Another Big Big Thread of Religious Discussion

[POS Industries]

Originally Posted by Serenity

I would say that a complex intelligence suddenly spawning is far less likely than a simple clump of lots of hydrogen atoms spawning.

Not really. Impossible is impossible, no matter which way you look at it. You can't say that one impossibility is more likely than another. Matter cannot be created. And yet, there it is. Saying it either spawned forth from nothingness or always existed is as valid as saying anything did so, including a deity.

I'm not using it to support the existence of a god, of course, as much as I'm just pointing out that the universe really shouldn't exist at all and it's highly suspicious that it does.

Oh, I'm sorry, I thought you were proposing a deity who actually likes complex organisms, rather than mindlessly going to the middle and assuming that any quantity of the AIDS virus is worth the same as a single human life. I guess you're a maltheist then?

Naw, I'm just someone who took Galileo's word for it and accepts that the universe doesn't revolve around us.

(if by complaining you mean pointing out that it's blatantly stupid to any deity who wanted complex life to form to include bacteria and viruses)

Well, since we evolved from single-celled organisms in the first place, I don't see why it's stupid that there's a whole shitload of them still around. Not to mention that our bodies benefit from a great number of bacteria more often than they are infected by bacteria that grew and evolved to survive by means that are unfortunately harmful to other species.

I don't pretend what the greater purpose of anything is, but I can tell you what life is like for a human on Earth. So yeah, survive, grow, reproduce, repeat is about it. What that has to do with the great whole, I have no idea.

Don't impose notions of human causality and linear time on the universe. Especially not to a time when the universe was almost completely governed by quantum phenomenon. Aside from the fact there doesn't actually have to be a beginning or end to time and the universe that whole quantum thing really gets in the way.

When the universe first started to expand, and where talking like femto seconds after the expansion started, it was wholly and completely quantum mechanical (well almost cause there might have been gravity and we have no idea how to make quantum mechanics and gravity play with each other). I'd say that before that it was governed by quantum mechanics but even quantum mechanics breaks down at those scales. Now quantum mechanically cause and effect aren't even remotely related in the same manner as they are in the macroscopic world. Time can flow just as easily one way as the other and you can't really tell were something is let alone how much energy it has. Its not hard to see why we might have a tiny bit of trouble when we try to apply the logic of our everyday experience to that situation.

I didn't know we'd tested and figured out time travel. Sure, I've heard some interesting ideas on the subject, but nothing even close to conclusive.