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Posted by Phil.o.sofir on October 2, 1999 05:25:08 UTC

: tenacious: : I appreciate your input in this area. I admit my understanding of physics is rudimentary at best, but I was simply trying to illustrate an example. So yes, I do accept your definition of time. So by the definition you've described, I agree that time is objective. I also acknowledge the existence of many objective facts, for instance the acceleration of gravity on earth being 9.81m/s^2, is also objective. So I'm conceding that humans can know some objective truths. However, does your argument follow, that just because some objective truths can be known, that it's possible to know all objective things? That is, our perception of reality (which is purely subjective), can coincide with objective reality. It's presumptious to say that all mysteries are solvable by humans. You also insist that our senses are not flawed, but are merely inaccurate (which are synonymous in my lexicon), because we can create instruments to measure O-R (objective reality). However, we still have only 5 senses, and the tools we've been able to create are merely extensions of these senses. Brad also agrees that the hypothetical 6th, 7th, 8th, etc. senses could be what we need to better understand the universe. : My argument remains; being humans is a bias in its self, and our humans senses are a smokescreen. Your assumption that all things can be known is unsustained.

: Greg: : I did not say our senses were inaccurate, they are simply not as acute as we need them to be. Einstein felt that all things are knowable and I agree with him. We are able to perceive things mathematically long before we can actually detect them with our instrumentation. Electrons, once thought to be the smallest components of matter, are being broken down into their components in particle accelerators. I believe only the "top" quark remains undetected. The mind perceives far beyond the ability of our senses, and our science turns the subjective view into an objective realization. We still only use about 30% of our brain at present, so we have considerable room to evolve, and we may even evolve beyond the corporeal view. Your assumption that there is some objective reality we may never know reminds me of the men at the end of the eighteenth century that said that everything that can be invented, already has been invented. Our understanding is rapidly advancing in every field, even beyond our maturity to appropriately appreciate due caution. I believe that only our ignorance in the way we apply our knowledge can prevent us from surviving long enough to realize all there is to know. The only place that might be illusive in obtaining an objective verification, is inside the schwartzchild radius of a black hole, and then only because from there it becomes a one-way journey, not because we couldn't comprehend what we might perceive there.

: tenacious: : On to my second point. You also said this: : "Now, allow me to suggest to you that the Universe is the way it is because God made it that way. Also, that He made it so that the Life Created in that Universe would perceive it, even as it was made. This being the case, it is available for us to perceive reality even as, in fact, it IS. God does not mean to deceive us, but He has given us Free-Will, and thus we are prone to error."

: I must point out that you would be hard pressed to prove either God or free-will, and to use these premises in your argument, you will succeed only in convincing people that believe both. Unfortunately, I believe in neither. : From what I can gather of your statement, you seem to be SUGGESTING that God created a universe that's well ordered; each component interacting harmoniously like the inner workings of a clock. You also assert that God made the universe in a way that's perfectly comprehensible to humans because he does not mean to deceive us. You've also cited free will as a source of our error. But alas, the universe is not so well ordered as we once believed. For example, many once cited the examples of "how a giraffe had a long neck" and "how the turtle got its shell" as examples of how every living creature was seemingly perfectly suited to its task. With the development of evolutionary theory, it was determined that animals were in fact not perfectly suited to their environments. They were mere "sufficiently" suited, until some sort of random process selected the best suited individuals to survive. Hence, animals do not have "perfect" structural adaptations endowed by a "perfect" God. There are products of random processes. You see humans as incredibly significant creatures; God created the entire universe in a way that man could benifit by learning all things about his environment. : Theists see humans as these remarkable things, somehow elevated from other animals because we were fashioned in the image of God. Perhaps it's the exact opposite. As I've said many times, God is a projection of human perfection, God is merely a magnified version of man. : I don't believe we are so significant. We're merely magnificent accidents with a higher evolved tool; our minds. Beyond that, we're nothing more than insignificant specks, obliviously hurdling through space on a rotating gas ball.

: Greg: : The Universe Does work Perfectly. Even what is perceived as Chaos has Purpose. A star explodes in a Super Nova, a seemingly chaotic event, but it actually produces all the elements heavier then iron, and distributes all the elements throughout the Universe in the process. Mutations are apparent errors in the genetic code, yet in the long run, through Evolution, Nature improves the species through those errors, so they are not errors at all, but simply Nature's Way of examining all the possibilities. The predatory nature of life also improves species, for as the predators ween out the invalid and weak, the species grow stronger and more capable, requiring the predators to grow stronger and more capable in order to hunt them. All Life is aspiring towards an improved view. Nothing was Created Perfect, but everything is evolving in that direction. Our Self-Awareness is what gives us God's Image, and our Free-Will is a result of our Self-Awareness. All the rest of the animal kingdom abides by instinct, Mankind does not. When you walk into an Ice Cream shop that has 29 flavors and choose one flavor over the rest, you demonstrate your Free-Will, for nothing else makes that choice for you.

: tenacious: : "Many believe that we are fallen angels. I prefer to think that we're risen apes." : -Desmond Morris.

: Greg: : I prefer to think we are little slimeballs, having scratched and clawed our way up from a primordial soup of organic molecules. We are Creation itself become aware, and although God may not have designed it to Create Mankind explicitly, He did design Creation to evolve into Life, and then into Self-Aware Life. :o)

***WOW, that is a good string of thoughts. There was something in there about god not wanting to decive, if so, we would'nt have to guess or debate about its very existance.

The senses are really only the primary recivers for the master sensing system of our brains, I guess I did not have to state that, thus our abstract/creative abiblities are a product of our evvironment/reality. Evolution is natures scientific method of finding what works given current circumstances.

Ordered workings of the universe, we have created the concept of order for manipulation purposes, and all this is based upon they ways things can fit togeher and the reaction from a random fitting of these pieces. Call it random order, or limited chaos. If one had the ability to track every variable in say the melting of a speck of gold,we know what would happen, and if we dropped this melted gold knowing all the forces (more variables) acting upon it from distances of light years, we still could not predict where every partical will end up, much less tag a single atom of gold during the melting process predicting where this atom will end up before it is dropped at any point intime. So constant change/movement creates unpredictability which is what we call randomness/chaos/and even time. But we do know generally, which in most cases is all we need to predict for practical purposes. Absolute zero is the only way to stop the change which we call time, but all would still exist in frozen change/time, if of course it covered the entire infinite universe. Thus the universe is a perpetual motion entity, there is no more or less movement/change or matter/nothingness in the concept of ininity, just simply more of a concept than we can handle at this point in our movement. But, what if it were possible to atain absolute zero, I do wonder what would happen to the energy/matter if it was caught in this chill? If it was destroyed because matter is dependent upon motion for the cycle to continue, then this little thing I think of would be false. Kinda like taking one of the 3 elements of fire away, and the fire cannot exist, bad example... There was more good stuff in there somewhere but I do believe I'm outof my shoes within this string. Goodthing about these bullitin type boards, they can't tell you to get lost before you fire it out. Shoot first and ask questions later.

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