Hi ,
Can someone please tell me how I unsubscrive from this mailing list >?
Thanks
Graeme
Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
Danny Mayes writes:
I haven't participated in the list in a while, but I try to keep up
with the discussion here and there as time permits. I personally was
raised a fundamentalist Baptist, but lost most of my interest in that
religion when I was taught at 9 years old that all the little kids in
Africa that are never told about Jesus Christ go to Hell. Even at 9,
I knew that wasn't something I was going to be buying. Who wants to
believe in a God that cruel? Even without the problematic cruel
creator, I have always been to oriented toward logic and proof to
just accept stuff on faith.
I sympathise with the conclusions of the young Danny, but there is a
philosophical non sequitur here. The fact that I would like something
to be true, or not to be true, has no bearing on whether it is in fact
true. I don't like what happened in Germany under the Nazis, but that
doesn't mean I should believe the Nazis did not exist, so why should
my revulsion at the thought of infidels burning in Hell lead me to
believe that God and Hell do not exist? It might make me reluctant to
worship such a God, but that is not the same as believing he does not
exist.
I started redeveloping religious belief, ironically, when I picked up
a book on quantum physics 6 or so years ago. I was at a legal
seminar and needed something to read during the boring sessions, and
the author ran through a number of experiments of QM and concluded
that the MWI was the most logical interpretation of these
experiments. I had read all the Sci Fi strories of alternate
realities and whatnot, but this was my first exposure to the concept
that reality is created in such a way to allow all things to exist
(that also actually appeared to be supported by some real science).
I still remember my excitement in contemplating this explanation, in
that it seems to explain so many questions.
I guess I could go into a long explanation as to why I now believe
intelligence plays a key role in understanding the nature of our
reality and how it came to be, but I probably wouldn't be able to say
much that almost anyone on this board has not already heard. For me
it boils down to this: I see absolutely no reason to believe our
experiences are not emulable. I strongly suspect it is possible to
create a quantum computer. I strongly suspect technology will
continue to evolve and computer processing will get more and more
powerful. Finally, even if we are somehow precluded from creating
new universes in the future (i.e. universes implented on the same
level of reality as our universe, virtual universes are obviously
possible), the one we are in will last for trillions of years. Final
conclusion? Well, I'll let you do the math...
But if it's scientific, it's not religion, is it? Religion means
believing something in the absence of sufficient evidence.
Stathis Papaioannou
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