In the early 17th century a demon was loosed on the world by Italian mathematician Galileo Galilei when he began swinging pendulums, rolling balls down ramps and observing the moons of Jupiter—all with an aim toward discovering regularities that could be codified into laws of nature.

So successful was this mechanical worldview that by the early 19th century French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace was able to “imagine an Intelligence who would know at a given instant of time all forces acting in nature and the position of all things of which the world consists.... Then it could derive a result that would embrace in one and the same formula the motion of the largest bodies in the universe and of the lightest atoms. Nothing would be uncertain for this Intelligence.”

By the early 20th century science undertook to become Laplace’s demon. It cast a wide “causal net” linking effects to causes throughout the past and into the future and sought to explain all complex phenomena by reducing them into their simpler component parts. Nobel laureate physicist Steven Weinberg captured this philosophy of reductionism poignantly: “All the explanatory arrows point downward, from societies to people, to organs, to cells, to biochemistry, to chemistry, and ultimately to physics.” In such an all-encompassing and fully explicable cosmos, then, what place for God?

Stuart Kauffman has an answer: naturalize the deity. In his new book, Reinventing the Sacred (Basic Books, 2008), Kauffman—founding director of the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics at the University of Calgary in Alberta and one of the pioneers of complexity theory—reverses the reductionist’s causal arrow with a comprehensive theory of emergence and self-organization that he says “breaks no laws of physics” and yet cannot be explained by them. God “is our chosen name for the ceaseless creativity in the natural universe, biosphere and human cultures,” Kauffman declares.

In Kauffman’s emergent universe, reductionism is not wrong so much as incomplete. It has done much of the heavy lifting in the history of science, but reductionism cannot explain a host of as yet unsolved mysteries, such as the origin of life, the biosphere, consciousness, evolution, ethics and economics. How would a reductionist explain the biosphere, for example? “One approach would be, following Newton, to write down the equations for the evolution of the biosphere and solve them. This cannot be done,” Kauffman avers. “We cannot say ahead of time what novel functionalities will arise in the biosphere. Thus we do not know what variables—lungs, wings, etc.—to put into our equations. The Newtonian scientific framework where we can prestate the variables, the laws among the variables, and the initial and boundary conditions, and then compute the forward behavior of the system, cannot help us predict future states of the biosphere.”

This problem is not merely an epistemological matter of computing power, Kauffman cautions; it is an ontological problem of different causes at different levels. Something wholly new emerges at these higher levels of complexity.

Similar ontological differences exist in the self-organized emergence of consciousness, morality and the economy. In my recent book, The Mind of the Market (Times Books, 2008), I show how economics and evolution are complex adaptive systems that learn and grow as they evolve from simple to complex and how they are autocatalytic, or containing self-driving feedback loops. It was therefore gratifying to find corroboration in Kauffman’s detailed explication of why such phenomena “cannot be deduced from physics, have causal powers of their own, and therefore are emergent real entities in the universe.” This creative process of emergence, Kauffman contends, “is so stunning, so overwhelming, so worthy of awe, gratitude and respect, that it is God enough for many of us. God, a fully natural God, is the very creativity in the universe.”

130 Comments

1. 1. Tan Boon Tee 03:26 AM 6/21/08

   At the dawn of the history of mankind, there were many things (especially natural phenomena) that humans could not understand, let alone explained.
   Ignorance bred anxiety, anxiety generated fear. Thus, supernatural beings were believed to have existed, and attributed to be the cause of everything.
   Having found a comfortable sanctuary in their faith, humans brought in religions.
   There are still a good number of natural occurrences beyond the explanation of science (for instance, the strange world of quantum physics). And by making various hypotheses, scientists are actually putting their faith in the conjectures or tentative explanations, hoping that one day these could be proven true.
   In this respect, science merges into the realm of faith. Since religion is practically a matter of faith, could science not be yet another religion (albeit a modern one)?
   (Tan Boon Tee)

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2. 2. Bradley 06:07 AM 6/21/08

   You are completely wrong. Quantum physics is a product of scientific research. Your statement only shows that you have little knowledge of this particular field.
   
   A hypothesis is an explanation of observable phenomena that can be tested by further investigation. Testing of hypotheses does not involve faith or hope.
   
   Do any of the examples of religion, below, resemble science to you?
   
   The Aztecs believed one or more of their gods required human sacrifice. Certain members of Judaism believe they own some real estate due to their alleged ancestors having been granted the land by some god a long time ago. Hitler firmly believed that his god wanted him to exterminate Jews. Certain followers of Islam believe their god wants them to stone to death any woman who commits adultery.
   
   Then there's Scientology, wherein a false link is made between science and religion as a front for a for-profit mind control cult. You are free to go that way if you like.
   
   Attempting to make your wishful thinking and culturally acquired delusions somehow equivalent to science will not make you any smarter or knowledgeable about the real world. Science is intended to have the opposite effect.

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3. 3. thought 07:41 PM 6/22/08

   Wow, Shermer writing a "sacred" article - now I have seen everything! LOL.
   
   I have a question for the author / Sci America / anyone who wants it. This article(and emergence in general) should get a lot of hits as it states some things that go against the laws of thermo, namely, "the whole is greater than the sum of it's parts" - does not really follow conservation principles. The idea of emergence is fascinating, it is clear that, as an analogy, the value of interactions of gears forming a clock is much greater than the value of a bunch of gears trying to work on their own.. the whole can have more value than the sum of the parts - So, what is the upper bound of what those gears can create if they work together? how much greater? Infinitely greater??? There is no upper limit to the number of ways those gears can interact with one another right? so... no limit to what can be created through interactions??
   
   I have always said what God is really trying to teach us is interactions - relationships - don't steal, play nice, love everyone, be united... united we stand, divided we fall – don’t be a hermit, interact and be a team player if you really want to accomplish something - these ideas are finally going to have some scientific support?--
   Edited by thought at 06/22/2008 12:49 PM
   
   --
   Edited by thought at 06/22/2008 12:55 PM

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4. 4. Jim Lacey 02:01 PM 6/24/08

   I'll stick with Laplace who is said to have replied to Napoleon's question why his theory of the cosmos did not mention the Creator that he had no need for that hypothesis. To drag in God every time there is a question we cannot currently answer is no answer at all. Planetary motion was a miracle before Kepler discovered its laws? --JFL

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5. 5. discipline 02:34 PM 6/24/08

   [i]God “is our chosen name for the ceaseless creativity in the natural universe, biosphere and human cultures,”[/i]
   
   
   Why do people like Kaufmann continually do this? The word "God" is specifically and inextricably linked to a supernatural, anthropomorphic deity with 2,000 years of historical, cultural and political baggage -- in other words, "God" is a Bronze Age myth with no supporting evidence. How is that related to science? The word simply can't be stripped of its common meaning and "repurposed."
   
   How about we call it what it is: Nature. Reality. The Universe.
   
   Look at what happened to Einstein when he did something similar: he was a Spinozan agnostic who used the word "God" to describe the wonder of the Universe -- yet every evangelical Christian now thinks that he's on their side. Does Kaufmann want that to happen to him?

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6. 6. Morlach 04:48 PM 6/24/08

   Just another sylized "god of the gaps." Pointless, useless.

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7. 7. sujeewa 07:02 PM 6/24/08

   hmmmm...
   
   what is wrong with the human like God who fights Satan?
   
   You are just disgracing him, whereas not adding a fraction to enhance his purely imaginative existence towards reality.
   
   There seem to be several mistakes in your part.
   
   - thinking that univcerse has to be purely explicable to a segment within itself called humans.
   - Not studying quantum physics.
   - Missing to understand the duality of Causality and Randomness, where macro-phenomena of causality is actually driven at infinitely tiny scale randomness.
   - Being unable to think out of the childhood brainwash [christianity for you]. For an example, every religiuon has some explanation for the inexplicable "missing" links that combines the elementary simplicity to higher order complexity [the phenomena which you call emergence]. So why choose Christian view to be right. Any other religion can equally be right. And all can be wrong too.
   - Science is not assumptions. Refer to Dover College case of Intelligent Design.
   
   Amen.

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8. 8. sujeewa 07:13 PM 6/24/08

   A small part which I missed before.
   
   Einstein has said to have stated:
   
   [b]"God does not play dice"[/b]
   
   I fondly state many a times that;
   
   [b]"God does not play dice, it is the dice that we mistook for God"[/b]
   
   Hope it will answer all your questions.

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9. 9. thought 08:17 PM 6/24/08

   How many votes for supporting free will through quantum indeterminacy, emergence, top down feedback, autocatalytic self-driving feedback loops?
   
   How many votes for robots following causal determinacy, reductionism, Laplace demon dominos game?
   
   Everyone can choose to believe what they want to because we do have free will.:-p

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10. 10. mcgruff 12:01 AM 6/25/08

    [i]"This article(and emergence in general) should get a lot of hits as it states some things that go against the laws of thermo, namely, "the whole is greater than the sum of it's parts"[/i]
    
    Not so. There will always be an energy source to power the work done emerging and maintaining complexity and hence the laws of thermodynamics reman intact. For example, the vast majority of the earth's ecosystems are solar-powered; none of these could survive without the sun.
    
    From the moment of the big bang until the heat death of the universe, essentially all that ever happens is the re-distribution of energy from one place to another or from one form to another, and the net effect of any energy transaction is always an increase in entropy. We can hitch a ride, for a while, and maybe process some information along the way, but there is only one end to the journey. Finally, all lights must go out. Forever.

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11. 11. RhanRhan 05:29 AM 6/25/08

    what a view...

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12. 12. RageofAnath 05:57 AM 6/25/08

    Did some of you guys miss the second page where the author separates Kauffmann's "God 2.0" and Yahweh as "God 1.0"? Kauffmann's "God 2.0" is the same as Spinoza's! An affirmation of Spinoza's God is not so much "faith" and "worship" as you would see in the Abrahamic religions but rather a system of spirituality, centering around an awe of nature and the natural world (and as a result, its laws) rather than kowtowing to an imaginary daddy in the sky. In this system, the place of utmost importance previously held by the sky-daddy is now held by nature and her laws, and since humans see the term "god" as the supreme and highest label, it follows that nature and her laws would then accept the mantle.
    
    And for the commenter thought: I would say the answer to your questions is "no", because the "god" of Kauffmann and Spinoza does not "teach" anything. You are stuck in the mindset of "God 1.0". Even if science can prove that being a team player is beneficial, it will never be able to prove that anything, especially a "god", mandated it to be so.
    
    --
    Edited by RageofAnath at 06/24/2008 11:01 PM
    
    --
    Edited by RageofAnath at 06/24/2008 11:02 PM

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13. 13. Verily 06:33 AM 6/25/08

    To say that God 'is our chosen name for the ceaseless creativity in the natural universe, biosphere and human cultures' is an exercise in semantics. We humans are creative about producing neologisms to delineate new worldviews or concepts. That is why I am now contributing to a ‘blog’, and why Old Testament prophets made no references to the Internet or to nuclear fusion. If Kauffman has an original vision it would have been preferable for him to use a different term, if only to filter out all the confusing and conflictual historical baggage associated with the term God. By not doing so, he appears to want to retain the baggage, so it is difficult to avoid the suspicion that he is working from a familiar a priori and looking for something emergently complex enough to flesh it out in a new guise.
    
    ‘Ceaseless emergent creativity’ adumbrates a conceptual framework which sounds very much like pantheism or animism. However, if you present an abstract concept which you believe says something new, the question arises of what you actually do with it which you would not have done with the old concept it replaces. I am not sure if Kauffman is suggesting that a principle of ceaseless creativity is something you pray to, bow down before, have unquestioning faith in or construct rituals around. If so, nothing has changed, other than that we have given the emperor new clothes.
    
    Alongside the teleology implicit in ‘ceaseless creativity in the natural universe, biosphere and human cultures’, we might well read Stephen Jay Gould’s observation: ‘Three billion years of unicellularity, followed by five million years of intense creativity and then capped by more than 500 million years of variation on set anatomical themes can scarcely be read as a predictable, inexorable or continuous trend towards progress or increasing complexity’. The re-invented sacred sounds like another ingenious progressivist narrative we can offer ourselves to bolster our status as a uniquely encephalised organism.

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14. 14. dbl17745 05:35 PM 6/25/08

    I personally see no conflict between faith and logic (be it physics, mathematics, etc.). Faith presupposes the unknowable, but the acceptance of logic does not affect faith. I see no need for gap-filling to justify faith and find it somewhat annoying.

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15. 15. tshinkle 06:09 PM 6/25/08

    You would have to know everything to know something can't be known, otherwise you couldn't claim that nobody or no thing can know it. But if you new everything then you would know that everything can be known. Therefore everything can be known, but you just don't know it yet.

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16. 16. ccsi99 06:38 PM 6/25/08

    Stuart Kaufmann’s declares that “’God’ is our chosen name for the ceaseless creativity in the natural universe, biosphere and human cultures.” In doing so he reduces the divine to a set of natural processes within the natural universe. Those process may be ‘ceaseless[ly] creative’ but they are still contained within the natural universe, a point which reduces them to weak deities at best and dead deity's in the end.
    
    A process may be defined as a predictable structure of action and reaction. It takes energy both to create and maintain these actions and reactions. And since it does, and the universe is finite, ‘billions and billions’ of years from now the energy density of the universe will be either too high or too low to support any processes, emergent or not. That is when the universe will be effectively dead. (And if it really is ‘god’ then we can say truly, ‘god is dead’ – not that we’ll be around to do so, mind you).
    
    Therefore by naturalizing the divine, Stuart Kaufmann effectively does away with any ‘spiritual realm’ and makes everything a part of the natural universe -- with nothing outside by which it can rescued from its entropy. If Stuart Kaufmann is right, in the end death becomes the last god. So why not cut to the chase and declare death god instead of all those lesser gods of ‘ceaseless creativity?” At least death can be worshipped.

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17. 17. Verily 01:13 AM 6/26/08

    'dbl17745' sees 'no need for gap-filling' where science and faith are concerned. Well, no, I agree, if you think like Kauffman. As I understand it, his argument goes something like this. Let Science = the study of nature, i.e. of all natural phenomena including human cultures, through processes of observation, measurement, hypothesis construction and reiterative testing, etc. Next, in a neo-pantheistic gesture, let God = Nature (as so defined). But also (mark this) let Nature = Emergent Complex Creativity. So, God = Nature = Emergent Complex Creativity. Ergo Science = the study of God. QED. What's all the fuss about? If your thinking runs along these lines, then rather than the unknowable even coming into the equation, there are no gaps left to be filled.

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18. 18. emil47 11:27 AM 6/26/08

    The Universe -as we understand it- is 14 billion years old. The life on Earth is 3.5 billion years old. The human civilization is 10000 years old. The modern science is less than 300 years old. It's difficult for us, as a product of the evolution - still in an early stage of it - to get rid off all the old baggage of religion.

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19. 19. sujeewa 07:51 PM 6/26/08

    Let me see it in a different view.
    
    Let's say, God exists.
    
    Say, God exists in a cohesive manner explained in every belief, including this one
    [note that this article is not science but yet another belief, and science is not a mere belief].
    
    As per what we know this is Gods definition.
    
    - God is so creative, powerful, means good, and excessively [even infinitely] intelligent.
    - God is eternal so everything exist within his knowledge and control [except for Satan who endlessly try to gain the control of other things].
    
    Would such an intelligent, good-mannered, powerful, knows-all being expect us to do the followings?
    
    - Worship him
    - Remember him
    - Pray him, Especially when you're in trouble
    - Be stupid [yes the underlying theory of Christianity dislikes getting knowledge]
    - Never to check his existence, but blindly believe.
    - Attend church every Sunday [Catholics call it a "murder crime" if not]
    
    Etc. [To be continued...]

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20. 20. sujeewa 07:53 PM 6/26/08

    [... Continuing my previous post]
    Failing which you will be subjected to;
    
    - Wrath
    - Problems
    - Death
    - Suffering in Satan's hand
    - Spells
    - Turning into rock or salt [as per bible]
    
    Sounds like an intelligent, good-mannered, powerful, knows-all person?? Nah, not to me.
    
    Now let us consider the case where God was interpreted in the time of Jesus. Certainly an intelligent, good-mannered, powerful, knows-a-lot being in Judea of 2000 years back would fit this description - but not today.
    Pls dont blame Jesus. He used his imagination to teach ppl [of Judea 2000yrs back] the good he thought of, either intentionally lying or himself being subjected to the belief.
    
    [to be continued...]

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21. 21. sujeewa 07:55 PM 6/26/08

    [...continuing my previous post]
    Now THIS is what some people are trying to rescue today. They need to fill the nagging incompatibility. They want to re-define a moderate God. I can list many such attempts.
    
    - This article which we started the discussion with.
    - Intelligent Design
    - Big bang theory [my only problem is that Big Bang created UNIVERSE  and UNIVERSE means everything]
    - Dan Brown's twisted explanation of singularity and anti-matter in Angels and Demons [That is more blasphemy than his other work, for me]
    Etc.
    
    I would like to imagine the God's renewed definition 2000 years in future. Pardon me, Im not Arthur C Clarke.
    
    Incidentally it is the same in every belief. It is an imagination in somebody's mind which is installed in ours when we knew nothing, and a system made to sustain in us by using the notion that the founder of the religion is soooo venerable and superior by some means [Son of god, knows everything, higher state of mind or whatever].
    Enough for imaginations

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22. 22. Salmon365 02:37 AM 6/27/08

    I got a chuckle out of Michael Shermers column entitled Sacred Science in the July Issue. What is funny is the notion that somehow the more we know about the mechanics of the universe, the more irrelevant God is. I fail to see the logical progression. Its like saying that the more I know about how my car works, down to the subatomic level, the more likely it becomes that it came about as the result of natural causes; it doesnt follow. The Bible says that the heavens declare the glory of God. By extension, the more we know about the mechanics, the more we marvel at a God who understood enough to put it all together. That was the view of Galileo, who dedicated his work to God, as did Kepler, and Newton, and Maxwell, and Kelvin, and many more of the early scientists who are often said (incorrectly) to be the brave secular geniuses who fought to push back the religious ignorance of the day.
    
    As for God 2.0, the definition Kauffman gives is a meandering, meaningless series of feel-good platitudes, or as my children would describe it, gobbledygook. In fact, God 2.0 has already been described 6000 years ago in first book of the Bible, Genesis, where Satan tempted Eve with the promise that if she ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, she would become like God herself. She would be God 2.0. It didnt work, of course, and will not work now. I prefer God 1.0, a God with creativity, personality and purpose. A God who understands relativity and string theory, quarks, black holes, dark matter, who created the cosmological constants in perfect harmony as to make life possible. The real problem most people have with God 1.0, I suspect, is not that he is scientifically outdated, but that he demands accountability for how we use the gifts he gives us, including our very lives. Feel free to describe God in any way that pleases you, Michael, but know that his existence and nature is not dependent on your, or my, definition.

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23. 23. mywxyz 02:57 AM 6/27/08

    Ywh (God -0.0) must be the bottom-most of bottom line!

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24. 24. Verily 04:26 AM 6/27/08

    I generally go along with sujeewa’s procedure of contrasting some of the many anthropomorphic attributes religious communities have given to the thousands of deities which have come, and mostly gone, during the past 6,000 years or so of historical records. These attributes have always been pretty much elective and contingent, but I do not see a particular reason to suppose, as sujeewa does, that his/her prototypical and ecumenical deity necessarily ‘means good’. This anthropomorphically loaded deity might equally well be malevolent or just plain neutral. To bring the discussion back to Kauffman’s cosmological pantheism, this point can equally well be made of a deity who is equivalent to and indistinguishable from the sum total of Nature, whether ‘emergent’ or not. It is very difficult (and here I agree again with sujeewa) to see the creative life-enhancing value either of billions of years of hostile extraterrestrial bombardment, volcanic violence and climatic catastrophe which resulted in many mass extinctions or organic life, or of the capacity of a bird flu virus to mutate rapidly in order to maximize its threat to human life. In other words, Nature, in the form of the Kauffmanesque God, is as contingently benevolent, malevolent or neutral towards human interests as any other anthropomorphised deity. As a footnote, Salmon365 seems to imply that we can only live ethical lives if we see ourselves as accountable to his particular version of this protean creation of human ingenuity. This echoes the long redundant myth that without the external threat of eternal punishment or the promise of eternal ecstasy we are incapable of conducting our lives decently, caringly, with a sense of humanity and community and a concern for the future of our planet. The kind of ‘emergence’ I am interested in is that of the many remarkable and ordinary human beings who continue to do just that.

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25. 25. sujeewa 09:23 AM 6/27/08

    Verily's response is correct. The contrasts are due to the fact that I started my argument with the assumption of the existence of biblic defined type of God, which I later contradicted [that was my intention]. Sure God can be good and bad as those are relative terms anyway.
    
    Looking at the new idea that nature, creativity and emergenec can be regarded as God. Well it is upto you to name it. But a phenomena of that type would not want us to do the worshipping type acts which is so submissive and, to me, honestly stupid.
    
    Respect nature by preserving it for future. Reducing the impact of you on it. Fear the nature for the type of reflections and returns it gives to you if you meddle too much with it [like Gloabal Warming].
    
    But naming it as God [hence lining it with already known biblic character], worshipping or submitting in any way to it, just because it is what created you is, to me, stupid again.
    
    And there is nothing called nature, nothing called emergence nothing called evolution. It is a name that we use for the phenomena we detect. It is the living beings and dead matter p[if they are any different] that continue to fulfill the elemenatry acts of above things which we call at macro scale names.
    
    Isn't that, again, imagination?
    
    As the bottomline, it is you [and the universe as a whole] that has to be respected. Does it mean anything now?

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26. 26. sephers165 06:56 PM 6/27/08

    My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it? A man feels wet when he falls into water, because man is not a water animal: a fish would not feel wet. Of course, I could have given up my idea of justice by saying that it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too--for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my private fancies. Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist--in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless--I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality--namely my idea of justice--was full of sense. Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.--C.S. Lewis
    
    God is not discoverable or demonstrable by purely scientific means, unfortunately for the scientifically minded. But that really proves nothing. It simply means that the wrong instruments are being used for the job. - J.B. Phillips
    
    As long as you are proud you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you. --C. S. Lewis

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27. 27. Verily 12:37 PM 6/28/08

    Sephers 165 says: ‘in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist - in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless - I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality--namely my idea of justice - was full of sense. Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning’. I take this to mean (a) that because one has a sense of justice, this can be the case only if the universe has ‘meaning’, and (b) that the causal dependency of a sense of justice on the putative meaningfulness of the universe is a reason for not being an atheist. I find this difficult to follow. Sense of justice – or rather senses of justice, because there is no particular reason to suppose consistency across time, space, individuals and cultures – can be an object of empirical study and other forms of scientific investigation, and indeed has been so exhaustively. There is, for example, a significant scholarly and scientific literature on the evolutionary origins of morality and altruism which offers plausible explanations for a sense of justice and injustice in human individuals and societies. However, this is not the case with the ‘meaning’ of the universe, which continues to escape empirically based determination. A sense of justice is widely regarded as indispensable to social and international harmony and underpins, for example, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which, however, very wisely does not attempt to explain the meaning of the universe. To suppose a causal dependency of the former on the latter does not seem to be usefully explanatory, and consequently to make this unexplained causal dependency a reason to be an atheist or otherwise is open to question..

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28. 28. 4squared 05:53 PM 6/28/08

    I agree with "discipline" in that the word God brings in too much baggage. I think that the late comedian and philosopher George Carlin did better than Kauffman at describing any version of God (emergence, Yahweh, etc.):
    
    "I think we’re part of a greater wisdom than we will ever understand. A higher order. Call it what you want. Know what I call it? The Big Electron. The Big Electron…whoooa. Whoooa. Whoooa. It doesn’t punish, it doesn’t reward, it doesn’t judge at all. It just is. And so are we. For a little while."
    
    I recommend you watch the entire piece at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eScDfYzMEEw
    
    Enjoy!

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29. 29. sujeewa 06:08 PM 6/28/08

    I dont see a point in debating against a faith with a follower. Faith is a personal matter, and to me, an illusion and imagination [my personal view]. Apart from that there is no "us" in faith - it is only a "me" always.
    
    But several comments went on with some ideas which I'd like to comment about. I hope you would not take me as an intruder into your belief. It is the general aspects of your personal opinion that I debate.
    
    Faith is a childhood brainwash. I have noticed that everyone with any faith FEELS, KNOWS and UNDERSTANDS its existemce. And they have no conflicts to interpret contemporary knowledge of universe into its realizations. It is the same for all faiths. And that is because your brains are trained in that way. So anyone with faith, KNOWING, FEELING, or UNDERSTANDING it, and hence issuing statements over that matter, and hence seeing no issues in applying it to the contemporray knowledge still keeping the faith in tact, is very much expected. What you can't do is to PROVE it. PROVE it to a non believer with strong ideas not to believe it.
    
    There are hundreds of such faiths in world. I have seen none being superior to another [of the lot I know]. Some are more logical [Buddhism], some are simpler and well explained [Christianity/Islam] but none is convincible or provable to a non believer - a non believer with a strong idea about the topic [call hardcore non-believer]. But I was born and brought up w/o any idea about theory of evolution, or newtonian or einstein physics. When I learnt them in school or uni, I found taht they explain teh world to a great deal, and model it to some minute precision. That is the differnce we have.
    
    Every religious leader is bound to HIS [or HER, dont know any ladies yet] childhood brainwash. Jesus changed the Jadaism. So did Prophet Mohamed. Buddha invented the nibbana to the vedic sansara cycles. Why is this dependancy? If any of them are CORRECT then their predecessers are also somewhat correct. And that particular genre is so universally and exceptionally right. I see no such speciality in any genre. If you back-trace all of them reduce to the simple idea that humans imagined the inexplicable. If we bring a caveman and [explain well] and show him how a robot works, he will surely think that robot also has a soul, equally like humans were said to have.
    
    What the believers miss is that we are not the owners of universe. It is not essential that it is comprehensive to us.
    
    Another problem I see is, no religion is compatible with theory of evolution. Every great religion founder missed it. Yes, they were all humans and how can they realise it? Don't blame them. But see the fallability of religions.
    
    And please dont re-invent religions to recover the shock of scientific denial. Let the bible be it. Humans are created to have lord's look some thousands of years ago, and there were no dinosaurs [or any other paleantological story]. Pls keep it so. Believe if you like. Dont let neo-sciento-believers mess them both. I hate that.
    
    I know the believers will say, "hey I see my god [or any other such phenomena] in every segment of universe, although you are not priviledged to feel so". Feel free to believe. You have your right. I have my obligation to respect your belief.
    
    And you have yours to respect my lack of it.

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30. 30. John_Toradze 01:46 AM 6/29/08

    > no religion is compatible with theory of evolution.
    Actually, no.
    
    [i]Buddha taught that all things are impermanent, constantly arising, becoming, changing and fading . Buddhist philosophers consequently rejected the Platonic idea of production from 'ideal forms' as being the fallacy of 'production from inherently existent other'.[/i]
    
    http://www.hinduwebsite.com/evolution.asp
    [i]Hinduism believes in the concept of evolution of life on earth.[/i]
    
    I also think that most seem to be missing Kauffman's point, although I'm sort in the "it's a silly point" camp. It seems to me he is basically making a semantical redefinition. Since God can be whatever we want it to be, that's ok.
    
    To me, the bottom line is that the very fact of existence is inexplicable in any rational way. Sure, this causes that, and structure, etcetera. But the fact of existence of anything is a wonder. That seems like it's along the lines of what Kauffman is saying, although he appears to be requiring something based on a more mechanistic view within the realm of what exists here.
    
    Go back to Korzybski and Hayakawa, 1937 (I think that's the date) General Semantics.

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31. 31. LarDonDia 09:46 PM 6/29/08

    Hello, here goes. First post. Alright you guys, remember, as the rules say, "Be nice."
    
    First, I had to comment, because I saw something. As I read the 32 comments, I saw that there were "No members and 158 guests online." I thought, "The scientists took Sunday off!" This amused me, and prompted me to join the site.
    
    This also led me to a confirmation of a belief: I'm sure some scientists hold faith beliefs, and they actually do honor a holy day each week. This is perfectly reasonable, even for all their relative silence in these fora, day by day.
    
    As I thought more about it, I concluded that all scientists have faith beliefs, that there are things they cannot prove now (or perhaps ever per Godel's theorem), because that's what science is all about: looking for and proving things that have never been proven before, or verifying things claimed to be proved are indeed provable. Scientists *believe* (have faith) in the fact that, "Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known." (Sagan). If they did not have this kind of faith, why would they look for something unknown? Why look for something new, if you have no faith there is something new to be discovered, learned and gained? That would not be scientific. So for starters, I'm not going to look down on any scientist's "faith."
    
    I hope the scientists out there respect my growing understanding of "faith," the kind that seems to be held in such low esteem around here. Sagan was right in that regard. Religion doesn't know everything, nor does science. We are both still playing in the spiritual, or perhaps quantum, sandbox. We haven't even found all the toys. Let's keep looking and talking, respectfully. Larry.

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32. 32. Theotherguy 11:09 PM 6/29/08

    What Shermer suggests is merely a weak form of Pantheism. "God 2.0" is really just Shermer's last vestiges of childhood religious indoctrination breathing its last dying breath. It seems that so many scientists want so badly to hold on to their irrational beliefs in God that they will stoop so low as to support a watered-down new-age "spiritualism" inherent in Pantheism rather than simply reject god-belief outright.
    
    Call it what you like, but believing emergent systems constitute "God" is like calling a carton of milk God and worshiping it. Both are pointless, both constitute an irrational assignment based on no evidence, and both lead to nothing interesting in the realm of scientific discovery.
    
    Like Lapace, I see no need for the God hypothesis when describing any system, be it emergent, classical or quantum. It simply adds another layer of unneeded complexity and a chocking layer of unfalsifiable, abstract haze.

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33. 33. Verily 12:44 AM 6/30/08

    I agree largely with LarDonDia. Disputes about who has 'faith' or not seem to me to be a discursive cul-de-sac. If we are prepared to work from the baseline (there are of course regrettably some who will not) that all human knowledge is provisional, this means that we accept the truth claims of some statements about reality because we can see more evidence in favour of them right now than for alternative or opposing statements. We also accept, in principle, that if future knowledge shifts this balance of evidence, we will be prepared to change our view. I agree that is a somewhat idealised scenario. It is trivially true to say that beliefs often go deep, so we may try simply to avoid confronting evidence which threatens our current worldview. But simply to be aware when we are doing so is a step in the right direction. 'Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it' (Andre Gide).

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34. 34. Paul of Eugene 12:23 AM 7/2/08

    I have argued with God, have trusted God, have been awoken in the middle of the night with instructions from God, have been helped out of messes by God, and this has been happening to me all my life. The idea, therefore, that there is no God is unthinkable to me. There do remain a few mysteries about Him, of course.

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35. 35. al 04:15 AM 7/2/08

    Man is like a flee on a cathedral floor asking

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36. 36. al 04:29 AM 7/2/08

    Man is like a flee on a cathedral floor asking why the cathedral was built in its honor. Anthropocentric thinking and an overdeveloped sense of self-importance coupled with the human obsession with meaning and death prevent most from accepting/acknowledging that on a larger scale all of humanity is nothing at all. More down to earth: most religious people probably would have serious problems if the religious 'logic' they apply to the big questions were applied to them in a courtroom (no proof, no evidence etc). I think religion and science are not reconcilable. Religion and faith are like dreams: a very personal sentiment that is totally dependent on the individual 'observer', making it the textbook antithesis of science.

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37. 37. Russel 06:32 AM 7/2/08

    There are two questions that humanity has asked itself since we were first able to ask questions; Why am I here? How does it work?
    
    Science is a tool of humanity at the service of humanity. It is meant to answer the question of how does it work. Anyone who does much scientific reading will know that there are more questions than answers and thus much interesting science to be done.
    
    Faith is meant to address the question of why am I here (meaning). Science is incapable of attributing meaning to anything. Thus religion and science address different human needs.
    
    Now we all make a choice. Some choose to believe that there is no greater meaning. This is the faith of atheism (It can't be proved or disproved.) Others choose to believe there is a greater meaning and will select one of the religions. Faith has been referred to as brainwashing in this discussion thread. Well the sneaky truth is that everyone is

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38. 38. Russel 06:35 AM 7/2/08

    Russel (Continued)
    
    "brainwashed" into their faith of choice (Remember, atheism is still a faith).
    
    This implies two conclusions:
    
    1. Science can't replace faith so it shouldn't be touted as an answer to all things. It can't meet the need for meaning.
    2. All people, including all the members of this thread, have a faith of sorts.
    
    I myself choose the Christian faith and I follow Jesus. Just because I do doesn’t prevent me from accepting what science finds. So there was a big bang, fantastic!! The evidence points to that right now. Move on to finding out where it came from. There is a point at which we will not be able to find answers, either because it isn’t possible or because we’ve run out of time as a species. A Christian can still be a serious scientist and science isn’t capable of replacing faith and answering all questions. Science is a tool with limits, that’s all.
    
    As for god 2.0. It’s pointless! It doesn’t address either the need for meaning or the quest for knowledge.
    
    Choose the faith you want. I choose to follow Christ.
    

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39. 39. al in reply to Russel 07:24 AM 7/2/08

    Dear mr./mrs Russell,
    there is no such thing as 'meaning'. Just like beauty and justice, it does not exist in our universe; it is an abstract notion invented by a mammal with too much time on its hands.
    Atheism is not a faith; it is the default state into which we are born: sobriety without delusions; the negation or absense of religious imaginations; the naturalist worldview. (Stating the obvious:) this is not a form of theism.
    Because you can not disprove the purple elephant I dreamt of last night, does not mean it therefore exists. The burdon of proof lies with the one posing the proposition. Atheism does not put forth anything that needs proving, religion does plenty of that.
    Also, new findings or facts can only be accepted if they don't contradict the body of already established facts, and 'theophysics' just don't qualify.
    

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40. 40. Russel in reply to al 11:37 AM 7/2/08

    Al, it appears that most of the world disagrees with you at some level. See the sight http://www.adherents.com/Religions_By_Adherents.html as an example. Only 16% of the planets population is non-religious and of that 16% half believe in a god of some sort. Your assertion that atheism is the default state isn’t accurate. People have an ingrained need to have meaning and relevance. It’s part of our natural makeup as various lines of research are revealing. Atheism is most certainly a faith. Using the tools of science only gets us so far. In saying that the existence of a god of some sort is ruled out an un-provable assumption has been implicitly made. Since most of the world doesn’t accept that assumption the burden of proof falls to those who make it. If we eliminate meaning from the human condition then why are we bothering about any of this? It doesn’t matter what we do, discover or build since it will all come to nothing in any event. So what does your world view offer that would make people want to accept it?
    
    Locking science into any faith limits the usefulness of the tool whether that faith is in a theistic being or the lack thereof since science can’t speak intelligently on the topic either way. Science can’t function as a world view that people will accept anymore than my PC can. It’s a tool, plain and simple.
    

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41. 41. V. V. Raman 01:52 PM 7/2/08

    fmans Creativity and Hypercomplexity
    Kauffman is challenging the classical and still current paradigm of science that

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42. 42. Adamus in reply to Paul of Eugene 02:54 PM 7/2/08

    @Paul, replace 'God' by 'the cookie monster' in your comment and you will be judged insane and delusional. Yet because it's 'God' your insanity gets a free pass?
    
    At one time 90% or more of the world's population believed the world was flat. That still didn't make that particular delusion true. Eventually that 16% of agnostics and atheists will become a majority. Unless we devolve back into stone-age thinking, of course, which is a genuine threat,

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43. 43. sujeewa in reply to Russel 03:11 PM 7/2/08

    I had some posts posted in Sci-Am, but now they are missing. Sadly I dont have records of them.
    
    Does anybody know what is happening?

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44. 44. sujeewa in reply to Russel 03:38 PM 7/2/08

    Few points about Russel's comment.
    
    - Atheism, if you call it as "there is surely no god" you can take it for being a faith of the non-existent of God. But not seeing a point in believing in God does not qualify to be a faith always. For this difference I call me as a "free-thinker" - someone who does not believe in anything, hence thinking free of belief.
    - Honestly I have no faith.And some people say "hey having no faith is your faith". That is funny. It means nothing. There is a reality for zero. Zero is not having any. Just because zero is a number you can't call it as having something which is zero - a funny statement that is.
    - To me science can not replace faith. Science is a different context. It tries to find out what is really there. Faith has a fixed notion for what is there, based on a teaching of someone in the past. They are different. Science is not accurate either. It is a growing knowledge base. Don't believe in science. Just study and understand.
    - "There is a point at which we will not be able to find answers". Indeed. Leave it so. Do not try to put imaginations over it. God is one imagination which is used to explain this inexplicable layer.
    - Science is not a TOOL, it is a knowledge base. Technology produces Tools.
    - Some people think science is a tool, made to find God. No. Science is a knwoledge base, of which the latest accepted is the best model that explains the universe. It does not try to prove anything, but tries to discover what it is [w/o pre-judgement]. Science can model the universe, only to a certain precision.
    - If you want to see the reality under faith, try "Flying Spaghetti Monster" in google and read. Tell me on what grounds that you denounce that faith. The truth is that it is a joke. But any logic that you use to disprove that "Joke" can equally be used to disprove your "faith". Now, how do we know whether you're believing in a genuine phenomena or a joke?
    - I do respect your personal right to have a faith. But ideologically I denounce the generalization of faith.

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45. 45. V. V. Raman in reply to sujeewa 04:18 PM 7/2/08

    Kauffman’s Creativity and Hypercomplexity
    Kauffman is challenging the classical and still current paradigm of science that "the universe and all in it are governed by natural laws." He calls this the Galilean spell. Like Daniel Dennett who wanted to free us of the spell of religion and come under the spell of ratioaltry (the worship of reason) Kaufman wants to rid the world of science of this spell.
    The Galilean spell has worked very well, thank you, and is still working very well for the physical world. Let's not forget that if we take it away altogether, we can fall back on the ancient paradigm in which things happen according to the whim of some supernatural being(s). So it is important to specify where the so-called Galilean spell is powerful and productive, and where it may not be applicable.
    More than a decade ago I introduced the notion of hypercomplexity: the level of reality beyond chaos and complexity wherein is utterly impossible even in principle. This arises largely - but not uniquely - in contexts where human thoughts and interactions come into play.
    Kaufman calls this "creativity." This is fine. But then he goes on to argue that "God as the creativity in the universe can ... offer us a view in which the sacred and the moral remain utterly valid." What is not recognized here (or at least isn’t state explicitly) is that the sacred and the moral are only subsets of creativity, and are essentially human-centered. There are horrors and catastrophes (from the human perspective) which are also aspects of that same creativity. It would therefore be equally valid to say that the Devil as creativity in the universe can offer us a view in which the profane and the immoral are also manifestations of the same creativity: an awkwardness that is avoided in my view of the hypercomplex.
    As I see it, the impossibility of tracking down the evolution of events and predicaments arising from thoughts from human brains and utterly random events in the universe (like the instigation of a new evolutionary trajectory by a cosmic ray particle hitting a cell) at the hypercomplex level may be looked upon as yet another Natural Law.
    The hypercomplex level of reality fuels creativity and variety in the splendor of life, both human and non-human, besides giving rise to unexpected and unforeseeable planetary formations, stellar degeneracies, and environmental zigzags from the most unexpected sources: E.g. If human ingenuity had not contrived the combustion engine, the polar caps wouldn't be melting today.
    The conclusion/hypothesis of the hypercomplex level of reality is observationally confirmed by umpteen episodes in people's lives: Just think of the chance factors that led you to your college or to your spouse. Its theoretical justification may lie in the possibility of generating utterly random numbers in any sequence of digits, as in Georg Cantor's recognition of transfinite numbers.
    
    V. V. Raman
    

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46. 46. sujeewa in reply to V. V. Raman 03:29 AM 7/3/08

    Regarding Complexity or Hypercomplexity, I again have the feeling that it is an issue of human capability of grasping the universe. We think that there exists a Complexity universally [i.e. independant of humans] since we think that rest of the universe also, plans, designs and implements their activities like we do. And also that universe tries to understand and judge [anything, including itself]. In anotherwords we try to give a creature-like beahavior to everything, and in that context we find that there exists a universal Complexity. Maybe our religious backgrounds make us think so.
    
    But if you think that there is neither a planner, designer or analyser, and in fact there is no judge, and leave everything in the hands of randomness, then you realise that Complexity is our issue - a defect in us trying to understand universe, hence human-centric.
    
    For an example take life, and let's leave Panspermia [for the sake of example] and think that basic big molecules like protean and amino acid gradually turned into what we call life today. The story of biological evolution, if you take as only two snapshots of premodial soup and today, is certainly a higher order complexity. But when you take the tiny elementary changes between each time T and T+delta, it is a simple checmical process. Nothing complex. It is just that we can not comprehend all the 4billion plus years of continuos proceedings. And the role that is played by randomness.
    
    If nature or its controller is a living being, certainly this is a very high oreder of complexity and can only be represented by a gigantic concept like God, Brahman [sorry the word maybe worng - I'm not expert in Hindu ideology] or similar phenomena.
    
    But if you think nature as dumb non-life, goverened by randomness, well, you realize that it is just happening so. And with pure chance it happened this way. Note that randomness, if it is pure and exclusively random, does not need a cause, morale, plan, design or implementation. Randomness is a concept which many fail to comprehend mainly thanks to the religious brainwash.
    
    I am in no position to conclude. Nor to believe [even in randomness]. But to me, it looks Randomness fits better into the model than all the religious supernatural phenomena known today.
    
    Can't it be that the universe including what we call life just happened to be so purely by chance? And hence there is NO universal complexity underlying, despite the complexity hurdle in human understanding. What do you think?

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47. 47. Verily 07:47 AM 7/3/08

    Tnis blog has shifted a long way from Kauffman's emergent creativity thesis. What strikes me particularly is that our internet debates take place in the last few seconds, metaphorically speaking, of evolutionary time. How can my brain wrap itself around billions of years when it will only last for a few relative microseconds? When consciousness first arose in organisms, it had no capacity to evoke an abstract concept like 'meaning', but was concerned with negotiating a survival pathway in relation to its environment. I can have no confidence in a supposed evolutionary teleology 'culminating' in homo sapiens as its magnum opus when I consider the repeated, massive and random extinctions of organic life which have afflicted the earth, and realise that we may well owe our contingent and totally unpredictable emergence to a primitive chordate like pikaiea gracilens which existed precariously over 500 million years ago. The way we live as 21st century humans is still predominantly intuitive, while most of the answers provided or hinted at by science are counter-intuitive. It is really not surprising that ready made cultural products like God should still be grasped as an explanation to save us from thinking. We have lives to live, people to please, children to raise, jobs to provide income, a thousand and one demands on our time, and it is easier to conform in the interests of social togetherness than to raise uncomfortable queries. Sometimes the firing of unexpected neurons in my cerebral apparatus alights on the prediction that 'ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free' (any slight misquotation is a memory lapse), but I then reflect that truth might well make me free but that there is absolutely no guarantee that it will be particularly comfortable.

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48. 48. imag94 02:22 AM 7/4/08

    I had read many of the threads and I come to the same conclusion when Atheists are around to give their opinion and here someo of them accepts that fact verbally, like stating 'relegious beings need proof and Aethists don't or give ever".
    
    This shows their underworked and 'over concluding' nature. It is difficult to argue with an Aethist because we find them underprepared and overly lazy to state facts with adequate proofs.
    
    So summing it up God is the most comprehensive truth which gives us the sacramental effects and feelings and Jesus is the Son of God who gives us life.
    
    Aethists are on the otherhand live on a 'spiritual deseart' and has no way of ever finding the truth
    
    ___________________
    Mathew Cherian

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49. 49. Russel in reply to Adamus 05:34 AM 7/4/08

    Before we carry on with the debate there are a few things that need to be clarified it seems. Ive purposely steered clear of Bible discussions but comments such as Yet because it's 'God' your insanity gets a free pass? require some discussion on it.
    
    1. The Bible is a collection of writings of the faithful produced over a massive period when compared to scientific writing. Some of the books were meant to teach people how to live but others, especially New Testament accounts, are eye witness accounts of the happenings in Jesus time.
    
    2. The volume of writing speaking to the existence of the person of Jesus far exceeds that of any other historical figure whose existence we take to be axiomatic, despite the fact that the Christian faith was persecuted for the first 400 years of its existence.
    
    3. When you view the history of civilization since the Roman Empire you will find that much of our western culture of today stems from the Christian Church. The first universities were established by the Church. Im not sure how that equates with backward thinking.
    
    There were eye witness accounts to the raising of Lazarus by Jesus. This was one of the main reasons that the authorities of the time wanted him dead. He was undermining their power base. I have yet to see science come close to reviving a four day old corpse.
    
    A bunch of twelve cowards ran like the wind from Jesus when they thought they might land up sharing his fate. These same cowards later went on to suffer gruesome deaths for the sake of Jesus who was supposedly dead. People dont just about face like that without some reason for doing so.
    
    What this all amounts to is that the choice to follow Jesus is based on rather more evidence than I have seen for either the flying spaghetti monster or the cookie monster. Christians have good reason for following their faith so I would be over confident of the majority of Christians simply abandoning their faith. Just because science cant speak to these eye witness accounts in the Bible doesnt mean that the evidence should simply be ignored or is invalid.
    

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50. 50. Russel in reply to sujeewa 05:38 AM 7/4/08

    Back to something a bit more scientific. I suppose that to discuss what constitutes a faith we need to define faith. I would define faith as “the acceptance of something as fact without question or proof.”
    
    Now let’s proceed to the really big question in science, where did the universe come from? We had the big bang but where did that super dense singularity come from? There are some theories ranging from energy fluctuations in a larger multi-verse to the collision of different branes to quantum scale self arranging 3d blocks that on the macro scale form 4d space time. But where did all of that come from?
    
    I’m sure we may eventually be able to push the bounds of knowledge back even further still but eventually one has to make an assumption. There are a few that can be made. One possible assumption is that something was always there and always will be. The universe then arises from random reactions between components of this something, whatever it may be. Another is that there is a creator that set everything in motion. Obviously the creator was always there in this case and the universe arises out of the creator. These are just two possibilities, I’m sure someone can think of more.
    
    If one makes no assumption whatsoever then I suppose that person can be considered free of faith. The instant an assumption is made that is accepted as fact without question or proof that assumption is faith. It follows then that if no assumption is made of the origins of everything then no cause is ruled out. The instant one rules out a cause one makes an assumption. Thus genuine science is open minded. True science would state that “There is no proof for a God right now and the evidence says nothing either way.” Thus the answer is that science doesn’t know and won’t know until more evidence is obtained. Right now we haven’t probed back remotely far enough, we simply don’t know where it all came from, form a scientific stand point.
    
    As a last point, I still say science is a tool. It’s more than just a body of knowledge, it is also a set of methodologies and a process by which to acquire more knowledge. It’s a powerful tool make no mistake, but it isn’t an answer to everything.
    

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51. 51. Shelley 12:20 PM 7/4/08

    Man made God in his own image. What if "God" was an unlimited databank? You certainly wouldn't pray to a databank. However, you could pull needed information from it, and then collapse that information into reality, as the "Observer" of quantum physics. As long as man gives away his power to some external "God", he will never evolve to be the non-linear, multi-dimensional consciousness that he is. The ancient mystery schools taught initiates how to override the genetic program of the body to then move into expanded awareness. Jeshua Ben Joseph, Apollonius of Tyanna, and Rah Ta Bin all learned this, and became the masters of time, distance and space. It is pure science.

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52. 52. sujeewa 02:04 PM 7/4/08

    Enter Your Comment Here.

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53. 53. Peaceseeker 03:51 PM 7/4/08

    More on Consciousness
    Consciousness is the isness of all that is. It collapses into matter in the now.
    Now is unmeasureable and unobservable. It is that instantaneous increment of time between the past and the future. It is when all that could be becomes what is. It is when consciousness collapses into isness. The past is all that is observable.
    During human meditation we can feel the now  feels like deep inner peace, pure love, indescribable joy. We cannot describe now because that is the instant when consciousness manifests as either particle or wave.
    DNA could be acting as a barcode for the interpretation of the consciousness collapse in all matter. I dont know if such a thing as DNA exists in what we call inanimate objects, like rocks, but there must be some program mechanism that allows a tree to remain a tree as the consciousness assigned to it resolves into tree matter in the now.
    The split screen experiment that demonstrates light interference patterns (in the past) might be providing a picture of what happens when consciousness, which is permanent and pervasive, collapses into either a particle or waveform.
    The only thing that exists in the now is consciousness. Of course we cannot observe it yet. We dont know what to look for. We know where to look, we think, but we do not have the instruments to assist with when to look.
    Consciousness exists equally everywhere across infinity. With appropriate environmental conditions all observable matter can exist anywhere because of this uniformity. This uniformity may explain the possibility of intelligent machines, human like, that are able to use technology of collapsing consciousness to traverse the Universe instantaneously. This phenomenon would appear to us as appearing and disappearing, when in fact we are observing the activity of a now event, currently incomprehensible to the human mind.
    The apparent paradoxes of quantum physics are not paradoxes at all. Experimenters believe that they are attempting to take measurements in the now, when in fact, they are actually taking measurements in the past of a product of the collapsing consciousness, hence the apparent paradox of not being able to measure the location and size simultaneously. All that could be becomes what is in the now, not some time later (when we are taking the measurements of what was.) If we are unable to observe the now, how could we possibly take measurements in the now?
    Schrodingers cat is not observable until the observation is made. When it is made, it is no longer the now, it has become the past. What we observe is the result of the collapse of consciousness that occurred an instant before we made the observation. By the time we are making the observation, all that could be has collapsed into what is.
    What we observe is always a reflection of something. Time passes between the event and our observation, no matter how small the distance of observation. We cannot yet observe the now.
    If I were a spiritual person, I might say that we will never observe the now, because the now is clearly the place where a spiritual person communes with Consciousness (God). I believe that that communion is highly spiritual and highly personal and highly human. I am a spiritual person. However, I also believe that intelligent life forms other than human exist in the traversable Universe. I believe UFOs are machines carrying silicon based machines that appear human like. I believe that these machines probably were created by human like creatures sometime in the past and these machines have conquered the technology of the collapsing consciousness. They exist, as we do, in the now, but are able to observe their work in the now.
    This is the paradox to me, all life as we know it exists in the now. All activities occur in the now. All human thought occurs in the now and yet we cannot define it. We have left this realm of thought to the philosophers.
    I believe that the human race will build machines that are comparable to those that come to visit Earth occasionally at some time in the future and we will use these machines in an attempt to save the race from its ultimate destruction here on Earth. I believe that eventually these machines will become what appears to be a race of their own. The experience that humans are able to have in the communing with Consciousness will be lost to fable and mythology. Then, those machines will search for how to become human, perhaps similar to what the visiting UFOs of today are searching for here on Earth.
    Finally, I believe the crop circles that appear routinely on Earth are a method of communication using collapsing consciousness technology. We cannot seem to understand that SETI is prodding other intelligence and that it is responding. They probably look at our archaic method of radio signals and wonder why we use such antiquated technology, much like our children today are shocked when I show them my 45 rpm records and play them on my record player. The stuff still works, but their Ipods cannot communicate with my record player.
    Sometimes I wonder about us humans and just how ridiculous we must look to an advanced system of logic. We consume our own planet to make a few humans feel good while the technology exists to snatch energy out of the air in their world. We honor controlled selfishness while teaching our young to share. We say one thing and do something else. We attempt to defend our way of life even though we know it is unsustainable. And the beat goes on.
    Brought to us by a sense of curiosity and imagination of Dennis Miner.
    

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54. 54. Verily 02:36 AM 7/5/08

    I would hesitate to opt for a single and exclusive definition of faith as Russel seeks to do. A random sampling of the conversations and written words we encounter in a single day would no doubt reveal many divergent meanings of the term. In The End of Faith, Sam Harris equated it most forcefully with religious belief, but many people do not understand it in quite that way. Whether scientists have faith or not is a bit of a blind alley. It seems to me that in fact what most annoys religious people about scientists or atheists, and equally what annoys scientists or atheists about religious people, is that they appear so certain they are right. It is true that scientific announcements sometimes take on an aura of redemptive certainty, but some reasons for this are fairly obvious: the general public is hungry for answers and solutions, the media is hungry for attention-grabbing headlines, and the science may be sponsored by corporate interests which do not favour the ambiguities and uncertainties of research being aired too openly, although any scientist worthy of the name knows that they are there. It is better to look for genuine open-minded curiosity and a passion for new knowledge. Sadly, when I read something like this comment by imag94: 'So summing it up God is the most comprehensive truth which gives us the sacramental effects and feelings and Jesus is the Son of God who gives us life. Aethists are on the otherhand live on a 'spiritual deseart' and has no way of ever finding the truth', I sense a mind which has shut the door on curiosity and any need to keep asking questions. After all, if you are certain, you know all you ever need to know, you can put your brain into cold storage for the rest of your natural life and it will make no difference. Whatever we may think of Kauffmans conflation of God with the cosmos, this is a mind full of impassioned curiosity. David Malone, writing in New Scientist, encourages us to learn to live with uncertainty, and quotes Bertrand Russell: Uncertainty, in the presence of vivid hopes and fears, is painful, but must be endured if we wish to live without the support of comforting fairy tales.
    

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55. 55. Aiya-Oba 01:21 PM 7/5/08

    God is the greatest Being, because the greatest being, is the b e i n g of All in all. -Aiya-Oba

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56. 56. jabailo 02:21 PM 7/5/08

    This view solves a lot of strife in the debate between religion and science. Science in the past may have denigrated Man too much -- at the same time, it also put us in our place. Religion may have elevated us too much...at the same time, it teaches us there is something greater. Seeing this other thing as creative does not conflict with any notion of God. Until we can explain it, we are as well being "believers" in creativity as a norm.

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57. 57. Aiya-Oba in reply to jabailo 02:43 PM 7/5/08

    Thanks Jabailo, for your understanding. -Aiya-Oba

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58. 58. sujeewa in reply to Russel 03:19 PM 7/5/08

    Firstly on the Proof some of you give for religion.
    
    - Using the fact [proposed by Russell] that many religious doctrines, gospels, and literature supports Christianity to prove it as Truth, is a cyclic way of proving it using the same. Those who wrote those doctrines and other “eye-witnes” evidence were equally brainwashed like today’s followers. Note that the God belief was not started by Jesus. Can you find its “evidence” in india, or china or red-indian legends?
    
    - Above facts do not PROVE. They mean that this structure has lasted for a longer period and lots of people have been taken part in it. But truth cannot be found via popular vote.
    
    - Every religious frame has equally huge hype and jargon “eye-witness” evidence, literature and doctrines which can |prove” [as per Russel] itself. On what grounds do you fail all the others and accept only one as right? I know one reason, and that is childhood brainwash, the idea is “installed” in your brain when you had no idea about world. It is protected with a layer of emotions and biased reasoning that came with the package. Even this original article is an example for such.
    
    - Religion enters your mind at the time when tooth fairy and monsters find a place in it – i.e. childhood. Latter do not remain when the knowledge and reasoning takes over, primarily because there is not protective layer for them in your mind. We are free to keep or leave the tooth fairy and Monster. Religion remains since the knowledge is protected. Superiority of the founder, power of its controllers, fear of blasphemy, the love you build with it, church/temple/mosque, emotions towards the community, reluctance to be a traitor [mainly since there are other religions competing] etc. And it makes you strying to reason for God in the light of all scientific knowledge and despite all potential curiosity that is supposed to have risen. Examples are the complete shutdown of reasoning as Imag94 exhibited, or biased reasoning of Russel.
    
    - FSM has been made up for a lie – a neat joke. But if it was introduced to people of 2000years ago in a serious manner, surely it will last the test of time. And moreover, if the author was killed in a tragic manner it would win zillion hearts. The fact that the rulers suppressed Christianity is a stronger reason why it lasted in hearts of the generations and blocked the brains.
    
    - Chinese dragons have a lot of literature about them. There is “eye-witness” evidence for their existence in ancient Chinese legend. Wonder whether that is enough qualifications to believe in Dragons.

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59. 59. sujeewa in reply to Russel 03:48 PM 7/5/08

    - Scientists can believe. But that is not a scientific segment of their life. Science, as we know it, cannot BELIEVE. If it does so, that will stop its progress right there. Had science held its FAITH of flat earth, all it could have done was stoning the outsiders who thought of the globe-shape. If it had FAITH in Newtonian mechanics, it won’t ever have a theory of relativity.
    
    - The small inexplicable elements of science which Russel put as “have to be believed” are never believed. A good scientist will never try to use a faith to interpret the inexplicable. He or she will only try to extend the precision of explicable.
    
    - We do not believe in science. We understand it, and its fallibility as well. I think the ability to comprehend the uncertainty and randomness is another layer of enlightenment.
    
    - Russel states that we have two choices [among many] for the mechanism which “flows” the universe - creator/controller vs Randomness. There can be many others. As you said none is conclusive and hence we call it inexplicable. But all are not even. It’s like Fuzzy logics. Nothing is a certainty, but they have different coefficients of validity. I haven’t set 0 for God, no. But surely randomness is far more [yet not 100%] valid for me than God. It is the religious segment that set 100% for anything which hints God, and 0% for everything else.
    
    - God being the inexplicable came a long way. It started with the idea that God created us in his same look, and the entire planet [with the rest of universe as its annex] in a week. Many discoveries failed this. Then came the Evolution realm, Quantum physics, emergence and chaos theory. Every time science uncovers a mystery “wrongly” explained by religion, religion returns with a new theory to consist the remaining inexplicable segment. And force us to believe in it. Tomorrow if we find the elementary ideas of chaos theory, hence explaining emergence in great detail, then a person in the shoes of Kauffman/Russel/imag94 or any of our great religious scholars would bounce back to accommodate that segment and constraint God to the remaining non-explained segments. To me, this is not only unethical and unscholarly, but also a disgrace to the original belief.
    
    - People who call science as a TOOL are those who want to use it to PROVE something. Those who have no faith regard science as a knowledge base explaining the universe to its best precision. A TOOL in the contrary should have a previously defined role, a purpose and goal; none of which science has.

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60. 60. sujeewa in reply to Verily 04:15 PM 7/5/08

    Coming back to original topic, I have several questions, hopefully which our diverse and knolwedged community would answer [in each diff way].
    
    1. Is emergence another composite idea like "atom"? We call many processes COMPLEX [non-linear] and hence they exhibit EMERGENCE. But most of such systems can be broken down to elementary level analytically, had all its information being known. Transition from any point of time to immediate next can again be explained [although the explanation might not derive a mathematical representation]. It is the number of such transitions, their composition, etc which gives rise to the phenomena we call emergence. Ex: Evolution, Brain, Butterfly Effect.
    
    2. On the day we break down chaos theory into good models, this reverence of emergence will be lost. Does anyone know the cutting edge discoveries in that realm?
    
    3. Even if God exists in the might as per bible and the fine precision of emergence, will he expect us to worship and pray? Such acts may be expected by a regional ganglord or a dictator. If god is nature, best worship is to preserve it and reduce our impact on it. I find it so hard to comprehend the rituals of followers, leave aside the faith.
    
    4. Was Kaufmann's statement "This creative process of emergence is so stunning, so overwhelming, so worthy of awe, gratitude and respect, that it is God enough for many of us. God, a fully natural God, is the very creativity in the universe”
    something similar to Einstein's famous remark "God does not play dice". I have seen many people suggesting that God notion was there only for literature aspect and Einstein never believes in God as almighty [which I dont know whether true or not].
    In simple words, are we debating a cosmetic word put out by Kauffman to enhance the writing quality of his statement?
    

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61. 61. sinamj 10:52 PM 7/5/08

    My name is John Robert Manis of Hudson Florida. One day I was thinking of what the worlds best scientists wonder about. That is, is the universe going to keep right on expanding or will it finally stop expanding and collapse into nothingness; or will it rhymically keep expanding to a limit of expansion and then collapse into and an infinite point at which it re-explodes add infinity. My thoughts on this came suddenly right out of the blue of something explaining to me what actually does or is happening to the universe now and in the future in such simple terminology that anyone could understand how the universe exists in obaying the laws of physics that originated from a pariculate explosion seemingly starting from a point coming out from nowhere. With each particulate having attained a measurable magnitude of kinetic energy in a perfect vacuum in which said kinetic energy cannot dissipate from said universe particulates in which universe physical time is included in the equation of their new existance in of which each said particulate has a center of mass in time which produces the greatest force of gravity which eventually will create a universe of which there is nothing but different size black holes with the largest eating up all the smallest untill their is only one huge single black hole now having all matter and energy of the universe in it which at the instant once fully contained therein cause all matter to be crushed together to a finite gigantic magnitude point of elemental energy which causes aii of the said universes elements then to become a singularity in time and space in which time can no longer increases in speed and there then time begins again as all elements no longer are attracted by there force of gravity but attracted now to the begining of time starting in a new universe in which all of the old elements of the old universe are born anew being blown into said new universe in perhaps a new way now in which the new time and space of these elements interact with a new set of physical laws which may be the way GOD the FATHER creates an earth and its heaven through the forces of the building blocks of pure love which is the way in which HE intended it to be for all of us built and created from star stuff who in this life through the necessities of sufferings and trials on this earth are required to bring us close to the FATHER through these suffering and trials to morally love Him and all of that which he has created for us to reach an infinite heavenly abode of which now with purity of love never tire

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62. 62. sinamj 11:20 PM 7/5/08

    My name is John Robert Manis of Hudson Florida. One day I was thinking of what the worlds best scientists wonder about. That is, is the universe going to keep right on expanding or will it finally stop expanding and collapse into nothingness; or will it rhymically keep expanding to a limit of expansion and then collapse into and a finite point at which it re-explodes add infinity. My thoughts on this came suddenly right out of the blue of something explaining to me what actually does or is happening to the universe now and in the future in such simple terminology that anyone could understand how the universe exists in obaying the laws of physics that originated from a particulate explosion seemingly starting from a point coming out from nowhere. With each particulate having attained a measurable magnitude of kinetic energy in a perfect vacuum in which said kinetic energy cannot dissipate from said universe particulates in which universe physical time is included in the equation of their new existance in of which each said particulate has a center of mass in time which produces the greatest force of gravity which eventually will create a universe of which there is nothing but different size black holes with the large eating up all the small ones untill their is only one huge single black hole left now having all matter and energy of the universe in it which at the instant once fully contained therein cause all matter to be crushed together to a finite gigantic magnitude point of elemental energy which causes aii of the said universes elements then to become a singularity in time and space in which time can no longer increase in speed and there then time begins again as all elements no longer are attracted by there force of gravity but attracted now to the begining of time starting in a new universe in which all of the old elements of the old universe are born anew being blown into said new universe in perhaps a new way now in which the new time and space of these elements interact with a new set of physical laws which may be the way GOD the FATHER creates an earth and its heaven through the forces of the building blocks of pure love which is the way in which HE intended it to be for all of us built and created from star stuff who in this life through the necessities of sufferings and trials on this earth are required to bring us close to the FATHER through these suffering and trials to morally love Him and all of that which he has created for us to reach an infinite heavenly abode of which now with purity of love never tire

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63. 63. sinamj in reply to sinamj 11:25 PM 7/5/08

    Ooops! This is John Robert Manis. My reply mistakingly got enetered THREE TIMES. Please just read the top first one entered which is the one I fixed from typos. Thanks.

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64. 64. __D__ 11:46 PM 7/5/08

    I imagine the issue of science vs sacred as something very simple.
    Why isn't there absolutely nothing in all directions, at all scales for all time forward and backward. This would be simple. The fact that this is clearly not the case is the only room for theology.
    Further... if you do not have absolute nothingness the only alternative is to have something. Once you have a something, I do not think it takes a great intelectual leap to imagine that the only possible something is an infinety. Again no great leap to imagine that this something would not be a single partical floating in a vast sea of space and time, and that no mater how far you zoomed in on this single particle it would be homogeneous. It makes no sense for this something to be a single particle, or two or a billion or any fixed number.
    Only one thing makes sense as an alternative to complete nothingness and that alternative is an infinety.
    Once you have an infinety every thing in this infinety must be infinet.
    Nothing can be constant across an infinety. No great intelectual leap there. Sure... in all of infinety there are 123 dimensions... no wait... 124... no... 12036.. Right .. clearly an infinet variety if not an infinet number is the only obvious answer. The same follows for everything else... constants... types of forces, types of particles... everything...
    Unifying the forces, searching for the smallest particle, imagining the big bang as acting across all reality is a kin to thinking that the heavens revolve around the earth.
    You may be able to unify all the forces that currently hold sway over the matter at our scale. Or the forces that a human can percieve. But to imagine that a tiny brain on a tiny spec in a vast infinety could unify an infinet number of forces acting on or in an infinet number of dimensions is silly.
    You may be able to search for the smallest stable particle a human can preceive but clearly space extends infinetly smaller just the same as it extends infinetly larger.
    It makes no sense to imagine that the inflation that occured durring our big bang extended across infinety. Right... something happened across an entire infinety, Nope, Clearly some of the infinet variety of constants, which are constantly and slowly(to us) changing, lined up in such a way that matter became stable at this scale. Poof... Like the height of a wave on the ocean this is a local occurance. If you could move far enough away in distance or scale things would be different.
    Infinet complexity - Simple.
    But why not nothingness? No answer for that.

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65. 65. Assegai 10:46 AM 7/6/08

    Stop this fighting and fussing, fighting about God. There is godliness in all of us, think about it, we all have the concept of timelessness, God is supposed to be timeless, time does not affect him, the same with humans. We research stuff and find it out. It takes time to research stuff because we do not know it. But once we know it that knowledge is instantaneous, it becomes timeless. A Baby does not understand 1 +1, but once they know that 1 + 1 = 2 that knowledge becomes timeless, for those extremely smart like yourselfs you understand the concept of relativity, and quantum's, that becomes timeless for you. As more becomes timeless, more knowledge that is, the more we are being aware. Does God exist, I don't know, religous people have destroyed that concept because they were darn evil, but what we know is timeless, we do not have to spend time researching it, or finding it out. Without this concept of timelessness we would not be humans, remember you know that 5 - 3 = 2 just like that, in the same manner that God supposedly knows everything, a little bit of godliness in all. Don't take this off, I know I am not your buddy, but I think you are on the web because you want to share what you have, so I too wanting a better world am sharing with you.

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66. 66. Verily 12:06 AM 7/7/08

    The commentary on nothingness and a somethingness which equates with infinity, offered by _D_, is a nice piece of abstract logic, but my understanding of human mind/brain properties suggests a limitation to its explanatory value. Much of the literature on mind and brain I have come across suggests that while the physical properties of the human brain are unlikely to have changed dramatically in evolutionary terms over, say, the past 50,000 years, the culturally constructed mind has, by way of contrast, developed massively in the direction of abstract cognitions of all kinds. The implication of this difference appears to be that the physical brain is still adapted to orienting the human organism in space and time within finite limits, since the abstract concept of infinity would be of very little material value whether you were seeking your way back to the main group of a foraging party during the Pleistocene or you are driving along a highway in 2008. Any attempt to actually visualise or imagine temporal and spatial infinity is in quite a literal sense mind-boggling (at least that is my experience), which is why we have to leave it to very recent powers of abstraction to express the concept at all, whether through mathematics and other scientific disciplines or through theological propositions about the ineffable. The sacred science thesis conflating the universe with God seems to me to offer some kind of parallel with the somethingness/nothingness opposition _D_ proposes, since it leaves nothing ineffable outside the universe to be effed. On the other hand, it simply transfers ineffability to nature, with no particular consequences other than semantic ones.

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67. 67. NewYorkJosh 02:42 PM 7/7/08

    I haven't read the book in question - but here is how I would explain the role of a divine consciousness in the implications of emergence theory (as they have occurred to me in my own studies): the deep implication of emergence theory is that it emergence operates at each change in organizational state of matter and information. From the way quarks naturally clump to form the subatomic particles of the standard theory, to the way those subatomic particles agglomerate into atoms; atoms into molecules; molecules into life; single cell life into multicellular creatures etc...
    
    To borrow a concept from "Godel Escher Bach", if you were, say, an alien and you knew our alphabet and knew all the rules for how letters combine you still couldn't imagine the richness of language. In a similar way, subatomic particles are like letters, and have simple rules, but you could not interpolate the richness of the behavior of atoms, and all the cool properties of the elements, from the properties of those subatomic particles. Those properties are emergent. Conversely atoms are a simple alphabet, from which you could never derive all the wild and wacky ways chemical compounds behave. Yet subatomic particles spontaneously self organize into atoms which spontaneously self organize into molecules. At each major phase transition, complexity derives a totally new morphology, one totally impossible to derive from the rules of the lower order. In the case of the actual alphabet, the rules for their combination into written words are derived from our language, a product of our intelligence. A religious person would say that the self organizing principles of the universe are direct evidence of God and an atheist would say that they are facts of the universe and are fascinating and beautiful but that's it.
    
    You can't say much about the deity implied by the "language" or "mindset" of the universe's emergent self-organizing principles except that the deep philosophy is "emergent phenomena struggles to self-order as a stand against the march of entropy". There are many moral principles that can be derived from this - environmentalism, "thou shalt not kill (unless your survival depends on it)", etc.. However, since the organizing principles are not described by current scientific theories - the possibility of their being evidence of a divine mind is certainly in play.

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68. 68. gkokm21 03:11 PM 7/7/08

    I feel that trying to redefine god as nature's creativity is adding haze to things. Its just a poetic way of descrbing nature to create a feel good factor about natural phenomenon.
    
    Natural phenomenon are just that... we humans realize that there are many laws and different systems.. like classical, emergent or quantum and they are simply knowledge which we can study and apply them. So our job is just to study them as systematically and as efficiently as possible so that we can create power and hopefully, a power so large that we can turn back time .. something like that.... haha....

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69. 69. gkokm21 03:37 PM 7/7/08

    let me offer a argument why god dun exist.
    
    they say god exist because it was mentioned in the bible. and bible contains gods words and stories. This is illogical because the two things, which are god and bible, are circular error, whereby the things twos claim that each other is real and truely exist.

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70. 70. sujeewa 04:38 AM 7/8/08

    See a fiction which I came up in my blog:
    
    http://whisper-in-the-breeze.blogspot.com/2008/07/beyond-rock.html

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71. 71. sujeewa in reply to NewYorkJosh 09:31 AM 7/8/08

    Nice ideas NewYorkJosh. BTW, I have been asking this Question for some time.
    
    Is there really an emergence/complexity? Or is it a problem in us trying to undertand the universe? What I mean is, the elementary/micro level of transitions can be individually explained. And its high level macro phenomena seems complex, simply because there are too many transitions and permutations - NOT because there exists a magic layer of emergence. i.e. emergence is the simplified word we use to explain the zillion individual "dumb and simple" events. Hence emergence is an issue in our understanding, not something that is inherent in the universe and reality.
    

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72. 72. NewYorkJosh in reply to sujeewa 01:22 PM 7/8/08

    sujeewa <>
    
    That's the crux of it, sujeewa. Certainly the phenomena of emergence seems deeply mysterious - numinous - to my human mind. Quite likely, however, my mind is wired this way. Just like it's wired to look for expression in human faces; humans look for patterns, order in disorder - and meaning in the patterns. But why are humans wired this way?
    
    Each of the phase transitions I mentioned [quarks to particles>particles to atoms>atoms to molecules> complex molecules to life ] seems to come about as a kind of natural spontaneous crystallization of higher organization as a response to the flow of entropy - a self ordering using the flow of energy concomitant with a flow from lower to higher state of entropy.
    
    The flow of energy and entropy has been used to create interesting analogs of natural phenomena in the lab. For example sand box physics where viscous fluids or "sand" (made for masses of evenly shaped little metal beads) are vibrated at certain resonant frequencies. Vibrational nodes form called "oscillons" - which at the right frequency behave just like subatomic particles with behavior that mimics electromagnetic attraction and repulsion - right down to the math that describes the observed behavior. The fact that a bunch of beads in a dish do this is resonant with the fact that real subatomic particles in the real world do it. The point is that there seems to be something in the flow of energy and/or entropy that activates a self organizing principle in the universe that seems to operate in different but somehow self similar internally consistent ways across vastly different scales.
    
    Some of the quality of this emergence can be experienced directly by doing the recursive math that generates chaos and then studying the fractal nature of the resulting chaotic structures. Is the similarity of this simple yet infinite math to the physical phenomena meaningful - or is it just reflective of common causes? That's the deep question. I find it difficult not to see the face of god in this stuff - but I suspect that might be human instinct for religiosity.
    
    Kauffman seems to be making the argument that the human need for meaning is valid and that human free agency in physical events in the real world transcends scientific analysis - making a place for the numinous necessary in human affairs. I'm not so sure. I've ordered the book and will post back here after I've finished reading it.

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73. 73. NewYorkJosh in reply to sujeewa 01:34 PM 7/8/08

    Sujeewa - I just read your "Beyond the Rock" story. It's a lovely parable for what religion is. As an atheist I've looked at the history of religion and shaken my head at the ironic inconsistencies. As a student of various religions I have tried to open my heart but floundered on the inconsistencies and fictions. As an agnostic rationalist I have tried to follow the science and do the math and I keep seeing the rock (i.e. some sense of the divine) everywhere I look at those phase transitions. It is a mirage in my brain - or is it something real. The science of emergence, and the fractal nature of chaos theory feels like my best hope yet. If a suitable theory develops that puts the structure of these universal phase transitions into a coherently described theory - then the light of science will have pushed back the touch of numinous madness/inspiration that infects me. I really pray that it does. In the meantime, I can't help get the feeling these structures reflect a deeper language - one whose meaning (and perhaps author) is tantalizingly just beyond by ability to comprehend or perceive.

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74. 74. al 04:05 AM 7/9/08

    When science does not quickly and easily provide all-encompassing explanations - preferably in an anthropocentric frame of reference - spirits in the sky are invoked. This age old custom just won't die out. The limitations of (the scope of) science should be recognised; it just measures and quantifies, but in essence does not really explain anything. In the current state of affairs the mere existence of matter and energy is a total paradox that can only be 'explained' by religious sounding stories like big-bang. Why should the universe comply with human notions like 'meaning'?
    Should we not be a little more patient and - above all - modest?

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75. 75. NewYorkJosh in reply to al 10:53 AM 7/9/08

    al - your comments that "science doesn't really explain anything" and "spirits in the sky are invoked" make me think you haven't really studied this issue. Science actually explains quite a lot. It's not science's failure to provide information that is causing the this particular entertainment of the "god meme". It's precisely because several branches of science (particle physics, chaos theory, emergence, computer modeling of evolution) are meshing in mysterious and evocative ways. In my research I keep seeing the same patterns popping up across vast differences in scale - behaviors of complexity and emergent self organizing behavior and structures in math, matter, and biology. The prevalence of these repeating structures and their deep mysterious concordance and similarity is what is inspiring. It's the science itself - the actual content of observation that is providing the grist for divine conjectures - not "spirits in the sky".

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76. 76. sujeewa in reply to NewYorkJosh 12:06 PM 7/9/08

    NewYorkJosh, [and here is a personal message] seeing from what you mention about your research I have become very fascinated in knowing what it is. Would you please post your website or something related.
    
    If you want to know where I am right now, I am working on some personal research related to Chaos theory, emergence, evolutionary computation and business decision making. I am trying to produce a research proposal and then few papers and move towards research, as a student. I am in the lookout for potential reserach supervisers and find youreself as 100% match for my interested fields.
    
    BTW, I hope you'd not discard me for being a free thinker, and if I can work under you I hope my freedom of [lack of] belief is preserved :) [Just kidding in this paragraph]
    
    And I hope Sci-am wont remove my personal message.

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77. 77. sujeewa in reply to NewYorkJosh 12:36 PM 7/9/08

    For patterns, well, I agree with NewYorkJosh. I also see patterns. Sometimes you get really overwhelmed and surprised. Patterns are not only seen while you analyse data sets, sometimes when you sit in your arm chair and think, about life universe and everything, I get so many tingling feelings about patterns - just everywhere.
    
    Interpretation of them is something personal. I understand how some people interpret them to GOD [I use capitals not to get confused with God, as per Bible - who is described almost alltogether differently]. GOD, be it emergnce, creativity, a living being or just everything, lives in our mind. We are unable to think beyond the phriphary of it, well, in any case. So it can be existent, non-existent, or those two terms have no meaning at that layer. Most Eastern ideologies say that there is nothing called reality, and it is a cabbage of infinite leaves.
    
    However, every religion that I know of has an explanation for these patterns. The followers are capable of mapping it well to the inexplicable. This makes me think that they are all imaginations due to childhood brainwash.
    
    So what are these patterns? What is resonance? What is entrophy? What are these basic universal forces and why dont they sit on one G-U-T? And the Golden Propotion? List is endless.
    
    But can they be just universe's elementary building blocks? Can they be just another phenomena to be modelled by our great scientists of today? Can they be the original sin of maths and science that is never to be redeemed? [Someone stated that if we based our numbers on the golden propotion instead of 10, we'd understand universe well. Stephen Hawkings said that feasibility of G-U-T will depend on the fact whether the universe is self-explanatory - since G-U-T is everything of universe and we will be part of the universe]. There are so many different ideas but GOD, some in other religions, some in scientific hypoththetical forms. GOD is not a nessacity, just an inevitable for the followers, not for the rest. Hence it is not necessarily THE TRUTH. Rich or poor we stand even here dont we? :)
    
    Now on particle->atom->molecules->complex molecules->life scenario. Pls refer to http://whisper-in-the-breeze.blogspot.com/2008/05/life-if-any_24.html [my blog] for a long discussion of life [or the lack of it] as I see. Also this transition is something I'm woirking by means of a sci-fi and will post it when I do. Sorry for directing to long [boring] write-ups of mine. But it takes its toll and I'm compelled to write long.
    
    And maybe, that's my religion. Enjoy.

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78. 78. sujeewa 02:15 PM 7/9/08

    Oneday so far in distant future, Internet will be Lord almighty, as it can include, almost everything known.
    
    If you like classic Sci-fi take this from maetro Asimov "The Last Question" - http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html
    

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79. 79. NewYorkJosh in reply to sujeewa 01:24 PM 7/10/08

    Sujeewa, I greatly enjoyed your blog on criteria for recognition of life (and I replied there). You are clearly doing some deep thinking.
    
    As for my research - I'm talking about my personal research. I've been studying physics, chaos theory mathematics (with lots of fun on the computer), evolutionary theory modeling on the computer, and lots of reading up on biology. I've been studying these subjects on my own time for decades. (I work in IT to make a living.) My ideas are not published or peer reviewed and I haven't posted them on the Internet as you have done yours, on blogs (but maybe you have inspired me to start). I'm searching for published research that reflects these ideas. I can't believe that I'm the only one to have them. Kauffman's book seems to be on this subject. My order (his last 2 books) should be delivered soon - I'll post here when I've finished them. If you know of anyone else publishing on this subject I'm keen to hear about it.
    
    The research I've read on emergence seems to focus on specific cases of emergent phenomenon - at specific scales. Works of grand synthesis are quite rare. One example is P. Anderson's seminal article on broken symmetry in the August 1972 issue of Science:
    http://www.cmp.caltech.edu/~motrunch/Teaching/Phy135b_Winter07/MoreIsDifferent.pdf
    
    If my ideas are original - I'm not the one to argue them, because I am not a member of scientific community. I doubt, however, that my ideas are original - I just haven't been able to find them in print yet. I have, as I've said, some high hopes for Kauffman.

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80. 80. sujeewa in reply to NewYorkJosh 02:06 PM 7/10/08

    Let me take this to reply few comments of NewYorkJosh.
    
    Thanks for taking your time on the blog. And thanks for updating me on your situation. For quite a sometime I did personal reserach, in fact most of which is "arm-chair" research [:)]. Meanwhile I'm also working with an "intel" which only knows to sum up, just like you. Now I want to spend all my time on reserach and get my "crude" ideas validated in a public system. Only practical protocol that I see is joining postgrad research.
    
    On your comment about [my article on] life, let me copy it here.
    
    I stated that;
    "I think there are only few elementary features that made life sustainable on earth. Let's generalize them.
    
    1. Ability to multiply its own structure (be it chemical of any other).
    2. Ability to apply mutations to the new generation at the correct rate"
    
    You said [after some more description which I agree]:
    "You must add a third criterion: Ability to actively modify the interior environment inside their bodies to sustain their dynamic processes."
    
    My condition 2 states "at correct rate". If my two conditions are fulfilled, then the evolution begins right there. If the "wavelengths" of reproduction and mutation matches the those of the environment, the evolution converges towards one or few directions.
    
    As a result of such convergence it may or may not be needing "Ability to actively modify the interior environment inside their bodies to sustain their dynamic processes", in order to enhance themselves. But you're right that Earth life needs this. And it has been evolved to achieve this at the very early days of life/nonlife margin [which may not be a meaningful term]. Amino Acids or Proteans can't eat of digust. Ameoba can. So the chemical processes of eating and digusting are achievements of evolution, if it is converging towards some direction.
    
    Not necessarily all potential "life" need to eat and digust, or modify their interior. What if they have energy sources capable of keep you running until they expire? What if they evolve nuclear fusion? And the "growing up" is also essential for us, not for bacteria? Bacteria does not "modify" itself. It just reproduces.
    
    What matters is the converging evolution. If not for that, processes may reproduce and mutate sporadically, but it will not progress and hence called non-life.
    
    In my other blogpost "Beyond the Rock" the rock symbolises the inexplicable, not deity. Deity, randomness, emergence, lack of reality, lack of comprehension, rationality, aethism and all the lot are what they imagine as "Beyond the Rock".

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81. 81. NewYorkJosh in reply to sujeewa 02:53 PM 7/10/08

    Sujeewa, fascinating topic. You said "My condition 2 states "Amino Acids or Proteans can't eat of digust. Ameoba can. So the chemical processes of eating and digusting are achievements of evolution, if it is converging towards some direction. Not necessarily all potential "life" need to eat and digust, or modify their interior. What if they have energy sources capable of keep you running until they expire? What if they evolve nuclear fusion? And the "growing up" is also essential for us, not for bacteria? Bacteria does not "modify" itself. It just reproduces. "
    
    By your definition a fire would be life. The fire can reproduce (sparks give birth to new baby fires). The fire evolves with its environment (subsequent "generations" can have different chemistry, color, and temperature if the fuel has different properties). Philosophically stars are just like fires. They can spread (a supernova can cause adjacent dust clouds to form or collapse because of shockwave); they burn through their fuel and then leave chemically transformed ashes. But unlike like, fires and stars do not have dynamic internal chemistry that works towards maintaining an internal environment for its own continuation. Bacteria do, indeed digest - unlike lifeless precursors. Digestion is one of the dynamic processes we call "metabolism" which defines life. The bacteria maintains its lipid boundary; maintains a homeostatic equilibrium, digests, and reproduces itself via these internal dynamic processes. Viruses, by contrast, do not. That's an interesting case. Viruses, by virtue of possessing nucleic acid molecules that express in the cells of other life forms, show their common ancestry with those other life forms. By not having an active metabolism, they lack a defining characteristic of life - but they are clearly "organisms" within the context of our biosphere. If we found an alien "virus"we might not recognize the analogous nucleic acid type molecule and failing to observe metabolism would probably fail to recognize it as an organism - and that would be a mistake.
    
    I guess the critical term I'm not understanding is "the proper rate". I don't see how rates of mutation are the issue. I'm still hung up on what differentiates a bacterium from a fire.

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82. 82. NewYorkJosh in reply to NewYorkJosh 02:55 PM 7/10/08

    Sujeewa - sorry I misquoted you. Please mentally remove "my condition 2 states" from my quoting of your post in the post I just made. It's out of place and I intended to cut it but missed it.

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83. 83. sujeewa in reply to NewYorkJosh 06:00 PM 7/10/08

    My whole point is there is nothing elementary called life. Just some macro level interpretation is called so, whereas at microlevel there are emelentary non-life and that's all.
    
    So, for me I see no difference in fire, bacteria, virus and humans, Some are converging in their evolution. Some are sporadic, and inbetween.
    
    I wonder what you'd call life and what you wont. You stated " By not having an active metabolism, they [virus] lack a defining characteristic of life - but they are clearly organisms within the context of our biosphere." This is exactly I am arguing against. The complex zillion little chemical actvities make us think that we are life, and few other animals too, but virus arent. I think it is a miss-interpretation.
    
    And religion fuels this. Soul or equivelant idea. That is why we tend to thnk some species are life and the rest as organism. In Buddhism too, trees and micro-species were either never mentioned or never treated as life.
    
    Life, to me is an organised macro behavior of "non-life" or organisms, And that organising is a habbit trained through evolution [zillion tiny elementary "dumb" transitions]. Life is another one like Emergence - inability to comprehend it analytically. In reality, at elementary level, there is nothing called life.

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84. 84. NewYorkJosh 01:18 PM 7/11/08

    Sujeewa says: "...there is nothing elementary called life. ...I see no difference in fire, bacteria, virus and humans, ... In reality, at elementary level, there is nothing called life."
    
    I understand your frustration with limited definitions of life that might fail to recognize the truly divergent forms alien life might take, and that more philosophically, somehow differentiate life from more elemental processes. You seem to seek a deeper oneness between life and the universe. However, in this pursuit I think you've thrown the baby out with the bathwater. Life is fundamentally different from simple chemical reactions like fire. Life's self organizing self replicating quality is totally unlike any other natural process. A fire burns out. But life continually renews itself in an active and transformative way. Life has dramatically transformed the environment on Earth - and transformed itself in the process. Life has persisted on earth from a common genesis moment for over 3 billion years. Geneticists have taken animal (fish) genes and had them express in plants (tobacco) [1] despite the fact that fish and tobacco last shared a common ancestor more than a billion years ago. These industrious little nucleic acid molecules have been churning away for eons - and yet their fundamental chemistry persists (as evidenced that gene expression still works in both divergent branches after such a long time.
    
    This perpetual-motion-machine like quality of life is fundamentally - elementally - different and special and distinct from other natural phenomena. I don't think you do anyone any favors when you deny that specialness. Kauffman's point is that the "extra information magically appearing" quality of emergence is evident all over the universe from the subatomic scale all the way up through evolution into the human brain and then out into the forms and quality of human social interaction and free agency. This is further than I'm prepared to go. I'm still wowed by the emergent properties of the water molecule - far beyond what you could extrapolate from just knowing about atomic oxygen and hydrogen. Don't even get me started on fluorine and sodium or any of the proteins.

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85. 85. NewYorkJosh in reply to NewYorkJosh 01:19 PM 7/11/08

    My citation on the fish/tobacco genetics cross in the previous post:
    [1] Hightower R, Baden C, Penzes E, Lund P, and Dunsmuir P. 1991. Expression of antifreeze proteins in transgenic plants. Plant Molecular Biology 17: 1013-1021.

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86. 86. sujeewa in reply to NewYorkJosh 02:03 PM 7/11/08

    Josh, I appreciate your replies. And like the directions you guide it. As few of the people [including Verily notably] stated, we are suffering from a symptom of what they coin as Anthropic Principle.
    
    We have atomic level, molecule level, big molecules, basic life forms, comples life forms, and [so called - as per our definition] intelligent life forms. We both agree that their transitions can be analysed into minute "dumb and simple" elements. The question is in the ordering of the elements.
    
    I understand your view, that the "complex" systems are produced by "simple" systmes due to whatever fundamenatal "magical" forces of universe, which you categorically coin as emergence, and then you like to add some form of divine nature into it, simply because it produces a series of complex structures.
    
    My point differs here. I think that it is a coincident which caused atom->molecule->big molecule->basic life [synonymously] -> complex life->intelligence[synonymously]. It was a lucky coincident that small carbon compounds could produce complex big molecules like Amino Acids. And then it was a coincidence that they caused DNA, which was capable of producing a self-reproducable cell and so on. Unfortunately the other such simple phenomena, can not produce such complexity, since the underlying chemistry and physics is not tuned rightly. So within my anthropic realization I only consider that Earth's carbon based "life" as the most progressive transformation and surely it has surpassed the basic constraints on the progress of other such systems such as fire.
    
    But I do not consider this as an Emergence at elementary level. I notice that it is a pure coincidence. Had it been in a different environment, something other than carbon and amino acids could have had its chance. You can coin it as randomness and again worship that yet inexplicable phenomena. But I do not see any "magical", "inexplicable" elementary transformations, Just that its extent [amount] is beyond comprehension of us.
    
    No magic or rules of thumb in the solution of life's mathematical equation. Just that we run out of paper due to the infinite number of lines.
    
    Again that is my view. No superiority expected.
    
    Also I should say, I do not strongly believe in this single view point. I havn't discarded Josh's view either. To me this magical, God-like emergence is lesser likely than the pure "dumb and simple" zillion transitions.
    
    And all this within the anthropic realization, below which is by theory incomprehensive. Who knows, stars and planets may be laughing at you and me:)

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87. 87. NewYorkJosh in reply to sujeewa 02:50 PM 7/11/08

    Sujeewa: " I think that it is a coincident which caused atom->molecule->big molecule->basic life [synonymously] -> complex life->intelligence[synonymously]. It was a lucky coincident that small carbon compounds could produce complex big molecules like Amino Acids. And then it was a coincidence that they caused DNA, which was capable of producing a self-reproducable cell and so on. "
    
    That's a lot of coincidence. I might go along with it being coincidence that our universe has basic conditions which allow life. However, the way that extra information seems to pop out at major scale/phase transitions seems very germane to the formation to life, to me.
    
    I'll be the first to admit that I don't feel comfortable calling such an unknown phenomenon "God". It might certainly be a powerful but rationally explainable aspect of the natural world that does not imply recourse to anything as spooky as "infinite mind", "external wisdom entity" or however you want to define the divine. The legacy of the Christian repression of freedom of thought in the West has made religion the enemy of empiricism. This legacy cannot easily be overlooked. Kauffman's point is that HE sees a ghost in the machine and finds the scientific evidence points to a numinous aspect in the universe. Until I learn otherwise I have to agree. I see a numinous quality in what I've "categorically" called "emergence". I'm not wedded to the term (it's a dangerously loose term). Maybe "synergy" - "complexity derived paradoxical increase in information richness" - I don't know what the right words are. Whatever it's called, I can't just simply write it off.

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88. 88. NewYorkJosh in reply to sujeewa 03:51 PM 7/11/08

    Sujeewa said: "I understand your view, that the "complex" systems are produced by "simple" systmes due to whatever fundamenatal "magical" forces of universe, which you categorically coin as emergence, and then you like to add some form of divine nature into it, simply because it produces a series of complex structures."
    
    I'm not just talking about complexity deriving from simple things - I'm talking about radically new phenomenon seeming to emerge from complex interactions of simple components. Let me give a concrete example:
    
    Take what you know about atomic hydrogen and atomic oxygen. You'll understand that they'll combine 2 to 1 as H2O from their electron structure. However, are the unique properties of water (solvent action; liquid at room temperature; degree of viscosity; freezing, boiling points, etc...) derivable from what you know about its atomic components? Not that I know of. The properties of water are of a very different nature. Science has been so successful being reductive that it hasn't bothered looking at the constructivist side (except in certain discrete areas like chemistry). The real question is are the emergent properties of water actually derivable from its component elements - just we don't know how; or is the phenomenon truly emergent and, if so, why? Is it because of quantum uncertainty? Or is it because the behavior of water is a created out of the complex interactions of water molecules and this phenomenon is far beyond the scale or scope of action of oxygen and water by themselves? Is there some chaos involved is the complex group molecular interactions? If the properties of water are truly unpredictable - through some real provable uncertainty - what is the structure and nature of this uncertainty? Is there a structure and order like the periodic table of elements has - in describing properties of atoms that are not predictable - and appear emergent in light of the know properties of subatomic particles. Can the emergent qualities be described and fitted into a theory? Or - are they evidence of a deeper organizing principle that one might - anthropically - view as "our creator" (since - really - that's what it is).
    
    My problem with viewing the emergent phenomenon as just coincidence is that there are strange concordances across scale - like the aforementioned dish of beads that can be vibrated and then spontaneously behave like subatomic particles. It's the spontaneous self organizing aspect that resonates with me.

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89. 89. sujeewa in reply to NewYorkJosh 03:53 PM 7/11/08

    Hmmmm,
    
    I'm in no point of accepting or denying.
    
    My whole idea is to show that there is a tiny constraint to be passed for some processes to self-progress. It is not necessarily God's plan, Emergence, or randomness. Zillions of dumb and simple transitions can go ahead automatically.
    
    Let's keep ourselves open for the next day's reserach. I remain void of faith anyway. I am only changing the possibility coefficients in my mind.
    
    SInce we're both into Chaos theory, let us see where it leads to. If oneday some form of emergence is broken down mathematically, even to a vague scale, your argument of "magic" layer is explained with deterministic concepts.
    
    Until such time I have no way for further continuation of "proving" one is right.
    
    Ah, one more thing. I'd like to invite Josh on studying a different religious framework [but w/o prejudgement, ok?]. West lived under Christianity for few millenia. But it does not provide any supremacy for one religion. Take the comparison of other's religion. That is not affected by YOUR brainwash so you're free to see it.
    
    Impact of Christianity on my non-christian childhood brainwash was my eye-opening on how primitive all religions are.

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90. 90. NewYorkJosh in reply to mcgruff 04:14 PM 7/11/08

    McGruff said: ""This article(and emergence in general) should get a lot of hits as it states some things that go against the laws of thermo, namely, "the whole is greater than the sum of it's parts"
    
    There will always be an energy source to power the work done emerging and maintaining complexity and hence the laws of thermodynamics reman intact. For example, the vast majority of the earth's ecosystems are solar-powered; none of these could survive without the sun.
    
    From the moment of the big bang until the heat death of the universe, essentially all that ever happens is the re-distribution of energy from one place to another or from one form to another, and the net effect of any energy transaction is always an increase in entropy. We can hitch a ride, for a while, and maybe process some information along the way, but there is only one end to the journey. Finally, all lights must go out. Forever. "
    
    Bravo McGruff - that's so true. When I talk about all these phase change emergent phenomena happening along the march from low to high entropy - that's what I'm talking about. The history of the universe is an evolution from a super hot totally low entropy ordered plasma down to a total entropy heat death. Along the way all that energy flow engenders all this material transformation and emergence happens at the scale transitions. The dish of sand doesn't pop out oscillons that act like subatomic particles until the disk is vibrated at the right frequency. It's the energy coursing through the system that sets up the complex interactions that spontaneously self-organize in the phenomena I'm referring to. That energy flow - and how it relates back to the the big energy vector of the universe's evolutionary history of expansion is a big part of the story.

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91. 91. NewYorkJosh in reply to sujeewa 04:36 PM 7/11/08

    Sujeewa says: " If oneday some form of emergence is broken down mathematically, even to a vague scale, your argument of "magic" layer is explained with deterministic concepts."
    
    No doubt true. As I said in my second post - I'm sincerely hoping that this happens. I'm a lot more comfortable without the spooky mystery staring me in the face. A nice bit of deterministic equations really keeps you warm at night (for real).
    
    Sujeewa says: "Until such time I have no way for further continuation of "proving" one is right."
    
    I certainly have no proofs of anything either - just questions and opinions. I hope I haven't offended you with my disagreement about what constitutes life. There is not scientific consensus about a definitive definition - so this area is very much fair play no doubt. I certainly do feel strongly about the self-sustaining aspect.
    
    sujeewa: "Ah, one more thing. I'd like to invite Josh on studying a different religious framework ..."
    
    Thanks. I actually have spent a lot of time studying other religions - specifically the Mayan theology, Buddhism, the Tao, and a number of African anamistic sects as well as Judaism, Christianity, and some Hinduism. I'm not a pro at comparative religions but I'm not a babe in the woods either.

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92. 92. sujeewa in reply to NewYorkJosh 05:36 PM 7/11/08

    On " I hope I haven't offended you with my disagreement about what constitutes life." No Josh not at all. Every new idea is very well appreciated. In fact this is the only way how isolated private universes combine to some degree. And when they do, conflicts are inevitable. I would be thankful for a different scholarly explanation. And I do NOT have a fixed idea to feel yours as blasphemy.
    
    For the case of Water, I think that those fetures of water are "explained" by science. i.e. why it is a liquid and why it has other features. They are all due to the COMBINATION or elementary features of H and O. Combinations make it seemingly complex. If H has 25 [just say] features and O has 25 more, they can combine and produce... well a zilllion, as each feature can exhibit infinite states [analog]. Fortunately, for water, a very little is left unexplained.
    
    Take brain. An individual neuron is almost "plain dumb". But there are nine billion neurons, with each capable of making 100s or 1000s of connections. Nine billion into power of hundred - wow, perhaps the biggets number I heard of. And that makes people think oh well, the dumb neuron makes a magic of a brain - hurrah, emergence.
    
    Luckily H and O has much less number of features and hence most of the features of Water is scientifcally explained.
    
    And for any unexplained, we are free to choose any name. Chaos, emergence, God, whatever. Sometime back, when water was not known as H2O, people thanked God for making the drinkable fluid called water. Science is explaining it to a ggreat deal now. So as someone else said, have patience and let the science deepen its explicability. Sadly, we may not be alive by then.
    
    I would like to take this discussion to one more very good concept someone brought [forgot the name in the 10 page mega debate]. [s]he asked whether it is our inability to comprehend infinity that we suffer. Indeed. If infinity is a reality in universe [which I think so] and since we are unable to comprehend it, this mental conflict causes us looking for some "magic" to fill the gap.
    
    When I was puzzled about Buddhism's three fundamental universal "natures" [anitta, dukka, anatta], specially #2 of it, a well read buddhist scholar stated that the bottomline of dukka is the mental conflict that arises when the "personal" universe of one's mind tries to overlap on the general universe. Anyway, I am not suggesting that it is a replacement for what we call emergence. Just showing you how many religions come up with a near-explanation for inexplicable.

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93. 93. sujeewa in reply to NewYorkJosh 01:20 AM 7/12/08

    Josh, most of the detail below is NOT my opinion, but what scientists think as scientific knowledge. Kauffman's hypothesis is one among infinite others, still at the state of a hypothesis.
    
    All right let me clear the bit of confusion over "Coincidence". I may not have provided enough explaination there. Apologies.
    
    If you look at the line atom->molecule->big molecule->basic life -> complex life->intelligence, I did not mean that it is a coincidence that it produced the rise of complex form from simple nonlife [terms taken for popular meaning]. Let's call the process atom ->...->intelligence my vertical axis. Coincidence is happening over a horizontal plane. i.e. At each infinitesimal node of transition, the choice of the next stage of higher structure is infinite. Process of evolution does not take one such path as if it is pre-programmed. It tries all. The one that sustains is chosen by the environment. That is what I meant by coincidence.
    
    When that simple theory is applied, the vertical rise from atom -> ... -> intelligence is not a coincidence, but something convergent, quite inevitable and automatic. Had there been slight variations of environment, in the time of such changes happening, the nature's choice would change and certainly the higher level structures of life and intelligence would look much different. Otherwise it is not a nicely pre-programmed design plan or, utmost creative, awesome emergence. It is just simple and dumb transitions, Trial an error, Coincidence.
    
    SImply put: The pinnacle of life and inteligence that we anthropically decide today, is just one such path. There are zillion others which would have been the case, if the environment supported them. Hence there is no magic in life or intelligence, something will represnt it for all the prababilty domain. As long as the basic evolution starts getting convergent [as described in my two basic conditions of reproduction and mutation] the rest is inevitable and automatic.
    
    I still dont see an essential reason to imagine some fundetmental emergence, a magic layer or god. To me, the fact the evolution is a trial and error process, is a point against the well laid out plan/design or a elementary creativity. And if you take each religion, they all try to explain inexplicable so nothing is magical about Christianity.
    
    Feel free to believe or not. But science will continue in its rational process and it will keep on deepenng its explicability, hence diminishing inexplicable.

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94. 94. sujeewa 01:56 AM 7/12/08

    Hi all,
    
    Due to some urgent requirement I will be off this channel for a week or two. And pls dont missinterpret it, I truly appreciate the channel and your intellectual presence. I hope to get in touch soon.

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95. 95. sujeewa 02:47 AM 7/17/08

    Hmmm...
    
    After sometime I logged in, and found that time has become stand-still.
    
    Yeah we were at best sporadic in our veiw points. So that will be the end, isn't it?
    

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96. 96. tomballard 10:09 AM 7/17/08

    Why isn't Shermer's latest article on wheatgrass posted? I'd be ashamed too. Putting down a harmless fad and not saying a word about the big patent medicine charlatans - the pharmaceutical industry. Critical thinking?

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97. 97. uncommonsense in reply to Tan Boon Tee 03:25 AM 7/23/08

    You are wrong. The laws of physics, and all sciences, break down at both ends of time: at the beginning and at the end. We know that quantum physics broke down and did not apply at the Big Bang. Therefore, quantum physics is not a "law" that is always 100% right, but merely a theory that is approximate. Also, the laws of conservation of energy and thermodynamics do not and cannot apply to the universe as a whole because because the universe is not a closed system.
    
    Furthermore, these so-called laws are simply shorthand and incomplete. Quantum mechanics cannot be 100% proven because of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, which can only be solved by going to the 5th dimension. We cannot do that.
    
    These laws are simply generalizations and generalizations are never 100% accurate. You cannot use the "law" to apply to specific particles in specific spaces at specific times, if for no other reason than, even though minute, the speed of light between your observation point and the observed thing is such that you do not know exactly what happened when. Therefore your "proof" will never be 100% accurate.
    
    Finally, the human element will always mean that we must leave room for doubt in everything. This again means that no "law" can be 100% accurate. Thus there are no such things as "laws" of science but only theories that require a type of blind faith if one is to believe they are 100% accurate and true, and this is no different from the religious person's faith that his theories and explanations of the world are 100% true.

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98. 98. uncommonsense 03:58 AM 7/23/08

    You are wrong. Science itself is simply a theory based upon a methodology that says a theory is "proven" if it can be reproduced in a controlled environment and a consistent result achieved every time.
    
    However, the theory of science itself is proven false by the scientific method.
    
    The scientific method is one that is strictly based upon hindsight. The theory of science merely assumes that because something always happened in the past, it will always happen in the future. It substitutes hindsight for foresight; the past is substituted for the future. But this is why it is false. Even though an experiment may be reproduced, it is reproduced at different times and in different spaces. All we can say for certain then if we are to be 100% accurate as we claim scientific laws to be is that at this particular time at this particular space, we achieved this result. That is all. Deductive logic turns into inductive logic when we generalize from specific examples to the entire whole.
    
    That is a fallacy. It is like saying, “Because I have never died in the past, I will never die in the future.”
    
    There are several other reasons why the theory of science is false:
    
    We can never be 100% certain of what happened at what particular time because not only of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle but because the small distance the speed of light has to travel between the observer and the observed means we can never know for certain what happened when. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle can be solved by moving to the 5th dimension, but until we can do that, that is simply another reason the “laws” of science will always be nothing more that “theories.”
    
    Furthermore, the laws of science will never be 100% accurate because they break down at the beginning and end of time. At the time of the Big Bang, all scientific “laws” broke down, which means they are not universal nor are they100% accurate in their application. If the laws of physics broke down once, they can break down again, invalidating the “laws” of physics. Also, the universe as a whole violates scientific laws such as the law of thermo dynamics and quantum physics.
    
    If these scientific laws were 100% accurate, they would be provable across dimensions, but they are not. They simply apply to the dimension that we are trapped in.
    
    Also, there is no such thing as a “closed” system. You cannot separate the fact that the scientist poured the chemicals into the beaker to start the reaction from the fact of the chemical reaction itself. All these causal factors are simply cut off in an arbitrary way, again meaning that your quantum physics or any other law cannot fully explain the phenomena described. You cannot get around the fact of existence. Therefore, every law, to be 100% accurate, would have to list every single cause and every single result within the non-existent “closed” system. You cannot draw a closed system in space any more than you can in time. Every law of physics then should start something like this, “In the beginning, an atom was created.” You still have to somehow explain how and why these particles exist in the first place if you are to list all the forces within the closed system. Somehow everything got into the closed system to begin with, right? You must begin at the beginning.
    
    There is also the human element, which means everything is subject to error and must be discounted as not being 100% accurate or you end up looking like the fools who were 100% certain that the earth was flat. Nothing is 100% certain.
    
    The laws of science themselves are simply generalizations that cannot be applied to any one specific particle at one specific time in one specific space. Otherwise, you would have to identify the particle, the space, etc. The best you could do then is say “at this one specific time with this specific particle at this specific space, this one result happened.” No matter how many times you redo the experiment, you are never doing the exact same experiment, and you cannot take them all and use inductive logic to substitute for deductive logic by saying, “These samples did this; therefore, we will generalize from individual samples to describe the entire whole when we have not tested the entire whole but only a few samples of it.”
    
    Those who believe that the laws of science govern the universe do so on blind faith no different from any other kind of blind faith because the theory of science is proved false by its own methods.
    

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99. 99. sujeewa in reply to uncommonsense 02:51 PM 7/24/08

    A very accurate note on science. In simple trerms science is an approximate explanation, a model of reality, which stands close to reality to a certain precision. And hence 100% accuracy means infinity to science.
    
    And I think [as someone else stated in this long thread of comments] that the attempt of realising the infinite universe by the finite human is the core issue. Human brain - however complex it is - is finite, and hence it's unable to fully comprehend infinity. There is no comprehensive pragmatic answer to question "what is infinity?", other than mathematical, metaphoric or symbolic ones.
    
    If you want a 100% it is YOUR fault. Such people think that scientists have to believe or have faith to build science. If you understand the inherent inexplicability, uncertainity and "mortality" of any explanation, I think that should be lesson one of science. A good scientist, in my view should not "believe" in his own theory even. His objective should be to make it explain better.
    
    But science is a moving knowledge base. Anything that fails to explain a new finding will be moved to the museums of science. A new theory will take over. This is a very strong reason for it to be the enlightenment of people [approximately again]. Religions, in the contrast, seal off the science of its founder's day with the personal perspective and seemingly imagination of the individual who authors it. That sealed chunk of knowledge is blindly transfered knowledge after knowledge through force and childhoos brainwash. Religion's 100% is achieved by means of force and brainwash, not free reasoning.
    
    I think that science is a better model, with higher precision of accuracy than religion due to its adaptability. There is no individual "might" within the scientific realm.
    
    I would find one contradiction [minute] with you. You mentioned that Q-physics falls apart at the two ends of big-banged universe, which is a flaw of Q-physics. Partly accepcted, but it can be a flaw of big bang theory too. Big bang is such a sluggish and stupid narrow thought of science [to me]. It cannot the beginning of Universe at all, if universe means "everything" [total infinity]. Also its foundation called "cosmological principle" is not at all logical. I did not mean Q-physics is 100% correct either, ok?
    
    Again, the beutification of inexplicable into a faith can not be justified by the lack 100% in science. It only shows inability to comprehend fundamentals of universe by the faith-driven individual due to brainwash. If you drop your hunger for 100%, everything will be fine.

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100. 100. gs_chandy 11:57 PM 7/26/08

     Well, from all the goofups I see in the way this SciAm discussion forum has been set up by Those In Charge, it is clear that SciAm would greatly benefit from some effective website design - and it wouldn't really matter at all whether God 0, God 1, God 2 or God (infinity) were to take up the task. Practically anything would have to be an improvement!
     
     --- GSC

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101. 101. gs_chandy 12:41 AM 7/27/08

     In my last posting, I had suggested that Those In Charge of these discussion forums at SciAm may like to seek the help of God 0, God 1, God 2, ..., God (infinity) to help them do a better job.
     
     I'm not claiming to be any kind of God (even God [minus infinity] - but here, for whatever they may be worth (or not worth), are some my observations of the goofups in the way that Those In Charge have committed in the design of this forum:
     
     1) Ever hear of anything called paragraphing? Helps readability very significantly. (You will notice that none of the messages at this thread have any paragraphs. I am pretty certain that the most of the authors had indeed put up their contributions with paragraphs - but Those In Charge of Discussion Forum Website Design at SciAm have not considered it necessary to PROVIDE PARAGRAPHS! (I do not know how this message will turn out: in the hope that SOME paragraphs may appear , I have provided double spaces whereever I wanted a paragraph to appear).
     
     2) Many messages have the cryptic comment ahead of it saying: "The following is a direct response to this [the word is a link in blue]. However, when one clicks on the , one is just taken to the beginning of the article! This is of no help at all!
     
     3) You have a potentially useful feature showing "number of characters remaining" at every comment box. As it stands, the feature is entirely useless!! (If one backtracks, removing some characters from one's comments made thus far, the number of characters excised are NOT added back to the "number of characters remaining". (For example, I see at the bottom of this window that I now, at this instance, have 533 characters remaining out of 2573 when I started out. However, an accurate count indicates that I should have many more characters remaining than just the 374 indicated at the instant that I typed that "3" above. (Discrepancies in the numbers above are caused by the fact that I had erased some characters in the message, but the number of characters erased were not added back. I now suddenly have just 89 characters remaining, so am departing in haste! Goodbye!! I now have only 20 characters remain
     
     There are PLENTY more inadequacies in this SciAm site design, but I'm getting a trifle tired with this exercise, not being God 0, God1, God 2, ...., or God [infinity]. May I suggest that Those In Charge should seek the aid of any of them (God 0, God1, God 2, ...., or God [infinity]) to get a better website design out?
     
     Thanks and regard, --- GSC
     
     g

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102. 102. PanamaBob 08:48 PM 7/27/08

     I totally agree about this awe inspiring emergent creative force behind the universe stuff. I usually spell this sort of creativity as "bullshit", though. But if you want to spell it "God", I guess that's your prerogative.

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103. 103. PanamaBob 09:00 PM 7/27/08

     ok - what created "God" the creative intelligence behind everything?
     I've seen a lot of emergent creativity in the universe, but I always labeled it bullshit. Seems to me to be just as good an explanation or definition as that put forth in this article.

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104. 104. Absinthe 02:58 AM 7/28/08

     Religion is a way to explain what we cannot understand rationally and its theories are substituted by science little by little. Human beings are looking for the Truth and when they don't understand something they create a "Deus ex machina". Religion (and the powers linked it) is based on ignorance -that's why, i.e., the Pope recentely has affirmed "If science contraddict religion, science has to stop." Somebody is scared to lost his power on masses, i think...-
     What about things we don't understand or explain? Well, we cannot do it now but it doesn't mean we won't do it in future! We want to know "who we are", we want to understand "where we go", it's natural: we are men. I go everywhere evidence brings me, i want the Truth not fairy tales -which are interesting and funny, i love them, don't misunderstand...Shrek is one of my favourite movies!I like religion, astrology, mithology, fairy tales, Donald Duck, Uncle Scruggle, Mickey Mouse and so on.

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105. 105. Absinthe 03:55 AM 7/28/08

     Religion is a way to explain what we cannot understand rationally, so it's substituting by science little by little. If we cannot understand and/or explain a phenomenon we create a "Deus ex machina" who is burned into ashes when we find a "scientific" explanation.
     If you believe you don't know, if you know you don't believe.
     Religion (and powers linked it) is based on ignorance and that's why somebody, as the Pope, affirms "when science contraddicts religion, science has to stop itself"- somebody is scared to lose his power on masses, i think...
     Human beings are looking for the Truth, for answer to questions as "who are we?", "where do we go?". Well, I go everywhere evidence brings me.
     What about things we cannot explain or understand? If we cannot do it now, it doesn't mean we cannot do it in future! I like religion -don't misunderstand- as i like astrology, mithology, fairy tales, Donald Duck, Uncle Scruggle, Mickey Mouse and so on...but we shouldn't confuse the reality with the fantasy. The existence of God is possible -we don't really know- but the religion -any type of religion- is a human fact not a divine one.

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106. 106. gs_chandy 10:00 AM 7/28/08

     There are still no signs AT ALL to indicate that Those In Charge of the SciAm Discussion Forum have come to realise that their website design of this Discussion Forum is most ineffective!

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107. 107. gs_chandy in reply to gs_chandy 10:33 AM 7/28/08

     How come I can see none of the postings that have come after I posted my first input on 26-July??? --- GSC

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108. 108. gs_chandy 10:40 AM 7/28/08

     HOW COME I CAN SEE NO POSTINGS AT THIS DISCUSSION THREAD AFTER MY (FIRST) POSTING OF 26TH JULY ?? THAT IS THE LAST POSTING THAT SHOWS UP ON MY SCREEN - BUT I HAVE BEEN RECEIVING ANY NUMBER OF MESSAGES FROM THE SCIAM DEMON TO THE EFFECT THAT THERE ARE MESSAGES REGULARLY COMING IN ON THIS FORUM. --- GSC

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109. 109. sujeewa in reply to gs_chandy 02:54 PM 7/29/08

     Looks like sciam site is created via a process like evolution, based on natural selection and mutation - hence no creator. Otherwise it is time to answer gs_candy's "virtual prayers".
     
     Come on Sciam, at least give me a chance to make paragraphs !!!

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110. 110. Tan Boon Tee 12:26 AM 8/3/08

     One needs to differentiate precisely between a fact and an opinion. Facts are supported by evidence, opinions are strictly personal (and therefore, the question of right or wrong does not arise).
     
     When Bradley says You are completely wrong, what actually does he mean and which particular fact does he refer to? It certainly cannot be just wrong opinion!
     
     Comments are comments, not necessarily factual every time. Verily, abuses are not and ought not be acceptable. (Tan Boon Tee)
     

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111. 111. Tan Boon Tee 12:41 AM 8/3/08

     One needs to differentiate precisely between a fact and an opinion. Facts are supported by evidence, opinions are strictly personal (and therefore, the question of right or wrong does not arise).
     
     When Bradley says “You are completely wrong”, what actually does he mean and which particular fact does he refer to? It certainly cannot be just wrong opinion!
     
     Comments are comments, not necessarily factual every time. Verily, abuses are not and ought not be acceptable. (Tan Boon Tee)
     

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112. 112. afraid of me? 10:00 PM 8/6/08

     Discussing "what is science" and...SCIENCE is PATTERN recognition, not truth and the truth is always opinion...or something close. I agree that science is not _simply_ pattern recognition, ORIGINALLY it is _just_that_, however, and that is what I am most interested in, the seeing or realization that something is happening or repeating itself...what the word "pattern" implies, before the percieved pattern gets dragged back into the labyrinth of the dreaded abstract mind, where it is dismembered, still screaming and made to fit our precious models. We build models and _call_ them reality, while actually ignoring REALity as being "too changeable." However, if we don't "have a good feel" for reality we build our models incorrectly. Additionally, we face the danger that if we don't know that we may have built our models incorrectly or if we build them without allowing for change we end up defending them because we don't know any better, or it's too much work to change them, or we have too much ego invested, or we don't see the need, or we don't see the mistakes. The biggest danger is not seeing the possibility of a mistake, which exists because we all have marvelous smoothing algorithms built into our minds that help us to fit things together, perfectly - witness the fact that we are hardly ever aware of the asymmetry of our own faces or of others' faces. If we proceeded as if a comparison to reality were the ultimate judge or test of veracity rather than a comparison to accepted theory, if we know how to think rather than parrot, if the accepted body of knowledge is treated as reliable information rather than the BIBLE. Suppose...Suppose the truth is an animal. Suppose that the truth existed in more dimensions than our normal 3+ dimensions. Suppose the truth left behind trails that we name "patterns", then much like the flatlanders in Goedel's example we would perceive only fractions of the truth at a time. Suppose we called these little traces TRUTH without knowing what a whole truth was. If we hold our mind's open to the possibility that the truth is perceivable ONLY in it's entirety, then it is ONLY by the assimilation of all the patterns into a single group at one time that we could percieve "truth." But I've already said that was impossible by_definition, at most we could build a pattern perceiver, a _tool_of_perception_ , NOT a model and using it glance along the body of the TRUTH, pass small truths through the tool to get an understanding, a sense of TRUTH, all the while using patterns in reality as tuning forks....

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113. 113. afraid of me? 10:07 PM 8/6/08

     continued.....patterns in reality as tuning forks, to maintain our objectivity. Picking up and trying different views, forgetting that one was math based, one psychology based, one religion based. Suppose this tool was called a lens - suppose this particular lens was called something snappy like: "the point at which all things converge, where there is no thing(yet) and all things(beginning)." Suppose this tool was alive. We would build our models differently, if we understood TRUTH, or at least we not worship them as false idols - or we would build fewer models and look for the patterns - they exist without any help from us, we do not need to hold onto anything, the truth exists and is there for the picking with the fingers of our minds. Again, the point is that reality is sacred not the models. A matter of emphasis, a different way of thinking. You need different tools in addition to the old ones. No sacred cows are being slaughterd. Trust me. A small experiment - try to read the rest of my words without reflection. Listen to me without opinion. Hear the cadence of my words, don't think - percieve, read my sentence as one thought, at once. Picture this - the first time you hear a record, do you hear it without anticipation? Or do you unconciously or conciously try to figure out what the next beat, sound will be, what the next words are, what song it reminds you of - do you try to sing along?Hear without anticipation - hear. See without interpretation - see. Your experential history gives you grounding and order, trust it, let reality arrange itself, take your hands off, let things move where they want to....which came first the bible or the world?

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114. 114. afraid of me? 11:01 PM 8/6/08

     PS: the drek about science being "completely wrong," or "open to question" is a logical falllacy.....because something contains "some discrepancy," is not the same thing as "is untrue." Grow up little minnows....bible thumpers need to understand that their "relgion" is based upon monolateralism, not monotheism.....look it up....and kids if you don't, it's because you're afraid of me.

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115. 115. Tiger Mike 07:15 PM 8/10/08

     This being my first post here, I apologize in advance if my comments offend anyone. As a scientist and a Christian, I find the whole debate over the existence of God to be an exercise in futility -- at least for the present time. This question has been argued on both sides for ages by great minds and, so far, no one has conclusively proven one or the other to be true. But -- hey -- Fermat's Last Theorem was only recently proven, so maybe there's hope (or its scientific equivalent).
     
     Meanwhile, sujeewa, uncommonsense, and the others continue to post mini-essays for Philosophy of Religion 101 while resembling little girls having a tea party. They've got the little cups and saucers, the teapot, and the mannerisms but they are just imitating what they've seen and heard. No original thought, no additions to the core of knowledge, just having fun.
     
     More tea, ladies?

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116. 116. SimonB 01:55 AM 8/14/08

     Sujeewa, how is that it is only religious people are "brainwashed", by your reasoning? Is it impossible that many christians or other religious people came to the conclusion that religion has something to offer, or is (in the mind/s of those who converted), somehow, "right" and thus, as adults, made a conversion to faith? You seem to imply that christians only exist because their parents exist. Yet a great number of adults (including former athiests) do their own thinking and research and make the decision to believe. What do you say about such people? The fact that christians are logical, reasonable people has been demonstrated to you by such people in this thread, whether or not you, I or anyone else agrees with them.
     Futhermore, your comments on religion are insulting to any scientist who is religous. I'm sure the likes of Newton, Pastuer et al would be the first to disagree with your reasoning.
     
     They could equally argue that someone like yourself has been "brainwashed" by the education system and some elements of the scientific community who teach evolution as fact and refuse to entertain anyone who may have the slightest objection to it. What is so reasonable and logical about being uncritical? It seems to me that you have not subjected your own thoughts and your worldview to the same critiques you are applying to the religious.
     
     Science is a useful tool, as has been noted. Religion is a useful tool. Metaphysics and philosophy are useful tools - all explain certain aspects of the human existence and human condition. Not one of them is more important than the other, rather all are complimentary.

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117. 117. MarshallBarnes 08:10 PM 9/2/08

     I'm afraid that the whole debate is one gigantic yawn for me. Does God exist? We don't know. Does science explain all there is? No. Will it ever? Maybe. In the meantime, the important thing is to get along with each other while we're here. That's it.

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118. 118. sujeewa 02:23 PM 10/11/08

     visited after ages. Are we alive? will reply here and there little queries, if I hear anything other than my own echo.
     
     hellooooooo is anyone out therrrrrrreeee....do you hear meeeeeeeeeeeee.

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119. 119. em3G 07:13 PM 12/1/08

     Guys! all i think most of you are doing is fulfilling prophecy.
     Welcome guys to the end time. People are now really heady minded, lovers of pleasures more than God & oh, and they say there is no God.
     
     I just need to understand how prophecy works scientifically; how that someone can be told by a non-existant someone, 2000 years or more in detail, before it occurs with all that randomness and stuff? What kind of science is that? Can nature really do that? Can molecules really assemble and do everything they do and tell you with an audible voice that so and so is going to get shot & even show you the person get shot in detail in a vision as real as you can see everything else years before it happens? Even if molecules could do that, what for?
     
     The Lord Jesus Christ does exists... go on and believe what you want, but you are only studying what He Has put together & gave existance & then you say He doen't exist. You are only seeing what and how you are made and then say you self existed. It's stupid and totally unscientific to say there is no intelligent designer/creator.
     
     It's like this;
     
     You sit on your computer and write a complex program that has laws such as of physics ++ and creatures with definitions such as the real world. Intelligent, self reproducing, free will and everything in it. You watch the conscious life you have created through its generations gain more knowledge of its surroundings and it then says "From nowhere, a blast just occurred, the universe (the computer in which they exists just came from nowhere) was born and thus how life (code eventually wrote itself) as we know it begun!"
     
     There are forces in the universe that we can't comprehend at the moment that govern the stability and existence of everything. Without which there could not be a star birth for instance. Then how could the universe blast & make all those lights, gases, forces and dusts etc necessary for the creation of stars and yet alone life? What did it blast from? Don't get me wrong, I am not saying that the big bang didn't happen that way, I am saying it did but from where? It's like your creatures in your program can't study their surroundings to find out that they are code, eventually they will prove it and modify it etc... but the code had to have a beginning sometime.
     
     I hope u got me...
     
     HE IS.
     

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120. 120. Yewtree 05:12 PM 7/14/09

     I had this idea ages ago - why didn't I think to write a best-selling book?

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121. 121. ATOM in reply to Bradley 12:41 AM 3/6/10

     A hypothesis is a theory developed that largely relies on supposition and conjecture. To negotiate the logic in the hypothesis one should seek with all their heart to disprove the idea! For this express reason evolution is not science because, for the reasons you state about testing and observation, true Science testifies faith like determination is requisite before one can argue the legitimacy of evolutionary theory in order to fill the non-provable voids that cripple the theory!

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122. 122. ATOM 12:44 AM 3/6/10

     A hypothesis is a theory developed that largely relies on supposition and conjecture. To negotiate the logic in the hypothesis one should seek with all their heart to disprove the idea! For this express reason evolution is not science because, for the reasons you state about testing and observation, true Science testifies faith like determination is requisite before one can argue the legitimacy of evolutionary theory in order to fill the non-provable voids that cripple the theory!

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123. 123. ATOM in reply to Bradley 12:44 AM 3/6/10

     A hypothesis is a theory developed that largely relies on supposition and conjecture. To negotiate the logic in the hypothesis one should seek with all their heart to disprove the idea! For this express reason evolution is not science because, for the reasons you state about testing and observation, true Science testifies faith like determination is requisite before one can argue the legitimacy of evolutionary theory in order to fill the non-provable voids that cripple the theory!

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124. 124. ATOM in reply to Bradley 12:49 AM 3/6/10

     Hitler was driven by evolution embrace...The most Evil person in history, Hitler, caused more death in WWII than all wars combined. Although he gained power through professing Catholic belief when in reality he was acting out what evolution teaches...such as servival of the fittest, Master Arian Race and so on....

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125. 125. ATOM in reply to Bradley 12:54 AM 3/6/10

     Do you mean dilusions like...Something from nothing, matter from non-matter, inorganic matter morphing into organic matter, organized life from non-life...You have to do better than that...your ideaology is no different to wearing horse blinders and is vastly deficient. You offer nothing but more questions...Chasing your tail monkey!

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126. 126. ATOM in reply to thought 01:08 AM 3/6/10

     Agreed but you over look presipice that the gears have been designed but exist without having been created from the sum total of its parts. Ore is the raw material which is a dense form of matter that a designer has reshaped and made stronger. the gearmaker creates nothing just reorganized matter. This seemingly supports chance theory but in reality it conclusivly demands a designer cause to render the effect. G-D does exist!

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127. 127. ATOM 01:10 AM 3/6/10

     Agreed but you over look precipice that the gears have been designed but exist without having been created from the sum total of its parts. Ore is the raw material which is a dense form of matter that a designer has reshaped and made stronger. The gear maker creates nothing just reorganized matter. This seemingly supports chance theory but in reality it conclusively demands a designer cause to render the effect. G-D does exist!

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128. 128. ATOM in reply to mcgruff 12:21 AM 3/7/10

     You fail to see the forest for the tree! Yes there will always be energy as long as there is motion; however it is entirely possible to surrender energy to exist in stasis only, rendering it inert and has filled the functionless. Stasis of energy example: soaking a sheathed conductor with electricity that has more energy coming than being used the current will fill the conductor and become static. As static within the conductor energy reaches equilibrium of capacity thereby ceasing current flow. When the flow is halted energy still exists within the conductor but is not extractable for lack of movement.

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129. 129. ATOM in reply to mcgruff 12:22 AM 3/7/10

     You fail to see the forest for the tree! Yes there will always be energy as long as there is motion; however it is entirely possible to surrender energy to exist in stasis only, rendering it inert and has filled the functionless. Stasis of energy example: soaking a sheathed conductor with electricity that has more energy coming than being used the current will fill the conductor and become static. As static within the conductor energy reaches equilibrium of capacity thereby ceasing current flow. When the flow is halted energy still exists within the conductor but is not extractable for lack of movement.

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130. 130. ATOM in reply to discipline 12:40 AM 3/7/10

     There is absolute truth that G-D exists! For evidence consider; conscience of mind, Being as opposed to not being, The power to effect change 10,000 miles away, DNA dilemma (chicken or the egg), irreducible complexity, Chromosome expiration, degenerating DNA (Functionless Nucleotides), etc…All this and much more refute evolution and if evolution is not the answer you have three choices; believing in G-D, magic, or Aliens…What do you believe?

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