Thread: God and science

I'm sure my colleagues who work in coalescent theory would be fascinated to hear that there are no random elements to evolutionary mechanisms....


James.

Originally Posted by bbshriver

If it is not random, then it must have been intentional... i.e. intelligent design.

Uhmm so are you saying that when you let a glass of salty water to cool down or evaporate the crystals that form do that because there is an intelligent force that is designing the perfect crystal and rearranging the individual atoms in that extremely ordered state (making errors every now and then)? Because the original state is an extremely chaotic and random one and all you do is take away energy from the system.

Simplistic arguments are perfectly fine but only when they are made by a person who can distill only the most important part of a phenomena. When people make simplistic arguments without having the slightest grasp of the complexity of it all and understanding of what is important and what is negligible, that is very likely (probability, i.e. randomness again) to produce the wrong conclusion.

However Hawking also points out that there very well may be a God who just happened to design everything to abide by the rules we see now, which is what I believe. What doesn't make sense to me is that the big-bang was "proven" and now attemting to be disproven.

Of course Hawking is a brilliant physicist and of course reducing our understanding of a phenomena to only one unexplained singularity is a great thing, but still makes one to then attempt to see if there is an alternative which doesn't rely on any unexplainable things. And singularity is like division by zero. There are many different kinds of them, i.e. division by zero is not the same as division by "zero-times-zero", even though formally the last one is also zero. Knowing the correct kind of singularity is important. I have not read the book, but I'm pretty sure the Catolic church's endorsement of it as a proof there it God is not what is driving him to look at it.

As far as what's bothering you - that's just how science works - it has never been able to explain everything and it currently cannot either. Nevertheless it is constantly attempting to explain more and more and is not afraid to abandon its previous explanations if it proves them wrong.

The modern religious views seem to have evolved quite a bit from what they have been for centuries. But as long God is considered omnipotent there is going to be a conflict between religion and science. Unless God is omnipotent in principle only, and won't ever care to break any rules and demonstrate that the scientific approach does not work.

Originally Posted by Jimbo

I'm sure my colleagues who work in coalescent theory would be fascinated to hear that there are no random elements to evolutionary mechanisms...

I said evolution wasn't random not that there were no random elements in it.

And incidentally if you think this is off topic then say so and leave it at that, continuing to make your reply and then complaining about it being off topic is a "little" hypocritical.

This is a great discussion, and can only be enhanced by some in depth readings on both sides.

May I suggest Brian Greene's "The Fabric of the Cosmos",
Niall Shanks' "God, the Devil, and Darwin",
and as a good foundation for organizing intellectual thought; Immanuel Kant's "Introduction to Logic"

These provide a good background into the scientific method that goes into such conclusions as "Humans share an evolutionary ancestral link to lower primates"
(which OFTEN gets misinterpreted as "Humans evolved from monkeys"). As well as "The Big Bang is what formed the universe" when really the big bang happened TO the universe (whatever it was back then, presumably a higher order of material state that is not present anymore) and the result is what we see now after billions of years of gravitational forces and Quantum Mechanical fluctuations clumping matter into the known galaxies stars and planets.

I happen to live in the thick of the bible belt and can honestly say it's ego the gets in the way the vast majority of the time. Neither side should be considered "wrong" or even "right" (at least not indefinitely) because they are different, and as such hold only so much worth in their own respective fields of expertise.

You don't go to a priest to have a broken bone reset, and you shouldn't go to most doctors for the solution to a moral issue. It's just a matter of keeping your nose where it belongs, so to speak.

Originally Posted by trewornan

I said evolution wasn't random not that there were no random elements in it.

And incidentally if you think this is off topic then say so and leave it at that, continuing to make your reply and then complaining about it being off topic is a "little" hypocritical.

Trewornan,

Any "off topic" emoticons that appear in my posts are to alert people that I consider *my* post to be off topic. I make no judgments regarding whether other people are off topic or not. However, I can appreciate that you feel I was suggesting you were off topic by implication - that was not my intent, so please accept my humble apology for any confusion that has arisen as a result of my over-zealous usage of the smilies menu.

James.

Nice dog, Jimbo!

(also off topic)

I don't know if others agree but I kind of feel this form "The Conversation" is somewhere to chat in a fairly casual manner without worrying too much about sticking closely to the topic. I enjoy just "chewing the fat" with friends and allowing the conversation to wander where it will.

OK. Since we are on DNA (sort of), here's where I get all my knowledge

Hip Hip Hooray For DNA

James.

Well, going off the original topic is very natural esp for long threads and in the conversation (formerly known as the offtopic) section.

I don't have any issues with smileys or off topic signs. I found it was more than anything very considerate of James to put them in his post. They could serve as a reminder that we may not want to go in details too much of the original topic. Or we may decide to pursue that if it's more interesting than the original topic or that one has been exhausted.

One thing I wasn't clear from the song was the mitochondrial DNA. Do we have any songs about that one? I'm kind of in the dark...

Well I suppose it depends on definition of random. What I was thinking is
"random
"having no definite aim or purpose," 1655, from at random (1565), "at great speed" (thus, "carelessly, haphazardly"), alteration of M.E. randon "impetuosity, speed" (c.1305), from O.Fr. randon "rush, disorder, force, impetuosity," from randir "to run fast," from Frankish *rant "a running," from P.Gmc. *randa (cf. O.H.G. rennen "to run," O.E. rinnan "to flow, to run"). In 1980s college student slang, it began to acquire a sense of "inferior, undesirable." Random access in ref. to computer memory is recorded from 1953." ) dictionary.com

So my thinking is evolution (without being put into action by some God/creator/mastermind) is random in that it cannot have an aim or purpose. Unless you're suggesting that the evolutionary process itself is determining where it wants to get to, which would circularly imply that the process itself is a sort of "god"/intelligent design. This would also apply to the process of making crystals you describe. By my definition that is random because the crystals are not behaving towards an aim or purpose, since an inadimate object cannot have an aim or purpose unless acted on by something else.

If we're saying random meaning "doesn't adhere to any rules" then it doesn't seem that ANYTHING could be "random" If I pick a "random number" it still follows that it must be a number and is therefore bound by the rules of what makes a number.

As far as my coments re:Hawking, I wasn't saying that he started his new work based on the Catholic interpretation, nor was I saying he was wrong in pursuing other alternatives to his original theory. I was just saying it bugs me that just because something doesn't fit into the rules we already know "scientists" abandon that idea in search of something else. How is this different than when people "knew" the earth was the center of the universe, and as soon as someone thought otherwise he was mocked/scorned/imprisoned, etc?

God being opmnipotent? If this is true it seems that He could more than easily be invisibly omnipotent. After all, if He created the laws we see, why should he ever have to break them? And if he's truly omnipotent, he could easily *break* the laws, but simultaneously change our knowledge and understanding of the laws so that the law broken was really the rule not the exception. Our understanding of the laws of the universe at any given time is finite. Think about the number of things you do today, that if done 200 years ago would be considered "magic", impossible, against the "law". For instance posting on this board. You can write one message, and almost instantaneously it is readable by millions or even billions of people. If someone 200 years ago heard this was possible, it would go against all their understanding of the natural laws of the universe, but now it is normal, and fully understood. That gets a little rambling, so I'm not sure if it comes out close to what I wanted to say or not. I'm sure it will be viewed by some as a "cop out" but I don't believe it is possible for humans ("finite" beings) to understand God ("infinite being")