Rising Sun:  I am having a hard time figuring out the quote button.  I am new to this.  I also don't understand how I can get to this post without going through pages 1, 2, and 3.  What if we are on page 100?  Am I supposed to go through 100 pages to get to the post I am looking for?  This is not directed at you thatonedude, but you just happened to be the post that took me so long to get to.  If you or anyone can help me, please do.   

I like green eggs and ham

As far as your other question is concerned, I do not agree with your conclusions.  Yes, it could have been just a crap shoot that we are all here, but it would have been beyond lucky.  Crap shoots indicate that the chances of this happening are almost nill.  Why would you believe in something that is almost nill, considering you are a rational person?  Just wondering, not attacking.

Rising Sun:  Who said that a disembodied intelligence willed it?  That is not my definition of an underlying intelligence.  Your definition therefore is not mine.  Do you see how we could end this conversation without truly understanding our respective positions?

This is not about a separate will dictating where we are going.  This is about the laws of our nature that compell us to move in a certain direction.  It does not prove that there is an intelligence, it just gives some evidence that there could be. 

You are also correct that your emotional response to a series of events has no bearing on the truth of those events, but it certainly would feel good if those events turned out to be true, wouldn't it?  That doesn't mean I am living off of the hope that this will be found true with no scientific evidence to support it.

 

Here, this might help.

http://www.rationalresponders.com/forum/the_rational_response_squad_radio_show/general_conversation_introductions_and_humor/7011

Rising Sun wrote:

It may appear disharmonious but even the disharmony that we see in the mankind system, when seen in total perspective, is following a natural order, which I call design.

Then perhaps the semantics is confusing us.

Rising Sun:  What appears to be chaotic and disharmonious in any given situation, might actually have a hidden order to it that we are not noticing.  If something could not be any other way than what it is, even if it appears random, then that randomness is not really random.  It just appears that way.  Sort of like at an airport.  It looks chaotic but it is controlled chaos.  There is an underlying order that we don't see at first glance.

"Design," to me, implies that effect in question was the result of some intelligent force, caused with intent.

Rising Sun:  Design to me means that when we look at our planet it appears that here is a purpose to everything we do, even if we don't see the total picture.  This compulsion to move in a progressive fashion is what creates the design.  But this is not random which is what I mean when I say there is an intelligent design.  This design is an expression of something within that needs to express itself, in form.  I do not mean that the world was designed in advance by God as if it were preplanned. 

Quote:

Rising Sun:  I don't mean to define intent in narrow terms when we are talking about creation.  In the context I am discussing this word, intent only means that life is not stagnant.   The intent of life is to express itself.

Express itself?

Rising Sun: Yes, there is a need for expression of some kind.  This is what I mean by intent.  To do anything there has to be an intent to do it.  Even birds have an intent to fly; turtles to crawl; dogs to bark.  The intent is that life force within every living thing to do what it must do, out of necessity.

Quote:

If there was no intent, then we wouldn't move at all, we would stay in one spot.

Kind of. Well, it's a naturalistic fallacy to say that life has an 'intent.' It is not the 'purpose' of life to reproduce. It is simply the natural order of things. Besides, if life was, as you say, "stagnant," then life wouldn't exist. However, it does strive to survive, which is why, ditto, it does exist.

Rising Sun:  Exactly.

Quote:

But this is not the intent of life.  Life is creative in the sense that it is compelled to express itself in whatever form it takes.  It never stays the same; it keeps evolving.

Pretty much, although I wish you wouldn't anthropomorphize so much.

Rising Sun:  I'll try to do better.

Life forms which, by chance variation, happen to have a stronger impulse to reproduce themselves, will tend to reproduce more, other things being equal, and so will come to be the most common forms. It's that simple, doesn't require any mystical "purpose", just a chemical or neurological bias toward more reproduction.

Most definitely does not require any directed purpose. The drive to survive evolves from any replicating system - those not disposed to survive don't survive, and so disappear.

The 'purpose' emerges from the basic logic of things which can reproduce themselves. The capacity to replicate, which came along with the first molecules like RNA and DNA, came before any drive to survive and fill the available environments capable of supporting life, rather than driving it.

Rising Sun:  Well that must be the purpose of these organisms which IS the capacity to replicate ONLY.  But isn't this a drive?  How can we separate what these molecules do, with their drive to get the job that they were designed to do, done?

Intelligence is a consequence of what order exists in the universe of matter and energy , amongst the surrounding chaos, not a cause of it. It is impossible that intelligence requires an even higher intelligence to 'create' it, otherwise could no 'first' intelligence could form. There is no logical reasoning that intelligence requires even more intelligence to 'create' it.

Rising Sun: Intelligence is borne out of whatever the DNA allows.  But this does not exclude the possibility of a higher intelligence which is not separate from the laws that give us a semblence of order. 

It is far more likely that basic non-intelligent matter/energy existed or came into existence before intelligence, because it is far simpler.

Rising Sun: Maybe you are right.  Maybe there was nothing more than a simplistic matter/energy combination that led to the complex processes of human life that we see today.

We can already create computers which can do some things that once only humans could do, and do them much faster, more accurately, and involving much more complex calculations than any human or group of humans could ever do. 

Rising Sun:  But it took the human mind to create computers.  So to say that computers involve more complex combinations is probably due to the mechanism that allows faster than speed calculations.  This in no way means that computers are smarter than humans, or that humans are not as complex as computers.

Purpose and intent are emergent things, attributes of conscious beings, not ultimate driving forces.

Rising Sun:  I am not sure about that.

The more stuff there is in the Universe, the more possibilities there are for some parts of it to happen to be suitable for complex structures to form, until on at least one of the hundreds of millions of planets at all varying distances from their sun, one happens to be ok for replicating molecules to form and start the process of Darwinian evolution. Even if the chances are one hundred billion to one against, that means it is still could be a better than even chance of life starting somewhere.

Rising Sun:  That is the theory.  It sounds great but is it true?  I don't know, and I admit that I don't know.  All I do know is that given what we know, the odds of life on earth coming from nothing except luck of the draw, are very very slim.

Under such conditions it could well have been more amazing if life didn't come about spontaneously. We don't have a good handle on the probabilities, but we are making new discoveries all the time that make life more likely, such as discoveries of distant planets that suggest that 'earth-like' planets are much likely to be much more common than once thought, and that the chemical building-blocks of life could be formed by relatively simple processes on the early Earth.

Rising Sun: If it is true that life came about spontaneously, and more planets will be discovered because eventually chance alone will bring about life in other galaxies, then that only means that whatever the intelligence is that is underlying our existence, will also be the intelligence that underlies all other existences.  I really think we are arguing over nothing.  The bottom line in this discussion is that we all are in agreement that the god of religion is not the 'god' that we are discussing, so it leaves us with nothing to argue about.

 

Of course you can inquire, but if I start a conversation on the book that has given me my ideas, we will lose the continuity of this discussion.  I might start a new thread for this purpose, but if I do I won't be staying to argue the pros and cons of the points being made.  Those who read this book in earnest will need to decide for themselves whether there is anything noteworthy of remembering.

Rising Sun:  What appears to be chaotic and disharmonious in any given situation, might actually have a hidden order to it that we are not noticing.  If something could not be any other way than what it is, even if it appears random, then that randomness is not really random.  It just appears that way.  Sort of like at an airport.  It looks chaotic but it is controlled chaos.  There is an underlying order that we don't see at first glance.

Rising Sun:  Design to me means that when we look at our planet it appears that here is a purpose to everything we do, even if we don't see the total picture.  This compulsion to move in a progressive fashion is what creates the design.  But this is not random which is what I mean when I say there is an intelligent design.  This design is an expression of something within that needs to express itself, in form.  I do not mean that the world was designed in advance by God as if it were preplanned.

Rising Sun: Yes, there is a need for expression of some kind.  This is what I mean by intent.  To do anything there has to be an intent to do it.  Even birds have an intent to fly; turtles to crawl; dogs to bark.  The intent is that life force within every living thing to do what it must do, out of necessity.