“Studies by the blue-chip Woods Hole Research Centre, carried out in Amazonia, have concluded that the forest cannot withstand more than two consecutive years of drought without breaking down.
Scientists say that this would spread drought into the northern hemisphere and could massively accelerate global warming with incalculable consequences.”
The massive collision of many negative threads of our modern life summed up in a single black swan. [via garret]
This is my response to Pharyngula: Moran on theistic evolution, written immediately after Larry Moran’s first comment.
Frankly this whole discussion confuses me. I defintely agree with Larry’s argument and the part that confuses me is why religious people insist that God could not have created the world as science explains it. The two are not mutually exclusive since science, at the end of the day (so far), cannot explain how everything started.
You can say collisions in M-space generated the specific universe we experience, or something similar, but that’s just turtles all the way down. You can say potentials in an underlying quantum field, still turtles.
However, God–in the sense of an unknowable entity outside our frame of reference and if such an entity exists and had the ability to create the universe we experience–could easily have created it to behave according to rules and precepts we’ve been decoding as science. Heck, that makes a lot more sense to me than angels whispering in ears and takes nothing away from this entity’s, um, stature.
Then again, the explanation doesn’t fit well with many (most or all?) established religions so I can understand the hesitance in gaining acceptance by adherents of the same.
(second comment:)
If the entity conceived of as God does exist, there’s no reason the entity could not take an action which definitively answers the existence question at a scientifically acceptable level. The entity, according to most religious explanations, chooses not to do so because faith in the entity’s existence is a pre-requisite of belonging to that religion.
Interestingly, both Judaism and Christianity (which I’m most familiar with) posit that God will be knowable in a scientific sense in their explanations of the end of time as we know it.
(third comment)
@kagehi: you quoted me but completely misconstrued my meaning. As previously stated I agree with Mr. Moran’s argument, and I use the term argument in its rhetorical meaning. You wrote:
First, it makes God redundant unless he continues to intervene. The second is far more serious in that every “intervention” seems to inexplicably be explainable with real world events, like volcanos.
First, my meaning is that the God entity cannot be explained by our science in any forseeable manner but this is irrelevant. Second, when I wrote that the hypothetical God entity could choose to take action which would be noticable on a scientific level, my intended implication was precisely opposite the ‘supernatural’ explanation for volcanos.
For example, simultaneously appearing on every TV, radio and internet channel (or, forgetting technology, in the presence of every human alive) to say hello and thanks for playing the game so well. Some event that is both not possible with our current or even nearterm technology and not even possibly mistaken for irrational ranting.
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