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Re: Sounds Interesting ....

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Posted by Rob Worrall/">Rob Worrall on October 5, 1998 11:12:24 UTC

A fascinating conversation chums. I think we have missed a few important points. So far, in many respects, I find Fabio's oratory most entertaining and insightful. Good onya Fab!

Firstly, we are all being just a little precious and defensive over our own convictions. This is where I suspect science fundamentally differs from theology. Theology requires faith as its premise. Science doesn't. Rather, the basic scientific method of conjecture and refutation are impaired by faith. If your methods, logic and testing are consistent with the best practices offered by the historical global corpus of science, then your have a version of the truth that stands up to criticism only until someone else using scientific method proves you wrong.

Clever animals that we are, we went and invented language to organise and communicate our sensory perceptions of the environment. Had we been a silicon based, ammonia breathing, non-sexually reproducing lifeform we may have chosen not to.

So we invented this thing called "God". It seemed to work at the time.

Same old brains inside our ancestral primate skulls went and learned how to count. So we invented mathematics. And, over time the corpus of thought managed to model the history of our physical Universe in numbers (and logical symbols), consistent with what we are able to empirically verify.

But at this juncture of (space-)time (to illustrate one particularly artful model!) our numbers model can go back no further. This is not to suggest that nothing happened before hand -it's just that right now we are not able to know. We don't have a sufficient model yet. With time we may penetrate this theoretical barrier - or maybe we won't. I probably won't be here long enough to know. But I hope people keep trying.

Also at this historical juncture the numbers model of the cosmos, when translated into spoken language somehow resembles another metaphysical model, derived from a completely different corpus of human enquiry, based on a very different set of observations, described on prose, translated into other spoken languages over time, and not at all premised on the method of conjecture and refutation, rather empiricism, i.e "Creation".

Sadly too much information is lost translating from numbers to words.

Anyway, that's enough good humoured, skeptical prattling from this lump of congealed post-Apocalyptic energy for one night. Seeya Ron. (all the Ozzies will understand that bit)

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