Hi Jaeger,


The essence of religion. Really nice to read this. Also good to read you admit the bad sides of religious organisations and people, like the un-biblical teachings (needless to say I'm sure they serve more good than bad, and surely are you). You have spoken to Phemox about faith in science, while that contradicts to most scientist believings, and this is only fair. To solve both matters, we are talking about the people here applying religion or science. And people misinterpretate. Essentially the concept of science is based on fact from the lower levels leading to speculation to higher levels, bottom-up (we're having a harder time to prove evolution and quantum physics because we can't go bottom-up here, than proving the workings of a star). The concept of religion is based on faith in higher levels arranging the lower levels, top-down. Gotta be a programmer to say it like that :p.

Yes fair enough.


And here I disagree with you. I have said why I think a mechanic object is more complex than a living body. It was build by a thought process of other complex beings. Without those, it wouldn't exist. In my philosophy, that makes the mechanical object more complex. The clock is perhaps not an object that eventually will reach diety status, it's a different kind of complexity. Just look what time definition, a totally made up concept, did to the world. The clock is the interface to the concept of time, and as a whole it's surely more complex than a living body.

I doubt you can reason me thinking otherwise. And I understand why you see mechanical things as less complex. It's exactly the same in programming, an often made mistake is going top-bottom in Object Oriented languages, thinking that the higher components should control the lower ones, but in Object Orientation it's kind of the other way around .

Yeah dry humor is dangerous in these discussions . I kinda misinterpreted your point of view, but the argumentation still applies. The lizard will not turn into a mammal because it's too complex. But look at this animal: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opabinia
An animal living 530 millions years back. It has five eyes, a fan shaped tail, a segmented body and a proboscis. This could be the ancestor of the spider, the bird, the armadillo and the elephant. But not the lizard, the lizard goes even further back. The lizard will never morph into a mammal indeed. Its not-so-lizardly ancestor did.

I do not know enough about the experiments to judge. I still don't believe we have simulated millions of years of evolution on a single branch. Yes we can let a billion fruitflies reproduce for a while, but that doesn't make the generation of one branch longer. That just expands the variety you will eventually get. Anyhow, without references I can't take this as truth.


Well, I listed one, though not scientifically proven. Could be a branch leading to five splits even and it's far more likely than a monkey turning into a human . It surely exists, as it's a found fossile (20 fossiles of those creatures have been found in total).


If we know nothing when the universe exists infinitely long, then we do not know if the physics would become untrue. If we know the physics would become untrue, we would know something we ought not to know according to the very physics that would become untrue... (this is getting psychologic now, be afraid of my nomenclature :D).


I understand. And I agree again with you!