It is the right of nontheists to require theists, generally, to agree on a single scripture and a single interpretation of that scripture before entering upon any discussion of possible scriptural validity. For, until almost all scripture-believers can agree on the truth of one scripture, no scripture held to be universally valid even exists to be deemed fit for discussion as a candidate for being a true account, and hence 'the one true scripture.'
Scripturiosity:
It is well observed that people tend to join the faith hewed to by their parents and most prevalent in their geographic setting. And it is fair to contend that most people who have been brought up in a particular religious tradition, and have been brought up reading the scriptures of that tradition, have not done much in the way of reading the scriptures of other religions. The vast majority of Muslims have never read the Bhagavad-Gita or the Book of Mormon; most Christians have not read the Book of Mormon, the Qu'ran, or any part of the Vedas; most Hindus have never perused the Old Testament. And indeed we may go one further than that and observe that many, if not most, adherents to any one scriptural faith have never fully and thoroughly read their own scripture, and have instead tended to rely upon their religious leaders to convey what meaning ought to be gleaned from it.
But contrariwise, I have personally known Muslims who read the the Bible, Old Testament or New, and at the end of the day expressed the sentimentation that it was an interesting book, but was in error while the Qu'ran was not so. And I have known Jews who read the New Testament and came to the same conclusion. And I have known Hindus who read both Qu'ran and Bible and found both to be errant accounts. And, naturally, I have known Christians who read the Qu'ran, the Book of Mormon, some of the multitudinous Vedas, or other scriptures, and have found all the other works to be in error, with only their Bible being true (and indeed only their particular translation being true). The common denominator amongst all of these was this: people who were born and raised into a particular tradition were inclined to believe that the superior scripture was whichever one there parents or peers had told them about. To this I will add that I have met in my time a small selection of religious converts; those who converted from Christianity to Islam or to Judaism or to Mormonism or to Wicca, as well as from Islam to Christianity, or from Mormonism to Christianity. The proportion of people who have changed faiths in this manner is small overall, and dwarfed by the number who have converted from theistic faiths to nontheistic traditions -- to Deism and Pantheism and Pandeism, and, naturally, to Atheism and generic incarnations of Agnosticism.
But this process seems counterintuitive, for if there is indeed one 'true' scripture, if one empirically stands above the rest, then honest promoters of that one ought to be able to convince honest and studious representatives of all other faiths of the truth of that one scripture. And it is inconceivable that faith traditions with millions of adherants ought not to have substantial numbers of the honest and the studious. And, those studious representatives being converted to the veracity of the one true scripture, the rest of their cobelievers ought quickly to fall into the same belief. For every scripture assigns consequences to the continued teaching of falsity, so if the most dedicated of Muslim Imams were to be convinced by logical explanation of the text that Tibetan Buddhism were true -- and that he would suffer a poor reincarnation and be distanced from Nirvana by continuing to lead others into Islam -- then rational thinking would offer no choice but to convert to that strain of Buddhism, and explain as much to his followers (no matter the consequences to himself of breaking with his previous practice).
But the vast majority of people in the world have rejected each of the scriptures and interpretations of them. Billions of people have rejected Hinduism, billions have rejected Islam, billions have rejected Christianity as a whole and billions more have rejected each of its individual branches, billions have rejected Sikhism. Now it is true that billions, perhaps billions more, have rejected nontheistic faith traditions such as Buddhism and Atheism and Pandeism, but these traditions have never claimed to have God-written books which muct be taken as true on pain of eternal torment. Buddhism for example simply has the observations of a man, the Buddha, self-proclaimed as nothing more than a man who reached a state of understanding. Buddhism teaches that all the scriptural religions in which men believe are simply part of the web of desires which humans erect to justify their continued wallowing in the suffering of want. Atheism and frequently Deism account for scripture-based religions in reductionist terms, as purely psychological and sociological phenomena. Pandeism accounts for scriptural religions as being, for the lion's share, manifestations of man's efforts to comprehend the incomprehensibility of the underlying, unconscious mind of our Creator.
And it is true as well that Buddhism, for example, has the writings of the Buddha, and other traditions have particularly revered writings such as Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason is to Deists. But by definition none of the non-scriptural traditions have or allow for a scripture, a written volume contending to have been inscribed or inspired directly by an intervening deity. And so we reach the crux of the argument, which is that amongst those who believe it possible for their deity to have had an intervening hand in the writing of a book, and who believe that the occurrence of this intervention is evident in but a single one of the many, many books for which this claim is made, then the truth of this assertedly evident intervention would come through the acceptance by most all scripture believers of the one scripture which was 'true,' and of the one most 'true' interpretation (and, even version or edition of that scripture, if more than one exists).
What is left:
Naturally, it is always conceivable that some small number of especially gullible types will be drawn into belief within a cult having a wholly implausible scripture. And so, it can not be required that a single work be recognized by the entirety of the theistic population, as people may reject a scriptural account for irrational reasons (irrespective of whether a rational person might reject such an account anyway). But once we get into faiths having hundreds of thousands or millions of followers, the equivalence of scripture evens out. For such population cannot be maintained without having followers within them who are free to make whatever inquiries they wish into the saliency of the scripture at issue, and inevitably having amongst that selection some whose perception and intellect tower above the average both within that faith and for humanity in general.
Nor is this itself an argument that no scripture is or can be true. It is instead simply an observation, that if one scripture were true, and were rationally demonstrable to be so, then all rational believers in the saliency-at-all of scripture ought to quickly come to acknowledge its truth -- and to do so before those who do not even believe in scripture may be expected to do so. And even if this truth were one only spiritually perceptible, if there were one scripture which was true in that sense it ought to be perceptable in so fair and honest a way that honest and studious persons of a spiritual bent coming from any background would conclude it to be more true than that to which they had heretofore adhered.
It is certainly possible to discuss generic -- that is, nonscriptural -- questions as to asserted proofs of God, even absent an acceptible universality of scripture. The Cosmological Argument and the apparent fine tuning of our Universe, the experience of the ethereal as reported by the mystics, all of these are debateable as proofs of divine creation even if no holy book has any word of truth in it. But if those already believing in the saliency of scripture are unable even to convince one another of the final correctness of one amongst that multitude, then no scripture yet written can be claimed to be the one to which nontheists must accord consideration as having a sufficiently persuasive effect to merit really any drop of nontheistic consideration whatsoever.
Sunday, September 11, 2011
ITIAGWIGAWAM
Itiagwigawam is a conceptual framework of discussion developed amongst some of those with whom I regularly converse about the ultimate issues of existence. It derives from a phrase we have found ourselves using so often as to need an abbreviation for it, and stands for:
and proceeds from these premises (though it might be claimed that the third premise is itself but a natural extension of the first two, and possibly that the second follows from the first, and so all we need propose is a God who is wise; but even so). The fundamental consequence which we have agreed upon ('we' being people of varying faiths, including Christians, Pandeists, and Atheists, able to discuss such consequences without needing to determine whether any such deity exists at all) is that if there is a God who is wise and good and merciful, then:
This, naturally, is a disconcerting conclusion to members of religious faiths who remain stern in their belief that their god punishes people based on belief, with those believers rather incredibly divided even further amongst themselves, between those who believe their god punishes incorrect belief but requires good deeds as well for rewards to be bestowed, and those who believe their god punishes belief alone, deeds be damned (although it must be amended to the latter point that such believers tend to believe as well that proper beliefs will compel good deeds even if those deeds are no measure of salvation).
One such colleague, herself nominally a Christian, rejects the existence of Hell (or a Hell having anyone in it) on this basis. Against those who insist that disbelief in Hell equates to disbelief in her god, she formulates her reponse thusly:
One conceptual premise of this proposition is that a God who is wise in the sense of God-level wisdom would be wise enough to know what were the personal limitations which each and every person strove to overcome in life, what were their reasons for adopting and adhering to whatever belief system, and were those reasons defensible given their specific circumstances. Such an enquiry would be beyond mere human evaluators, and would require the fallback to deontological shortcuts, propositions of unbending systems of rules the violation of which reflexively resulted in an assigned punishment. The premise that justice requires bureaucratic slavishness to a small and certain set of rules, with a small and certain set of exceptions, is a product of limitedness. For an unlimited being -- or even one whose limitations still allow it sufficient capacity to consider every facet which might reasonably influence a determination of a 'just' outcome, the enquiry as to what is just becomes one with the enquiry as to what is merciful. Every possible basis for bestowal of mercy becomes known and apparent.
Now, there remain some still, who in contravening this argument point to their local interpretations of scriptures which, although deeming their God to indeed be merciful (and not simply merciful, but absolute in mercy) still would have their God be merciless to 'nonbelievers' in the name of 'justice.' But it can not be contended that God, by being 'just,' is thereby dimished in wisdom, or somehow thereby moves along the line from being good towards being evil. And, as well, for every scripture yet written, there are thousands of potential interpretations. And so the question then simply shifts to whether the human interpreter, insisting upon the more merciless of interpretations, has interpreted those words more mercifully than a perfectly and absolutely merciful God would be able to. And since there are entire movements within each religion proposing that in an infinitude of mercy, the worst that a non-believer would suffer would be complete nonexistence -- and with these movements themselves having millions of solemn and sober adherents, we may be well assured that the initial proposition bears logical weight, and may be well-taken as an article of faith. That is, that if there is a God who is wise and good and merciful, then those who try to do good will not be punished for their beliefs alone -- no matter what they do or do not believe.
'if there is a God who is good and wise and merciful,'
and proceeds from these premises (though it might be claimed that the third premise is itself but a natural extension of the first two, and possibly that the second follows from the first, and so all we need propose is a God who is wise; but even so). The fundamental consequence which we have agreed upon ('we' being people of varying faiths, including Christians, Pandeists, and Atheists, able to discuss such consequences without needing to determine whether any such deity exists at all) is that if there is a God who is wise and good and merciful, then:
those who try to do good will not be punished for their beliefs alone -- no matter what they do or do not believe.
This, naturally, is a disconcerting conclusion to members of religious faiths who remain stern in their belief that their god punishes people based on belief, with those believers rather incredibly divided even further amongst themselves, between those who believe their god punishes incorrect belief but requires good deeds as well for rewards to be bestowed, and those who believe their god punishes belief alone, deeds be damned (although it must be amended to the latter point that such believers tend to believe as well that proper beliefs will compel good deeds even if those deeds are no measure of salvation).
One such colleague, herself nominally a Christian, rejects the existence of Hell (or a Hell having anyone in it) on this basis. Against those who insist that disbelief in Hell equates to disbelief in her god, she formulates her reponse thusly:
If you were a parent, and your child whom you dearly loved failed to believe what you wished them to believe, how long would you allow that beloved child to be set afire and burned for that crime? And if your child tried to do good but fell short, how long would you allow your beloved child to be set afire and burned as punishment for falling short? And however long you believe you would, are you more loving, or less loving than a perfectly loving God? Are you more merciful, or less merciful than a perfectly merciful God?
One conceptual premise of this proposition is that a God who is wise in the sense of God-level wisdom would be wise enough to know what were the personal limitations which each and every person strove to overcome in life, what were their reasons for adopting and adhering to whatever belief system, and were those reasons defensible given their specific circumstances. Such an enquiry would be beyond mere human evaluators, and would require the fallback to deontological shortcuts, propositions of unbending systems of rules the violation of which reflexively resulted in an assigned punishment. The premise that justice requires bureaucratic slavishness to a small and certain set of rules, with a small and certain set of exceptions, is a product of limitedness. For an unlimited being -- or even one whose limitations still allow it sufficient capacity to consider every facet which might reasonably influence a determination of a 'just' outcome, the enquiry as to what is just becomes one with the enquiry as to what is merciful. Every possible basis for bestowal of mercy becomes known and apparent.
Now, there remain some still, who in contravening this argument point to their local interpretations of scriptures which, although deeming their God to indeed be merciful (and not simply merciful, but absolute in mercy) still would have their God be merciless to 'nonbelievers' in the name of 'justice.' But it can not be contended that God, by being 'just,' is thereby dimished in wisdom, or somehow thereby moves along the line from being good towards being evil. And, as well, for every scripture yet written, there are thousands of potential interpretations. And so the question then simply shifts to whether the human interpreter, insisting upon the more merciless of interpretations, has interpreted those words more mercifully than a perfectly and absolutely merciful God would be able to. And since there are entire movements within each religion proposing that in an infinitude of mercy, the worst that a non-believer would suffer would be complete nonexistence -- and with these movements themselves having millions of solemn and sober adherents, we may be well assured that the initial proposition bears logical weight, and may be well-taken as an article of faith. That is, that if there is a God who is wise and good and merciful, then those who try to do good will not be punished for their beliefs alone -- no matter what they do or do not believe.
Saturday, September 03, 2011
Slaveowner or Slave liberator -- who burns in Hell?
In 1852, a well-regarded Kentucky clergyman, the perhaps ironically named Reverend Joseph Priest, wrote a popular tract assuring readers that slave-ownership was not simply perfectly Biblically correct, but was itself essentially a holy duty, writing that "the institution of slavery received the sanction of the Almighty". Priest waxed eloquently on slavery, declaring that:
Other priests may disagree, but this Priest tells us, "the mere fact of being a slaveholder will not, in our humble judgment, debar a man from an entrance into that house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens." And, Priest thence direly warned that "the existence of free blacks in any community, whether free or slave, is universally admitted to be an evil of no minor consideration. Their removal, therefore, is a matter deeply affecting the interests and well-being of both races."
Priest's book runs to over 500 pages of thoroughly documented and parsed out passages from Old Testament and New, classing American-style race-based slavery not simply as a non-sinful institution, but a positively blessed undertaking brought into being by God directly and carried forth with the promise of God's blessing and certain reward to the slaveowner. The work ends with a thorough condemnation of abolitionists as thieves and fomenters of discord, in other words classing them as sinners whose very agitation for abolition has earned them eternal hellfire. Priest's book ends with pages upon pages of endorsements from various compatriots of the day, praising the correctness of his analysis. Thousands of copies were sought and obtained throughout the American South, to be held up as examples of the proof that God undoubtedly loved slavery and the slavemaster, and condemned opponents of slavery. And this was one of hundreds, if not thousands, of works written by scores of literate and well-versed Christian leaders arriving at the same conclusion.
But naturally, though this be the majority view, there were contradictory works written by Christian leaders as well, though of a different geography. Those mostly Northern voices arrived at quite opposite conclusions, citing chapter and verse to condemn slavery as a sin in the harshest terms, agitating for the liberation of the slaves, and in some instances (though hardly with uniform universality) praising those who would liberate slaves from their owners. And, verily, some of the very authors of abolitionist Biblical readings were no doubt themselves amongst the breakers of chains and the hiders of fugitive slaves.
So here we have a stark divide -- for if Priest and his ilk are correct, than slavery was never any sin but was instead God's own blessed work on Earth. And so the slaveholder who bought slaves on the block, steadfastly worked them every day of his life, whipped them when they were disobedient or chafed for freedom, and died without a drop of remorse for all this, will be rewarded with a clear passage to Heaven; but, those who broke chains and hid fugitives were thieves, who stole slaves which were the property of that or any other slaveowner. And those who stole were scum in the eyes of God, unforgiven, condemned to eternal Hell. And indeed, those who authored tracts condemning slavery were equally hated by God, and equally condemned.
But on the other hand, if it is the abolitionist clerics who are correct, it is then the unrepenting slaveowners who have sinned, and who are spurned by God and descend to the eternal fires of Hell along with those who advocated for slavery as God's word and will. Meanwhile, those who liberated slaves have so earned passage to Heaven, in the view of the abolitionists.
So, as between them, and assuming no other arguably sinful concerns are at issue, who now burns in Hell? Those who owned slaves and believed it rightful to do so? Or those who schemed to free slaves from their masters and believed it rightful to do so? Naturally, in modernity the politically correct answer is surely to put the slaveowners in Hell, and credit instead of condemning the abolitionists.
Now there are, it must be confessed, two other possibilities. One being that both the slaveowner and the slave liberator burn for their respective deeds, just as he steals from a thief becomes a thief as well without absolving the original thief of their thiefdom, and he who murders a murderer is a murderer still; the other being that the whole conceit is a matter of myth, and so neither one is condemned as a matter of course for their part in the grand charade.
Its legality was recognized, and its relative duties regulated by our Saviour, when upon Earth; that it was established in wisdom, and has been wisely continued through all ages, and handed down to us in mercy; and that the relation of master and servant harmonizes strictly with the best interests of the inferior or African race in particular, in securing to him that protection and support which his native imbecility of intellect disqualifies him from securing for himself.
Other priests may disagree, but this Priest tells us, "the mere fact of being a slaveholder will not, in our humble judgment, debar a man from an entrance into that house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens." And, Priest thence direly warned that "the existence of free blacks in any community, whether free or slave, is universally admitted to be an evil of no minor consideration. Their removal, therefore, is a matter deeply affecting the interests and well-being of both races."
Priest's book runs to over 500 pages of thoroughly documented and parsed out passages from Old Testament and New, classing American-style race-based slavery not simply as a non-sinful institution, but a positively blessed undertaking brought into being by God directly and carried forth with the promise of God's blessing and certain reward to the slaveowner. The work ends with a thorough condemnation of abolitionists as thieves and fomenters of discord, in other words classing them as sinners whose very agitation for abolition has earned them eternal hellfire. Priest's book ends with pages upon pages of endorsements from various compatriots of the day, praising the correctness of his analysis. Thousands of copies were sought and obtained throughout the American South, to be held up as examples of the proof that God undoubtedly loved slavery and the slavemaster, and condemned opponents of slavery. And this was one of hundreds, if not thousands, of works written by scores of literate and well-versed Christian leaders arriving at the same conclusion.
But naturally, though this be the majority view, there were contradictory works written by Christian leaders as well, though of a different geography. Those mostly Northern voices arrived at quite opposite conclusions, citing chapter and verse to condemn slavery as a sin in the harshest terms, agitating for the liberation of the slaves, and in some instances (though hardly with uniform universality) praising those who would liberate slaves from their owners. And, verily, some of the very authors of abolitionist Biblical readings were no doubt themselves amongst the breakers of chains and the hiders of fugitive slaves.
So here we have a stark divide -- for if Priest and his ilk are correct, than slavery was never any sin but was instead God's own blessed work on Earth. And so the slaveholder who bought slaves on the block, steadfastly worked them every day of his life, whipped them when they were disobedient or chafed for freedom, and died without a drop of remorse for all this, will be rewarded with a clear passage to Heaven; but, those who broke chains and hid fugitives were thieves, who stole slaves which were the property of that or any other slaveowner. And those who stole were scum in the eyes of God, unforgiven, condemned to eternal Hell. And indeed, those who authored tracts condemning slavery were equally hated by God, and equally condemned.
But on the other hand, if it is the abolitionist clerics who are correct, it is then the unrepenting slaveowners who have sinned, and who are spurned by God and descend to the eternal fires of Hell along with those who advocated for slavery as God's word and will. Meanwhile, those who liberated slaves have so earned passage to Heaven, in the view of the abolitionists.
So, as between them, and assuming no other arguably sinful concerns are at issue, who now burns in Hell? Those who owned slaves and believed it rightful to do so? Or those who schemed to free slaves from their masters and believed it rightful to do so? Naturally, in modernity the politically correct answer is surely to put the slaveowners in Hell, and credit instead of condemning the abolitionists.
Now there are, it must be confessed, two other possibilities. One being that both the slaveowner and the slave liberator burn for their respective deeds, just as he steals from a thief becomes a thief as well without absolving the original thief of their thiefdom, and he who murders a murderer is a murderer still; the other being that the whole conceit is a matter of myth, and so neither one is condemned as a matter of course for their part in the grand charade.
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Line-of-sight limited miraculous relics
A curious phenomena reported across many faiths and cultures is the solemnly held belief in the miraculous power of certain objects-- especially those objects believed to have been touched or held or used by the venerated religious figures of the faith. Modernly, many relics exist which are held by tradition (and in some cases, no small degree of chicanery) to have come in contact with, for example, Jesus, Mohammad, the Buddha -- a reporter debunking claims about one particular relic quipped not long ago that "There are enough pieces of the 'True Cross' in circulation to make a wooden aircraft carrier. And enough nails to put it together." And beyond that, there are countless relics claimed to have been connected with countless minor holy figures of these and other traditions, Prophets and Imams and Saints. And for every such object claimed as an artifact out there, there is some testimonial, maybe many, about the wondrous miraculous powers imbued in that artifact, most often expressed through the ambiguous healing of (non-amputation related) ailments, and the more generalised experience of good fortune.
Believers may be inclined to express as much certainty in the power of the artifacts of their own faiths as they are in the faith itself -- possibly even after the historical validity of a particular item claimed as such an artifact has been debunked. Presumably a correlary of this, though not one which I've seen much expressed, is a similarly active disbelief in the miraculous powers attributed to artifacts from competing and doctrinally exclusive religions. But in any event, there are two most curious thing about these artifacts, one being the seemingly haphazard incidence of their existence at all, and the other being the quizzically limited physical field of their effectiveness.
As to the first thing, why is it that every spot on the ground once stood upon by the Buddha, or Mohammad, or some especially pious Pope stood is not miraculous in its qualities? For the assertions of miraculous points of contact suggest that it is contact itself which makes holy that point, and so it remains to be explained why only some such points, and not all, have this characteristic. One would think that if a spot on the ground absorbed healing powers due to the passage there of a venerated figure, that all of the other spots which marked the path of this figure as it approached and then departed from that sacred spot ought to be, if not imbued with the same capacity, detectably holier than spots where the figure never tread. And so with every vessel drunk from by them and every article worn by them. Amongst the qualities oft attributed to such relics is that of staying power, of continuing to exist in much the same state for centuries onward from their sacredness-imbuing moment of use.
As to the second thing, why, if a thing is miraculous in itself, that its miraculous power is limited to affecting those who come to a close physical proximity to it? After all, there is a certain presupposition at play that metaphysical powers are not limited in the way in which forces which are simply physical are physically limited. Why are those with faith so strong as to believe indelibly in the power of the artifact of their religion unaffected by that power unless they draw within some proximity to it? Why is a person in Australia who believes in the healing power of a blessed stone in India not healed by that belief alone, but only by travelling to the site of the stone? Mohammad and Jesus and the Buddha all stood, or so it is reported, on the planet Earth; and so why is not 'the planet Earth' imbued with miraculous healing powers which present themselves to all who touch it? Were all of these figures so limited in their inherent power as to be unable to affect a physical reach beyond a few feet, to affect an object bigger than what might be conveniently carried about?
The obvious solution is, indeed, that if relics believed to have such limited range and power do possess any supernatural power at all, then such power is the product of supernatural forces themselves possessed of limited range and power. Naturally, those having especial fealty to any faith will insist on the infinitudes of power available to their favored deity, but will have at the ready any number of excuses as to why their deity only ever behaves entirely consistently with an entity of limited power. But such an explanation does nothing to satisfy the objection that other entities claiming the same essentially exclusive power share approximately equal or comparable limitations in the effective range of the relics with which they are associated. And, at last, it must be recalled that their are theological models -- pandeism leading them, but other ideations of pantheism and deism and panpsychism as well -- which account for all such phenomena occurring within all such faiths as notions of a single underlying power from which miraculous results are drawn, unwitting, from man's own predispositions.
Believers may be inclined to express as much certainty in the power of the artifacts of their own faiths as they are in the faith itself -- possibly even after the historical validity of a particular item claimed as such an artifact has been debunked. Presumably a correlary of this, though not one which I've seen much expressed, is a similarly active disbelief in the miraculous powers attributed to artifacts from competing and doctrinally exclusive religions. But in any event, there are two most curious thing about these artifacts, one being the seemingly haphazard incidence of their existence at all, and the other being the quizzically limited physical field of their effectiveness.
As to the first thing, why is it that every spot on the ground once stood upon by the Buddha, or Mohammad, or some especially pious Pope stood is not miraculous in its qualities? For the assertions of miraculous points of contact suggest that it is contact itself which makes holy that point, and so it remains to be explained why only some such points, and not all, have this characteristic. One would think that if a spot on the ground absorbed healing powers due to the passage there of a venerated figure, that all of the other spots which marked the path of this figure as it approached and then departed from that sacred spot ought to be, if not imbued with the same capacity, detectably holier than spots where the figure never tread. And so with every vessel drunk from by them and every article worn by them. Amongst the qualities oft attributed to such relics is that of staying power, of continuing to exist in much the same state for centuries onward from their sacredness-imbuing moment of use.
As to the second thing, why, if a thing is miraculous in itself, that its miraculous power is limited to affecting those who come to a close physical proximity to it? After all, there is a certain presupposition at play that metaphysical powers are not limited in the way in which forces which are simply physical are physically limited. Why are those with faith so strong as to believe indelibly in the power of the artifact of their religion unaffected by that power unless they draw within some proximity to it? Why is a person in Australia who believes in the healing power of a blessed stone in India not healed by that belief alone, but only by travelling to the site of the stone? Mohammad and Jesus and the Buddha all stood, or so it is reported, on the planet Earth; and so why is not 'the planet Earth' imbued with miraculous healing powers which present themselves to all who touch it? Were all of these figures so limited in their inherent power as to be unable to affect a physical reach beyond a few feet, to affect an object bigger than what might be conveniently carried about?
The obvious solution is, indeed, that if relics believed to have such limited range and power do possess any supernatural power at all, then such power is the product of supernatural forces themselves possessed of limited range and power. Naturally, those having especial fealty to any faith will insist on the infinitudes of power available to their favored deity, but will have at the ready any number of excuses as to why their deity only ever behaves entirely consistently with an entity of limited power. But such an explanation does nothing to satisfy the objection that other entities claiming the same essentially exclusive power share approximately equal or comparable limitations in the effective range of the relics with which they are associated. And, at last, it must be recalled that their are theological models -- pandeism leading them, but other ideations of pantheism and deism and panpsychism as well -- which account for all such phenomena occurring within all such faiths as notions of a single underlying power from which miraculous results are drawn, unwitting, from man's own predispositions.
Monday, August 29, 2011
The relative unnaturalnesses of vegetarianism, homosexuality, and pants
An oddity of rhetoric is the constant effort by homophobes to label homosexuality as 'unnatural' -- yet the same people who are so declaredly interested in the naturalness of human behaviour only rarely decry vegetarianism, and never rail against that most fundamental of unnatural human practices, the wearing of clothing.
So let us consider the relative 'naturalness' of these and other things commonly found in the human pattern.
Homosexuality, first and foremost, is fairly well recorded in the, ahem, annals of history. Naturally, to the degree that ancient expressions of condemnation of it exists, this can only mean that the practice then existed to be condemned. Ancient accounts do not, by contrast, condemn internet addiction because there was no such thing at the time. But, turning our focus to nature itself there are, it is now well recorded, hundreds of animal species in addition to humans who are happy to provide an example of how to gay up the jungle (or the woods, or the icy Antarctic floes). So, though opponents of the freedom of those who would engage in homosexual acts deem the predisposition toward same-sex-attraction to be a matter of choice, nature itself instructs that this is a natural choice to make.
Vegetarianism is indeed a far less 'natural' practice, man being an omnivore by nature (and prehistorically quite a big bug-eating insectivore on top of that). But this observation lays out the crux of another question: is there anything wrong with doing things in a way which is contrary to the practice in nature? Here is starker item of comparison. Suppose a lost teenage boy from a different city came wandering onto your property, looking for something to eat. What would you do? Well, going back to the ways of our prehistoric forebears, you'd kill him. Or, at least, you'd try, try to drive him off with sticks and stones, and if he persisted in loitering in your neighbourhood, to make a more level effort to end his life. Nature is violent. However peaceful it may appear in the moment of a quiet glen or solemn wood, it is filled at every moment with the predator aiming to kill, and the prey animal avoiding sudden death, and with competitors from the same species contending over turf and resources, often with deadly results. Other animals may even kill competitors to punish them for their own attacks against the territory of the killers, even to make an example of them before their peers. True though it is that man has a broader range of reasons for killing, and methods of so doing, man is as well the only animal for which members of a tight-knit social group will contend to prevent one of their own from engagin in violence against a stranger. And, though many animals are vegetarians by dint of their biology only permitting the digestion of plant matter, man remains the only animal fully capable of eating and digesting meat which will naetheless choose to refrain from eating meat when it is available, plentiful, even. For man is the only animal possessing ethical purposes, and so, the only one which acts against its own nature in defiance of his biological compulsions.
Now let us look at clothes wearing, and its natural converse, nudism. Wearing clothes, it may not seriously be denied, is highly unnatural. True, there are creatures like crabs and turtles who are oft anthropomorphised as treating their shells like clothing, or as externalities wherein they make their home. And there are indeed some small number of exotic species, mostly kinds of crabs biologically alien to us, who assemble for themselves a carapace incorporating bits of material from their environment, instead of grown from their bodies. And yet humans in most (though assuredly not all) cultures around the world have adopted the practice of draping themselves with cuts of cloth situated for the coverage of uncomfortably exposed body parts. This is to a degree an expression of the evolutionary process, for man came to be man on African plains where bodily hair for warmth could be disposed of, and so did the bareness of human skin evolve. But then man spread out in a way that few other large animals ever do. And in so doing, man encountered climates which demanded cover against the cold, and indeed it was man's intellect, man's ability to defy nature even, which enabled the spread of the species to prevail even into arctic climes. Clothedness, then, was never any thing which originated in response to some imagined wrongful character of nakedness. To be sure, every human being is still born unclothed, though perhaps the prudes will someday imagine up a way to clothe the baby in the womb, so it is delivered with its naughty bits inoffensively covered. And even the most prudish, even the ones who have campaigned in the past to require zoos to put pants of chimpanzees, unashamedly experience at least some moments of nakedness in their homes, unless they are so pathological in their objection to nudity that they bathe, shower, sleep, and have sex all while clothed (or that they do none of these things).
A few other modern mores venture into the exceedingly unnatural. Monogamy, and its corollary legalistic expression, marriage. Precious few species of animals out there really do mate exclusively, or for life, and man in his natural state is decidedly not amongst them. Eating food which is cooked (no matter whether flora or fauna)? No beast of the wild does so except by some bizarre circumstance following a forest fire or volcanic eruption. Abortion? Animals experiencing scarcity while pregnant will give up their unborn rather than have it born into hunger which can not be fed -- though this is an unchosen process more akin to miscarriage than to the human activity of abortion, though that practice in humans may well be an expression of the same natural instinct. But the practice of going to a clinic for a late-term procedure to exact revenge against the wayward father of the fetus, that seems a more unnatural thing. In sum, there are a great many things which fall within not only the permissions, but even the expectations of our society which are deeply unnatural. But before anyone comes to condemn any behaviour for being unnatural, for God's sake, they ought to take their damned pants off!!
So let us consider the relative 'naturalness' of these and other things commonly found in the human pattern.
Homosexuality, first and foremost, is fairly well recorded in the, ahem, annals of history. Naturally, to the degree that ancient expressions of condemnation of it exists, this can only mean that the practice then existed to be condemned. Ancient accounts do not, by contrast, condemn internet addiction because there was no such thing at the time. But, turning our focus to nature itself there are, it is now well recorded, hundreds of animal species in addition to humans who are happy to provide an example of how to gay up the jungle (or the woods, or the icy Antarctic floes). So, though opponents of the freedom of those who would engage in homosexual acts deem the predisposition toward same-sex-attraction to be a matter of choice, nature itself instructs that this is a natural choice to make.
Vegetarianism is indeed a far less 'natural' practice, man being an omnivore by nature (and prehistorically quite a big bug-eating insectivore on top of that). But this observation lays out the crux of another question: is there anything wrong with doing things in a way which is contrary to the practice in nature? Here is starker item of comparison. Suppose a lost teenage boy from a different city came wandering onto your property, looking for something to eat. What would you do? Well, going back to the ways of our prehistoric forebears, you'd kill him. Or, at least, you'd try, try to drive him off with sticks and stones, and if he persisted in loitering in your neighbourhood, to make a more level effort to end his life. Nature is violent. However peaceful it may appear in the moment of a quiet glen or solemn wood, it is filled at every moment with the predator aiming to kill, and the prey animal avoiding sudden death, and with competitors from the same species contending over turf and resources, often with deadly results. Other animals may even kill competitors to punish them for their own attacks against the territory of the killers, even to make an example of them before their peers. True though it is that man has a broader range of reasons for killing, and methods of so doing, man is as well the only animal for which members of a tight-knit social group will contend to prevent one of their own from engagin in violence against a stranger. And, though many animals are vegetarians by dint of their biology only permitting the digestion of plant matter, man remains the only animal fully capable of eating and digesting meat which will naetheless choose to refrain from eating meat when it is available, plentiful, even. For man is the only animal possessing ethical purposes, and so, the only one which acts against its own nature in defiance of his biological compulsions.
Now let us look at clothes wearing, and its natural converse, nudism. Wearing clothes, it may not seriously be denied, is highly unnatural. True, there are creatures like crabs and turtles who are oft anthropomorphised as treating their shells like clothing, or as externalities wherein they make their home. And there are indeed some small number of exotic species, mostly kinds of crabs biologically alien to us, who assemble for themselves a carapace incorporating bits of material from their environment, instead of grown from their bodies. And yet humans in most (though assuredly not all) cultures around the world have adopted the practice of draping themselves with cuts of cloth situated for the coverage of uncomfortably exposed body parts. This is to a degree an expression of the evolutionary process, for man came to be man on African plains where bodily hair for warmth could be disposed of, and so did the bareness of human skin evolve. But then man spread out in a way that few other large animals ever do. And in so doing, man encountered climates which demanded cover against the cold, and indeed it was man's intellect, man's ability to defy nature even, which enabled the spread of the species to prevail even into arctic climes. Clothedness, then, was never any thing which originated in response to some imagined wrongful character of nakedness. To be sure, every human being is still born unclothed, though perhaps the prudes will someday imagine up a way to clothe the baby in the womb, so it is delivered with its naughty bits inoffensively covered. And even the most prudish, even the ones who have campaigned in the past to require zoos to put pants of chimpanzees, unashamedly experience at least some moments of nakedness in their homes, unless they are so pathological in their objection to nudity that they bathe, shower, sleep, and have sex all while clothed (or that they do none of these things).
A few other modern mores venture into the exceedingly unnatural. Monogamy, and its corollary legalistic expression, marriage. Precious few species of animals out there really do mate exclusively, or for life, and man in his natural state is decidedly not amongst them. Eating food which is cooked (no matter whether flora or fauna)? No beast of the wild does so except by some bizarre circumstance following a forest fire or volcanic eruption. Abortion? Animals experiencing scarcity while pregnant will give up their unborn rather than have it born into hunger which can not be fed -- though this is an unchosen process more akin to miscarriage than to the human activity of abortion, though that practice in humans may well be an expression of the same natural instinct. But the practice of going to a clinic for a late-term procedure to exact revenge against the wayward father of the fetus, that seems a more unnatural thing. In sum, there are a great many things which fall within not only the permissions, but even the expectations of our society which are deeply unnatural. But before anyone comes to condemn any behaviour for being unnatural, for God's sake, they ought to take their damned pants off!!
Monday, August 15, 2011
On The Evolution of the Pocket Watch
One of the more striking arguments (if you will pardon the pun) for the existence of a Creator-god is what is popularly known as the divine watchmaker argument. The argument suggests that things which are the product of an intelligent designer's design are immediately apparent to us by their complexity and intricacy.
It was British religionist William Paley, who perhaps most famously enunciated this contention when he wrote in his Natural Theology:
In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that, for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there forever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think of the answer I had before given, that for anything I knew, the watch might have always been there.
Naturally, there remains (if you will pardon another pun) some grit in the gears of this argument -- for it seems to suppose that the pocket watch itself sprung fully-formed from the mind of man, needing and having neither antecedent technology nor a chain of ancestry for the men who invented it (and observe that the pocket watch is the technology of choice for this illustration because, naturally, the evolution of the wristwatch was yet incipient). In Paley's day, then, startling a conception as it may be, the pocket watch likely represented the very height of peacetime portable technological advancement -- and, indeed, more modern variations of the argument have substituted things such as 747 airliners and cellular phones (both of which by no small coincidence necessarily have time-keeping devices built into them). And yet, the very first 'pocket watch,' assembled at some early point in the 1510s, was necessarily made from some simple parts which had been made for only passingly similar purpose, or even for some other purposes entirely, but which were loosely and handily adapted for use in making that first pocket watch. Nor would it be correct to assume that the very first attempt to make a pocket watch was a complete success; surely it may have worked well enough to draw a few oohs and aahs, but as surely it was a primitive thing when put next to its more advanced descendents.
In fact, the earliest handily portable timekeeping devices which might be called 'pocket watches,' born in the early Sixteenth Century, were relatively heavy brass boxes several inches across, with a single hand -- an hour hand. Mechanisms able to accurately reflect smaller increments had not yet evolved. And even that hour hand didn't rightly tell the hours, typically tending to be off by several of them per day. Metal grillwork, instead of glass, covered the face, and the whole thing was combined by tapered pins and wedges, as screws usable for this purpose had not yet evolved either. Though they needed twice-daily winding to be kept running at all, they were as a practical matter useless as timekeeping devices, impossibly inaccurate and inconsistent. Their use was strictly ornamental, as baubles for show.
But the passage of time and generations of watchmakers developing new innovations, incorporating some and discarding others as obsolete or unhelpful, brought about a gradual and continual advance. Smaller and smaller gears shrank the whole of the thing; more finely tuned springs improved accuracy until it became feasible to add another hand to count off minutes. Lighter and more durable materials were found or innovated, the grillwork was replaced with a glass face. Eventually -- in the far future even from Paley's perspective -- inventions were added ranging from the second hand and a little window displaying the date, to the quartz crystal to keep time, to the watch battery and the digital display.
But were we to come upon even an Eighteenth Century pocket watch on the heath, though we might in an instant recognize it as the product of an intelligent craftsman's hand, we would in the same instant be as well assured that the watch was not produced by a person who had himself never studied watchmaking or some analogous art, nor seen or interacted with a pocket watch. Nor would we credibly assume that the only possible explanation for the existence of the pocket watch on the heath was that it was plopped into existence from nothing by an all-powerful genie who happens, for the sake of arbitrariness, to impose punishment on all people who eat grapes and wine in the same meal, or who have sex with others of a disfavored tribe.
Nor would we be justified in imagining any capacities for the watchmaker other than that he was physically and mentally up to the task of making this one watch, and -- possibly most intriguingly for this analogy -- that he had been taught the particulars of how to make that watch by someone initially more learned on the subject than himself, though the advance of knowledge necessitates that with the passage of generations, some future craftsman would indeed exceed their teachers and improve the craft itself. And so, if a pocket watch implies a watchmaker, it at the same time implies a string of predecessors to the watchmaker, each of whom taught the next and likely improved on the craft itself.
Nor, again, does the finding of the watch demonstrate that the ability to manufacture pocket watches has existed with man, the designer, since time immemorial. Even the hundred most able and intelligent men amongst the Ancients of Greece or Rome or the Dynasties of China would have been unable to build such a device. To the contrary, man began with no way to estimate time but for the following of the sun and moon, first with eyes alone, then with sundials and other stationary devices which caught and distributed their shadows. Then came hourglasses, water clocks, and candle clocks (which measured time by the stable melting time of candles of certain lengths), and finally, only after metallurgy and the consequent discovery of the spring, the true clockwork-mechanism time-telling devices. And even these took countless models, countless small improvements, occasional combinations of innovations, to go from nothing to the modern clock over a few thousand years -- an eyeblink in the vaster geological time scales over which the biological form of evolution occurs.
So, when someone proposes finding a pocketwatch on the heath and wonders how it got there, the accurate response is that it came from ancestors which sprang by unbidden coincidence from the elements, and evolved.
Thursday, August 11, 2011
Temporal fortuity in light of the End of Cosmology
In 2007, astrophysicists Lawrence M. Krauss and Robert J. Scherrer published The Return of a Static Universe and the End of Cosmology, wherein they made certain remarkable projections about far future cosmology. Chief among these were the observations that the radiation remnants of the Big Bang were slowly evaporating, and that at the same time, the process of generation of new stars was working towards obscuring the initial chemical composition markers of our Universe. Most remarkably of all, they proposed that the The expansion of the universe is speeding up|expansion of our Universe was possibly accelerating, and that such would continue to the point where the rate of expansion of distances between galaxies would outpace the speed of light itself!!
Observe that, though the speed of light is an absolute limit, faster-than-light expansion is permissible in physics because it does not describe the speed at which anything actually 'travels,' the increasing distance between galaxies resulting from the increasing size of space itself, and not anything happening 'in' space. And so, concluded the paper, astronomers coming to the fore a few trillion years in the future would find no signal that a Big Bang had ever happened, either through telltale Cosmic Microwave Background, or through the chemical signature of our Universe pointing to such an event, or even through the observation of cosmic expansion visible in the continuing movement of all galaxies (or galactic clusters) away from every other.
In fact, once expansion of our Universe overtakes the speed of light, and the last light emitted leading up to that moment passes by the reaches of our world, all of our Universe from beyond our own galactic neighbourhood will disappear. Undetectable, it will be as though it never was. And the astronomer born in such a time will have no reason to imagine that anything ever did exist beyond the borders of our own galaxy (and perhaps one or two close companion galaxies tied to a common centre of mass, though it is predictable that in sufficient time, all galaxies locally attracted in this manner will collide and merge into one). They will live in what the authors describe as an 'Island Universe,' wherein they shall forever remain "It's the End of the World as We Know It|fundamentally incapable of determining the true nature of the universe, including the existence of the highly dominant vacuum energy, When we have reached the end of time and light|the existence of the CMB, and the primordial origin of light elements."
An Element of the Pandeistic:
Now, though Krauss is an outspoken critic of the idea of Intelligent Design (and perhaps rightfully so in respect to the ham-handed wholesale-plopped down life forms model of that theory), let us consider this circumstance in the light of the pandeistic model. Pandeism propose that ours is a created Universe, and that Creator became our Universe -- and, naturally, not just any sort of Universe, but one possessed of careful balances of fundamental constants, governing dynamics designed to bring about complexity. Such complexity would, in turn, eventually yield self-replicating molecular structures -- the building blocks of life itself. And life, once brought into existence, seems to find a way to continue in existence, including adapting copying errors -- mutations -- to its advantage by promoting those which are advantageous, a process which is inclined to bring about more and more intelligent beings.
But another aspect of our Universe which would be of vital importance to such a designer would be the capacity of intelligent life to go beyond this slow and steady natural process, and instead use that intelligence to 'crack the codes' of our Universe. Intelligence, once achieved, must be usable to figure out how and why electrons and atoms and DNA ribbons work as they do, and to use that knowledge to self accelerate. By this, we mean that intelligent life ought to be able to accomplish things like building machines capable of performing quick and massive calculations, and crafting substances capable of fighting disease. Eventually, such knowledge will rise to the point where the calculating devices may be integrated directly into our brains, and where the new disease fighting methods will be addended directly into our immune systems, possibly even through DNA modifications permanently affixing them to our species. But, more than that, Pandeism predicts that we ought to be able to crack the code of the origin of our Universe, to come into possession of the ability to detect the proofs of its age and state before those become obscured from perception by time and space.
Now then, it is possible to conceive a Universe wherein certain chemical reactions necessary to our evolution progress three-hundred times slower than our experience; in such a Universe, intelligent life might arise in four trillion years, instead of the 13.5 billion years which passed before this happened (that we know of) on Earth. A civilization arising in that era would see no signs that our Universe had a singular point of origin, a particular age, or even that it existed at all outside of our galaxy and perhaps one or two others positioned nearby. Atheism offers no explanation of why this ought not to be the case; and for theistic faiths, our current circumstance is positively anathema to such a Universe. For the theist who believes in a special and wholesale Creation of life on Earth especially, out of all the Universe -- and in young earth creationist
|a Creation of a relatively recent duration -- there is simply no reason that the nature of our Universe ought to be able to contradict their theistic account. There is no reason that massive stellar gravitational wells ought to have bent and tugged the light of stars billions of years distant into our view, no reason for us to be able to observe cosmic background radiation or distant stars midway through multi-billion year stages of development. Indeed, no reason at all for us to not exist in an 'Island Universe.'
Extrapolation:
I grant that, in light of this it remains conceivable that at some past point, perhaps mere millions of years after its birth, our Universe was at the centre of other companions, other Universes which quickly faded from our ability to detect or even contemplate them. Such other entities may have become invisible to us in the same way that the galaxies we current observe might become invisible to cosmologists of a far-distant future. But if so, then at least our capacity to gauge the ultimately transient nature of our own cosmic observations ought to inform us of the possibilities to be modelled, if not actually observed. And it remains with us, in our generations of advancement yet to come, to leave such signals as may be found by far flung future inhabitants of our galaxy, informing them of that which they are no longer able to observe. Indeed, such ought to be the responsibility of intelligent life arising in any galaxy, once this potentiality comes within the grasp of their knowledge. And so, in addition to the fortuitous circumstances of properties of matter and energy which suggest our Universe to be one designed to bring about life through a random-wandering billions-of-years process, we may now add temporal fortuity. For ours is a Universe wherein the capacity of intelligent life to gauge its own cosmic pedigree indeed balances upon the edge of a knife, thanks to the speed of evolution so far outstripping the speed of expansion of our Universe.
====
For those who are interested, here is an hour+ lecture by Krauss (minus two minutes of introduction delivered by Richard Dawkins), intriguingly outlining his entire cosmological schema from beginning to end....
Observe that, though the speed of light is an absolute limit, faster-than-light expansion is permissible in physics because it does not describe the speed at which anything actually 'travels,' the increasing distance between galaxies resulting from the increasing size of space itself, and not anything happening 'in' space. And so, concluded the paper, astronomers coming to the fore a few trillion years in the future would find no signal that a Big Bang had ever happened, either through telltale Cosmic Microwave Background, or through the chemical signature of our Universe pointing to such an event, or even through the observation of cosmic expansion visible in the continuing movement of all galaxies (or galactic clusters) away from every other.
In fact, once expansion of our Universe overtakes the speed of light, and the last light emitted leading up to that moment passes by the reaches of our world, all of our Universe from beyond our own galactic neighbourhood will disappear. Undetectable, it will be as though it never was. And the astronomer born in such a time will have no reason to imagine that anything ever did exist beyond the borders of our own galaxy (and perhaps one or two close companion galaxies tied to a common centre of mass, though it is predictable that in sufficient time, all galaxies locally attracted in this manner will collide and merge into one). They will live in what the authors describe as an 'Island Universe,' wherein they shall forever remain "It's the End of the World as We Know It|fundamentally incapable of determining the true nature of the universe, including the existence of the highly dominant vacuum energy, When we have reached the end of time and light|the existence of the CMB, and the primordial origin of light elements."
An Element of the Pandeistic:
Now, though Krauss is an outspoken critic of the idea of Intelligent Design (and perhaps rightfully so in respect to the ham-handed wholesale-plopped down life forms model of that theory), let us consider this circumstance in the light of the pandeistic model. Pandeism propose that ours is a created Universe, and that Creator became our Universe -- and, naturally, not just any sort of Universe, but one possessed of careful balances of fundamental constants, governing dynamics designed to bring about complexity. Such complexity would, in turn, eventually yield self-replicating molecular structures -- the building blocks of life itself. And life, once brought into existence, seems to find a way to continue in existence, including adapting copying errors -- mutations -- to its advantage by promoting those which are advantageous, a process which is inclined to bring about more and more intelligent beings.
But another aspect of our Universe which would be of vital importance to such a designer would be the capacity of intelligent life to go beyond this slow and steady natural process, and instead use that intelligence to 'crack the codes' of our Universe. Intelligence, once achieved, must be usable to figure out how and why electrons and atoms and DNA ribbons work as they do, and to use that knowledge to self accelerate. By this, we mean that intelligent life ought to be able to accomplish things like building machines capable of performing quick and massive calculations, and crafting substances capable of fighting disease. Eventually, such knowledge will rise to the point where the calculating devices may be integrated directly into our brains, and where the new disease fighting methods will be addended directly into our immune systems, possibly even through DNA modifications permanently affixing them to our species. But, more than that, Pandeism predicts that we ought to be able to crack the code of the origin of our Universe, to come into possession of the ability to detect the proofs of its age and state before those become obscured from perception by time and space.
Now then, it is possible to conceive a Universe wherein certain chemical reactions necessary to our evolution progress three-hundred times slower than our experience; in such a Universe, intelligent life might arise in four trillion years, instead of the 13.5 billion years which passed before this happened (that we know of) on Earth. A civilization arising in that era would see no signs that our Universe had a singular point of origin, a particular age, or even that it existed at all outside of our galaxy and perhaps one or two others positioned nearby. Atheism offers no explanation of why this ought not to be the case; and for theistic faiths, our current circumstance is positively anathema to such a Universe. For the theist who believes in a special and wholesale Creation of life on Earth especially, out of all the Universe -- and in young earth creationist
|a Creation of a relatively recent duration -- there is simply no reason that the nature of our Universe ought to be able to contradict their theistic account. There is no reason that massive stellar gravitational wells ought to have bent and tugged the light of stars billions of years distant into our view, no reason for us to be able to observe cosmic background radiation or distant stars midway through multi-billion year stages of development. Indeed, no reason at all for us to not exist in an 'Island Universe.'
Extrapolation:
I grant that, in light of this it remains conceivable that at some past point, perhaps mere millions of years after its birth, our Universe was at the centre of other companions, other Universes which quickly faded from our ability to detect or even contemplate them. Such other entities may have become invisible to us in the same way that the galaxies we current observe might become invisible to cosmologists of a far-distant future. But if so, then at least our capacity to gauge the ultimately transient nature of our own cosmic observations ought to inform us of the possibilities to be modelled, if not actually observed. And it remains with us, in our generations of advancement yet to come, to leave such signals as may be found by far flung future inhabitants of our galaxy, informing them of that which they are no longer able to observe. Indeed, such ought to be the responsibility of intelligent life arising in any galaxy, once this potentiality comes within the grasp of their knowledge. And so, in addition to the fortuitous circumstances of properties of matter and energy which suggest our Universe to be one designed to bring about life through a random-wandering billions-of-years process, we may now add temporal fortuity. For ours is a Universe wherein the capacity of intelligent life to gauge its own cosmic pedigree indeed balances upon the edge of a knife, thanks to the speed of evolution so far outstripping the speed of expansion of our Universe.
====
For those who are interested, here is an hour+ lecture by Krauss (minus two minutes of introduction delivered by Richard Dawkins), intriguingly outlining his entire cosmological schema from beginning to end....
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)