What Is the Meaning of It All?

If Intelligent Design is not responsible for the beauty and complexity of the world then it somehow came to be by pure, random chance. If that is the case then there is no essential reason for us to find ourselves existing in an improbable and inconsequential reality.



All of religion, philosophy and culture then is an honest or desperate attempt to make sense of why we are here and what it all means or might mean. Humanity might outlast the dinosaurs but if we don't, then what did it all mean and why did we bother with any of it in the first place?

Since we are here though why not get as much benefit, pleasure and mutual support from life and each other as possible?

Perhaps it's not so bad after all if you look at it that way. The challenge then becomes: how to interact with those who don't want to contribute and share the hard work that is essential to further each other's goals. Those are the evil ones. They're the ones who want to throw a wrench into the machinery.

How do we ethically deal with these flat notes in each others songs?

We accidentally were and then just as enigmatically, we could very well cease to be. Funny thing, Life?

Published with Blogger-droid v1.7.4

Ever Revealing Science of God

"There is no version of primeval history, preceding the discoveries of modern science, that is as rational and as inspiriting as that of the Book of Genesis," Asimov says. However, human knowledge does increase, and if the Biblical writers, "had written those early chapters of Genesis knowing what we know today, we can be certain that they would have written it completely differently." -- Isaac Asimov

Published with Blogger-droid v1.7.4

Living With Theistic Evolution as a Paradigm

Special Creation: wonderful, but it is a quick and easy way out. There are seldom easy ways out in life. The ramifications of special creation are very complicated themselves. Cf: the book of Romans in the New Testament. Lovely realities described in Paul's epistle to the Romans but very heavy going and not as simple as you would think. Paul, the author of the epistle had what would amount to a Ph.D. in philosophy today.

Non-theistic Evolution: mostly for agnostics, atheists and theists who like a good intellectual challenge or are dissatisfied with the other two approaches. Some, though not all, adherents suffer from a delusion of intellectual superiority, smugness, or self-righteous condescension to anyone not buying into the belief that only evolution is necessary. "Let's not waste any more time and lets proceed with other issues or intellectual challenges" is the practical approach they prefer when considering the Evolution vs. Special Creation debate.

Intelligent Design: very tempting, at least to those who see the complexity and the aesthetic excellence of flora and fauna which seems a tall order to leave to chance alone. Simple organisms and mostly ugly ones being the result of non-theistic evolution makes a lot of sense, but physiological complexity, sentience, intelligence and symmetry that is capable of visiting other worlds and potentially continue intelligent life on yet-to-be-colonized worlds beyond our Earth, almost demands that, if not God, then some other Intelligent Designer is responsible for the marvels we encounter daily on planet Earth.

Theistic Evolution: the main difficulty is that there was sin in the world before Adam and Eve were created if you prefer this paradigm. If sin already existed before Adam and Eve also succumbed as well*, then why would Christ Jesus have to die to appease God's wrath against sin or to vindicate God's Law and its permanence. It also presents a problem for observing the seventh-day Sabbath since living organisms are no longer created in seven days, but rather, during millions of years. Presents quite a problem for orthodox Jews, as well.

Fourth Paradigm: awaits discovery. Any valid approaches need to be included as they become available or discovered.

Practical Paradigm:

Don't hurt anyone or anything. After all, you yourself don't want to be hurt either.

Improve the chances of the survival of the human race whether on this Earth of ours and eventually on other worlds.

Enjoy your life to the fullest and assist others in the enjoyment of theirs. Your well-being is intricately connected to the well-being of others.

If you haven't become aware of this interconnectedness of humanity there is still time to catch on.

__________

* If sin existed on another world, as well, then it becomes less of a problem if there was already sin in the world before Adam and Eve existed. Of course, the Bible says that everything that God created was good so there's no accounting for how there were fossils already buried in the Earth of another cycle of life that had experienced death already. After all, the Bible says that the wages of sin is death.

Some solve this problem by referring to the rebellion against God by Lucifer and cohorts in heaven itself as being responsible for the death and sin that would then have existed on Earth prior to Adam and Eve's Special Creation in the isolated perfection of the Garden of Eden were another pair of perfect beings (morally and physiologically perfect) were given another chance. Sadly, they also did not pass the test.

This footnote has the potential of never ending as another angle quickly suggests itself.

[Needs stylistic refinements, grammatical processing, etc.]

The History of the Theory of Time Travel

Like evolution, time travel is not a supposition, for it has a scientific basis. Disbelief in time travel is akin to those who, for religious reasons, believe in Creationism in spite of there being no hard science to back it up.

Before delving into the science behind time travel let us briefly mention some classic works dealing with time travel.

The first such title is historian H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine" (1895). Predating the publication of Albert Einstein's Relativity theories it, of course, can't be said to have suggested Einstein's suggestion that time travel might not be completely baseless given the proper technological advances. Nevertheless, Well's the "Time Machine" has contributed its share of importance to the concept of time travel.

The television series "The Time Tunnel" is also another work dealing with the subject of time travel. The impact of the this series is negligible. It did, however, focus on the subject of the causality paradox in episodes where the time traveler found himself aboard the Titanic hours before it sank. He endeavored unsuccessfully to change the course of history. There is an unwritten rule in time travel literature that suggests that changing history via time travel is somehow impossible even when attempted.

The movie "Return to the Future" also presents the problem of causal paradoxes which we will later present and study the views of Cosmologists Stephen Hawking [1] and Misio Kaku [2]. The causality paradox can best be summarized in the question if a time traveler goes back and prevents his mother from marrying his father, wouldn't he then never have been born? If he  had never been born due to history having been changed how could he then have been able to travel back in time to prevent his parents from marrying?

There are several adjustments to this conundrum. One solution is that there are different time lines. While the time traveler may have altered the particular time line which no longer includes his conception by his parents, in a separate, but equally valid, timeline his parents did marry and his mother did, in fact, give birth to him.

This paradox has been offered by some cosmologists, as well as detractors of the theory of time travel, as making time travel into the past, at least, unfeasible and causally problematic.

Briefly, let us outline the simplest type of time travel into the future but not the only one. It has been proven by experiments in space that when people travel faster than people on the ground the astronaut's passage through time actually slowed down the aging process but at a minuscule amount. Therefore, this theory which was foreseen by Albert Einstein, has now been experimentally verified.

In order to take this concept and make it true time travel imagine, if you will, a space ship travelling at incredible speeds towards the nearest star. On board is a space traveler whose other twin remains on Earth. Once the star traveler has returned to Earth he will have found, if his twin has not died of old age, that he or she has aged only a few years while the twin (s)he left behind has aged considerably. The other amazing outcome of this experiment is that the time-star traveler will be seeing decades as a younger person and all the technological advancements and historical outcomes than if (s)he had stayed on Earth with his or her twin.

Though some would find this cheating at time travel since it uses laws of science to slow down the aging process and thereby propel the star traveler into a future that s(he) would otherwise never have seen, it is, nevertheless, as bona fide time travel as may be possible in the foreseeable future.

To contrast future travel in time with backward travel in time, we have a thornier problem. It is believed that you can attempt traveling back in time by building a wormwhole whether by harnessing an actual black hole singularity or by creating a "baby wormwhole" in the laboratory and using that to create a closed loop from the time of creating the wormhole to some future time. Backward travel in time would only be as far back as the time that the wormhole was created and no further.

The ease with which the famous time traveler of H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine" flitted back and forth, whether venturing millennia into the distant future or travelling back to his own time, remain speculative fiction. The literary construct of his novel has other significant points which we will not go into here.

Finally when all the evidence, theories and concepts have been presented, some will still choose, as they do in the evolution vs. creationism issue, that it depends on what you choose to believe and not what scientific proofs, concepts or theories suggest what may or may not be possible.

In the mean time, enjoy your slow travel through time in your own life. It may very well be the only type of time traveling that most, if not all of us, will ever experience.

References:

1. Hawking: Time Travel Will Happen
2. Borrowed Time: Interview with Michio Kaku

[This post needs more footnotes.]

How to Escape the Death of the Universe

Cosmologists speak of M-theory which speaks of three visible dimensions of space, length, height and width. Additionally, it crunches seven super-tiny and virtually invisible dimensions into the mix. M-theory also includes one dimension of time, as well. *

What if there were a second dimension of time, as well. We'll call it Static time to keep it separate from the Dynamic Time we experience every day. Dynamic Time includes past, present and future. Static time, however, only has one state. That state is best described as an Endless Now. This is not necessarily nonsense.

Consider, if you will, a very advanced civilization with knowledge and resources to visit or, should it ever become essential, to escape into, a timeless parallel reality that is outside of our known universe. This would come in handy in escaping the eventual death of our universe when individual stars have spent all their fuel and our universe becomes both a ghost universe and a virtual non-universe.

Having escaped our dying universe our far-future friends who wait in Static Time would be virtually immortal. There could, of course, be accidents. After all, they are not gods with invulnerability but rather, advanced humans, cyborgs or possibly androids who are "out-of-time," as it were, and so do not experience time as we know it. In Static Time organisms don't age as they do in our Dynamic Time reality. Hopefully though, it is possible to think and move while in Static Time. If not our futuristic travelers would be forever trapped in their Static Time reality. They become, in effect, prisoners of their own devising.

If they were intelligent enough they could find another universe where a Big Bang singularity had jump started a new universe or they might try enlarging a small black hole and create a baby universe and set up residence there once conditions had stabilized sufficiently to permit humans to live naturally on one of the new worlds of the baby universe.

Some of the scenarios I've just described are, in fact, based on various theories by different cosmologists. Others are wishful thinking and may not have all the science once would wish to back them up.

Finally, there is at least one historical figure who does experience this theoretical Endless Now and to whom Static Time is very much a given and not just a theory. I'm speaking of someone who lives outside of our Dynamic Time universe and can at times access our Dynamic Time universe. Needless to say I'm referring to God who inhabits a realm we can only refer to as Infinity.

No one can say for sure what Infinity is like. Even the Bible doesn't give us much clue as to its nature or location. It, no doubt, makes no sense to speak of Infinity as having a location. Infinity might be a reality possessing a location which we could never imagine or understand even given the proper mathematics to try to comprehend it conceptually.

One clue the Bible does give about the nature of Infinity might be the descriptions of God given in both the Old and the New Testament. In the Old Testament God is described as the ONE WHO WAS, the ONE WHO IS and the ONE WHO WILL BE. In the New Testament it is said of the Lord God that He is the Alpha and the Omega or the Beginning and the End.

Infinity, by association, can then be described as being a reality which was, which is and which will be and all three descriptions refer to the same Endless Now of Static Time. Infinity might be a perpetual steady state reality with past, present and future all indistinguishable one from another. Perhaps that is why the Bible also states that for God a thousand years is like a day and a day is like a thousand years. The same might be said of Infinity where length of time has no meaning since time is static and not dynamic as it is in our universe with its birth, development and death.

Yes, it is a bit shocking to speak of our universe as dying for all that lives is born to die. Even stars die and galaxies crash into other more gravitationally powerful ones so that new stars and new galaxies might be born. This should not be a cause for concern though since the God who created our universe out of nothing can also create other universes out of nothing as well.

______________

* Hawking, Stephen. The Grand Design.

Death Contains the Seeds of Life

Stars die that others might be born. Seeds die that fruit trees might feed the hungry. Unused sperm and eggs die that newer and fresher ones might produce life the following month. People die that younger, healthier and stronger progeny might reproduce.

Of course ours us is a limitless universe. Eternal youthful life would allow us to populate countless worlds. However, until immortality and fast-as-light star craft become the norm exploration of distant worlds are out of the picture.

Ingenious Scientific Means of Spreading Life Beyond Earth

Dr. Venter advertised his genome as the wave of future migration to the stars. Send a kit of chemicals and a digitized genome across space."

In context:

In "A Romp Through Theories on Origins of Life" 2-21-2011:

"Using mail-order snippets of DNA, Dr Venter and his colleagues stitched together the million-letter genetic code of a bacterium of a goat parasite last year and inserted it into another bacterium's cell, where it took over, churning out blue-stained copies of itself. Dr. Venter advertised his genome as the wave of future migration to the stars. Send a kit of chemicals and a digitized genome across space." [1]

__________
[1] A Romp Through Theories on Origins of Life

Future Fate of Our Milky Way Galaxy and Some Solutions

"The Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy are approaching each other with a speed of 300,000 miles per hour." [1]

 We should have a million years or so at our disposal to escape this galaxy.[2] We need not find another physical world unless it was desired by some colonies of Earth-born refugees or, most likely, their descendants. Another option could be a MacroLife [3] habitat that could travel in search of still safer locations in the Universe to better position themselves until the next galaxy approaches millennia from then.

Thank God our star, the Sun, is close to the edge of the galactic spiral. Our intelligent species, man the thinker, is ideally placed and equipped to avoid the pre-collision effects of the two galaxies' first gravitational impact if decisions are made now on a global scale. If not it be harder, but there have always been those who have been designated a remnant when the fate of civilization or culture where seemingly in their death throes, e.g., the fall of the Roman empire and the dark Middle Ages were both balanced by the culture and science of Asian and Arab cultures.

In more recent times the Adventist movement which began around 1844 has become a worldwide force. Historically Seventh-day Adventists, emulating the model of the Israelites of antiquity, also consider themselves a cultural and cosmological remnant. More to the subject at hand, however, is the raison d'etre of the Adventist Futurists who envision man's future not on this endangered world, but beyond the approaching dangers of our Milky Way galaxy.

If the knowledge required to transcend our at-risk galaxy is not currently available it will come. Had the Greek intellectuals of Plato's and Hippocrates's culture known we could now reattach severed hands and even male reproductive organs we would be considered demigods indeed. One need not dwell too much on the seemingly impossible and improbable accomplishment of visiting another world, the moon, and returning safely, as well as more current history of sending our robotic extensions to gather information and to monitor weather patterns around far-flung worlds of our solar system.

With each passing year astronomers are finding a cornucopia of exotic worlds beyond our solar system. The speed of all this progress in science is the basis for my conjecture that a million years is ample time to overcome challenges of speed, energy requirements and other extra-galactic travel requirements.

__________

1. Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy. 21 October 1997
2. This is an educated as well as an optimistic guess. The dinosaurs had between 140 and 160 million years [http://dml.cmnh.org/1995Apr/msg00178.html] to avoid their doom and did nothing due to mental limitations it would appear. Man the thinker might be more intelligent in comparison to our reptilian cousins but we might not be as hardy. Nevertheless, we appear to be blessed or fated--depending on your personal beliefs--to thrive not only on this world, but on others in contrast to the Earth-bound dinosaur species. As a personal wish one would hope at least some future intergalactic refugees take along both ostrich and crocodile frozen embryos so that some descendants of the dinosaurs might also live beyond the sun that warmed their ancestors.
3. Macrolife, Space Colonization & Adventist Futurism

How Well Do You Tolerate Evolution and Creationism?

Non-theistic evolution though intellectually stimulating has too many variables to consider here. It ignores a need for a prime mover by stating that the Big Bang took place and requires no further justification. This is similar to theists saying God needs no creator for he had no beginning. No more questions need be asked. End of story.

Special Creation solves many mysteries except the origin of God. Furthermore, Special Creation presents a demonic being as the origin of Evil though Special Creation and its associated theologies do not excuse Evil or the demon in question due to the mystery of Evil itself. Evil is simply because it is. Special Creationists can't or won't explain Evil since by explaining it they would then justify or understand why it exists at all. Special Creation does not solve all of the enigmas. It creates extra ones and leaves them as is.

Theistic evolution solves some problems but ultimately presents God as a cosmic mad scientist. How, pray tell, do you pray to and love an omnipotent being who needed eons of trial and error--just look at all of the fossil record--to finally produce one of the generally impressive results of evolution:  Man the Thinker? What is the other impressive end-product of theistic evolution? Gaia (Mother Earth) itself [see footnote]. Our self-actualizing world is almost sentient in its perfection and self-regulating complexity. Some see this perfection and near-sentience as an indication of an omniscient God who is responsible for the almost flawless miracle that we call Earth.

What then is the answer of answers :  how did we get here? If we were to find this perfect solution we'd cease to evolve as a species. It is better to leave some questions unanswered.

______________

Gaia philosophy (named after Gaia, Greek goddess of the Earth) is a broadly inclusive term for related concepts that living organisms on a planet will affect the nature of their environment in order to make the environment more suitable for life. ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_(philosophy)

Where Is God?

Only the mystery we call God can change the hell that can sometimes exist both in our mind or in the world that surrounds us. No other mystical power or force of science can change that permanently with  lasting effects in mind. Thank God for God. How truly alone we'd feel if He didn't exist. Without God the wonder that we call the universe would be a charade or a cruel joke. All this dazzling immensity and beauty created for no reason and easily destroyed--eventually after billions of years--meaninglessly, as well.

God must exist, you see. He just has to. Otherwise the quality and beauty of life is cheapened.

If--and this we cannot prove--God does not exist then we have to become our own all-loving, all-forgiving and all-comforting "God." [1]  Let us not even consider the quagmire of dealing with lower-case gods or beneficent forces of nature. We need God or the ideal implied by the word God, not just for each other's sake, or for our own sake. We also need God or the ideal of God ("God") for the benefit of the culmination of eons of evolution--pre-primate and primate--as well. Ultimately we need God if only to insure that our own health and survival as a species is assured for whatever fate or providence or some nameless and undefined Factor or Ideal has in store for us down the road. Without something larger than ourselves millions of years of human evolution lose whatever meaning artists and poets have attributed to the wonder of being human and being alive to enjoy that splendor and glory. [2]

Humanity really, then, is created in the image of God. We are carbon copies of our perfect and wonderful God. We need God, however, to let that wonder and perfection shine and grow. Not from within ourselves only but from a mysterious reality or force beyond ourselves. That mystery can only be called God. It truly can be said of us, His children, that "we are the light of the world."

______________

References:

1. It may not be necessary for some, but in the event that there is some confusion as to what I'm referring to when I speak of God (the deity of the Old and New Testament Bible) and "God" (the ideal of God or a conceptual God, if he were not to exist) this note may prove helpful. Again, it is not my intention nor concern at this time to address any interaction or use of a lower-case god. There are already too many lower-case gods in our  postmodern world.
2. Though probably used in a different context and possessing different meaning than what I've presented here, I am partially indebted to Jack Provonsha's "God is With Us" which I read at the age of 19. It still lingers in my mind though only vaguely. It was there that I first came upon the sometimes confusing uses of God and "God."

This Changes Everything about Observable Reality

Observable truth about the extent or the nature of the universe will change and be incorrect with what we know now to be true sometime in the distant future. For a believer in God this, necessarily, has ramifications.

If at some distant point in the future scientists will see only pure blackness surrounding our little local group of galaxies, including the Milky Way galaxy. Might not scientists now be missing important, once observable, information about the universe that is forever lost because of its distance in space and time? That information would have long expanded away from our most powerful telescopes. Perhaps other once-observable realities, or forces, that may still be out there, but are beyond our most sensitive and powerful instruments to detect, are forever gone to us. We can never know what has passed us by because we live at this point in time, and on this particular galaxy.

One solution would be if our descendants could build a 99.9 percent fast-as-light space craft, or even a theoretically faster star craft that would travel at the same speed as the expanding universe which is moving away from us at faster-than-light sped. (See article below for this faster-than-light fact.) However, I'm not sure we could travel that far in our 80 years of life, or that our descendants on-board would ever reach the edges of the myriad galaxies we can easily see now, or that our virtual robotic substitutes would ever reach the galaxies that are now observable to humanity.

Another part of the problem would be that our original future culture back home (the one that sent us in search of these distant galaxies) would have ceased to exist or would have experienced billions of our real-time years and so we could never communicate this important reality to them. We would only be able to share the existence of formerly-invisible galaxies to those on-board with us. We could use this on-board remnant of humanity to become humanity as we will know it someday with some planning if we travel to that distant point in space and time via a Macrolife type of craft and engineered habitat (See the Dandridge Cole post about the real possibility of Macrolife in Macrolife, Space Colonization & Adventist Futurism)

You will always have those who would think such missing information that was once observable from Earth, as irrelevant to their world. Such an attitude on the part of our recent ancestors would,  no doubt, have stuck us in the industrial age for centuries since that age possessed enough comforts and wonders for society to function satisfactorily, though not as efficiently as post-industrial culture now functions.

Would God ever allow or permit, though not condone--as conservative Christians are wont to say--such a cataclysmic state to ever occur to the far future inhabitants of planet Earth?  Would He let humanity not see scientifically-observable facts that their ancestors, aka our present generation, took for granted, i.e., that the universe consists of more than our immediate galactic cluster?

Have these changes in perceptual realities already taken place and we, of course, have no way of knowing what we could have known had we been on Earth millions or billions of years ago. If not on Earth, than at least on one of the worlds within our galactic cluster?

Please see:

Darkness on the Edge of the Universe

The Meaning of Everything

Galileo helped further the truth that the Earth revolves around the sun and not the sun around the Earth. Though it caused havoc for both Galileo and society we are better off with the knowledge.

Recently I'm reading more about M-Theory which suggests quite strongly that the universe is not just one but an infinite number. We live, M-Theory suggests, not in a Universe but as part of a Multiverse. The ramifications of M-Theory are too many to outline briefly but let me share some thoughts about how M-Theory relates to those who believe in One God.

With an infinite number of universes all created by one God how can we insist that ours is the only sinful world. What if in at least one percent of the infinite number of universes of the multiverse there was one world that also contains sinful beings in need of redemption. One percent of an infinite number is of course an infinite number, as well.

Where am I going with all this? Some will decide that the implications of this line of reasoning lead to agnosticism. Others will catalog it along with the centuries-old discovery that the sun does not revolve around the Earth. World culture survived such monumental discoveries. People of faith eventually followed suit. If both survived such discoveries once it will, no doubt, happen again.

God bless us, his children, who live on an even tinnier speck in one world among the infinite number of worlds of the Multiverse.

By the way, "Hyperspace" (the book that appears in the photo above) was written by Michio Kaku, a respected scientist and a favorite author, and is not science fiction. It is about cosmology, quantum physics, etc.

Consult also the following serious work by another favorite author:  “The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos” by Brian Greene, a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia.

Thank you.