[Rufus]

Religion is a very human thing and really has nothing to do with how God came to be, or how we came to be. If it is proved via a TOE that God exists then s/he would have no real connection to religion. S/he would have no connection to the human penchant for prayer or any type of religion whatsoever. WE invented all that stuff. S/he would not be connected to Jesus Christ or any particular race or nation and certainly would not be separate from the evil of human kind, such as we envision the Devil. Obviously both God and the Devil would be the same force.

Sometimes we can't see the forest for the trees.

God would probably not even know how s/he was caused to be in the first place. Think about it.

[Guille]

Originally Posted by subversion Now you know I agree with this, but we should make sure that the ethics and morals we make up are good and valid ones. How come when I suggested anarchy you said it was a half-baked idea?

Becuase anarchism in an utopian form is not possible for the simple reason of individuality and conflincting wills. In an archistic utopia, to who does israel belong? Who wins the football match? who is smarter? And worst of all, people nowadays measure their happiness in relation to the happiness of the others, and they do this by looking at who has more things/people/events, so what would happen? But anyway, I don't neglect anarchism. Anarchism is possible and in fact we will end up in it whether we go the capitalist way, or the fascist way, or the communist way. It is the ultimate oblight aim of politics. Unless of course humanity is destroyed (probably by itself) before that. Ethics is too general for me, I'm not that abstract as to deel with it. Neither with moral principles or moral intuitions (philosophers ahve distinguished between the two to make the discourse easier). However, I have read a book by Michael Hardt about Deleuze, where the philosopher's interpretation of the book Ethics by Spinoza is explained very well, very interesting. But let's come back to truth, if it has any relation to morality (truth is not always good, nor falsity always wrong).

[mkirkpatrick]

Originally Posted by Rufus Religion is a very human thing and really has nothing to do with how God came to be, or how we came to be. If it is proved via a TOE that God exists then s/he would have no real connection to religion. S/he would have no connection to the human penchant for prayer or any type of religion whatsoever. WE invented all that stuff. S/he would not be connected to Jesus Christ or any particular race or nation and certainly would not be separate from the evil of human kind, such as we envision the Devil. Obviously both God and the Devil would be the same force. Sometimes we can't see the forest for the trees. God would probably not even know how s/he was caused to be in the first place. Think about it.

I agree,you are so right,religion is solely man
made,andhas nothing to do withGod?

kind regards michael.

[Rufus]

Originally Posted by mkirkpatrick I agree,you are so right,religion is solely man made,andhas nothing to do withGod? kind regards michael.

I appreciate your agreement. I listened to some audio from a book advertised by a Google ad on Toequest and it was very interesting to hear just how rare a perfect planet would be that could support life such as ours. The sticky part was when the speaker began to suggest that Christianity was God's particular chosen religion and quite associated with creation. He used Einstein and quantum mechanics to support this and really ruined an otherwise good talk.

Morals have been mentioned in this thread several times and I think about the animals and how they seem so totally immoral in their constant quest to devour each other, yet are so caring for their own kind. Humans decide their own morals and have the ability to live them if they chose. Darwinian natural selection has been supported but the idea that one species will eventually mutate to another appears to be nonsense. Do you agree with that?

[harmonygirl]

I am not sure that I agree that animals are immoral. They devour each other to live. We all have to kill in order to live, whether it's the prime rib you had for dinner or the salad (vegetative life is still life!). I think that humans are the only species that have made a sport out of killing or kill for obscure things such as ideas or religion. In my opinion, that is immoral.
Incidentally, while religion is worthless, I think that spirituality is key.
For what it's worth, I think that all species mutate to adapt to their environment. If they don't they die. One question, though, when is the point they become something else?

[Guille]

Fine, hate me. It's fine for me, I'm used to it. But I'm not a pessimist. I'm not even such thing as a 'realist'. I don't know myself what I am. The important thing is that I do realize combined wills and etz, but humans are simply stupid. I'm gonna explain politics in a few sentences now, without the need of Machiavelli, or Marx, or Engels, or Bakunin, or Feyerbach, or Pierce, or Ludwig von Mises... A tribe has a tv (imagine). There is the wisdom guy, the 'always second at everything' guy, the social/funny guy... And the strong guy. The group has subconsciouslly made the strong guy the leader. So the strong guy, as not being smart enough to listen to the wisdom guy or any other guy, decides by his own what all of them watch on tv. Of course, the women are left out even more (reason for feminism). Then when the tribe grows, it ahs more people, more territory... more of a lot of things, it can ahve more tvs and so it has one for each (or one for 2, 3, or 4). That's it. This means, we could be democratic in the anarchy way, but we aren't for we automatically lead to dictatorship (whether it's communist or fascist), and then we run away from the problem by inventing capitalism (inventing consumism to create a false individualism). And the story of philosophy is enhaced to that of politics: the people vote for leader the strong man, but follow the talk and action of the wisdom man, who has a lot of convincing ideas always well based. But the wisdom man can never be good to all, there are always left outs, and these are those that become leading wisdom men in the future (this is modernism). So wehn wisdom men were enough wisdom, they ralized it was better not to be leaders, and there was post-modernism (starting with Nietzsche, part of Marx, Kierkegaard and Heidegger, and even Freud, and then going on to Baudrillard, Lyotard, Foucault, Badiou, Derrida, Deleuze, Levinas, Blanchot.. most postmodernism thinkers are french).

[Guille]

This is a game with words and meanings, and you know it. Correct, when associated with truth, means 'the knowledge ist rue if it is in harmony with reality'. Whiles the correct used with the concept of goodness is that of morality, and means that 'something is good if it is correct do/have/say it, if it is moral'. There is a difference between moral correcteness and natural correctness. The later is real, whiles the first is just an invention (conception). For example, is it always good to tell someone he is going to die in two hours and you can save him but you don't want to because other people would most probably be infected as it is a germ that stays in the body forever 8even if it's reduced) and it's a danger to humanity? Or would you ask a farther to kill his children if you know he has more power than them, and you knew the children will destroy humanity but the farther doesn't and won't accept it?

[harmonygirl]

I think thoughts can exist without matter and space, but not without energy. If the TOE is truly the TOE, it should account for how everything started, which is currently the logical place for one to believe in the Goddess, because no matter how evolved science gets, it can never explain this. So the TOE should affect religions, but whether it will is a different story. We (as people and political creatures) tend to take good ideas and turn them into dogma, and have people (mis)interpret them. I doubt if the TOE explains life and everything, if it will persuade people to abandon whatever their church is, whether it's religious, antheist or agnostic.

[Joseph]

As to whether a TOE should or would have an impact on religion, well, yeah, it already has. If you think about it, astronomers tell us our planet earth is part of a single solar system, and that this single solar system is part of a single galaxy which we call the milky way galaxy. Further, our milky way galaxy is part of an even larger collection of galaxies called the universe. Now while it’s true we don’t know how many universe’s there might be in the larger, parent reality within which our universe exists, it’s certainly true our universe only needed to be created once, however it was created. So if we’re assuming, if only for the sake of the argument here, that our universe is the direct result of a deliberate act of creation by a Creator, then science is telling us there’s only one Creator, at least as far as our human race is concerned. So you see, science has already effectively settled the argument about whether different religions have different Creators, or different religions all have the same Creator, but think about, worship, and generally celebrate, the Creator in different ways.
But wait, there’s more.
Dictionaries define "reality" as "the way things are", and they also define "truth" as "an accurate description of reality". Again, if you think about it, both religion and science are searching for the truth about the world and about ourselves. It’s just that religion’s search for truth is a matter of faith, while science’s search for truth tries to remain a matter of fact. But let’s say that science all of a sudden starts to really begin to understand the universe (as I’ve explained can be done in a previous article "On Understanding the Universe"). Well, in such a situation, if it were to turn out that the universe actually is the result of a deliberate act of creation by a Creator, then, clearly, the Creator is responsible for the reality of the universe (the way things are), which means all the truths about the universe are the Creator’s truths. So you see, if this indeed turns out to be "the way things are", then it just might be that very soon now science may come to realize that the truths it has been searching for about the universe have actually been the Creator’s truths all along. Which, again if you think about it, was why Einstein was so adamant about the universe being an orderly and determinate place, since order implies the existence of an orderer.
And what might be the upshot of such a case? Well, for one thing, as I mentioned, albeit in passing, in the aforementioned article, once you understand how the universe works, it’s quite clear that the universe was always going to produce human beings. Beings like us, with brains like ours. Beings who would someday stand up, look around, and ask "who are we?", "where did we come from?", and "why are we here?". So if the universe is indeed the result of a deliberate act of creation, then if, say, we come to realize that in the evolution of the universe we’re actually observing the unfolding of the Creator’s plan, one thing we’ll know for sure is that we’re the Creator’s reason for the entire universe. Which would, for one thing, settle the question about "intelligent design".
Regards, Joseph

[ema]

Hi everybody;
I want to ask a question: why we should separate between god and science? Seems that if anyone wants to be scientific he must b then materialism?

God, is the science, is the life, and everyone must has the faith of that, because God who created the science, and who sent the prophets with religions.

If you believe that there is only one god, then why you expect that there is a contradiction between faith of god and science?
Your simple summary of QM,anton, is very simple, very simple to seem ur summary wrong!!

There is no theory full complete until now, neither relativity nor QM., and I don expect that there is any theory will tell us everything about what happened in the universe.
You seem like want find a theory tell us how god works!! I can't answer ur question: what Is God because I believe that philosophy is the art of missing life!!,.. I know what is god by my heart, and I don find words to discuss him..

God, who created the science, and who created the universe, and if we until now can't find how it works, it's our failure, as a result of our human weakness.
sorry for my English; it doesn’t help me always...

God with you!!!
ema