The randomness of Evolution

[Belgium101]

Quite a nice piece, I would like to add that figmentations of every sort will one day, if not already, exist. The hurricane will not make a 747, but perhaps one day we as humans will use wind velocity manufacturing. There are already similar uses, and much research toward this applied science of building a 747 from a "Wind Storm", it is little to think that the conscience of humans is the highest form of understanding existents. If you can simply imagine something, anything, odds are that somewhere in this vast universe something quite similar has already been “created”. Perhaps theology has no place in modern science, but that is the only place you will find this argument of atheism. And even in most hospital rooms, laboratories, and field research, where modern science is practiced solely the greatest power is believed to be prayer and hope.

[austintorn@aol.com]

A study showed that prayer didn't help, actually hurt a bit. Of course, it the reverse had been the outcome, it would be praised, but, as it did come out, I suppose, the religious would attempt to debunk it.

[Graybeard]

Great piece Austin. Where do you find the time to write ??

cool bananas ... greg

[austintorn@aol.com]

Graybeard,

I'm retired, mostly, and I sometimes get some of the words from what I wrote before when inspiration came and half wrote it for me.

Belgium,

As for prayers—whatever makes people feel happy or comforted as long as it doesn't go crazy into religious wars. As for me, I believe in the Great Karma of using energy for good.

[r.p.bibra]

A study showed that prayer didn't help, actually hurt a bit. Of course, it the reverse had been the outcome, it would be praised, but, as it did come out, I suppose, the religious would attempt to debunk it.

Shallow prayers may not work but love will do wonders. Try and see the results! we all pray you may have a long and fruitful life, so that you go on sharing your bounty of love and’ beauty' amongst the barren hearts. Love & regards. ls

[austintorn@aol.com]

Next, I came upon a God sitting on a high fence and waved to Him, saying “Come down and talk.”

“I can’t, but Salutations to you. I am the God of Agnosticism. None of the agnostics know if I exist or not, so here I must stay, along with the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus, and the Easter Bunny, just in case they might exist as a quadzillion-to-one shot.”

“Why can’t agnostics make up their minds?”

“My followers cannot even make probability judgments about the question of Me. This is the limitation of their kind of agnosticism, perhaps an error of not considering the likelihood of that for which evidence is not even conceivable!”

“Yes, it is a fallacy, what I call the poverty of agnosticism, because, although being agnostic is reasonable for other things, such as whether life exists on other planets somewhere, it is not appropriate for those things for which the idea of evidence is not even applicable; however, actually, we can really still talk about the probability of the event. The true fallacy, however, is that the existence and nonexistence of You are not on an even footing to begin with. They are not at all equiprobable. The burden of proof then lies with the believers of the unseen and the unknowable, for ANYTHING that we can conceive of can be claimed to exist, such as ghosts, spirits, and such forth. Are we then to straddle a fence that isn’t even there?”

“Yes, never seen, my friend. So, then, as always, in the end, probability creeps into the beliefs of agnostics and in practice they end up not going ‘half the time’ to Church, but mostly don’t go at all.”

“Yes, they still do decide what is ‘undecidable’, for the fence is uncomfortable and so the superposition decoheres mostly to the inclination of non belief until the Extraordinary’s evidence appears, although, by definition of faith, it cannot.”

The God came down off the fence, for he couldn’t exist and not exist at the same time.

I continued on through the undulating hills.



Of all my rotten luck, The God of the Old Testament appeared and proclaimed, “I am Yahweh. Those schooled from infancy in My strange ways have become desensitized to MY horror and so they continue to keep Me alive through their thoughts. Fire away at Me. I no longer bite that hard.”

“You’re too easy of a target to attack—it would be rather unfair of me.”

“True, but I won’t deny it—it’s all there in the Testaments. I was the most unpleasant character that anyone ever made up in literary fiction. I was revealed to be jealous and proud of it, petty, unjust, controlling, vindictive, an ethic cleanser, genocidal, infanticidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, homophobic, misogynistic, sadomasochistic, and much more, like a Bully who gave free will only if it matched My own.”

“Peace be with you. How about the New Testament to replace and hide You, as many religions have already done through a focus on Jesus?”

“Yes, that Testament is quite opposite in tone, but I am still the Father of Jesus, so the problem of Me can never really go away. I am what I was.”

“So long, then. You’re the worst role model that human mammals have ever dreamed up. Who would imitate, emulate, or follow You as a ‘leader’?”

“Well, how about those numerous and many who excuse my mysterious insane ways, along with my exclusive desert tribe that is ‘chosen’.”

“Well, You’re the Boss, and, anyway, who ever said a God had to be perfect and good?”

“Everyone that I told.”

“Oh well, never mind. So, um, Joseph was not the biological father of Jesus?”

“No, I was.”

“So Jesus didn’t really descend from David?”

“No, I fibbed.”

“Well, my ancestors descended from the trees, Hey, why don’t Catholics get the 72 virgins that Islam gives for martyrdom or whatever?”

“I told each religious faith a different story.”

“You also gave a bible half-different to the Mormon founder, Joseph Smith, finely engraved on golden plates?”

“Sure. I thought at the time ‘why not’.”

“You had Islam add many other different things to their Bible, the Koran, as well?”

“Yes.”

“You told only the Catholics that there were umpteen levels of angels? And that bread was your body and that wine was your blood?”

“Yep, just them and a few others, but they made up the Saints all by themselves.”

“And You presented more differing visions to the Lutherans, the Episcopals, and the Jewish, and to many other faiths?”

“Pretty much, except that a King of England founded the Episcopals—the Anglicans—since his own religion wouldn’t give him a divorce.”

“Did you kill everyone but Noah and his family in the Great Flood, even young children and their pets?”

“Sure, again, why not? Life is cheap. However, My creation of the rainbow says that I’ll never be so cruel again. What can I say—I goofed; I caused undue and unwarranted pain.”

“But You are infallible, and even omniscient and so You know all future.”

“My omnipotence of changing my mind got in the way.”

“But your omniscience knew you would…”

“Yeah, I know—it’s a paradox. And I can still technically end all life by means other than a flood.”

“You burned people in Hell when they didn’t follow the unfree will that you gave?”

“Yes, because I was not a loving God.”

“Who made You?”

“No problem—either I was Eternal or I made Myself.”

“This is remarkably the same as the Universe’s fundamental ingredients could be. What a coincidence.”

“Then who would need me—wait, don’t answer.”

“Is the Earth only about 4000 years old?”

“Of course not, but I may have let that slip to some, just to test their intelligence.”

“Can you mind read the thoughts of every human and write a script for each, being omnipresent?”

“I tried that, at first, but it didn’t work for Me to put my finger on every atom and micromanage its doings.”

“That’s called God’s Will, by some, even now. What went wrong?”

“It disrupted all the atoms’ normal and natural movements.”

“And that’s what caused the storms, lightning bolts, and plagues of locusts and such?”

“Yes, so I stopped making such a mess of things.”

“So the prayers of six million Jews killed in the holocaust went unheeded?”

“Yes, plus I have better things to do than look after some old experiment of Mine from my misspent youth.”

“Did you really make Adam and Eve and all of Earth and Nature?”

“Yes, I made Nature, including the humans in My image.”

“It shows.”

“Thank you, I think.”

“My God, God, it’s ID deja-vu all over again—I really have to move on.”

“No, wait. I like your questions. I’m mellower now. Not as many strictly admit to Me anymore.”

“How come so many of the gospels were omitted from the Catholic Testament, like those of Thomas, Peter, Nicodemus, Philip, Bartholomew, and more, as well as whole books, although You told some other religions to keep them, like the Book of Revelations?”

“Those gospels were embarrassing. They told about My Son doing magic tricks and practical jokes on people when He was a child.”

“Oh. And didn’t You tell the Mormans that Jesus spent His early years in what was to become America?

“Probably.”

“What about the trillions of galaxies in the sky?”

“Just for show and scenery, nothing more.”

“Where’s all your rantings and ravings I’ve heard about?”

“I now take Prozac for my mood swings.”

“You don’t really exist, do you, for how could you have an emotional system—a composite—and still be absolute and fundamental?”

“No, I don’t exist, for how could I since I am so horrible? Human mammals made all Me up as a very bad example, as it turned out, from their many fears of Nature, in the childhood of their species. Unfortunately, it caught on and remained.”

“Yet You subsist in this indefinite locus of wishes?”

“Yes, sort of. I am sustained here since many children have learned to obey and listen to what is/was told to them, for this obeying was evolutionarily useful, as many of their obediences resulted from warnings of things that were truly dangerous, like ‘Don’t go near the cliff’, and so the children grew up to indoctrinate their own children in all the knowledge.”

“Well, we’ll have to offer more reason to those so indoctrinated. Farewell.”

“See you. Pay no attention to Me, but to the Man Behind the curtain.”

He soon dozed off into never land.

[austintorn@aol.com]

I next encountered all the individual, specialized, and specific Gods of all the Religions. They didn’t get along at all, for all they had in common was their intolerance of each others’ greatly erroneous and unjustifiable beliefs that clashed with their own, for tolerance was truly NOT an attitude that the jealous Gods endorsed. The followers of each God thought that their own irrational embrace of myth trumped all of the others’ and this led to many of the world’s wars.

I watched the Gods battling for a while, in the present, as well as in the past, their followers’ beliefs scripting the actions of conflicts that led to dying for untestable propositions about where everything came from:

Metaphysical Martyrdom conflicted with the divine Book of Revelations.

Deuteronomy 13:7-11 stoned those disbelieving in Yahweh, killing them, while the Koran eliminated many infidels.

India and Pakistan, different countries because the beliefs of Islam could not be reconciled with those of Hinduism, poised themselves at the brink of nuclear war merely because they disagreed about some supernatural ‘facts’ concerning the afterlife.

Karmas ran over Dogmas. Musharraf suspended Pakistan’s constitution, trying to stamp out a growing Islamic militant threat.

Palestine’s Jews and Muslims scuffled on; Balkan Orthodox Serbians dueled with the Catholic Croatians, as well as with the Bosnian/Albanian Muslims; Northern Ireland Protestants warred with the Catholics; Sudan Muslims discorded with the Christians; Sri Lankas’s Sinhalese Buddhists went against the Tamil Hindus; Caucasus Orthodox Russians and Chechen Muslims exterminated each other; Iraq’s Sunnis and Shias massacred each other for some very slight dogmatic differences.


I interrupted their skirmishing and said, “What about respect for the other faiths?”

“They all spoke at once and said, “That’s just political talk. If we tolerated other beliefs, that would be akin to recognizing them as having some credibility, which they certainly do not. We are saved and they are all doomed; we can’t have them exerting influence in the world.”

“So,” I said, trying to make some small talk, “I’ve heard that You’ve each written a book that makes an exclusive claim as to its infallibility. Congratulations to each of You on being published. All have made the bestseller list. However, I have respectfully shelved all of them next to the Egyptian Book of the Dead and Ovid’s Metamorphoses in the contradictory book and Bible section. Hey, how about getting modern and making a film? I know that a book was a great thing way back, but a moving picture is worth 10,000 still pictures which are in turn each worth a thousand words.”

“We will each be divinely inspiring a movie that will soon be in a theater near you.”

“Wait, I take it back, for are not all your children doing enough harm by fighting over your books? Will people now die for another media—the movies?”

They ignored me and fought on, unable to see but through their own “right” minds, which they were especially and paradoxically out of. Unfortunately, they now represented the largest threat that human kind has ever imposed against itself—all due to religious differences regarding some very improbable and differing things about the nature of the universe.

I noted the Land of Evil Demons, although sometimes it was hard to tell which was which or not witch.


I skipped Satan’s Lair…

…but saw a cute little devil…


I also bypassed the numerous and various Gods of the Cults that had always gained so many followers pretty much instantly after their formation.

I next encountered the God of Religious Moderates, whose numbers had been swelling lately, but they had seemed to get stuck there in the middle.

“Greetings. All things in moderation,” The God of Moderates said to me.

“I bet that You derive from secular knowledge and religious ignorance.”

“Well, yes, modernity has allowed some dust to settle on the old unchangeables, and so people now pick, choose, invent, or ignore the Dogmas.”

“Dogma is unchangeable—it does not admit of progress, by its very definition.”

“True, but I am still their God, as they have abandoned winged horses, virgin births, sexual prohibitions, and they even have some doubts about the afterlife.”

“They betray both faith and reason.”

“That they do.”



Lastly, I met the God of Einstein—Spinoza’s God.

“I am the so-called God of Nature and I am one and the same with it—no different; although, that which has no difference is really not any different at all. Anyway, at least this is how people awed by Nature’s intricacy and beauty refer to Me. I am only here in this nebulous vicinity because I don’t actually exist, but seem to some to be tautological with the beautific and existent Nature.”

“It’s OK, don’t worry about it.”

“Thank you, and welcome to reality.”

“You mean I’m back?”

“Yes, or at least you have one foot in it, just as I seem to do.”

“I’m going home, but why did humans invent the theistic and deistic Gods?”

“Man created them in his image because he was/is terrified of his insignificance, as well as from a fear of losing the beauty of life and nature forevermore.”

“So man proudly just declared that he was of Special Creation.”

“Yes.”

“Farewell and thank You for Your insight.”

He called after me. “Enjoy reality—it’s really a better place. There’s nothing more beyond it. ALL comes from matter of energy. You’re electrochemical creatures—as organic and natural as anything else in Nature. Consider this knowledge as the ultimate humility if you will. Live life, love it—while you can, during your lucky incarnation from the evolving composites of the last 13.75 billions years. You are here. You have arrived.”


As I rejoined Actuality, I felt its waves of brightness and color joyfully washing over me. Getting back to my existence, I ignored some Jehovah Witnesses knocking on my door, made nine golden tablets, and reported my findings on ToeQuest, and then went breathing, seeing, hearing, and otherwise sensing much that was truly knowable as reality.

[austintorn@aol.com]

The Watch

A man came upon a watch, opened it, and noted its complex and fine tuned machinery; furthermore he thought of the similar makings of man—although thousands of times more complexly composite than a watch, for man is a living chemical biological machine.

He then analogously concluded that there must be a Great Designer of man, whom I shall call THE WATCH (underlined, caps, bold, and in color to remind us of its greatness even if I only subsequently refer to it as THE WATCH without the other effects).

THE WATCH not only tells the present time, but remembers all of the past and tells all future for every event, whether micro- or macroscopic. THE WATCH can do this rather easily because its machinery is complex beyond imagination. It could even do this for a trillion other universes—a mere drop in the bucket and quite untaxing to its system of intelligence, knowledge, and emotions. THE WATCH that watches all usually has not ‘much’ to do, for its talent is infinite and instant.

It knows all that could happen, might happen, or what it wishes to happen. Its machinery is so fast than it can know everything all at once. THE WATCH designed the universe that designed the man that designed the watch which is now seen as like a mere nothing in comparison—or maybe THE WATCH designed the universe and man near the same time in a mere instant. Whatever, its system was the ultimate unerring machinery and the parts of the system were eternal and beyond failure—no redundancy needed. It was the ultimate answer to what made man.

So it was that the man then knew that the Great Designer Itself, THE WATCH, must have had a Really Great Designer, THE MAKER OF THE WATCH, but then, all of the sudden realized that it was the parts of a man or a Designer that were really was what absolute and fundamental at some bottommost point, like a quark or something, for that simplistic place of beginnings was surely no place to introduce the ultimate complexity and thus beg the question of what made the universe and man—by providing an astronomically larger and much more complicated question of design as the same type of answer that could not be accepted in the first place.

So the man who noted the watch just concluded that the fundamental(s) had to be (versus nothing) and so had to have been always there, eternal and therefore undestroyable, eliminating the Middle Man of Myth who had complicated the question beyond all repair.

[austintorn@aol.com]

There is a lot more to say, such as how Moses and Abraham, two human pillars of religious adoration, were also amazingly evil exterminators, but it is all there in the Book to be perused. How many believers have ever really read the Book? There is also Lot’s debauching tale and so many other weird and strange legends that have have been cobbled together into the Word.

I’ve hinted about the perpetuation of the Myth though childhood obedience and of early man’s fears, but what really started it all? Well, it seems to be a human tendency, through natural selection, to assign Intention to nature, for that gets us through the practical life. When a beast approaches, we don’t waste time evaluating its design or break it down scientifically, but, we grasp its intention to devour us. Likewise, humans assigned intention to nature itself, such as to storms, droughts, and the Gods. I have only skimmed the surface here. See the best selling books by Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Richard Dawkins for deeper reading of why religion tends to poison everything.

What can we say to the half of the US electorate that still literally believes in God’s Great Flood, evil spirits, and such? That they are still burning science at the stake, as the Catholic Church once did to Bruno—who identified stars as suns, such that it greatly worried the church that there might be planets and people out there that made us unspecial, that the stars were no longer pinholes showing us the light of Heaven?

Let’s just say that I think it may a slow process, although the winds of change are gathering, unless some great religious-induced catastrophe strikes from the attempt to wipe out the others’ false Gods, for much of our species remains mired in the reason-resistant era of the mythic age. While the past crusades, inquisitions, and so forth killed hundreds of thousands, the next one may annihilate billions. In the end, evil will not work; those who lie and promote false beliefs, even unintentionally, will eventually become meaningless and fewer due their own abuses and attempts at control. Only goodness, reason, and trust can ultimately prosper, by natural means, in and of themselves, for evil destroys itself.

God created Adam, then Eve, of Adam’s rib, both fully formed, imbued with God’s knowledge and memories of times that never were, such as childhood. They believed a shifty talking snake, ate the verboten fruit, and were cast out to fend for themselves, God apparently being quite surprised.

God therefore became very angry at His own lack of foresight, a base emotion of His own invention. The harshest punishment of all time led to all of the gruesome events of existence portrayed in the Old Testament, rather a waste, for man’s past and future sins were soon redeemed in the New Testament by God’s Son, Jesus, conceived of a virgin, as so many phrophies had already said and had ‘come true’ with other Messiahs later discarded.

In a galaxy, among trillions, on a planet, among billions, called Earth, out on an arm of the Milky Way Spiral, some organisms formed over five billion years, leading to over 30 million species, among them some higher mammals, such as dolphins, chimps, and humans. This does not mean that there is some grandiose scheme of design for all of us mere specks of life.

However, some of the mammals came to believe that they were much more than just a natural outgrowth of the organic world, that they were placed here for a special purpose. Various mammals indeed claimed that Gods, Spirits, and Angels spoke to them. All this caused many problems. Reason awaits the end of the mythic age.

[The new Creation Museum in Kentucky features dinosaurs in their Ark, deemed small at the time (4000 years ago), so that they would fit in the boat. None were mentioned in the man-inspired Bible since their fossils were unknown at the time. The oversight has now been corrected.

Georgia has apparently been afflicted by an act of God—a 14 month drought. Some mammals, led by their Governor, gathered and prayed for rain.]

[Graybeard]

Re Evolution

Life killing and eating other life is uncontrolled random evolution "outside" - it is the "law of the Jungle" created by the universal mind and expressed through our human thought processes.

Natural Selection and the 'Laws of the Jungle' show an amazing 'equivalence'

There is no bias, no subjectivity, conditional only to prior events. No justice, sentimentality or tradition play a part.

... created by the universal mind and expressed through our human thought processes.

How can 'Natural Selection' which by its definition is purely random in its adaptation be 'created by a 'Universal mind' ..... ?? How to explain this paradox ??

Even perception is conditional ..... and what type of neural process can witness this ? ... One that is free from subjectivity, or just under a larger subjective umbrella, which is under a larg........ ?

"By Allah, O brother, thy faith is none other than exceeding faith and thy story right strange; were it graven with gravers on the eye corners, it were a warner to whoso would be warned... and of no avail, O my master, is a twice-told tale!"

Tale of the Trader and the Jinni

cool bananas ... greg