Hi Platt,
Steve P:
First of all, the blog I am working on is not aimed directly at
convincing theists that they have a bunch of wacky beliefs that we'd
all be better off if they dropped. That is indirectly part of my goal,
but the blog is not to attract theists to the discussion. I want to
converse with other non believers in an ongoing strategy session that
would include the sort of suggestion you made.
Platt:
Perhaps your non believers would like to address the question Pirsig
posed
in Lila:
"Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of
carbon,
hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to
organize
themselves into a professor of chemistry? What's the motive? If we
leave a
chemistry professor out on a rock in the sun long enough the forces of
nature will convert him into simple compounds of carbon, oxygen,
hydrogen
and nitrogen, calcium, phosphorus, and small amounts of other minerals.
It's a one-way reaction. No matter what kind of chemistry professor we
use
and no matter what process we use we can't turn these compounds back
into a
chemistry professor. Chemistry professors are unstable mixtures of
predominantly unstable compounds which, in the exclusive presence of
the
sun's heat, decay irreversibly into simpler organic and inorganic
compounds. That's a scientific fact.
"The question is: Then why does nature reverse this process? What on
earth
causes the inorganic compounds to go the other way? It isn't the sun's
energy. We just saw what the sun's energy did. It has to be something
else.
What is it?" (Lila, 11)
Steve:
I also love the above passage. I think his question points to a
creative aspect of the universe (Dynamic Quality) that science needs to
try to incorporate into it's theories. We may never have answers to
these questions, but this sounds to me like the sort of process that
science has come up with better and better explanations for in the
past.
Do you already have answer that you'd like to share? Since your
question was addresses to nonbelievers, are you suggesting that the
answer to these questions is God?
Regards,
Steve
atheistichope.blogspot.com
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