Religion vs Science

[Whack-a-Mole]

Toby-T wrote:
And if the one-celled organisms evolved and crawled out of some primordial soup, then where did the soup come from? What made certain cells become alive? How did life just spontaneously begin in these little cells? Science, in all its glory, cannot duplicate this feat, they cannot bring cells to life, no matter what technology they develop.

Actually scientists sort of have done this. While not creating life as such they have reproduced the precursors necessary to life in a laboratory.

Basically, some guy (I don’t remember who but I’m looking for a cite) sealed up a big glass jar filled with what scientists believe was the primordial goo on early earth. He then zapped it with electricity to emulate lightning and basically let it sit and stew awhile. When the jar was opened and the contents examined they found amino-acids (basic building blocks of life) had been created.

So, while a tadpole didn’t spontaneously form in the jar scientists do have some evidence for the ability of a desolate planet to create its own life under certain circumstances.

[Spiritus_Mundi]

Spiritus and I agree on something.

Thus, the world is about to end

There you go again, making sweeping pronouncements without establishing logical support for your argument. You know I have to call you on it, right?
[sub]Oh, and Gaudere, maybe I should make it a 6-pack, based upon past performance.[/sub]

[Toby-T]

**

Toby-T wrote:
And if the one-celled organisms evolved and crawled out of some primordial soup, then where did the soup come from? What made certain cells become alive? How did life just spontaneously begin in these little cells? Science, in all its glory, cannot duplicate this feat, they cannot bring cells to life, no matter what technology they develop.

*Originally posted by Jeff_42 *
Actually scientists sort of have done this. While not creating life as such they have reproduced the precursors necessary to life in a laboratory…

So, while a tadpole didn’t spontaneously form in the jar scientists do have some evidence for the ability of a desolate planet to create its own life under certain circumstances. **

I wan’t aware that this procedure had been performed. This is very interesting to me. This still troubles me somewhat. Even if a “desolate planet” may have all the precursors necessary for life (and I agree that this is quite possible), That still does not in any way mean that the planet can “create its own life under certain circumstances”.

Having the precursors for life, and creating life are two amazingly different things. I can have all the ingredients needed to bake an awesome chocolate cake, but those ingredients alone are useless until they are combined properly. This may be a poor way to illustrate my point. I guess what I am trying to say is that even with perfect conditions, and all the necessary ingredients, I still can’t understand how life would begin spontaneously, where no life exists without a higher power.

Does this make any sense? I hope I managed to get my point across

[erislover]

Yeah, they mixed together the precursor junk(elements and simple compounds) and zapped it with electricity(to simulate lightning) and came up with some amino acids which are the precursors of more complicated things. Or was it simple protiens which are the precursors of amino acids? My biology escapes me presently.

Now, that is some strong stuff(either way) when you come to think about it, because the average planet has a lot going for it in terms of lightning, heat sources (hot springs and/or volcanoes), wind (required to mix some surface dust around and get things jumbled) plate techtonics, etc etc. A world close to earth would seem to create life easily, given a billion years or so.

Winning the lottery is a tough thing to “do,” but given enough tickets(time) it isn’t unreasonable. Also, given the apparent size of the universe coupled with its age, I’m still sort of baffled that we haven’t found life elsewhere. That there could have been life on Mars once, AFAIK, is still not a crazy idea. Some moon of Jupiter or Saturn too, where there’s liquid water? I haven’t read much about this for a few months since its so tough to go digging there

If we find any life at all on another planet, I think the bible has a lot more explaining to do.

Spiritus: sigh Leap of logic? Do I have to explain everything?

[Astroboy14]

To all who responded to my post:

All good points, and thanks for the input! But I just don’t buy the “just chance” explanation any more… the chances against it, seem to me, are just too huge…

I really am not comfortable concluding that there IS a God, but I can’t, logically, get around it!

Anyways, I’m off to work right now, so I’ll post later and answer some of the Q’s some people asked me…

[Lightkeeper]

*Originally posted by Astroboy14 *
-The Bible is the only religious book that describes a creation event that fits with the Big Bang.

Hey, I salute you! It does take guts to say something like this on the SDMB boards. Your arguments are well-taken, and some of them make sense (with the notable exception of the numerical ones!)

Granted, the whole argument is about cause vs. effect. Are we there because of chance, or are those “chances” there for our sake? Argue this as you may, you won’t reach a conclusion any time soon. Solution: Either believe or don’t believe.

I personally would like to give Einstein some credit for saying: “Everything in the universe must have simplified explanations, because God is neither capricious nor haphazard” (quoted from “The Mythical Man-Month”).

So a question that arises is: Are things really simple, or have we reduced it to the simplicity of our own perception?

The universe is governed by laws, and these laws are, thus far, the only things we know to be truly immutable. Changes in paradigms are not changes in the “laws of nature”, but rather changes in our own understanding of them.

The laws have existed since the Big Bang, and will exist till the end of the universe. Question that arises: Are these laws “made” by someone (i.e. God), or are they simply our own description of an otherwise chaotic reality?

One correction I wanted to make: Not sure if the Bible describes a creation event that fits with the Big Bang, but I think it’s not the ONLY religious book that does. Many Muslims today believe that the Big Bang, the expanding universe, creation of the earth from interstellar dust, and even evolution are in line with the Qur’an.

[Opus1]

To those who believe that the Bible describes a creation event which is in line with the Big Bang:
I made this post in another forum. I’m simply going to post a link, because I did a lot of text formatting that won’t carry over without a lot of work:
http://pub5.ezboard.com/fsabdiscussionboardconflictswithscienceandhistory.showMessage?topicID=126.topic

[hardcore]

Originally posted by Lightkeeper *
**
I personally would like to give Einstein some credit for saying: “Everything in the universe must have simplified explanations, because God is neither capricious nor haphazard” (quoted from “The Mythical Man-Month”).*

Hopefully you realize that Einstein did not believe in a traditional “God”. Instead he called the universe “God” – at best he was a pantheist.

[Surgoshan]

I’m a hard-core apatheist. God may or may not exist, and my opinion on the matter probably doesn’t matter too much to him if he does exist. He’s probably got bigger things on his mind.

I believe the man that performed that first experiment with the primordial goop and electricity was Steve Moore or Steve Miller or something like that. He put in a lot of carbon compounds, like carbon dioxide, a lot of nitrogen, some metals, some clay, stirred it up, and ran a bolt of electricity through it. In his own words, paraphrased, it turned from nearly colorless to bright red, with lots of solids and such precipitating, very dramatic. Others have tried to duplicate his experiment. They didn’t have the same drama to their results, but their results were similar. They formed a lot of nucleic acids, simple sugars, and amino acids (the one the precursor to RNA and DNA, the second to complex sugars, the other the building blocks of proteins, the three basic building blocks of life, I believe).

The Earth was, a few billion years ago, a big hot lump of clay with a lot of carbon and nitrogen gases swirling around, with oxygen locked up in both (CO2, NO2, N2O, N2O2, N2O4, CO, etc). The clay would’ve had a lot of metals and metal oxides and such in it, all wonderful catalysts.

That is, at least, the theory, I think.

As for the “chances just being too small without an organizer” and “the rules are just too convenient for us” and “the earth is perfectly situated”, I don’t buy those. When it comes right down to it, if circumstances didn’t favor us being here, we wouldn’t be here. As it is, since we’re here, we shouldn’t be too surprised that they DO favor us.

However, what I think may be a good argument for the existence of an organizing being, or at least some force to combat entropy, is, I believe, a force that tends to organize things. I think I read in James Gleick’s Chaos an experiment. Or maybe it was a book on AI or Artificial Life. Either way. A man set up a field of 100 by 100 lights (ten thousand lights, a very large number). He had a large number of cards that would determine the rules (from all the boolean operations) wether each light would be on or off, based on if its neighbor’s were on or off. This was in the day of punch card programming, so it was easy to randomize these rules. He shuffled the cards. In theory, one could see 2^10,000 combinations of lights on/off before the system would repeat. However, every time he did it, it went through about 14 or 15 iterations… Make of that what you will. Is there an anti-entropy? A god, perhaps? I dunno. I’m just interested in passing my finals, doing the same for another 2.5 years, getting married, moving to the suburbs, having 2.5 children and 1.3 dogs, and fading into blissful anonymity.

Yes I’ve been up all night and have had a bit of coffee. I should really get back to studying.

[Whack-a-Mole]

Toby-T wrote:
Having the precursors for life, and creating life are two amazingly different things. I can have all the ingredients needed to bake an awesome chocolate cake, but those ingredients alone are useless until they are combined properly. This may be a poor way to illustrate my point. I guess what I am trying to say is that even with perfect conditions, and all the necessary ingredients, I still can’t understand how life would begin spontaneously, where no life exists without a higher power.

Does this make any sense?

I hear what you’re saying. There is a leap from ingredients to finished product that hasn’t been shown here. However, to continue the analogy, we have the ingredients make themselves. I.e. For your chocolate cake analogy we have a planet that converted wheat into flour, sugar cane into processed sugar, chocolate from cocoa, created chickens and cows for eggs and milk, etc…

I agree you are still a step (an important step) away from your chocolate cake but it is still an important result. It shows that the planet can make stuff necessary for life from just some mud, rock, water and a few gasses. Throw all your ingredients into a pot the size of a planet and stir for a few hundred thousand (or million) years and somewhere, sometime, the ingredients might combine in a random fashion that produces a simple, self-replicating organism. After that the rest is a piece of ahem cake.

[Toby-T]

*Originally posted by hardcore *
**Hopefully you realize that Einstein did not believe in a traditional “God”. Instead he called the universe “God” – at best he was a pantheist. **

If Einstein called the universe “God”, then explain this famous Einstein quote:

**

“God does not play dice with the universe.”*

Hmmm, is he saying the universe does not plays dice with itself? Where did you get the info about Einstein’s belief in God.

(when looking for this quote I found several different wordings such as “I shall never believe that God plays dice with the world.” or “I cannot believe that God would play dice with cosmos.” All these wordings seem to point to Einstein defining God as more than just the universe.)

[Spiritus_Mundi]

But I just don’t buy the “just chance” explanation any more… the chances against it, seem to me, are just too huge…

Point taken. Of course, I never used the “just chance” explanation in refuting your positions. If I had, then you would have seen me ask questions like:
"How do you justify assigning a probability to the events in question?
After all, if you use “Big Numbers” to arrive at a fundamental conclusion about the nature of the Universe, you need to make sure those numbers are accurate.

More to the point, do you understand the difference between a situation like the “tailored Universe” and the “origins of life”. Big numbers are used to discuss both of them (almost always inaccurately–but that’s a separate issue), but in one case a probabilistic appraoch, if the probability space could be accurately established, might be meaningful. In the other, it can never be meaningful.

[Whack-a-Mole]

Toby-T wrote:
If Einstein called the universe “God”, then explain this famous Einstein quote:
quote:

“God does not play dice with the universe.”

Hmmm, is he saying the universe does not plays dice with itself? Where did you get the info about Einstein’s belief in God.

I’ll venture a guess but this comes from a somewhat faulty memory.

I believe Einstein’s statement came in response to some deep problems he had with Quantum Mechanics. Quantum Mechanics says that nothing can be known with 100% certainty (see the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle). So, you shoot a photon of light at a target with a barrier that has two slits in front of the target. Quantum Mechanics says you can’t know which slit the photon passes through (or, more interestingly, the photon passes through both slits simultaneously). Einstein liked a much more deterministic Universe where anything could be predicted or explained if you knew enough of initial conditions. Quantum Mechanics started showing that things might be this way, might be that way or might be both at the same time and you could never know which it was regardless of how much info you have to start with. To Einstein this was playing ‘dice’ with the Universe and he didn’t like it.

I do not think this quote alone gives any indication of Einstein’s actual belief in God. It was more an off-the-cuff remark on his part.

[Toby-T]

Thanks Jeff_42! I was unable to find the context of that quote. That cleared it up for me. I agree that it probably was just an “off the cuff” remark, if your memory serves you correctly on the context of the quote, and that explanation sounds reasonable to me.

[betenoir]

*Originally posted by Jeff_42 *
**
I’ll venture a guess but this comes from a somewhat faulty memory.

I believe Einstein’s statement came in response to some deep problems he had with Quantum Mechanics. Quantum Mechanics says that nothing can be known with 100% certainty (see the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle). So, you shoot a photon of light at a target with a barrier that has two slits in front of the target. Quantum Mechanics says you can’t know which slit the photon passes through (or, more interestingly, the photon passes through both slits simultaneously). Einstein liked a much more deterministic Universe where anything could be predicted or explained if you knew enough of initial conditions. Quantum Mechanics started showing that things might be this way, might be that way or might be both at the same time and you could never know which it was regardless of how much info you have to start with. To Einstein this was playing ‘dice’ with the Universe and he didn’t like it.

I do not think this quote alone gives any indication of Einstein’s actual belief in God. It was more an off-the-cuff remark on his part. **

That sounds about right to me. And, as far as i know, Einstein definatly rejected the idea of a personal God- Yaweh, a god who was interested in human affairs.

Which brings me to a question I have about this whole subject- if we prove the existence of God, from the first cause issue, from the “life is too complicated to happen by chance” issue (never mind the problems with those), say we do in fact prove the existence of some intelligence behind the creation and development of the universe- What, exactly, have we proven?

What can we say we know about the NATURE of that intelligence? Not much, I’d say.

We certainly can’t say if he (it?) takes any note of us. It does not follow that he (or it) cares what kind of sex we have or with whom or if we’re married when we do. Or that we kill, cheat or steal. It does not follow from mere proof of God that he will take us to heaven if we believe in him. Or that he even notices if we believe in him.

So…if we prove God exists, what HAVE we actually proven?

[erislover]

I would hazard a few guesses here.

1. We prove a god exists much in the same way we prove everything else exists, only we don’t notice sentience and in effect create a “god” force or a “god” reaction, etc…never knowing we are actually studying a creator.
2. The method of proof could entail religious means on a broad enough scale whereby it is generally accepted that it was Yaweh, Jehova, Shiva, Tiamat, whatever. Given the similarity of most religions, though, this one is likely to only increase the divide instead of rectify it.
3. We have proven what we knew all along: there’s stuff we just don’t understand

Actually, 2 is interesting in itself as an explanation for the existence of so many similar religions…there really WAS some “god” effect on man early on, and–like the infamous telephone game–it all got distorted in fact and in personal ideas pushed into the brew. Hmm. Neat.

[hardcore]

For those of you wondering who performed the “life from the primordial goop” or abiogenesis experiments in the 1950’s, it was, of course, Dr. Stanley L. Miller.

*Originally posted by Toby-T *

**“God does not play dice with the universe.”

Hmmm, is he saying the universe does not plays dice with itself? Where did you get the info about Einstein’s belief in God.**

Einstein indeed was speaking about his distaste with the role of “chance” in Quantum Mechanics when he spoke those famous words. To which Niels Bohr supposedly replied “Albert, stop telling God what to do!” Nevertheless, they were both speaking of the nature of the universe, not of some supernatural being.

I obtain my info about Einstein’s beliefs from pages such as this one. You will find many quotes there illustrating Einstein’s true religious convictions. For example:

I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals Himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.

Spinoza was the founder of pantheism.

It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.

I cannot conceive of a personal God who would directly influence the actions of individuals, or would directly sit in judgment on creatures of his own creation. I cannot do this in spite of the fact that mechanistic causality has, to a certain extent, been placed in doubt by modern science. My religiosity consists in a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit that reveals itself in the little that we, with our weak and transitory understanding, can comprehend of reality.

I see only with deep regret that God punishes so many of His children for their numerous stupidities, for which only He Himself can be held responsible; in my opinion, only His nonexistence could excuse Him.

I do not believe in immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it.

I hesitated to post these quotes, as they have been noted in this forum countless times before. But I do find them interesting and they do bear repeating. Hopefully, someone will find them useful.

As much as I admire Einstein, please note that I am in no way supporting the notion that anyone should base their personal religious beliefs on the thoughts of some famous scientist.

[Montag]

“I believ God exists, but when it comes right down to it I can’t point to anything factual. It’s just something I know in my heart.”

a muslim or a hindu might say they “feel in their heart that their religion is true”; how can you only accept christianity on the basis of feeling it in your heart.

“Science has a physical nature. God, to me, has a spiritual nature. The one doesn’t really prove the other, in my mind.”

How does god have a spiritual nature? Why does he “reveal” himself to some people and not others? Why is christianity only popular in the western-world? Wouldn’t “god” want his message spread throughout the whole world?

[betenoir]

*Originally posted by Montag *
**“I believ God exists, but when it comes right down to it I can’t point to anything factual. It’s just something I know in my heart.”

a muslim or a hindu might say they “feel in their heart that their religion is true”; how can you only accept christianity on the basis of feeling it in your heart.

“Science has a physical nature. God, to me, has a spiritual nature. The one doesn’t really prove the other, in my mind.”

How does god have a spiritual nature? Why does he “reveal” himself to some people and not others? Why is christianity only popular in the western-world? Wouldn’t “god” want his message spread throughout the whole world? **

Welcome. Good point(s).

[Astroboy14]

Montag, according to both the Bible and to modern Christian doctrine, God does want his word spread to all all parts of the world! That’s why there are (insert ridiculous number that I pulled out of my ass here) Christian missionaries annoying people in every country of the world today!

And where did Christianity begin? Not in the west! The Mid-east!! :rolleyes:

Although I can’t speak for all of Asia (and am too lazy to research it right now) here in Korea, the VAST majority of the people are either Buddhist or some variety of Christian, and IIRC the greater percentage are Christian. Maybe it’s just me, but this seems to indicate that belief in the Christian God is not only popular in the west…

Humorous anecdote: my 2nd week in Korea, there was a knock on my door early Sunday morning. I dragged my VERY hung-over ass out of bed and opened the door to find… Korean Jehova’s Witnesses!! No joke, they’re here, too! Did they speak English? No! Did I speak Korean? NO!! Would they go away despite the linguistic differences? NO!!! I had to be rather rude, and close the door in their faces… felt bad for a little while…

BTW: Welcome!