DDL on 9/9/2010 at 13:32
When the oil dries up, the humans die. They apparently could foresee this, but hey: lazy. Plus check out my hummer, dude!
Some things are independent of rational thought.
Also, there's no reason creativity should not be a desirable trait. Creative tool use ensures greater survival rates. Creating impressive things increases chances of getting laid, and extend that far enough and any obvious link between the creativity and 'actual utility' can easily be lost. Look at peacocks: does all that shit serve ANY purpose other than "HEY LOOKIT ME"? No. It impresses the ladies, though.
So there's one reason for art. Next is education: we've evolved to be incredibly good at learning, but at the trade off of being incredibly stupid to start with. Concommitant with this has been a huge shift from instinct-based behaviour to learned behaviour. We are incredibly good, INCREDIBLY good, at learning. Combine that with creativity being a desirable trait and sooner or later you make the shift from keeping the collective knowledge in the brains of the previous generation and passing it on via oral teaching....to writing that shit down.
Combine writing shit down as a teaching aid, with wanting to impress the opposite sex, with just generally high levels of creativity, and you can pretty much explain away anything.
Remember, it's not just survival, it's sex too. Plus even with such limited selection criteria you can still get a ton of accessory traits coming along for the ride which would not appear to confer any strict obvious advantage (at the raw genetic level, a non-essential gene situated right next to a gene absolutely required for survival is going to persist far more than one situated elsewhere simply because it's close to an essential gene).
I'm not denying we're not unique, we certainly are...but so is every other species out there. No human was ever dazzled by the electric field lines running down the side of a lady shark, but you don't see sharks boasting about this on the internet.;)
There are a ton of reasons why we should be the way we are, and none of them require anything other than time, selective pressure and resources. Yes, we're special. But so is everything else.
Sulphur on 9/9/2010 at 14:06
Quote Posted by Kolya
Sulphur: You're getting awfully close to a religious explanation there. ;)
:D Damn, you found me out. And that's exactly why an overlap between issues that science and religion deal with isn't going to happen, or at least end with an agreeable outcome for religion. Dogmatic explanations based on supernatural happenstance don't cut it for most phenommena. Religion can deal with philosophy, but it can leave the fundaments of the firmament to science.
Vivian on 9/9/2010 at 15:38
Quote Posted by Kolya
And the human longing for eternity, to transcend death, is unique to the conscious human mind.
hahaha good luck proving that
Nicker on 9/9/2010 at 20:01
I don't see questions like, 'why are we here, what is our purpose, what happens after we die', as transcendent. I think they are incredibly vain and selfish.
The first two are essential identical and both are an intellectual and spiritual dead ends. The third is responsible for the bulk of violent atrocities and other insults to our humanity, which religious authorities have perpetrated on us.
Asking "why" appeals to our egos. It presumes that humans are super special, and have a purpose, rather than a utility. Cows are for eating, horses are for riding but humans can only be here for some elevated reason extending from our "obvious" and unique connection with a creator. Pure hubris! Ask a virus or a blowfly what humans are good for - we make great hosts and a super place to raise the kids.
Each "why" invokes a "because" which invokes another "why". It's like an endless game of "how come" with a deathless five year old. Even for theists it hits the wall once god is offered as an explanation, because you can't ask "why" of god - at least you can't expect to understand the answer, even if one was forthcoming.
And the afterlife is the biggest crock of crap EVAR! "Do what I say because I know what happens after you die..." Can it get any more specious than this? In Hinduism it has sustained and justified the caste system for millennia. In the Abrahamic religions it has inspired countless atrocities and continues to do so even today. Our egos cannot stand the possibility that we are temporary beings.
The fantasy of eternal life is so powerful our egos will murder and torture to sustain it. That alone is reason to choose reason over faith and while religion clings to the afterlife it cannot, by its own terms, achieve "peaceful coexistence" with science.
Renzatic on 9/9/2010 at 21:52
Quote Posted by Nicker
Each "why" invokes a "because" which invokes another "why". It's like an endless game of "how come" with a deathless five year old. Even for theists it hits the wall once god is offered as an explanation, because you can't ask "why" of god - at least you can't expect to understand the answer, even if one was forthcoming.
Which could be said of anything, regardless of if it's scientific or religious. It doesn't matter which flavor you prefer, from Genesis to the Apocalypse, all the way over to the Big Bang and the eventual heat death of the universe. The very nature of our existence is basically one huge why and how come.
Like evolution. It's a good explanation of a process, but why is there evolution? What drives it? Adaptation. Why If you keep following that path back far enough, your eventual answer will be "because the vast entirety of our universe exploded out of a space smaller than a skin cell in the tip of your finger".
"Why"?
Or what if you question in the opposite direction? "Eventually our ever expanding universe becomes too thin and cold to sustain itself, and it just simply disappears". So what's there afterwards? Nothing. Nothing? What about the space that contained the universe? Even though nothing is in it, the space itself exists, right? An empty room doesn't quit existing simply because there isn't furniture in it or people to observe it. So what does it do? Keep existing as tangible nothingness? What if there's another big bang? And is that what the true universe is? A series of small things we define as universes that keep exploding and fading away ad infinitum? Why would it do that? What causes it? What if we look farther out? Certainly something exists beyond the observable 4 dimensional fabric of this universe of universes? What is it? A brane in a higher dimensional universe? Well shit, there are multiple dimensions? That brings about a whole new set of questions. Like what's above that in the hierarchy? Is there ever a point where the universe is simply unobservable despite existing? Ect. Ect. Ect.
In the end, you come down to two equally silly ultimatums. Either you have a whole bunch of finite matter that exists without beginning or end, and eventually coalesces into walking talking monkeys, or there's a prime mover Godlike entity that brought it all about. Oh, a prime mover? Has it always existed? If not, what created it? And so on and so on.
So your argument against the pat answers religion gives can be equally applied to the current secular world if you look out far enough. Everything eventually leads to guesses and assumptions, where God is as equally valid an argument as anything else.
Nicker on 9/9/2010 at 22:59
Renz ; "Why" is like "faith" - the words both have contradictory uses. Faith can mean both belief without evidence AND certainty based on experience.
Why can be both a query about purpose (implying a creator or managerial deity) OR it can be used in science as another wording for, by what mechanism.
Why is the sky blue? Is it because blue is Jehovah's favourite colour (my pastor actually told me this and that 7 is his fave number) or because molecules in the atmosphere scatter blue more efficiently than other colours?
"Why" is not used the same way by both parties so it is incorrect to conflate their conclusions along with their contradictory definitions of "why".
"Why is there evolution?" is an irrelevant query to science. Why is there the sun? Such questions are unanswerable and, more importantly, unnecessary when trying to understand HOW something happens. And while the cycle of "why / because" is potentially endless in either religious or scientific inquiry, it meets a hasty demise in the ultimate "because" of theism - god did it. That's neither healthy nor honest.
Standing on the borders of our ignorance and declaring that God is just as reasonable a proposition as a natural one, strikes me as lazy. Every time our knowledge advances, god is driven further into the void. I see no evidence for this trend being reversed. Science and religion may both be guessing at that point but I know which horse my money will be on.
Kolya on 9/9/2010 at 23:31
Nicker, are you on some kind of scientific crusade? Rest assured it's unnecessary, we're all quite rational people here. And I don't think you'll find it so vain and selfish to wonder what will happen to you, the day you die. It's a quite normal human emotion usually born out of fear and not vanity. You're just ignoring a lot of what's been said and partly making up a bad strawman religion to run your head into.
june gloom on 9/9/2010 at 23:53
Quote Posted by Kolya
Nicker, are you on some kind of scientific crusade? Rest assured it's unnecessary, we're all quite rational people here. And I don't think you'll find it so vain and selfish to wonder what will happen to you, the day you die. It's a quite normal human emotion usually born out of fear and not vanity. You're just ignoring a lot of what's been said and partly making up a bad strawman religion to run your head into.
Quoted for truth. Nicker you're 3 steps away from being a stereotypical straw-rationalist, raging out against the ignorant, unwashed throwbacks when we don't have any.
Except Fragony, who never listens anyway.
I kid, Fragsy ;)
not reallyQueue on 10/9/2010 at 00:26
You know, there might be something to this melding of religion and science thingy here. The granddaddy of science and reasoning himself, Sir Isaac Newton, secretly was an obsessive eschatologist and spent a good chunk of his life trying to decode the Bible to determine when Armageddon would occur.
Apparently it'll be in 2060.
Then again, Newton also stated that the coming apocalypse would be preceded by a thousand-year reign of immortal saints, of which he would be one--smiling down upon us from his heavenly apple orchard. So either he was wrong about that by 950 years, or he took one too many Malus fruits to the noggin.
CCCToad on 10/9/2010 at 00:35
Keeping in mind what everyone's said, there is a definite boundary between the two in some areas. While science might be able to explain WHAT the rules that govern (for example) gravity are, it can never explain WHY the rules of the universe are what they become. Why is it that matter(for the most part) attracts other matter instead of repels it? Why is gravity not a repellant force?
