| Posted: 04 September 2010 at 5:11am | IP Logged | 6
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What I have a hard time believing is that water, sunlight, and "whatever other" non living matter combined and developed a code. These elements, not God, breathed life into themselves and formed a code (Man being the end result of this code can't even come close to creating something as complex on their own). And then these elements, or the newly formed code, had the "urge" not only to stay alive, but to multiply its code. Not only to multiply, but to improve on itself. Not only to just BE, but to develop ways to sense, to see, to hear the universe these elements sprang from. These elements that were just matter... had no intellect, no reason, no senses, no meaning for being ... reversed all of that the instant the code was formed. The code would develop everything the elements didn't have before: intelligence, reason, perception of its surroundings, the need to survive, the need to multiply. And beyond that, the elements that formed a code over time would come to think there is a God, or at lest some of the code thinks so! •• You would take a great step forward toward reason and away from delusion if you would first abandon this notion that Man is the "end result" of the natural processes of the Universe. Having shed that homocentric view of reality, you might then be able to begin to grasp the fact that natural laws as we perceive them are merely what happened here, at a particular time in a particular place, and that under even slightly different circumstances, an entirely different set of such laws would have sprung into existence, doubtless leading to beings very different from us, some of whom would nonetheless be absolutely convinced that their particular set of laws had been specially engineered for them. I return to a simple illustration I have used many times before. In fourth grade our teacher was telling us about the way plants reproduced themselves with seeds. She used an apple as an example, showing us how the apple provided a food source for the seeds it carried at its core, but that also, because the apple tasted good, animals (including Man) would come along and pick the apple, eat the good part, and then toss away (or excrete, tho she skipped that part!) the core and seeds. Thus the seeds would be dropped a distance further from the tree than simply rolling could accomplish, and the apple would propagate itself over a wide region. "So," she said, "the apple tastes good so that we will eat it." I carried that simply turn of phrase in my head for a long, long time. "The apple tastes good so that we will eat it." And then one day, logic and reason kicked in, and I realized this was a classic example of what I have come to call "looking thru the wrong end of the telescope". The apple does not taste good so that we will eat it, we eat it because it tastes good. For the apple, as for the Universe as a whole, there is no "so that". Nothing happens with any purpose, least of all to create a world that will be hospitable to Man. (In reality, less than 2% of the Earth's surface is actually hospitable to our species, without us making special adaptations. Hardly a good example of us being the "end result" of any sort of deliberate process.) We look at the Universe, and because we are in it, it seems engineered to meet to our needs. Nothing could be further from the truth.
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