The Holy Trinity

[Pabmusic]

Pabmusic,

I said that the universe has a point because there is no point to finality of individual parts if there is not an ultimate point to the whole system.

Was Aquinas so wrong?

It was obvious to Aristotle that a stone seeks the earth, not consciously, that is clear, but as an end to which it tends

Only in a gravitational field, as on the Earth. In space it wouldn’t fall (or to be more exact, it would fall constantly, but at the same speed as anything else. Therefore it would effectively float, as astronauts do). Aristotle (or Aquinas) didn’t know that. So a stone has no inherent tendency to fall to the ground, let alone ‘seeks’ to do so.

Modern scientists, on the whole,presume that everything is explained by efficient causality - one billiard ball bumping into another.

Do they? I suspect scientists accept that the laws of physics work as we expect them to (even at the very extremes, where our knowledge is not complete), but that’s hardly the same thing.

But we take for granted that things are directed to an end result: strike a match and it produces flame, never ice or the smell of roses.

We expect that the end result will be according to the laws of physics, because that is both what the maths tells us and what our experience is. Here I should explain that the ‘laws of physics’ encompasses chemistry and biology, too, since it is ultimately the laws of physics by which any chemical reaction works, or a seed germinates and grows.

Final causality is inherent in the properties of things.

I think you are trying to define an argument into existence:

a. All things end
b. ‘End’ can be called ‘final causality’
c. Therefore final causality is inherent in all things
d. ‘Causality’ implies ‘purpose’
e. Therefore all things have a purpose
f. Things that have a purpose must have been given that purpose
g. Therefore there must be a purpose-giver

I’m sure someone with a better grounding in logic than I could come up with more elegant premisses, but they’d be just as wrong. It’s not possible to define something into existence, there needs to be evidence that it’s also true. ‘Final causality’ can provide a comforting feeling of purpose and a satisfying feeling that things are ordered, but to use it to ‘prove’ something is ‘begging the question’ – the logical fallacy where you assume something that you’re trying to prove already exists. ‘Final causality’ can only be a synonym for ‘end’ unless you can show that it is something more.

Try describing an organism and its parts without referring to functions, which is to say, final causes. How would you identify the heart or sexual organs of an unknown creature except by reference to their function? The point or "teleological element" of DNA is precisely what is interesting about it. That is why metaphors from computing are so popular in genetics, for computer programs have a point to them: they are teleological.

The predictable properties of chemical elements exemplify final causality too. In order to form water, oxygen must react with hydrogen. From the point of view of the water produced, the reaction of oxygen and hydrogen is the efficient cause. From the point of view of the elements tendencies the production of water is the final cause.

I’d suspect a biologist might be able to do just what you doubt. But here’s the thing: parts of an organism, or elements of a molecule do not think at all. They have no ‘wish’ to be part of a body or of a chemical reaction. They have no desire to 'fulfil their destinies'. And it is profoundly unhelpful to speak as if they do. Things happen, sometimes by chance but usually according to the laws of nature (aka the laws of physics).

Here in the Philippines there is Lake Taal inside an extinct volcano, out of which rises a smaller volcano. It’s beautiful. The small volcano is dormant or extinct and its crater is filled with water. Thus there’s a lake within a lake, but the outer lake has quite acidic water, the inner lake very alkaline (or maybe it's the other way round - I'll can't remember); there is a notable difference between them in potential energy. These are perfect conditions for a natural battery (‘accumulator’, my Granny called them). Connect the one to the other and an electric current will flow. This hasn’t happened, but an earthquake could change all that.

It is very difficult to see how this state of affairs would have any cause other than the laws of physics acting upon a chance happening. And yet… The potential difference between the two bodies of water might be a reminder of the sort of event (occurring under the sea about 3.4 million years ago) that could have provided the energy for some very simple molecule to replicate – the origin of life on Earth (there's probably life on millions of other planets, but we don't know).

By the way, I'd have said that computer analogies are popular in genetics because DNA has a computer-like code, though it's quadrinomial rather than binomial. It is effectively a digital code.

A description of the world in terms of its being a system of efficient causality is necessarily a system which involves tendencies and is, therefore, a system which involves finality.

Aquinas's Fifth way supplies the point of the whole caboodle the cosmos. and this must be provided by an intelligence outside the system.

Why ‘must’ it be? What evidence is there that this might be so? If there are two possible explanations, one reliant on evidence and an understanding of the laws of physics, the other on something that is untestable, the supernatural, why go with the supernatural in preference? Even if we knew little of the cosmos, what explanatory power is provided by something we cannot ever know? It sounds like the dragon in my garage again.

I don't suppose we will ever agree on the existence of a creator and the point of the universe. As much as I enjoy these discussions and arguments they are really ultimately futile.

I still feel as I originally said that we will never fully understand this creation because we are part of it.

You say there is no point to the universe because all life will ultimately be destroyed by the laws of physics but life ends everyday for someone.

There are certainly brilliant scientists who find it possible to believe in God and be Christians even though there are some aspects of the faith and doctrine which are difficult to understand.

Why is it that it is only apparently poor and relatively uneducated people who see Visions or experience Miracles? Certainly it never seems to be Nobel Prize winners!

You may say that it is because they are mentally ill or religious fanatics or that it is supernatural tosh but the Roman Catholic church, especially, is very very wary of accepting them and they are vigorously examined and professional scientists and doctors consulted before they are confirmed.

Could it be that the minds of such people are not cluttered up with intellectual baggage and that makes them more open to these things? Just a thought.

I suspect people believe for many different reasons – because it’s a social or family tradition, because it is immensely comforting for some, because it does seem to provide a sense of purpose for others. (I doubt, though, that logic of itself ever caused anyone to believe.) Yes, there are many scientists who ‘believe’ in some way (giving up religion is not a prerequisite, after all) though scientific knowledge in many fields, especially biology, can make it difficult to reconcile many religious teachings. There are different ways of getting round this, one of which is to rationalise, but I suspect there are very few religious scientists who take (say) Genesis literally.

I would never say that anyone who believes in gods is mentally ill. In fact it does seem to have been a ‘natural’ part of our existence since we developed big brains – perhaps 1.5 million years ago. It’s arguably an emergent property of large brains – an extension of useful ‘superstitious’ behaviour (“What’s that movement in the long grass? I’d better take care”) and evolutionary benefits of obeying elders unquestioningly (“Don’t play near the crocodile-infested river”).

I do say that it’s supernatural – but after all, aren’t you also saying that we can never ‘know’ because it’s outside or beyond nature, which is exactly what supernatural means? I find it intriguing, though, that there’s a slightly perjorative tone to your “Could it be that the minds of such people are not cluttered up with intellectual baggage and that makes them more open to these things?” This could be read as “there are some who are just too intellectual to understand the truth” – which is almost like saying “you understand religion easier if you don’t think too hard”. This is the sort of attitude that favoured Aristotle and Plato over Democritus, and which led to nearly 2,000 years of rejection of scientific thinking.

I suppose what I find most unpalatable is the certainty apologists display. "This is how it is". Never "This is a plausible hypothesis - now, what evidence supports it, and what would this conclusion mean for that phenomenon?"

Can I thank you again, Magnificat, for what has been an interesting and lively discussion.

[Richard Tarleton]

Can I thank you again, Magnificat, for what has been an interesting and lively discussion.

And thank you, Pabs, for some elegantly illuminating posts. I wish Magnificat could have spared a moment if only to tell me what was wrong with my questions in #68. Diana Athill tried putting similar questions to Rowan Williams when she was guest editor of the Today programme a few years ago, but got a load of...very much what you would expect from the Archbishop.

The reason I mentioned trilobites (see my last post) is that I find there to be something strangely satisfying about their having been the most successful group of species on Earth for 300 million years. They're relevant to my original question, and they help rid me of any lingering feelings of anthropocentricity.

[Serial_Apologist]

Very interesting read this thread, and thanks to those who have taken time to post their considered thoughts.

I can only make sense of these matters by assuming, as many do now, a universal consciousness, based in a a deeply (or absolutely)interconnected universe.
It just, at the level I have read(which isn't a huge amount) makes sense, of a universe of which we understand only a modest amount.

Nicely put.

"Life is renewed by death because it is again and again set free from what would otherwise become an insufferable burden of memory and monotony. Genuine reincarnation lies in the fact that whenever a child is born 'I' - or human awareness - arises into the world again with memory wiped clean and the wonder of life restored. Everlasting annihilation is as nonsensical as everlasting individuality. And who can doubt that if human life has arisen in this tiny area of one immense galaxy, it must be happening again and again, on grounds of sheer probability, throughout the whole diffusion of nebulae that surrounds us. For where the organism is intelligent the environment also must be intelligent". (Alan Watts: Psychotherapy East and West, Jonathan Cape, London 1971, P 121).

What he said had a huge influence on me and still makes more sense to me than almost anybody else.

By confusing one form of intelligence with another, I've been charged with categorical error for agreeing with the above, but broadly it's what I think.

[Magnificat]

The obviously striking feature of the posts above from those of a Christian persuasion (Magnificat, I'm looking at you ) is how anthropocentric they are. I'd be grateful for help on a few very basic points.

What was God doing for the 14 billion years before man arrived on the scene, on this one tiny planet? When aged 14 I asked a master at school whether God simply set the whole thing in motion and then sat back to watch he told me I was talking like an 18th century deist which didn't help me much but perhaps tells you something about the sort of school I was sent to

Does God have a purpose, and if so is man central to it? (you'd assume He does, given that He sent His only-begotten etc.) And if so, why did it take so long to arrive at the main part of the project?

There have been at least 5 mass extinctions - what were they about? A re-booting of the experiment? How do you account for the next one, which wll be of us?

Is it all about us - or are there other projects on the go elsewhere? After all it's a very big (and expanding) universe. And what, if it's about us, is the rest of the universe (most of it) for?

I could go on but you get the idea. Any talk of God seems to put us at the centre of things - it's all about our relationship with Him. As late as the 18th century or so, creation was the only explanation in town, but it's becoming harder to shoehorn God into what we now know.

I caught the last half of IOT and have frankly learnt more from this thread than I did from the wrigglings of Melvyn's guests.

Richard,

Sorry I ignored you or missed this post but when there is a discussion like this going on you have to concentrate on one or two lines otherwise I find that you are continually searching through the thread to find who said what and trying to locate it and can lose complete track of where you are in the argument.

I am not trained in logic or science. I have no University degree and I wouldn't call myself a Christian apologist just a seeker after the Truth. I, like many other believers, have spent much time trying to understand the great questions you ask i.e. what's it all about? I have read books and articles listened to discussions between theologians and scientists etc and come to some conclusions as far as it is possible for me to do so. Pabmusic has made me think even more.

To try to sum it all up:

I accept that there was a Big Bang that created the Universe but say there must have been an initial cause - a Creator or designer - The TRUTH.

I cannot accept that there is no purpose to it.

I just cannot believe that this complex life we experience has all come about through sheer random chance, even over millions of years, after the initial mixing of some chemical elements activated by an electrical charge or something in the so-called primordial soup and note that the scientists also now say that the Universe is indeed too well ordered to have developed as it has by sheer chance. Looking at things at the molecular level, they say, as far as I understand The Anthropic Principle, that if just one molecule in an atom was placed differently the whole Universe would have been different. To this extent anyway the Universe seems to have been formed to enable human life to exist. I believe the creator- God- intended this. And Richard you must remember that God's time is not our time as I said somewhere ' A thousand years in His sight are but as yesterday '

I would say that His design includes evolution. Interestingly, although I do not accept it literally, the Bible story of Creation in the Book of Genesis does seem to me to get the sequence of evolution pretty much spot on e.g. life starting in the sea then coming on to the land. The provision of plant life for food for the emerging life around it. Even Pabmusic's question as to light being created before the sun and moon does bear correlation with the evolutionary timescale for the development of the eye.

Pabmusic makes big play of the Laws of Nature but he never answered my question as to who/what created them.

As regards his unease at my querying whether it is possible to have our minds closed to the supernatural by being cluttered with too much intellectual baggage. I was thinking of Jesus Christ's teaching that it is only possible to enter the Kingdom of Heaven as a child.

Miles Coverdale asked about whether I have ever experienced Divine intervention.I have never had any supernatural experiences; but I do know people who say they have and I have a completely open mind about the possibility. I have had prayers answered as far as I can tell but as MC says they could be coincidences.

I believe that human beings have free will and can choose whether to be good or evil and whether or not to exterminate some of the human race.

I believe that disasters have to happen for us to understand the existence we experience and I cannot see that it is necessary to believe that an omnipotent and omniscient God would necessarily intervene in His creation although this does create problems for me with some aspects of the Christian faith.

I believe the 10 Commandments of Moses and the new Commandment of Jesus Christ that we should love one another and should treat our neighbour as we would wish to be treated ourselves provide The WAY and The LIFE for us to eventually encounter God - THE TRUTH.

So to end on a musical note appropriate to this message board and the great Henry Purcell and, of course, St Paul:

Rejoice in The Lord alway
And again I say rejoice
Let your softness be known unto all men
The Lord is at Hand
Be careful for nothing; but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God
And the peace of God which passeth all understanding will keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.
Amen.

VCC

[Richard Tarleton]

Thank you, Magnificat, for this elegant Credo. You have responded generously to my questions.

[Pabmusic]

Yes, Magnificat, may I echo Richard’s comments?

…I just cannot believe that this complex life we experience has all come about through sheer random chance, even over millions of years, after the initial mixing of some chemical elements activated by an electrical charge or something in the so-called primordial soup and note that the scientists also now say that the Universe is indeed too well ordered to have developed as it has by sheer chance. Looking at things at the molecular level, they say, as far as I understand The Anthropic Principle, that if just one molecule in an atom was placed differently the whole Universe would have been different. To this extent anyway the Universe seems to have been formed to enable human life to exist.

This is quite easy. This complex life has not come about “by sheer chance”. The choice has never been between a god on the one hand and chance on the other. Natural selection not only explains how the complexity of life happened, but it is the only explanation that does so without recourse to the supernatural. It is not – most emphatically not – ‘sheer chance’. People who say this either don’t understand natural selection, or are being deliberately mischievous. Natural selection is very well understood and is the reason (for instance) that many bacteria have developed immunity to antibiotics in our lifetimes. No natural selection, no MRSA. (Also no complex life forms.) If only doctors in the 1940s had been more understanding of natural selection, penicillin might not have become almost useless by 1960.

As to the anthropic principle (which applies not only to us humans, but to everything), it’s true. If things were just a little different, we probably wouldn’t be here. But something else probably would, for whom their universe would be just as finely tuned. For the first two billion years or so of Earth we could not have survived anyway since the atmosphere contained no oxygen. But other organisms did, presumably early ancestors, until cyanobacteria and stromatolites began producing oxygen as a waste product. Over millions of years this created an oxygen-rich atmosphere and allowed organisms who could stomach the highly poisonous gas to exist. But they appeared only because they could live in these conditions. Natural selection tuned us to cope adequately with a fine-tuned universe. Those organisms that couldn’t cope with it went extinct.

I posted a bit by Douglas Adams on this very point (post 77).

I would say that His design includes evolution. Interestingly, although I do not accept it literally, the Bible story of Creation in the Book of Genesis does seem to me to get the sequence of evolution pretty much spot on e.g. life starting in the sea then coming on to the land. The provision of plant life for food for the emerging life around it. Even Pabmusic's question as to light being created before the sun and moon does bear correlation with the evolutionary timescale for the development of the eye.

There are actually two creation stories, and they differ (for instance as to the order of creating man and animals. And we now know (through molecular genetics) that the minimum number of homo sapiens (modern humans) that could have existed in order that we’d now have the present diversity was about 1,250, not two.

Pabmusic makes big play of the Laws of Nature but he never answered my question as to who/what created them.

I’m sorry I missed this. I’ve no idea who or what created the laws of nature. I’m not at all sure that any ‘who’ or ‘what’ had to. What we call natural laws are human descriptions of existing phenomena. Drop anything and it falls to earth (on Earth, anyway). That has probably always been true, but it’s only been a ‘natural law’ since Isaac Newton’s time. Before that it was just something that happened. Newton showed why it happens (later modified extensively by Einstein) and why we can predict it will always happen. Perhaps the answer is that it happens because it happens: if things were different, it would happen differently.

The problem is that we have no other universe to compare with ours. I don’t want to put words into your mouth, but it seems to me that this is the point when you might suggest that a god ‘created’ those laws. Well, perhaps so (I can’t disprove it, after all), but I see no reason for anything to have created it. Why can it not just be descriptive of the way things act in this universe? And if I’m right, what point a creator?

There are some scientists who hypothesise that the laws of physics were created in the Big Bang randomly – they might have been different, but this is what we’ve got. If there are other universes, the laws of physics might be different in each of them. Well, yes. But we have no way of testing such a hypothesis, so it can never rise above speculation.

As regards his unease at my querying whether it is possible to have our minds closed to the supernatural by being cluttered with too much intellectual baggage. I was thinking of Jesus Christ's teaching that it is only possible to enter the Kingdom of Heaven as a child.

Oh, I do object. I wasn’t uneasy about what you wrote. I was suspicious, and your comment seems to have confirmed my suspicion.

I believe that human beings have free will and can choose whether to be good or evil and whether or not to exterminate some of the human race.

There is plenty of evidence that ‘free will’ as philosophers have understood it doesn’t exist. Connect a person to an MRI scanner and get them to carry out tasks, and what do you see? About one third of a second before messages are sent to (1) the conscious part of the brain and (2) the relevant muscles, the unconscious part of the brain sends out preparatory signals. In other words, your unconscious prepares you to do something before you think to do it. This is the latest phase of an understanding of idiomotor reaction first investigated by Michael Faraday in 1850 or thereabouts, who investigated ‘table-turning’. [/QUOTE]

I believe that disasters have to happen for us to understand the existence we experience and I cannot see that it is necessary to believe that an omnipotent and omniscient God would necessarily intervene in His creation although this does create problems for me with some aspects of the Christian faith.

Are you really suggesting that disasters happen deliberately to teach us something? If so, why do they so often happen in the parts of the world affected by extreme weather? How about making them occur in areas where such a lesson perhaps needs to be taught? (And anyway, what happened to your god’s promise to Noah after the flood that he wouldn’t do such a thing again? Rainbow and all that?) Are you really suggesting that the typhoon we experienced here in the Philippines last November was a sort of reminder to us all? If you are, I find that bordering on the offensive. I saw some of the devastation caused to generally hard-working, generally poor and very likeable people.

So to end on a musical note appropriate to this message board and the great Henry Purcell and, of course, St Paul…

What a good choice. Beautiful stuff.

Here’s my gripe with what I believe is your way of thinking. I suspect that your eyes are firmly set on the future – on what happens after death, when we leave this imperfect world of sorrows. And I can see the attraction (to an extent) in that. But… It all depends on faith. (Bit of a gamble, really, since faith is the belief in things without evidence.)

Now I have no such expectation. The only life I will have is this one. I cannot afford to sacrifice that on the altar of a dream. An American atheist, Robert Green Ingersoll, wrote this (about 1900):

Happiness is the only good. The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is to make others so.

How could I not subscribe to that?

[ardcarp]

I believe that disasters have to happen for us to understand the existence we experience

VCC, I am afraid that is the sticking point for many (including me) who find the concept of 'a benevolent deity' hard to swallow, e.g.

The bloody history of Hutu and Tutsi conflict stained the 20th century, from the slaughter of 80,000 to 200,000 Hutus by the Tutsi army in Burundi in 1972 to the 1994 Rwanda genocide in which Hutu militias targeted Tutsis, resulting in a 100-day death toll between 800,000 and 1 million.
But many observers would be surprised to learn that the longstanding conflict between the Hutu and Tutsi has nothing to do with language or religion -- they speak the same Bantu tongues as well as French, and generally practice [sic] Christianity

Do 200,000 members of the human race have to die just so that I can experience what I experience?

I don't want to introduce an overly disputatious note into this otherwise civilised discussion, but all the apologies offered over the centuries for God's willful indifference to human suffering just compound my reasons for doubting His existence.

[Alison]

Wars and conflict I can put down to the folly of mankind.

God isn't responsible for the foolish misuse of free will.

Christians foul up all the time. They're no different.

Natural disasters I find much harder to explain.

I think it's important to distinguish between what God wills and what he allows as part of his overall purpose.

Something like when parents allow their teenager to ride a motorcycle. It's tragic when the youngster gets killed in an accident but the parent didnt want to stand in their way.

[Serial_Apologist]

Wars and conflict I can put down to the folly of mankind.

God isn't responsible for the foolish misuse of free will.

Christians foul up all the time. They're no different.

This, for me one of the chief drawbacks of religion, is amply demonstrated in the Central African Republic as of now, where two belief systems are literally at each other's throats. Other causes of war - scarcity, starvation, politics etc - can be ascribed to mismanagements within the human sphere; religion gets used because two or more opposing groups in possession of The Truth are notoriously intractable to reason and therefore prone to manipulation.

[Bryn]

We don't know much about earlier Homo sp. and religion, but it seems pretty clear to me that either Homo Sapiens or one of its precursors created gods, rather than the other way round, the monotheistic God of Abraham/Ibrahim being a later creation of the minds of some members of Homo sapiens.

[Richard Tarleton]

We don't know much about earlier Homo sp. and religion, but it seems pretty clear to me that either Homo Sapiens or one of its precursors created gods, rather than the other way round, the monotheistic God of Abraham/Ibrahim being a later creation of the minds of some members of Homo sapiens.

I had vowed to bow out of this thread, but the temptation was too great

A reasonable guess would be that religion began with Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers for whom things that had an effect on their lives - their surroundings, the animals they hunted, the weather, the seasons (would Spring ever return?), eclipses, etc. - things for which they had no rational explanation - had to be respected, propitiated, painted on the cave wall, eventually made sense of through animist religions or cults. More formal religion probably developed with farming, when there was an economic surplus and enough to support people (shamans, witch doctors, priests) to specialise in taking care of the rituals, sacrifices etc. . Divine revelation was a device to enable those in charge of the ritual side of things to reinforce their power and ensure that their income stream was maintained, sacrifice to terrify the population into compliance. What is fascinating about early cults and religions is how similar they were even though they sprang up in isolation in different parts of the world, the pioneering work on the subject being J G Frazer's Golden Bough.

Nowadays we have the explanations, and religion should be purely cultural and anthropological interest. Realising this, and realising what nonsense I had been taught from an early age, was the greatest moment of release I have experienced in my life.

[Magnificat]

1) As to the anthropic principle (which applies not only to us humans, but to everything), it’s true. If things were just a little different, we probably wouldn’t be here. But something else probably would, for whom their universe would be just as finely tuned. For the first two billion years or so of Earth we could not have survived anyway since the atmosphere contained no oxygen. But other organisms did, presumably early ancestors, until cyanobacteria and stromatolites began producing oxygen as a waste product. Over millions of years this created an oxygen-rich atmosphere and allowed organisms who could stomach the highly poisonous gas to exist. But they appeared only because they could live in these conditions. Natural selection tuned us to cope adequately with a fine-tuned universe. Those organisms that couldn’t cope with it went extinct.

2).I don’t want to put words into your mouth, but it seems to me that this is the point when you might suggest that a god ‘created’ those laws. Well, perhaps so (I can’t disprove it, after all), but I see no reason for anything to have created it. Why can it not just be descriptive of the way things act in this universe? And if I’m right, what point a creator?

3) Are you really suggesting that disasters happen deliberately to teach us something? If so, why do they so often happen in the parts of the world affected by extreme weather? How about making them occur in areas where such a lesson perhaps needs to be taught? (And anyway, what happened to your god’s promise to Noah after the flood that he wouldn’t do such a thing again? Rainbow and all that?) Are you really suggesting that the typhoon we experienced here in the Philippines last November was a sort of reminder to us all? If you are, I find that bordering on the offensive. I saw some of the devastation caused to generally hard-working, generally poor and very likeable people.

4) Here’s my gripe with what I believe is your way of thinking. I suspect that your eyes are firmly set on the future – on what happens after death, when we leave this imperfect world of sorrows. And I can see the attraction (to an extent) in that. But… It all depends on faith. (Bit of a gamble, really, since faith is the belief in things without evidence.)

Pabmusic,

1) Yes, but WE are here which in my view was the intention all along!

2) It would follow my thinking generally that the creator of the Universe also decided the rules under which it operated. Again computer analogies come to mind

3) No I'm not. What I meant to say to Richard was what I had clearly stated before to you that natural disasters and man- made disasters ( eg plane crashes ) that happen have to happen if we are to understand the world in which we live. We would not understand a perfect world and I can't see that the creator would want to intervene unless it was His intention to let us exist in perfection and His plans were not working as He intended. As for Noah, like Genesis, a poetical narrative lacking the understanding we have now perhaps. As you said somewhere our understanding develops even if, as I have said before, we are unlikely to ever have complete understanding of God's purposes.

4) I have great trouble in trying to form any idea of what comes after death. A perfect existence perhaps? I do believe we have a soul that can can exist separately from our body but this is another very big field - we could go on for ever on this.

Pab you are very big on evidence and proof and, if I understand you correctly, that evolution answers most if not all the questions; but what does evolution have to say about emotions e.g love and the appreciation of beauty. Not much as far as I can tell and these parts of our nature are not provable as far as I can see. I love my wife but I can't prove it. If God is love rather than an old man with a white beard ,as I believe, can it ever be proved? Really you just have to accept that it cannot and cling to faith as you say.

VCC

[Bryn]

... I had vowed to bow out of this thread, but the temptation was too great
...

I had sort of vowed similarly to myself, but then decided I at least wanted to make a brief statement of my position. It's a view I came to long before reading any of David Lewis-Williams's work, but his The Mind in the Cave ... , and co-authored The Shamans of Prehistory and Inside the Neolithic Mind ... have done much to reinforce and further inform that view.

I would recommend D L-W's more recent Conceiving God: The Cognitive Origin and Evolution of Religion to all.

[Pabmusic]

Pabmusic,

1) Yes, but WE are here which in my view was the intention all along!

There are two possibilities, aren’t there? Either the universe was made in order that we could occupy a miniscule small portion of it, or we developed through natural selection as beings that were able to survive in these particular conditions. In other words, either the universe fits us or we fit the universe.

Now consider. If it is really the second of these options (which after all is what all evidence suggests) how would you expect it appear different from the first? How could you tell them apart?

Another thing. We don’t know of any other intelligent life in the universe (I hesitate to say just ‘life’ since we’ve found bacteria in meteorites**) but consider the probabilities: a conservative estimate is that there are 100 billion galaxies, each containing 100 billion stars. That’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 suns out there (described, I have seen, as more stars than the total number of words spoken by everyone who's ever lived). Now, how frequently might there be a habitat orbiting one of those suns that’s suitable for complex life to develop?

Again, being very conservative indeed, let’s say just once in any galaxy (and we know there’s at least one in the Milky Way because we can experience it). That’s still 100 billion planets suitable for complex life. If you feel that a probability of 100 billion to 1 is still too frequent, let’s make it I trillion to 1 (one million million to one). That still leaves a billion planets with suitable habitats.

Now say that intelligent life has evolved on only one planet in a million of those that had a suitable habitat. That’s still 1,000 planets out there with complex life, using an ultra-conservative estimate.

The point I’m making is that I’d be very surprised indeed if there’s no other intelligent life in the universe. And if there is other intelligent life, what does that say for any notion of the universe having been designed for us on Earth?

** [I think this is wrong. What we've found are amino acids - necessary precursors of "life as we know it, Jim"]

2) It would follow my thinking generally that the creator of the Universe also decided the rules under which it operated. Again computer analogies come to mind.

An interesting point here might be to consider whether a creator made the laws of physics from scratch – in which case they’re purely arbitrary and (presumably) could be changed at any time – or whether he or she co-opted something that already existed – in which case, why was a god required? Time and again as we understand more, the space that could be occupied by gods gets smaller.

3)… As for Noah, like Genesis, a poetical narrative lacking the understanding we have now perhaps.

As a complete aside, Noah’s an interesting example, mainly because it’s lifted wholesale from the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Sumerian legend than predates anything in the Bible. Sumeria was where Iraq is now, and the flood plain of the Tigris-Euphrates was notorious, some 5,000 or 6,000 years ago, for flooding. There is some geological evidence for a very bad flood there about 4,000 BCE, for instance.

The Epic of Gilgamesh contains the story of Utnapashtim, who saved his family and animals in a boat he’d made, having been warned that the gods would send a great flood. He sent out various birds to test whether the waters had fallen, and the boat came to rest on a mountain. The gods then sent a rainbow. A recently translated Sumerian tablet has the same tale, complete with the animals entering the boat (a great coracle) in pairs.

Presumably Hebrew slaves held in Babylon (previously Sumeria) heard the story and incorporated it into their own tales.

Pab you are very big on evidence and proof and, if I understand you correctly, that evolution answers most if not all the questions; but what does evolution have to say about emotions e.g love and the appreciation of beauty. Not much as far as I can tell and these parts of our nature are not provable as far as I can see. I love my wife but I can't prove it. If God is love rather than an old man with a white beard ,as I believe, can it ever be proved? Really you just have to accept that it cannot and cling to faith as you say.

And you, Magnificat, are very big on belief. I believe things too. I believe that music has a power to move that’s quite different from other things. But I also believe that believing true things is always preferable to believing false things. Here we return to the Platonic view that physical reality is less important than spiritual – tremendously influential upon the authors of the bible – and a philosophy that ousted Democritus and other early ‘scientists’.

But we cannot define ‘spiritual’ except in physical terms. As far as we can tell, the ‘spirit’ is the sum of our brain’s activities – what makes each of us us, so to speak. But this is not satisfactory for those who seek exact answers; much easier to posit an independent ‘soul’ that survives after death. Yet we know that people can change their personalities entirely as the result of traumas to the brain. Does this mean a change of ‘soul’ too?

Your question about love is important, but you are wrong to suggest that evolution has not much to say about it. The development of emotions in species is a fascinating area of evolutionary study – and has been since 1872, when Darwin began it. It’s not difficult to find whole books devoted to the issue, including Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene (1974) which, despite its often misunderstood title, is as much about the evolutionary development of altruistic behaviour.

There is a lot of research into emotions in animals, and the results may surprise us. Other primates, particularly apes, experience well developed emotions, with the equivalent areas of their brains being stimulated for different emotions as are stimulated in ours. They share many of the behaviours we do, including things that might come within ‘love’ – signs of affection, caring for each other and the like. But it doesn’t stop with primates. Dogs (wolves), elephants, dolphins and octopuses (yes) all show wide ranges of emotional behaviour, in much the same way as we.

So what’s happening? I suspect that much of it is the result of natural selection favouring those in communal societies who have a greater tendency to empathise with others, who demonstrate more altruistic behaviour and who better assimilate the ‘rules’ of ‘give-and-take’ (aka game theory). I don’t know much about octopuses, but the other animals I’ve referred to above are social, living in groups and relying on social interaction. All of them (octopuses too) are intelligent, with well developed brains.

We have the added advantage of speech, and we can express our emotions in abstract ways. But this is greater complexity rather than uniqueness. No doubt the other animals communicate their emotions – there’s not too much point in having them otherwise.

So why might this have happened among social species? At the most basic level, altruistic behaviour has an evolutionary advantage where the groups are small and their members mostly related. (This was the case among our ancestors for millions of years, until only some 10,000 years ago.) It ensures the chance of my genes being passed on are higher. Remember that with sexual reproduction (most common among complex species) we only pass half of our genes to any child, where they are shuffled with half from the other parent. The evolutionary advantage of this is the constant re-shuffling that allows greater diversity, better protection against illnesses, and more opportunity for natural selection to work since there's a greater possibility of helpful mutations arising. The downside is that we pass on only half our genes.

By my being part of a small community, the chances of all my genes being passed on by are greater, since I share most (or all) of my genes with the group as a whole. Perhaps it won’t be me who passes them on (I may be eaten by a lion) but they probably will survive through others. Natural selection would thus have no doubt favoured those who carried genes for greater empathy and altruism - who interacted better. (Remember that nothing really 'favours' anything. There's no decision made. It's just that over time the proportion of members of any group that evinces a particular adaptation will increase if it is a useful adaptation.)

Living in large communities is quite recent in our history. We are thus ‘hard-wired’ to be social and demonstrate empathy and altruism by the previous several million years' development. And this even though we don’t usually live in small, family-oriented groups. Quite the opposite in fact.

It’s much more complicated than this, of course, but this is the evolutionary background. Evolutionary psychologists have taken the development of emotions further. Steven Pinker comes to mind as someone worth reading on this subject.

But we must never forget that, although 'love' may well have been an evolutionary adaptation, it is hardly so now (at least not primarily so). This is very common in evolution, particular in human evolution, since our huge brains allow us to question the very processes that allowed those brains in the first place and to rationalise (and romanticise) the consequences.

[Richard Tarleton]

Another fascinating post, Pabs. I'm proud just to hold your coat in this debate but could I just add to your first para, "for a miniscule small period of time"? This time thing still bothers me, along with the size of the universe as discussed in your last post, and my first.

Magnificat, I think your explanation for the mere blink of an eye that we have existed since our ancestors first appeared on the African plains (100,000 years), compared to 4 billion years for Earth, and 14 billion for the universe, will be:

And Richard you must remember that God's time is not our time as I said somewhere 'A thousand years in His sight are but as yesterday'

... which seems to me to be part of the increasingly difficult task of making the facts (unknown for most of the time that our particular monotheistic cult has existed) fit the theory. I think it's a cop-out.