Finger Pointing At The Moon Department

[athelind]

I don't often talk about religious, metaphysical or philosophical matters. My contemplations in these arenas are elusive things, and words are a poor and coarse net in which to attempt to snare them.

On rare occasion, however, I encounter something that drives me, however briefly, to attempt to communicate something of my opinions.

Watch on YouTube

There is nothing I consider greater evidence for the existence of a benevolent divinity than a reminder of just how amazingly, elegantly miraculous the laws of nature that govern existence are.

I understand neither the fundamentalist religionists, nor the fundamentalist atheists; the more I learn about the world, the more deeply I understand the principles that govern it, the more keenly aware I become of the Divine.

How is a Supernatural Entity assembling each individual creature in a static, unchanging world more inspiring or miraculous than a cosmos where such things spontaneously arise from the very nature of information itself?

How can you not see the Hand of God in evolution, when He has granted us the privilege of watching his fingers mold the clay of reality itself?

Emergence reflects Immanence.

Comments

[ebony14.livejournal.com]

How can you not see the Hand of God in evolution, when He has granted us the privilage of watching his fingers mold the clay of reality itself?

Exactly.

[rikoshi.livejournal.com]

I spent four years earning a degree in Evolutionary Biology.

About two years' worth of that information was just summed up in about 10 minutes here.

[athelind.livejournal.com]

I know! He just demonstrates it all so concisely.

The same guy has a whole series of videos. Some are on a par with this; some are kinda weak. But this is a GEM.

[triggur.livejournal.com]

Without getting unduly into anthropic principle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle), the beauty of evolution is that it doesn't need a god to direct it.

IMO the thing that makes so much of organized religion untenable is that they rely on a god directing day-to-day goings-on, which inherently leads to all sorts of messy contradictions and problems.

[shdragon.livejournal.com]

Forgive my language, but this deserves it.

FUCK. YES.

I'd given up on even attempting to explain how I can believe in evolution and the Divine at the same time. No one, NO ONE, seems able to see the two ideas as any less than completely opposed.

Thank you so much for that video. I want to rent every billboard in every major city and broadcast that video 24x7 (though I get the feeling it's too technical and would fly right over the fundie's heads.)

... And I really want to get my hands on that source code.

[athelind.livejournal.com]

Without getting unduly into anthropic principle, the beauty of evolution is that it doesn't need a god to direct it.

Precisely.

[pathia.livejournal.com]

How is a Supernatural Entity assembling each individual creature in a static, unchanging world more inspiring or miraculous than a cosmos where such things spontaneously arise from the very nature of information itself?

This has always been my belief since I really sat down and thought about things. You just said it better than I ever could.

[pathia.livejournal.com]

Oh the guy gets bonus points for the song he picked for the video heh, but then I'm a coldplay fan.

[hitchkitty.livejournal.com]

"Creation was a miracle. It just took longer than seven days."
-- Inherit the Wind

"And we who listen to the stars, or walk the dusty grade,
Or break the very atoms down to see how they are made,
Or study cells, or living things, seek truth with open hand.
The profoundest act of worship is to try to understand."
-- The Word of God, Catherine Faber

[ceruleanst.livejournal.com]

"Over" their heads seems like a severe understatement of a metaphorically interstellar distance, considering that I've heard "then why are there still monkeys?" a couple different times this month alone.

[hitchkitty.livejournal.com]

Here's another way of putting it:

"Ever read a murder mystery, where in the last ten pages, brand new characters are introduced? Or how about a sci-fi novel, where mind-bogglingly useful technology is brought into the story in the final chapter, and never acknowledged beforehand? Remember how dumb the Superman movies got, when new powers were invented -- like Repair-the-Great-Wall-Vision?

Authors who don't play by their own rules do not impress me. Neither do deities."

[hitchkitty.livejournal.com]

The response to "why are there still monkeys" is "so you'll have someone to look down upon, dear."

[wingywoof.livejournal.com]

This is pretty genius and brings up a lot of good questions. Any clue what it was programmed in?

[araquan.livejournal.com]

This is incredibly brilliant. I want this shown in every biology classroom. Right now.

[araquan.livejournal.com]

Come to think of it. Show it in Sunday school too.

[returntonull.livejournal.com]

For the source... site is fickle and horrible. Working on a better solution as soon as I can actually get it down.

http://files-upload.com/files/502321/Clock%20Evolution%20Functions.zip

[archteryx.livejournal.com]

What he really did was come up with a beautiful metaphor for VIRUS MICROEVOLUTION. Viruses are very, very much like his clocks -- a series of interconnected gears with one very, very directed function, and the better those gears intermesh with themselves and with the host, the better a virus you get at the end. What we in molecular virology see is stunningly similar to his clock model.

And viruses can go through millions of "generations" in the course of a single infection, rather then the hundreds his model produced.

Bloody awesome. I need to save that YouTube, very very badly, to show to students trying to understand virus evolution.

[pseudomanitou.livejournal.com]

I still get twitchy when someone looks at something like this and claims to see the hand of god in it... this will not tell you what god is, nor define what a supreme being might be. Odds are, if something such as this was created to create, the will that made it is beyond comprehension to the point that it's existence might even defy what we consider existence.

Too many unknowns, and too much ego, give humans the notion that they see an answer in all this...

Keep looking.

[richardf8]

I don't understand, either, how science and religion came to be at war.

I look upon the world as the book of God's work, and science as the heuristic for exegesis of that book. The more we come to know about the world through science, the better our understanding of God.

The side effect is that for those seeking an anthropomorphic, or even an anthropopathic God, the answers we find might prove . . . unsatisfying. Those who want a theology that marks mankind as the raison d'etre for the universe are threatened by scientific discovery that suggests that God did not personally shape man and breathe life into him.

The gentlemen who wrote the talmud believed demons caused disease. It was in accord with the best science of the day. They believed that because of the special demon that lived in the bathroom, that one should wash one's hands after using the bathroom. Germ Theory was well over a millenium away, and the Microscope wouldn't be invented for 1200 years. It was the best science of the day, and the theory served them well, it did what it should - explain a phenomenon in a manner consistent with observable data and able to predict what certain mitigating factors (hand washing) would have on the phenomenon (disease).

However, one does not cling to demonology as a theory of disease once our observational abilities reveal a better theory that predicts more and more accurately.

[hitchkitty.livejournal.com]

Seeing evidence of a Divine Presence, and claiming to know the will of that Presence, are two different things.

[athelind.livejournal.com]

And this is why I find language such a poor tool for such concepts, and why I hesitate to verbalize them at all -- when I attempt to draw together all the cross-connections and resonances that form within my head, I succumb to the temptation to lapse into the conceptual shorthand of the poetic. Alas, people are all too prone to taking metaphor literally, or or reading conventional cultural assumptions into an attempt to express something entirely UNconventional.

Overexuberent phrases as "His fingers molding the clay of reality" don't help matters at all. That was... over the top. It doesn't convey what I wanted to say at ALL, but, wow, did it sound good when I was on a roll!

The "Divinity" I see in the self-organizing structures that repeat on every scale of the observed cosmos is not anthropomorphic, and is not necessarily a "Creator". I draw no conclusions as to the nature of the Divine -- it is simply evident to me, upon contemplation of the raw data, that existence itself is a miracle, a source of wonder, delight, and awe.

"An existence that might even defy what we consider existence?" A lovely turn of phrase, and one that echoes my own sentiments.

"Keep looking?" I never stop.

[pseudomanitou.livejournal.com]

They are, forgive me for not being detailed enough.

I wasn't focusing on defining the will of some sort of divine -- I was saying nothing can be defined when we deal with something at the level of what we perceive to be define.

For instance... say a divine will exists. Define 'existence' in a way that is beyond your perception.

[pseudomanitou.livejournal.com]

That response makes me think better of this topic.

You are right that most language is a poor delivery for concepts. They are crutches to define what we cannot comprehend. Words such as 'nothing', 'infinity', 'time'... such things cannot be fully understood by us (yet).

And so when I see discussion of what might have caused, what I can only describe as, existence -- I must tell everyone to step back at least 80 paces to begin thinking on the topic instead of jumping ahead of what we can conceptualize.

[athelind.livejournal.com]

"The Tao that can be named is not the Eternal Tao."

Recently, I heard Tao translated as "Process" instead of "Path". I like that better. A "path" is static; a "process" is dynamic.

A much, much overdue response...

[athelind.livejournal.com]

The gentlemen who wrote the talmud believed demons caused disease... [snip] ...However, one does not cling to demonology as a theory of disease once our observational abilities reveal a better theory that predicts more and more accurately.

Or perhaps our observational abilities have simply given us more precise information about the nature of such demons. In this context, "demon" and "germ" sound semantically congruent.