I like Sahtouris' take on human evolution, which includes a non-reductionist viewpoint.

Very nice post HyperspaceFool.

Life is only magnificent from the perspective of the living themselves. That we may find ourselves magnificent is no argument for the existence of any god-creator.

Where do you get that the universe is literally teeming with intelligence? Apart from us humans and certain higher animals, the universe is most certainly not teeming with intelligence. There is nothing, literally nothing that remotely suggests that the universe is teeming with intelligence. This is your own perspective and/or personal experience, and while I often share that feeling with you (especially on DMT and other hallucinogens), I know it's just a hunch. And I must also point out that extraordinary evidence is required for extraordinary claims, but I suspect you have none, so you're claim stands with no further foundation.




Well, if you define G*d to be the whole Universe, then sure I am not an atheist. But! What attributes do this God have? Now there is where atheism gets very vary. If anything supernatural, intelligent or unfounded enters in here, then atheism is again far removed from pandeism. But if this G*d we're talking about doesn't exhibit any attributes except just being the Universe, then it makes no sense to switch the word Universe with the word G*d. So surely, there must be more to this G*d, right?


Hmm.. Well, since different philosophers have different opinions on this I guess it is hard to reach a consensus. Nevertheless, since ontology deals with something to the effect of "how things actually are" it is, imo, an ontological fallacy to think that your subjective mystical experiences reveals the ultimate nature of reality. Why? Because our experiences can deliberately shown to be quite inaccurate or just plain wrong. Now, I will rightly admit that I am not extremely versed in ontology (perhaps you can enlighten me, Hyperspace Fool, as you seem to know more), so I will step down from ontology and down into more familiar grounds, saying that at least this assumption from anecdote is a fallacy of reason - and that it is. Anyway, let's continue the discussion with other parts of your post as well!



I see this to simply be the Universe itself, which by definition is everything that exists, but I wonder why call it G*d? What is the difference here? As I said earlier, I think there must be something more to this concept, for example something involving intelligence or something immaterial and supernatural. And that is not unproblematic, as discussed earlier, and as I will discuss further down.




The idea that the cosmos created intelligence and consciousness by accident out of primal chaos is, in fact, a very likely thing. Everything suggests that this is the case. The universe is not fine tuned for us, none of the fundamental laws or constants of physics is fine tuned and it is a fallacy to assert that this is the case. Indeed, the universe at large is not really complex at all. Most of the matter of the universe exhibits little structure and shows no sign of being intelligently designed. The very low-energy photons in the cosmic microwave background radiation, for example, are a billion times more plentiful than the atoms in galaxies. These particles are spread uniformly through space in one part in a hundred thousand, and they move around almost completely randomly. The little structure that is seen is understood as being the remnant of random fluctuations that took place in the very early universe and that helped trigger galaxy formation. At any rate, absence of design is evident.

Furthermore, that we see many things become more orderly and intelligent over time is not weird at all, but it only seems so because of our local position and limited perspective here on earth. The simplest way to see this is by the following analogy; suppose that whenever you clean your house, you empty the collected rubbish outside in your yard. As you continue to do this, the yard will eventually be filled with rubbish, i.e an increasing entropy. If you enlarge your yard by buying more space for example, you can continue to clean in your house and toss all the rubbish outside. In this way you are able to maintain a high degree of order in your house at the expense of increased disorder in the rest of the universe. Taking this analogy to the universe at large, the same applies. The universe can become more orderly in certain regions as the rubbish, or more correctly the disorder, is "thrown" out into the larger, ever-expanding space surrounding it. The total entropy in the universe indeed increases with time. However, the maximum possible entropy increases ever faster, leaving even more room for order to form.

The observed universe and the laws and parameters of physics look just like they would be expected to look in the absence of God and/or intelligent design.

I have to go now, sorry, so I can't comment some more about life and other things. I will wait to see responds to this post, and I'll see you all soon.

Peace.

I'm afraid you are clinging to a very anthropocentric view of intelligence. To quote Wikipedia... "Intelligence is most widely studied in humans, but has also been observed in animals and plants. Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines or the simulation of intelligence in machines."

The Latin root word means to pick out. The term is regularly applied to everything from the selectivity involved in Evolution to the striking features of consciousness displayed by organisms like cephalopods (who have no brain to speak of). Various cells within living organisms display a startling amount of intelligence as well. Take, for instance, macrophages seeking out pathogens to destroy them. Or the digestive system creating bile when fats enter the duodenum.

Think about the intelligence required for the Bee Orchid to have designed a sexual reproduction system that exactly mimics a bee. On some level the plant has to understand that bees carry its pollen, how bees think, and even what bees look like (without having any eyes).

As far as I am concerned, the fact that stars can create elements displays a kind of intelligence.

Needless to say, the very complexity of the cosmos and its very subtle and arbitrary laws tuned to a precision where if a single force like gravity was off by a tiny fraction of a quintillionth, the Universe could never have even formed... displays some kind of intelligence.

Again, we are not talking about Humans or our ridiculous IQ tests.


Actually not. I didn't invent Pandeism, and don't subscribe to it myself, but it was a favorite philosophical take of Age of Enlightenment types (like Ben Franklin) who saw divinity in science and the Universe around them without need for anything metaphysical, miraculous, or theistic. This is why pandeism is different from pantheism. Deists in general tend to have remarkably secular views.

I'm fairly sure I was not claiming anything about being able to reveal the "ultimate" nature of reality. I have no idea if such a thing is possible, because as I described in my post above... no matter how large your conception becomes, it will always be something (a subset of everything). You could have vast and truly cosmic understanding and still be scratching the surface of a single grain of sand in an infinite sea of universes.

The only saving grace in all of this is that our reality appears to be fractal and self-similar... holographic even. Thus, it is conceivable to grasp many things about the structure from any part you happen to look at, no matter how small. It is something like the idea that we can grasp quite a bit about what the conditions on Titan might be like from a single infra-red photograph.

Our experiences can certainly be wrong, but they are still valid pieces of evidence as long as they are understood to be impressions of a human consciousness made in concert with the rather limited human perceptual apparatus.

I like to think of it as the Omniverse. Humans in our time are recognizing that the Universe might be only one out a potentially infinite number. Our best explanation of the material universe at the moment (string theory) basically insists that there be other Universes which are likely to have completely different laws of nature from this one. It also paints a picture of a 9-11 dimensional matrix where temporality is only the 4th dimension.

This might not match the G*d that most religious folks envision... but IMHO it far surpasses it. And like I said before, this isn't necessarily about what archaic humans thought. I, personally see quite a bit of immaterial and supernatural elements to this thing, but it is not necessary to embrace or believe in such things to recognize that this "everything" when viewed holistically doesn't match the unconscious, dumb, universe as an accident of material model. As I said before, Deists tend to be notoriously un-mystical.

These are your opinions. You are, of course, entitled to them... but someone as rational as yourself must see that there is no more evidence to support this conjecture than there is to support the opposite or something entirely else. Plenty of scientists are gravitating towards the "holographic universe" model because it explains more than the Newtonian "billiard balls" on a slightly warped cloth idea. At any rate, I propose that background microwave radiation being seemingly random says nothing about the very complex structures we do see being absent of design. Does the seeming random jumble of earth in an apple orchard when viewed too closely prove an absence of design when we know that in this sea of randomly placed soil particles are rows of neat little apple trees?

Hundreds of billions of galaxies each with hundreds of billions of stars is a design of epic proportions.


I like this analogy. It is filled with systems and structures that have to have been created. Who would build a house? Rubbish doesn't turn into a house or throw itself out.


This is dependent on how far you want to go back or forward in time. I appreciate that if you restrict yourself to observed space-time and define G*d as some magical bearded dude, what you say is a rather rational stance to take. However, physics has no answer for why there is any matter at all, what caused it to inflate, or even the mechanism of such a (mis-labeled) "big bang." The leading contender for an answer to this is that another universe bubble in the multiverse collided with this one. This just pushes the big questions further away.

I will take your conclusion and rephrase it to my conceiving...

The observed universe and the laws and parameters of physics look just like they could be expected to look if they were put in place and directed by a grand cosmic G*d.

All the best amigo.
HF

I forgot this part in my massive wall of a response.

heheheh

I will just say that while I do know a good bit about ontology and metaphysics (as philosophical branches)... and I actually love the word ontological... I find that ontology adds very little to a discussion of theology, divinity, or any explorations along those lines.

It is rather neutered in the face of things we term infinite, eternal, transcendental etc. In the context of the current discussion, it winds up only being used to affirm things that are fairly obvious, or as a fancy adjective to describe other words being used. As such, I will refrain from dragging it into this discussion unless it becomes relevant in some unforeseen way.

;-)

easyrider??? My new user name? Well polytrip... whatever you're smoking, I'd like a taste.

But seriously, my point was not about the relativity of the human concept of said "magnificence". I agree that human conceptualization is ONLY relative to the human experience. But then again, this is what we are, the body of our conceptual regalia. Or is it? What are we each, beneath this layer of learned behavioral cognition?

Or like the old Zen koan challenges, "What did your original face look like, before your birth?" Whe obviously, we had no faces without physical bodies to aptly wear them.
Let me put it another way, who can observe the Cosmos overhead or the intricate beauty of a fern in the forest... and not see this as magnificent? Be it randomly created magnificence or Divinely created magnificence, what's in a name?

"A transcendental interphase of observer & Omnipresent observation, by any other name, would smell as sweet."

It's plain for all to see, that we each view things from a slightly different angle. Yet we do agree on one point and that is that the existence of God cannot be explained or proven to exist or NOT to exist, through reason, logical deduction or rationality.

Isn't it time to lay aside the tired old argument, that if the Sacred dimension cannot be proven through reason and procedural analysis or cannot be reproduced objectively for an across-the-board consensus, one cannot say it exists at all?

I honestly admit my relative perspective is a subjective interpretation. I therefore theorize, based on my own direct experience, what could be labeled as God does indeed exist, in lucidly "obvious" ways, for those who have witnessed it's sublime and magnificent presence.

To see the Sacred is to know it instinctively, mentally and emotionally. Through such knowledge... it is revealed as immanent. When our mortal mind pauses in it's mental dialog, just long enough, the soul revels in such intricately intelligent beauty, thus provoking the most in awed sensation of self-dissolving bliss. To merge with it's essence is indescribably euphoric and most enlightening, in-and-of itself. These are some of my relative observations and definitions of the nature of the Divine.

The alternate camp, in counterpoint to the rational challenge for clinical proof, suggests that the Unified Field of Interconnection (AKA Divinity) can be perceived through other means. If this hypothesis is still unclear, might I suggest discussing the specificity of these means towards such an end? The intrinsic nuts and bolts of transcendental thought? :idea:

It's not just a tug of war we are involved with here, it is a chance to actually bring some point-blank, specific methodological ideas forward and examine them with an acute degree of sufficiency. And with any hope, distinguish which avenues of thought are... and are not, IMO, useful approaches when choosing to go into an immersion within the Godhead.

BTW, just for the giggles of poking fun at myself, my wife used to cal me "uneasy rider", back when I had my 1971 Triumph Bonneville - 750cc motorcycle. It was too big a bike for one of my height, being just 5'8" tall, and not a good choice for winding, mountainous roadways. Dirt bike country. I spilled it 3 times, before I decided to pass it on to someone else's care.

One thing that does move me slightly in the direction of creationism is that a single cell is so complex!

http://www.answersingene...0/01/10/the-amazing-cell

Something must have designed this?

I suppose though, these cells were probably planted here on earth by a cosmic wind or intelligent alien life form so it doesnt really prove that a god created them.

To add to HF's comment above, Terence McKenna talked about nature's intelligence in his lectures.

During a Q&A, a listener once asked Terence if he had ever witnessed any miracles. Terence describes this scenario from when he was on his Hawaiian island home involving a miracle of plant intelligence.

There was a vine that Terence was growing which ended up using a dead tree to prop itself up with. As this vine continued to grow, Terence noticed there was a certain branch that the vine simply would not grow on. He even coexed it out onto the branch, trying to get it to continue to grow but no matter how many times he would do this the plant ignored the tree limb. One day when Terence was in his garden, the dead tree limb broke off and fell suddenly and he said he was struck by an epiphany: the vine had somehow known that the tree branch would not be able to support its growth. How it knew this Terence had only theories (which he never suffered a lack of), but he claimed that was witnessing a miracle of nature to him.

Hyperspace Fool:

I choose not to chop up your post, because it would take so much space, but I will address your main points nevertheless. I hope you bear with me and don't mind me being, shall I say, "sloppy"? =)

I wasn't really talking about humans or our ridiculous IQ tests me neither. So we're on the same wavelength there, thus I do not think that I am clinging to a very anthropocentric view of intelligence.

Now, there are certainly other organisms on earth that seem to exhibit some type of intelligence, and as we investigate more we often find that it applies to more organisms as well. I can't refute this, nor do I doubt it. These are the facts, more or less. Before I move on, I must get back to some old arguments used in my last post; namely the fact that most of the observable universe is not at all complex, exhibits little structure and certainly not intelligence. We are an infinitesimal small part of the observable universe my friend, and just because there is some degree of complexity (even remarkably so) and intelligence here on earth - probably elsewhere too, but it's still such an infinitesimal part - it doesn't follow that the rest of the universe exhibits these properties. The matter of fact is that it don't, and that is not an opinion, but a matter of fact.

There is an incredible waste of matter (not to say space and time) in our universe. The hundred billions of galaxies, each with on the order of a hundred billion stars, are composed of atomic matter. The portions that are luminous constitutes just one-half of one percent of all the mass in the universe. Another 3.5 percent of the matter in galaxies are of the same atomic matter, only nonluminous. Just 2 percent of atomic matter is composed of heavier elements than helium. One half of one percent of this again is composed of carbon, the essential component of life. That is 0.0002 percent of the mass of the universe. Yet we are supposed to think that there is intelligent design, the universe is teeming with intelligence and what not? Come on! 96 percent of the universe is not even composed of the matter of life and the little complexity we see, 70 percent of this being dark energy and 26 percent dark matter. This remains unknown in nature indeed, but they possess no known miraculous or complex properties. Waste of energy it is too; for example of all the energy emitted by the sun, only two photons in a billion are used to warm earth – the rest radiates uselessly out in space.

Any huge, random universe (as our universe is according to quantum mechanics), regardless of its properties, will naturally develop at least a few tiny pockets of complexity within a sea of chaos, as we see in our universe. There is nothing to suggest, and there is no need to insert, some kind of G*d and intelligent design to account for these deviations as are consistent with chance. Furthermore, we have things like Self-Organization to account for complexity.

Next is the fact that even though a number of organisms show certain traits of intelligent behaviour, it does not imply that they are intelligently designed. The theory of evolution quite clearly demonstrates how complex lifeforms, such as ourselves, over great lengths of time evolve by a combination of random mutation and natural selection. Living things not only develop without the need for the intervention of intelligent design by some G*d, but also provide ample evidence for lack of such an intervention or proposed mechanism.

Organisms accumulate changes that enable them to survive and have progeny that maintain those features. If there were an intelligent force behind these purely materialistic and natural mechanisms, then why do we find so much poor design? Our spine and our knees are adopted to a life on four legs, and this gives us lots of problems we don't find elsewhere in animals that have remained on all their fours. We have a tail bone that doesn't do us much good. We have barely used muscles and nerves in our bodies. While most animals and plants synthesize their own vitamin C, we do not synthesize it on our own because the gene for this enzyme is defective, and lack of vitamin C can ultimately lead to death. The structure of our eyes is not ideal, there is a prevalence of congenital diseases and genetic disorders for humans and the existence of the pharynx leads to the drastic increase in risk of choking. Our bones lose minerals after the age of thirty, making them susceptible to fracture and osteoporosis. Our rib cage doesn’t fully enclose and protect most internal organs. Our leg veins become enlarged and twisted, leading to varicose veins. The examples of poor design are many, and it would be boring to list them all up. Nevertheless, they put intelligent design in a very dim light, while they are perfectly conceived of through random mutations and natural selection.

Evolution has no direction and no final goals. It is blind selection all the way. It is not intelligent, and its "design" can often be very poor. It is not at all perfect, and through engineering we can adopt in a lot higher degree and a lot faster than what evolution is able to.

Now, let's turn our attention again to the constants and parameters of physics not being fine-tuned in any way. You say this is my opinion, but it is not. This comes from physics, and we'll examine some of it.
First of all we can consider the fact that modern cosmology suggests that we are, and you’ve said this yourself, a universe within a multiverse (I love this btw). The huge number of solutions for the crazy equations in string theory also suggests the existence of many universes with different parameters than our own. This implies a very neat solution to the whole problem of fine-tuning, because if we accept this picture then we just happen to live in a universe that is suited for our kind of life and what we see here. So the universe is not fine-tuned for us, we are fine-tuned for the universe.

However, we need not rely on this to solve the problem of fine-tuning, we can just look at our own universe, as I have done much already. We’ll continue along this path, and take a look at the relative strengths of gravity and electromagnetism. If these two forces were anywhere near being equal to eachother, the universe would collapse in on itself before stars and any life could come to the scene.
Let us denote N as the ratio between the two respective forces, and calculate them. We will call the electric force Fe and the gravitational force Fg. As you may know, the force of gravity is inverse proportional to the squared distance between two masses and likewise the electric force is inverse proportional to the squared distance between two charges. Since they both are inverse square forces like this, the distance will cancel out. We get: N = Fe/Fg = (kq1q2/r^2)/(Gm1m2/r^2) = kq1q2/Gm1m2. Here k is the Coulombs constant and G is the gravitational constant, m denotes the respective masses of two objects and q denotes the charges. If we choose the force then, between an electron and a proton we will have upon plugging in the numbers N = 10^39.

Again, if the gravitational force between these elementary particles were not much smaller than the electric force, the universe would collapse in on itself. Therefore it is often argued that this ratio N above is highly improbable and must have been fine-tuned. Note that N is not a universal number, because it depends upon the total arbitrary mass and charge of the bodies you use in the calculation. For the chosen proton and electron we get the famous N = 10^39, but why assume these two particles in defining this ratio? The proton is not even fundamental, as it consists of quarks. If we were for example to choose two unit charges of equal mass 1.85 x 10^-8 kg we would get N=1, thus the forces are equal! There is just no universal way we can describe the strength of gravity, and the N we chose for our example is not the relative strengths of these two forces in all cases. In short, the strength of the gravity is an arbitrary number and can’t possibly be fine-tuned and doesn’t suggest any intelligent-design.
The fundamental constants that we use in physics and that we have used in the calculations above are not universal either, because they depend totally upon the system of units being used, and thus they are arbitrary. There is simply no fine-tuning going on here.

I could go on like this and show to you, through physics and not opinion, that there is no fine-tuning in our universe.

Fine-tuning is a fallacy, and comes largely from poor understanding of physics and science in general. Fine-tuning and intelligent design are not at all consistent with data, thus it is a very poor model of our universe. You should read "The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning" by physicist Victor J. Stenger for more reference. In this book, he goes in depth and analyze data and theory to see if they are consistent with such a model that you propose. He finds, among most of the physics community, that it is not.

As a last note, as I have said n-times here on the forum, attacking physics for not having all the answers to questions yet doesn't give any reason to fall into varieties of the God of the gaps argument.

Peace HF, I appreciate our discussions
Citta out (for now)

Hey Citta.

Nothing you said above is a proof against intelligent design or fine tuning per se. I think you are missing the point that all of what you describe meets the definition of intelligence. Self-Organization is one of the key elements of most discussions of what intelligence is or entails. The fact that the Universe displays this is a mark of intelligence not an argument against it.

Despite what you have said, it seems that you choose not to recognize intelligence that doesn't resemble our own in at least some rather overt ways. My point was rather that every little thing (including your vaunted random elements) displays some remarkable design and could be considered a type of intelligence. The term, remember, only implies some kind of ability to pick out or discern. The example I used before of the Bee Orchid is a perfect example.

The fact that most of the Universe is not composed of things that would support human life is not an indication that intelligence and/or life are somehow as rare as you are assuming. There have been reports of gas clouds and nebulae acting in ways that indicate that they are living systems with some intelligence. Considering that dark matter is still an unproven theory, that science still has no explanation for consciousness, and that it would be rather presumptuous for us to demand that life, consciousness or intelligence match our preconceived notions... I think you are overshooting the current understanding of science and physics by a long shot.

It seems to me that the current state of physics and popular opinion is agnostic on the origins of the cosmos as well as what the structures we can observe mean in terms of intelligence and consciousness. Many atheists project their wishes onto that data set, but the data doesn't back up atheism any more than it backs up theism, deism, taoism, or animism.

Whether or not our Universe is fine tuned because we exist in the one Universe we could exist in or not is kind of a red herring. The fact is that we exist, and in a system that (despite what you insist to the contrary) is remarkably complex. Your own example of the gravitational and electric forces actually speaks to this. And, the idea that the human body is not perfect, or that our ability to improve on nature with our creativity speaks against design is a rather large leap IMHO. The Bible (whatever you think of that book) clearly states that we were made in G*d's image with free-will. The place that is supposed to be perfect is generally known as heaven.

;-)

The fact that we are not familiar enough with things outside our solar system to recognize their salient intelligent features per se is only natural. We could be witnessing sapient extra-terrestrial intelligence all the time without being able to recognize it. I am fairly sure that mice who live next to a nuclear power plant have little concept of what they are looking at either.

We barely understand the planet that we live on, and are still baffled by things like Saturn's moon Iapetus. To me, the idea that a handful of minerals and a meager volume of water could organize itself into a body... human or otherwise, speaks loudly against dumb evolution. In fact, the very concept of natural selection is a kind of intelligence. The fact that cells can read a couple books (DNA & RNA) and learn from this data how to construct things of such remarkable complexity is miraculous. If you don't think so... it is your opinion. But you can not insist that the facts show this.

I think we should probably move this discussion over to this thread https://www.dmt-nexus.me...aspx?g=posts&t=28319 because we are primarily discussing variations on pantheism and how they relate to the scientific view of the universe. We have kind of hijacked this thread which was supposed to be about the various spiritual leanings of the Nexus, and not a forum for trying to refute those beliefs. The debate might even be better suited for a subforum not reserved for people who were annoyed with this kind of debate to begin with and just want to get into the lovey dovey stuff without any defense whatsoever.

This is, after all the SPIRITUALITY & MYSTICISM sub forum where people were supposed to be able to talk about these things without being challenged to constantly back up their spiritual beliefs with supposedly objective scientific fact. Contrary to your last point above, I am not attacking physics or any branch of science. I practice these things daily and at a relatively high level. I just have had experiences that show me viscerally that our existence is not purely material... if it is even material at all. After all, I have dreams that are more realistic and material than this waking life every single night.

(Note: Personally, I like an intellectual debate. The record is pretty clear on that point. And, you and I have crossed foils before... to the delight of some and the exasperation of others. ;-))

This has sparked an interesting thought for me (maybe it would be a bit arrogant to call a thought of myself interesting, but then again, i´m most likely not the first person to have had this thought):

Logic is the language with wich we describe the world as given to us. Logic enables us to know certain things with great certainty, about the reality we´re in, seen from our perspective. The most obvious example of this would ofcourse be descartes famous 'cogito'.

Yet logic fails to describe anything that could have been taking place prior to the creation of this reality, anything that would fall outside of it...like jamie says.

Therefore it is impossible to speak of anything that would lie behind our known reality, in a logical manner. It is impossible to speak logically about the existence of a god.

Therefore it is also impossible to speak logically about even the possible existence of a god. Because not only would 'god' itself be a phenomenon we couldn´t speak of logically, but also the possibility of the existence of a god would be something we couldn´t speak of in a logical manner.

Therefore it would also be impossible to ask a question like: 'do you believe in god ?', or 'what happened prior to the creation of the universe?'. In the sense that it are not a logical questions.

And this would inevitably lead to an infinite regression where eventually, you cannot ask any logical question anymore.

And this line of LOGICAL thinking would bring us straight to those 'illogical' budhist koans quoted here within this thread, that where meant to demonstrate that you cannot experience reality or even have a glimpse of reality...with the use of thinking.

if you want to have any chance of experiencing reality, of getting a glimpse of it, you should maybe try to stop thinking about it.

because even these words are illogical.

As usual, me and Hyperspace Fool tend to hijack threads with our rather long and sophisticated debates. I will take your wish and move our discussion over to the other thread you linked to, Hyperspace Fool (I'll answer it sometime today or tomorrow).

I am sorry if anyone found this debate to stop them from posting on topic. May the thread continue its natural flow without me and Hyperspace Fool going off on our tangents. Catch you on the flip side, HF

Citta out.

perhaps we should have a citta vs hsf thread for you two to battle it out
either way it makes for an interesting read...