western religions. I’m not referring to Yahweh, and whatever the force is, it’s almost certainly not omnipotent. I previously started a thread on infinities in nature, and from what I can tell none exist in the real world, and probably wouldn’t in any other universe either. Omnipotence would imply an infinity of power, which I don’t believe in. But some force or another had to create the universe. In this one we have gravity, electromagnetic, and strong and weak nuclear forces. None of those are capable of causing Big Bangs as far as my understanding of them goes, so I presume it must be some other force that doesn’t exist in this universe. I simply chose to use the term god to describe that force. All that being said, I don’t see how that force, whatever we choose to call it, has any kind of sentient or sapient connection with life on our planet. You could argue, as you have, that it’s a direct conclusion from the arguments I laid out, and you would be correct, but I believe it’s a trivial conclusion. The force that created the Big Bang is responsible for our evolution in the same sense that the supernova that created the heavy elements found on Earth is responsible for our evolution. It’s true, but it doesn’t imply any sort of religious causation. ETA: That’s why I use a lowercase g for god. I’d group the god I’m talking about with gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces, rather than grouping it with Yahweh, Brahma, Ahura Mazda, Zeus, etc. ---
**Author:** ![RitterSport](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rittersport/32/6326_2.png) [@RitterSport](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RitterSport)\ **Post date:** [April 17, 2021, 12:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cultural-grievance-is-not-a-governing-agenda/937288/226 "2021-04-17T12:46:02Z")
You’re just redefining god as some unknown force that may have started the universe. A non-sentient force is not part of the definition of a god or gods. ---
**Author:** ![FlikTheBlue](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/fliktheblue/32/10972_2.png) [@FlikTheBlue](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FlikTheBlue)\ **Post date:** [April 17, 2021, 1:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cultural-grievance-is-not-a-governing-agenda/937288/227 "2021-04-17T13:14:12Z")
Yes, that’s what I’ve done. The main reason is that the word god comes closer to describing “an unknown force capable of creating a universe / that did crate our universe” than any other word we have in the English language. To be clear, I think this force is almost certainly an impersonal natural force, no different than gravity and electromagnetism. There was no sentience or sapience, no thinking “I’m going to create this new universe with physical laws that just so happen to allow for the evolution of humans on a planet that I specially picked out for them” anymore than something called Gravity thought “I’m going to pull this apple down onto the head of Isaac Newton.” It’s just some force that we don’t yet understand, for the obvious reason that it doesn’t exist in our current universe (as far as we know) and so is not really amenable to scientific investigation on a practical level. ---
**Author:** ![Acsenray](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/acsenray/32/4519_2.png) [@Acsenray](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Acsenray)\ **Post date:** [April 17, 2021, 1:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cultural-grievance-is-not-a-governing-agenda/937288/228 "2021-04-17T13:16:39Z")
I don’t know what you might be doing for yourself by using “god” with that definition, but you’re not doing yourself any favors in using it in conversation with others. You’re just confusing the conversation. ---
**Author:** ![FlikTheBlue](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/fliktheblue/32/10972_2.png) [@FlikTheBlue](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FlikTheBlue)\ **Post date:** [April 17, 2021, 1:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cultural-grievance-is-not-a-governing-agenda/937288/229 "2021-04-17T13:22:00Z")
I just happen to think the word fits. It’s similar to how the physicist Leon Lederman wanted to term the Higgs boson the god particle. Although I will take note that his idea, as stated in the wikipedia article, was also not very popular with his fellow physicists. It basically boils down to me thinking it sounds like the coolest term we could use to describe that force. > **[Higgs boson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson)** > > Pages for logged out editors learn more > > > > > The Higgs boson, sometimes called the Higgs particle, is an elementary particle in the Standard Model of particle physics produced by the quantum excitation of the Higgs field, one of the fields in particle physics theory. In the Standard Model, the Higgs particle is a massive scalar boson with zero spin, even (positive) parity, no electric charge, and no colour charge, that couples to (interacts with) mass. It is also very unstable, decaying ... ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [April 17, 2021, 5:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cultural-grievance-is-not-a-governing-agenda/937288/230 "2021-04-17T17:04:33Z")
Sure, but again, the point isn’t, “Religion is dumb in general,” the point is “Republicans have more people who reject scientific fact in favor of personal belief.” [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cultural-grievance-is-not-a-governing-agenda/937288.md?page=11)