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tonyrey
Guest
:thumbsup:An excellent point.
Rarity or size has no bearing whatsoever on significance.
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Rarity or size has no bearing whatsoever on significance.
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Regular_Atheist
Guest
Those are really the reasons why I don’t accept theist’s claims that creation is perfectly designed for humans. Because it isn’t.
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tonyrey
Guest
In other words emotions and intentions can supposedly be explained in terms of material objects…
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Justin_Swanton
Guest
I’d invoke Occam’s razor here: nothing suggests that God did create parallel universes so we need not invoke their existence. Parallel universes, like warp holes and hyperspace, are interesting exercises in imagination but no more than that (sorry about the cold water).
Loved the video:thumbsup:
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dchezik
Guest
Nothing has significance without a mind to imbue it with significance. However, minds do imbue things with significance, usually because of their rarity or their associations. For example, imagine literally finding the Holy Grail. One could hardly contemplate it without associations of Jesus coming to mind. To think his lips actually touched the rim of the cup! His fingers grasped it! You can almost see him drinking from it! A person aware of Christian theology could not help but be bowled over by this cup’s significance. It would give many goosebumps! But it’s just a cup! A perfect replica it wouldn’t have the same significance - it has to be THAT cup. But the significance is a product of the mind, not reality. (By the way, how come there’s never a been a search for the Holy Sandals? And think of all the Holy Stones that Jesus trod on while on earth! Boy! Wouldn’t you like to have one of those? Jesus actually stepped on those! Wow!)
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cornbread_r2
Guest
You invoke Occam’s Razor against the notion of a God-created multiverse while previously positing that God allowed the Fall to be the cause of non-human predation that preceded it by hundreds of millions of years? If it cuts in the one instance, why not the other?
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cornbread_r2
Guest
Until someone demonstrates how the supernatural interfaces with mental processes which appear to be wholly dependent on functioning brains, then yah, I’m going with that.
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Wisner
Guest
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Justin_Swanton
Guest
There is no need to posit multiple universes, but there is a need to explain predation. Starting with the principle that God is the cause of all living beings, there is the problem of squaring His goodness with the fact that creatures harm each other. Talking about a balance of nature does not solve the problem. A buck caught by a lion does not want to die and suffers pain and trauma in doing so: God could easily have created a balance of nature that did not require a hunter and prey.
A solution - suggested by St Paul’s reference to all creation groaning until the liberation of the sons of God - is that the natural (not moral) evil in the natural order is a consequence of the sin of Adam. Assuming that that is the case, I would invoke the famous razor and say it is unnecessary to suppose that God created a harm-free world, which He changed into the present one only after Adam sinned. That would, in physical and biological terms, require a complete re-creation. The most elegant solution is that God created the world as it is knowing that Adam would sin, i.e. a world that is not a natural heaven for sinless man, but one whose imperfections make it the perfect place of preparation for wayfaring fallen man, where he can work out his salvation.
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st_albans
Guest
Respectfully, I beg to differ. First, Occam’s Razor, as Einstein put it, “The grand aim of all science…is to cover the greatest possible number of empirical facts by logical deductions from the smallest possible number of hypotheses or axioms”. Considering this is a man who’s exceedingly complicated physics has helped define our current understanding of physics, I think it should be understood that our existence is not simple. The idea of ‘multiverse’, ‘parallel universes’, etc…, are sound mathematical constructs and warrant more than ‘imagination’. Because we can’t imagine such a thing does not mean it is not true, and I would submit that if we can create the sound math and imagine such a thing, it is not only possible but likely that God would create such an existence. I think it is simpler to think of such hard and theoretical physics as possible, or even likely, than to call it an exercise of the imagination.
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TimeEntrance
Guest
I watched about 3 minutes of that video. Thanks for posting it though.
“Astrobiology” strikes me as an oxymoron. Biology deals with a statistical sample size of one when it comes to “life.” That’s a weakness it has. That astrobiologist claimed intelligent life on another planet would be contingent on a number of things including oxygen. But I don’t see why. That seems to be inferring “life” from our small sample size of one: planet earth.
Anyways, I’m still an undergrad and don’t know a whole lot, so, I’ll leave most of this discussion to those with graduate degrees or high school students that are geniuses.
I do think one very remarkable aspect of planet earth is not just simple life form or complex life forms like humans, but rather, all the vast amounts of diverse life forms inhabiting the planet. That even begs the question of "Why?"
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cornbread_r2
Guest
I would suggest that the most elegant explanation for the suffering of prey species is a theory – the discussion of which is banned in these forums.
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tabycat
Guest
Very strange but very wonderful!!! 
:dancing::bounce::flowers:
:dancing::bounce::flowers:
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kompaz
Guest
That’s all fine, except that your cosmological God is not a Catholic God. It is a deist God.
Let me explain. Your God simply declares a set of physical laws which will produce a life-bearing and intelligence-bearing universe, and kicks off the process. These laws will then produce, inter alia, humans. The implication is that human is not directly created “in God’s image”; the human is a product of God’s laws, not of God himself.
There are many reasons why such view can be attractive; for one, it elegantly solves the problem of evil and its ilk (disease and predation). Further, there have been numerous theologians who experimented with integrating such God into Christianity (i.e. Hans Kung wrote a whole book about this very problem).
However, such God is incompatible with the orthodox Catholic God (or, at least, the vision of God which seems to be prevalent on these forums). For such God, human is not the pinnacle of creation, but instead, one of many creation, indirect creations at that. Next, such God implies evolutionary origin of mankind, which runs into obvious problems with the historicity of Adam and the Original Sin, and doing away with that blows up the doctrine of atonement. Also, it casts serious doubt on the idea of Jesus as THE one and only (universe-wise) Son of God, because it is difficult to explain why a God which operates on the scale of the entire universe personally attend to the salvation of one particular species among many. That, in turn, casts doubt on the doctrine of Trinity.
As Kung demonstrated in his book, it is possible to integrate such God into Christianity, but the resulting theology is radically unorthodox.
As the OP correctly, observed, the God envisioned by orthodox Catholicism does not seem to integrate well with the observed cosmology. It however integrates well with Biblical cosmology. The best proof of that comes from Young Earth Creationism. The YEC position is very logical; their adherents acknowledge that modern cosmology and their God are in contradiction, hence, one of them must be rejected – so they reject modern cosmology.
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kompaz
Guest
Life is, essentially, chemical self-replication. Chemical self-replication requires some complicated chemistry, and the best way to do complicated chemistry is with carbon in water. This follows from the very properties of chemical elements.
Alternative biochemistries have been proposed, but they all seem to be inferior to ours: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothetical_types_of_biochemistry
Of course, all that does not preclude the existence of a life based on alternate chemistry somewhere in the universe. It just means that when you go out looking for places which can support life, the places which can support our type of biochemistry are a safe bet.
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Al_Moritz
Guest
That would be right if humans were merely physical beings. You forget the immaterial rational soul that stands outside the process of evolution (a mere physical, material process) and has to be directly created by God.
For that, and the issue of original sin that you touched upon, I would recommend reading as a start:
edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/09/modern-biology-and-original-sin-part-i.html
edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/09/monkey-in-your-soul.html
edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/09/modern-biology-and-original-sin-part-ii.html
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Al_Moritz
Guest
Actually, in classical Thomistic metaphysics deism is also excluded for the mere fact that God needs to sustain the world in each moment (that has to do with such concepts as esse and actus essendi, actus and potentia; I recommend Feser’s Aquinas for that, available at Amazon). He cannot simply “walk away”.
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Justin_Swanton
Guest
Not really. The Theory That Shall Remain Unnamed just pushes the question back a step without answering it. God could have either created living creatures directly or allowed them to come into being via a series of natural processes of which He is the cause. Either way, He is responsible for the final product, hence He is the cause of predators. One still needs to explain why they were either created or allowed to come into existence.
If there is *no *God or natural processes work entirely independently of Him then obviously there is not a problem. Predators are seen, not from the perspective of good and evil (there being no such things), but from the viewpoint of convenient and inconvenient. The philosophical conclusion from this line of reasoning is that it is better to be a predator.
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Ridgerunner
Guest
Any number of the neat ideas heretofore expressed might explain it. I particularly like thinking about the one some poster state: That we will be very different after this life. We would be able to explore the center of the sun without being destroyed or even pained by it. We could dart from one part of the universe to another at the thought of doing so.
But one other thing has intrigued me. Maybe the universe is so vast because maybe it isn’t designed for us alone. I don’t mean space aliens, though God would not be precluded from having created other beings on other planets, notwithstanding that we presently have not detected the slightest indication that He did.
But maybe it’s not about material beings at all. We are informed that angels somehow have a role in the universe. I have wondered, since we really don’t know what their nature is, whether perhaps they ARE the principles by which the universe operates. Are they perhaps something vastly more magnificent than singers before the throne of God? One, perhaps, “thinks into operation” the action of quarks, for example, as a conduit from the Mind of God? Another IS the action of black holes or time? Maybe the vastness of the universe (particularly any part we will never see or even imagine) is not so much for us as for them. Is the “celestial harmony” their interaction; their “song”?
I recall St. Francis of Assisi’s seeing some immensely vast presence in the heavens, or perceiving it somehow. What was it?
We don’t know here, but it’s interesting to think about.
But one other thing has intrigued me. Maybe the universe is so vast because maybe it isn’t designed for us alone. I don’t mean space aliens, though God would not be precluded from having created other beings on other planets, notwithstanding that we presently have not detected the slightest indication that He did.
But maybe it’s not about material beings at all. We are informed that angels somehow have a role in the universe. I have wondered, since we really don’t know what their nature is, whether perhaps they ARE the principles by which the universe operates. Are they perhaps something vastly more magnificent than singers before the throne of God? One, perhaps, “thinks into operation” the action of quarks, for example, as a conduit from the Mind of God? Another IS the action of black holes or time? Maybe the vastness of the universe (particularly any part we will never see or even imagine) is not so much for us as for them. Is the “celestial harmony” their interaction; their “song”?
I recall St. Francis of Assisi’s seeing some immensely vast presence in the heavens, or perceiving it somehow. What was it?
We don’t know here, but it’s interesting to think about.
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ricmat
Guest
Everything eats something else. Everything is a predator. Everything is prey.
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