On 2 Sep 2006 at 19:28, Richard Baker wrote: > Andrew said: > > > "inevitable" is a word which is loaded in itself, and as to > > "outcome", I don't think we're quite at the end of the river yet. > > This being the case, it seems to me that these religions imply that > humanity was supposed or intended to exist in the universe.
You won't actually get many Rabbis willing to hold forth on pure theoreticals like that, just like not many will hold forth on life- after-death. Essentially, though, Judaism is not threatened if Aliens exist, even intelligent ones. > On the other hand, although one might make the case for certain > traits such as intelligence or bipedalism being likely to arise, it's > vanishingly unlikely that humanity would appear in its current form > if evolution had had even a very slightly different starting point or > been subject to very slightly different perturbations along the way. That's why I brought up many-words/multiverse - in that, we are not unique snowflakes at all. There are at "alpha" versions of you, for example, if they're true. I'm not going to get into transinfinites, but if it's true then we're NOT unique, NOT unusual. I refer you to John Brunner, _The Infinitive of Go_ > the word "inevitable". Which then further suggests the question: why > would God bother with this rather elaborate scheme rather than > creating humans directly? We're getting into perceptions now. Okay, if people KNEW they'd been created then it's change our perspective of G-d. If we didn't know, well, then...I'm going to refer you to Brin's _Heavens Reach_. How does the quote go..something like.. "All the simulations have been run and discarded, what we call existance is merely an illusion of elapsed time". > I can't help but say that it looks to me like religious people > struggling to hold onto vague and metaphorical versions of ideas > whose exact and literal versions have been shown to be extremely > unlikely indeed by the progress of science. Maybe and maybe not. But please don't confuse Christianity and Judaism's approach to science. Gallelo is the perfect example. He had years of trouble with - was called a Heretic by - the Catholics for advocating Copernician theory (although calling the Pope a simpleton in print did't help either). The Jewish astronmers of the day were not convinced by Copernician theory either, but there was no threat to their religious views - the important observations of the sky for the Jewish religion would not change if the idea of heliocentric movement was true. What mattered was not scientific theory but the specified observations. Time after time, where a Christian finds historical views have changed within the Church, there has simply not been a conflict in the first place for the Jews. AndrewC Dawn Falcon _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
