Yeah.
I'm in that kind of mood.
I finally got to finish Richard Dawkins The God Delusion and I'm about to start on The Blind Watchmaker. As I mentioned in another post I was actually disappointed in one of Dawkins' arguments because I saw the religionist's "bailout position" all too clearly and that left us right back where we started. Some explanation is in order.
About 6 years ago I was observing a rather primitive drop forge operation at the company I sold for. There was a patented (yeah, right) process that the product went through to produce some desirable results in the market...hardness and strength of steel especially...and it hit me.
The company didn't "invent" the process, they "discovered" the process. The process and the end results were always there..at least the metallurgy, physics and chemistry of it was, and the company just "discovered it". They didn't invent the scientific laws that they applied. Those laws have ALWAYS been there.
So I started to think it over a bit more and came to the conclusion that at the beginning of science there was "design".....no....not the "old man in the sky" but "design"...something...something undefinable.
And that's where Dawkins and I break down. He cites another work which posits that the whole of the universe is dependent on only six numbers and makes a pretty good case for it. He says that in order for all life to exist all God had to do was "tweak" those six knobs until he hit just the right combination...another version of the "Goldilocks Zone" as he described it elsewhere.
What I'm confused about is WHERE DID THE SIX KNOBS COME FROM? He argues quite effectively that if you take the position that "God created everything", then you must also ask, "Who created God?"
cue the "bailout position":
There. End of the question....or maybe not.
I did a lot of reading on String Theory when it was a hot topic in the scientific community and have since read several more books on quantum theory. I suspect that I am one of those poor, deluded souls who believes that if I take something apart, disassemble it, enough and look at the individual pieces, then it will all make sense to me and I will, when I can't dissemble it any more, know the truth. What modern quantum physics is telling us is that we won't EVER know the truth because of the nature of subatomic particles and the famous Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. (You can determine mass or speed but not both) Even stranger is that the very act of observing certain particles alters their behavior and, in keeping with what Einstein called "weirdness at a distance", the alteration takes place whether the observation takes place in the same room or across the galaxy.
If all that wasn't strange enough, then there is the "extra dimensions" aspect of String theory to consider. The calculations for string theory work best with eleven (?) different dimensions.
Dimensions....you know like x-axis, y-axis, time, z-axis....and beyond that?
Therein lies my own personal cop-out on this subject. We can't think in anything beyond four dimensions. We can locate our place in time but nothing farther than that. Not only can we not see the other dimensions, we can't even IMAGINE what those other dimensions are because it isn't wired into our delicate human nervous system'. Dawkins sites another physicist who stated that the universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than WE CAN IMAGINE.
That's where the answer to the God or No God question must lie.
Beyond what we can imagine is either a "god" or a "science" of incredible beauty and symmetry
Religion...or perhaps more appropriately, RELIGIOUSITY is beyond this question. It is the stuff that has the potention of taking us back, as Len, The Existentialist Cowboy, once said, to the dark ages. Until either of the two major political parties quits pandering to religious bigots who control their respective flocks with fear and shame, we won't escape the danger of another dark age.
I'm in that kind of mood.
I finally got to finish Richard Dawkins The God Delusion and I'm about to start on The Blind Watchmaker. As I mentioned in another post I was actually disappointed in one of Dawkins' arguments because I saw the religionist's "bailout position" all too clearly and that left us right back where we started. Some explanation is in order.
About 6 years ago I was observing a rather primitive drop forge operation at the company I sold for. There was a patented (yeah, right) process that the product went through to produce some desirable results in the market...hardness and strength of steel especially...and it hit me.
The company didn't "invent" the process, they "discovered" the process. The process and the end results were always there..at least the metallurgy, physics and chemistry of it was, and the company just "discovered it". They didn't invent the scientific laws that they applied. Those laws have ALWAYS been there.
So I started to think it over a bit more and came to the conclusion that at the beginning of science there was "design".....no....not the "old man in the sky" but "design"...something...something undefinable.
And that's where Dawkins and I break down. He cites another work which posits that the whole of the universe is dependent on only six numbers and makes a pretty good case for it. He says that in order for all life to exist all God had to do was "tweak" those six knobs until he hit just the right combination...another version of the "Goldilocks Zone" as he described it elsewhere.
What I'm confused about is WHERE DID THE SIX KNOBS COME FROM? He argues quite effectively that if you take the position that "God created everything", then you must also ask, "Who created God?"
cue the "bailout position":
God always was and God always is.
There. End of the question....or maybe not.
I did a lot of reading on String Theory when it was a hot topic in the scientific community and have since read several more books on quantum theory. I suspect that I am one of those poor, deluded souls who believes that if I take something apart, disassemble it, enough and look at the individual pieces, then it will all make sense to me and I will, when I can't dissemble it any more, know the truth. What modern quantum physics is telling us is that we won't EVER know the truth because of the nature of subatomic particles and the famous Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. (You can determine mass or speed but not both) Even stranger is that the very act of observing certain particles alters their behavior and, in keeping with what Einstein called "weirdness at a distance", the alteration takes place whether the observation takes place in the same room or across the galaxy.
If all that wasn't strange enough, then there is the "extra dimensions" aspect of String theory to consider. The calculations for string theory work best with eleven (?) different dimensions.
Dimensions....you know like x-axis, y-axis, time, z-axis....and beyond that?
Therein lies my own personal cop-out on this subject. We can't think in anything beyond four dimensions. We can locate our place in time but nothing farther than that. Not only can we not see the other dimensions, we can't even IMAGINE what those other dimensions are because it isn't wired into our delicate human nervous system'. Dawkins sites another physicist who stated that the universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than WE CAN IMAGINE.
That's where the answer to the God or No God question must lie.
Beyond what we can imagine is either a "god" or a "science" of incredible beauty and symmetry
Religion...or perhaps more appropriately, RELIGIOUSITY is beyond this question. It is the stuff that has the potention of taking us back, as Len, The Existentialist Cowboy, once said, to the dark ages. Until either of the two major political parties quits pandering to religious bigots who control their respective flocks with fear and shame, we won't escape the danger of another dark age.
