Why'd you do it that way, God?

Message 48 of 137 (541470) 01-03-2010 7:29 PM

Reply to: Message 1 by Meldinoor 10-03-2009 4:24 AM

I've lent it to a number of friends, both atheist ad deist. Most approached it with knowing smirk, but once they were into it became highly enthusiastic about the depth of the ideas.

He looks at evidence for the universe being "bio-friendly" eg physics paprameters which appear to be specifically tweaked for evolution of life and intelligence to occur, and hypothesises what this would mean in a cyclic universe.

His idea - an evolutionary process like the one we see around us could have occured in the previous universe cycle(s), and over billions of years of technological development the inhabitants gained the knowledge and control over inanimate matter to be able to 'tweak' the physical parameters themselves.

So in this theory the universe itself is not designed so much as it is terraformed, and evidence for this terraforming is indistuinguishable from evidence for design.

His idea is naturalistic and also darwinian in that terraformed universes are subsequently more likely to give rise to intelligent life which can further terraform and guarantee the stability of the universe, his title 'self biocosm' is drawn from Dawkins 'selfish gene'. So universes with intelligent life have a selective advantage, yet there isn't any mystical sense to the theory.

Edited by jasonlang, : No reason given.

Edited by jasonlang, : had authors middle initial wrong. D'oh!

Message 50 of 137 (541474) 01-03-2010 7:47 PM

Reply to: Message 8 by Izanagi 10-03-2009 1:56 PM

An omnipotent and omniscient God could have created the universe as-is 5 minutes ago with all memories etc intact.

For such a God, imagining something would be as good as creating it (perhaps he is imagining us right now).

Therefore he could have already divined the lifetimes of all sentient beings worthy of going to Heaven and actually created them in Heaven to start with. No need for hell or suffering, no need to separate the wheat from the chaff when you can create the wheat full-grown with false memories of the life they would have led, had you actually created them. We can only divine that he did things the way he did because he wanted them to happen like this, so if there is a Hell it's because God wanted there to be a Hell.

Edited by jasonlang, : No reason given.

Message 51 of 137 (541476) 01-03-2010 8:34 PM

Reply to: Message 35 by Sky-Writing 10-06-2009 10:38 PM

Scientists in general seem to be happy with the impact hypothesis, and as the scientist near the end of the video states it's in all the textbooks and I haven't heard any reputable scientist really disputing the model or having an alternative (maybe I'm wrong though). Also, it's well backed up by computer simullations originally developed to model impacts between Saturns moons, but if there's anything less than total 100% agreement by "All of the brightest minds in the world" you won't accept the theory and say we must posit magic as the only rational cause?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibV4MdN5wo0&NR=1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_impact_hypothesis

BTW : The rings of Saturn seem to be about 100 million years old, not 1 billion, so what you say is a a straw man argument about the age of the moons being wrong.

Edited by jasonlang, : No reason given.

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Message 85 of 137 (541601) 01-04-2010 5:48 PM

Reply to: Message 80 by Sky-Writing 01-04-2010 3:18 PM

I typed your quoted phrase into google, as you did not provide the exact search terms used to get the 80 hits referenced before and got only 1 hit, an article titled "Local view: Scientific fact shows that global warming is real ..." and it required a subscription.

Can you tell us the exact search term(s) used for the 80 hits, so we can check out the source of the info ourselves? Or is that a secret?

Throwing poo is the best you can come up with ? And you don't believe you are decended from a monkey?

Edited by jasonlang, : No reason given.

Message 90 of 137 (541617) 01-04-2010 6:35 PM

Reply to: Message 86 by Sky-Writing 01-04-2010 6:04 PM

Article title: "Local view: Scientific fact shows that global warming is real ..."
http://www.duluthnewstribune.com/.../event/article/id/156254
The site requires a registration and for me to provide a valid U.S. or Canadian zipcode (I'm still awaiting a confirmation email of my registration, where I lied about my zipcode '90210'). UPDATE : Never got my registration email
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UPDATE : Is this the research you meant?

http://www.theresilientearth.com/?q=content/arctic-aeroso...

So it's still human pollution causing the problem, but because only half the warming is due specifically to CO2 per se that means scientists are liars and the warming/melting isn't 'really' happening ? BTW doesn't this actually imply that any predicted arctic warming needs to be doubled to take into account the effect of man-made aerosols? And there's no indication at all that the emissions of the aerosols are going to cease (it's not even on the agenda, unlike CO2 emissions).

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