Ship of Fools: Our galaxy has 200,000,000,000 stars & the universe has more galaxies than this

Thread: Our galaxy has 200,000,000,000 stars & the universe has more galaxies than this Board: Oblivion / Ship of Fools.

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Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on :

In roughly estimated numbers.

What can religion, Christianity, tell us about the wider universe and our place? I think the explanation that it means that humanity is really really special is a way of avoiding the implication that we are actually not so much a big part of the whole creation.

I think the knowledge of really how insignificant we are within the universe must tell us that our conceptions of God, of our place in creation, how special or not we are, are so far, at best, interim with our holy books, traditions and history, and we now require extensive additional thought and understanding.

I have limited ideas of where to start, but consider that we are, on earth, in a sort of not-so-lovely Eden, and our knowledge about the universe and our cosmic insignificance is serving to get us kicked out of this one psychologically. Because we really have, now, bitten the fruit. And we are greedily eating the entire tree, and the whole orchard, while we also find uses for the wood of the tree, and decide to build something else where the tree once stood. We know too much to not add to our mythology, wisdom literature and narrative about who we are.

Can we possibly write a narrative, a story, an explanation, that will serve us now? What does this story need?

[ 01. March 2015, 03:48: Message edited by: no prophet's flag is set so... ]

Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :

"...people who believed in a flat earth with the stars only a mile or two away."

[He was referring to medieval theologians. I handed him Ptolemy's Almagest, the standard astronomical handbook used throughout the Middle Ages. He read from it...]

"The earth, in relation to the distance of the fixed stars, has no appreciable size and must be treated as a mathematical point."

"Did they really know that then?" said my friend.

[I replied,]

"People usually think the problem is how to reconcile what we now know about the size of the universe with our traditional ideas of religion.... The enormous size of the universe and the insignificance of the earth were known for centuries, and no one ever dreamed that they had any bearing on the religious question."

--CS Lewis, "Religion and Science," in God in the Dock

Posted by ChastMastr (# 716) on :

Mousethief and Jack (Clive) speak for me.

Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on :

That is actually not correct. They thought the Milky Way was it until into 19th century. They also held that the universe was a mere 200 million years old. The additional knowledge does ask us to do something. I have read about the consilience between religion and science. I find myself generally annoyed with religious people who don't know science, and science people who don't know religion. Because neither know what they don't know. I am hoping we can move beyond the usual responses.

And Lewis is incorrect on this, no matter how much I respect him, but people specifically do have the problem he says they do not.

[ 01. March 2015, 04:28: Message edited by: no prophet's flag is set so... ]

Posted by Ikkyu (# 15207) on :

quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
"...people who believed in a flat earth with the stars only a mile or two away."

[He was referring to medieval theologians. I handed him Ptolemy's Almagest, the standard astronomical handbook used throughout the Middle Ages. He read from it...]

"The earth, in relation to the distance of the fixed stars, has no appreciable size and must be treated as a mathematical point."

"Did they really know that then?" said my friend.

[I replied,]

"People usually think the problem is how to reconcile what we now know about the size of the universe with our traditional ideas of religion.... The enormous size of the universe and the insignificance of the earth were known for centuries, and no one ever dreamed that they had any bearing on the religious question."

--CS Lewis, "Religion and Science," in God in the Dock

That CS Lewis quote sounds to me like "no one ever dreamed that physical reality has anything to do with religion"
Well that only works if religion has no bearing on the real world.

Posted by Oscar the Grouch (# 1916) on :

One question I have is about intelligent life. I can quite comprehend that there are many other planets where life exists. But how likely is it that intelligent life (similar to human intelligence) will come into being? 1 in 100? 1 in 1000? 1 in 1,000,000?

It seems to me that there is no guarantee that intelligent life will always evolve where life exists. Perhaps the chances of encountering other intelligent life forms are really small.

Posted by Golden Key (# 1468) on :

Perhaps every bit of Creation is special?

And I do mean every bit, everywhere, even things we normally consider inanimate. We're made up of all sorts of smaller things. Maybe *we're* smaller things that make up something else?

Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on :

Oscar, welcome to the Fermi paradox.

This addresses the question of why, given a huge universe with lots of potentially habitable planets, we haven't met anyone yet.

Particularly annoying is the thought that even if we did spot evidence, the logistics of making contact are just beyond difficult. Consider the problems Mars One is looking at and scale them up, well, almost infinitely.

As to the OP, well, I'm another CS Lewis fan. I think there has historically been more cosmological awareness than people give our ancestors credit for, that there is room, à la Perelandra, in God's universe for other intelligent life, and that (also à la Perelandra), room even for other Eden-type narratives and whole realms of existence of which we are ignorant, even if I suspect that not to be the case.

On the issue of scale, it just points up the words of the Psalm "what is man, that you are mindful of him?"

Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
That is actually not correct. They thought the Milky Way was it until into 19th century. They also held that the universe was a mere 200 million years old. The additional knowledge does ask us to do something.

The timespan issue is, by order of magnitude, more than half way there. (Two hundred million squared is forty thousand billion.) There's a greater disparity in the size. Still, I think in each case, the numbers are so huge as to make the differences irrelevant for the purposes of imagination.

The significant difference between Ptolemaic cosmology and modern cosmology, which Lewis comments on elsewhere, is that Ptolemaic cosmology has an absolute down - towards earth.

Posted by Yorick (# 12169) on :

I’m very interested in a proper discussion of the issues raised in the OP. I have often seen the problem of our cosmic insignificance dismissed by theists as though it doesn’t matter, or, worse, with a sort of Zaphodian immunity to the Total Perspective Vortex- ‘we Children of God are so staggeringly insignificant in the Grand Scheme of Things that we MUST be really really special, for He made us in His image, amen!”

As well as our planet and even its vast galaxy being relatively physically teeny, life itself, which everyone keeps going on about, is ever so small temporally. Our intelligence has only just emerged, after a very long time during which not much happened (at the point of 11:54pm on 31 December on the cosmic calendar, with the Big Bang happening on 1 Jan). But that’s nothing compared to the mid boggling brevity of ALL life appearing and disappearing in the universe as a whole- life in all its imaginable alien forms.

The universe is very old in human terms, but 13.8 billion years is stupendously, staggeringly, immensely young in terms of its own lifetime, even at the lowest estimates of that. Brian Cox illustrated it thus: "As a fraction of the lifespan of the universe … life, as we know it, is only possible for one thousandth of a billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billionth of a percent.”

What does this mean? Well, for a start, it makes my tax bill seem much less vexing. It also implies that our tendency to imagine ourselves as in some way important or special or Chosen or Loved or whatever is just plain daft. We’re less than almost nothing.

It also makes me contemplate the nature of an alleged deity that would create a universe which is so overwhelmingly void of life. I mean, what do you think your your imaginary god will do for all those trillions and trillions and trillions of massively prolonged epochs after the last black holes have evaporated and in which photons, neutrinos, electrons, and positrons will fly about meaninglessly from place to place, hardly ever encountering each other?

Posted by orfeo (# 13878) on :

So we're collectively a small piece of the cosmic ballet. And? Is that really any different to the proposition that each of us, as an individual, is just one person out of billions, and probably a not very important individual at that?

Christianity has been perfectly capable of existing in a form that says to every little person on the planet, "you matter". We say that God is prepared to talk to and listen to each and every person.

I don't see why that would change when talking about us just being one planet out of billions of populated ones. Either you believe that God can drill down through all that, or you don't. If you believe God knows your name out of all the billions on Earth, then expanding into the wider universe isn't changing much.

[ 01. March 2015, 07:12: Message edited by: orfeo ]

Posted by quetzalcoatl (# 16740) on :

Yes, I don't buy the insignificance argument; to make it, you have already stepped back (intellectually), from the human subject. So, it's a kind of tautology - oh look, if I look from far away, things look far away!

Posted by Yorick (# 12169) on :

I think the problem here is one of scale. It’s very hard, nay, impossible, for us to get our heads round the reality of our insignificance, but if we could I think we'd take it much more seriously.

But cognitive obstacles aside, let's try to run with this for a moment. Let’s imagine the god-created universe as a three-hour epic movie. In this movie, ANY possible form of life ANYWHERE can only exist for a single nanosecond, and human life on Earth for a gazillionth of that nanosecond. Yes, the tiny little bit where stuff happens in this film is wonderful, but what does its brevity tell us about the movie itself, and its screenwriter?

It tells me we imaginated him in our own image, that's what.

Posted by quetzalcoatl (# 16740) on :

But that's to pre-load and pre-empt the discussion. I could equally say that via humans, the universe becomes aware of itself. Where do I begin to think about it? There isn't any particular place.

Posted by agingjb (# 16555) on :

Let us not confuse unimaginably large with infinite.

Posted by Yorick (# 12169) on :

I'm sorry, q, I don't follow. What I'm trying to do here is precisely not define reality as a product of our consciousness, but as objectively extrinsic to it as taught by the Judeo-Christian creator god model.

My question here is this: If a god exists outside of the universe, who created it, why did he make us so very small a part of the whole? For my question to have carriage, one must try to perceive our relative position here- hard though that is- which would demonstrate very manifestly that we are not even remotely important by any definition of the word. And if we are unimportant, then so is god, right?

Posted by quetzalcoatl (# 16740) on :

Yorick, I just see you arguing in a neat circle. Humans are insignificant, therefore (wowzer), humans are insignificant. Formidable.

Posted by Jengie jon (# 273) on :

A interesting question does a drop of water matter more or less if it is in a village pond or an ocean?

In other words if we are infinitessimally small in comparison to the Universe does it matter how infinite the Universe is?

The only problem with Mousetheif argument is that he dates it from the middle ages and yet at least poetically the immensity of the universe has been grasped since the days of the writers of the psalms.

The problem is not that God should care for humanity but that God cares about the detail of the way subatomic particles behave in individual interactions.

Your God is too small.

Jengie

[ 01. March 2015, 08:31: Message edited by: Jengie jon ]

Posted by Yorick (# 12169) on :

I'm sorry if I'm going round in circles- I do find this thing hard to articulate.

The thing about insignificance is this. Christian theists claim that God created us, and that we are special in His eyes- indeed, we are created in His image, so there is something of God in us.

That concept seems at great odds with the reality that we are such an insignificant part* of His creation.

* and this is where that idea loses purchase, I think because the scale of that insignificance is so hard to grasp.

Posted by hatless (# 3365) on :

Perhaps we can embrace insignificance. I really like anything that backgrounds my tax bill. And feeling ever so special can get in the way of friendships and being in a good team and a sense of belonging to greater causes, movements and times.

I'm increasingly struck by the importance of the so recent emergence of language, awareness, and the development of human self-understanding as a corporate thing, as we move out from crude theisms and simplistic anthropologies towards better ways of living together. This baby computer revolution has long strides to make with us, too.

Posted by agingjb (# 16555) on :

For an infinite God the whole many zeroed universe is precisely as significant or insignificant as a single atom.

Then again, are created beings with infinite consciousnesses possible?

Posted by quetzalcoatl (# 16740) on :

This reminds me of Blake's grain of sand - tiny, yet all-embracing.

Posted by Yorick (# 12169) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Jengie jon:
The problem is not that God should care for humanity but that God cares about the detail of the way subatomic particles behave in individual interactions.

Does He indeed? Well, doesn't that make our insignificance all the more resonant to you? For surely, we play a very insignificant part in a cosmos full of subatomic particles.

[ 01. March 2015, 08:45: Message edited by: Yorick ]

Posted by Barnabas62 (# 9110) on :

The struggle between significance and insignificance throws some light on the more personal issue. "Made in the image of God" is I suppose the ultimate expression of human significance. But it is a dangerous precept unless balanced by a genuine humility.

On all sorts of levels, the night sky seems to induce in many of us a sense of awe, an awareness of our smallness in the scheme of things. Maybe those things have changed by degree since the Psalmist's soliloquies, but the abiding link seems to me to be that sense of awe, by which we can "connect" with the Psalmist, however wrong or approximate his understanding of that the night sky actually was.

I think for some people, the now-known scale and age of the universe is a kind of "reductio ad absurdum" of historic notions of God. It doesn't function that way for me. I really only know two things about God. He's God, and I'm not. Night sky awe functions as a kind of window for me, through which I can "see", or "connect with", the unimaginable Creativity of God.

Posted by Yorick (# 12169) on :

quote:
Originally posted by agingjb:
For an infinite God the whole many zeroed universe is precisely as significant or insignificant as a single atom.

I’ll go with that. Although we are such a tiny part of the whole (and the tininess is unimaginable, but if it we could imagine it we’d instantly soil ourselves, and the whole is unimaginably big but if we could imagine it we’d instantly lose our minds) we are nevertheless ‘special' to our creator. Fine. He loves us like a googleplex big thing even though we are so mathematically approximate to zero. It's comforting.

But wait. What does Scripture tell us about WHY this god made us so insignificant? It doesn’t, does it? The Bible tells us we are important, and even that we are like Him- and the Incarnation proved it.

Its a massive contradiction, like a circular square.

[ 01. March 2015, 08:54: Message edited by: Yorick ]

Posted by Patdys (# 9397) on :

But there is relationship between all subatomic particles and we would be missed.

Why do we assume we are the pinnacle of creation. If we are still birthing as a species, as the universe, then surely our potential is far from tapped.

Perhaps space is our future?

Posted by itsarumdo (# 18174) on :

I don't particularly get the idea that God is "outside" the universe - God IS the universe (and maybe, probably, other things as well). The "outside" version places us, as you say, like teensy weeny goldfish or lab rats in a stupendously large tank, and raises all kind of other questions about what it is we were made from (if that something is not God).

Posted by Evensong (# 14696) on :

I think the OP is basing itself of the false premise that physical magnitude or size makes things insignificant or unimportant in the eyes of God.

It doesn't follow.

[ 01. March 2015, 09:09: Message edited by: Evensong ]

Posted by Barnabas62 (# 9110) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Evensong:
I think the OP is basing itself of the false premise that physical magnitude or size makes things insignificant or unimportant in the eyes of God.

It doesn't follow.

Yes. "Small" = "insignificant" is a human projection. "Awe" is something different, a kind of visceral response.

Posted by Yorick (# 12169) on :

Have we got to that already? How quick you theists are to shrug your shoulders at interesting questions, and find an answer in 'God is a mystery to us'.

Easily satisfied much?

Posted by quetzalcoatl (# 16740) on :

In fact, some mystics use the image of the hologram - the fragment contains the whole.

Posted by Pyx_e (# 57) on :

Horizon (the BBC program) are very good at doing retrospectives. There was one recently on theories about the Big Bang was fascinating. My take on what they were trying to say was ........ It's a theory with as many wholes in it as any other and they have not overcome the issues of why the universe is speeding up, dark matter or black holes. Those theories have evolved and changed tremendously over the life of the Horizon series.

This has not stopped the scientific community treating each new theory as the received wisdom of the ages. They seem to bang on about how awful the church was for treating Galileo so badly while ignoring that many Christians throughout the ages have had a very scientific bent and Christian universities are the font of modernism. And further ignoring, for example, the fact the poster boy Einstein was a nightmare about quantum physics and got it wrong.

The universe is big, woo hoo. I don't understand the outworking of Christ's sacrifice, I don't understand how God created the universe through Christ, I don't understand love, along with the scientific community I don't understand "dark matter" ( you know that stuff they made up to make it all hang together, that they put so much faith in but have no proof of)........ God does what He does, my life is less about trying to prove Him wrong and more about trying to prove Him right. I try and do this by living faithfully to what I do know and being open to His revelation.

Not being able to understand something does not preclude my having faith in it.

As for intelligent life? Someone give me a ray of hope we will ever be able to communicate with them. Explain how that works. Once you have done that we can talk about whether it exits and why.

And as for Brian cox, every day I don't either open a Hell thread about that numpty or scribble his name in cow shit across the university campus quad is a good day for me. Sneaky, lank haired, worm-tounged jester of the liberal intelligentsia. Come the revolution he is going to be first against the wall and loved so hard he screams.

[ 01. March 2015, 09:37: Message edited by: Pyx_e ]

Posted by Yorick (# 12169) on :

Pyx_e you’re fabulous. But I’m sure you know very well that the very strength of the scientific method is that it’s revisionist, and our understanding is only ever thought good until it is shown not to be, and it is the showing of the untrue that leads us to truth. Unlike religion, whose understanding of truth is absolute, science is always searching for its own mistakes. A more wholesome way of going about things, as I’m sure your friend Brian would say.

Posted by Evensong (# 14696) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
Have we got to that already? How quick you theists are to shrug your shoulders at interesting questions, and find an answer in 'God is a mystery to us'.

Easily satisfied much?

If we've got that. What's the problem?

quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
Pyx_e you’re fabulous. But I’m sure you know very well that the very strength of the scientific method is that it’s revisionist, and our understanding is only ever thought good until it is shown not to be, and it is the showing of the untrue that leads us to truth. Unlike religion, whose understanding of truth is absolute, science is always searching for its own mistakes. A more wholesome way of going about things, as I’m sure your friend Brian would say.

The genius behind the Big Bang theory was a Catholic Priest.

At the time the scientific community dismissed the idea because it did not follow Greek philosophy and supported the doctrine of Creation too much.

[ 01. March 2015, 09:57: Message edited by: Evensong ]

Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on :

The atheists are like Trin Tragula and his Total Perspective Vortex. The theists are like Zaphod Beeblebrox.

(No idea what I'm talking about? Listen here for a reading of the most relevant bit, or see here for a "technical" description.)

This is a total non-problem for Christians, exactly for the same reason why it's a total non-problem for Zaphod - thanks to God and Zarniwoop, respectively.

Posted by itsarumdo (# 18174) on :

There is also the question of entanglement - it is assumed that the possible quantum entanglements arising from the time of the Big Bang were broken, but there is no proof that this is the case. The tiniest of acts here on Earth may have vast implications. Or we may be playing out a cosmic drama that is being unfolded elsewhere. Or both.

Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :

I agree with a number of posters on this thread. We're small, but we're not insignificant.

Posted by Yorick (# 12169) on :

Am I alone, then, in thinking that the scale of our smallness is important? If my metaphorical epic movie written and directed by Almighty God were three millennia instead of three hours long, and if all life in the universe played an infinitesimally brief cameo role that occupied a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second in it, that's the important bit.

Am I alone in wondering why bother with the rest?

Posted by Yorick (# 12169) on :

quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
The atheists are like Trin Tragula and his Total Perspective Vortex. The theists are like Zaphod Beeblebrox.

(No idea what I'm talking about? Listen here for a reading of the most relevant bit, or see here for a "technical" description.)

This is a total non-problem for Christians, exactly for the same reason why it's a total non-problem for Zaphod - thanks to God and Zarniwoop, respectively.

Yeah, I brought up the TPV upthread, and suggested it's nothing to be proud of if you can kid yourself that you're important because you're the most insignificant thing in the universe...

Posted by Pyx_e (# 57) on :

quote:
But I’m sure you know very well that the very strength of the scientific method is that it’s revisionist ......

And despite what some shipmates may argue so is the life of faith.

quote:
Am I alone, then, in thinking that the scale of our smallness is important?

As the man said "But for right now, until that completeness, we have three things to do to lead us toward that consummation: Trust steadily in God, hope unswervingly, love extravagantly. And the best of the three is love."

You may be small, insignificant even, but given this gift, this life, your Love my light up things beyond your imagining.

For me this is what it is all about. The gravitational tumbling of a black hole 12 billion times bigger than our sun pales into insignificance when someone forgives, loves, hopes, heals.

For God the making of it ALL was but a breath, the saving of you cost His last breath. Such love.

Posted by Pyx_e (# 57) on :

quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
The atheists are like Trin Tragula and his Total Perspective Vortex. The theists are like Zaphod Beeblebrox.

(No idea what I'm talking about? Listen here for a reading of the most relevant bit, or see here for a "technical" description.)

This is a total non-problem for Christians, exactly for the same reason why it's a total non-problem for Zaphod - thanks to God and Zarniwoop, respectively.

That's a bit weird, I just made a HGTTG/Zaphod ref/joke on the current Martin Hell thread. Am I channelling Ingob?

Posted by Will H (# 4178) on :

Are tall fat people more significant than short thin people?

If your yardstick measures physical size, then yes we are insignificant in the universe.

[ 01. March 2015, 10:46: Message edited by: Will H ]

Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :

quote:
Pyx_e: For me this is what it is all about. The gravitational tumbling of a black hole 12 billion times bigger than our sun pales into insignificance when someone forgives, loves, hopes, heals.

This.

Christians believe that we are significant because we are significant to God. He made us and we have something of Him in us.

But the second reason, no less important, we are significant because we are significant to eachother. Yes, I'm talking about relationships between one tiny speck and another tiny speck. But these matter, and their size cannot be measured.

Posted by itsarumdo (# 18174) on :

just to put some perspective on it APOD for Sun 1st March

Posted by agingjb (# 16555) on :

There is nothing in Science (or Mathematics) that moves me towards disbelief.

The tendency of Christians to say "raca, thou fool", contrary to explicit instruction, on the other hand ...

Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :

quote:
itsarumdo: just to put some perspective on it APOD for Sun 1st March

Here is a permanent link to that picture.

Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
Yeah, I brought up the TPV upthread, and suggested it's nothing to be proud of if you can kid yourself that you're important because you're the most insignificant thing in the universe...

You don't get it, do you? We are the most significant corporeal thing in the entire universe, indeed, all of the material universe is made for us. It is our right and duty to lord over it as stewards of (material) creation. In the broader picture, we are the hinge of creation, that binds together the material and immaterial domain: highest of matter, lowest of spirit. We have fallen from our natural place by sin, and as with any domain whose ruler is corrupted, so material creation has fallen with us. But God has chosen to raise us out of this misery even above our natural superiors, the spirits. God became man, raising humanity to the Divine - and now the Queen of Heaven, the highest creature of them all, is not an Archangel any longer, but a human woman.

You point to the cosmos and say it shows our insignificance. I say, witness the splendour of our realm, or rather, witness the poor foreshadowing of the much greater glory that will be New Creation, the domain of resurrected humanity. We will be co-heirs in Christ, we will be as Royal as we will be God-like.

And we do remember what ought to have been. All this science fiction with people zipping at warp speed to distant worlds ... it's an echo, a communal memory, of the place that was assigned to humanity before the fall. Come to think of that, probably most of the gods of the Greeks and other pagans are not really describing demons. They are mostly describing the "ought have been" of humanity in corrupted ways. Well, the world will again be our oyster when Christ returns and finally ends the rule of the usurper, of the prince of the world, who tricked us out of our domain. Book you place now, while you still can, and let's stride the new universe together in resurrected glory. Ad astra, to the stars...

Posted by Yorick (# 12169) on :

quote:
Originally posted by LeRoc:
Christians believe that we are significant because we are significant to God. He made us.....

See, this is where I get stuck. Where do you get that idea that we're important to Him? He didn't just make us, he made the whole fucking shebang.

Your idea that we're important to God goes against your own argument. We know, due to modern science, that life in all its possible forms occupies an incomprehensibly small part of the physical and temporal whole, right? We know that, in terms of the duration of the universe, conditions necessary to support life are vanishingly brief, and that the scale of this brevity is mindnumbing. Think of the way a single grain of sand would stand out individually on a beach covering our entire planet, and you're still so far from the scale here that you have to sart again.

I do agree that, if you happen to BE that grain of sand, then in that very particular sense you're important. But that's a very self-oriented perspective, isnt it? It's anthropocentricity gone bigtime. What is this single grain to the rest, or more pertinently, to a god who sees and knows all other grains?

You believe that God can know us and also every other thing in the universe, and that his transcendence of spacetime permits him a perspective of the whole that we are forbidden by our finiteness, right? He sees all the individual grains of sand. He watches the whole damn movie, all three thousand years of it, not just the fraction of a nanosecond of it in which life makes its cameo appearance. From that perspective, then, from God's own viewpoint, how is it that you must be important?*

* If the answer is something like 'It's a mystery', please don't trouble yourself.

Posted by Yorick (# 12169) on :

Please don't talk like that, IngoB. You're frightening me.

Posted by Boogie (# 13538) on :

Without single grains of sand there would be no beach. Without single stars there would be no universe. Without single humans there would be no human race.

Every particle matters.

Do they matter to God?

I'm not sure.

I think God is either in and through every part of everything or s/he doesn't exist. If the former then s/he is elusive in order to give us freedom - no other reason. Christianity? It has a bit of the truth - as do all other religions and none. "Take the best of them and make the best of it." is my motto. We are here on Earth for a short enough time without wasting too much ink on the whys and wherefores. Most religions (and those with none) have 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.' That'll do for a religious text - none other are needed imo.

[ 01. March 2015, 12:28: Message edited by: Boogie ]

Posted by Porridge (# 15405) on :

Maybe we're looking in the wrong direction. Just yesterday I was listening to Neil deGrasse Tyson on some radio show (dunno which) discussing what an anomaly it is that anything exists at all.

The discussion involved electrons, positrons, etc., and if this nonscientist followed at all, what it all comes down to is imbalance: matter exists because there's more particles with a positive charge than there are particles with negative charge, and the (universe) is in a constant state of trying to, but never quite achieving, balance (which I take to be some form of equivalence) between the two.

In short, we (and everything else) may exist (whatever that means) because of a single excess positively-charge particle. That's an entirely different take on the "size and significance" issue.

Posted by Yorick (# 12169) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Boogie:
Every particle matters.

Only a little bit. A very very very little bit. So little a bit as to stretch the meaning of the word 'matters' out of all usefulness.

Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :

quote:
Yorick: See, this is where I get stuck.

LOL, you're reacting to what was my introduction in that post. The important point I was trying to make is in the last paragraph.

Yes, God made the whole Universe. And every dust grain in the Coma Cluster is important to Her. But that doesn't diminish our significance. What can I say, She has a big heart.

But one other thing that makes us significant is that we can have relationships. We can choose, even if it means that we sometimes choose the bad thing. This is something the dust speck lacks (Hah!)

Posted by orfeo (# 13878) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
I'm sorry, q, I don't follow. What I'm trying to do here is precisely not define reality as a product of our consciousness, but as objectively extrinsic to it as taught by the Judeo-Christian creator god model.

My question here is this: If a god exists outside of the universe, who created it, why did he make us so very small a part of the whole? For my question to have carriage, one must try to perceive our relative position here- hard though that is- which would demonstrate very manifestly that we are not even remotely important by any definition of the word. And if we are unimportant, then so is god, right?

To understand why this argument doesn't really work, one should visit a Lego exhibition and observe the amazingly intricate things that can be created one insignificant brick at a time.

Posted by orfeo (# 13878) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:

quote:
Originally posted by LeRoc:
Christians believe that we are significant because we are significant to God. He made us.....
See, this is where I get stuck. Where do you get that idea that we're important to Him? He didn't just make us, he made the whole fucking shebang.

And why does that last sentence negate our importance?

Why, if I make hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of things, are you suggesting that I can't point to one of those things and say "I particularly like this one?"

There is a severe gap in your argument where you don't explain why all made things are of the same value. And perhaps just as importantly, of the same kind of value.

You basically seem to be arguing that the phrase "one in a million" means "exactly like the other 999,999", which is the opposite of how the phrase is normally used.

Posted by cliffdweller (# 13338) on :

quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:

You basically seem to be arguing that the phrase "one in a million" means "exactly like the other 999,999", which is the opposite of how the phrase is normally used.

Further, in order for the gospel to be true, we don't need God to love us more than the other 999,999 things. We need God to love us-- fully, passionately, sacrificially. God's passionate love for the other elements of his creation-- from massive stars to tiny atoms-- does not diminish his love for me.

Posted by Boogie (# 13538) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:

quote:
Originally posted by Boogie:
Every particle matters.
Only a little bit. A very very very little bit. So little a bit as to stretch the meaning of the word 'matters' out of all usefulness.

No, because without each one the whole would not be possible.

Posted by Yorick (# 12169) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Boogie:

quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:

quote:
Originally posted by Boogie:
Every particle matters.
Only a little bit. A very very very little bit. So little a bit as to stretch the meaning of the word 'matters' out of all usefulness.
No, because without each one the whole would not be possible.

I'm not sure I follow you. I suppose you're saying that the existence of the universe is contingent on the existence of each and every component part, rather like saying that the 800 million hectares of Russian forest wouldn't exist if a single one of its trees didn't.

Posted by Yorick (# 12169) on :

quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:

quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:

quote:
Originally posted by LeRoc:
Christians believe that we are significant because we are significant to God. He made us.....
See, this is where I get stuck. Where do you get that idea that we're important to Him? He didn't just make us, he made the whole fucking shebang.
And why does that last sentence negate our importance?

It doesn't. It simply puts it into perspective.

quote:

Why, if I make hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of things, are you suggesting that I can't point to one of those things and say "I particularly like this one?"

But you're not getting the scale thing, are you? We're not talking about hundreds and hundreds here. Or 999,999. We're talking about such huge numbers that we cannot reckon their meaning. The sheer scale of our tininess in relation to the hugeness of everything else is the issue here, but I see that this is a concept that people cannot grasp. I suppose our anthropocentrism makes it impossible.

Posted by agingjb (# 16555) on :

The attention of an infinite God would not be diluted by a multiplicity of subjects, or even an infinity of subjects.

Posted by cliffdweller (# 13338) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:

quote:

Why, if I make hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of things, are you suggesting that I can't point to one of those things and say "I particularly like this one?"
But you're not getting the scale thing, are you? We're not talking about hundreds and hundreds here. Or 999,999. We're talking about such huge numbers that we cannot reckon their meaning. The sheer scale of our tininess in relation to the hugeness of everything else is the issue here, but I see that this is a concept that people cannot grasp. I suppose our anthropocentrism makes it impossible.

Anthropocentrism works both ways. I would suggest that your anthropocentrism is at work in your inability to comprehend a God who can passionately love and care for billions or billions of billions of things, and so can care for each human being with an intense passionate love that humans feel for only a few individuals. Just as our brains are finite, so are our hearts. But the heart of God is infinite.

(cross-posted with agingjb)

[ 01. March 2015, 14:45: Message edited by: cliffdweller ]

Posted by itsarumdo (# 18174) on :

I think there are scientific analogues for this

for instance there is an ambiguity as to whether electrons are individual, or whether "every electron" is actually just one electron that appears everywhere. In this case, despite the googolplex of electrons, each one is as precious as each other because - if one cease to exist, they all would.

Similarly in the human body, despite the trillions of cells that each are carrying out billions of functions each day, the rate of incorrect DNA copying is less than 1 in 1 billion. So there are thousands of incorrect copies made each day - trivial numbers when compared to the whole, but each one could cause mayhem - so the body also checks that they have been properly carried out, and usually initiates an apoptosis sequence if the copy is not correct. Each is important, and just one not properly cared for can result in cancer.

Spiritually, the situation is somewhat the reverse of this - humanity has in the vast majority strayed from God, and God wishes all of us to receive Grace - and will not give up until every single soul is able to fully take what it needs. Every single soul is important.

Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :

quote:
Yorick: The sheer scale of our tininess in relation to the hugeness of everything else is the issue here, but I see that this is a concept that people cannot grasp.

I have a post-doctoral degree in nuclear physics. Astronomy is one of the things you have to learn for that. Believe me, I do have a grasp of the scale of the Universe, both in space and in time.

You say "Our tiny size with respect to the Universe makes us insignificant". This has been answered by multiple people here. What is missing is an argument from you in favour of your assertion. "Look how big it is" won't work.

Posted by Yorick (# 12169) on :

LeRoc, I'm sorry if I came over as patronising, or my posts would seem to imply that I understand the scale of things here better than anyone else.

I'm failing to make my point clearly, I think, perhaps because I'm running in and out of my study in between doing other things. It's also a strangely difficult thing for me to articulate this stuff properly, somehow. I'm going to go away and think more carefully about what I'm trying to get across here, and hope to come back later.

Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
I'm sorry if I'm going round in circles- I do find this thing hard to articulate.

The thing about insignificance is this. Christian theists claim that God created us, and that we are special in His eyes- indeed, we are created in His image, so there is something of God in us.

That concept seems at great odds with the reality that we are such an insignificant part* of His creation.

* and this is where that idea loses purchase, I think because the scale of that insignificance is so hard to grasp.

What you're basically saying is, "Human beings think they're significant. Which is hard to square with the fact that they're not." But the only argument for "the fact that they're not" is "we're really small in a really big universe." As if size were the sole measure of significance. Well I suppose that's possible but nobody here has demonstrated or indeed even argued for it. It seems to be taken for granted by the sizeists to be the case. Defend it. Make a case for it. Because us non-sizeists don't buy it, and until you give us a reason to, you're just talking to yourselves.

quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
Am I alone, then, in thinking that the scale of our smallness is important?

No, certainly not. Nor are you alone in taking it for granted but not having demonstrated it.

quote:
Yorick: The sheer scale of our tininess in relation to the hugeness of everything else is the issue here, but I see that this is a concept that people cannot grasp.

It's not that people can't grasp it. It's that they can't grasp why you believe it matters so much, why it makes us insignificant. Mostly because you haven't argued for that, you've merely taken it for granted. And now insulted us for not going along with you.

quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
LeRoc, I'm sorry if I came over as patronising, or my posts would seem to imply that I understand the scale of things here better than anyone else.

It's not that you understand scale better. It's that you think it matters, and we don't. And saying, "no, it's much much bigger than you can possibly imagine it to be" doesn't change the problem because after some point it's no longer a matter of scale.

As for it being different than Lewis's analogy, which of course isn't his but Ptolemy's, I think that maybe people don't see that it's quite the same however big the universe is known to be, is that they don't understand how small a mathematical point is. It has no breadth or length or width at all. The ratio of the size of a mathematical point to a meter is incomprehensibly larger than the ratio of the size of us to the universe. Because it's infinite and the universe isn't.

[ 01. March 2015, 15:18: Message edited by: mousethief ]

Posted by quetzalcoatl (# 16740) on :

It's been a traditional argument from atheists, I think, but how many of them live as if they are insignificant? I'm not sure that anyone can actually do that. You could argue that this shows our basic narcissism; on the other hand, we find meaning through living. And I still like the point that through us, the universe becomes conscious of itself.

Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :

quote:
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
It's been a traditional argument from atheists, I think, but how many of them live as if they are insignificant?

Again this takes the size=significance equivalency here for granted. Why don't have to live as if we're insignificant because we aren't. Just because we're very very small doesn't make us insignificant. If you think it does, PROVE IT. Otherwise there's no reason to take your argument seriously.

Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :

quote:
Yorick: LeRoc, I'm sorry if I came over as patronising, or my posts would seem to imply that I understand the scale of things here better than anyone else.

No problem, and I'm sorry if my reaction was a bit too strong.

I do agree with something that is related to what you are saying. I believe that our small scale in relation to the Universe should teach us humility. The days we thought we were the centre of the Universe are over, and good riddance. But humility isn't the same as insignificance.

We know that we are small compared to the Universe, no-one here denies that. What you would need is an argument that bridges the gap from 'tiny' to 'insignificant'.

Posted by quetzalcoatl (# 16740) on :

quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:

quote:
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
It's been a traditional argument from atheists, I think, but how many of them live as if they are insignificant?
Again this takes the size=significance equivalency here for granted. Why don't have to live as if we're insignificant because we aren't. Just because we're very very small doesn't make us insignificant. If you think it does, PROVE IT. Otherwise there's no reason to take your argument seriously.

Except that it's not my argument. If some atheists make it, then they are in bad faith, unless they live as if they are insignificant. That seems very difficult to me.

Posted by Jengie jon (# 273) on :

Yorick

Regardless of how massive the Universe is in comparison with God it is smaller than a spec of grain caught under the nail of his little finger.

This is the problem with dealing with a hugely infinite being.

Therefore while for some they despair of God with these figures others are moved to wonder as God becomes more beyond our ken.

For those who think if God is so huge then he cannot take particular care of humanity, lets consider a train situation. If you had the opportunity of working for half an hour with a world expert but he dealt with others, or you had the opportunity of working for half an hour with a less experienced person but he would not deal with others which would be better?

The situation is the same, the care and attention God gives to any individual far exceeds that that any other finite individual can give, even though he gives that level of consideration to all other beings.

The problem is because all that exists is finite people assume that God is finite. It is perhaps better to say God is the ground of existence and it is on his will that all that exists depends.

That such gives attention to us seems marvellous but there is also no reason why God should not. He has the resources to do that without removing resources from anything else. This is the nature of an infinite being.

Jengie

Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
I'm failing to make my point clearly, I think

No. I think you're making your point quite clearly. You're not making a particularly difficult point. Anyone who's come across any atheist apologetics will have come across it before. We just disagree. Obviously that's a bit of an abstruse concept, and I may not be expressing myself very well. I'll have to go away and think about how to make it clearer.

[ 01. March 2015, 16:02: Message edited by: Dafyd ]

Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on :

For me the problem is always the Fermi Paradox. As soon as it could rain there was life on Earth. Simmer and stir with a lunar spoon for four billion years (take off the boil and freeze twice): sapience. Materialistically that's how it was and has to be everywhere. Everywhere. A lot slower without a moon.

I see no reason not to be a strong uniformitarian on the basis of life on Earth extrapolated so, so the galaxy teems with sapience. And we're average. The older, smarter will be signalling. We would hear it. We've been listening for well over a hundred years and they've been broadcasting for millions. A billion. But nowt.

Where are they? There HAS to be a proper materialistic explanation for this, and I suspect the moon has a lot do with it: but in a galaxy of at least ten trillion (10,000,000,000,000) moon-planet-sun systems there HAS to be 10,000 life bearing systems (one in a billion), scattered every 10,000 light years, explaining why we can't detect them.

But that's crazy. There have to be a hundred times more at least. That's still only one in ten million systems. Soon to be detected within a thousand light years. Soon being a century. We'll surely have the technology to detect high oxygen atmospheres in that range by then? What would it take to get spectrographs of planets transiting their stars at that distance? Equipment a thousand times better than what we've got now? A million? How much better would our optical telescopes have to be?

It's still all tantalizing. If we find no life elsewhere after those technological advances, that'll not just be tantalizing. That'll be significant. Strange. This strange. If it isn't already.

Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :

I've never been moved by the Fermi paradox. If we assume the lasting impossibility of FTL travel, the time it would take to move from star system to star system would be immense. And if only a gazillionth of a percent of star systems had sentient life, some sentient race could be racing from system to system, and have been for as long as our galaxy has existed, and still not yet have made it to ours.
.
And besides all that, maybe they have made it close enough to see that we're not the sort of sentient life species they really want to get to know better. There may be a big "Quarantined - Do Not Contact" sign around our star system on the galactic maps of the more enlightened races. There is no Atoning Unifex.

Posted by hatless (# 3365) on :

Is God really huge? Why not incredibly small?

I think it's widely felt that the scale of the universe is daunting. I've known people who have not wanted to know about the latest astronomical news because of the existential chill it gave them.

One of my favourite hymns goes:
Now all the heavenly splendour
Breaks forth in starlight tender,
From myriad worlds unknown,
And Man the marvel seeing
Forgets his selfish being
For joy of beauty not his own.

A rich starry sky can do that, but a lecture on neutron stars, black holes and universal heat death generally makes me feel weak.

[ 01. March 2015, 16:12: Message edited by: hatless ]

Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :

quote:
mousethief: And if only a gazillionth of a percent of star systems had sentient life, some sentient race could be racing from system to system, and have been for as long as our galaxy has existed, and still not yet have made it to ours.

Statistically, that argument doesn't work very well. Even if there is only one space-faring race in the Milky Way, if it is capable of travelling close to the speed of light, it could reach all systems comfortably during the age of the Milky Way. It is more than 10 billion years old, but only a couple of 100,000 light years across. (Sorry, no more accurate numbers. Wikipedia is off-line for my internet connection, so my knowledge of the Milky Way suddenly got a lot smaller [Smile]

)

quote:
mousethief: There may be a big "Quarantined - Do Not Contact" sign around our star system on the galactic maps of the more enlightened races.

That's one possible solution to the Fermi Paradox. This page gives a systematic overview of the more common solutions. Most of them have been the stuff of Science Fiction stories.

[ 01. March 2015, 16:40: Message edited by: LeRoc ]

Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on :

Aye mousethief. It's a dispositional thing as ever. I'm the kind of ijit who is impressed by the fact that I'm three handshakes from Stalin and probably the same from Hitler.

Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :

quote:
Originally posted by LeRoc:

quote:
mousethief: And if only a gazillionth of a percent of star systems had sentient life, some sentient race could be racing from system to system, and have been for as long as our galaxy has existed, and still not yet have made it to ours.
Statistically, that argument doesn't work very well. Even if there is only one space-faring race in the Milky Way, if it is capable of travelling close to the speed of light, it could reach all systems comfortably during the age of the Milky Way. It is more than 10 billion years old, but only a couple of 100,000 light years across. (Sorry, no more accurate numbers. Wikipedia is off-line for my internet connection, so my knowledge of the Milky Way suddenly got a lot smaller )

My mistake then.

Posted by Golden Key (# 1468) on :

quote:
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
In fact, some mystics use the image of the hologram - the fragment contains the whole.

Like Indra's net.

Posted by Golden Key (# 1468) on :

quote:
Originally posted by LeRoc:
But one other thing that makes us significant is that we can have relationships. We can choose, even if it means that we sometimes choose the bad thing. This is something the dust speck lacks (Hah!)

Have you read "Horton Hears A Who"? Or seen the animated TV version? There might be more to dust specks than you think.
[Smile]

Posted by Golden Key (# 1468) on :

quote:
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
But that's to pre-load and pre-empt the discussion. I could equally say that via humans, the universe becomes aware of itself. Where do I begin to think about it? There isn't any particular place.

"We are star stuff. We are the universe made manifest, trying to figure itself out."

--Ambassador Delenn, "Babylon 5"

Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :

quote:
Originally posted by LeRoc:
Even if there is only one space-faring race in the Milky Way, if it is capable of travelling close to the speed of light, it could reach all systems comfortably during the age of the Milky Way.

Every time I've seen a discussion of what it would take to build a spaceship that crosses interstellar distances, it has largely consisted of: here are some ways that have been proposed - here are some reasons why some of them are marginally less infeasible than others.

Posted by Lamb Chopped (# 5528) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:

quote:
Originally posted by Boogie:
Every particle matters.
Only a little bit. A very very very little bit. So little a bit as to stretch the meaning of the word 'matters' out of all usefulness.

Yorick, the problem is that you're making the modern mistake of equating physical size with importance. You're not the only one, the western modern worldview is permeated with it. But it's a mistake other cultures in other times did not make (they had their own mistakes, of course).

Yes, I feel awed when I look at the Hubble Deep Field photos. I feel awed when I work through those online demonstrations of how small we are in the universe, hopping up from solar system to local group to supercluster and so forth and so on. I feel it. I'm modern, too.

And our ancestors felt it too--"Oh Lord, thy sea is so vast, and my boat is so small". What has changed between our time and theirs? Certainly not the realization that we are very very small, and the scheme of things is very very very big. They knew that too. The ocean, which has always been there, is enough to induce that form of awe. Mountains have always been able to do it too. And beyond a certain degree of bigness, it all blends together, doesn't it? I can be just as awed by the size of the earth relative to the sun as I am by the size of the earth relative to a supercluster. The extra zeroes don't increase the awe. We're already there.

So our ancestors knew that awe. But they differed from us in one thing (well, maybe two): First, they didn't make the mistake of taking that sort of awe to be an indication of our value or otherwise in the eyes of God. As if size = value! Think it through and you're forced to the conclusion that a six-foot-tall man is more valuable than a five-foot-tall man, and a computer tower case is more valuable than the CPU it encloses. Which is just nonsense.

No, we shouldn't base our theology on a false train of logic. Instead we should take the awe, which is very real, and the resulting humility, and make something useful out of it. Like a mental reminder that though we are valuable, yet our value consists precisely IN God's choice to value us, and is not somehow inherent in us (either because of size, or position, or inborn gifts and attributes, etc.) If our value comes from someone else (=God), then we have no grounds for self-conceit or for being nasty to our neighbors (of any size). But similarly, we cannot lose our value--it does not consist in anything we have the power to change.

The same is true of every created thing, from vanilla quirks right up to the multiverse (if that's what we have, I know the debates rage). Value comes from love--God's love, God's choice that things should matter. It is not innate and losable. Nor is it scalable.

As for our ancestors--they never did see mankind as the heart and soul of God's creation, at least the Judeo-Christian types. Man has always been a suburban creature. The angels are above us in the natural scale of being. If you like, we can call them "higher species" than us. We are not the firstborn of creation--we are the younger siblings, the middle children, with the animals, plants, and inanimate nature below us.

The angels have other concerns than just dealing with us. They have a life of their own that we know basically nothing about, curious as we are. So do other bits of creation--animals, plants, fungi, terrestrial and extraterrestrial geological processes--it's really NOT all about us. We interact with everybody else, but we're not their first thought on waking (those creatures that have waking). If there are extraterrestrial civilizations, it's entirely possible they know and will continue to know absolutely zip about us until we all meet before God's throne at the end of the universe, in the new creation. And that's fine. They have a life of their own! As believers have always known.

Look at Dante if you want to see how this plays out in a Christian imagination. He is a man, yes, and he is interested primarily in human issues (very naturally). But of his angel ranks, only the lowest two of nine have anything to do with humankind (the messenger to Mary was a mere archangel, only one rank above the lowest). And the geographic center of the universe is not mankind, but Satan's asshole. (Seriously, go read the Inferno, it's really gross.) The moral center of the universe is precisely what you'd expect--God himself. In either case, humanity has its spot--but it's a surburban spot, neither in the center nor at the edge. I figure we're a bit to the left of the possums.

Posted by HCH (# 14313) on :

The question of the significance of human beings leads back to the observation that God looks after every sparrow. There is a difference of scale, of course.

The question of life elsewhere also is of interest. Suppose we knew for sure that there is no life elsewhere in the universe other than on Earth. (This seems quite possible at present.) How would that affect religions? Likewise, suppose we knew for sure that while there might be life elsewhere, there was no intelligent life. How would that affect religions? Third, suppose there is intelligent life elsewhere but none of it is as advanced as we are?

Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :

quote:
Dafyd: Every time I've seen a discussion of what it would take to build a spaceship that crosses interstellar distances, it has largely consisted of: here are some ways that have been proposed - here are some reasons why some of them are marginally less infeasible than others.

I think that these discussions are about what it would take for us to build such a spaceship, with our current state of technology. For a far more advanced society, it would plausibly be easy.

The Fermi Paradox works more or less like this:

The probability of intelligent life arising among 200b stars is relatively high
The Milky Way was already old when the Sun was born. So, the probability is high that civilisations have arisen long before us, and are therefore much more advanced
Even with sub-light speeds, it would take such a civilisation less than 50 million years to colonise all of the Milky Way. That sounds like a long time, but it is tiny (I'd even say 'insignificant' ) compared to the age of the Milky Way
Why aren't we seeing them?

Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :

quote:
Golden Key: Have you read "Horton Hears A Who"? Or seen the animated TV version? There might be more to dust specks than you think.

No I haven't. I'll try to look them up.

Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on :

quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
You don't get it, do you? We are the most significant corporeal thing in the entire universe, indeed, all of the material universe is made for us. It is our right and duty to lord over it as stewards of (material) creation. In the broader picture, we are the hinge of creation,

Oddly, I find myself in partial agreement with IngoB here. But not entirely.

We are absolutely significant. So far as we know, life might exist elsewhere in the galaxy and universe, but if earth is any model, it will not be going anywhere. For most of the nearly 4 billion years that life has existed on Earth, all we had were bacteria, plankton, and multi-celled algae. 600 million years ago we got complex multicellular life. But this was no where near what we are. Only in the last 1-2 million years has there been anything like us, and the evolutionary line of development that produced us is only of those many possibly evolutionary lines.

So while I think it is likely we'll eventually detect life, I think it will probably been bacteria at most. Because that's what most of earth's history shows life to be. So yes, we are special.

But I disagree with IngoB's idea that we should lord it over creation, because we're messing it up the more we lord. This is the sin of hubris and pride. We need to understand that it was farmers who decided to lord it over wilderness, and consider that humans lived as one of many species before the farmers and herders multiplied and exterminated the hunter-gatherers. The hunter-gatherers have more to teach us than many people think. I know people who live that way, and they are far more humble and are much better stewards of creation. But that's a tangent.

I think the question is to put our ancient received faith into the modern context where we know things they didn't back then. It is absolutely not enough to say "Jesus loves me" or "the bible tells me so" or that Jesus was such a good man-god that we don't need to bother with these questions.

I firmly believe that we need to broaden our perspective and consider how to take into account the actuality of the universe as it is. This has nothing whatsoever to do with changing scientific theories over time, but of the directly observed scope and size of things.

Could we?:

"The universe was without form and void, and occupied no physical space. And God said let there be light, and there was a big bang, and everything came into existence after that...."

[ 01. March 2015, 19:16: Message edited by: no prophet's flag is set so... ]

Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :

quote:
no prophet's flag is set so...: So far as we know, life might exist elsewhere in the galaxy and universe, but if earth is any model, it will not be going anywhere. For most of the nearly 4 billion years that life has existed on Earth, all we had were bacteria, plankton, and multi-celled algae. 600 million years ago we got complex multicellular life. But this was no where near what we are. Only in the last 1-2 million years has there been anything like us, and the evolutionary line of development that produced us is only of those many possibly evolutionary lines.

So while I think it is likely we'll eventually detect life, I think it will probably been bacteria at most. Because that's what most of earth's history shows life to be. So yes, we are special.

I'm sorry, statistically this argument doesn't add up either. Even if intelligent life is short compared to bacterial life (for example the ratio 1:600 you mentioned), it would still mean that of every 600 planets that have bacterial life, one would have intelligence. With many planets in the Milky Way, there would still be much intelligent life around. I'm simplifying things a bit here, the basic argument is Drake's formula.

Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on :

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
I firmly believe that we need to broaden our perspective and consider how to take into account the actuality of the universe as it is. This has nothing whatsoever to do with changing scientific theories over time, but of the directly observed scope and size of things.

Could we?:

"The universe was without form and void, and occupied no physical space. And God said let there be light, and there was a big bang, and everything came into existence after that...."

This is just hubris as far as I'm concerned.

I'm willing to allow that science might have a better handle on the facts of cosmology than a few hundred years ago, but equally confident that in a few hundred years it will have an even better handle, one that will quite possibly render our current understanding obsolete.

Unless you want to start taking Genesis 1 as science, I think you'd do much better to leave it as it is than take on our modern world's pretentious and fallacious assumption that it knows well enough to interject its theories into texts a couple of millenia old. Genesis 1 works perfectly well without them.

Posted by Adeodatus (# 4992) on :

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
They thought the Milky Way was it until into 19th century. They also held that the universe was a mere 200 million years old.

This reminds me of the story of the 1st-year astrophysics class. The lecturer is outlining her narrative - "And in about five billion years the Sun will expand and consume the Earth..."

And there's a shocked gasp from the back of the class.

"I'm sorry," says the lecturer, "Does someone have a question?"

A tremulous voice says, "Erm... could you just repeat that last bit?"

"Certainly. In about five billion years..."

"Oh thank goodness!" says the student, "I thought you said five million!"
.
.
.

As for my own take on the whole business of a creation narrative, knowing our place in the universe, and all that ... well, today I spent a few minutes looking at a patch of crocuses. They were lovely.

[ 01. March 2015, 20:23: Message edited by: Adeodatus ]

Posted by cliffdweller (# 13338) on :

quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:

quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
I'm sorry if I'm going round in circles- I do find this thing hard to articulate.

The thing about insignificance is this. Christian theists claim that God created us, and that we are special in His eyes- indeed, we are created in His image, so there is something of God in us.

That concept seems at great odds with the reality that we are such an insignificant part* of His creation.

* and this is where that idea loses purchase, I think because the scale of that insignificance is so hard to grasp.
What you're basically saying is, "Human beings think they're significant. Which is hard to square with the fact that they're not." But the only argument for "the fact that they're not" is "we're really small in a really big universe." As if size were the sole measure of significance. Well I suppose that's possible but nobody here has demonstrated or indeed even argued for it. It seems to be taken for granted by the sizeists to be the case. Defend it. Make a case for it. Because us non-sizeists don't buy it, and until you give us a reason to, you're just talking to yourselves.

This.

As a person of very short stature (5'0") I'm fascinated/ discouraged by numerous studies that demonstrate subtle biases in favor of tallness-- tall people are more likely to be listened to, receive promotions, make more $$, etc. When I've been in conversations with a group of people where I'm the only person under, say, 5'6", I've noticed the entire conversation goes on literally over my head, like I'm a toddler hanging onto mama's skirt. All very subtle and subconscious and (pun intended) under the radar.

So it makes sense that we carry these biases over into the universe. That we think size matters. The largest thing is the most important.

And yet, perhaps because I am smaller, I don't think that's a value that comes from God. One could look at the universe and see these immense planets that are basically just big balls of gas, and the only planets that have life (or as far as we know the potential for life) are smaller, less significant. We could look at the universe an note the impact of micro-organisms like the HIV virus. All sorts of examples where the big thing is nothing more than a big bag of air and the small thing, whether beneficial or maleficent, is the thing that has more influence (cue evil laugh).

So maybe men got it right all along: size doesn't matter.

Posted by cliffdweller (# 13338) on :

quote:
Originally posted by HCH:
The question of the significance of human beings leads back to the observation that God looks after every sparrow. There is a difference of scale, of course.

The question of life elsewhere also is of interest. Suppose we knew for sure that there is no life elsewhere in the universe other than on Earth. (This seems quite possible at present.) How would that affect religions? Likewise, suppose we knew for sure that while there might be life elsewhere, there was no intelligent life. How would that affect religions? Third, suppose there is intelligent life elsewhere but none of it is as advanced as we are?

This has been asked before many times, including on the ship. I personally don't see how it changes anything, other than giving us another marvelous aspect of God's creation to wonder at and be awed by.

Even intelligent life on other planets really doesn't change anything. Again, just as I don't need to be the biggest thing in the universe to be significant, I also don't have to be the only thing or the smartest thing. God's heart is big enough to love more than one person, but is also big enough to love more than one kind of thing. The God who cares about sparrows AND humans could also care about vulcans or Na'vi or whatever. Their theoretical significance does not take away from our significance. There's enough of God to go around.

Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :

quote:
cliffdweller: So maybe men got it right all along: size doesn't matter.

I was wondering who was going to be the first one to make that joke.

Posted by cliffdweller (# 13338) on :

quote:
Originally posted by LeRoc:

quote:
cliffdweller: So maybe men got it right all along: size doesn't matter.
I was wondering who was going to be the first one to make that joke.

Sorry. Couldn't resist the, uh, low-hanging fruit.
[Hot and Hormonal]

Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :

quote:
Originally posted by cliffdweller:

quote:
Originally posted by LeRoc:

quote:
cliffdweller: So maybe men got it right all along: size doesn't matter.
I was wondering who was going to be the first one to make that joke.
Sorry. Couldn't resist the, uh, low-hanging fruit.

The lower it hangs, the more likely you are to think size matters.

Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :

quote:
Originally posted by LeRoc:

quote:
Dafyd: Every time I've seen a discussion of what it would take to build a spaceship that crosses interstellar distances, it has largely consisted of: here are some ways that have been proposed - here are some reasons why some of them are marginally less infeasible than others.
I think that these discussions are about what it would take for us to build such a spaceship, with our current state of technology. For a far more advanced society, it would plausibly be easy.

The Fermi Paradox works more or less like this:
The probability of intelligent life arising among 200b stars is relatively high
The Milky Way was already old when the Sun was born. So, the probability is high that civilisations have arisen long before us, and are therefore much more advanced
Even with sub-light speeds, it would take such a civilisation less than 50 million years to colonise all of the Milky Way. That sounds like a long time, but it is tiny (I'd even say 'insignificant' ) compared to the age of the Milky Way
Why aren't we seeing them?

Maye we're not seeing them because we are them. An abandoned colony. Too far from the space lanes to be worth dropping by.

[ 01. March 2015, 22:41: Message edited by: mousethief ]

Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :

quote:
mousethief: Maye we're not seeing them because we are them. An abandoned colony. Too far from the space lanes to be worth dropping by.

Exactly, that's a possible solution. In an earlier post, I linked to this page giving possible solutions to the Fermi Paradox. Yours is Explanation Group 2, Possibility 2: "The galaxy has been colonized, but we just live in some desolate rural area of the galaxy." [Smile]

Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :

quote:
Originally posted by LeRoc:

quote:
mousethief: Maye we're not seeing them because we are them. An abandoned colony. Too far from the space lanes to be worth dropping by.
Exactly, that's a possible solution. In an earlier post, I linked to this page giving possible solutions to the Fermi Paradox. Yours is Explanation Group 2, Possibility 2: "The galaxy has been colonized, but we just live in some desolate rural area of the galaxy."

This leaves out the first half of my proposal: we are the result of such colonization, subsequently abandoned.

Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :

quote:
mousethief: This leaves out the first half of my proposal: we are the result of such colonization, subsequently abandoned.

Ah yes, that's an interesting variation. We didn't naturally evolve here from evolution, but we were seeded. I don't think it makes much difference to the logic of the Fermi Paradox and its possible solutions though.

Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :

quote:
Originally posted by LeRoc:

quote:
mousethief: This leaves out the first half of my proposal: we are the result of such colonization, subsequently abandoned.
Ah yes, that's an interesting variation. We didn't naturally evolve here from evolution, but we were seeded. I don't think it makes much difference to the logic of the Fermi Paradox and its possible solutions though.

But it matters to me. I want them to create a branch on their hierarchy of solutions called the Mousethief Postulate. Whom do I contact?

Posted by ChastMastr (# 716) on :

quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
You don't get it, do you? We are the most significant corporeal thing in the entire universe, indeed, all of the material universe is made for us. It is our right and duty to lord over it as stewards of (material) creation.

I should point out that this is not the way all Christians view the relationship of humanity to the rest of the (or of this) universe...

Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :

quote:
mousethief: I want them to create a branch on their hierarchy of solutions called the Mousethief Postulate. Whom do I contact?

I know someone in Nigeria who can arrange this. Just give me all your bank details. A small fee may be required to get the process running.

Posted by ChastMastr (# 716) on :

quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
And we do remember what ought to have been. All this science fiction with people zipping at warp speed to distant worlds ... it's an echo, a communal memory, of the place that was assigned to humanity before the fall.

Though this, I can believe, could be true. [Smile]

Posted by ChastMastr (# 716) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:

quote:
Originally posted by Boogie:
Every particle matters.
Only a little bit. A very very very little bit. So little a bit as to stretch the meaning of the word 'matters' out of all usefulness.

Um, we don't really know that. At least as far as how much each particle matters to God. In Perelandra Lewis describes a sort of vision Ransom has of the Great Dance in which everything, from the tiniest to the greatest, is in beautiful harmony, and everything can truly say that it is at the center of things--an excerpt is here. Indeed, even particles of dust are mentioned specifically...

quote:
"That Dust itself which is scattered so rare in Heaven, whereof all worlds, and the bodies that are not worlds, are made, is at the centre. It waits not till created eyes have seen it or hands handled it, to be in itself a strength and splendour of Maleldil. Only the least part has served, or ever shall, a beast, a man, or a god. But always, and beyond all distances, before they came and after they are gone and where they never come, it is what it is and utters the heart of the Holy One with its own voice. It is farthest from Him of all things, for it has no life, nor sense, nor reason; it is nearest to Him of all things for without intervening soul, as sparks fly out of fire, He utters in each grain of it the unmixed image of His energy. Each grain, if it spoke, would say, I am at the centre; for me all things were made. Let no mouth open to gainsay it. Blessed be He!"

(Maleldil is the name for God in Old Solar, the language on Perelandra.)

Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :

quote:
Originally posted by LeRoc:

quote:
mousethief: I want them to create a branch on their hierarchy of solutions called the Mousethief Postulate. Whom do I contact?
I know someone in Nigeria who can arrange this. Just give me all your bank details. A small fee may be required to get the process running.

I think I got an email from that guy. I didn't realize he was legit.

Posted by Golden Key (# 1468) on :

Re humans being "lords of creation":

Some think we're supposed to be more like park rangers--helping and taking care of things, not throwing our weight around.

Posted by ChastMastr (# 716) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Golden Key:
Some think we're supposed to be more like park rangers--helping and taking care of things, not throwing our weight around.

Mind you, I think when IngoB mentioned being stewards, this is likely part of what's meant there.

One last quote as I'm grading stuff in another window...

In the 14th century, Julian of Norwich wrote about visions she had in a book of devotions called The Revelations of Divine Love; one of them is as follows:

quote:
And in this he showed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand, it seemed, and it was as round as any ball. I looked thereupon with the eye of my understanding, and I thought, 'What may this be?' And it was answered generally thus: 'It is all that is made.' I wondered how it could last, for I thought it might suddenly fall to nothing for little cause. And I was answered in my understanding: 'It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it; and so everything has its beginning by the love of God.' In this little thing I saw three properties; the first is that God made it; the second is that God loves it; and the third is that God keeps it.

All that is made. Not just humanity or Earth or the sun or the stars, but everything. So in this perspective, written in the 14th century, the whole Earth would be... I don't know, and I'm sure someone can do the math about an object the size of a hazelnut (around 15 mm diameter) containing all of that era's grasp of the size of visible Heaven and Earth, and how small Earth would be in comparison to that 15 mm, but I think it reaches a quite extreme level of itsy-bitsy teensy-weensiness (like timey-wimey wibbly-wobbly, I suppose) without adding on the understanding that our telescopes give.

[ 02. March 2015, 00:23: Message edited by: ChastMastr ]

Posted by Oscar the Grouch (# 1916) on :

quote:
Originally posted by LeRoc:

The Fermi Paradox works more or less like this:
The probability of intelligent life arising among 200b stars is relatively high
The Milky Way was already old when the Sun was born. So, the probability is high that civilisations have arisen long before us, and are therefore much more advanced
Even with sub-light speeds, it would take such a civilisation less than 50 million years to colonise all of the Milky Way. That sounds like a long time, but it is tiny (I'd even say 'insignificant' ) compared to the age of the Milky Way
Why aren't we seeing them?

I think that there are plenty of problems with this. First of all, you need not just intelligent life, but life which has reached the point where it can (and wants to) communicate beyond it's own planet. We have no way of judging whether humans are slow or fast in this respect. It seems to me perfectly feasible that there may be huge numbers of intelligent life forms that have not reached (and may never reach) the point where they can communicate beyond their own planet.

Secondly, there is the question of HOW interplanetary communication might be achieved. At the moment, things like a Warp Drive or HyperDrive are simply sci-fi McGuffins. They have to be there to make Star Trek et al work, but we have no way of knowing if they will ever become a reality. My personal hunch is that they won't and that travel between galaxies will never be possible. And radio communication has its own difficulties, as well.

To be honest, I seriously doubt that interplanetary communication or travel will happen. I'd like it to, though.

I see life in the universe as being highly possible, but utterly isolated and unconnected. We are not all there is - but God has created it all. The possibilities of other galaxies and life forms simply makes me even more in awe of the majesty of the Creator.

Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :

quote:
Oscar the Grouch: First of all, you need not just intelligent life, but life which has reached the point where it can (and wants to) communicate beyond it's own planet. We have no way of judging whether humans are slow or fast in this respect. It seems to me perfectly feasible that there may be huge numbers of intelligent life forms that have not reached (and may never reach) the point where they can communicate beyond their own planet.

This is more or less covered by the Drake Equation. Even if a very small percentage of civilisations reach this point, multiply this by 200,000,000,000 and you still get a big number. (Once again, I'm simplifying things.)

quote:
Oscar the Grouch: Secondly, there is the question of HOW interplanetary communication might be achieved. At the moment, things like a Warp Drive or HyperDrive are simply sci-fi McGuffins. They have to be there to make Star Trek et al work, but we have no way of knowing if they will ever become a reality. My personal hunch is that they won't and that travel between galaxies will never be possible. And radio communication has its own difficulties, as well.

That doesn't matter. Even if they build Voyager 1 and 2 style space probes that take thousands of years to reach another star. Given the age of the Milky Way, they'd still have plenty of time to reach us. Faster than light travel is not required.

I'm not making things up here, this is more or less the accepted thinking about the Drake Equation and the Fermi Paradox. You can look them up (Wikipedia isn't working well for me).

Posted by Anglican_Brat (# 12349) on :

I just watched the first episode of the series Cosmos: A SpaceTime Odyssey today, the updated version.

In the episode, the host places the history of the cosmos in the context of a 12-month calendar. The whole of human history amounts pretty much to the last day of December. The life of Jesus Christ, he piped would only be five seconds ago, according to this scheme.

Christians have traditionally seen the Incarnation as the pinnacle/climax of history, the focal point of all reality. How does understanding that the life of Jesus Christ, if situated in cosmic history, only amount to a fraction of a nanosecond, affect our faith?

Posted by orfeo (# 13878) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:

quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:

quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:

quote:
Originally posted by LeRoc:
Christians believe that we are significant because we are significant to God. He made us.....
See, this is where I get stuck. Where do you get that idea that we're important to Him? He didn't just make us, he made the whole fucking shebang.
And why does that last sentence negate our importance?
It doesn't. It simply puts it into perspective.

quote:

Why, if I make hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of things, are you suggesting that I can't point to one of those things and say "I particularly like this one?"
But you're not getting the scale thing, are you? We're not talking about hundreds and hundreds here. Or 999,999. We're talking about such huge numbers that we cannot reckon their meaning. The sheer scale of our tininess in relation to the hugeness of everything else is the issue here, but I see that this is a concept that people cannot grasp. I suppose our anthropocentrism makes it impossible.

I'm fully getting the scale thing. I just didn't see the point of writing a whole lot of extra 0s or 9s. One doesn't need to go past one in a million to reach a situation where the single individual is invisible in the throng and is not, in human terms, recognisable or knowable. Making them "more invisible" really doesn't change anything.

Posted by Lamb Chopped (# 5528) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Golden Key:
Re humans being "lords of creation":

Some think we're supposed to be more like park rangers--helping and taking care of things, not throwing our weight around.

I agree with that!

Posted by Lamb Chopped (# 5528) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Anglican_Brat:

Christians have traditionally seen the Incarnation as the pinnacle/climax of history, the focal point of all reality. How does understanding that the life of Jesus Christ, if situated in cosmic history, only amount to a fraction of a nanosecond, affect our faith?

No problem at all. Again, this is a confusion between scale (in this case, duration) and importance. There is no correlation.

Just think about how the one-second-length phrase "I do so promise, with the help of God" has affected a lot of us lifelong!

Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Anglican_Brat:

Christians have traditionally seen the Incarnation as the pinnacle/climax of history, the focal point of all reality. How does understanding that the life of Jesus Christ, if situated in cosmic history, only amount to a fraction of a nanosecond, affect our faith?

Say the Lord tarries and doesn't return for, oh, say, 500 million years. Then the tiny little 2,000 years between us and him will seem infinitessimal. SOMEbody has to be closer to him in time than somebody else; that's how time works. You might as well tell the Apostolic Fathers that they can't possibly believe in Jesus because the world was 4000 years old and Jesus was supposedly around just a few decades earlier.

The difference is one of amount, not substance. And it's meaningless.

Posted by Ikkyu (# 15207) on :

There have been many very eloquent defenses of the importance of humanity in this thread. My favorite is from the Japanese poet Issa.

This dewdrop world, is a dewdrop world, and yet ...

[a very long URL]

But I am with Yorick in thinking that people are dismissing the problem a bit too easily.
If, as it seems at present, the universe continues to expand forever. The period of time in which there is anything remotely interesting happening in the universe is a tiny fraction of time. We are talking trillions of eons in which there are not even atoms.
Heat death of the Universe
If you attend a tree act play in which the only interesting events happen during the first
Planck time of the first act, you would not think very much of the playwright. For any outside observer assuming that that first Planck time had any special significance would be very strange. Its only for us who will spend our lives inside it that it has any importance.
Assuming that the whole universe is made for us is absurd.
On the other hand human beings are important to other human beings. And every other living thing on earth is incredibly precious and important to us. That is not a contradiction.

[fixed broken scroll lock]

[ 02. March 2015, 06:54: Message edited by: Eutychus ]

Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Ikkyu:
But I am with Yorick in thinking that people are dismissing the problem a bit too easily.

What problem? Yorick hasn't defined a problem, only given us a gut feeling of his that small means insignificant. The only problem so far is with Yorick's gut feelings. Why should we share his gut feelings? He hasn't given us a reason to. Now you say you share his gut feelings. Well and good. But truth isn't decided by a vote.

Still we have no arguments for the idea that size=significance. Still waiting.

Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :

quote:
Originally posted by LeRoc:
I think that these discussions are about what it would take for us to build such a spaceship, with our current state of technology. For a far more advanced society, it would plausibly be easy.

I think some of the technical limitations plausibly apply to any society, even ones that are unimaginably advanced. For example, colliding with little bits of interstellar debris at relativistic speeds is going to be a problem for any society.

Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Ikkyu:

If you attend a tree act play in which the only interesting events happen during the first
Planck time of the first act, you would not think very much of the playwright.

As you go on to observe, we aren't attending all three acts of the play. We're only attending the parts of the play where things are happening.

The only outside observer present is God, who is an infinite being outside space and time for whom infinite stretches of time are trivial.

Posted by Boogie (# 13538) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Anglican_Brat:

Christians have traditionally seen the Incarnation as the pinnacle/climax of history, the focal point of all reality. How does understanding that the life of Jesus Christ, if situated in cosmic history, only amount to a fraction of a nanosecond, affect our faith?

Not in the least.

Jesus was a supreme example, not a supreme being, in my view.

Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on :

Like Muhammad?

Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
I think some of the technical limitations plausibly apply to any society, even ones that are unimaginably advanced. For example, colliding with little bits of interstellar debris at relativistic speeds is going to be a problem for any society.

I thought a humungous ice shield was the accepted workaround?

[ 02. March 2015, 06:52: Message edited by: Eutychus ]

Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Golden Key:
Re humans being "lords of creation": Some think we're supposed to be more like park rangers--helping and taking care of things, not throwing our weight around.

Lords of material creation... Anyway, these are just modern hangups with the word "lord". That word doesn't automatically indicate abusive despotism. And we are talking post-resurrection here, not fallen human beings.

I think the scale of the universe (not just its size, but also its multi-scale complexity) answers a simple question: just how cool a playground do you have to build so that a multitude of super-powered human saints will not ever get bored with it, in eternity?

For now we are grounded to our room for misbehaving, and we stare furtively out of the windows...

Posted by orfeo (# 13878) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Ikkyu:
There have been many very eloquent defenses of the importance of humanity in this thread.

But I am with Yorick in thinking that people are dismissing the problem a bit too easily.

I can't speak for anyone else, but it is absolutely crucial to my argument that it is not a defense of the importance of "humanity" at all. It is a defense of the importance of an individual human being.

Posted by Golden Key (# 1468) on :

Misc. comments:

--Re size, insignificance of individuals and Earth:

Think of a mosaic, or a painting, or a digital picture on a screen. Each is made up of many things, all contributing to the overall effect.

Chip a piece off the mosaic; scrape off a bit of the painting; switch off one pixel in the digital picture.

Does it make a difference?

--Re what God did/will do when we're no longer in the picture, and will the remaining things whirl around meaninglessly:

Maybe there's lots going on that we don't know about. Maybe nothing's meaningless.

--Re Big Bang Theory (not the TV series!), expansion of the universe, etc.:

I have a theory ("and it is my theory, and it is mine"--Ann Elk, "Monty Python") if there was a big bang, maybe it was (like) a seed germinating. And growing might be (like) expansion.

If that's the case, I'd expect the expansion to slow down. Maybe there'll be blooms. Maybe new seeds, or running roots, or spores. Eventually, though, our cosmic plant would probably contract and die--then become something else, or feed something else, or put out new parts of itself (as some seemingly-dead trees do).

Tangentially, that might make it impossible for us to hop from our plant to another--we're part of the plant.

Posted by Ambivalence (# 16165) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Ikkyu:
The period of time in which there is anything remotely interesting happening in the universe is a tiny fraction of time. We are talking trillions of eons in which there are not even atoms.

Two things I set against a future of endless tedious nothing;

Physically) that the evolution of the Universe already involved a drastic change with expansion - driven by a mechanism we don't understand - there could be some equivalent change awaiting in the future.

Theologically) God can call "time" on the Universe whenever She feels like it.

Posted by quetzalcoatl (# 16740) on :

quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:

quote:
Originally posted by Ikkyu:
There have been many very eloquent defenses of the importance of humanity in this thread.

But I am with Yorick in thinking that people are dismissing the problem a bit too easily.
I can't speak for anyone else, but it is absolutely crucial to my argument that it is not a defense of the importance of "humanity" at all. It is a defense of the importance of an individual human being.

Well said. Also, for me, the present moment. But maybe the modern atheist wakes up in the morning, realizes yet again his own utter insignificance, and stumbles through another empty day. Or maybe not.

Posted by Barnabas62 (# 9110) on :

quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:

Still we have no arguments for the idea that size=significance. Still waiting.

I haven't seen any either. My "devil's advocate" of reductio ad absurdum didn't get any takers. In any case I think that is just another spin on size = significance.

I guess Occam's razor may come into play at some stage.

But I think Evensong made a good point. It doesn't seem to me to have anything to do with mysticism at all. Size = significance and the self-assertion of significance both come from a human perspective. The conception that "the heavens declare the glory of God" falls more into the category of general revelation. You might not buy it, but it's pretty hard to look at the night sky and deny even the possibility that it may indeed be true.

Posted by Golden Key (# 1468) on :

Re the Fermi Paradox question of "Why aren't we seeing them?":

I rather like the answer in the movie "Starman". A man (gov't scientist?) is energetically asking the space alien why no one's visited us before. The alien laughs, and says something to the effect of, "What wonderful arrogance! It's only just recently that you became interesting."
[Snigger]

Maybe we're boring. Or scary. Or dangerous. Or too weird. Maybe whatever space people there may be aren't curious, beyond their world. Maybe the pretty lights above them are just pretty lights. Or maybe they don't have sight, and no intuition that there might be an Elsewhere, so the question never arises. (Then again, there's Aunt Beast's people in "A Wrinkle In Time".) Maybe they took a different path, and their culture is more like the indigenous cultures of Earth--close to Nature; various kinds of technology that's appropriate for the way they're living; and all sorts of knowledge that "advanced" people tend to discount. So no radios, space ships, telescopes, etc. Maybe they can't physically leave their place--mushrooms, living rock, bacteria.

Maybe they're happier where they are. Maybe they're just *happy*.

Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :

quote:
Golden Key: Maybe they're happier where they are. Maybe they're just *happy*.

That must be because of the mushrooms [Smile]

Yes, all of the things you mentioned have been proposed as solutions to the Fermi Paradox. For example, I saw the 'Zoo Hypothesis' in there.

Posted by Eliab (# 9153) on :

I also think this is a non-problem for Christians.

If the unvierse is vast and empty, and we are the only intelligent species in it, then obviously we're significant. We'd be the only intelligent species. That's awesome - and the chances against it on a naturalistic account would be so great that the view that it was made for us would seem to me to be very plausible.

On the other hand, if the universe routinely generates intelligent species, and we aren't that unusual, we couldn't quite claim that same unique significance as if it were just us, but we could still say that intelligent life in general is significant in the universe. We have increased the pool of things God might care about in similar ways as he does us, but not said anything to undermine the suggestion that he cares about us.

And as far as individual human beings are concerned, Christianity has always taught that we are as nothing next to God (we are 'dust'), but that despite this infinite distance he has chosen to love us. The fact that we're in a really big universe doesn't make that any more or less wonderful.

Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Ikkyu:
If you attend a tree act play in which the only interesting events happen during the first
Planck time of the first act, you would not think very much of the playwright.

How very anthropocentric to think that we can determine which part of the play we're in at all! For all we know this grand space opera we're in has just concluded the overture, and we're in the very early seconds of the first act. And there are four more acts to go after this one, each more interesting than the last.

Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :

quote:
mousethief: For all we know this grand space opera we're in has just concluded the overture, and we're in the very early seconds of the first act. And there are four more acts to go after this one, each more interesting than the last.

Just wait until the soprano begins to sing.

Posted by Ikkyu (# 15207) on :

quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:

quote:
Originally posted by Ikkyu:
But I am with Yorick in thinking that people are dismissing the problem a bit too easily.
What problem? Yorick hasn't defined a problem, only given us a gut feeling of his that small means insignificant. The only problem so far is with Yorick's gut feelings. Why should we share his gut feelings? He hasn't given us a reason to. Now you say you share his gut feelings. Well and good. But truth isn't decided by a vote.

Still we have no arguments for the idea that size=significance. Still waiting.

For me the problem is not size=significance. In my opinion we humans invent significance. So using that scale we are very significant.
But Universe invented for us significant? That is the part that is absurd.
And events happening on Earth as the center of Universal History for everyone else not human? Also absurd.

Posted by Ikkyu (# 15207) on :

quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:

quote:
Originally posted by Ikkyu:
There have been many very eloquent defenses of the importance of humanity in this thread.

But I am with Yorick in thinking that people are dismissing the problem a bit too easily.
I can't speak for anyone else, but it is absolutely crucial to my argument that it is not a defense of the importance of "humanity" at all. It is a defense of the importance of an individual human being.

Having the importance of an individual human being depend on our place on the Universe is bizarre for me. For me, we humans give each other as much importance as we have. If we do a poor job its on us because thats all we have.
But expecting the Universe to somehow "make us important" is a bit arrogant and actually somewhat odd.

Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :

quote:
Ikkyu: For me the problem is not size=significance. In my opinion we humans invent significance. So using that scale we are very significant.
But Universe invented for us significant? That is the part that is absurd.

So, you believe that humans are significant because we give significance to eachother.

As a Christian, I believe that humans are significant because we give significance to eachother and because God (the Universe if you wish) gives significance to us.

I don't see the discordance here. Neither of us thinks that humans are insignificant.

Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Oscar the Grouch:
I see life in the universe as being highly possible, but utterly isolated and unconnected. We are not all there is - but God has created it all. The possibilities of other galaxies and life forms simply makes me even more in awe of the majesty of the Creator.

This is what I think. And I was motivated to start this thread to try to get to some sort of understanding of how we might work this through in light of our religious traditions. I thought we might be able to add astonishing details to what we retell each Sunday. Can we?

I'd sure like more than the "Star Trek" prayer of consecration in the Canadian Book of Alternative Services. Link, see p 201

Posted by Crœsos (# 238) on :

quote:
Originally posted by LeRoc:
The Fermi Paradox works more or less like this:
The probability of intelligent life arising among 200b stars is relatively high
.
.
.

There's a lot of vague, hand-wavey guesswork associated with the Drake equation, but as Ernst Mayr pointed out in his SETI debate with Carl Sagan, this assumption that human-type intelligence is a commonplace adaptation is probably the least supportable.

quote:
What Percentage of Planets on Which Life Has Originated Will Produce Intelligent Life?

Physicists, on the whole, will give a different answer to this question than biologists. Physicists still tend to think more deterministically than biologists. They tend to say, if life has originated somewhere, it will also develop intelligence in due time. The biologist, on the other hand, is impressed by the improbability of such a development.

Life originated on Earth about 3.8 billion years ago, but high intelligence did not develop until about half a million years ago. If Earth had been temporarily cooled down or heated up too much during these 3.8 billion years, intelligence would have never originated.

When answering this question, one must be aware of the fact that evolution never moves on a straight line toward an objective ("intelligence") as happens during a chemical process or as a result of a law of physics. Evolutionary pathways are highly complex and resemble more a tree with all of its branches and twigs.

After the origin of life, that is, 3.8 billion years ago, life on Earth consisted for 2 billion years only of simple prokaryotes, cells without an organized nucleus. These bacteria and their relatives developed surely 50 to 100 different (some perhaps very different) lineages, but, in this enormously long time, none of them led to intelligence. Owing to an astonishing, unique event that is even today only partially explained, about 1,800 million years ago the first eukaryote originated, a creature with a well organized nucleus and the other characteristics of "higher" organisms. From the rich world of the protists (consisting of only a single cell) there eventually originated three groups of multicellular organisms: fungi, plants and animals. But none of the millions of species of fungi and plants was able to produce intelligence.

The animals (Metazoa) branched out in the Precambrian and Cambrian time periods to about 60 to 80 lineages (phyla). Only a single one of them, that of the chordates, led eventually to genuine intelligence. The chordates are an old and well diversified group, but only one of its numerous lineages, that of the vertebrates, eventually produced intelligence. Among the vertebrates, a whole series of groups evolved -- types of fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals. Again only a single lineage, that of the mammals, led to high intelligence. The mammals had a long evolutionary history which began in the Triassic Period, more than 200 million years ago, but only in the latter part of the Tertiary Period -- that is, some 15 to 20 million years ago -- did higher intelligence originate in one of the circa 24 orders of mammals.

The elaboration of the brain of the hominids began less than 3 million years ago, and that of the cortex of Homo sapiens occurred only about 300,000 years ago. Nothing demonstrates the improbability of the origin of high intelligence better than the millions of phyletic lineages that failed to achieve it.

In other words, the usual assumption that life will almost always eventually develop intelligence wherever it forms is almost certainly a vast over-estimate.

Posted by Yorick (# 12169) on :

I’m sorry I’ve been unable to articulate myself well enough here to present what people would consider an argument, and got caught up in a distracted way with a tangent about small being the same thing as insignificant (which, I agree, clearly isn’t).

The question I’m trying to raise is about the fact that we human beings view our place in reality in a particularly limited way- because we just cannot grasp the size of the universe, we cannot objectively see our relative position in it. Rather, we observe and measure ourselves subjectively on a human scale- we base our valuation of things like love and interpersonal relationships and individual human lives from a human perspective and in the context of human history. So far, so uncontentious.

What I’m wondering about here is the hypothetical enquiry that IF we were somehow able to see ourselves (and those things we consider significant (like love, hope, etc.) with a more objective view of our actual position in reality, on a cosmic scale as it were, we would then appreciate the significance of those things rather differently. We might even consider them insignificant at that scale.

So what? I hear you ask. Well, ISTM people claim that God can view us with a perspective that takes in the whole universe, that He is in a position, being omniscient, to see us as part of the whole.

People have always known that we are a small part of a very large whole, just by looking upwards at night, but as science provides us with more and more evidence of the real sizes of the parts and the whole, this thing takes on an even greater power to move our emotions (well, it does for me, anyhow). The fact that in all the universe, the conditions necessary to support any life at all will last for such an amazingly small portion of the lifespan of the universe (one thousandth of a billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billionth of a percent) is something we are only now having to get to grips with in our collective psyche. It’s getting harder to dismiss this as not really any different from a few hundreds or even millions or whatever, IMO.

God sees us objectively as this tiny thing in a great big thing, you would presumably say. Questions arise from this assertion, such as why would a creator god make it that way? Why would these extremely extremely special creatures, made in His image no less, have such a tiny part in the whole? And saying that God made the universe this big so his angels don’t get bored during their eternal playtime doesn’t cut the biscuit (though thanks for answering the question, at least, IngoB).

It may well be that I stand alone in wondering about these things, and that I’m trying to have a discussion with the wrong people here- people who are satisfied with the sidestep answer of God’s inscrutability. That’s okay too, as long as I’ve managed to iterate my wondering satisfactorily. Thanks for reading.

Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :

quote:
Crœsos: There's a lot of vague, hand-wavey guesswork associated with the Drake equation, but as Ernst Mayr pointed out in his SETI debate with Carl Sagan, this assumption that human-type intelligence is a commonplace adaptation is probably the least supportable.

Yours is Explanation Group 1, Possibility 1.

quote:
Yorick: What I’m wondering about here is the hypothetical enquiry that IF we were somehow able to see ourselves (and those things we consider significant (like love, hope, etc.) with a more objective view of our actual position in reality, on a cosmic scale as it were, we would then appreciate the significance of those things rather differently. We might even consider them insignificant at that scale.

This has already happened with the Pale Blue Dot photo, that was taken 25 years ago last month. Yes, when we saw that photo, even if we intellectually already knew it, it was a shock to see how tiny we are. And no doubt, some people used the word 'insignificant'.

But an interesting thing happened: if something became insignificant to people, if only fleetingly, it is are the petty reasons why we fight and make war between us. And what became more significant is that we should care more for the pale blue dot on which we live.

Posted by Nicodemia (# 4756) on :

quote:
Questions arise from this assertion, such as why would a creator god make it that way? Why would these extremely extremely special creatures, made in His image no less, have such a tiny part in the whole?

Exactly my problem, Yorick. It all seems just so unlikely. Reading about the complexities of us actually being here (various extinctions, the Cambrian explosion of life. There's a great article in this Week's New Scientist ) I just can't relate this to a loving God who made us in his image.

Posted by quetzalcoatl (# 16740) on :

In an odd way, the blue dot photo was a numinous experience for some people. Even a transcendent one.

Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :

quote:
quetzalcoatl: In an odd way, the blue dot photo was a numinous experience for some people. Even a transcendent one.

Exactly. Perhaps in a paradoxical way, it made things more signigicant, not less.

Posted by Crœsos (# 238) on :

Reminds me of what's been called the loneliest photograph. Every human being who was alive on July 21, 1969 (plus the remains of every human who died before that date) is included somewhere within the shot . . . except for Michael Collins.

Posted by Ikkyu (# 15207) on :

quote:
Originally posted by LeRoc:

quote:
quetzalcoatl: In an odd way, the blue dot photo was a numinous experience for some people. Even a transcendent one.
Exactly. Perhaps in a paradoxical way, it made things more signigicant, not less.

More significant for us , in the this is all we have we better take care of it sense. But not in the we are so great and special sense.

quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:

why would a creator god make it that way? Why would these extremely extremely special creatures, made in His image no less, have such a tiny part in the whole?

This is what the crux of the matter is. It is
a problem if you assume that we are like Zaphod Beeblebrox THE most important thing in the universe. The Universe created for US. If not not so much.

Posted by quetzalcoatl (# 16740) on :

Well, we are special, because we were able to take that photo, and feel the loneliness. Who else would do that? Well, maybe someone in Alpha Centauri - but then they would also be special.

Posted by Ikkyu (# 15207) on :

quote:
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
Well, we are special, because we were able to take that photo, and feel the loneliness. Who else would do that? Well, maybe someone in Alpha Centauri - but then they would also be special.

Genjokoan:
"To carry the self forward and illuminate myriad things is delusion. That myriad things come forth and illuminate the self is awakening."

Posted by quetzalcoatl (# 16740) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Ikkyu:

quote:
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
Well, we are special, because we were able to take that photo, and feel the loneliness. Who else would do that? Well, maybe someone in Alpha Centauri - but then they would also be special.
Genjokoan:
"To carry the self forward and illuminate myriad things is delusion. That myriad things come forth and illuminate the self is awakening."

That's very pretty, and convinces me how special you are, that you were able to think of it.

Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on :

And Christ in shining white robes solemnly takes a seat before assembled mankind. He raises his arms and speaks:

"Welcome to the Great Judgement."

(dramatic pause)

"The universalist were right. This concludes the Great Judgement."

(stunned silence)

Suddenly a strange noise rises from somewhere in the billionth row of the multitude.

lolololololoLOLOLOLOLOLwheeeeeeeeeeBAM

(spacetime shakes as IngoB in his resurrection body speeds off at warp 20)

St Peter eagerly bounds toward Christ:

"Should I bring him back, O Lord?"

Christ looks St Peter up and down:

"Sure, Cephas. Fetch."

yourwordismycommandwheeeeeeeeeeBAM

(spacetime reverberates once more as St Peter hits warp speed)

Christ grins, places His hands on his forehead and makes a ripping motion. The world twists like a vortex around his head and suddenly everybody looks down on the galactic plane, and zooms in on the immense sea of stars in one galactic arm, and focuses to see....

... a spark hurtling towards a star, slamming through it, rushing towards the next star, while the first star begins to blow up into a supernova, leaving a trail of gigantic explosions ...

... wheeeeeeeeeeeee ...

... and then another spark in angry pursuit, dodging and weaving around the supernova explosions ...

Suddenly the view collapses into itself and there's just Christ again, with his hands closed to fists, slowly lowering his arms.

He grins again.

"In my Father's house are many mansions."

He looks expectantly. Nothing happens. Christ sighs.

"You can go now. ...uhh... At ease. ... hmm ... Have fun?!"

Rumblings as the multitude disperses to do all sorts of weird and wonderful stuff. One can hear Christ's voice over the din fading into the distance:

"Yes, I would love to have some tea with you. What's tea?"

quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
And saying that God made the universe this big so his angels don’t get bored during their eternal playtime doesn’t cut the biscuit (though thanks for answering the question, at least, IngoB).

I didn't talk about angels, of course. I talked about saints, i.e., resurrected humans.

And I don't think that it is an accident that you made this "mistake". Or for that matter that you here simply assert that this "doesn't cut the biscuit", without providing any kind of argument.

It is an entirely viable explanation to say that the universe is so big and complex to give humans something sufficiently interesting to engage with. In fact, that is true even now, in our fallen state, where we are confined to earth (or maybe the solar system, if we work really hard at it) but for observations. The whole of natural science - that very human endeavour that you have turned into your quasi-religion - is already totally reliant on the universe being so big and complex.

If the universe was small and simple, then we would be done with science. We would be done with exploring. We would be done with discovering. Been there, done that, for everything. Can you imagine the utter boredom of everything being known? No, you cannot, not really - we psychologically rely on the the world being a stunning thing that always has some other part or aspect for us to look at.

The science that you love is also but a weak echo of what we will be doing in New Creation. It will all be eternally fascinating, and even for finite minds you need a rather big place if they have endless time to explore...

Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :

quote:
Ikkyu: More significant for us

Yes, and isn't that great? We are significant to eachother. That matters.

You seem to confuse to things: "we are significant" and "we are the most important thing in the universe". Those two statements don't mean the same thing, there's actually a wide gap between them. Most people on this thread are saying the former, not the latter.

Although we can be the most important thing in the universe for eachother sometimes.

And IngoB, this is the gazillionth time I told you to be careful not to hit your head on the CfA2 Great Wall. I'm not going to warn you again.

[ 02. March 2015, 17:56: Message edited by: LeRoc ]

Posted by Barnabas62 (# 9110) on :

St Peter in angry pursuit of IngoB? Think I'll try to get the heavenly equivalent of a front row seat for that one ..

Nice fantasy though - provided the supernova creation doesn't do for any not-yet-eternal species. That reminds me, uncomfortably, of Arthur C Clarke's The Star.

[ 02. March 2015, 18:50: Message edited by: Barnabas62 ]

Posted by Ikkyu (# 15207) on :

quote:
Originally posted by LeRoc:

quote:
Ikkyu: More significant for us
Yes, and isn't that great? We are significant to each other. That matters.

You seem to confuse to things: "we are significant" and "we are the most important thing in the universe". Those two statements don't mean the same thing, there's actually a wide gap between them. Most people on this thread are saying the former, not the latter.

Although we can be the most important thing in the universe for each other sometimes.

And IngoB, this is the gazillionth time I told you to be careful not to hit your head on the CfA2 Great Wall. I'm not going to warn you again.

I think we are pretty much in agreement on this one. I don't think they mean the same thing either. I thought I made that clear with all the statements I made about how I think we are significant. But while you are probably right about most in this thread. There is still a problem. There is still a lot of preaching around that implies that the Earth was made for us to do as we will with it. And a subtler one, this reaching for a more "special" and rarefied "meaning" to our lives than the one staring at us right in the face. Just look at any flower for example, what does it "mean"? How "important" is it?

Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :

quote:
Ikkyu: There is still a lot of preaching around that implies that the Earth was made for us to do as we will with it.

Perhaps there is, but that's not what I believe. I believe that the Earth was made for us to care for it. The word 'stewards' has been mentioned on this thread.

quote:
Ikkyu: Just look at any flower for example, what does it "mean"? How "important" is it?

Perhaps ask a poet?

Posted by Ikkyu (# 15207) on :

quote:
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:

quote:
Originally posted by Ikkyu:

quote:
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
Well, we are special, because we were able to take that photo, and feel the loneliness. Who else would do that? Well, maybe someone in Alpha Centauri - but then they would also be special.
Genjokoan:
"To carry the self forward and illuminate myriad things is delusion. That myriad things come forth and illuminate the self is awakening."
That's very pretty, and convinces me how special you are, that you were able to think of it.

You might be quetzalcoatl but I am definitely not
Dogen [Smile]

Posted by Ikkyu (# 15207) on :

quote:
Originally posted by LeRoc:

quote:
Ikkyu: There is still a lot of preaching around that implies that the Earth was made for us to do as we will with it.
Perhaps there is, but that's not what I believe. I believe that the Earth was made for us to care for it. The word 'stewards' has been mentioned on this thread.

quote:
Ikkyu: Just look at any flower for example, what does it "mean"? How "important" is it?
Perhaps ask a poet?

And miss it?

Posted by quetzalcoatl (# 16740) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Ikkyu:

quote:
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:

quote:
Originally posted by Ikkyu:

quote:
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
Well, we are special, because we were able to take that photo, and feel the loneliness. Who else would do that? Well, maybe someone in Alpha Centauri - but then they would also be special.
Genjokoan:
"To carry the self forward and illuminate myriad things is delusion. That myriad things come forth and illuminate the self is awakening."
That's very pretty, and convinces me how special you are, that you were able to think of it.
You might be quetzalcoatl but I am definitely not
Dogen .

Quetzalcoatl is merely a persona; I am the one, who lives under the sky, and finally knows less and less.

Posted by cliffdweller (# 13338) on :

quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
And Christ in shining white robes solemnly takes a seat before assembled mankind. He raises his arms and speaks:

"Welcome to the Great Judgement."

(dramatic pause)

"The universalist were right. This concludes the Great Judgement."

(stunned silence)

Suddenly a strange noise rises from somewhere in the billionth row of the multitude.

lolololololoLOLOLOLOLOLwheeeeeeeeeeBAM

(spacetime shakes as IngoB in his resurrection body speeds off at warp 20)

St Peter eagerly bounds toward Christ:

"Should I bring him back, O Lord?"

Christ looks St Peter up and down:

"Sure, Cephas. Fetch."

yourwordismycommandwheeeeeeeeeeBAM

(spacetime reverberates once more as St Peter hits warp speed)

Christ grins, places His hands on his forehead and makes a ripping motion. The world twists like a vortex around his head and suddenly everybody looks down on the galactic plane, and zooms in on the immense sea of stars in one galactic arm, and focuses to see....

... a spark hurtling towards a star, slamming through it, rushing towards the next star, while the first star begins to blow up into a supernova, leaving a trail of gigantic explosions ...

... wheeeeeeeeeeeee ...

... and then another spark in angry pursuit, dodging and weaving around the supernova explosions ...

Suddenly the view collapses into itself and there's just Christ again, with his hands closed to fists, slowly lowering his arms.

He grins again.

"In my Father's house are many mansions."

He looks expectantly. Nothing happens. Christ sighs.

"You can go now. ...uhh... At ease. ... hmm ... Have fun?!"

Rumblings as the multitude disperses to do all sorts of weird and wonderful stuff. One can hear Christ's voice over the din fading into the distance:

"Yes, I would love to have some tea with you. What's tea?"

quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
And saying that God made the universe this big so his angels don’t get bored during their eternal playtime doesn’t cut the biscuit (though thanks for answering the question, at least, IngoB).
I didn't talk about angels, of course. I talked about saints, i.e., resurrected humans.

And I don't think that it is an accident that you made this "mistake". Or for that matter that you here simply assert that this "doesn't cut the biscuit", without providing any kind of argument.

It is an entirely viable explanation to say that the universe is so big and complex to give humans something sufficiently interesting to engage with. In fact, that is true even now, in our fallen state, where we are confined to earth (or maybe the solar system, if we work really hard at it) but for observations. The whole of natural science - that very human endeavour that you have turned into your quasi-religion - is already totally reliant on the universe being so big and complex.

If the universe was small and simple, then we would be done with science. We would be done with exploring. We would be done with discovering. Been there, done that, for everything. Can you imagine the utter boredom of everything being known? No, you cannot, not really - we psychologically rely on the the world being a stunning thing that always has some other part or aspect for us to look at.

The science that you love is also but a weak echo of what we will be doing in New Creation. It will all be eternally fascinating, and even for finite minds you need a rather big place if they have endless time to explore...

Surprisingly perhaps, I love everything about this. [Axe murder]

Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :

L'homme n'est qu'un roseau, le plus faible de la nature, mais c'est un roseau pensant. Blaise Pascal.

(Humanity is nothing but a reed, the weakest in nature, but it is a thinking reed.)

Assume the probability of intelligent life is such that the expected number of societies with intelligent life in the universe is one - in that case, it takes a universe to make one planet with intelligent life.
If the probability of intelligent life is higher than that, so that there's more than one - then there's more than one planet with intelligent life.
I'd agree that it would be arrogant to suppose we are more important than other societies with intelligent life on them. But I don't think anybody is putting that claim forward.

Each individual human being is no less important to God now there's seven billion of us than they were a few hundred years ago when there were less than one billion. I think saying that human beings are insignificant on a cosmic scale, and are therefore insignificant on an objective view is a bit like saying that individual human beings are objectively less significant because there's more of us. Maybe if you look at it in some ways, but those are not the ways in which God is supposed to look.

Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on :

OK. So we're still a century or ten away from finding biogenic oxygen on another world. But we will. We must. It HAS to be there. Because if it's not, we are VERY special indeed. And all is orthodox.

And when we do, it's a game changer. A theology changer. It means there's no such thing as orthodoxy.

IngoB understands this. In every direction within ten thousand light years there's life. That means in the next spiral arms. Tens, hundreds, thousands of worlds.

One has us. Sapients. May be ten.

They'll have Saviour. God incarnate. As a cephalopod. Or a tree. Whatever we are there.

It gets worse [Smile]

As orthodoxy is over with a whiff of oxygen, not only will the practically infinite finite universe have had trillions of incarnations, the eternal infinite multiverse will have had infinite x infinite.

Yorick's right for the wrong reason. It IS about size.

Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :

quote:
Martin60: So we're still a century or ten away from finding biogenic oxygen on another world.

We'll have the techniques for finding it in a decade or so. The question is whether it's there.

quote:
Martin60: One has us. Sapients. May be ten.

And they're all on the Ship [Razz]

Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
When answering this question, one must be aware of the fact that evolution never moves on a straight line toward an objective ("intelligence") as happens during a chemical process or as a result of a law of physics. Evolutionary pathways are highly complex and resemble more a tree with all of its branches and twigs.

After the origin of life, that is, 3.8 billion years ago, life on Earth consisted for 2 billion years only of simple prokaryotes, cells without an organized nucleus. These bacteria and their relatives developed surely 50 to 100 different (some perhaps very different) lineages, but, in this enormously long time, none of them led to intelligence. Owing to an astonishing, unique event that is even today only partially explained, about 1,800 million years ago the first eukaryote originated, a creature with a well organized nucleus and the other characteristics of "higher" organisms. From the rich world of the protists (consisting of only a single cell) there eventually originated three groups of multicellular organisms: fungi, plants and animals. But none of the millions of species of fungi and plants was able to produce intelligence.

The animals (Metazoa) branched out in the Precambrian and Cambrian time periods to about 60 to 80 lineages (phyla). Only a single one of them, that of the chordates, led eventually to genuine intelligence. The chordates are an old and well diversified group, but only one of its numerous lineages, that of the vertebrates, eventually produced intelligence. Among the vertebrates, a whole series of groups evolved -- types of fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals. Again only a single lineage, that of the mammals, led to high intelligence. The mammals had a long evolutionary history which began in the Triassic Period, more than 200 million years ago, but only in the latter part of the Tertiary Period -- that is, some 15 to 20 million years ago -- did higher intelligence originate in one of the circa 24 orders of mammals.

I've editted this a bit, so as not to quote too much. I'm grateful for your post.

I went to the Burgess shale in the 1990s, and saw Pikaia which is said to be the one in the Cambrian explosion with a chordate type of anatomy. That Pikaia and only this was the ancestor of chordates, and that there were many, many body plans possible for organisms was astounding. Of the many, many possible body plans for arthropods for example (bugs, insects etc), only one lineage essentially survived taught me that if we re-ran the movie again, the likelihood of evolution running the same way again, or even close to what has happened, even on earth, let alone other planets is exceedingly unlikely. Thus, contradicting the idea that the universe is teeming with intelligent life by inference. (I'd recommend Stephen Jay Gould's book Wonderful Life, which for all of its flaws and relative age, puts forth the best argument with actual data. Though I conclude differently in some respects that he.)

It is (annoying) things like this that make it difficult for me to reject religious claims for specialness of life on earth, but it forces me to say 'life' and not just reference 'humanity'.

Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :

quote:
no prophet's flag is set so...: Thus, contradicting the idea that the universe is teeming with intelligent life by inference.

This is a non sequitur.

Posted by orfeo (# 13878) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Ikkyu:

quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:

quote:
Originally posted by Ikkyu:
There have been many very eloquent defenses of the importance of humanity in this thread.

But I am with Yorick in thinking that people are dismissing the problem a bit too easily.
I can't speak for anyone else, but it is absolutely crucial to my argument that it is not a defense of the importance of "humanity" at all. It is a defense of the importance of an individual human being.
Having the importance of an individual human being depend on our place on the Universe is bizarre for me. For me, we humans give each other as much importance as we have. If we do a poor job its on us because thats all we have.
But expecting the Universe to somehow "make us important" is a bit arrogant and actually somewhat odd.

Okay then. Well, if you believe that God only talks to and cares for and saves IMPORTANT people, then I'd say about 99% of Christians are screwed just on the basis of their position on their home planet, never mind whether alien races exist. That's the point I've been making all along.

[ 03. March 2015, 00:47: Message edited by: orfeo ]

Posted by orfeo (# 13878) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
God sees us objectively as this tiny thing in a great big thing, you would presumably say. Questions arise from this assertion, such as why would a creator god make it that way? Why would these extremely extremely special creatures, made in His image no less, have such a tiny part in the whole?

Eh?

There are some odd assumptions in this.

The first is that if we are made in God's image, we are the ONLY creatures made in God's image. I suppose some people do hold that view, but writers that have wrestled with the theological implications of intelligent life elsewhere such as C.S. Lewis and Poul Anderson have had other models.

The second assumption seems to be that the creation was made for us. Again, some people might hold that view, but I certainly don't. We were made for the Creator. As were many other things. Saying that we are special in some way is not the same thing as saying that the whole rest of creation exists just so that we can go ooh and ah at it. I'm quite sure that God is capable of delighting in a gazelle cavorting across the grasslands or a penguin waddling across Antarctica even if there's no human being around to see it.

And the third assumption, somewhat linked to both of the above, is that "being made in God's image" is the only possible way of being special. As if all the other creatures on this Earth, never mind elsewhere, are just so much yawn-worthy matter.

Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Martin60:
They'll have Saviour. God incarnate. As a cephalopod. Or a tree. Whatever we are there.

First, let's remind ourselves what "orthodoxy" has defined as "human being": a rational animal. Consequently, every sapient and corporeal alien life we may find is by proper philosophical definition human.

In a way, every science fiction movie we have ever made reflects that. For in them we always are either dealing with another set of non-sapient animals. And however difficult to understand or dangerous they might be, it is simply a question of time before we can control them. Or we deal with rational animals. And then a whole different dance starts, of ideas and dreams and hopes.

Now salvation history has a clear trajectory. First, there was one family. Then there was one tribe. Then there was one nation. Now there is one humanity. So what comes next? Here's my prediction then. If there are sapient aliens out there, then

They are fallen.
God has not come incarnate to them.
Their Saviour is none other than Jesus Christ.

So this will be the final frontier, the widening of salvation even across different species of human. From the naked apes of earth, to the intelligent trees of Vega or the rational gas balloons of Sirius or what have you.

And if this works, and I think it can work, then for the same reason why science fiction movies work. In the end, the condition of being an embodied spirit transcends all details. Anybody who has a physical body and understands the world is in the end in the very same boat. A rational gas balloon of Sirius may not have the slightest idea of what a cross is. But it will know pain and death. It will know despair and hope. It will know enemies, and it will know love.

And if all this becomes true one day, then the human beings of planet Earth will be both special and not special. Just like now the Jews are both special and not special. Salvation comes from the Jews, but is for all of us. Well, salvation comes from the naked apes of Terra, but it is for all the human beings out there.

[ 03. March 2015, 01:11: Message edited by: IngoB ]

Posted by orfeo (# 13878) on :

quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
Here's my prediction then. If there are sapient aliens out there, then
They are fallen.
God has not come incarnate to them.
Their Saviour is none other than Jesus Christ.

C.S. Lewis' approach was that they were not fallen.

Poul Anderson's approach was that how God had revealed himself to sapient aliens was a matter for them, not us.

Posted by Ikkyu (# 15207) on :

quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:

quote:
Originally posted by Ikkyu:

quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:

quote:
Originally posted by Ikkyu:
There have been many very eloquent defenses of the importance of humanity in this thread.

But I am with Yorick in thinking that people are dismissing the problem a bit too easily.
I can't speak for anyone else, but it is absolutely crucial to my argument that it is not a defense of the importance of "humanity" at all. It is a defense of the importance of an individual human being.
Having the importance of an individual human being depend on our place on the Universe is bizarre for me. For me, we humans give each other as much importance as we have. If we do a poor job its on us because thats all we have.
But expecting the Universe to somehow "make us important" is a bit arrogant and actually somewhat odd.
Okay then. Well, if you believe that God only talks to and cares for and saves IMPORTANT people, then I'd say about 99% of Christians are screwed just on the basis of their position on their home planet, never mind whether alien races exist. That's the point I've been making all along.

No, I actually don't believe in a personal God.
About salvation if there is such a thing I agree
with you that it has nothing to do with "importance". Where does the scale of the Universe fit in for me? For me it means we are
all we have. We have to take care of each other or
nobody else will. And we are "important" to each other only any other importance is meaningless. I'm including all life on earth in "we".
And that this does not seem to fit well with traditional religious narratives.

Posted by Golden Key (# 1468) on :

Ingo--

Your wonderful flight [Biased]

of fancy now resides on the Quotes thread.

I think, however, St. Pete might want a word or two with you, when you get to The Gate.

[Cool]

Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :

quote:
Originally posted by LeRoc:

quote:
mousethief: For all we know this grand space opera we're in has just concluded the overture, and we're in the very early seconds of the first act. And there are four more acts to go after this one, each more interesting than the last.
Just wait until the soprano begins to sing.

The fat one? That means it's almost over, right?

quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
why would a creator god make it that way? Why would these extremely extremely special creatures, made in His image no less, have such a tiny part in the whole?

Why do you think it should be otherwise? I don't understand why you think yours is the default view.

And why do you drag in "tiny" when you SAID that you don't equate size with significance? Do you or don't you? Make up your mind.

Posted by Barnabas62 (# 9110) on :

quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:

quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
why would a creator god make it that way? Why would these extremely extremely special creatures, made in His image no less, have such a tiny part in the whole?
Why do you think it should be otherwise? I don't understand why you think yours is the default view.

And why do you drag in "tiny" when you SAID that you don't equate size with significance? Do you or don't you? Make up your mind.

That's the trouble with preconceptions, I find. They are so far under the skin we don't always know they are there until someone else points them out. Even then, the tendency to deny can be strong. A truth which applies to all of us, not just Yorick. But on this issue, it does rather look as though it applies to him.

[ 03. March 2015, 08:55: Message edited by: Barnabas62 ]

Posted by Golden Key (# 1468) on :

Ingo said:

quote:
For now we are grounded to our room for misbehaving, and we stare furtively out of the windows...

"For now we see through a glass darkly..."

Actually, it sounds like we're Max, in Maurice Sendak's picture book, "Where The Wild Things Are". In which case, we've been sent to our room, gone into a magical world, had a wild rumpus with Wild Things, sailed back to our room ("over a year and a day") to find that our supper is waiting for us...and it is still hot.

[ 03. March 2015, 09:14: Message edited by: Golden Key ]

Posted by Yorick (# 12169) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Barnabas62:

quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:

quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
why would a creator god make it that way? Why would these extremely extremely special creatures, made in His image no less, have such a tiny part in the whole?
Why do you think it should be otherwise? I don't understand why you think yours is the default view.

And why do you drag in "tiny" when you SAID that you don't equate size with significance? Do you or don't you? Make up your mind.
That's the trouble with preconceptions, I find. They are so far under the skin we don't always know they are there until someone else points them out. Even then, the tendency to deny can be strong. A truth which applies to all of us, not just Yorick. But on this issue, it does rather look as though it applies to him.

Oh, please. For 'tiny' read minor, or whatever. Why are you so determined to ignore the point because I equate physical size with significance WHEN I DON'T? I have very carefully explained that it's not a matter of size, but of a subjective vs. objective perception of proportion, or scale. If you cannot answer the point, at least do me the favour of leaving that poor straw man alone.

Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on :

I still think you're confusing size and significance, as evidenced by your use of the words "proportion" and "scale".

Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :

quote:
IngoB: And if all this becomes true one day, then the human beings of planet Earth will be both special and not special. Just like now the Jews are both special and not special.

Hm, if I recall how other peoples have treated the Jews, it means we're screwed.

Posted by quetzalcoatl (# 16740) on :

The question of subjectivity and objectivity seems a difficult one to me. After all, I am a subject; well, I can see myself as an object, or others as objects, or the world as an object. I'm not convinced that this is the path to wisdom.

For one thing, it seems a very intellectual approach; well, again, I haven't found that a rewarding path.

Posted by Doc Tor (# 9748) on :

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
Of the many, many possible body plans for arthropods for example (bugs, insects etc), only one lineage essentially survived taught me that if we re-ran the movie again, the likelihood of evolution running the same way again, or even close to what has happened, even on earth, let alone other planets is exceedingly unlikely.

Well, that's probably not true, and we have good evidence to believe so. Enter convergent evolution, stage left.

Essentially, sharks and dolphins. One's a fish. One's a mammal. Same evolutionary pressure, analogous outcome. To whit, there's a good chance that aliens will look like us, or if you prefer, we we will look like aliens.

Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
For 'tiny' read minor, or whatever. Why are you so determined to ignore the point because I equate physical size with significance WHEN I DON'T? I have very carefully explained that it's not a matter of size, but of a subjective vs. objective perception of proportion, or scale. If you cannot answer the point, at least do me the favour of leaving that poor straw man alone.

My dictionary defines 'scale' as 'ratio of size'.

If you mean something else, such as proportional intelligence you might need to say so explicitly.

Posted by orfeo (# 13878) on :

Hmm. Yes, I had the same reaction. "Proportion" just means "relative size".

Posted by Boogie (# 13538) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
I have very carefully explained that it's not a matter of size, but of a subjective vs. objective perception of proportion, or scale.

I had a moment of this kind of perception last night. It was very subjective.

The moonlight woke me up as it shone through a chink in the curtains, it was so bright. I looked out at the moon and stars and I felt tiny in every sense of the word.

But I also felt reassured, in place. As if all this solar system, universe, galaxies etc are holding me safely and in place - just where I am. It was a really good feeling, probably a totally false sense of security (after all the next dinosaur-wiping asteroid could have smashed into us seconds later) No, I don't feel or think that I am at the centre of the universe - I'm not even at the centre of my family. But looking outwards helps me feel more centred, not less.

100% subjective.

It's all a matter of how we feel imo. There are no explanations which are not subjective. The science is very useful indeed - but it doesn't replace our own self image/picture/feeling/sense/perception of where we stand in all this.

Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Doc Tor:

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
Of the many, many possible body plans for arthropods for example (bugs, insects etc), only one lineage essentially survived taught me that if we re-ran the movie again, the likelihood of evolution running the same way again, or even close to what has happened, even on earth, let alone other planets is exceedingly unlikely.
Well, that's probably not true, and we have good evidence to believe so. Enter convergent evolution, stage left.

Essentially, sharks and dolphins. One's a fish. One's a mammal. Same evolutionary pressure, analogous outcome. To whit, there's a good chance that aliens will look like us, or if you prefer, we we will look like aliens.

I have read the debates and writings of Simon Conway Morris and Stephen Jay Gould on the two sides of this. None of the convergence implies intellegence, binocular vision, skeletal anatomy, or any thing else. It merely tells us there are limited numbers of solutions to problems. Hence 5 or so different solutions to eye evolution for example. Convergence is an argument but not persuasive. I expect life elsewhere will be single cells myself.

Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :

Yorick: But you're drawing some kind of conclusion from this "objective" proportion -- indeed, a subjective conclusion. There are no objective opinions about things like the relative importance or unimportance of the human race. Especially for its members.

Posted by Doc Tor (# 9748) on :

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
None of the convergence implies intellegence, binocular vision, skeletal anatomy, or any thing else. It merely tells us there are limited numbers of solutions to problems. Hence 5 or so different solutions to eye evolution for example. Convergence is an argument but not persuasive. I expect life elsewhere will be single cells myself.

I'll agree with you that convergence does not imply any of those things. However, as physics is physics whether we're on Earth or Arcturus, and there are limited solutions to say, moving quickly through a dense fluid in order to obtain lunch - the results are in. Binocular vision wins. Skeletons, whether they're made of bone or cartilage, good. Intelligence and cunning in active predators, a given. We see this again and again and again.

Life will out. The only reason that life elsewhere might be single celled will be because it hasn't had a few hundred million years to cook.

Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on :

I think Doc Tor we're arguing on the two sides of this. I see the 50% of Earth's history with single cells, and the ~7 million year history of hominids without Homo Sapiens as more persuasive. But I've been convinced that evolution is as likely to be non-progressive as progressive, and that we tend to have a bias to see progressive adaptation, while adaptation to changed local conditions sans any progression. The history several mass extinctions also caution progressivism I think.

What I've come to, is that the evolution of life is probably going to eventually be proved common, but life in the forms that we could talk to is going to be rare indeed.

Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
I see the 50% of Earth's history with single cells, and the ~7 million year history of hominids without Homo Sapiens as more persuasive.

I can certainly see that puts the expected number of linguistic entities arising over the course of four billion years as no greater than one. I can't see that it puts it as less than one.
This doesn't require any belief in inherent progress: merely a belief that if you roll the dice often enough all results will eventually appear.

Claims that intelligence has only arisen once are overstated. Of the two branches of amniotes, both show tool manufacture (New Caledonian crows). I think octopi have been shown to exhibit mammalian levels of intelligence, and they're as different from us as any complex animal. The step change is linguistic rather than intelligence.

On the other hand, evidence that widespread emission of radio signals lasts for longer than a couple of centuries, a mere momentary blip, is equivocal and requires a certain deal of faith to sustain.

[ 03. March 2015, 15:12: Message edited by: Dafyd ]

Posted by Doc Tor (# 9748) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
On the other hand, evidence that widespread emission of radio signals lasts for longer than a couple of centuries, a mere momentary blip, is equivocal and requires a certain deal of faith to sustain.

There is the theory that more advanced civilisations have "gone dark" to avoid detection by even-more advanced civilisations. It's actively being mooted in SETI circles now.

Posted by balaam (# 4543) on :

quote:
Originally posted by LeRoc:

quote:
Ikkyu: There is still a lot of preaching around that implies that the Earth was made for us to do as we will with it.
Perhaps there is, but that's not what I believe. I believe that the Earth was made for us to care for it. The word 'stewards' has been mentioned on this thread.

Like in John Calvin's commentary on Genesis do you mean? This idea has a long history.

I have no idea if this is also taught in non-Protestant traditions also, but I wouldn't be surprised to see an even longer history there.

Posted by balaam (# 4543) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Doc Tor:

quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
On the other hand, evidence that widespread emission of radio signals lasts for longer than a couple of centuries, a mere momentary blip, is equivocal and requires a certain deal of faith to sustain.
There is the theory that more advanced civilisations have "gone dark" to avoid detection by even-more advanced civilisations. It's actively being mooted in SETI circles now.

If they are so civilised why do they need hiding from? Unless by advanced you mean aggressive.

Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :

quote:
balaam: Like in John Calvin's commentary on Genesis do you mean? This idea has a long history.

I guess so. I'm not overly familiar with Calvin's commentaries, but my birth church is historically based on Calvinism, so I guess this word found its way in there.

Posted by ChastMastr (# 716) on :

quote:
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
Surprisingly perhaps, I love everything about this.

I, as well. [Overused]

Posted by SusanDoris (# 12618) on :

This afternoon I spent a couple of hours listening through this interesting topic; and first a thank you to posters, because I’d run out of talking books.
I nod in agreement with just about all of what Yorick says.

quote:
Leroc said:
I believe that our small scale in relation to the Universe should teach us humility. The days we thought we were the centre of the Universe are over, and good riddance. But humility isn't the same as insignificance.

I wonder if you would expand a bit on the subject of humility, Leroc. You see, I don’t think I feel humble! This does not mean that I feel superior though. I’m firmly in the middle all of the time I think. I respect skills, understand awe,etc, but humility…. Hmmmm.

quote:
Quetzalcoatl said:
Well said. Also, for me, the present moment. But maybe the modern atheist wakes up in the morning, realizes yet again his own utter insignificance, and stumbles through another empty day. Or maybe not.

I wake up … that’s good enough for me! [Smile]

So I do all I can to keep fit in order to wake up for as many more years as possible! But I don’t take it for granted; and am completely confident that there is no God involved.
I might have mentioned this the other day, but I read (heard) the book, ‘Bang! A complete history of the universe’. I thought it was excellent. On another forum, someone commented rather snootily that ‘it was aimed at 12-year-olds’, but if the content of a book is good, it is good, full stop.

Posted by Jay-Emm (# 11411) on :

quote:
Originally posted by SusanDoris:
I might have mentioned this the other day, but I read (heard) the book, ‘Bang! A complete history of the universe’. I thought it was excellent. On another forum, someone commented rather snootily that ‘it was aimed at 12-year-olds’, but if the content of a book is good, it is good, full stop.

Yes, absolutely.
Though It is worth knowing the target audience (and the authors), as then you have a better idea when to treat it as a nice picture, and when you can build up on it.

[but on the rest, I'm in the camp where we crossed the insignificance bridge when we realised we were only one small country in a world. If you could shrink the universe then it would cause a shift in worldview, going outward just makes it more amazing with each order of order of magnitude. In one sense fascinating, in another more of the same]

[ 03. March 2015, 19:24: Message edited by: Jay-Emm ]

Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on :

quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
If there are sapient aliens out there, then
They are fallen.
God has not come incarnate to them.
Their Saviour is none other than Jesus Christ.

From what?
Why not?
How?

Posted by itsarumdo (# 18174) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
I see the 50% of Earth's history with single cells, and the ~7 million year history of hominids without Homo Sapiens as more persuasive.
I can certainly see that puts the expected number of linguistic entities arising over the course of four billion years as no greater than one. I can't see that it puts it as less than one.
This doesn't require any belief in inherent progress: merely a belief that if you roll the dice often enough all results will eventually appear.

Claims that intelligence has only arisen once are overstated. Of the two branches of amniotes, both show tool manufacture (New Caledonian crows). I think octopi have been shown to exhibit mammalian levels of intelligence, and they're as different from us as any complex animal. The step change is linguistic rather than intelligence.

On the other hand, evidence that widespread emission of radio signals lasts for longer than a couple of centuries, a mere momentary blip, is equivocal and requires a certain deal of faith to sustain.

The difference appears to have most likely been caused by a change in diet, leading to a reduced need for a massive jaw, resulting in an increased growth of the cranial vault, leading to changes in neck musculature and body balance, leading to a more upright posture being more efficient... etc etc.. in a self-reinforcing feedback as greater intelligence increaed too usage which in turn continued to mak ethe diet less reliant on jaw strength.

Posted by Doc Tor (# 9748) on :

quote:
Originally posted by balaam:

quote:
Originally posted by Doc Tor:

quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
On the other hand, evidence that widespread emission of radio signals lasts for longer than a couple of centuries, a mere momentary blip, is equivocal and requires a certain deal of faith to sustain.
There is the theory that more advanced civilisations have "gone dark" to avoid detection by even-more advanced civilisations. It's actively being mooted in SETI circles now.
If they are so civilised why do they need hiding from? Unless by advanced you mean aggressive.

'Aggressive' in human terms, yes. There is a school of thought that has solved the Fermi Paradox by positing a galaxy-spanning civilisation that snuffs out emergent intelligence wherever they find it - not vindictively, but as one would exterminate a bacteria with antibiotics.

Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on :

Nah. Nobody ever gets to Kardashev II And snuffing out emergent intelligence is vindictive. Just plain evil. It's therefore impossible.

Posted by itsarumdo (# 18174) on :

Nanu Nanu

Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on :

Shazbot!

Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :

quote:
SusanDoris: I wonder if you would expand a bit on the subject of humility, Leroc. You see, I don’t think I feel humble! This does not mean that I feel superior though. I’m firmly in the middle all of the time I think. I respect skills, understand awe,etc, but humility…. Hmmmm.

There was a time we thought we were the centre of the Universe, and that everything revolved around us. You'll probably say that the Church was largely to blame for this, and you'd be right. Science has shown us our place and size with respect to the Universe, and this has taken away some of that arrogance. I think that is a good thing.

Humility isn't the same as low self-esteem. I do a lot of work with young people with low self-esteem in Latin America and Africa. Psychologists on the Ship may know this better than me, but low self-esteem can cause bad school results, unemployment, substance abuse, teenage pregnancies, crime ...

On the other hand, finding yourself more important than everyone you interact with, isn't good either. It leads to arrogance, stilted social interactions, and lack of empathy.

I think that humility helps us to find the balance between these extremes. To keep us firmly in the middle, as you express it.

[ 03. March 2015, 22:11: Message edited by: LeRoc ]

Posted by Oscar the Grouch (# 1916) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Doc Tor:
There is a school of thought that has solved the Fermi Paradox by positing a galaxy-spanning civilisation that snuffs out emergent intelligence wherever they find it - not vindictively, but as one would exterminate a bacteria with antibiotics.

Would that be the same school that has watched too many episodes of Star Trek?
[Razz]

Posted by Oscar the Grouch (# 1916) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Martin60:

quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
If there are sapient aliens out there, then
They are fallen.
God has not come incarnate to them.
Their Saviour is none other than Jesus Christ.
From what?
Why not?
How?

Very good. My responses to IngoB would be:

How do you know?
How do you know?
Extremely implausible. I think that this makes God a very big bastard. "You need a Saviour, but it is someone on a planet you've never heard of and can never have any chance of encountering."

Posted by Barnabas62 (# 9110) on :

The degrees of arrogance and humility in human beings are not directly related to perceptions about the size of the universe, are they. Arrogant and humble behaviours are matters of individual choice.

The virtue and value of humility, and the vice of and damage caused by pride, were identified in Christian belief long before more modern discoveries about our universe.

Personally, I have no difficulty in accepting that humility and pride are to be found in people of all beliefs and none. In Christian theology, the journey towards the virtue of humility, away from self-centredness, is regarded as becoming more Christ-like, less selfish, more loving. That's something to be celebrated wherever it is found.

Posted by Doc Tor (# 9748) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Oscar the Grouch:

quote:
Originally posted by Doc Tor:
There is a school of thought that has solved the Fermi Paradox by positing a galaxy-spanning civilisation that snuffs out emergent intelligence wherever they find it - not vindictively, but as one would exterminate a bacteria with antibiotics.
Would that be the same school that has watched too many episodes of Star Trek?

I couldn't possibly comment.

Posted by Golden Key (# 1468) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Oscar the Grouch:

quote:
Originally posted by Doc Tor:
There is a school of thought that has solved the Fermi Paradox by positing a galaxy-spanning civilisation that snuffs out emergent intelligence wherever they find it - not vindictively, but as one would exterminate a bacteria with antibiotics.
Would that be the same school that has watched too many episodes of Star Trek?

There was an episode of "Star Trek: TNG" where a scientist was running an experiment on the surface of a planet that had no intelligent life.

However, there was a civilization of bacteria, very intelligent, living just below the surface. Some of them were killed by the experiment, and there was a big confrontation. Things were straightened out as much as they could be. Then Capt. Picard said "we'd like to get to know you", etc. The spokesbacterium basically said, "You're not ready. Come back when you've grown up." This unsettled Picard a bit. Not used to being in that position!
[Smile]

Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :

quote:
Golden Key: There was an episode of "Star Trek: TNG" where a scientist was running an experiment on the surface of a planet that had no intelligent life.

Would that be Evolution (Season 3, Ep. 1)?

However, when I think of 'a galaxy-spanning civilisation that snuffs out emergent intelligence wherever they find it - not vindictively, but as one would exterminate a bacteria with antibiotics', the Borg spring to life more readily.

Posted by Yorick (# 12169) on :

Like I said, I understand (very acutely) that we humans are important to ourselves. We’re the most significant thing in the universe, to us, and this is so despite the fact that we are small in size compared to galaxies, etc. OBVIOUSLY this isn’t about size, and it’s not even about how significant we are to ourselves, however much people keep blathering on about that. It’s about how important or significant we are in the universe, and, by the same kind of process, how significant or important we are to a hypothetical entity (God) that sees us objectively in context of the whole. And that is the bit that I’d like people to discuss with me, if anyone should care to.

My argument is this. We are insignificant* on the cosmic scale like a grain of sand is unimportant on an unending beach. God sees us on a cosmic scale, although we cannot do so ourselves. Indeed he allegedly made us insignificant and unimportant in this particular way. I’d like to understand why people imagine this might be.

*When I talk of significant or important, I mean in the classical sense that we make any difference whatsoever, whether we exist or not.

Posted by orfeo (# 13878) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
Like I said, I understand (very acutely) that we humans are important to ourselves. We’re the most significant thing in the universe, to us, and this is so despite the fact that we are small in size compared to galaxies, etc. OBVIOUSLY this isn’t about size, and it’s not even about how significant we are to ourselves, however much people keep blathering on about that. It’s about how important or significant we are in the universe, and, by the same kind of process, how significant or important we are to a hypothetical entity (God) that sees us objectively in context of the whole. And that is the bit that I’d like people to discuss with me, if anyone should care to.

My argument is this. We are insignificant* on the cosmic scale like a grain of sand is unimportant on an unending beach. God sees us on a cosmic scale, although we cannot do so ourselves. Indeed he allegedly made us insignificant and unimportant in this particular way. I’d like to understand why people imagine this might be.

*When I talk of significant or important, I mean in the classical sense that we make any difference whatsoever, whether we exist or not.

It is what we're discussing. You just don't seem to like the answer. You assert that "God sees us on a cosmic scale" but what is a "cosmic scale" if it's not about size? If it's not about size, where do you get the proposition that God sees us as insignificant? He's said the exact opposite.

Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
We are insignificant* on the cosmic scale like a grain of sand is unimportant on an unending beach.

I agree completely with orfeo. You are still equating significance with size.

quote:
*When I talk of significant or important, I mean in the classical sense that we make any difference whatsoever, whether we exist or not.

Size has absolutely nothing to do with significance.

Besides, your assumption that significance is defined only in terms of "making a difference" is questionable. The biblical perspective is that humans are significant because we are made in God's image.

(This discussion would be even more fun in French, in which the word important means both "large" and "significant")

Posted by Doc Tor (# 9748) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
My argument is this. We are insignificant* on the cosmic scale like a grain of sand is unimportant on an unending beach. God sees us on a cosmic scale, although we cannot do so ourselves. Indeed he allegedly made us insignificant and unimportant in this particular way. I’d like to understand why people imagine this might be.

You've a whole passel of assumptions there, but try this:

We are the eyes with which the Universe Beholds itself, and knows it is divine

That's not insignificance. That's a solemn duty, and it belongs to each and every one of us.

Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
God sees us on a cosmic scale, although we cannot do so ourselves.

You seem to be confusing God sees us on a cosmic scale with God sees us only on a cosmic scale. The latter is not objective.

Looking at a mountain from a hundred kilometres above it is no less a specific viewpoint than looking at it from half way up the side of it. It may have advantages for certain purposes such as large scale mapping in context, but it's less good for others (the vegetation half way up the side of it).

Posted by Golden Key (# 1468) on :

quote:
Originally posted by LeRoc:

quote:
Golden Key: There was an episode of "Star Trek: TNG" where a scientist was running an experiment on the surface of a planet that had no intelligent life.
Would that be Evolution (Season 3, Ep. 1)?

However, when I think of 'a galaxy-spanning civilisation that snuffs out emergent intelligence wherever they find it - not vindictively, but as one would exterminate a bacteria with antibiotics', the Borg spring to life more readily.

No, "Home Soil", from the first season. I was wrong: the creatures are (micro) crystals, not bacteria. BTW, they described humanoids as "ugly bags of mostly water"! But the "Evolution" episode deals with some similar ideas.

I think the Borg, as awful as they were, sought more than just extermination of other species. IIRC, they assimilated whatever life they could in a particular place, and destroyed what was left. "Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to our own."

Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :

quote:
Golden Key: No, "Home Soil", from the first season.

Ah yes, of course. I mostly try to forget about Season 1.

quote:
Golden Key: I think the Borg, as awful as they were, sought more than just extermination of other species. IIRC, they assimilated whatever life they could in a particular place, and destroyed what was left.

You're right, but in the Star Trek universe, this is the closest I could think of to the civilisation Doc Tor described.

The Revelation Space novels by Alastair Reynolds describe a race called the Inhibitors. However, they have a moral goal for their actions (SPOILER ALERT): they want to protect sapient life against the collision with the Andromeda Nebula.

[ 04. March 2015, 11:17: Message edited by: LeRoc ]

Posted by Doc Tor (# 9748) on :

The problem is ascribing 'morality' to an action that could be as mundane as a bit of pest control.

I'm rather hoping that we're not in the sights of a civilisation that is as far above us as we are above ants. And for all we know, we're first: emergent intelligence in the universe has to start somewhere, and it could be us.

How's that for significance?

Posted by Oscar the Grouch (# 1916) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Doc Tor:
The problem is ascribing 'morality' to an action that could be as mundane as a bit of pest control.

I'm rather hoping that we're not in the sights of a civilisation that is as far above us as we are above ants. And for all we know, we're first: emergent intelligence in the universe has to start somewhere, and it could be us.

How's that for significance?

But if a civilisation is as far above us as we are above ants, wouldn't that be most likely to mean that they would be LESS inclined to just exterminate us? I think it is possible to see in our own struggles to "improve" ourselves that the more "developed" a society becomes, the more understanding it is of "the other" and the less inclined it is to treat "the other" as a threat that must be eradicated as soon as possible.

I think I might be moving myself a little to the view that there may be "super races" out there, but they are so developed that they have chosen to remain hidden from us for our own benefit. It is a little like the occasional discoveries of new tribes in Brazil or Borneo. These days, we tend to try and leave them well alone, rather than leap in and try to "civilise" them.

Perhaps a very developed race might have a very developed sense of morality?

Posted by Doc Tor (# 9748) on :

"Dude, you've got humans on you."
"Arghh! Get 'em off, get 'em off!"

I think it's fine as long as we stay where we are. We need to bear in mind the potential swatting that might come our way if we travel to somewhere outside of our immediate environs.

It might also be that we need to bear in mind the swatting we can dish out. The amount of energy required to move a mass interstellar distances will always make a handy weapon.

Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :

quote:
Oscar the Grouch: I think I might be moving myself a little to the view that there may be "super races" out there, but they are so developed that they have chosen to remain hidden from us for our own benefit.

In discussions about the Fermi Paradox, this is called the 'Zoo Hypothesis'.

Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Oscar the Grouch:

quote:
Originally posted by Martin60:

quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
If there are sapient aliens out there, then
They are fallen.
God has not come incarnate to them.
Their Saviour is none other than Jesus Christ.
From what?
Why not?
How?

Very good. My responses to IngoB would be:
How do you know?
How do you know?
Extremely implausible. I think that this makes God a very big bastard. "You need a Saviour, but it is someone on a planet you've never heard of and can never have any chance of encountering."

I do not know this. In the full text (just before the quoted text) I said that I was making predictions. And I've stated explicitly the basis of my predictions, namely that they are an extrapolation from prior salvation history. These aliens would be fallen from a state of original innocence and grace, just like we are. Indeed, exactly like we are, for then Adam would be their ancestor (in a spiritual, not biological, sense). This whole scenario relies indeed on us being able to reach the aliens, at a minimum that we can communicate with them. I do not know how. Clearly this would require considerable technological advances at least on one of the sides. But if we can bring the gospel to the aliens, then this answers the objection that they cannot be saved by what they do not know. (Presumably they can be saved even by what they do not know, at least this is a standard argument why not all non-Christians will go to hell. But I agree that it would be fitting for them to have a chance to become Christians.) I believe that there would be only one Incarnation precisely as the logical continuation of salvation history with one "Adam" for all rational animals, and one Christ as well, and with steadily widening circles of who is explicitly included as "God's people".

The alternative is that either we are alone in the universe (which I consider most probable), or that we are not alone, but in practice out of reach. (Then an Incarnation elsewhere would for all practical purposes not interfere with ours, even if it is in principle within the same universe.)

It is of course thinkable that there are many alien races, and that they have all their own specific "Adam" and "Christ". However, if these many species of "rational animal" end up making contact, then I can see this only working if none of them fell, or if all of them did. I do not think that a mix of fallen and not fallen works. I don't think the fall is just a human (rational animal) thing, it is more like a disease that spreading from the steward infects the entire domain. The world falls with us. But if a fallen human and a not fallen alien would meet, then there would be a contradiction in their worlds, their domains would clash. One can imagine the fallen world "infecting" the not fallen one, but that is taking the disease analogy too far. Why would the non-fallen alien steward have less power of governance over their domain?

Since we have fallen, then to avoid salvation clash, all aliens we can reach must have fallen as well. But if we say that all of them are fallen, then it looks like God is tricking us. It may appear that Adam fell out of his free choice, but if all those alien "Adams" have also fallen, then that's a bit much of a coincidence. I don't think that this can work, because it would make God appear like a trickster.

So the one mode that I can imagine - if we are to meet aliens - is that they are simply the next widening of the circle of salvation spreading from Christ. That's possible. I consider this unlikely, because it abolishes the biological connection and makes Adam a mere spiritual figure. So my best bet is that we are alone, that we are the only embodied sapient creatures in the entire universe (or at least in the entire practically reachable universe). But if we are not, then I think the first thing we have to do is to bring these aliens Christ, however that can be accomplished.

Posted by Palimpsest (# 16772) on :

Many things are possible. There's been some opposition to trying to the effort communicate with extra-terrestrial intelligence on the Ogden Nash theory;
"When called by a panther, don't anther". They point to what usually happens to isolated indigenous peoples when civilization calls... decimation, death or at best assimilation.

I do have a vision that if there are alien civilizations out there, that they may see something similar to the people of Papua, New Guinea who have eight hundred languages. They may be surprised that we have more than one or two religions.

Posted by orfeo (# 13878) on :

quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
These aliens would be fallen from a state of original innocence and grace, just like we are. Indeed, exactly like we are, for then Adam would be their ancestor (in a spiritual, not biological, sense).

I love it when people use the word "spiritual" to evade the obvious point that what they are saying is not true in any literal sense.

It kind of leapt out at me from your original predictions that there is no reason an alien should share in the consequences of the fall of Adam. Nor is it obvious why Jesus, who constantly labelled himself as "the Son of Man", should be the saviour of an alien.

Even if you are right in your prediction that aliens have fallen (an approach which, as I've pointed out, CS Lewis did not share), it'd be their own fall, not Adam's. And if it's their fall, then surely it has to be their redemption - all the stuff that Paul says in Romans about Adam and Christ doesn't really make sense for aliens.

And if their redemption requires the incarnation of God, as ours did, I really can't see why God couldn't incarnate over there as well.

[ 04. March 2015, 20:53: Message edited by: orfeo ]

Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on :

IngoB: Fallen? Again, what's that?

According to LeRoc was it? We'll dis/prove ET in 10 years. On what basis? If we'll know in 10 years we must already have the technology patented. What is it? Unless we're extrapolating to having the technology in 10 years that will enable us to know. Again from what, at what rate?

How many more orders of magnitude of information do we need from extra-solar planet star transits to measure atmospheric oxygen? Let alone to see extra-solar planets in detail by starshine.

And as for the proposition that a Kardashev II level civilization would be functional and emotionally crippled enough to murder us ... again, that's silly. No species that powerful, that smart, that experienced could be that insane. That evil.

Kardashev II is obviously impossible or they'd be here: there isn't enough anti-matter to harvest and there certainly aren't any silly wormholes.

Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :

quote:
Martin60: According to LeRoc was it? We'll dis/prove ET in 10 years. On what basis?

Not prove or disprove ETs. But if there is an exoplanet within our range with oxygen in its atmosphere, then we'll be able to detect that within a decade.

My basis for this is that we already know how to do this. We've already detected oxygen in the atmosphere of at least one exoplanet. That was a gas giant moving close to its star, making it easier, but doing this for other planets too is just a matter of improving resolution. I believe that we'll be able to do that within a decade.

Posted by itsarumdo (# 18174) on :

yes - there was a programme on TV about this last week - about a decade. The SETI people were saying it will mean their search is no longer random and they will be handed a "telephone directory"

Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on :

From this article: We conclude that in the near future extremely large telescopes will enable us to search for the signature of oxygenic photosynthesis on habitable planets near late-type stars.

The feasibility has been done with the Mauna Kea 30 m. How large is extremely large? 10 x larger, i.e. 100 m? Who's building this?

Posted by Barnabas62 (# 9110) on :

I'd have thought they would do better with "Hubble 2", suitably enhanced. Not sure if there are any plans, or even dreams, in that direction either, but getting the instruments outside the earth's atmosphere looks likely to improve the possibilities of successful detection.

Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on :

Re Star Trek etc....

It seems just as likely as Kurt Vonnegut's character Kilgore Trout who wrote the basis for a story called "The Dancing Fool" in the book Breakfast of Champions. "Like so many Trout stories, it was about a tragic failure to communicate. "

quote:

Here was the plot: A flying saucer creature named Zog arrived on Earth to explain how wars could be prevented and how cancer could be cured. He brought the information from Margo, a planet where the natives conversed by means of farts and tap dancing.

Zog landed at night in Connecticut. He had no sooner touched down than he saw a house on fire. He rushed into the house, farting and tap dancing, warning the people about the terrible danger they were in.

The head of the house brained Zog with a golfclub.

I expect that we will treat aliens as kindly as this, and we should expect the same treatment from them. But perhaps bacterial aliens will communicate by infecting us, and measles is really alien communication, and anti-vaxers are their fifth column. Yup yup yup.

Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on :

quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:
I love it when people use the word "spiritual" to evade the obvious point that what they are saying is not true in any literal sense.

God can couple the fate of any rational animal in the universe, and indeed of all the universe, to the historical deeds of one specific kind of rational animal. If He so wishes. "Spiritual" evades nothing here, it is simply descriptive: the connection would not be biological, obviously, but between like spirits (namely embodied ones) and established by a Spirit (namely God).

quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:
It kind of leapt out at me from your original predictions that there is no reason an alien should share in the consequences of the fall of Adam. Nor is it obvious why Jesus, who constantly labelled himself as "the Son of Man", should be the saviour of an alien.

To repeat what I have already said: philosophically every (sapient) alien will be a human being, namely a "rational animal". Currently we are the only species of this (philosophical) genus that we know of, but if we meet aliens then there would be multiple species of "human being". Just like the (biological) genus "panthera" contains the species tiger, lion, jaguar, leopard and snow leopard.

Consequently, it is possible that "Son of Man" is a reference to the genus "rational animal", not to the particular species thereof that runs around on earth. (I said "possible", not "likely".)

quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:
Even if you are right in your prediction that aliens have fallen (an approach which, as I've pointed out, CS Lewis did not share), it'd be their own fall, not Adam's. And if it's their fall, then surely it has to be their redemption - all the stuff that Paul says in Romans about Adam and Christ doesn't really make sense for aliens.

If C.S. Lewis said something theological, then for me it is likely that it sounds nice but is wrong. There's nothing in Romans about Adam or Christ that would not make sense for aliens. Our connection to Adam is anyhow tenuous and while linked to biology, not really biological. It's not like original sin is a gene defect.

quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:
And if their redemption requires the incarnation of God, as ours did, I really can't see why God couldn't incarnate over there as well.

You mean other than according to the nice arguments I have made about that? I do not think that the universe can contain both fallen and unfallen stewards of creation, unless their respective domains are so well separated as to effectively not interact. If a fallen and a not fallen steward meet, in what sort of universe are they meeting? In a fallen or a not fallen one? It cannot be both, and I see no a priori reason why one should trump the other. Then such "world breaking" meetings must be impossible, either because different kinds are too separated, or because there is only one kind.

Posted by orfeo (# 13878) on :

quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:

quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:
And if their redemption requires the incarnation of God, as ours did, I really can't see why God couldn't incarnate over there as well.
You mean other than according to the nice arguments I have made about that? I do not think that the universe can contain both fallen and unfallen stewards of creation, unless their respective domains are so well separated as to effectively not interact. If a fallen and a not fallen steward meet, in what sort of universe are they meeting? In a fallen or a not fallen one? It cannot be both, and I see no a priori reason why one should trump the other. Then such "world breaking" meetings must be impossible, either because different kinds are too separated, or because there is only one kind.

1. Well it's fairly clear their respective domains ARE well separated. If there are any aliens out there, we've done a spectacularly good job of not interacting with them so far.

2. I'm not sure I'm happy with you postulating that because we're fallen we live in a "fallen universe". Nor with labelling us as stewards of creation in a way that implies we're looking after the Andromeda Galaxy. We're really not. If we're stewards of anything, it's of our own particular planet.

Posted by orfeo (# 13878) on :

quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
There's nothing in Romans about Adam or Christ that would not make sense for aliens.

You think that the second half of chapter 5 is compatible with your propositions?

I suppose it is technically, in that it doesn't say anything that's explicitly 100% incompatible with the notion that Adam is responsible for the fall of the entire sentient universe, but in my translation at least it says things like "sin entered the world" not "sin entered the universe". If we do ever encounter aliens I think you'll find the theological debate doesn't naturally fall into line with your view that the spiritual battles of the whole universe are centred on Earth. Even if Doctor Who does visit here remarkably often.

Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
My argument is this. We are insignificant* on the cosmic scale like a grain of sand is unimportant on an unending beach. God sees us on a cosmic scale, although we cannot do so ourselves. Indeed he allegedly made us insignificant and unimportant in this particular way. I’d like to understand why people imagine this might be.

But that's not an argument, it's mere assertion.

I see you have two things going on here:

1. We are insignificant on a cosmic scale. This is asserted but not argued for.

2. God sees us on a cosmic scale. This is asserted but not argued for.

But your last sentence is bizarre. "Here is a claim that you disagree with. Why do you think it's true?"

[ 05. March 2015, 01:19: Message edited by: mousethief ]

Posted by Lamb Chopped (# 5528) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
Like I said, I understand (very acutely) that we humans are important to ourselves. We’re the most significant thing in the universe, to us, and this is so despite the fact that we are small in size compared to galaxies, etc. OBVIOUSLY this isn’t about size, and it’s not even about how significant we are to ourselves, however much people keep blathering on about that. It’s about how important or significant we are in the universe, and, by the same kind of process, how significant or important we are to a hypothetical entity (God) that sees us objectively in context of the whole. And that is the bit that I’d like people to discuss with me, if anyone should care to.

My argument is this. We are insignificant* on the cosmic scale like a grain of sand is unimportant on an unending beach. God sees us on a cosmic scale, although we cannot do so ourselves. Indeed he allegedly made us insignificant and unimportant in this particular way. I’d like to understand why people imagine this might be.

*When I talk of significant or important, I mean in the classical sense that we make any difference whatsoever, whether we exist or not.

You are begging the question, I'm afraid. (and thank you--I've been looking for a great example of that for a while!)

You beg the question when you say, "Look, we're insignificant, why did God make us that way?" You assume we are insignificant (reasons not stated) and then go on to inquire about the cause.

But that's illogical, because "insignificant" is an value judgment which does not exist as a thing-in-itself; rather, it is held by a Person. To be insignificant is to not matter, to be of no concern [... wait for it... to whom?]. For this concept to make any sense, there has to be Someone out there to whom we matter (or don't, to whom we are of concern (or not). Nobody matters (or doesn't) in an unpeopled vacuum. If no such person exists, the whole issue of significance loses its meaning.

So you must first settle the question of whether there is a God. Because if there is, his opinion (being Maker and Preserver at once) is ultimately the only one that counts.

Once you have determined that question (does a God exist?), you may inquire into his opinion of us (significant or insignificant?) which opinion you will need to ask him for if you want a dependable answer. Trying to derive his opinion from unspoken clues in the universe (physical size or other stuff, it doesn't matter) is a chancy business, as "my thoughts are not your thoughts, and my ways are not your ways." Heck, trying to derive another human being's opinion without asking directly is a chancy business--how much worse in the case of a non-human like God!

So you will need to ask--or search out places where he has already spoken, if any such exist. Scripture (which of course you don't accept) has him saying that yes, we ARE important to him. But if you refuse that evidence, you will need to seek out something else.

Posted by Golden Key (# 1468) on :

Yorick--

I don't know if this will help...but if you think of the saying "can't see the forest for the trees", then maybe God is fully aware of the forest AND the trees AND every bit of them, further and further in AND that entire habitat AND further and further out--all at the same time.

Posted by SusanDoris (# 12618) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Jay-Emm:
I'm in the camp where we crossed the insignificance bridge when we realised we were only one small country in a world. If you could shrink the universe then it would cause a shift in worldview, going outward just makes it more amazing with each order of order of magnitude. In one sense fascinating, in another more of the same]

Thank you. yesterday I
was waiting for a taxi after swimming and many young children were coming in with parents taking them to some activity. I wonder what new and fascinating information will be available to them during the next 80 years!

quote:
Originally posted by LeRoc:

quote:
SusanDoris: I wonder if you would expand a bit on the subject of humility, Leroc. You see, I don’t think I feel humble! This does not mean that I feel superior though. I’m firmly in the middle all of the time I think. I respect skills, understand awe,etc, but humility…. Hmmmm.
There was a time we thought we were the centre of the Universe, and that everything revolved around us. You'll probably say that the Church was largely to blame for this, and you'd be right. Science has shown us our place and size with respect to the Universe, and this has taken away some of that arrogance. I think that is a good thing.

Yes, the church was probably mostly responsible, but on the other hand most of the people were probably doing the best they could with the information at their disposal most of the time, I suppose - though somewhat reluctantly!

quote:
Humility isn't the same as low self-esteem. I do a lot of work with young people with low self-esteem in Latin America and Africa. Psychologists on the Ship may know this better than me, but low self-esteem can cause bad school results, unemployment, substance abuse, teenage pregnancies, crime ...

On the other hand, finding yourself more important than everyone you interact with, isn't good either. It leads to arrogance, stilted social interactions, and lack of empathy.

I think that humility helps us to find the balance between these extremes. To keep us firmly in the middle, as you express it.

Many thanks for your interesting reply. I like that wider and more practical definition of humility.

Posted by Barnabas62 (# 9110) on :

The term self-esteem is interesting in this connection. And Le Roc is right to point out that humility, properly understood, helps balance.

Mary's prayer in Luke's gospel points to that rebalancing in an interesting way. The proud are to be scattered and the lowly lifted up.

But I'm still not clear how the church was responsible for overstating the significance of human beings in such a way as to encourage us to be proud or self-important. Regardless of how wrong it may have been, historically, in its cosmological understanding, it seems clear to me that pride has been discouraged since the birth of the church.

Also, using Le Roc's concept of balance, I can't see how the lowly are lifted up by asserting the insignificance of human beings on the cosmological scale. One might argue that an emphasis on cosmological insignificance can be as damaging as an emphasis on cosmological significance.

The psychological problem with a belief in personal insignificance is that it can damage awareness of personal responsibility, encourage the damaging and destructive aspects of the victim mentality. I think C S Lewis pointed out that the "worm mentality" very often concealed a kind of inverted pride.

Posted by Philip Charles (# 618) on :

leRoc

quote:

Christians believe that we are significant because we are significant to God. He made us and we have something of Him in us.

But the second reason, no less important, we are significant because we are significant to eachother. Yes, I'm talking about relationships between one tiny speck and another tiny speck. But these matter, and their size cannot be measured.

My wife is significant to me, and I am significant to her. This relationship is far more important to me than my relationship to an immense universe.
I am fortunate to know that I have a unique and special relationship with God. Again this relationship is more important than my relationship with the universe.
God is even more immense that the universe and he has a relationship with everyone and all the bits that make up the universe. I am linked into the human race and the universe through my relationship with God.

Posted by quetzalcoatl (# 16740) on :

Who said that if I stub my toe, this is vastly more important than the universe at that moment? It sounds like David Hume.

Posted by Barnabas62 (# 9110) on :

Speaking as someone who once broke a toe by stubbing it on a door frame ...

All that happens is than the immediate pain drives all thought from your mind. Bugger the big picture, THAT HURTS.

And I guess there is something in that. If we are beset by immediate and painful problems and challenges, cosmological speculations don't get much of a look in. We just don't have time for such stuff. Nor, I find, do we have much patience for them. So conversations like this are nearly always born out of the thoughts and fancies of our more reflective times. When we have the both time and the space (emotional and intellectual) to "shoot the breeze".

Posted by quetzalcoatl (# 16740) on :

I remember that a friend of mine broke his back, and was in hospital for months, and very uncomfortable it was. I cautiously asked him if he'd had much time for spiritual matters, and I'm afraid to say that his reply was unprintable. But of course, others have been inspired by illness or recuperation.

Posted by quetzalcoatl (# 16740) on :

I used to have a Zen teacher, who used to get very passionate, and she would grab the sleeve of her sweater, and bellow, 'what's this, you fools?' Of course, we goggled at her like goldfish. But all thoughts of cosmology or philosophy were banished.

[ 05. March 2015, 11:20: Message edited by: quetzalcoatl ]

Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :

quote:
Barnabas62: But I'm still not clear how the church was responsible for overstating the significance of human beings in such a way as to encourage us to be proud or self-important.

To be honest, I'm feeling a bit out of my depth to defend in much detail what was really an off-hand remark I made about humility. What I was doing was to try to meet Yorick halfway: "Our small size with respect to the Universe doen't teach us our insignificance, but it might teach us humility."

What I didn't give much thought on when I made this remark is that 'humility' can have different meanings, both positive and negative, as people on this thread have rightly pointed out. I even think there is a difference in nuance between the Portuguese word humildade and the English 'humility'.

I could go into this further, but I admit that I don't really have an extensive theological / philosophical framework for the concept of humility I could draw upon. It would be interesting if I had that, but it isn't a subject I've dived deeply into.

With respect to the Cosmos, I think that the big fight between the Church and Science at the end of the Middle Ages wasn't about the Earth being round, but about the Sun and the planets not revolving around us.

I'm not an expert on this time period, but in the way the Church saw the Earth as the centre of the Universe (and itself as the centre of Earth), I detect some hubris. And this self-aggrandising may well have been used to oppress the lowly. At least, that is how I interpret it.

What people like Galileo and Copernicus did, was to remove the basis of that hubris, and I think that's a good thing.

I've been thinking, perhaps it would be an idea to open a topic on the relationship between Christianity and humility? I believe the subject is more ample than the discussion about our size with respect to the Universe, and I think there are a number of Shipmates who could say more about it than me.

Posted by quetzalcoatl (# 16740) on :

Yes, a considerable decentering has occurred; I would add also the discovery of the unconscious (by people like Nietzsche and Freud), which made the ego look rather puny. I suppose this is often linked to the 'death of God', which Nietzsche thought might impel us to become gods, in a kind of grotesque compensation.

Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on :

quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:
1. Well it's fairly clear their respective domains ARE well separated. If there are any aliens out there, we've done a spectacularly good job of not interacting with them so far.

The domains would however cease to be well separated if we made any contact whatsoever with aliens. And since we are basically discussing the possibility and consequences of that scenario, nothing much follows from the fact that so far they appear well separated. (Other than that we are almost certainly wasting our time with this discussion, but that's has never stopped us on SoF, has it?)

quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:
2. I'm not sure I'm happy with you postulating that because we're fallen we live in a "fallen universe". Nor with labelling us as stewards of creation in a way that implies we're looking after the Andromeda Galaxy. We're really not. If we're stewards of anything, it's of our own particular planet.

We are not the stewards of this particular planet either. The prince of this planet is Satan. We have lost the role we were supposed to have, and we will not regain it until Christ comes again. At which point I think being stewards over Andromeda is as much on the cards as anything else. Of course, just because we have lost our role does not mean that we ought to be shit to the environment and non-sapient life forms. We ought to build back to what we were supposed to be like. My point is not to deny that taking care of this planet is our duty here and now, it sure is, to the limit of our abilities. My point is that our limitations now are not a proper measure of what ought to have been and what will be.

quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:
You think that the second half of chapter 5 is compatible with your propositions? I suppose it is technically, in that it doesn't say anything that's explicitly 100% incompatible with the notion that Adam is responsible for the fall of the entire sentient universe, but in my translation at least it says things like "sin entered the world" not "sin entered the universe".

I think it's pretty safe to say that "world" back then meant "all there is", or at least "all there is with people in it". There is no particular reason to restrict this discussion to "planet Earth", at least not based on an ancient text whose writers certainly were not aware of the potential existence of many other inhabited planets.

And once more, I personally actually think that we are "alone" in the universe, in the sense of being the only embodied intellectual spirits. There are animals below us, and angels above us, but we are it as far as the mixture of these two modes of being is concerned. That's what I actually think is true. And in part so precisely because I think the "Adam event" was more than a myth or concept. However, I'm discussing here what else is possible in terms of scripture. So to say that scripture is not explicitly incompatible with what I am saying is good enough.

Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on :

What did we ever have that we've lost?

From what height are we fallen?

Posted by Boogie (# 13538) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Martin60:
What did we ever have that we've lost?

From what height are we fallen?

We didn't.

Our failure is a failure to become the best we can be, not a fall from a previous state.

Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Martin60:
What did we ever have that we've lost? From what height are we fallen?

Tradition claims that Adam had sanctifying grace (formal justification, partaking of Divine nature, sonship by adoption, eternal life, plus the equivalent of receiving the Holy Spirit, the infused virtues of faith, hope and charity, etc.) as well as the preternatural gifts of integrity (perfect harmony of intellect, will, and desires/impulses - no concupiscence), immortality (not experiencing a separation of body and soul, no bodily death), and infused knowledge (infused in the sense of not regularly learned, not in the sense of beyond human nature - knowledge concerning God and his characteristics, the moral law and man's relationship to God, and some material / spiritual knowledge about the universe).

Through Christ we have regained the ability to receive sanctifying grace, but we have not regained the preternatural gifts and hence are under much greater threat to lose it (misled by concupiscence, fear of death and ignorance).

In terms of Adam's "day job", he would have been master over all the animals and would have lived in harmony with the soil and plants, which would have provided him easily with all he needed. Details on how that would have worked are a bit sketchy, obviously, but in a way we are reproducing technologically (in the sweat of our brows) what we would have received for free. The "domestication" of animals, as well as the killing of animals that are dangerous / inconvenient to us, ape our command over the animal kingdom. And the entire global network of farming and allied technology ape our ability to simply collect from the land what we need and want. Basically we would have been "nature benders" not by force of our intellect and technology, but by the freely given obedience of nature. How far these skills would have extended is anybody's guess.

(I would say that Adam was at the very beginning of exploring these skills when he fell. Basically I think the entire human intellectual and technological enterprise is a kind of corrupted image of what a non-fallen humanity would have achieved in "nature-bending". Likewise, our fascination with sorcery and magic stems from the same desire to regain what was lost. We see the same in fictional characters like Yoda. I think a non-fallen humanity may well have developed "nature-bending" into much more than just stopping a lion from eating us or making a fruit appear in a tree. But those are just my speculations, and they are more based on guesswork from what I see in humanity today than what has been revealed. And I do not believe that any such magic exists today as skill that could be acquired.)

Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on :

quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
We are not the stewards of this particular planet either. The prince of this planet is Satan.

This is both ridiculously funny in the way you go on to explain it as personified evil, and sadly true in the symbolic sense that so many of us do all the wrong things.

Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on :

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:

quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
We are not the stewards of this particular planet either. The prince of this planet is Satan.
This is both ridiculously funny in the way you go on to explain it as personified evil, and sadly true in the symbolic sense that so many of us do all the wrong things.

I did not go on to explain this as "personified evil", nor indeed in any other manner. So what the heck are you talking about?

Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on :

Satan = personified evil. Satan, the devil, whatever, is a metaphor, a projection.

That you actually accept the Adam story as fact is also the acceptance of myth and symbol as real.

[ 05. March 2015, 14:49: Message edited by: no prophet's flag is set so... ]

Posted by quetzalcoatl (# 16740) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Boogie:

quote:
Originally posted by Martin60:
What did we ever have that we've lost?

From what height are we fallen?
We didn't.

Our failure is a failure to become the best we can be, not a fall from a previous state.

I find this obsessive comparison with what we were, or with what we might be, baffling. It sounds like an endless exercise in masochism. There is also something here about idealization, which is maybe more comprehensible; I mean kids idealize their parents for a while, which is an important stage in development. But we can give up the ideal for the real, eventually.

There's an old Zen story, of a woman asking a butcher for best steak, and he says all my meat is the best.

Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on :

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
Satan = personified evil. Satan, the devil, whatever, is a metaphor, a projection.

Satan is neither the former, nor the latter. In fact, to say that Satan is personified evil is precisely turning him into a metaphor, a projection.

Satan is a fallen Archangel, possibly the former "top angel" as far as the angelic hierarchy is concerned. But he is a creature, and more precisely, an angel - just one who is bent on evil at least in certain regards. Unfortunately, these regards very much appear to include us humans. (There is some pious tradition, though not at the level of official teaching, that Satan fell over us - and hence has become our dedicated enemy.)

So our relationship to Satan is perhaps comparable to that of a regular Jew in Nazi Germany to Adolf Hitler. That's not to deny that angelic nature is different from human nature, in that sense the analogy is inaccurate. But it is to deny that Satan is some kind of "principle of evil". No, he is a creature with an agenda, and as much as we may protest his evil given that it is so detrimental to us, we should still be able to see also the creature rather than just the evil. Just like Hitler remained a man and in between committing genocide and war atrocities would paint mediocre paintings and be nice to dogs.

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
That you actually accept the Adam story as fact is also the acceptance of myth and symbol as real.

I'm not sure about the precise status of the Adam story. It seems to me to have aspects of both myth and fact, and it is non-trivial to say what is what. I personally tend to think of it as a kind of "alternate universe" story. So basically, we have Adam's world, then we have our world, and we will have New Creation upon Christ's return. And all these worlds have to do with each other, but they are not exactly the same world. In that sense then Adam's story could be both fact and myth at once in the same aspect: fact in Adam's world, since something along these lines happened in that universe, but myth for us in this world, since we only know about this by (Divinely revealed) story. In particular, there is a painfully obvious fudge as we go from Adam and Eve to Cain and Abel, though the latter are supposed to be the - thus far only - children of Adam and Eve. Note that Cain fears to be slain by others. What others? There are only his mum and dad, supposedly. And where exactly is the wife he is taking coming from? Is it an unmentioned sister? So there we have a rather clear transit between two in principle separate accounts.

Posted by itsarumdo (# 18174) on :

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
Satan = personified evil. Satan, the devil, whatever, is a metaphor, a projection.

That you actually accept the Adam story as fact is also the acceptance of myth and symbol as real.

I think not a projection, though it can be that as well in the infinite hall of mirrors. Interesting talk R4 moral maze this week - whether it is thought or action that is immoral. So a) choice of thought (good/evil) and if that stage fails b) moral choice of action, and if that stage fails c) choice of action according to punishment, and if that fails, d) go to Jail. But it starts at (a). If you believe that thoughts are "ours" (i.e. originating in, of and by us as individuals) then yes - satan is a projection and a metaphor. However, if all thoughts come from the spiritual world, then it is not a projection and we have a duty to choose which thoughts we pick up and run with, according to the principles of free will.

Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on :

We reify** many things, to our sorrow. This reification of satan allows us to examine evil and nefarious motives externally, projecting them outwardly away from ourselves. It also allows a personalization, and is another form of asserting our importance that we are noticeable enough for the personification of evil. It has the function of dealing with guilt and shame, and additional functions within society and social groups.

**treating something as real and tangible when it is rather an abstraction and idea.

Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on :

no prophet, would you be willing to substitute "Adolf Hitler" in the above for "satan"? If yes, then I will try to understand what point you were trying to make there. If no, then I will consider that paragraph to be pseudo-psychological gibberish that really serves no other purpose than to "explain" rhetorically how people less enlightened than you could possibly come to believe that Satan is an actual, concrete being.

Posted by ChastMastr (# 716) on :

I agree
With IngoB.

Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on :

quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
no prophet, would you be willing to substitute "Adolf Hitler" in the above for "satan"? If yes, then I will try to understand what point you were trying to make there. If no, then I will consider that paragraph to be pseudo-psychological gibberish that really serves no other purpose than to "explain" rhetorically how people less enlightened than you could possibly come to believe that Satan is an actual, concrete being.

Hitler and ad hominem argument in the same paragraph, Godwin's law aside.

The pseudo psychological gibberish is actually the belief in a being you call satan. It's only gibberish to you because you don't like it. The understanding I posted is not original with me, just as your belief in satan is not original to you.

I'm more interested in the functional role of a belief in satan, here's a small taste.

Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on :

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
Hitler and ad hominem argument in the same paragraph, Godwin's law aside.

How is it an "ad hominem" to say that you are talking gibberish? It is precisely not saying something about you as a person to point out that you are talking gibberish, it is saying something about what you do, namely talking gibberish. And the comparison of Hitler to Satan was entirely appropriate to the specific point I was making.

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
The pseudo psychological gibberish is actually the belief in a being you call satan. It's only gibberish to you because you don't like it.

See, now that is an ad hominem.

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
I'm more interested in the functional role of a belief in satan, here's a small taste.

That's an amazingly stupid mini-article, which outright ignores that the religion proposing the existence of Satan completely denies the purported consequence of "BPE" (belief in pure evil): "Evil people are born evil – they cannot change. Two judgments follow from this perspective: 1) evil people cannot be rehabilitated, and 2) the eradication of evil requires only the eradication of all the evil people."

The logical consequence of the "psychological research" would have to be that "BPE" is not Christian, and does not refer to Satan, since clearly the judgements that supposed to follow from it are non-Christian, indeed, anti-Christian. But hey, trashing Christianity is always a facile means to make something more interesting to the public...

Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :

Following through on a discussion we had earlier on this thread, I opened a thread about Christianity and humility, because I think that topic is a bit separate from the Astronomy-related discussions we are having on this thread.

Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on :

quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
Hitler and ad hominem argument in the same paragraph, Godwin's law aside.
How is it an "ad hominem" to say that you are talking gibberish? It is precisely not saying something about you as a person to point out that you are talking gibberish, it is saying something about what you do, namely talking gibberish. And the comparison of Hitler to Satan was entirely appropriate to the specific point I was making.

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
The pseudo psychological gibberish is actually the belief in a being you call satan. It's only gibberish to you because you don't like it.
See, now that is an ad hominem.

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
I'm more interested in the functional role of a belief in satan, here's a small taste.
That's an amazingly stupid mini-article, which outright ignores that the religion proposing the existence of Satan completely denies the purported consequence of "BPE" (belief in pure evil): "Evil people are born evil – they cannot change. Two judgments follow from this perspective: 1) evil people cannot be rehabilitated, and 2) the eradication of evil requires only the eradication of all the evil people."

The logical consequence of the "psychological research" would have to be that "BPE" is not Christian, and does not refer to Satan, since clearly the judgements that supposed to follow from it are non-Christian, indeed, anti-Christian. But hey, trashing Christianity is always a facile means to make something more interesting to the public...

Not at all. I understand that you adhere holus-bolus to a particular RC view, which does not contain all of what Christianity is. No, it is not anti-Christian, which is an over-statement and hyperbole. It is merely an analysis of one of the functions of this particular belief. As for "trashing", it would seem the "gibberish" is a comparable term - I should think that gibberish is trashable - thus, you seem to be doing of what you accuse.

Posted by Fr Weber (# 13472) on :

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
Satan = personified evil. Satan, the devil, whatever, is a metaphor, a projection.

That you actually accept the Adam story as fact is also the acceptance of myth and symbol as real.

No, sorry. You're going to have to prove, or at least argue, the point that Adam and Satan are intended as metaphors or symbols.

I get that you read them this way. Which is fine for you; it's one legitimate reading of the text. It's not the only one, though, nor is it the normative Christian one.

Posted by Fr Weber (# 13472) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Boogie:

quote:
Originally posted by Martin60:
What did we ever have that we've lost?

From what height are we fallen?
We didn't.

Our failure is a failure to become the best we can be, not a fall from a previous state.

And learning to love yourself is the greatest love of all. [Roll Eyes]

Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Fr Weber:

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
Satan = personified evil. Satan, the devil, whatever, is a metaphor, a projection.

That you actually accept the Adam story as fact is also the acceptance of myth and symbol as real.
No, sorry. You're going to have to prove, or at least argue, the point that Adam and Satan are intended as metaphors or symbols.

I get that you read them this way. Which is fine for you; it's one legitimate reading of the text. It's not the only one, though, nor is it the normative Christian one.

I wasn't aware that most people read the bible literally outside of some particular versions which we see especially in America. The claim that Adam existed literally and had the various interactions literally must be proved by those making the claim, because we have ample evidence that the evolution of humans took place, the additional species of hominids which have become extinct etc. The only sensible way to read about Adam and his adventures is as myth and metaphor.

The concept of the devil and satan similarly have no possibility of being proved to exist and are only a matter for belief. I haven't spoken myself to a priest or bishop who've accepted the existence of the creature in a literal sense, and I'd dispute the acceptance of a literal belief as mainstream, at least in my part of the world.

Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
Hitler and ad hominem argument in the same paragraph, Godwin's law aside.

Not every comparison to Hitler falls under Godwin's Law. It only falls under Godwin's Law if you compare your opponent to Hitler.

quote:
The pseudo psychological gibberish is actually the belief in a being you call satan. It's only gibberish to you because you don't like it.

Now that last sentence is an ad hominem.

I agree with you rather than with IngoB.

Posted by Fr Weber (# 13472) on :

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
I haven't spoken myself to a priest or bishop who've accepted the existence of the creature in a literal sense

I think this says more about the Anglican Church of Canada than it says about the plausibility of a personal devil. And isn't the argumentum ad populum normally accepted as fallacious?

Posted by ChastMastr (# 716) on :

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
I haven't spoken myself to a priest or bishop who've accepted the existence of the creature in a literal sense, and I'd dispute the acceptance of a literal belief as mainstream, at least in my part of the world.

I'd assume that none of the clergy you've spoken to are exorcists?

I would definitely argue that the literal existence of Satan is a pretty mainstream Christian position. Though I do wonder if we're talking past each other--I don't mean something like the way the Devil is usually depicted in fiction, but the basic concept of (1) angels, (2) some of which are fallen from grace and corrupt, (3) Satan being the biggest and worst one. It doesn't need to involve anything with wings or red tights or contracts signed in blood or, depending on the depiction, show tunes.

Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :

quote:
ChastMastr: I would definitely argue that the literal existence of Satan is a pretty mainstream Christian position.

Like others on this thread, I do think there is a geographic difference in this, and that these ideas are generally speaking more mainstream in the Americas than in Europe / the UK.

Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on :

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
No, it is not anti-Christian, which is an over-statement and hyperbole. It is merely an analysis of one of the functions of this particular belief.

How is "evil people cannot be rehabilitated" not quintessentially anti-Christian?! One could say that that is pretty much all Christianity is about, rehabilitating evil people...

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
The claim that Adam existed literally and had the various interactions literally must be proved by those making the claim, because we have ample evidence that the evolution of humans took place, the additional species of hominids which have become extinct etc. The only sensible way to read about Adam and his adventures is as myth and metaphor.

I'm not sure why we are even discussing this. But this assumes a false dichotomy, where the Adam and Eve story is either accurate journalistic reporting ("literal") or has no true factual content whatsoever ("metaphorical"). There is however no reason why it should not be a mixture of both factual and poetical / mythical truth. Indeed, that is typical for ancient texts. And usual RC claims about Adam and Eve cannot be disproven by the scant evidence we have about the evolution of homo sapiens sapiens. Much less is that the case for the kind of speculative SF-ish interpretations that I favour, which consider Adam and Eve to be transitional figures between different universes (in analogy to how the people alive at Christ's Second Coming will in person bridge between this world and New Creation).

Posted by Fr Weber (# 13472) on :

quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
No, it is not anti-Christian, which is an over-statement and hyperbole. It is merely an analysis of one of the functions of this particular belief.
How is "evil people cannot be rehabilitated" not quintessentially anti-Christian?! One could say that that is pretty much all Christianity is about, rehabilitating evil people...

You're sure it's not about self-actualization, being Nice, and recycling? [Smile]

[ 05. March 2015, 22:55: Message edited by: Fr Weber ]

Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on :

quote:
Originally posted by ChastMastr:
I'd assume that none of the clergy you've spoken to are exorcists?

Only one. I had a Hungarian priest who was a philosophy professor in 1978. He'd been involved in some in the 1930s. I recall his discussion of these issues rather completely which discussed several cases, and the psychiatric examinations he's seen in subsequent cases in Canada.

Exorcism is irresponsible when mental health is the issue, and mental health is the issue, even if the suffering person and those 'treating' him/her believe in possession. There are no exorcists locally here. There is good mental health care.

quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
But this assumes a false dichotomy, where the Adam and Eve story is either accurate journalistic reporting ("literal") or has no true factual content whatsoever ("metaphorical"). There is however no reason why it should not be a mixture of both factual and poetical / mythical truth. Indeed, that is typical for ancient texts. And usual RC claims about Adam and Eve cannot be disproven by the scant evidence we have about the evolution of homo sapiens sapiens. Much less is that the case for the kind of speculative SF-ish interpretations that I favour, which consider Adam and Eve to be transitional figures between different universes (in analogy to how the people alive at Christ's Second Coming will in person bridge between this world and New Creation).

The statement about scant evidence for our evolution is uninformed in the extreme. There's tons.

As for the SciFi ideas, I agree with Oscar who posted above. Too much Star Trek.

Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on :

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
The concept of the devil and satan similarly have no possibility of being proved to exist and are only a matter for belief. I haven't spoken myself to a priest or bishop who've accepted the existence of the creature in a literal sense, and I'd dispute the acceptance of a literal belief as mainstream, at least in my part of the world.

I'm not sure what you would consider as a "proof of existence" for an incorporeal intelligent entity, who only creates an illusion of embodiment when that serves its purposes. That something is "only a matter for belief" also does not mean that it is untrue or unimportant. Life after death is only a matter of belief, yet I consider it both true and important. And I am not a big fan of Pope Francis, but one thing he gets right, and is really well known for, is his insistence that Satan is a real being.

Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :

quote:
no prophet's flag is set so...: Too much Star Trek.

There's no such thing as too much Star Trek (although in this case I might make an exception [Smile]

)

Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on :

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
Exorcism is irresponsible when mental health is the issue, and mental health is the issue, even if the suffering person and those 'treating' him/her believe in possession. There are no exorcists locally here. There is good mental health care.

Confirmation bias really simplifies things, doesn't it?

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
The statement about scant evidence for our evolution is uninformed in the extreme. There's tons.

I would bet that I know at least as much about the evolution of hominids, and the available archaeological and genetic evidence for it, as you do. By no stretch of imagination is there "tons of evidence" for any of it, much less is there tons of evidence for the specific development of homo sapiens sapiens, least of all is there tons of evidence that could speak to specific RC claims about what sets modern humans apart (like the infusion of a rational soul).

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
As for the SciFi ideas, I agree with Oscar who posted above. Too much Star Trek.

Here's the neat thing about personal preferences: I prefer mine over yours, indeed, I'm entirely within my rights to not care at all what you our Oscar may prefer. If you have some kind of argument or reason, then that is a different matter. But you don't, so I don't care.

Posted by orfeo (# 13878) on :

quote:
Originally posted by ChastMastr:
I agree
With IngoB.

I'm finding myself in this situation quite a lot, now, with the latest twists in the conversation. Even though I don't agree with several of the things he said on the way here!

Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on :

quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
I would bet that I know at least as much about the evolution of hominids, and the available archaeological and genetic evidence for it, as you do. By no stretch of imagination is there "tons of evidence" for any of it, much less is there tons of evidence for the specific development of homo sapiens sapiens, least of all is there tons of evidence that could speak to specific RC claims about what sets modern humans apart (like the infusion of a rational soul).

I don't think your first sentence is probably true. Though I take this from your posts and not with specific info about your education, areas of study (and research if you do some).

Nothing in biology makes sense without evolution. There is nothing in the evolutionary record that allows the drawing of a fence around humans. Souls? I have wondered about the souls of Neaderthals, Homo erectus, habilis, afarensis and others. There were a large number of species of Homo/humans, and we're the surviving branch, with bonobos and chimpanzees our closest relatives. Where do you put the fence? Just around us moderns? Do our extinct close species get included? Where do we draw the line? Thinking? Ability to use tools? Understanding of death and evidence of death rituals?

I don't dismiss souls, but I don't buy the RC formula, and think we as human beings should be much, much more humble about our place in creation. We disagree about that, it is clear.

BTW, it's not archeology. Archeology doesn't deal with fossils. The words you want are paleontology and paleoanthropology.

Posted by ChastMastr (# 716) on :

quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
And I am not a big fan of Pope Francis, but one thing he gets right, and is really well known for, is his insistence that Satan is a real being.

Which, by the way, would suggest that on both sides of the pond, the real existence of Satan is a pretty mainstream Christian position, unless someone wants to exclude the Roman Catholic Church from being "mainstream." Ditto exorcists. I'm pretty sure there are exorcists in Canada, even if they are RC rather than Anglican.

Posted by ChastMastr (# 716) on :

(With almost half of Canadians baptised Roman Catholic, as well.)

[ 06. March 2015, 03:50: Message edited by: ChastMastr ]

Posted by Leorning Cniht (# 17564) on :

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:

The concept of the devil and satan similarly have no possibility of being proved to exist and are only a matter for belief.

Well, yes. Like God. I can't prove that God exists in the same sort of objective scientific way that I can prove that the Higgs Boson exists.

I don't think I understand how you can be happy to claim the existence of an almighty creator God, but require some greater standard of proof for the existence of the Prince of Lies.

quote:

I haven't spoken myself to a priest or bishop who've accepted the existence of the creature in a literal sense,

I am surprised. I haven't had a priest who did not (although I'm sure I've met a few). Not as the red-skinned homunculus with the horns any more than God is a beard in the sky, but real? Absolutely.

Posted by Golden Key (# 1468) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Boogie:

quote:
Originally posted by Martin60:
What did we ever have that we've lost?

From what height are we fallen?
We didn't.

Our failure is a failure to become the best we can be, not a fall from a previous state.

I think of it more as "we are not yet the best of what we could and should and will be"--whether that's due to a Fall from a more graceful state, or evolutionary growing pains.

Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on :

So we could be better now than we are now? How?

Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on :

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
I don't think your first sentence is probably true.

Are you some kind of professional then? I'm a lay person concerning these matters, but I'm keeping reasonably up-to-date (and I typically read articles on human evolution when they pop up in my content alerts, e.g., from Nature and Science).

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
Though I take this from your posts and not with specific info about your education, areas of study (and research if you do some).

Well, let's just say that I'm doing reasonably well in academic dick size comparisons.

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
Nothing in biology makes sense without evolution. There is nothing in the evolutionary record that allows the drawing of a fence around humans.

The first statement is plain false, and rather ridiculously so. Most of biology is not concerned with how various biological structures came about historically. And I'm not sure how any evolutionary record would manage to draw a fence around anything, as long as it remains as patchy as it is. That's a common criticism of evolution, by the way: it is an extraordinarily elastic concept that seems rather impervious to falsification, since it is basically postdictive rather than predictive.

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
Souls? I have wondered about the souls of Neaderthals, Homo erectus, habilis, afarensis and others. There were a large number of species of Homo/humans, and we're the surviving branch, with bonobos and chimpanzees our closest relatives. Where do you put the fence? Just around us moderns? Do our extinct close species get included? Where do we draw the line? Thinking? Ability to use tools? Understanding of death and evidence of death rituals?

These are interesting questions. But they are not biological questions, or more specifically, not evolutionary questions. FWIW, I would have no problem accepting that "Adam and Eve" were of say homo habilis stock, if that's where the evidence points to.

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
I don't dismiss souls, but I don't buy the RC formula

I'm sorry, what do you believe then that the RC teaches about souls? Since you are rejecting it, presumably you know what it is? Just to get you started, obviously "animals" ("anima" = soul in Latin) have souls.

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
Archeology doesn't deal with fossils. The words you want are paleontology and paleoanthropology.

You are quite correct about that.

Posted by Golden Key (# 1468) on :

Ingo--

quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
I don't dismiss souls, but I don't buy the RC formula.
I'm sorry, what do you believe then that the RC teaches about souls? Since you are rejecting it, presumably you know what it is? Just to get you started, obviously "animals" ("anima" = soul in Latin) have souls.

Goodness, Ingo, that's practically Lutheran! [Biased]

(“Be thou comforted, little dog, Thou too in Resurrection shall have a little golden tail.”--Luther, possibly influenced by Romans 8.)

Next thing we know, you'll be singing and dancing the "Reformation Polka" with Martin and Katje.
[Razz]

[ 06. March 2015, 08:44: Message edited by: Golden Key ]

Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on :

quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
Are you some kind of professional then?

Indeed.

quote:
Well, let's just say that I'm doing reasonably well in academic dick size comparisons.

We tend to leave the genitalia out of it, hoping that both genders will have equal opportunity. But I understand what you mean. The general move in academia here is to work with teams of people, and to be less personally grandiose and more research group oriented. Which I think is more productive and probably helped by moves toward gender equality.

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
Nothing in biology makes sense without evolution. There is nothing in the evolutionary record that allows the drawing of a fence around humans.

I'd point you to the 1973 essay with the approximate title of this sentence, but it doesn't come up except in Wikipedia: Link

I hold that our ancient and biblical stories makes sense, and that the authors and tellers of them are every bit as able and intelligent as us, and perhaps more focussed because they lacked TV and electronic distractions. But they lacked the factual knowledge we've gained. We need to consider our stories not as ancient and solidified accounts subject to no alteration, but as foundations upon which we must build. I can thus only accept the bible, for the most part, as allegory, mythology, poetry and a story of faith. Not as fact that must be reconciled with science. But it must not either attempt to compete in the details where science has shown the light.

I believe that we are just getting started on our understanding of life, the universe and everything. We mustn't try to fit science to a biblical procrustean bed. We must remain open to ancient wisdom, while appreciating its limitations.

I do agree with LeRoc that Star Trek is hard to overdo (except perhaps for Wesley or when Spock sings "Stepping into Eden").

Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on :

It's funny how the more I see a theologically conservative position articulated, as in the ordination of women, homophobia, creationism of any degree, racism, placism, denominationalism, Zionism, divorce - where I have been the worst of sinners in conservatism - the more whatever side bets I have are hosed away.

And so it is here. I argued here alone for all too many years with a side bet on Eden. The final nails in that coffin were hammered by the paleontological collection of the Musée d'Angoulême five years ago and reading the works of Brian McLaren since.

Which leads me to my latest volte-face. It MUST be assumed for the sake of rationality, of soundness, until proven otherwise - which can never be, but practically can be and will be when we start to be able to detect exoplanet photosynthetic oxygen and can't on just hundreds of rainy worlds - that sapience is universal and therefore so is hypostatic union.

That Jesus was unique as an individual, a new Adam, but that eternity has had an infinity of new Adams and The Second Person incorporates them all.

For if it is rational, sound, meaningful, consistent for life and Saviours to be universal then it is for universes to be. For God to be eternally creator. No lesser orthodoxy can overturn that.

Posted by Boogie (# 13538) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Martin60:
So we could be better now than we are now? How?

Can't you think of 10,000 ways?

I can.

We could start by leaving violence behind us.

Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on :

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
We tend to leave the genitalia out of it, hoping that both genders will have equal opportunity.

The dicks being compared are metaphorical, not biological. I thought your were keen on that distinction? Perhaps we can compare h-scores, if you must.

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
I'd point you to the 1973 essay with the approximate title of this sentence, but it doesn't come up except in Wikipedia: Link

Your Wikipedia entry actually links to the original article as a reference. I'm not sure what you are trying to prove to me with it though. That evolution has some reasonable support? Sure, why not? I'm not an anti-evolutionist (or general "creationist"). That does not change the fact that our evidence for hominid evolution is scant. And it does not change the fact that so far it is insufficient as a guide how the "Adam and Eve" story has to be interpreted.

I don't want to preempt you explaining the RC position to us. I'm rather looking forward to that. But as you presumably will mention some time soon, the RC position is compatible with an evolutionary origin of man. Up to a point.

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
We must remain open to ancient wisdom, while appreciating its limitations.

You are doing well on the latter, I will grant you that.

Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on :

I couldn't agree more Boogie. It has to start with me. And it only just has, the past three years. Could it have happened earlier? No chance. The same as for in our evolution for the past half million years and more. God is wise and patient beyond belief.

Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Martin60:
That Jesus was unique as an individual, a new Adam, but that eternity has had an infinity of new Adams and The Second Person incorporates them all. For if it is rational, sound, meaningful, consistent for life and Saviours to be universal then it is for universes to be.

I take it then that the fall is also universal according to you? In which case, did we fall, or were we floored?

Most people would get a bit suspicious that the cards are stacked against them, if they lose a billion times in a row.

Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on :

quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
We tend to leave the genitalia out of it, hoping that both genders will have equal opportunity.
The dicks being compared are metaphorical, not biological. I thought your were keen on that distinction? Perhaps we can compare h-scores, if you must.

Sorry if it was too subtle. I was making the point that using the word 'dick' in such a way isn't appropriate. I hope you don't use it in academic contexts. H-scores is not something we use.

I get you're interested in competition. I'm not.

Thanks for the info re the essay is linked within the wiki entry. I was in a rush and didn't notice.

I'm not going to budge from the evolutionary history argument and evolved lack of specialness to a particular hominid species, which has acquired sentience and self awareness. I know you've got a different idea.

Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on :

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
I'm not going to budge from the evolutionary history argument and evolved lack of specialness to a particular hominid species, which has acquired sentience and self awareness. I know you've got a different idea.

You are not going to budge from that based on what, precisely? Right now nobody in this entire world knows how sapience can emerge in a brain, and arguably we don't even know how sentience can be properly instantiated in wetware (qualia etc.). Neither is there a sufficient paleontological / pre-historic record to somehow trace the effects of that transition closely. All you have there is the conviction that this must have been natural "business as usual". Somehow. But such a conviction is not itself a scientific statement, it is at best philosophy and frankly more likely to be a kind of faith.

Posted by agingjb (# 16555) on :

I'm always puzzled by the idea that anything in nature, which we do not yet, and may never, understand, requires the intervention of the Creator at any point.

I would have said that the Creator is, being supremely capable, able to initiate and sustain any intended series of results without specific intervention.

I see evolution as a example of artistic economy - within a universe of unlimited magnificence.

Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on :

quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
I'm not going to budge from the evolutionary history argument and evolved lack of specialness to a particular hominid species, which has acquired sentience and self awareness. I know you've got a different idea.
You are not going to budge from that based on what, precisely? Right now nobody in this entire world knows how sapience can emerge in a brain, and arguably we don't even know how sentience can be properly instantiated in wetware (qualia etc.). Neither is there a sufficient paleontological / pre-historic record to somehow trace the effects of that transition closely. All you have there is the conviction that this must have been natural "business as usual". Somehow. But such a conviction is not itself a scientific statement, it is at best philosophy and frankly more likely to be a kind of faith.

We do know actually quite a number of things. Such the series of genetic differences between humans and chimps that cause the understanding of grammar. It is rather involved to explain, and I cannot begin to to it justice, but if you're really interested, as an intro, forkheadboxp2 (FOXP2) is a good place to start.

Posted by Crœsos (# 238) on :

quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
I'm not an anti-evolutionist (or general "creationist"). That does not change the fact that our evidence for hominid evolution is scant.

Really? Because the whole denying the existence of evidence is a standard creationist tactic.

As a point of clarification, when you say "hominid" are you referring to members of family Hominidæ (which contains all great apes) or more vernacular use meaning members of genus Homo (humans and their closest, now extinct, genetic relatives)? At any rate, aside from a variety of fossil evidence, doesn't the fact that we can identify things like the fusion point on human chromosome 2 strongly indicate descent with modification (i.e. evolution) in humans?

Posted by Barnabas62 (# 9110) on :

Well, there's a tangent there which you might consider taking to Dead Horses, the right place to discuss any aspect of creation and evolution.

Barnabas62
Purgatory Host

Posted by Eliab (# 9153) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
At any rate, aside from a variety of fossil evidence, doesn't the fact that we can identify things like the fusion point on human chromosome 2 strongly indicate descent with modification (i.e. evolution) in humans?

I think IngoB's point is that the evidence for human evolution does not contain anything that would refute his speculations or the Catholic Church's teaching on human nature, and how it got that way. He's not arguing for creationism.

All he needs for his account to be possible (not proven, but possible) is a story of human development that allows there to have been a point where an individual animal first became, or was made, sufficiently self-aware, mentally, morally and spiritually, to count as a "human being" and for that individual to make a critical decision to obey or disobey God. IngoB doesn't even require (though I imagine he would think it likely) that this individual would biologically count as homo sapiens, or even be an ancestor of homo sapiens, to count as a "human being" in the special theological sense he is using. I think (though I'm less sure) that IngoB's story might even still work if there had been a social group or lineage of first human beings complicit in that fatal decision, rather than one or two erring individuals taking all the responsibility.

I'm not claiming to be an expert on evolution, but I fully accept it is true, and I don't know of anything that prevents me from seeing the mythical figures of Adam and Eve as place-holders for "the first humans to make a moral choice with lasting spiritual consequences, wherever in the history of life such beings existed". And that's all the Christian needs for the theology to work, I think.

[Cross-posted]

[ 06. March 2015, 22:31: Message edited by: Eliab ]

Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on :

As I keep asking, what fall? From where? To what?

I can no longer maintain a side bet on Eden as having ANY meaning, apart from it being some Bronze Age genius' once-upon-a-time. Sapience itself is loss of dumb innocence. We lost that hundreds of thousands of years ago. When no one walked with us in that African garden.

And yet I bow to the Son of Man remembering Satan. We need a theology that embraces both. Well I do.

Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :

quote:
Martin60: Sapience itself is loss of dumb innocence. We lost that hundreds of thousands of years ago.

I know some people who still have it.

Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on :

Aye. Everyone but me I feel at times. Most times. All the time to be honest. And I can't think myself better either.

Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on :

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
Such the series of genetic differences between humans and chimps that cause the understanding of grammar.

LOL. No, we don't. Correlation is not causation, much less mechanistic explanation, much less understanding. And yes, I do have some idea what I'm talking about. As it happens, I'm currently part of a consortium writing a Horizon 2020 grant application on ADHD, which includes data mining on GWAS, as well as neuroimaging. And both get you only so far, which is pretty much why my group (and other groups like mine) are in the mix. And one of my closer collaborators at the my university is a student of Noah Chomsky who is investigating grammar usage in humans with neuroimaging. Should I tell him that his career is over because somebody out there already knows how humans understand grammar? I think not. And hey, I'm also collaborating with people doing Bayesian estimations of ancestral gene networks with MCMC methods, and I have some idea what they are talking about. Because, you know, I can do maths. Since you are "not doing h-scores", like everybody in the "hard" sciences, I take it you are from the humanities? Well, talking the talk gets you only so far, then you have to walk the walk. And that turns out to be a different thing altogether...

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
Really? Because the whole denying the existence of evidence is a standard creationist tactic.

Take your misrepresentations elsewhere. The record shows that I have not denied any evidence in the above. I have made the objectively true statement that there is little direct evidence for the evolution of hominids. Enough for someone who thinks that hominids have evolved to draw some kind of evolutionary tree? Sure. A correct tree? Quite possibly, though it has been changing as new evidence comes in now and then. But there simply isn't a massive fossil record, and genetic approaches rely on assumptions.

quote:
Originally posted by Eliab:
All he needs for his account to be possible (not proven, but possible) is a story of human development that allows there to have been a point where an individual animal first became, or was made, sufficiently self-aware, mentally, morally and spiritually, to count as a "human being" and for that individual to make a critical decision to obey or disobey God. IngoB doesn't even require (though I imagine he would think it likely) that this individual would biologically count as homo sapiens, or even be an ancestor of homo sapiens, to count as a "human being" in the special theological sense he is using. I think (though I'm less sure) that IngoB's story might even still work if there had been a social group or lineage of first human beings complicit in that fatal decision, rather than one or two erring individuals taking all the responsibility.

That's all exactly on the money. And indeed, it is unclear to what extent a "group" rather than two individuals would work as "Adam and Eve". Basically because Catholics are always reluctant to lose the connection between the spiritual and corporeal (here: biological).

The most likely scenario (aside from my "Star Trek" speculations) is pretty much the Divine "enlightenment" of a couple among some super-bright apes, who had evolved as close as naturally possible to supporting a "true human" existence. I'm afraid the usually not spelled out consequence would be that the (human) offspring of Adam and Eve either engaged in complete interbreeding with each other or slept with animals (namely those super-bright, but not quite human, apes) to get the next generations of "true humans" going. Scriptural evidence (Cain taking a wife from surrounding people!) suggests the latter.

Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on :

There's nothing 'likely' about it.

That's creationism.

For A&E to be of habiline stock means of the line H. habilis, erectus/ergaster, (antecessor), heidelbergensis/rhodesiensis, (floresiensis), neanderthalensis/sapiens. The latter were sapient at least. At least 130,000 years ago.

Sapience could easily be three to ten times older than that. In fact it HAS to be. We need a model of gradual/punctuated sapience. Oh look! Human ontogeny.

To shoe-horn in a repeatedly edited 4,000 year just-so story against that is utterly absurd.

An absurdity I engaged in for 40 years.

You are nailing the oh-so wooden coffin of magical ensoulment with your ever-so-big cranium just fine IngoB.

Posted by itsarumdo (# 18174) on :

Steiner saw evolution as being strongly anthropocentric - with all of evolution being focussed on the creation of humankind. But then, I don't know how literally he meant this, or whether he was making a Goethen statement about the specific perspective necessary when considering certain topics of human existence. i.e. an earth-centred universe is also a useful pov for some purposes. Acknowledging this pov is being used helps to unravel when it IS being used... as we so often unthinkingly do. If you want to get a flavour of the power of this kind of shift in perspective, it's worth looking at e.g. a map of the world centred on Mecca or Peking or the north pole.

Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Martin60:
There's nothing 'likely' about it. That's creationism.

That's not what is usually called "creationism". The label has been assigned previously, I do not belong to the people labeled by it, and to assign this label to me is nothing more than cheap rhetoric.

quote:
Originally posted by Martin60:
The latter were sapient at least. At least 130,000 years ago.

Whether Neanderthal was sapient is questionable. Anyway, it does not matter. Neither does it matter whether it was 10,000, 100,000 or a million years ago. The key question is quite simply whether sapience is entirely material, or not. I don't think it is. Hence it is impossible that it evolved, completely. And the "Adam and Eve" story is the best lead we have on how it came to be in this world.

quote:
Originally posted by Martin60:
We need a model of gradual/punctuated sapience.

If you believe that sapience supervenes on physical brain states, perhaps.

[ 07. March 2015, 13:55: Message edited by: IngoB ]

Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :

Correlation + explanation may not be precisely causation, but as Hume proved, we cannot prove causation anyway. Add successful prediction and you're getting closer. But at some point one has crossed over into denialism and become a creationist perhaps in all but name.

Posted by Teilhard (# 16342) on :

I think that the astonishing immensity and variety of the observed Universe -- combined with the (thus far) observed rarity of beings/creatures like us -- makes us all that much more special rather than insignificant …

Self-organizing matter/energy ("life") contemplating itself is a really interesting deal, IMHO ...

Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :

quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
Correlation + explanation may not be precisely causation, but as Hume proved, we cannot prove causation anyway.

Hume proved that we cannot prove causation within the terms of classical empiricism.

Posted by Teilhard (# 16342) on :

While we can't "prove" causation, we can and do experience it ...

Posted by Ikkyu (# 15207) on :

Its not Creationism is God of the gaps. We don't
yet have a full picture of something therefore God did it.

Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on :

hosting/

There has already been a host post on this thread reminding posters that Ship policy on debates relating to creation and evolution is that they should take place in Dead Horses.

And just for clarity, arguing about what constitutes creationism is a subset of that debate.

There is plenty of scope for discussing the OP without engaging in those tangents, or indeed for starting a thread in DH to discuss them.

Transgressors, be warned.

/hosting

Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Teilhard:
I think that the astonishing immensity and variety of the observed Universe -- combined with the (thus far) observed rarity of beings/creatures like us -- makes us all that much more special rather than insignificant …

Self-organizing matter/energy ("life") contemplating itself is a really interesting deal, IMHO ...

I agree with this. There have been many proposals for life's development and the organization of the physical structures of organisms, and only our branch of the tree of life does what humans do. The rarity of creatures like us needs to be confirmed and I hope we can find out if this hypothesis of the rarity of sentience can be determined.

It is interesting the consider your screen name in light of what you posted. Teilhard de Chardin went quite far out in my view, but some kernel of his ideas have appealed to me. The idea that perhaps there is large universe (for our perception infinite) and that self-awareness would evolve somewhere, rarely, or even only once. Is this the free will of the cosmos?

Posted by Crœsos (# 238) on :

quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
Really? Because the whole denying the existence of evidence is a standard creationist tactic.
Take your misrepresentations elsewhere.

First off, credit where credit is due! If you're going to complain about misrepresentations, perhaps you shouldn't misrepresent who you're responding to.

quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
The record shows that I have not denied any evidence in the above. I have made the objectively true statement that there is little direct evidence for the evolution of hominids. Enough for someone who thinks that hominids have evolved to draw some kind of evolutionary tree? Sure. A correct tree? Quite possibly, though it has been changing as new evidence comes in now and then. But there simply isn't a massive fossil record, and genetic approaches rely on assumptions.

For starters, the idea that no hominid* species changes over time (i.e. evolves) would make them pretty radically distinct from every other organism on the planet. And exactly what "assumptions" do you find unpalatable about genetics? For example, the remains of Richard III were recently identified using genetic testing, which would seem to rest on the same assumptions as most of the rest of genetics (parent organisms pass along genetic material to their descendents, occasional mutations occur, etc.)

--------------------
*Still not clear whether you mean "hominids" as roughly equivalent to H. sapiens or mean to include all great ape species in the term.

Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on :

As I must comply with Eutychus' directive I cannot take you on here IngoB. But I can easily take you on. I'm twice as old as the geniuses I work with. Hell or Dead Horses? I tell you what, I'll totter off to Hell. It'll take a while, I'm old, slow, thick. But the pitiful dragon of claimed intellectualism still has to be slain.

Posted by itsarumdo (# 18174) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Teilhard:
While we can't "prove" causation, we can and do experience it ...

as an interpretation of sensory information. But if your pov about meaning changes, the interpretation also changes.

Posted by Barnabas62 (# 9110) on :

Host Hat On

@ Croesos' last post

Croesos, you are discussing the evolution of hominids and also referring back to a creation/evolution distinctive. Your post and the continuation of the arguments belong in Dead Horses.

You are are ignoring Eutychus' Host ruling and my earlier post as well. So in accordance with normal practice, that gets you a reference to Admin. Others please note.

Barnabas62
Purgatory Host

Host Hat Off

Posted by Teilhard (# 16342) on :

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:

quote:
Originally posted by Teilhard:
I think that the astonishing immensity and variety of the observed Universe -- combined with the (thus far) observed rarity of beings/creatures like us -- makes us all that much more special rather than insignificant …

Self-organizing matter/energy ("life") contemplating itself is a really interesting deal, IMHO ...
I agree with this. There have been many proposals for life's development and the organization of the physical structures of organisms, and only our branch of the tree of life does what humans do. The rarity of creatures like us needs to be confirmed and I hope we can find out if this hypothesis of the rarity of sentience can be determined.

It is interesting the consider your screen name in light of what you posted. Teilhard de Chardin went quite far out in my view, but some kernel of his ideas have appealed to me. The idea that perhaps there is large universe (for our perception infinite) and that self-awareness would evolve somewhere, rarely, or even only once. Is this the free will of the cosmos?

One way to understand "God" is as, "the Soul of The Universe" … Human beings understood as being created "in the image of God" adds into that picture ...

Posted by Teilhard (# 16342) on :

quote:
Originally posted by itsarumdo:

quote:
Originally posted by Teilhard:
While we can't "prove" causation, we can and do experience it ...
as an interpretation of sensory information. But if your pov about meaning changes, the interpretation also changes.

Yes … "Meaning" isn't necessarily one single static thing that must be experienced/understood identically by all … The incredible heat of the sun is a different thing today (in Minnesota, thawing out from a miserable February) than in July (in Arizona) …

IOW, while "Reality" presumably is the same reality everywhere always, in fact, it isn't necessarily so … The same sun that saves my life in Minnesota in March might kill me in Arizona in August ...

Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on :

Hell for your creationism will keep IngoB. What would you call a creature that builds dwellings with fireplaces, cooks, builds boats, buries its dead? Non-sapient?

Fallen?

At least two hundred thousand years ago?

From where?

I pause. Seriously. Is this a Dead Horse?

To what?

You say that that is irrelevant, implying that you bow to all the rational, sound, scientific evidence, you being a scientist squared and all, more scientificalisticalisticistical than anyone else here by an extra cerebral hemisphere or two, that the supernatural endowment of sapience is nonetheless credible even half a million years ago, a la 2001 A Space Odyssey.

Because the Bible tells you so.

How did they know? I mean REALLY how did they know? The post-Exilic editors of a tradition a thousand years older?

quote:
Originally posted by Martin60:
We need a model of gradual/punctuated sapience.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

If you believe that sapience supervenes on physical brain states, perhaps.

Talk about cheap rhetoric. I don't have to BELIEVE in anything. It's IRRELEVANT. What happened? What's the story? The scientific one AND Genesis? Been there mate. There can ONLY be one.

If I take this to Hell it'll be more of the same without the kid gloves on.

Posted by Barnabas62 (# 9110) on :

Host Hat On

Well, I think I've decoded Martin60's post sufficiently to refer it to Admin as another possible ignoring of Eutychus' Host post and my underlining of it. Ruminating in Purgatory about whether you'll continue the DH theme (creationism v evolution so far as hominids are concerned) or call IngoB to Hell; both are off limits here. Call him to Hell or reopen the discussion in DH. Those are your only options.

For everyone else. This thread will be closed if there are any more posts re creationism/evolution of hominids.

Barnabas62
Purgatory Host

Host Hat Off

Posted by RooK (# 1852) on :

[ADMIN]

Always listen to the Hosts.

Crœsos, Martin60, please take a couple weeks to contemplate how serious we are about Commandment 6. Hopefully nobody else needs similar reminding.

[/ADMIN]

Posted by ChastMastr (# 716) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Teilhard:
One way to understand "God" is as, "the Soul of The Universe" … Human beings understood as being created "in the image of God" adds into that picture ...

Perhaps that is one way to understand God, but I don't think it's anything like the orthodox Christian way of understanding God (He is the Creator of all things, not a spirit animating creation, even all of creation).

Posted by Teilhard (# 16342) on :

quote:
Originally posted by ChastMastr:

quote:
Originally posted by Teilhard:
One way to understand "God" is as, "the Soul of The Universe" … Human beings understood as being created "in the image of God" adds into that picture ...
Perhaps that is one way to understand God, but I don't think it's anything like the orthodox Christian way of understanding God (He is the Creator of all things, not a spirit animating creation, even all of creation).

(Reportedly) The LORD God "breathed into [them] the spirit-breath of life and they became living souls" … There are many ways to understand that affirmation … but they all involve "God" and the "dust" ...

Posted by ChastMastr (# 716) on :

There may be, but again, orthodox Christian belief is pretty specific about God being an eternal self-existent Being Who created everything else ex nihilo, and isn't a part of the material universe in Himself.

Posted by Teilhard (# 16342) on :

quote:
Originally posted by ChastMastr:
There may be, but again, orthodox Christian belief is pretty specific about God being an eternal self-existent Being Who created everything else ex nihilo, and isn't a part of the material universe in Himself.

True … Except that the "ex nihilo" part, while "Orthodox"-"Catholic," isn't necessarily "Biblical" … The Biblical Creation stories are a bit fuzzy about that part …

But what is CLEAR is that "life" is all about God animating the dust and clay with "spirit-breath" that comes from -- and only from -- God ...

Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :

Still, in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. God is eternal. The heavens and the earth are not; they came to be at some time. This doesn't seem to jive with a "God as world-soul" theology.

Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on :

quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
Still, in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. God is eternal. The heavens and the earth are not; they came to be at some time. This doesn't seem to jive with a "God as world-soul" theology.

This and ChastMastr's posts are helpful. But may I ask how do we actually know about what is meant by eternal in the context of the universe? We know that planets and solar systems form and then the suns/stars burn out, so they are finite. But the universe may go through series of big bangs and contractions, cycling through. Out conception of eternity is merely that time for us starts with the current big bang. The whole thing seems so amazingly grand, bigger than my brain can handle.

What if the universe is infinite in this sense?

Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :

In that case "beginning" would be metaphorical. But we believe the Father begot the Son, but not in time; eternally begetting, eternally being begotten. It's a relationship of causality. We equate causality with time because we are IN time. (IngoB could not doubt tell us about the four kinds of causation à la Aristotle but I'm no expert there.)

But even in our world of time and space, causation needn't imply succession in time, and can be static and ongoing. The girders of the first flooor cause the second floor to be above the ground. All the time, right now, and continuing.

We know the building to have been built at some time, and presumably the first floor was built before the second. Although it needn't have been. It would be odd to build the second story first, hold it in the air and build the first underneath it, but neither logically nor physically impossible. The point being that causation in time is not necessary for the kind of ongoing, static causation I'm referring to. (Static isn't quite the right term but I ohpe it conveys the nothing-moving-ness of what I'm referring to.)

In similar manner (you can only ever really use analogues and metaphors with God, innit) the Father begets the Son. Not at some point in the past, but all the time, ongoing.

So, if the Universe were temporally infinite, the same principle would apply. God is always causing the universe to exist, in a static, now and all the time sense.

This may be folderol but it's my attempt to square that circle.

Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :

quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
IngoB could not doubt tell us about the four kinds of causation à la Aristotle but I'm no expert there.

I think the Aristotelian word is only still translated 'cause' because it's a) traditional; and b) there isn't a better word available. It doesn't quite mean 'cause' as generally understood in English these days. Perhaps 'explanation' is a closer English equivalent, although explanation is ambiguous between what is going on and people talking about what is going on.
Anyway...

'Formal cause': what something is, its shape, the way it is put together.
'Material cause': what it is made out of.
'Efficient cause': what brings it about. Closest to the meaning of cause in modern English.
'Final cause': what something is there for, the purpose. (Not necessarily the same as the intention behind something, unless you're a Roman Catholic creationist.)

Posted by ChastMastr (# 716) on :

I was going to post a reply but Mousethief summed it up pretty well. "Eternity" in this sense isn't time going on for a really really long time--it's something that transcends the whole thing. (As a side note, this gets into the whole free will/predestination thing, as I understand it, because while we freely make our decisions and (on an earthly level) perceive them as sequential points along our personal timeline, God transcends the whole thing and sees our timeline all at once in His neverending Now, along with trilobites and dinosaurs and the births and deaths of galaxies and what we see as the distant future and beyond that--and, if there is a multiverse or multi-multi-multi (etc.) verse, all of that as well.

Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on :

That's the problem re time. The people who discuss such things talk of some events in the universe currently as having a minimum flexible time where time passes more quickly or slowly some places than in others as a function of speed. We don't know if there is time within a black hole for instance.

Eternity may be a characteristic of God and of black holes.

Posted by itsarumdo (# 18174) on :

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
That's the problem re time. The people who discuss such things talk of some events in the universe currently as having a minimum flexible time where time passes more quickly or slowly some places than in others as a function of speed. We don't know if there is time within a black hole for instance.

Eternity may be a characteristic of God and of black holes.

a photon has a lifespan of zero...

Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on :

Is a photon a particle or a wave?

The mystery, oh the mystery!

Posted by Teilhard (# 16342) on :

We finite human beings (who imagine our selves to be THE model of intelligence, wisdom, knowledge and understanding !!!) of course naturally try to get hold of that slippery thing called, "Reality," as best we can in terms of our own experience and limitations … How could we do otherwise, or better … ???

Thus, the problem, yes … ???

Meanwhile … Dear well-meaning Steve Hawking thinks, writes and talks about "how 'God' sees the Universe," and so on, while dear well-meaning guys like Rick Dawkins just cut to their own chase and either scoff or vomit whenever "God" is mentioned …

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