Searching for GOD...

[bluehillside Retd.]

AB,

But if intelligent intervention is possible, is it not a possibility that it was used to prevent a total wipe out of life in the hostile environments?

Anything is possible Alan, your god and my leprechauns included. What you're claiming though is that one of these conjectures is probable - a completely different matter. All that's being said here is that the evidence for evolutionary speciation with no intelligent anything being involved or necessary is overwhelming.

Why then do you dismiss that evidence out of hand?

[Nearly Sane]

But if intelligent intervention is possible, is it not a possibility that it was used to prevent a total wipe out of life in the hostile environments?

why did your god create and then murder the dinosaurs?

[Gordon]

But if intelligent intervention is possible, is it not a possibility that it was used to prevent a total wipe out of life in the hostile environments?

You've still to demonstrate the  'is possible' bit, since if that is your position then pretty much anything 'is possible': that you (and others) are keen on the idea of 'intelligent intervention' isn't enough.

[Alan Burns]

.
And how does that choice happen? That's the question ypu have been asked, repeatedly. And never answered.  Therefore still meaningless posting from you, Alan.

If you continue to think in a physically deterministic way, then I agree that any choice must be pre determined by events.

But conscious awareness is a property which does not have a physical definition, so is not necessarily bound by the physical deterministic control of past events.  The reality is that conscious awareness interacts with the physical and is not driven by it.

[Alan Burns]

why did your god create and then murder the dinosaurs?

We do not see the big picture - can anyone say that the human race would be here if dinosaurs had never existed?

We are all a product of past events, both divinely and deterministically driven.

[bluehillside Retd.]

AB,

If you continue to think in a physically deterministic way, then I agree that any choice must be pre determined by events.

Absence any evidence for a non-"physically deterministic way", how else should one think?

But conscious awareness is a property which does not have a physical definition...

Presumably by "definition" you actually mean "explanation", and that's substantially not true in any case. A great deal about consciousness is known, albeit that the picture is far from complete. If you want a conjecture for which there's no definition or explanation at all though, try "soul".

...so is not necessarily bound by the physical deterministic control of past events.

Yet another non sequitur Alan? Really?

The reality is that conscious awareness interacts with the physical and is not driven by it.

No, that's not "the" reality at all - it's just your personal reality, and moreover it's an incoherent and entirely un-evidenced reality to boot.

[Gordon]

But conscious awareness is a property which does not have a physical definition, so is not necessarily bound by the physical deterministic control of past events.

That is your claim - but that is all it is.

The reality is that conscious awareness interacts with the physical and is not driven by it.

Which is just another unsupported claim.

[Alan Burns]

AB,

Anything is possible Alan, your god and my leprechauns included. What you're claiming though is that one of these conjectures is probable - a completely different matter. All that's being said here is that the evidence for evolutionary speciation with no intelligent anything being involved or necessary is overwhelming.

Why then do you dismiss that evidence out of hand?

But would your leprechauns exist without the intelligently driven creative imagination of human beings?

[Nearly Sane]

We do not see the big picture - can anyone say that the human race would be here if dinosaurs had never existed?

We are all a product of past events, both divinely and deterministically driven.

in which Alan argues against free will not just for humans but also his 'god".

[floo]

in which Alan argues against free will not just for humans but also his 'god".

God having the free will to sit back and watch humans suffering because it did a botched job when creating human nature!

[Nearly Sane]

God having the free will to sit back and watch humans suffering because it did a botched job when creating human nature!

she wrote as a non sequitur

[Dicky Underpants]

We do not see the big picture - can anyone say that the human race would be here if dinosaurs had never existed?

We are all a product of past events, both divinely and deterministically driven.

How many mass extinctions have there been over the millennia? The great Permian extinction was the biggest wopper - and all these stops and starts, all that suffering (let alone the law of kill or be killed down the aeons), just to produce the little old human race, and God's spokesman, little old Alan. I am committing the sin of incredulity here - but only in the context of a hypothesised all-powerful creative intelligence (who seems to have taken an inordinate amount of time to get round to realising his original plans).

[wigginhall]

That reminds me of the inordinate love of beetles,  imputed to God by Haldane.   Or was it Beatles?

[bluehillside Retd.]

AB,

But would your leprechauns exist without the intelligently driven creative imagination of human beings?

Yes.

[torridon]

If you continue to think in a physically deterministic way, then I agree that any choice must be pre determined by events.

But conscious awareness is a property which does not have a physical definition, so is not necessarily bound by the physical deterministic control of past events.  The reality is that conscious awareness interacts with the physical and is not driven by it.

Conscious awareness, which evolved in vertebrates millions of years before humans evolved, is still a product of 'the physical'.  Your understanding is back to front - conscious awareness, intelligence, choice, these things are all emergent derivative outcomes of the complex arrangements of simpler stuff, not the other way round.

[wigginhall]

AB's brand of theism is totally back to front.   Mind is first, which then creates matter.   There is no evidence that mind came first, so all he can do is assert it,  'conscious awareness', 'conscious awareness', 'conscious awareness'.  It sounds like one of those dolls with a string that you pull, mama, mama, go weewee, go weewee, free will, free will, mama, mama.

[SusanDoris]

Alan Burns

I have been reading posts carefully and I have not seen a direct reply from you to the question you have been asked: Why did God create dinosaurs and then destroy them?

[bluehillside Retd.]

Hi Susan,

I have been reading posts carefully and I have not seen a direct reply from you to the question you have been asked: Why did God create dinosaurs and then destroy them?

He can't answer. When reality intrudes into the nursery tale narrative he's wrapped himself in he either dismisses it out of hand, or tells us that he hasn't worked out all the details of the "big picture" just yet. You'd think that a god keen to create his favourite species in his own image wouldn't have bothered with creating first and then killing off dinosaurs, then waiting around for another 65 million years and then finally getting around to the main event but there you go.

Oddly, as a kid I was obsessed with dinosaurs and even then remember asking why a god would bother with them in the first place. Maybe it was just to give careers to palaeontologists all these millions of year later?

[Alan Burns]

AB's brand of theism is totally back to front.   Mind is first, which then creates matter.   There is no evidence that mind came first, so all he can do is assert it,

Well there is evidence in the inspired, awesome opening chapter of John's Gospel -
"In the beginning was the word ..."

[Gordon]

Well there is evidence in the inspired, awesome opening chapter of John's Gospel -
"In the beginning was the word ..."

Which is of course fallacious by being both an argument from authority and an example of reification: this may be evidence (translated) of what someone wrote in antiquity but that is all it is evidence of, and then there is your assumption that this turn of phrase is 'inspired' and 'awesome'.

At best it is a quaint expression of primitive thinking: those living in antiquity have an excuse for producing deepities like this, but you don't.

[wigginhall]

Well there is evidence in the inspired, awesome opening chapter of John's Gospel -
"In the beginning was the word ..."

Hey, I like this quotation game.  Here's a nice one for you:


"all phenomena bear the mark of Emptiness;
their true nature is the nature of
no Birth no Death,
no Being no Non-being,
no Defilement no Purity,
no Increasing no Decreasing."  Heart Sutra, trans. Thich Nhat Hanh.

[Nearly Sane]

Well there is evidence in the inspired, awesome opening chapter of John's Gospel -
"In the beginning was the word ..."

That isn't evidence.

[bluehillside Retd.]

AB,

Well there is evidence in the inspired, awesome opening chapter of John's Gospel -
"In the beginning was the word ..."

Which do you want first - the good news or the bad?

Well, the good news is that's it's evidence all right - evidence that those words are written in a book.

The bad news however is that the "inspired, awesome" is just your personal opinion on the matter, and that it's not evidence of any kind of a truth for anyone else.

By all means try again though. 

[torridon]

Well there is evidence in the inspired, awesome opening chapter of John's Gospel -
"In the beginning was the word ..."

All very nice and poetic, and I'd go along with the notion that much of the Bible especially the King James version has much in the way of inspired powerful writing.  Beautifully written or expressed however does not equate to factually correct, and the notion of words coming first is not going to stand up to the merest scrutiny.  Back in the real world, observation suggests that the universe creates intelligence and not that intelligence creates the universe.  Putting intelligence as a first cause would be like planning to build a 50 storey skyscraper starting with the 50th floor and working back until you eventually get down to ground level. A non starter of an idea.

[torridon]

I do not dismiss the findings, but I question the conclusions and assumptions.
One questionable assumption being that every beneficial mutation needed to create life as we know it was generated by purely random events, together with the assumption that the events needed to generate the first living cell were also purely random.

And the justification for these questionable assumptions is the fact that free will does exist in this universe.  I know you try to deny it, but the reality is that every human being implements conscious acts of free will every day.  We are not all automated biological robots but free thinking human beings which can consciously interact with this universe, not just react to it.  How else could I possibly write these posts?  This is evidence that our universe is not entirely deterministic, but can be manipulated by conscious acts of free will derived from the spiritual source of the human soul, or from God Himself.

More science denial from Alan 'I'm not a science denier' Burns.  Yes, we know free will feels free, no one fails to understand that. But some of us have also understood, rather than denied, the findings from cognitive science and elsewhere that point to a more subtle understanding of the nature of will and the conscious self.