Clara

I’m definitely in agreement with that. My older brother told me the other day that the church his wife goes to believes that dinosaurs coexisted with human beings early on and were not carnivorous. They apparently became that way only because of The Fall, or something like that.

I don’t have the details. And I can even sympathize. Who wants a story that reads “God created a system whereby life would feed on death, misery, and suffering, in order for life to flourish”? That doesn’t sound very palatable. It’s much nicer to believe that the lion always laid down with the lamb.

And in many animated movies, the animals are all friends. That sort of leaves you wondering what the wolves eat. And in many Christian or Catholic stories, all suffering (except for the “natural” suffering of tidal waves, earthquakes, and such) is considered to have sin at the root.

And that’s a good story, even a logical one, *if* creation is inherently a paradise that we have subsequently screwed up. But I don’t hold to that doctrine because I don’t believe paradise, under the terms we live, is possible. That is, I think the very foundation of the universe is set so that pain and suffering are not aberrations but inherent to the way things work.

That needn’t lead to a sense of fatalism or despair. It usually does which is why we get all these other stories. But perhaps in no stronger way do we ever experience God than in the role of Job — being a good man or woman despite the hardships. It’s a strange Bible story, I will relent. And I don’t think it’s literally true. But it’s surely metaphorically true.

There is every excuse to be a rat bastard in this life. The hard argument, instead, is why one should not be. And (hint) reducing your carbon footprint or using the right pronoun has nothing to do with that. The miraculous, even holy, man or woman is the good man or woman who is so and not because life has always been easy and soft. But because they have true (not virtue-signaling) sympathy for others — and (most importantly) act accordingly.

This is the real meaning of “turning the other cheek.” It has nothing to do with being “non-judgmental.” It simply means not living according to nature but according to God, for if we lived by the rules of nature, we’d all be Nazis. Why nature should exist in the form it does is a profoundly interesting question. But our reaction to this reality determines whether we walk with the angels or the devils.

First off, there is not one, or even a dozen, methods for studying and codifying the natural world.

But my gripe isn’t that there isn’t, in very general terms, a “scientific method.” It’s that “science,” as an appellation, has been turned into a sort of disembodied committee of know-it-all experts against which there is no higher appeal. It has become a word steeped in a sort of idol worship, a “worldview” that does not denote a method but a set of beliefs that have nothing to do with any method, per se.

When some “scientist” photographs a bird in the jungle and announces that it is now “known to science,” that is one big juicy ball of arrogance on display there — as if when a native (or anyone else) viewing or photographing a bird, the bird somehow remained invisible.

Basically “science” can, and does, entail all the pitfalls of a sclerotic and arrogant hierarchy.

I see that Mr. Kung and I were thinking along the same lines. Great minds, etc.

I watched this short documentary on CuriosityStream about the Cassini-Hoygens mission to Saturn (circa 2004). It mentioned the interesting phenomenon of its moon, Enceladus, which was found to spew geysers of gasses hundreds of miles into space. The geysers were characterized as existing of “the building blocks of life.”

This Wiki article notes that these gasses are made up of “water vapor, molecular hydrogen, other volatiles, and solid material, including sodium chloride crystals and ice particles.” That which doesn’t fall back to the planet apparently feeds Saturn’s E ring.

There’s no talk of the “building blocks” on the Wiki site. But let’s let that pass for now. The documentary’s claim is reminiscent of the Miller-Urey experiment which shot some electricity into gas in a controlled environment and produced “the building blocks of life.” It matters not to the enthusiasts that the product of these experiments would have instantly degraded in what we know about the earth’s early atmosphere.

These are stories that scientific people tell themselves while castigating the religious for believing in fairy tales. Granted, if you’ve seen some of the truly remarkable Lego creations, you’d be right to say that the Lego brick (although they come in hundreds of prefabricated block) is the building block of Lego creations.



So if, say, they found that Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, spewed Lego bricks out of one of its volcanoes, you would expect that Lego castles, Lego animals, and and Lego Taj Mahals would simply be a matter of looking at enough planets to find some lying around.



But what’s wrong with this story? The main problem is that in both cases it’s information (intelligent design, if you will) that is the real missing factor. Information is the basic building block of either these Lego designs or life. We know this without doubt regarding life because of the information content of DNA.

In the case of Lego bricks (because they come pre-manufactured in some very specific shapes, such as working wheels), there is already tons of information embedded in the bricks. You could still make an elaborate Taj Mahal out of simple rectangular bricks (if small enough for fine-grained detail). But the designs go quicker with the prefabbed features such as doors, windows, platforms, etc.

In the case of life, its starts with even less. Even if you were to grant the wishful thinking of so-called scientists and stated that amino acids (which do exist naturally in the environment and even in space) are the “building blocks of life,” that is still an extremely primitive brick compared to even the simplest Lego brick that is intricately designed to fit together.

Perhaps the same is true of physics and amino acids. They are designed to fit together to provide the basic “Lego brick” to construct life. But it still can do so only via the input of the information encoded in DNA, which works much like the instruction sheet in the Lego sets you can buy which have prefabricated shapes for building, for instance, the Millennium Falcon.



And it’s not that it’s inconceivable that life somehow starts from nothing and slowly and incrementally gets more complex. We can certainly conceive of it. We just can’t show how it can be done. We can’t even in principle see how it could ever be done. And yet we are inundated with this “building blocks of life” propaganda which has most believing that Lego Taj Mahals will be found on the surface of some distant planet or moon if we just look at enough of them.

And we might indeed find some. The universe is a large and strange place, so who knows? And we’re not likely to find them on planets such as Mercury which is too hot (or cold) and barren to facilitate complex structures (biological or Lego) even if you pre-manufactured them and set them down on the planet. So it’s not illogical to look specifically at earth-like planets for signs of life for you’re surely not going to find it on Mercury.

But if we were to move Mercury out to a more suitable orbit, perhaps seeding it with all the chemicals and atmosphere (see: Total Recall), we could then just wait around and suppose that because it now had “the building blocks of life” that some day, even if it took hundreds of millions of years, there would be something a thousand times more complex than the Lego Taj Mahal that would self-generate.

The argument, of course, is that time heals all wounds. Given enough time, small incremental changes will take you from the building blocks to the human brain. We can certainly imagined that this happened. We just can’t show that it happened. The burden of proof is on “the building blocks of life” people. They must find a method (and their just-so creation stories are not a method) whereby Lego bricks can all by themselves increment themselves into these complex creations we see people making.

There’s a whole lot more to this than the above. But we’re being fed a dishonest paradigm by people who either don’t think or are afraid of thinking. But any honest discussion of exoplanets would note that it’s going to take a lot more than bricks to make the Great Wall of China. This problem is fundamentally entwined with information, not matter, although matter (and certain favorable environmental conditions) is an obvious prerequisite for the type of life we know about.

I think it’s totally reasonable and “scientific” to state the principle that only “natural” causes should be taken into consideration when examining any element of the universe. I get that. It just seems inadequate to explain life. In fact, given what see in life (the database of DNA, the nanobots, the micro-machinery), it needn’t have anything to do with religious zealotry to suppose that there is more going on here than can be explained by the simple, algorithmic “natural” laws of the universe as we know them.

Because the religious-like zealotry of “science” is so thick in this regard, most just can’t bring themselves to be honest. Or most simply know that “scientific correctness” has the power to ruin careers as surely as the Gestapo who orchestrate political correctness. And I laugh in their faces at this because these same bullies are the ones who never let us forget how the Church bullied Galileo (and that story is quite a bit different and more complex than the popular perception).

Although we can, and should, castigate blow-hard philosophers for dealing in obfuscation and building their mind-castles in the air, I think there is a place for good philosophy. It’s just that it is in very short supply at the moment. Baloney and misinformation predominate.