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Life From Dirt?

Polymath257

Think & Care
Staff member
Premium Member
The possible and partial how answers can come through science, but when it comes to the things that aren't naturalistic answers, the how might have to wait until the doer shows us.
God does not need to be more complicated and God is not just assumed, God is reasoned.
Let's face it, our complex brain and body self assembled if that is what you believe.
If you want to treat God like a thing to be scientifically studies then maybe God is a harder answer. But what consciousness is, is hard, and just saying that brains are complex is no answer. How something knows to assemble itself to a functioning thing is a hard thing.
And why would I expect there to be answers that are not naturalistic?

You are *assuming* there is a 'God' and assuming you know what that entity wants or is capable of. The 'reasons' used to justify belief in a deity are all, as far as I have seen, poorly argued and ultimately invalid.

So, yes, God is most definitely a harder answer. At the very least, it assumes many things that are simply not in evidence. It also assumes many things where all the evidence points in the other direction.

Did my complex brain and body self-assemble? Certainly. That is sort of what happens in embryonic development, after all. Nothing supernatural occurs: only chemistry and physics. Yet the complex human body self-assembles spontaneously along with the brain.

A thing does not need to 'know' how to self-assemble. It just has to have the properties required for self-assembly: attractions between different parts of such a nature that the parts come together in the required way. During development, you certainly did not 'know' how to self-assemble. Yet you did.

And self-assembly is common in chemistry, for example. In many situations, more complex chemicals are formed naturally and spontaneously from simpler precursors given the right conditions. Self-assembly is actually common in many areas of science. For example, stars 'self-assemble' without any intelligence being required, only the gravitational properties of the matter they are made from.
 

Subduction Zone

Veteran Member
Well yes I believe God fits into the things that God has said that He has done (create, give life) and other things that God has not said He has done have physical mechanisms and a how answer is appropriate instead of saying that God did it (as in for eg God threw that lightning at that tree )
And no, God fits in everywhere and science is finding out how God did it, (or part of the how answer at least) but God is the who did it and God can also tell us why He did it.
So I have more answers and more sensible answers than "it assembled itself" "unconscious matter became conscious" "the universe poofed into existence all by itself" and that comes down to "magic is real with no Gods and because science says so but not real if there is a God involved"
There is more evidence of the Earth poofing into existence all by itself than there is for a god. And I know that you believe in a god. That does not matter. What is important is what claims you can support.

The God of the Gaps is the things that were said to be definitely acts of God in the the past and now we know that God was not necessary. I know, you believe that God still use those tools but you do not appear to have a good reason for those beliefs.
 

Brian2

Veteran Member
There is more evidence of the Earth poofing into existence all by itself than there is for a god. And I know that you believe in a god. That does not matter. What is important is what claims you can support.

The God of the Gaps is the things that were said to be definitely acts of God in the the past and now we know that God was not necessary. I know, you believe that God still use those tools but you do not appear to have a good reason for those beliefs.

Did I ever have a good for my beliefs? Not if I wanted the evidence you want. And I don't know if even you know what that is.
If the universe can poof into existence all by itself without magic then God can create it without magic.
So creation is not magic it is just God who is magic. Or is it that magic is not magic any more because a naturalistic speculation has been suggested for it. So magic is just something that we don't understand and is not magic if it can happen all by itself without a cause. Hmmm
 

Brian2

Veteran Member
Sure it is. It would be a violation of the known laws of physics. If validated, that would open up some serious avenues of research.

Oh, wait, are you thinking that's what current science says happened? Well, it isn't.

You're the one who said negative energy plus positive energy equals zero energy.
I think it was Paul Davies that said that nothing means absolutely nothing, except the laws of physics.
What does current science say happened?
 

Brian2

Veteran Member
And why would I expect there to be answers that are not naturalistic?

You are *assuming* there is a 'God' and assuming you know what that entity wants or is capable of. The 'reasons' used to justify belief in a deity are all, as far as I have seen, poorly argued and ultimately invalid.

So, yes, God is most definitely a harder answer. At the very least, it assumes many things that are simply not in evidence. It also assumes many things where all the evidence points in the other direction.

Did my complex brain and body self-assemble? Certainly. That is sort of what happens in embryonic development, after all. Nothing supernatural occurs: only chemistry and physics. Yet the complex human body self-assembles spontaneously along with the brain.

A thing does not need to 'know' how to self-assemble. It just has to have the properties required for self-assembly: attractions between different parts of such a nature that the parts come together in the required way. During development, you certainly did not 'know' how to self-assemble. Yet you did.

And self-assembly is common in chemistry, for example. In many situations, more complex chemicals are formed naturally and spontaneously from simpler precursors given the right conditions. Self-assembly is actually common in many areas of science. For example, stars 'self-assemble' without any intelligence being required, only the gravitational properties of the matter they are made from.

I start with the reasoned position that God exists, a faith, no proof. My reasoning tells me that the universe did not self assemble without a designer who made things to be able to do that and arranged the environment for it to happen, and especially if that designer has shown us humans that He exists and spoken to us to let us know what is happening in the universe and why and what He is doing about it.
 

Valjean

Veteran Member
Premium Member
Maybe life sprang from dirt 3.5 billion years ago though abiogenesis but I’m beginning to seriously doubt it. The God theory is sounding more and more plausible.
"...Beginning to?" Haven't you been convinced of it all along?
"Through abiogenisis?" Just to clarify, abiogenesis is not a particular mechanism, it's just what we call the emergence of life from non-living matter.
"God theory?" There is no God theory. "Gdddidit" is not a theory, it's not even a mechanism. It's an assertion of agency and magic, based on no objective evidence whatsoever.

Goddidit is abiogenesis by magic, as opposed to chemistry.
Don’t be so nit picky. People find it annoying
Not nit picky, it's the very heart of the dispute. Dismiss his point and you're dodging the issue again.
So don't be so simplistic. Confront the issue. Use objective facts, reason and logic.
 
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mikkel_the_dane

My own religion
...
So don't be so simplistic. Confront the issue. Use objective facts, reason and logic.

Yes and then learn the limits of those.
The problem is not that those work, the problem is if they have a limit for how we can explain the universe.
In practice for these debates we have 3 general "categories" at play.
The believer, the objectivist and the skeptic.
The believer: There is a God.
The objectivist: There is no objective facts to support that.
The skeptic: Yes, but the believers can still think/feel/act different that you and we are all different parts of the universe. Now explain that and don't explain it away.
 

Valjean

Veteran Member
Premium Member
Wouldn't creation be a mechanism?
One would think so, but no mechanism is ever adduced. Even asking about mechanism is discouraged as faithlessness.

The word of God is not a mechanism.

The creation, from Genesis I:
God said:
"Let there be light."
"Let there be a dome."
"Let dry land appear."
"Let the earth put forth vegetation."
"Let there be lights in the dome."
"Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth..."
"Let the earth bring forth living creatures..."
"So God created humankind in his image."

Where is the mechanism? There's no "how" here, only "who."
 
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mikkel_the_dane

My own religion
Don't the religious take it as an article of faith that everything must have a beginning and a cause? At least that's what they assert as a major premise in their arguments against evolution.
God as uncaused cause is a special pleading.

Stop talking about the religious as if they are all theists of that version. You have no evidence for that. Start checking your own thinking as much as you check everybody else's.
 

Valjean

Veteran Member
Premium Member
Interestingly, I disagree, and I would love to hear your thoughts on why. I will say that I rarely see anyone who proposes that God created the universe go into detail about the mechanisms of how this was done, but that doesn't mean that no such mechanisms have ever been supposed.

However, in order to go into detail about the mechanisms through which God created the universe, we first have to reject naturalism in favor of either metaphysical idealism or mitigated dualism. While this is a stretch for the scientifically minded and the skeptical critical thinker, this is also the territory that the concept of God resides in the vast majority of the time. It is only once we settle on one of these metaphysical concepts that we can begin proposing a mechanism for how God could give rise to the physical universe.

If you think about it for a second, this is sort of inevitable. The question of what physics is and how it got here is not a question within the physical sciences themselves but about physics, thus meta-physics. So any potential answer we can give, whether it's from naturalism, idealism, or dualism, it will be within the domain of metaphysics. Now, you can attack the methods of metaphysics as well as how justified its conclusions are, but once we start asking metaphysical questions it becomes a conversation about metaphysics.

Simply arriving at idealism or dualism is not enough, of course. We would have to go a step further and propose specific mechanisms for which the ideal can interact with or induce changes in the apparently material. We also have that! It's called manifestation.

Think about it this way: have you ever daydreamed or had a lucid dream where you could add and subtract objects to your mental image? By visualizing something, it gains form within the mind. Idealists posit that our entire universe is in the mind of God, and so God did the same thing when they created the universe; they visualized it and it manifested.

Theologians like George Berkeley call this "immaterialism." If it weren't for God continuing to dream up what we perceive as a material universe, we would stop existing within their mind and thus stop existing entirely. In this way, God not only created the universe, but continues to sustain it by holding on to the mental images of everything within it. This also explains how God is both omniscient and omnipotent: they know everything because everything is contained within their mind and they're omnipotent because they're essentially lucid dreaming on a cosmic scale.

Immaterialism is one example of how idealism solves this problem of a mechanism. Mitigated dualism tends to apply the same general principle, just with added steps that only really make sense after doing some fairly specific visualization exercises.

I was going to get into how this provides philosophical justification for occult and New Age concepts of magic, which use additional mechanisms that rely on this core idea, and how they're linked to the general concept of receiving synchronous "signs from God," but my post is already getting too long. We can discuss immaterialism more and how it provides a mechanism for creation if you want.

Of course, immaterialism is unfalsifiable, but our current understanding of the world makes it highly likely to be false since we know that matter generates mind, not the other way around. However, it does provide philosophical coherency to the metaphysics of theology, which is pretty much exactly what you're asking about here.
Mechanisms have been proposed, and tested, by scientists; not using metaphysics, but ordinary, familiar chemistry. Bringing a God into the equation is unnecessary, as is His magic.
 

mikkel_the_dane

My own religion
Mechanisms have been proposed, and tested, by scientists; not using metaphysics, but ordinary, familiar chemistry. Bringing a God into the equation is unnecessary, as is His magic.

Well, or God is unknown. You seem to arguing from a subjective position of what is necessary for you. Now if you with objective fact, reason and logic can show that is unnecessary, I will listen.
 

Valjean

Veteran Member
Premium Member
I start with the reasoned position that God exists, a faith, no proof. My reasoning tells me that the universe did not self assemble without a designer who made things to be able to do that and arranged the environment for it to happen, and especially if that designer has shown us humans that He exists and spoken to us to let us know what is happening in the universe and why and what He is doing about it.
How can faith be a reasoned position? This is an oxymoron.
'Not self-assembling without a designer' is not based on reasoning.
A designer has not shown us he exists, nor is there any credible evidence that he's spoken to us or let us know what's happening or why. This is an assertion of faith, not reason or evidence.
 

Valjean

Veteran Member
Premium Member
Stop talking about the religious as if they are all theists of that version. You have no evidence for that. Start checking your own thinking as much as you check everybody else's.
Acknowledged. Would you prefer the believers, the theists or the Abrahamics?
 

Valjean

Veteran Member
Premium Member
Well, or God is unknown. You seem to arguing from a subjective position of what is necessary for you. Now if you with objective fact, reason and logic can show that is unnecessary, I will listen.
I'm arguing for parsimony, and not adding unevidenced or unnecessary variables to the argument.
 

Heyo

Veteran Member
I start with the reasoned position that God exists, a faith, no proof.
That's not a reasoned position, that's an assumption - or in philosophical terms, an axiom.

Every system of thought has to have a set of axioms that can't be proven within the system. Geometry has Euclid's five axioms, number theory has the five Peano axioms and science has reality, order and knowability as axiom.
In a consistent system true statements can be logically (or in science by observation and logic) derived from the axioms.
If theology were a consistent system, it would have an enumerated list of axioms and true statements could be derived by logic or observation. I'd think it would be interesting to see such a system but theists aren't very interested in logic or consistency so no-one has ever tried to formulate a consistent theology.
 

exchemist

Veteran Member
The energy in this early state would have been a property of various fields, radiation and matter. So then something had to exist to but no one knows what. If so I can get my head wrapped around that.

This is pretty much what I always wanted to know ... "So no, energy is not a thing. Nobody thinks you can have a jug of momentum. Nor can you with energy" and "but not with any conviction what exactly the energy was a property of!" that was always my point and question ... what energy is. Maybe it is the matter-energy conversion that throws me. Physicists say it's a two way street, or maybe I misheard that somewhere. I always thought that if energy can convert to matter, energy had to be something. Or maybe energy s converting something else to matter. :shrug:

Thanks, this actually does make sense for my level of understanding.
Yes, that is one of the popular misconceptions. In E=m(B#)² [arf arf] , "m" does not stand for "matter" but for "rest mass", or just "mass". Mass is not a thing either. Like energy, it is a property of something. You can't have a jug of mass. You can have a jug of something that has mass - as one of its properties.

Matter is the term we give to entities that have a rest mass. When people loosely talk of matter being created from "energy" they don't mean that. They mean matter can be created from radiation and vice versa, for instance in pair production or its opposite, the annihilation of particles and antiparticles. Radiation is not energy: it has energy, among its many properties (others being frequency, wavelength, speed, amplitude, momentum, spin, polarisation.....)

The entity, the physical system, that is converted to another entity, matter, here is radiation: radiation<->matter. The energy is conserved in this process. Radiation energy (E=hν) becomes rest mass energy (E=mc²).

People often use nuclear fission as an example of proof of E=mc², and so it is. The total mass of the split up nuclei after fission is less than that of the nucleus before it splits. The difference is in the energy of the radiation (γ-rays) plus the kinetic energy of the particles and daughter nuclei that are emitted in the fission process. So energy is again conserved: some of the rest mass energy has gone into radiation energy and kinetic energy.
 
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mikkel_the_dane

My own religion
Acknowledged. Would you prefer the believers, the theists or the Abrahamics?

Well, there are more kinds of believers than those 3 groups.
The problem is that you treat religion as if it is only the above kinds. That is actually false as per evidence of human behavior.

The problem is if reason, logic and evidence have a limit? If that is the case, we are all believers, for those of us with the cognition to claim something about what objective reality is.
 

mikkel_the_dane

My own religion
That's not a reasoned position, that's an assumption - or in philosophical terms, an axiom.

Every system of thought has to have a set of axioms that can't be proven within the system. Geometry has Euclid's five axioms, number theory has the five Peano axioms and science has reality, order and knowability as axiom.
In a consistent system true statements can be logically (or in science by observation and logic) derived from the axioms.
If theology were a consistent system, it would have an enumerated list of axioms and true statements could be derived by logic or observation. I'd think it would be interesting to see such a system but theists aren't very interested in logic or consistency so no-one has ever tried to formulate a consistent theology.

Well, yes, if that is possible for all of the human experience. The theory of truth for coherence comes in a strong and weak version. To me the strong version is an idea just like God.
But yes, in practice science can do something theism can't do and religion can do something, science can't do.
 

Brian2

Veteran Member
That's not a reasoned position, that's an assumption - or in philosophical terms, an axiom.

Every system of thought has to have a set of axioms that can't be proven within the system. Geometry has Euclid's five axioms, number theory has the five Peano axioms and science has reality, order and knowability as axiom.
In a consistent system true statements can be logically (or in science by observation and logic) derived from the axioms.
If theology were a consistent system, it would have an enumerated list of axioms and true statements could be derived by logic or observation. I'd think it would be interesting to see such a system but theists aren't very interested in logic or consistency so no-one has ever tried to formulate a consistent theology.

Is it a reasoned position that God/s do not exist or is that an assumption?
 
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