| Posted: 04 September 2010 at 11:07am | IP Logged | 1
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What do you consider "dead" matter? A carbon atom? A simple carbon molecule? A complex carbon molecule? How complex? Is an amino acid molecule "alive"? Do you consider only those things that appear to have "purpose" be "alive"? I use quotation marks because when comparing things that are alive to things that are not, it's not as cut and dry as you might expect. At least not at the simplest levels. A human being is definitely alive, a rock is definitely not, A vurus, however, is not definitely alive. Viruses can be crystalized and still recover from the process. Viruses can be smashed "dead" and retain a degree of their infectious properties. I liked Asimov's analogy: you look at a castle from a distance and it looks like a castle. Get closer and you can see the individual bricks that make up the construction. Disassemble the castle without damaging any of the blocks, and put all the blocks in a pile. Where did the castle go? One hundred percent of its materials are present, but the castle itself is gone. The organization is missing, and that's enough to remove the castle from "life" even though nothing is "really" gone. A dead human body (assuming no obvious trauma) is exactly the same as a live human body except in some degree of organization we can't identify (at least not yet). We can talk of "souls", which imply a level of complexity be added to "reality" if they exist (Heaven, Hell, ghosts, out-of-body experiences, etc), but we don't require some hidden quality of "castleness" to explain or describe the organization that went missing from our reverse-construction process earlier. We don't think the castle exists in some hidden form and "remembers" that it used to be a castle. The bricks that get reused in a future construction process don't have a memory of their prior configuration. Why should the carbon, phosphorus, nitrogen, calcium etc atoms of your body or mine "remember" who they used to comprise? Life is a process. It's a mystery only in that we haven't figured out the blueprints completely. Science is about asking the questions that lead to better comprehension. Faith is about providing pat answers that historically have slowed real progress in comprehension. Too many people in too many societies have had to "unlearn" what had been considered Truths before they could discover what appears to be usable information. The real difference between science and faith? Faith might work, prayer might work, hope might work. When faith doesn't work it's taken as a failure in the person using it. Science always works. When science doesn't work it's taken as an indication that their is a problem in the theory being employed. The theory gets studied and improved upon to learn why it failed in some fashion (typically at an exteme condition not normally encountered) and it then gets BETTER. Faith is as good as it's ever going to get. Science is as good as our own understanding. Choice seems obvious.
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