Origins of life

[mccann51]

The whole point of mine wasn't so much that churches are more moral, but that they provide much more structure in a group mindset to influence children positively. As the groups that have been preaching these morals (and they are the basis for our western morality) they are also very learned in how to accomplish these goals. Atheists and Agnostics, while there are some some groups, are nearly as organized and don't have the focus on morality that a church group would.

I personally think I could teach morality without the church, but as for how -I- view my daughters' attendance in these groups(eventually), that's the justification for me. It doesn't hurt anything AND they will help provide a moral foundation for her.

I think you give too much credit to organized religions; not that people don't learn morality from their religious group, and not that it's a bad thing for such to happen, but I'd say the primary vehicle of morality being taught to children is the parents. If the parents happen to be active in a religion, then yes, the morality is probably coming down from the religion, but it is still primarily the parents.

Children learn most of their values from their parents (even if it is in a contrarian fashion, eg "my parents are alcoholics, so I abhor alcohol"), not just their morals.

 

[Chevette Girl]

I honestly don't remember how I learned what was wrong and what was right. Always an empathetic youngster, I was always able to put myself in someone/something else's shoes and I learned very early that it made me feel bad if I hurt someone or something because I wouldn't like it to happen to me... so I think that's where it came from for me... and some people don't have that, and have to be told that hurting is wrong. And people who recognize that they don't have morals but still want to fit within society's norms develop a code of ethics instead, and that's more what's in the bible... it's an instruction manual for life with a bunch of basic rules that help a society to work.

I think where morality/ethics comes in with organized religions is that you're associating with a community (whether through school or church) and you sort of absorb the beliefs and behaviours of that community, societal norms and all that... and most religions have some basic tenets - don't murder, don't cheat, don't screw around on someone you're committed to, don't steal, and take care of your neighbours if they can't take care of themselves.

 

[TheAlchemist]

Lewis Thomas

Here's a quote from Lewis Thomas, healer, poet and all around renaissance man (I believe he was also a man of faith--?Calvinist? but can't verify):

What sticks in the top of my mind is another, unavoidable aspect of my genealogy, far beyond my memory, but remembered still, I suspect, by all my cells. It is a difficult and delicate fact to mention. To face it squarely, I come from a line that can be traced straight back, with some accuracy, into a near-infinity of years before my first humanoid ancestors turned up. I go back, and so do you, like it or not, to a single Ur-ancestor whose remains are on display in rocks dated approximately 3.5 thousand million years ago, born a billion or so years after the earth itself took shape and began cooling down. That first of the line, our n-granduncle, was unmistakably a bacterial cell.

I cannot get this out of my head. It has become, for the moment, the most important thing I know, the obligatory beginning of any memoir, the long buried source of language. We derive from a lineage of bacteria, and a very long line at that. Never mind our embarrassed indignation when we were first told, last century, that we came from a family of apes and had chimps as near-cousins. That was relatively easy to accommodate, having at least the distant look of a set of relatives. But this new connection, already fixed by recent science beyond any hope of disowning the parentage, is something else again. At first encounter the news must come as a kind of humiliation. Humble origins indeed…

Where did that first microorganism, parent of us all, come from? Nobody knows, and in the circumstance it’s anyone’s guess, and the guesses abound. Francis Crick suggests that the improbability of its forming itself here on earth is so high that we must suppose it drifted in from outer space, shifting the problem to scientists in some other part of the galaxy or beyond. Others assert that it happened here indeed, piecing itself together molecule by molecule, over a billion years of chance events under the influence of sunlight and lightening, finally achieving by pure luck the exactly right sequence of nucleotides, inside the exactly right sort of membrane, and we were on our way.

No doubt the first success occurred in water. And not much doubt that the first event, however it happened, was the only such event, the only success. It was the biological equivalent of the Big Bang of the cosmophysicists, very likely a singular phenomenon, a piece of unprecedented good luck never to be repeated. If the sheer improbability of the thing taking place more than once, spontaneously and by chance, were not enough, consider the plain fact that all the cells that came later, right up to our modern brain cells, carry the same strings of DNA and work by essentially the same genetic code. It is the plainest evidence of direct inheritance from a single parent. We are all in the same family-grasses, seagulls, fish, fleas and voting citizens of the republic….

I am obsessed by bacteria…

Lewis Thomas
A Long Line of Cells

Mitakuye Oyasin
All My Relations

 

[TheAlchemist]

Aw, go on Jenn...get in the game...we all know you are both a woman of faith and a science teacher...you've got to have something to say here...

 

[mccann51]

Nice quote, Alchemist!

Not sure what I think of Francis Crick's extraterrestrial-origins-idea, but it's one of those ideas that is a consciousness-raiser.

 

[AToE]

There are secular equivalents to the moral teachings of a religious setting, but they are a lot more sneaky about it. We've got sports teams (a good coach instills a LOT of morality, teamwork, respect, hard work ethic, the list is almost endless), we've got classrooms (I've had some absolutely amazing teachers that made a huge impact on who I am today).

What we don't really have is a truely organized "lets sit down and only discuss morality" setting like is seen in religious groups. Now, I'll agree that the influence those groups have on a child is usually going to be a tiny fraction of the influence parents have on the kid (or even coaches and teachers, we spend a lot more time with them than we do in a religious setting... unless you're in a religious school or sports team, then that argument fails a bit).

But frankly it would be nice to have just big group discussions on how to live life best, not even really an atheist version, just a multi-faith and non religious setting where everyone could get together and discuss each others ideas. I wish something like that could be worked into the school system (I actually think too that a "religions of the world" class should be manditory in all schools, right from grade 1 through to 12).

 

[Chevette Girl]

I am a product of the Catholic school system, and I think the only useful year of Religion class was the one year in high school where we studied other religions. The rest of it was studying scriptures, mostly go look up a passage in the bible and explain what you think it means, compare it to another passage somewhere else... we never discussed right and wrong that I ever remember, it was mostly bible study with the odd movie or story with some moral behind it... oh, and pushing abstinence.... And I had one or two good teachers (like the one who disapproved of how we are left in the dark about things like contraceptives and left the room during health class so we could ask our guest speaker ANYTHING) but am still trying to leave behind the continuing repurcussions of some really bad ones (like the bad taste in my mouth remaining from the one who implied to my class that anal sex causes, not spreads, HIV)... About the only other positive thing I can say about the religious teaching I received through the school system was that we learned that the bible is made up of the writings of multiple people who sometimes perceived the same event very differently. That was something specifically stressed at some point, but I haven't talked to too many others to find out if everyone was told that point-blank or if it was just my school/teacher that year... What I took away from it is to take nothing in there literally. Of course, by then it was too late for any kind of faith I might once have had...

But I really do wish we'd gone more in-depth on world religions. It would make for significantly fewer misunderstandings and less looking up things on Wikipedia... like, what does Halal designation mean, what is Ramadan, why do kosher Jews separate milk and meat, why do Catholics (or is that all Christians?) forego things for lent and advent, who believes in heaven/hell, who came up with the idea of eating pancakes the day before Ash Wednesday, what is the significance of the equinoxes and solstices, and does Satanism mean worshipping the dark one or just living in a selfish manner because you're going to hell anyway?

 

[Medsen Fey]

This is a slow ramping up process, but it results in areas (pools) with high concentrations of organic compounds. This is not just conjecture, these experiments have been done. ...

After some (excessively long, by our human standards) amount of time, you would have some very primitive forms of replication. Nucleotide strands (ie RNA) would facilitate the synthesis of amino acid strands ...

The Boeing 747 is a product of this total "evolution". To say a Boeing 747 does not spontaneously assemble (so why should a cell) is to make a false dichotomy. It took a long time of aeronautical trial-and-error to develop and build the first Boeing 747, the same is true for the first cell. Nobody is suggesting a cell just came together one day from a bunch of chemicals; it took a LOT of "development".

In terms of a creator, I am not full on against the idea, but my immediate question is, what created the creator?

I'll point out that their experiment did NOT show the development of nucleic acids which make up DNA/RNA.

And remember, the evolution of the 747 was intelligently directed and planned, with a purpose. It was not a series of random changes.

My problem with the airplane parts being toss around analogy is that while it gets the point across, it's really not analogous at all for obvious reasons. Planes require welding, bolts, so forth and so on. On a microscopic level it's a lot easier for things to fall into place with each other - there are strong attractions between things (unlike plane parts, which have no measurable attraction to each other) and only certain parts can fit onto certain parts, and the fact that gravity has little/far less effect on something this size also removes one of the major problems that would arise if trying to assemble a plane in such a manner!

It's tough to come up with a macroscopic analogy that has any relevance because everything on our scale just behaves so differently than down at the molecular level.

Again, compared to a 747, a cell is FAR more complicated and has many more parts. They all have to be attached through bonds (covalent, ionic, and so forth). Not only do they have to work in gravity, they have other forces such as osmotic pressures to deal with. They are extremely complicated and well engineered, self-regulating machines - a technical marvel. And if you glob together a few billion of them with various specialized functions, you get a self-aware creature - that's miraculous.

When one looks at a skyscraper, one does not need to acknowledge the architect and the builder. One can say, this must be a natural formation. Those steel girders must have formed deep in the earth where there is heat and pressure, and the glass windows as well. This structure, then, must have been pushed to the surface through tectonic activity, and the open space inside created by erosion over time. Or one could say, it's magic! One universal human trait is the ability to rationalize. Nevertheless, there was an architect and a builder, even if we can see no other proof of their existence other than the building.

When I see the amazing function of life, even at the molecular level, I see vivid proof of the genius of the architect. One fact that I've often wondered about in these discussion and haven't seen addressed is apoptosis - programmed cell death. It is an interesting concept, and accounts in part for the fact that we have a lifespan. I would think that natural selection would strongly favor species/organisms that didn't program in a life-span. Such organisms would be able to reproduce more and would have a competitive advantage. Building organisms with a cellular life-span sort of defeats that purpose and makes me think again, life systems were engineered with a plan.

As for the entropy issue, I recognize that it has some flaws, the biggest of which is that we are not in a closed system. There is constant energy input. Of course, you can take that back many steps. Who created the energy? who created the big bang? who created the stuff that went bang? and who created the creator? I believe this is the most fundamental question we have as humans. I don't think any of us will come up with answers in this corporeal existence - perhaps we get the chance to learn at some point later. For those who choose not to acknowledge the creator, that's certainly your prerogative, and luckily it does not preclude your creation.

In the meantime, I'll continue to tip my hat to God and thank him for the gift of life.

As for morality and religion, I do believe religion serves as a good way for us to draw closer to the creator. It encourages us to become something greater than our biological programing. However, like anything humans run, it has a tendency to run off the track at times. On the other hand, morality is not relative. There is good and there is evil. Slavery is evil. In our culture, it was considered acceptable (and even good) for a very long time. Just because a majority of people at the time said, "It's OK" did not make it OK. It was wrong, and it remains wrong (though it still exists). Moral relativism merely allow us to justify whatever we choose on the basis that others think so too. If we look in our hearts, it usually isn't too hard to see what "good" is - most people around the world can agree on at least some of it.

 

[AToE]

As for the entropy issue, I recognize that it has some flaws, the biggest of which is that we are not in a closed system. There is constant energy input. Of course, you can take that back many steps. Who created the energy? who created the big bang? who created the stuff that went bang? and who created the creator? I believe this is the most fundamental question we have as humans. I don't think any of us will come up with answers in this corporeal existence - perhaps we get the chance to learn at some point later. For those who choose not to acknowledge the creator, that's certainly your prerogative, and luckily it does not preclude your creation.

Well, "some flaws" might be a wee understatement - this is an argument used all the time as scientific evidence for creationism, and because we're not talking about closed systems it simply doesn't apply at all. My issue with it is that it seems so convincing on it's surface that it misleads a lot of people into believing that it is actually proof of creation. I'm happy to see people believe in a creator if it impacts their lives in positive way, but I want people to believe for the right reasons, not because of misquoted science (that's NOT intended to be a dig at you Medsen, this entropy argument has been a hinderance to many discussions I've had with people over many years!).

When I say that life absolutely could have arisen on it's own, that's not just my opinion, that is the belief shared by the vast majority of the scientific community, the vast majority of whome are in fact religious themselves. The idea that evolution took place doesn't exclude the idea of a creator, just because it "could" happen on it's own, doesn't mean that it did, just that it could have. I don't like that a lot of religious people (not you specifically here, I'm talking about people who have museums showing people living alongside dinosaurs and such!) seem to feel the need to mis-represent science.

Regardless of how impossible it may seem, there are lots of solid leads into explaining how life got started, and we'll probably have it explained within our lifetime, hopefully with an experiment that actually shows it happening. Just because we who only partially understand the processes are baffled by it does not (and cannot) mean it's impossible.

Faith is supposed to be based on a lack of disproof of a creator (and there is indeed no way to disprove such a thing), and a feeling in your gut that there's something supernatural going on, that there's some greater being out there - not bad science! I want people to believe because they believe, not because they've been lied to/misled (not always intentionally) about science.


Now, when you bring up the whole "what the heck caused/came before the big bang?" thing, NOW we're talking! That's a discussion to be had for sure, and a great one! What I love about it is that it's (at this time anyways) unprovable, and so the discussion is free to run of into lots of interesting ideas. Us Atheists cannot explain what caused the universe to come into existance from a singularity (lots of decent hypothesis though), and religious people cannot explain what caused their Creator to come into existance. So in the end, both our experiences boil down (at least in part) to simple gut-instinct!


ALSO: We're only talking right now about atheism (common meaning of that term only) versus belief in a creator. We're leaving out entirely those atheist religions like Buddhism that actually do not believe in a deity at all, nor a creator, nor a creation. They believe that time is cyclical and the universe ends then begins from the ashes then ends again, with no true "start" or definite ending. This is REALLY fun stuff, because it actually does not conflict with the current scientific hypothesis about the nature of the universe (note, when I say "doesn't conflict" I'm not saying this means they're right!).

 

[TheAlchemist]

We're leaving out entirely those atheist religions like Buddhism that actually do not believe in a deity at all, nor a creator, nor a creation. They believe that time is cyclical and the universe ends then begins from the ashes then ends again, with no true "start" or definite ending. This is REALLY fun stuff, because it actually does not conflict with the current scientific hypothesis about the nature of the universe (note, when I say "doesn't conflict" I'm not saying this means they're right!).

Delighted to see Buddhism come in to the discussion at last. Deeply spiritual thought that does not necessarily focus on God.

Also, we do not need to look too far to see evidence of the evolutionary process in our own lifetimes. MRSA and VRE are cases in point.

 

[mccann51]

I'll point out that their experiment did NOT show the development of nucleic acids which make up DNA/RNA.

No, but other experiments have.

And remember, the evolution of the 747 was intelligently directed and planned, with a purpose. It was not a series of random changes.

...

Again, compared to a 747, a cell is FAR more complicated and has many more parts. They all have to be attached through bonds (covalent, ionic, and so forth). Not only do they have to work in gravity, they have other forces such as osmotic pressures to deal with. They are extremely complicated and well engineered, self-regulating machines - a technical marvel. And if you glob together a few billion of them with various specialized functions, you get a self-aware creature - that's miraculous.

When one looks at a skyscraper, one does not need to acknowledge the architect and the builder. One can say, this must be a natural formation. Those steel girders must have formed deep in the earth where there is heat and pressure, and the glass windows as well. This structure, then, must have been pushed to the surface through tectonic activity, and the open space inside created by erosion over time. Or one could say, it's magic! One universal human trait is the ability to rationalize. Nevertheless, there was an architect and a builder, even if we can see no other proof of their existence other than the building.

When one looks at a skyscraper or Boeing, one is look at something that's parts cannot spontaneously be produced (ie the glass, the steel girders, the wiring, etc). Only a half-century of research has produced results that indicate the component parts of cells are spontaneously produced in conditions similar to those of early Earth. As AToE points out, the components of cells are on a totally different scale that operates differently from our own.

Consciousness is pretty miraculous, but within the context of evolution is by no means impossible; again, it's a ridiculously slow ramping up process. And though conscious we are, we are by no means perfect beings outside the influence of our evolutionary history. We have evil drives that speak to our violent, tribal ancestry. We - thankfully - also have compassion and ingenuity, which speaks to the same ancestry and evolutionary past. We also have trouble thinking about and dealing with issues of the incredibly small and incredibly big and old (exactly what we're attempting to deal with here, haha!); these issues were not relevant to our survival as a species when we were first evolving, so it's outside of our evolutionary experience.

As spectacular as our consciousness is, it is most certainly confined within the bounds of our evolution as a species.

When I see the amazing function of life, even at the molecular level, I see vivid proof of the genius of the architect. One fact that I've often wondered about in these discussion and haven't seen addressed is apoptosis - programmed cell death. It is an interesting concept, and accounts in part for the fact that we have a lifespan. I would think that natural selection would strongly favor species/organisms that didn't program in a life-span. Such organisms would be able to reproduce more and would have a competitive advantage. Building organisms with a cellular life-span sort of defeats that purpose and makes me think again, life systems were engineered with a plan.

Without knowing anything about the arguments for the evolutionary advantage of apoptosis (ie there's probably better, more well-thought arguments for its evolutionary advantage), I would venture that it somehow functions as a defense against progressive, deleterious mutations.

As for morality and religion, I do believe religion serves as a good way for us to draw closer to the creator. It encourages us to become something greater than our biological programing. However, like anything humans run, it has a tendency to run off the track at times. On the other hand, morality is not relative. There is good and there is evil. Slavery is evil. In our culture, it was considered acceptable (and even good) for a very long time. Just because a majority of people at the time said, "It's OK" did not make it OK. It was wrong, and it remains wrong (though it still exists). Moral relativism merely allow us to justify whatever we choose on the basis that others think so too. If we look in our hearts, it usually isn't too hard to see what "good" is - most people around the world can agree on at least some of it.

I couldn't have said it better myself (the bolded text); I agree with this 110%. Obviously there are more subtle situations that are not so black-and-white, but there are definitely things (such as slavery or genocide, or on a smaller scale, rape or murder) that every compassionate person could agree with. But I do not think religion does a better job at teaching it than a secular environment. "Don't do shit to others that you wouldn't want done to you." Yes, Jesus said something very similar, but I don't think it's a revelation that most people need the Bible to come to. Other religions say similar things, and so do many atheists and secularists. It's more universal than religion, and it's unfair for religion to take credit for it.

Faith is supposed to be based on a lack of disproof of a creator (and there is indeed no way to disprove such a thing), and a feeling in your gut that there's something supernatural going on, that there's some greater being out there - not bad science! I want people to believe because they believe, not because they've been lied to/misled (not always intentionally) about science.

Agreed. I also think this can be applied more broadly to any conviction a person has.

We're only talking right now about atheism (common meaning of that term only) versus belief in a creator. We're leaving out entirely those atheist religions like Buddhism that actually do not believe in a deity at all, nor a creator, nor a creation. They believe that time is cyclical and the universe ends then begins from the ashes then ends again, with no true "start" or definite ending. This is REALLY fun stuff, because it actually does not conflict with the current scientific hypothesis about the nature of the universe (note, when I say "doesn't conflict" I'm not saying this means they're right!).

Zen Buddhism, I feel, is a very good starting place for a secular equivalent to religion.


Btw, this is a very thought-provoking discussion, and I'm enjoying it thoroughly!

 

[AToE]

Delighted to see Buddhism come in to the discussion at last. Deeply spiritual thought that does not necessarily focus on God.

Also, we do not need to look too far to see evidence of the evolutionary process in our own lifetimes. MRSA and VRE are cases in point.

I find there are two groups of creationists (huge generalization). Those who very much acknowledge evolution (how can one not? We see it happening right now, and the fossil records speak for themselves) but believe there was a guiding force involved, or, like Medsen, have a problem with that initial change from non-life to life (which is an understandable skepticism frankly).

Then there are those who deny it all. I don't know how to argue with those people because they've been so thoroughly taught psuedo-science that "backs up" the young earth stuff, or anti-evolution pseudo-science. It's not that they have a truely good argument, the problem is that they know the fake science far better than I know the real science! Which makes me clearly not the person to try to change their minds. I can point out little things here and there, but I'm never going to change their minds.

You also have the "universe as god's experiment" group, who believe life is indeed accidental, but that god created the universe and then just set it free to do whatever it did (perhaps in an attemp to figure out where god itself came from, or simply as part of a process to enrich the creator's life). I think one group of these people are the Process Theology people (though many of them do also believe life was sparked by god, or guided, etc too). I like Process Theology, I find it an extremely emotionally compelling school of thought.

 

[akueck]

Interesting stuff. I always find these discussions entertaining, but honestly I come to the same spot every time: Who Cares? What it really boils down to is the fundamental question: how do I choose to live my own life? i.e. what fundamental basis do I use to understand the context of my existence? Religion is a common backdrop to frame the answer; personally I don't find it suitable. All just seem like wallpaper to me. To me it all distracts from the fact that I have to choose who I am, where I'm going, and how I'm going to get there. Getting all the answers from the back of the book just seems like cheating to me. Hmm, ok reading that sentence again it sounds like I'm calling anyone who follows religion a slacker. Not trying to do that, just saying that I--me personally--get no warm fuzzies from religion and in fact I think it messes up my lighting. I choose the blank canvas in the empty room with no one looking at it and no one to show it to.

Morality is well and good, and you can't have civil society without being able to transfer it from one generation to the next. But I'd like to think that I help people out because it makes me feel good, and I don't help people out when I don't feel like it. (hopefully for the rest of the world I feel like it more often than not.) I'm not trying to be righteous, get to heaven, or please a deity. I'm just here, for no plausible "big picture" reason, doing what seems right to me. And I better do what I think is right for me, because I might not be here tomorrow. Why do some things make me feel good? Not sure, probably a strong function of the morality suggested to me by family, friends, society at large, etc. Could be some deeper human/whatever truth? Again I don't really care, because I don't think knowing the answer would change anything. Really, if we all found out tomorrow that my neighbor down the street is actually God, would any of us change the way we live our lives?

Of course, the "do what you think is right" argument can quickly lead to a lot of really nasty hate crimes. I'd say it requires a bit of aloofness, and a general appreciation for how rare and interesting life is. Having the incredible luck to be able to even contemplate the question from my couch using wireless internet doesn't hurt either. To the point, coming to understand how crazy the circumstances (natural, supernatural, or other) must have been for me to even exist in the first place instills a healthy respect for life that should preclude the homicidal maniacs from using my "right for me" philosophy. It might lead to some selfish assholes, but I'm ok with that; we seem to get those anyway.

Now I'll add that respect for life doesn't mean I'm going off the deep end on the other side and only eating compost; in fact I am very omnivorous (on Friday I ate some of cow stomachs 2 and 3, apparently you can order them separately--#2 is better). Honestly I feel like eating is part of living, and something dies every time something else eats. Circle of life, yadda yadda, but I refuse to feel guilty for doing what it takes to stay alive another day to talk about why I'm still here. I will go out of my way to find animal products (and plants too) produced in sustainable, humane ways because that makes me feel better, and I can only hope others choose to do the same. And if not, well, so what. ("so what" from a moral standpoint, there are lots of compelling environmental reasons and some good health ones to head toward sustainable/humane.) Could turn out we're all in God's Arcade and then how silly would we look arguing about cows and pigs. My neighbor down the street eats them too.

 

[AToE]

That all (especially about how we have to make our own decisions and be "good" or "bad" for our own reasons) really is similar to how I feel.

Even if I found out there was a god I don't think it would influence me very much at all.

EDIT: I should add though that religion is one of my all-time favourite subjects. It's been such an amazing part of human history, and has really shaped the many cultures around the world, and it's of course helped inspire (or at least fund!) much of the most amazing artwork our species has ever seen.

As much as I wouldn't really care if there were a creator (because then I'd just believe the creator was an evolved being just like I believe we are, so it really wouldn't change anything), I must say that I do prefer a universe without one. I'm a moral person because I choose to be, life has value because I say it does, and I like that my morality comes from only human sources.

 

[TheAlchemist]

So many things to think about and say here...

I need Grace. Unmerited favor. It’s that simple.
I am a woman of Christian faith, and this alone would be reason enough.

A favorite C. S. Lewis quote springs to mind:
I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen. Not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

But I also need Somewhere to put my Gratitude. A world without God would be, for me, a lonesome place. I need Someone to whom I can call out at 3am when I am sitting beside my anxious and ill mother’s bedside. I, myself, am not Large enough to contain my sense of Wonder. I am at occupational risk of occasional exposure to the Numinous. I have colleagues that are exposed to the same signs and wonders that I encounter regularly who do not have a faith orientation. I just don’t know how they can make sense of these things…

Another favorite quote, this one by Frederick Buechner:
The place God calls you to
is the place where
your deep gladness
and
the world’s deep hunger
meet.

More to come...

 

[Loadnabox]

So you reckon god's a guy or masculine?

no, not really, just the way I've always referred to that power (habit) It's hard to say if God even has a gender.

that's her in your AV?

Yup, my girl's on the right and the other little one is my 10 month old nephew

 

[Medsen Fey]

When one looks at a skyscraper or Boeing, one is look at something that's parts cannot spontaneously be produced (ie the glass, the steel girders, the wiring, etc). Only a half-century of research has produced results that indicate the component parts of cells are spontaneously produced in conditions similar to those of early Earth. ...

Consciousness is pretty miraculous, but within the context of evolution is by no means impossible; again, it's a ridiculously slow ramping up process. And though conscious we are, we are by no means perfect beings outside the influence of our evolutionary history. We have evil drives that speak to our violent, tribal ancestry. We - thankfully - also have compassion and ingenuity, which speaks to the same ancestry and evolutionary past. We also have trouble thinking about and dealing with issues of the incredibly small and incredibly big and old (exactly what we're attempting to deal with here, haha!); these issues were not relevant to our survival as a species when we were first evolving, so it's outside of our evolutionary experience.

As spectacular as our consciousness is, it is most certainly confined within the bounds of our evolution as a species...

You can find naturally produced glass around cooled lava flows.
Finding girders seems a bit less likely, but perhaps you have to give it a few billion more years for those heavier elements to spontaneously crystallize in the correct forms. ;D

I think there is still a great leap from a stew of organic chemicals to a living organism. However, I will say that if the structure of organic materials is such that they will inevitably congregate together forming every-more-complex patterns that produce life, that is the coolest design job I've ever seen. It also means that there must be similar forms all over the galaxy and the rest of the universe, and it also means there's hope for up to continue developing into something a little better. So if I'm wrong, and humans are just a spontaneous development, there's still a lot to look forward to.

I think our consciousness, our sentience (what I refer to as our soul), is not merely a function of our biology. There is a spark (divine?) in each of us that I believe is a product of (or a part of) the creator. I've seen a lot of dead bodies, and the organic and biochemical machinery is still there, but something is missing. I've seen a lot of people whose hearts were still beating (with or without the aid of machines) where the spark was gone. There is an energy there that I believe is conserved - though I don't know how, or in what form, and I have no way of proving it (in this life). Perhaps it returns to the creator from whence it originated - I'd like to think so (who wouldn't want to merge the "the force" right? ). It is this spark which give us the ability to make choices rather than following instincts; to do good or evil; to (at times) be greater than the hairless apes that our genetic material programs us to be. I think it also gives us the creative impulse which allows us to do many things (including mead crafting).

I'd like to think we may be on the verge of gaining a better understanding of this because we may soon build machines that can develop "consciousness." A self-aware electronic entity will raise so many questions. Is it life? Does it have a soul? Can it exceed its programing (or rewrite it)? Imagine having a conversation with a computer about the meaning of existence. Will it acknowledge a creator? Certainly this is the stuff of science fiction at the moment, but hey, the development of life takes time right?

 

[AToE]

I'm definitely a mind arises from material person, I've seen a lot of computers that were turned off, the circuts all still there, but something was missing. (Take with salt, SALT! ), the difference there is that a computer doesn't suffer physical damage when it's turned off, our bodies suffer instant damage. Once a cell is dead it's dead, not just the whole organism. - my point is that in a dead person, the "machinery" is not "all still there", not in the same way as when it was alive anyways, or else it would still be alive. Sure, each organ is still there, but down at the cellular level, where all the real magic/work happens, all the machinery is smashed and broken. Especially when we look at the brain, when someone dies, it's not intact anymore, it's broken, toast, just fell apart.

I really don't see any reason that there "needs" to be something more. But, I don't disrespect people who do believe there's something more in there than that, I can very much see why someone would feel that.

When you get talking about the whole issue of artificial consciousness I agree with you, it becomes a really seriously messed up philosophical/spiritual conundrum!

 

[AToE]

So many things to think about and say here...

I need Grace. Unmerited favor. It’s that simple.
I am a woman of Christian faith, and this alone would be reason enough.

A favorite C. S. Lewis quote springs to mind:
I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen. Not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

But I also need Somewhere to put my Gratitude. A world without God would be, for me, a lonesome place. I need Someone to whom I can call out at 3am when I am sitting beside my anxious and ill mother’s bedside. I, myself, am not Large enough to contain my sense of Wonder. I am at occupational risk of occasional exposure to the Numinous. I have colleagues that are exposed to the same signs and wonders that I encounter regularly who do not have a faith orientation. I just don’t know how they can make sense of these things…

Another favorite quote, this one by Frederick Buechner:
The place God calls you to
is the place where
your deep gladness
and
the world’s deep hunger
meet.

More to come...

I loved Mere Christianity by CS Lewis, both for his unique take on the religion, but also for the way he absolutely insists on the integrity of the words used in such a discussion (for example, you can't call a bad Christian a non-Christian, it just muddies the waters of the discussion). It was a great book, I especially liked his take on birth control "I am not a woman, therefor I will say nothing. I don't like when people talk about the decisions soldiers make when they were not themselves a soldier (as he was), so I will extend the same respect I want to women, their bodies, their choice, as a man I simply cannot have a truely valid opinion" (Super heavily paraphrased of course!).

I find a lot of religious people think I'm missing that sense of wonder, man I have wonder by the bucketful! And gratitude, I could hardly be more greatful for every single thing in existance!

 

[TheAlchemist]

As for the 747 analogy, in fact, virons can and do “just put themselves together,” given contact with all their necessary parts. "But that's just a viron," you say. Agreed. No, a viron is not “intelligent life” but that doesn’t mean a viron can’t take us down. Do not underestimate the power of a viron…