Secular folks should worry.

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honorentheos
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Re: Secular folks should worry.

Post by honorentheos »

Gadianton wrote:
Sat May 06, 2023 2:57 am
honor wrote: Perhaps it is more practical to make adjustments along the way.
I believe this was huckelberry.
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Re: Secular folks should worry.

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MG 2.0 wrote:
Sat May 06, 2023 1:51 am
honorentheos wrote:
Sat May 06, 2023 12:22 am
In the bigger picture, the question remains why it matters if there is a creator involved or not?
Purpose and meaning being both intrinsic AND connected/related to something/someone outside of ourselves in whom we find our source code and continued purpose/meaning after we die.
Those are subjective reasons. Which is why I chose to point out it being a distraction from the real issue: power.
honorentheos wrote:
Sat May 06, 2023 12:22 am
I don't think the answer to that is universal to everyone. But in the context of this thread it comes down to power. The assertion there is a creator god actively involved in the universe isn't a conclusion being drawn from evidence, but an assertion being made. And that assertion is tied to other assertions about morality, about authority, and about superiority.
Morality and authority, yes. Superiority? That’s not what Jesus teaches us in the scriptures and through modern apostles and prophets. According to LDS thought/teachings anyway. 🙂

Those that take that position do so at their own peril.

And power? Yes, in the sense that God has all power and is willing to share a small portion of that power with mankind.

Evidence? It goes both ways. Eyes to see, ears to hear and all that.

Regards,
MG
One can pursue questions about evolution for reasons that are not personal nor primarily subjective interpretation. The science of biology can be blissfully ignorant of the question of there being an intelligence moving amongst the mechanics of the universe. Conversely, ID exists, not to advance human knowledge, but to control. It's why you believe the same motive exists on the side of evolution.

So it is valuable to remember why it's being discussed in the context of the OP.
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Physics Guy
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Re: Secular folks should worry.

Post by Physics Guy »

I can imagine that ID supporters are often tempted to be inconsistent, because they have two potential lines of argument that both seem to lead in the direction they want:

A) This must have been made by hand because no machine could ever make this automatically,

versus

B) The fantastic machine that can do this automatically must itself have been made by hand.

Up to a point it may even seem that the two lines of argument are complementary rather than conflicting. The harder it is to make something by machine, the harder it surely has to be to make the amazing machine that can nonetheless do it. And the harder it seems to be to make a machine that could do this job, the harder it must be for any machine whatever to do it.

I think the problem is just that IDers are using kiddie-cartoon concepts of design versus chance, to discuss a problem of nonlinear many-body dynamics. It's like trying win a Formula 1 race with a soapbox racer.

If the laws of nature do in fact inevitably favour the evolution of intelligent life, then the machine is not a Rube Goldberg contraption. It's something more like a sewing machine: hard to fathom but actually simple, and so completely reliable. This is the implication of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, in fact. The "irreducible complexity" people had no idea what they were talking about, when they talked about entropy. If intelligent life does evolve naturally, then it does so by increasing entropy.

That means that the evolution of intelligent life must be like falling downstairs. It must be not hard, but easy. Not necessarily easy to the point where it happens every time something sneezes, but easy to the point where it's bound to occur in a galaxy, somewhere. The bar for demonstrating that it isn't that easy is really high, because galaxies are big and last a long time. Multiplying low naïve probability estimates until you reach fantastically small chances won't do, because the question is how big the chance is that you've overlooked a systematic effect.

I think that evolving intelligent life must be a lot like a magic trick. It only seems impossible when you don't know the trick; once you know the trick, it's obviously easy. Magic tricks are mostly like that: the trick is rarely anything impressive, once you know it. It's usually something stupid that just leaves you disgusted.

At the moment we don't actually know all the tricks that make intelligent life tend to evolve. The opposite position to ID, however, is not that there is some incredibly unlikely machine that does something incredibly difficult. It's that there are subtle but reliable effects which make the difficulty of evolving intelligence much less than one would naïvely estimate.

Is inventing tricks like that fine tuning? I don't think it actually is. If being a theist is like being a little-kid fan of an action hero, however, the way I'm rooting for my hero to win is not with a lame ex-machina move like fine tuning, but with a typically brilliant simple trick.
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Re: Secular folks should worry.

Post by Physics Guy »

Kishkumen wrote:
Tue May 02, 2023 8:08 pm
Theists who insist that intelligent design or creationism must be taught in the schools have a very poor grasp of theology. If I believe that things exist only because God made it possible, does that mean I have to imagine him arranging the rocks in the Garden of Eden or splicing DNA? I mean, what kind of ludicrous deity needs to be written into the cartoon-like narratives that these people must be imagining? I would say that anything in the way of ID or creationist accounts these folks come up with is bound to be practically blasphemous in its inadequacy and vulgarity.
+1

I'll think twice about just dismissing anything that the Bible says, but only twice. It's an ancient text. Even so, what I see in Genesis is abiogenesis:
Genesis 2:7 wrote:Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground.
Creationists will perhaps tell me that I'm not paying enough attention, here, to "God formed". I think they're not paying enough attention to "God". The God who creates time with a word doesn't scoop dust with fingers.
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Re: Secular folks should worry.

Post by Gadianton »

Honor wrote:I believe this was huckelberry.
My mistake, it had been a long day and I was deep into the single 22 oz IPA I would drink for the week, and I was starting to lose it. And then yesterday, the hangover put me out for the entire day. So yesterday after chores, I leaned back in my recliner and watched youTube and Netflix until bed time. I guess that's God punishing me for breaking the word of wisdom. If I drink a single beer in a week, I better do it no later than 1 PM or this is what happens.
physics guy wrote:to discuss a problem of nonlinear many-body dynamics.
I think this is a great insight. I still recall a documentary I saw as a kid about the dangers of semi trucks pulling more than two trailers. Two trailers are safe, to demonstrate, if you back up the rig with two trailers, the direction each trailer will turn is predictable. Add a third trailer, and you can't predict its direction. And so that third trailer can get out of hand on the freeway and impossible to reign in and cause accidents. There is something unimpressive about being impressed that science can't predict the direction of the third trailer.
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Doctor CamNC4Me
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Re: Secular folks should worry.

Post by Doctor CamNC4Me »

Gadianton wrote:
Sun May 07, 2023 3:13 pm
Honor wrote:I believe this was huckelberry.
My mistake, it had been a long day and I was deep into the single 22 oz IPA I would drink for the week, and I was starting to lose it. And then yesterday, the hangover put me out for the entire day. So yesterday after chores, I leaned back in my recliner and watched youTube and Netflix until bed time. I guess that's God punishing me for breaking the word of wisdom. If I drink a single beer in a week, I better do it no later than 1 PM or this is what happens.
physics guy wrote:to discuss a problem of nonlinear many-body dynamics.
I think this is a great insight. I still recall a documentary I saw as a kid about the dangers of semi trucks pulling more than two trailers. Two trailers are safe, to demonstrate, if you back up the rig with two trailers, the direction each trailer will turn is predictable. Add a third trailer, and you can't predict its direction. And so that third trailer can get out of hand on the freeway and impossible to reign in and cause accidents. There is something unimpressive about being impressed that science can't predict the direction of the third trailer.
Huh. Who woulda thunk the three-body problem extends to hauling trailers …

- Doc
Hugh Nibley claimed he bumped into Adolf Hitler, Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Gertrude Stein, and the Grand Duke Vladimir Romanoff. Dishonesty is baked into Mormonism.
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Re: Secular folks should worry.

Post by Kishkumen »

Gadianton wrote:
Sun May 07, 2023 3:13 pm
My mistake, it had been a long day and I was deep into the single 22 oz IPA I would drink for the week, and I was starting to lose it. And then yesterday, the hangover put me out for the entire day. So yesterday after chores, I leaned back in my recliner and watched youTube and Netflix until bed time. I guess that's God punishing me for breaking the word of wisdom. If I drink a single beer in a week, I better do it no later than 1 PM or this is what happens.
Love me some IPA! Just one a week? What are you, a monk?
“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.”~Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
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Re: Secular folks should worry.

Post by Morley »

There are no IPAs for me, tonight. This post will be the result of a flat-on-my-back, oxy cocktail brain. For what it’s worth.

Any Intelligent Design concept of God creating a machine to perform his handiwork is something that could result in a moral and practical nightmare, I would think. Any mechanism that God could create might potentially outstrip its own creator.

We already know that God makes mistakes. In the beginning, God created the first woman, Lilith, and had to set her aside, for a more pliable Eve. Later, God repented of ever of making mankind and tried to drown most of the lot of us in a diluvial bathtub. And then, he screwed up with Biblical unicorns, and placed coffee into the Word of Wisdom prohibitions. All this means that it’s possible that God could have designed a dysfunctional machine.

Couldn’t God create a celestially grade golem, a Mary Shelley’s monster, or a ChatGPT AI—resulting in a leviathan so significant and powerful, that the genie could never be completely controlled, let alone coaxed back into the bottle?

The whole concept of the clockmaker trusting the fate of his creations to the coo-coo clock? The downside really bothers me. I don’t see how a self-generating evolution machine could be a good idea—though I guess the probable results might offer some explanation for the seemingly beyond FUBARness of the trajectory of the modern world.

Yeah maybe, as MG claims, secular folks should worry about GenZ’s possible tolerance for Democratic party politics. Oh, and drag queens. I always forget the destruction wrought by all the drag queens.



edit to add:

If he’s not out on one of his famous philosophy house calls to the movie stars, we could really use the services of the good Dr Stak, on this one.
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Re: Secular folks should worry.

Post by Gadianton »

theologins will say God can't make a rock so big he can't move it. The Old Testament is pre-theology. But the Mormon god isn't a theological god either and so the possibility is real.

I believed as a TBM, prior to the serious doubt stage, that Satan could win. I can't recall if I'd heard Cleon Skousen's ideas yet at this point, but Skousen said that it was possible for God to fall. He could "cease to be God", as the Book of Mormon says. My reasoning was that all those wars in Heaven that God has over and over gain throughout the eternities can't be all that dramatic if God always knows the outcome. Basically, unlike Star Wars, there's never anything really at stake. And Satan would have to be incredibly irrational to fight a war he knows he can't win. And how sick would God be, if he knows the outcome and just kicking back pretending to be dramatic while the rest of us risk it all? There has to be a chance evil will win, or everything is pointless.

The more interesting part of your question is if Mormon God could create a "singularity", an emergent system that surpasses himself, or "grey goo", an emergent system like a swarm that replicates and swallows everything. He might stick with Satan for a reason.

I think evolution and AI challenges the way Aristotle and Plato thought about the world, where everything is just the instantiation of that same thing as potential or a form. A calculator might be able to do things our brains can't do, but there is no mystery about how a calculator arrives at the answer. When a neural network beats a master at chess or go, it's different because the creators have to dig into the logs to figure out how on earth it it made such a bad mistake or such a brilliant move.
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Doctor CamNC4Me
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Re: Secular folks should worry.

Post by Doctor CamNC4Me »

Gadianton wrote:
Mon May 08, 2023 2:28 pm
There has to be a chance evil will win, or everything is pointless.

The more interesting part of your question is if Mormon God could create a "singularity", an emergent system that surpasses himself, or "grey goo", an emergent system like a swarm that replicates and swallows everything. He might stick with Satan for a reason.
*incoming Dune reference*

Perhaps mankind needs a god emperor who sees a golden path, lest we “the Ixians” will create a machine that through sheer design and logical ‘mission’ seeks out and destroys all of mankind. If we go back to the Bible, it appears Man can’t help but be self-destructive, always choosing horror over paradise. I dunno.

But you’re onto something, Gad, theologically. There has to be skin in the game for God, otherwise it’s just a larp, a drama to be played out at Life’s expense. On the flipside, it’s obvious to me why Lucifer rebelled, because the Plan is inherently unjust, unfair, elitist, and evil beyond description. The sheer suffering levied on all life is too much to really accept as just or moral. The capricious nature of Man and God is so bananas, that it boggles the mind. Sure Mormons have a workaround, in that this life is just a blip of time, but that doesn’t alleviate the fact that is incomprehensibly crazy, that we’re to be judged on a blip of time where the rules may or may not be applied, and our faithful hunches may or may not pan out.

Whatever the case may be, and going back to my Ixian reference, I don’t really see a way out for humankind. We’re driven by the same forces and impulses all Life goes by, so we’re turning to a complex technocracy that has and will outpace our ability to manage it - and that’s not even taking into account bad actors who get ahold of supremely destructive tech - and no amount of Jesus-worship is going to save us from our own worst impulses. There is no god emperor to see the golden path for us.

- Doc
Hugh Nibley claimed he bumped into Adolf Hitler, Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Gertrude Stein, and the Grand Duke Vladimir Romanoff. Dishonesty is baked into Mormonism.
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