The universe....

[Rstanley0312 0]

Believe in God or not... this is a good read.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/eric-metaxas-science-increasingly-makes-the-case-for-god-1419544568

Life is all about ass....either you're kicking it, kissing it, working it off, or trying to get a piece of it.
Muff Brother #4382 Dudeist Skydiver #000
www.fundraiseadventure.com

[quade 3]

Nope.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps

quade -
The World's Most Boring Skydiver

[SkyMagilla 0]

Did you create a generic log-in ID that we can all use to access the article?

I'm not going to pay $12 to subscribe to read it...

[Anvilbrother 0]

I like Nick Offerman's thoughts on god and the bible.

“Now, there are things I like just fine about church, and I don’t just mean making money. The notion of getting together as a community to remind ourselves why we shouldn’t behave like animals is a fucking great idea. I think the Bible is largely an amazing and beautiful book of fictional stories from which we can glean the most wholesome lessons about how to treat one another decently.”

Postes r made from an iPad or iPhone. Spelling and gramhair mistakes guaranteed move along,

[quade 3]

And I too, maybe much to the amazement of some people, have no issues even with an organized religion if it brings somebody comfort in troubled times. I think that aspect can be a great thing.

The problem though is when it's taken literally as an explanation of how the world works scientifically or even worse as a way to keep and abuse power.

The notion that "god" decided this or that individual should rule over other people is ridiculous and pretty much any time I see ANY politician talk about god I can't help being highly skeptical, even cynical, about the person's motives. It absolutely sickens me to know our 43rd President was consciously manipulated by Cheney, Rumsfeld and other members of the PNAC to start what he believed was in large part a religious war in Iraq.

quade -
The World's Most Boring Skydiver

[ryoder 1,388]

SkyMagilla

Did you create a generic log-in ID that we can all use to access the article?

I'm not going to pay $12 to subscribe to read it...

Here is the weird thing about WSJ:

If you give someone a link to an article, you get that stupid login prompt,
BUT if you just copy/paste that article title into Google, the first result that comes up is link to that same article w/o the stupid login prompt.

"There are only three things of value: younger women, faster airplanes, and bigger crocodiles" - Arthur Jones.

[Tink1717 2]

Quote

Believe in God or not... this is a good read.

http://www.wsj.com/...e-for-god-1419544568

No, it's NOT a good read, it patronizing bullshit. It's trying to make the case that bronze age people in the Judean desert knew more about the way things work than we do now.

Skydivers don't knock on Death's door. They ring the bell and runaway... It really pisses him off.
-The World Famous Tink. (I never heard of you either!!)
AA #2069 ASA#33 POPS#8808 Swooo 1717

[lurch 0]

To this day the cognitive dissonance is one of the most darkly hilarious things about religion, to me.
Over and over, these endless, mindless assertions. "God does this" "God says this" "God wants that".

All from a book, a compilation of ancient writings by mostly illiterate bronze age galilean sheepherders who knew -nothing-.

They did not know of the solar system, the planets, they did not know they were ON a planet, they did not know what planets WERE. They did not know of cells, mechanisms of life, DNA, bacteria, viruses...

Knew nothing of chemistry, medicine, geology... tectonics, molecules, atoms, subatomics, astronomy... electricity, gravity, orbital dynamics... they did not know what an orbit was.

The average first-world 8-year old child knows far more about the universe than those people ever did. All they had were invented explanations, myths, stories, made-up crap that is charming and cute when a child does it. But when a supposedly rational adult makes the same assertions in the face of modern knowledge they come off as witless.

When people make assertions of knowledge about God I tend to feel the same condescending exasperation a doctor must feel when diagnosing a patient with a bacterial infection and prescribing an antibiotic... Only to have the patient say "No no you silly man that's not it at all, I made the mistake of camping on a ley line which disturbed my energy because venus was in orion last night. I've been having trouble opening my chakras to expel the negative vibrations I picked up, but you'll see, I'll offer some burning sage to the four corners which will clear my chakras and harmonize my energy."

The doctor looks blankly at the idiot and wonders if it is worth the aggravation to inform the patient that they are speaking pure gibberish.

To anyone who thinks anything from any ancient scripture has ANY resemblance to reality... to anyone who claims they know what god wants or says or thinks...

Science has given us the most stunningly effective "Shut the fuck up" rebuttal ever available, and it can be expressed in just four words.

Hubble Extreme Deep Field.

The closest we will ever come to actually -knowing- what is -really- out there. Because for the first time in human history we can SEE it.

Something like .00001% of the night sky. And in it, 10,000 galaxies' worth of cold, hard, fact.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_eXtreme_Deep_Field#mediaviewer/File:Hubble_Extreme_Deep_Field_%28full_resolution%29.png

THAT, is what infinity actually LOOKS like. More stars, than the entire human species has brain cells.

I love looking at that image and trying to comprehend the implications. Because I can't. It's the greatest mindfuck in all history. Where religious types would fall on their knees in mindless worship and reduce it all to the simplistic human notion of "god" in an effort to try to think they have a handle on it, I just look, and enjoy the limitless sense of sheer AWE that comes with understanding that it IS too much to understand.

We do not and cannot know, anything... about whatever may have started it all behind the scenes. All we find is complexity of rules energy and matter going beyond all scales we can create. We can see about 14 billion light years. As near as we can tell, that's just the barrier to sensing due to the fact that the lightspeed limit means no information from further away than that has had time to even reach this part of the universe yet. As near as we can tell, that beautiful mess of galaxies as numerous as atoms, just goes on... forever.

The only true and intelligent answer to almost all of these questions to which people answer "god" is "I don't know."

Is that simple humility really THAT hard?
-B

Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

[gowlerk 1,914]

Quote

The only true and intelligent answer to almost all of these questions to which people answer "god" is "I don't know."

Thank you for that. Exactly the way I feel, but so hard to make people understand.

Always remember the brave children who died defending your right to bear arms. Freedom is not free.

[christelsabine 1]

Best post, crystal clear

dudeist skydiver # 3105

[jakee 1,257]

Rstanley0312

Believe in God or not... this is a good read.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/eric-metaxas-science-increasingly-makes-the-case-for-god-1419544568

No, it's bollocks. His claim that probability says there shouldn't be any life supporting planets in the universe is just not true. He's made it up to sound good.

Do you want to have an ideagasm?

[mistercwood 287]

gowlerk

Quote

The only true and intelligent answer to almost all of these questions to which people answer "god" is "I don't know."

Thank you for that. Exactly the way I feel, but so hard to make people understand.

+1. I love the HDSF image for much the same reasons. I occasionally debate theology with more religious friends, and it's the sheer scale of the universe that for me puts the lid on it.

Could there be a "first cause"? I don't believe so at all, but I couldn't rule it out - as you say, I just don't know. Could you talk to it if there was? Absolutely not. To presume you could is (to me) the height of human arrogance, and my biggest gripe with organised religion.

You are playing chicken with a planet - you can't dodge and planets don't blink. Act accordingly.

[maadmax 0]

Quote

All from a book, a compilation of ancient writings by mostly illiterate bronze age galilean sheepherders who knew -nothing-.

The one thing they knew that any one who is spiritually self aware knows, is that we came from something and we will be changed into something else. If you are content with "from oblivion to oblivion" then you have sold yourself short and missed out on why you are here. Look at our history, we have sought for the purpose and meaning of our self consciousness through out the ages. For some who have found God know the answer.

...

[jakee 1,257]

There's no such thing as spiritually self aware. There's reality and there's wishful thinking.

I can understand why you don't want oblivion to be your final destination but the reason you believe in something else isn't because you have better information.

Do you want to have an ideagasm?

[sfzombie13 307]

could you please put the article here, because when i tried what you said, it took me to the page wanting a login to read past the first paragraph.

_________________________________________
Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes

[SkyMagilla 0]

sfzombie13

could you please put the article here, because when i tried what you said, it took me to the page wanting a login to read past the first paragraph.

Click this google search: https://www.google.com/search?q=Science+Increasingly+Makes+the+Case+for+God&oq=Science+Increasingly+Makes+the+Case+for+God&aqs=chrome..69i57&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=122&ie=UTF-8

Then select the top entry in that list, which should be the Wall Street Journal. That should give the full article. Like Ryoder said. You just can't get there directly for some reason.

[winsor 186]

quade

And I too, maybe much to the amazement of some people, have no issues even with an organized religion if it brings somebody comfort in troubled times. I think that aspect can be a great thing...

Right.

[Bertt 0]

One point about the SETI project: It looks for intelligent life on other planets.
There's been life on earth for ~ a billion years. It's only in about the last hundred years that life on earth has been able to reach out beyond earth's atmosphere.
If you're looking for life on other planets, you're not looking for radio waves, you're looking for bacteria and dinosaur poop. Do bacteria believe in God? Probably not, but the failure of the SETI project does nothing to boost the author's idea that life is impossibly improbable. There's still plenty of room in the universe for the kind of life that doesn't build alters to gods.

You don't have to outrun the bear.

[lurch 0]

Invalid argument. Consider the scaling of time involved. If I had to guess I'd say the actual time clock for system development followed by enough time for a planet to settle down and life arise on it is more or less set by the time the star is forming and lights off.

Not all stars light off at the same time. Those suckers have been coming and going in waves of star formation for many generations. The galaxies they can see way out there are visibly younger and simpler than the nearby "modern" ones- since the ones we can see 13 billion light years out, we are seeing as they were 13 billion years ago. The image of what they look like now, won't reach us for 13 billion years. Nothing says variations of life haven't been arising, scattered across the galaxies for hundreds of millions to billions of years.

Given the number of stars out there, I'd say it is likely there are billions upon billions of planets bearing life at all levels of evolution from single cell (or even forms of life that don't involve a cell structure- that may just be our little local tweak for all we know) through the local analogue to dinos, to uncounted variations on sentient species from prehuman to far past human levels.

I'd bet on graveyard planets where something like us arose, and, cursed by the same aggression and intelligence that led to dominance of the planet, nuked themselves into glass before they could ever get out of the system.

When you have a trillion trillion trillion stars to work with, the most improbable things imaginable actually become certain to happen as long as we know they aren't entirely impossible, and since we exist, we know we're possible, ergo, we are everywhere!

"We" defined as intelligent life. Billion to one odds? Hell, that means that shit happens billions of times a day, out there somewhere.
Trillion to one odds? There's a galaxy out there with an estimated 9 trillion stars in it. Therefore if the odds of a species identical to ours were one in a trillion, odds are there are NINE species like us in that one galaxy ALONE!

There are an estimated 200 billion galaxies in the observable universe. That's just the part we can see. Given isotropism of galactic distribution, the fact that on a big enough scale the spread of galaxies all looks the same, there's no reason to think the large scale structures change just out of sight- so unless there's a massive bend in physics laws that only kicks in in a sphere 15 billion LY away from here centered on this planet just out of view, (sarcasm) we know the universe looks like this at any range further than Observable Universe. You go 500 billion lightyears from here and shit still looks the same- trillions of galaxies as far as the hubble can see.

If we ever invented a tachyon-based observation method involving detection of galactic emissions at 2x the speed of light, the "observable Universe" would extend out from 14 to a sphere 28 billion lightyears in radius. At which point just the observable part of the universe would be up to the megatrillions of galaxies.

Want a more optimistic view?

I'd also bet on perhaps local communities in the more dense star systems, binaries... if life arose in a place where you had more than one star nearby, say, orbit of Pluto, hell, even twice that, interstellar travel becomes possible- at least for the locals.

If we detected a species around a star only twice the distance to Pluto away from here, we'd have a high speed rail system to that star system by this time next week.

First thing we'd do, of course, is try to kill them, second would be see if they were good to eat.
If they were better armed, they might be able to make us back off and behave ourselves. If we were fortunate and they turned out to be more civilized, and did not annihilate us in return, which is what we'd do, we'd eventually see trade.

We didn't have to turn out this vicious, and maybe in a few thousand more years of evolving toward civilization we won't be. Maybe sometime we'll even be safe to set loose out there. It's self limiting- we sure as hell will never get out of the system while we collectively spend 10 trillion a year on military killing each other and a few tens of billions developing space gear and figuring a way out of the box. I.E. a way to leave the solar system.

I think it entirely possible, in fact extremely probable, that there are more species than we can count out there, living much better lives than we are. Their radiative emissions either are discreet, nonexistent or unnecessary, or haven't reached us yet, their civilizations being 60 billion lightyears from here, or we simply haven't come up with a way to detect them yet.

I'd bet on that last. Only just recently did we gain the ability to detect planets. At first they only found one, then two, now there's a catalogue of thousands, and now we know planets are as common as dirt out there. When I was a kid, they didn't actually know if there were planets around any other stars but our own. They couldn't say for sure if planets were just a quirk of our solar system or what. Now they know.

More recently they were able to indirectly identify the color of a planet- some blue thing 200 times the size of earth orbiting its star closer than Mercury. Story is the physics indicated a surface of mostly molten glass, basically.

Here's the advance I'm hoping for.
I think if they keep working at it, and eventually can easily work out the color of planets they identify, the one I'm waiting for is a very specific return saturated in the 500-600 nm range- the color of chlorophyll.

To my knowledge there is only one natural process that could turn a planet that particular color of green- Life.

The day we find a green planet is the day we know for certain there is life out there, and relatively nearby.

If I had to bet, I'd bet that we are in fact saturated with their signals all the time, we just haven't figured out what they are and don't know to look for them that way yet. There's probably a simple, obvious way to make a signal stand out, a way we haven't thought of yet, and much like discovering planets were everywhere all along, we'll find we've been rolling in reruns of I Love Lucy from thousands of species for millennia but it took that long to figure out what that signal would actually look like when it got here and build something designed to detect it.
-B

Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

[SkyDekker 1,123]

Anvilbrother

I like Nick Offerman's thoughts on god and the bible.

“Now, there are things I like just fine about church, and I don’t just mean making money. The notion of getting together as a community to remind ourselves why we shouldn’t behave like animals is a fucking great idea. I think the Bible is largely an amazing and beautiful book of fictional stories from which we can glean the most wholesome lessons about how to treat one another decently.”

This.

I am not overly religous, but I very much enjoy going to church. I enjoy my one our a week of quiet reflection, with some interludes of pipe organ.

Do I need organized religon for that? No, but it works for me.

[turtlespeed 212]

quade

Nope.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps

What a well thought out and descriptive narrative on the subject.

I'm not usually into the whole 3-way thing, but you got me a little excited with that. - Skymama
BTR #1 / OTB^5 Official #2 / Hellfish #408 / VSCR #108/Tortuga/Orfun

[turtlespeed 212]

jakee

***Believe in God or not... this is a good read.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/eric-metaxas-science-increasingly-makes-the-case-for-god-1419544568

No, it's bollocks. His claim that probability says there shouldn't be any life supporting planets in the universe is just not true. He's made it up to sound good.

I'm not usually into the whole 3-way thing, but you got me a little excited with that. - Skymama
BTR #1 / OTB^5 Official #2 / Hellfish #408 / VSCR #108/Tortuga/Orfun

[turtlespeed 212]

jakee

***Believe in God or not... this is a good read.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/eric-metaxas-science-increasingly-makes-the-case-for-god-1419544568

No, it's bollocks. His claim that probability says there shouldn't be any life supporting planets in the universe is just not true. He's made it up to sound good.

HUH?

Weird . . . I can't edit the last post.

What says that his probability is bollocks.

Please show your work.

I'm not usually into the whole 3-way thing, but you got me a little excited with that. - Skymama
BTR #1 / OTB^5 Official #2 / Hellfish #408 / VSCR #108/Tortuga/Orfun

[jakee 1,257]

turtlespeed

******Believe in God or not... this is a good read.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/eric-metaxas-science-increasingly-makes-the-case-for-god-1419544568

No, it's bollocks. His claim that probability says there shouldn't be any life supporting planets in the universe is just not true. He's made it up to sound good.

HUH?

Weird . . . I can't edit the last post.

What says that his probability is bollocks.

Please show your work.

The work that he's referencing, the maths that shows that the probability of any planet in the universe supporting life is vanishingly small, does not exist. He's made it up.

It can't be shown because it isn't there. If you agree with him, then you need to show that it does exist. You can't, because it doesn't, so I'm sure you'll find some excuse about how it's not your responsibility but unfortunately this is how logic works.

Do you want to have an ideagasm?

[turtlespeed 212]

jakee

*********Believe in God or not... this is a good read.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/eric-metaxas-science-increasingly-makes-the-case-for-god-1419544568

No, it's bollocks. His claim that probability says there shouldn't be any life supporting planets in the universe is just not true. He's made it up to sound good.

HUH?

Weird . . . I can't edit the last post.

What says that his probability is bollocks.

Please show your work.

The work that he's referencing, the maths that shows that the probability of any planet in the universe supporting life is vanishingly small, does not exist. He's made it up.

It can't be shown because it isn't there. If you agree with him, then you need to show that it does exist. You can't, because it doesn't, so I'm sure you'll find some excuse about how it's not your responsibility but unfortunately this is how logic works.

I asked for work that shows different, do you have any?

I'm not usually into the whole 3-way thing, but you got me a little excited with that. - Skymama
BTR #1 / OTB^5 Official #2 / Hellfish #408 / VSCR #108/Tortuga/Orfun