The Improbability of God
- Thread starter Scott Free
- Start date
Shoulda stopped there, then you'd have said something true.
At best, as Christopher Hitchens points out eloquently and at length in God is Not Great, religion is from the childhood of our species, and thanks to such devices as the telescope and the microscope it no longer offers an explanation of anything important. To that I would add that it never did offer a *correct* explanation of anything important. His summary is that its scriptures are myths and fables, it has always been an enemy of science and inquiry, it has subsisted on lies and fear and been the willing accomplice of ignorance, guilt, slavery, genocide, racism, sexism, and tyranny. It has run out of justifications, and it's past time to put it aside. Couldn't have put it better myself.
In the particular case of Christianity, we don't even know what its founding documents say, we don't have them. We have copies of copies of copies of copies... many iterations removed from the originals, from times when copies were made laboriously by hand, and many scribes provably made deliberate additions and emendations, quite apart from accidental copying errors. The famous story in John, for instance, where Jesus meets the woman caught in adultery and utters the famous remark about letting those without sin cast the first stone, is provably a later addition, not part of the original text. Similarly, the last 12 verses of the Gospel of Mark, the critical bit where Jesus' appearance to others after his death and resurrection is described, is a later addition, not part of what Mark originally wrote. Modern scholarship based on all the fragments of sources we now have of ancient bits of what is now the New Testament estimates that there are over 200,000 such variations in the texts, and some estimates go as high as 400,000. Just to put that in perspective, it means there are more variations in the sources than there are words in the New Testament. Even in the 18th century biblical scholars knew there were at least 30,000 variations. It's impossible to justify taking this book literally when we don't even know what the original documents said.
I'm inclined to agree, with the provisos that "the known" and "what has always been" aren't the same thing, and aren't even always intersecting sets, and there's a chance that there may nothing, or very little, that "has always been." "The known" may in fact be in error, as the history of science abundantly proves, and there are legitimate arguments on the fringes suggesting that what we call the constants of nature may not really be constant. If they're not, they change very slowly over VERY long time scales, but there may be multiple bubble universes in which they're different from the values we see. I don't even have much confidence in the claim that eventually we'll figure it all out. What I know of the history of scientific discovery, which is quite a lot, makes me suspect that reality is fractal, in the sense that it'll show the same degree of complexity regardless of the scale at which we examine it.
Most people view rock as a solid. As a geologist I know it is a fluid and a plastic which over time will literally flow as if it were lava or fold as if it were dough. Over time, pressure and a small amount of heat it will even morph into new minerals forms.
What really really continues to fascinate me is how minerals "grow" into crystalline form, nearly pure, absolutely perfect form that can alter and emit energy as if it were alive.
If god created life then he/she/it gave far more effort to the chemistry of the universe than life.
Compared to a crystal a human is an imperfect failure on a grand scale.
Iggy,
You can't do this to me! You can't just post pictures of a giant skeleton without some details. Who, when, where, how? Dude, I won't be able to sleep tonight!!!!!!
You can't do this to me! You can't just post pictures of a giant skeleton without some details. Who, when, where, how? Dude, I won't be able to sleep tonight!!!!!!
I think that's an utterly brilliant observation. I should have guessed from your user name that you're a geologist. I spent a fair bit of time in that business too, though formally I was a geophysicist. You know,the guys who fly over the terrain towing a magnetometer, not the guys grubbing in the dirt on the ground... :smile: In retrospect, I'd rather have been on the ground, it's much more interesting than flying over it, though the mathematics of geophysics always fascinated me and that's what drew me into it.
I do geo-fizz, on the ground exploration, mineralogy and exploration seismology. I got my first wash pan at age 8 and haven't looked back since. I love every minute of it except when working away from my family. My girl is going to follow in my footsteps and work with me and I'll hand it all over to her and then I'll go bump up from MSc to Ph.D and teach.
What do you do now?
What do you do now?