Early Retirement Extreme Forums

@freedomseeker - The quantum fluctuation model does not need a beginning. When it comes to the framework, it was always there.

Much of your frustration might stem from desiring a teleological explanation for everything---that every effect must have an identifiable cause and preferably one that makes sense to the human mind (a limiting perspective) or worse is relevant to humans (even more limiting). I'm not too much into teleology talk, so whereas you consider these questions highly relevant, I offer myself as a data point of someone who doesn't consider it relevant at all.

Consider the 2009 credit crisis? There certainly were some effects, that we can agree on. However, did it have a cause? And if it did, did that cause actually care about its relevance to the humans it affected? I think it would be naive to unequivocally answer yes to both questions.

In terms of the universe ... we, humans, used to think ourselves as special. We used to think the earth was the center of everything but realized it was just another planet in the solar system. Then we realized that our solar system is just another solar system in the galaxy; and that our galaxy is just another galaxy in the universe.

Suppose we learned that universes pop in and out of existence in the metaphorical sense of bubbles in a can of soda ... In that case, the existence of our particular universe (one specific short lived bubble in the metaphor) would be completely unremarkable; that is, it would be unremarkable from a soda can perspective whereas of course it would be highly relevant to us (living inside the short lived bubble).

My last paragraph explains why I no longer really care very much about "deep questions". (I was just about as much into this as you seem to be currently in my early 20s.) I simply don't find them very relevant in terms of living as a human being compared to e.g. figuring out how to grow more potatoes in my garden or predicting what the politics/economics of the next 50 years are going to be like.

One big difference is likely that I have never seen any evidence for a supreme being which I couldn't explain using much simpler Occam's Razors arguments such as statistics, fallacies, and various confirmation biases which all have far fewer "cosmological" implications than postulating a supreme being.

However, in taking this back to the top of this post and looking at the quantum vacuum fluctuation. A Stoic would understand the quantum vacuum in an equivalent as many religions understand a designated creator. Instead of having a Creator-God, who created the universe and then let it run with various interferences (e.g. miracles); the stoics had/have a "Framework-God" who actually runs the universe. It is then within the capacity of humans to get closer to that god by understanding how the universe runs. In the stoic sense, philosophers and scientists have the closest connection to god.

In any case, good luck with your quest!

How close an inspection of any scripture does it take to infer that the scripture and their god are man made?

Man creates god in his own image and his rules and laws are always what is prevalent and accepted in that society anyway.

If anything god makes a convenient pivot to rally people around and get them to do things they wouldn't otherwise do.

If you are interested in the philosophical nature of god, then you don't need to go back and forth, with scripture says this, does science corroborate and vice versa.

IMHO you could do a survey of available systems of philosophy that include discussion of god and chose one to study more.

Every major religion has them, and there are also those which are no longer continuous lived traditions but we have what they wrote down.

Or you could simply replace the Universe God with Personal God, rest it at that and then start from there.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoga_(philosophy)

This way you don't have to worry about the implications of existence or non existence of god.

There is no firm reason to believe that there ever was "nothing." There is no firm reason to believe that the universe hasn't "always" been around in some form, either. Its an open question that is being actively studied.

There is no firm evidence that there is a god. There is VERY strong evidence that there is not a god who created life as described in western/near eastern religions. That we do not have a specific answer of "how" does not imply that a thinking being made the universe and us on purpose.

Before Darwin, there was a theist thought experiment called the blind watchmaker. It said that if you found a watch, it was reasonable to assume that something so complicated must be designed and built by someone intelligent. Darwin showed us that the fundamental difference between watches and people is that watches are not self-replicating systems. Living things are. Furthermore, the mechanism of natural selection fundamentally creates complexity. Only designed systems are as simple as possible while fulfilling a specific function.

New genes form from random sequences ( http://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/acc ... _come_from ) or are copied from existing ones by genetic copying errors, and are free to be selected upon from there. This inevitably leads to the intricate, convoluted way organisms appear to work.

Combine this understanding with knowledge that life is chemical in its nature, (no different than any other chemical process) and it becomes apparent that the beginning of life would likely be a chemical event as well. RNA World and Metabolism First may both be completely wrong. Life may have come to be some other way. Maybe the conditions on earth were never amenable to starting life, and it instead formed somewhere else before coming here, i.e., Panspermia. But once a plausible, naturalistic explanation can be posited for any of these things, it seriously limits the god argument. Paraphrasing Neil Tyson; if your god is limited to current gaps in our knowledge, he will keep shrinking as long as people keep studying our surroundings.

freedomseeker, and if there wasn't a beginning? (which was my original point)

However, if it is determined that the laws of physics were suspended at some point, then perhaps that would indicate the universe is a simulation.

hey everyone, sorry for the delayed reply, things have been getting busier again lately. While I was hoping some people would read a few of the links (if not books) to go through some most often misunderstood info (especially regarding the natural selection/entropy relationship), I really appreciate everyone's patience and frankly gentleness with this.


Jacob,

I'm butt-kissing a little bit here, because you wrote my book of 2014 (still waiting with anticipation for investment shake down) and you've really helped me to change some of my ways of thinking, definitely beyond just money management. Thanks for the generosity.

I've got no leverage to ask you, but If you would scan this part 1 (2part series, but foundation is established in part 1) article, I'd really appreciate it, in case I'm missing something. It speaks on your first few points by dealing with the flip side of what we can test as material or chemical( what we can test that is non-material). I think the logic checks out and that if you apply Occam's razor, it certainly has implications to the question at hand. (Since nobody has yet made any mention to any of article I've posted so far, I figure I'll take a liberty and ask directly.)

http://creation.com/laws-of-information-1

I just deleted some more stuff written to follow up on the last few comments, because I'd rather focus on frying this fish. I posted the same link in response to ThisDinosaur below, regarding testable 'things' that are not chemical or material. (ie, information, and on from there).

Anyway, I really appreciate the genuine compassion for said search, and can imagine you spent some solid time on it, since you are a master of hedging! This is partly why it's important to me, it's either absolute waste or the very ultimate. Obviously, here we differ as to it's ultimate relevance in life or not, as I am finding it to be the most relevant.

But alas, absolutes are hard to find, yet I continue to believe in them (time will tell haha) but will try to keep open eyes and an open mind (not too open though, as the famous quote goes haha).



ThisDinosaur,

I would very much agree with your Neil Tyson quote, but that's the very opposite to what I would expect from "God".
Ie, I also just as much agree with Louis Pasteur's quote:
"The more I study nature, the more I stand amazed at the work of the Creator. Science brings men nearer to God." (Louis Pasteur)

Scientific discovery can explain the mechanics of how things happen, but much of the foundation of modern science has used the God of the Bible as that foundation of an inherent rationality. (vs randomness and no-mind-ness of materialism that erodes said foundation of rationality) has been absolutely built on the strong belief in God of the Bible for many of the scientist greats, ie Newton, Kepler, Kelvin, Joule etc etc).

As C.S. Lewis wrote, “Men became scientific because they expected law in nature and they expected law in nature because they believed in a lawgiver.”

WRT the lack of specific evidences on either side of the fence, I hear you, and thus the frustration for so many who have spent some time digging, I guess. Hence my last line to Jacob above regarding absolutes.

As far as the natural selection fundamentally creating complexity. I don't mean to beat a dead horse, but the gene is modular with the complexity PRE-built in, and natural selection can merely select which gene is used in the next generation. Mutations disqualify previous complexity by no longer making it an 'option, hence the decline. Complexity(usable potential) is going down, not up, in the same way that the 2nd law of thermodynamics applies to everything else with a beginning.

With the knowledge that life is purely chemical, this gets to the heart of one of the key issues I was trying to raise before. Our brains are chemical yes, our minds are not. Information is not chemical or material, yet it is can be tested to be repeatedly observable.
“Information is information, neither matter nor energy.” -Norbert Wiener (was Math Prof at MIT)

"The materialistic worldview has widely infiltrated the natural sciences such that it has become the ruling paradigm. However, this is an unjustified dogma. The reality in which we live is divisible into two fundamentally distinguishable realms: namely, the material and the non-material. Matter involves mass, which is weighable in a gravitational field. In contrast, all non-material entities (e.g. information, consciousness, intelligence and will) are massless and thus have zero weight. Information is always based on an idea; it is thus also massless and does not arise from physical or chemical processes. Information is also not correlated with matter in the same way as energy, momentum or electricity is. However, information is stored, transmitted and expressed through matter and energy."
- excerpt from a eye-opening 2part series at http://creation.com/laws-of-information-1 which goes into the laws of information, and implications. This will help shed light on a big, wide scale incongruence with the notion that all that exists is chemicals and matter. This is the same link I put above, asking Jacob to look at.

JamesR,

this is what most atheists believed until a couple hundred years ago, but most have walked away from it because of the implications of the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics.
‘All the evidence we have says that the universe had a beginning."—Cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin and again Vilenkin, “You can’t construct a space-time with this property” (the numbers don't add up basically) “It can’t possibly be eternal in the past. There must be some kind of boundary.”3

+1 jacob. Put to words clearly those things that bounce around inside my own head.

It might be interesting to ask everyone here what, if anything, would change your mind on this issue?

@freedomseeker
The 2nd law of thermodynamics applies to the universe or to closed systems. The earth is not a closed system. Entropy here is free to decrease because we are bathed in the bright glow of a massive thermonuclear inferno in the center of the solar system. The universe's entropy increases dramatically more from the sun's activity than the entropy of earth's surface drops with increasing order. This misuse of the 2nd law by creationists and Intelligent Design advocates is a common red herring, and I assume that's where you have seen it used. Same with the persistent belief that mutations cannot increase complexity, create new genes, or be beneficial.

Your comments read as though you favor the god outcome. That might be because you are arguing with a bunch of atheists on this forum, and you might take the opposite side if more religious posters were commenting. If not, you should consider what evidence you would find satisfactory.

@freedomseeker - The laws in the link aren't "the laws of information". They are only dressed up as such. What we have here is really a bunch of postulates intended to be self-consistent with a foregone conclusion. Actual scientific laws are held to a much higher standard in that that they are essentially summaries of actual observations. If you want to know what the actual laws of information are, start with Shannon:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory ... it's a far richer field than that author gives the impression of.

The author is more or less working backwards from a conclusion he wants to obtain trying to figure out whether there are a set of postulates that are logically compatible with this. Since it's generally easy to make self-consistent narratives, this is achieved in part 2. However, showing the self-consistency of a single particular narrative proves nothing.

Indeed, a lot of the argument seems to rest on the proposition that "There are complicated things we don't understand => Therefore there is a God". This particular line is dangerous because it rests on a rather flimsy foundation. Indeed by accepting this line of argumentation then every time we understand something more about the universe, it is logically speaking further evidence that there is no god. So it's never a good idea to use argument from ignorance to prove a point.

From the link:

The programs in living systems obviously exhibit an extremely high degree of sophistication. No scientist can explain the program that produces an insect that looks like a withered leaf. No biologist understands the secret of an orchid blossom that is formed and coloured like a female wasp … and smells like one, too. We are able to think, feel, desire, believe and hope. We can handle a complex thing such as language, but we are aeons away from understanding the information control process that develop the brain in the embryo. Biological information displays a sophistication that is unparalleled in human information.

But apparently Craig Venter et al understands the programming well enough to build simple life forms. Does this mean that Craig Venter is God? If we use the same logic, it does! What the author is doing here is already an argument from incredulity which is worse because unlike the argument from ignorance, where the ignorance is universal, the ignorance here is personal... and it is apparent to those who know more [about biology].

People used to believe that gods lived on mountains because mountains were hard to climb and the tops were covered in clouds. Then humans climbed mountains and found nothing. Then they believed that gods lived far above the ground because humans couldn't fly. Then airplanes and rockets were invented. And so God is now believed to reside somewhere else ... He's essentially used that exact same model (There's something we don't understand somewhere, so a God lives there) for biology. Unfortunately, his understanding has already been superceded by scientific knowledge.

If I were a theologician, which I'm not, I would focus my strategy on finding God in places that are unlikely to get overrun by hard science within the next 25-50 years.

ThisDinosaur, that is always a good question. Strong resistance to change despite gross cognitive dissonance can be observed by individuals (including very intelligent ones) on both sides, and I'm sure all who have done a bit of digging in the topic has seen examples of some famous quotes outlining this from both sides of heavily emotionally-invested people, either not wanting anything higher than themselves that they might have to answer to or those wanting a higher power for whatever reason.

For myself, I'm not sure at this point. I always want to think that I would follow the lines of evidence and make rational choices, but I certainly don't do it immediately or perfectly. Since I've tried the other side and the more internally and externally consistent everything has been increasing over the last 6ish years of my life, it would take a significant shift over time for me to trust an alternative, but I will keep pursuing truth wherever it leads me, although I certainly lag behind by a varying amount!

I don't think I have tried to suggest that entropy will be a consistent across all systems due to all kinds of external factors(systems within systems within etc), but I don't typically see 'increasing order' as a description of the outcome in scientific sources, usually more philosophical descriptives.
Interesting you say that I seem to be leaning away from most in this thread, as I do tend to run contrarian in arguments to test the logic. That aside though, you're right, I have tried not believing but currently my findings have pointed towards the God outcome, so that is my slant now, and why I am asking these questions to test the logic once again.

For the record since I've been misunderstood, I always have tried to clearly state that some mutations are not beneficial in some environments. However, I do think that all evidence points towards the gene not increasing in complexity but decreasing, including sometimes beneficial effects in certain environments(but losing the ability to go back to pre-mutated state in subsequent generations).

This fits in with the name "natural selection" rather than natural "creations" or whatever you would rather call it. Something must be there to select, but this is where we diverge. If you have good sources that display otherwise, please direct me towards them.

Jacob, this was meant to be short, since there has been so much already, but I have yet to master the art of writing concisely! Thank you for weighing in on the article though. At the risk of trying everyone's patience , I appreciate that the suggested 'laws' listed in the link are not considered actual laws of information. I was more interested in checking the logic of their framework, rather than checking on whether or not it was established, or even biased, as hard as it can be to consider the idea despite the bias and flavour. I fully appreciate the bad taste that biased-research (leading to self-consistent discoveries) brings, and there is some to be found on both sides of the fence to be sure. I can see how it is written that way, but I still didn't see a problem with the logic, but perhaps that's my own bias that is now in line with the authors, but there is still nothing else that I've seen to explain emotions, or information, or all these things that are clearly outside of 'material' substance, which was why I was trying to bring up the article to demonstrate how inadequate a material-only viewpoint is to explain what we can clearly observe.

As far as Craig Venter being God; Honestly, if he could create something (living or not) out of literally nothing, I would concede to calling him God, and separate him from all else, as he would wield a power and position separate from all else. In the same way, if I rejected the strong evidence that Jesus did rise from the dead and all the prophecies etc were worthless, then I would, presumably like any atheist who believes that the universe has a beginning, call the universe God (if it created itself out of nothing). (more on this at end) Beyond that, perhaps it's just semantics.

“The issue between the atheist and the believer is not whether it makes sense to question ultimate fact, it is rather the question: what fact is ultimate? The atheist’s ultimate fact is the universe; the theist’s ultimate fact is God.”68”
― John C. Lennox, God and Stephen Hawking

I keep hearing about the God of the gaps theory that you are describing('argument from ignorance'), and I wrote about it a little bit earlier since it was brought up, but I don't see that going on (again, maybe it's a blind spot for me?). If I were to look for God only in places that I was hoping would not yet be discovered, in order to save myself from the anguish of being found following a lie, that would be clearly to choose a life of hiding and a pitiful attempt to reject reality. I know Hawking's and others have this idea of God, but this is hardly relevant of the 'God of the Bible' who is purported as being Creator of the universe unknown and known! It's the known that has pointed me (and many others) to God, not the unknown. I don't understand why this is a hang up for so many these days, but it was not always so. I know this will sound foolish and inaccurate right now, but bear with me .

All of us must work from a bias to do science(or think much) at all, the foundation of what we use as our starting point, as you have mentioned, is what is key. I've quoted part of my response to ThisDinosaur (and some)to highlight what the foundation was that much of our scientific framework is built on. Truth leads to truth, and an eroding foundation ought to show fruit of that in time as well. We'll see I guess. (and I suppose even the historical description of how events played out will be disputed (and at times misunderstood and lied about) in the future as well )

(off topic, but the same can of worms)“If life is the result of a purely naturalistic process, what then of morality? Has it, too, evolved? And if so, of what significance are our concepts of right and wrong, justice and truth?”
― John C. Lennox, God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?

“Men became scientific because they expected law in nature and they expected law in nature because they believed in a lawgiver.’ It was this conviction that led Francis Bacon (1561–1626), regarded by many as the father of modern science, to teach that God has provided us with two books – the book of Nature and the Bible –”
― John C. Lennox, God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?

“Johannes Kepler described his motivation thus: ‘The chief aim of all investigations of the external world should be to discover the rational order which has been imposed on it by God, and which he revealed to us in the language of mathematics.”
― John C. Lennox, God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?

“When Sir Isaac Newton discovered the universal law of gravitation he did not say, ‘I have discovered a mechanism that accounts for planetary motion, therefore there is no agent God who designed it.’ Quite the opposite: precisely because he understood how it worked, he was moved to increased admiration for the God who had designed it that way.”
― John C. Lennox, God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?

[/i]

ThisDinosaur wrote:Paraphrasing Neil Tyson; if your god is limited to current gaps in our knowledge, he will keep shrinking as long as people keep studying our surroundings.

quote="freedomseeker"]ThisDinosaur,

I would very much agree with your Neil Tyson quote, but that's the very opposite to what I would expect from "God".
Ie, I also just as much agree with Louis Pasteur's quote:
"The more I study nature, the more I stand amazed at the work of the Creator. Science brings men nearer to God." (Louis Pasteur)

Scientific discovery can explain the mechanics of how things happen, but much of the foundation of modern science has used the God of the Bible as that foundation of an inherent rationality. (vs randomness and no-mind-ness of materialism that erodes said foundation of rationality) has been absolutely built on the strong belief in God of the Bible for many of the scientist greats, ie Newton, Kepler, Kelvin, Joule etc etc).

As C.S. Lewis wrote, “Men became scientific because they expected law in nature and they expected law in nature because they believed in a lawgiver.”

With the knowledge that life is purely chemical, this gets to the heart of one of the key issues I was trying to raise before. Our brains are chemical yes, our minds are not. Information is not chemical or material, yet it is can be tested to be repeatedly observable.
“Information is information, neither matter nor energy.” -Norbert Wiener (was Math Prof at MIT)[/quote]



I hope I'm not off in my projecting that he (Hawking)may be an influence, but I will add a couple more insights from Dr. John Lennox (math prof at Oxford+) since he has a great way of words and deals with many of Hawking's assumptions and conclusions kindly and directly. (I haven't read them yet, but in the same way, for anyone interested, I would be happy to fund a book or two of Lennox like 'Has science buried God' or 'God and Stephen Hawking: whose design is it anyway?' coupled with Hawking's book 'The Grand Design' for a similar direct comparison, with (subjectively) more personable authors and writing styles.)


“Hawking’s inadequate view of God could well be linked with his attitude to philosophy in general. He writes: “Philosophy is dead.”9 But this itself is a philosophical statement. It is manifestly not a statement of science. Therefore, because it says that philosophy is dead, it contradicts itself. It is a classic example of logical incoherence. Not only that: Hawking’s book, insofar as it is interpreting and applying science to ultimate questions like the existence of God, is a book about metaphysics — philosophy par excellence.”
― John C. Lennox, Gunning for God

“For, the statement that only science can lead to truth is not itself deduced from science. It is not a scientific statement but rather a statement about science, that is, it is a metascientific statement. Therefore, if scientism’s basic principle is true, the statement expressing scientism must be false. Scientism refutes itself. Hence it is incoherent.”
― John C. Lennox, God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?


“God is not an alternative to science as an explanation, he is not to be understood merely as a God of the gaps, he is the ground of all explanation: it is his existence which gives rise to the very possibility of explanation, scientific or otherwise. It is important to stress this because influential authors such as Richard Dawkins will insist on conceiving of God as an explanatory alternative to science – an idea that is nowhere to be found in theological reflection of any depth. Dawkins is therefore tilting at a windmill - dismissing a concept of God that no serious thinker believes in anyway. Such activity is not necessarily to be regarded as a mark of intellectual sophistication.”
― John C. Lennox, God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?

“The example of the jet engine can help us to clear up another confusion. Science, according to many scientists, concentrates essentially on material causation. It asks the “how” questions: how does the jet engine work? It also asks the “why” question regarding function: why is this pipe here? But it does not ask the “why” question of purpose: why was the jet engine built? What is important here is that Sir Frank Whittle does not appear in the scientific account. To quote Laplace, the scientific account has “no need of that hypothesis”.29 Clearly, however, it would be ridiculous to deduce from this that Whittle did not exist. He is the answer to the question: why does the jet engine exist in the first place?”
― John C. Lennox, God and Stephen Hawking -perhaps not an evidence for God, but surely not evidence against either. But that being said, even in your Ai example, I know you said you're not much for teleological arguments, and fair enough, but I would be inclined to think that there was a brilliant scientist (or team) that were behind artificial intelligence, rather than self-erected when I hear of these accounts. I was not very surprised to hear that he had some success to build artificial intelligence with wisdom and matter etc, but I would be very surprised to find out that his project sprang up on it's own, from literally nothing. Not an evidence for, but the logic that one could or should safely assume the opposite direction doesn't seem very strong to me. From what I see tested, intelligence breeds intelligence, randomness breeds randomness, and over time things will slowly become more randomized, and have yet to see otherwise. I know none of this is 'decisive evidence', nor is it meant to be, but I don't see the logic supporting 'rational thinking from an irrational source' is not better than these, even as this isn't actually 'hard evidence' for anything. In the end, I guess we can just "judge a tree by it's fruit".

Have you ever looked at phenomena where order is created out of chaos? Things like drilled holes from the movement of rocks in streams/rivers or the hills created at the nodes of standing waves from earthquakes or the sorting of geologic deposits by mass & size (in the same way gold panning works).

You might also delve into computer science algorithms called genetic programming.

George the original one, I have not, thanks! The first one in particular sounds interesting to me (I'm assuming the second one parallel's the concept, just not an area of interest, but likely valuable none-the-less). While knowing nothing about it, I'm going to go on a limb and say I will be surprised to see the effects going into such vast and complex areas

For example: comparing the pattern of crystal reproduction where we can see a simple framework in place, acting out on the information established, to something more complex that would require establishment (even if you count natural laws and the information already preprogrammed in for crystals to do what we know them to do, as a given) and extrapolating that pattern to something more complex, like the example below. Understanding and being able to describe what is happening has little basis for finding explanations of it before it was there, which is why I kept trying to stress the information side that is beyond the scope of science (since information is not matter).

ie: the origination of sexual reproduction where all parts on both sides must be fully functional simultaneously, all at once, from the very onset, or each generation that doesn't execute all this perfectly would be extinct, every time, and beyond the chemical and matter orientation to be in place, it more importantly has to work together with this new information to build something new in an amazingly complex way, with no one programming this information in! Chemicals are not intelligent, and they cannot program themselves. Hence why it cannot be a slow series of mistakes or it would quickly meet it's end each potential generation and this would require it to start from scratch every time; not from where it had left off since a nonfunctioning reproductive system is detrimental to carrying forward for subsequent attempts. This is a more graphic, parallel example to what I was trying to get at before with the gene; for supporting, upholding, repairing, coding, decoding, and so on without any reason for it to decode information. Or produce ribosomes to repair the vast majority of damaged DNA to avoid certain swift death of cell. Or on and on and on. For another example, one can look at the ATP synthase chicken-and-egg-chicken problem(nothing is done without ATP present. ATP must be present to produce ATP. The paradoxes only get worse the more you start poking around. I can always add more links if anyone wants, and this is why I was trying to talk about this stuff earlier. It really is amazing stuff.)

^Digressing, I'm putting this out there, in open ignorance in the area you've mentioned, because if I look into it and see much further reaching effects than I had thought, and it would be reasonable to extrapolate to the level that I described in paragraphs above, then I'm on the hook and will have to endure the public, online shame Noo..my internet cred! haha, sadly I still care more than I ought to. Really though, it does sound interesting, and might give me a better understanding of finding the limits (or lack of) of order from chaos (although the order of the laws still exists, but if we assume it always has for the sake of argument. I did speak in broad generalities without establishing parameters so fair enough.)





All: To avoid beating horses, replies appear to be petering out and I suspect things have run their course for the time being here, so I'll return to lurking the money forum mostly for a while. While I am not ready to throw out everything that I've come to believe on the evidence I've seen, I've got some leads of things I can look into, so a big thank you all, it's not an easy topic.

To close, a little bit of my history and part of why I've been so curious what you guys would think of this because so much of ERE fits in so well with so much of Jesus' teaching and the Bible in general (though often in stark contrast to the example and teaching of so many religious folk and organizations that say they're following Him) and it really helped put into words where most 'religious folks' are so clearly missing the big picture by going against what Jesus (and Jacob obviously haha) suggest are crucial to living in freedom. By this I mean; avoiding slavery, whether debt induced wage slavery, slavery to consumption or experiences, etc , or hypocrisy(largely cognitive dissonance and the mental turmoil that the inner inconsistency brings), selfishness, etc. This includes myself in many ways, and while I'm not perfect(won't be here, that's ok), but I'm grateful to be on track to getting myself better aligned on my web of goals in pursuit of internal consistency.

Truth seems to leave trails, and the more of it found, the more things seem to connect, as opposed to a pile of dead ends from inconsistent and incomplete thoughts and beliefs. I know Jacob touched on this a little at one point, as have others. This strengthening and increasing (or alternatively: a falling apart series of dead-ends) framework is perhaps not a perfect guide, but a useful insight. This is an encouraging thing for me/anyone seeking truth/freedom/wisdom! I've got lots of known unknowns and surely many unknown unknowns, but in a lot of ways I feel like I'm looking at 'the matrix'(I'm not a huge movie person, but what a fantastic movie!). I'm not trying to say I know everything or anything arrogantly presumptuous, but I'm sure I'm not the only one here!

There are so many simple truths and answers for so many questions and struggles that need not be complicated, but we, globally, seem to really enjoy overcomplicating things. Anyway, just rambling now. I had much more written (surprise), largely about the last few years of my personal journey, but I think I will leave it for now and go back to spending most of my time absorbing for a while again. Perhaps in some time, I will ask what you guys use to derive a universal code of ethics in their naturalist framework(similar question to this thread, but a different angle) but for now, i need a break on these head-spinners! Anyway, thank you all so much for the talk and things to think about again.

If I want to believe something I just postulate it. Unlike Descartes I don't try to prove my postulates.

My definition of faith is the will to believe.

freedomseeker,

you might read hugh ross's creator of the cosmos.

yes, he's once of those "believers", but he is also an astrophysicist and his books lay out pretty good how the universe grew and the earth also and the earth's part of it.

yes, he could be totally wrong in his belief. personally, i believe its possible there could be multiple universes and multiple gods, but he lays out that this one and earth are hard to say it was chance.

leeholsen, I've heard the name enough times but I haven't read any of his books. I've read from other 'believing' astrophysicists, but there are obviously multiple theories from all sides of the fence, and I'm not yet sure which one he thinks most likely. Thanks for the name, I'd be curious to learn his and his reasoning on why not the current alternatives (most of which will continue to evolve or die off) when I have more time for this stuff again. thanks