One of the best arguments that there is no God is exactly that beauty and complexity. It's only complex in a certain type of way, an evolutionary type of way.
No animal has jet boots, or fusion power, or laser beam eyes, or the billions of really useful, but impossible/really, really hard to evolve features. There's no design. There's no plan. There's only evolution baby!
You'll have to make do with some generalizations though, trying to go into the detail of every single thing is probably beyond what can be read in a single human's life time now.
Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything is pretty good start, or Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins, which is a book about how science makes nature even more beautiful by explaining it, not less.
It doesn’t matter whether I’m atheist or not, but to state that you can fully explain - well - any process of the universe is simply naive. There are areas we know many things about, but biology itself has an enormous amount of accidental complexity, (which is often brought up by atheists as a criticism of design) for example many many signal path ways that do fundamentally the same thing, but differently. Compared to that, spaghetti codes have good architecture.
Whether God exists or not is imo orthogonal to the complexity of the world around us.
No, starting from beetle eggs does not count. They point is no one knows how to start from the inert chemicals that make up a beetle and cause them to assemble into a living beetle. More generally, abiogenesis has not been cracked.
We do, however, know pretty much roughly how a beetle grows, how cells and DNA work, cell division, hell, even atoms, and their constituents. Even if we can't replicate it 100% yet.
Is your God one of hundreds of thousands that have been forgotten? Or do you just happen to follow one of the modern trendy ones? Is it Thor? Athena? Xerxes? Why is yours so special compared to the 99,999 that have been discarded?
There have been succesfull experiments with xeno-pregnancies aka interspecific pregnancy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interspecific_pregnancy#:~:tex....
With current technology, we very much do indeed experiment with DNA of animals.
As for making DNA from raw materials, that is what DNA printers to. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_gene_synthesis
Second, have you ever heard of this thing called philosophy? It is not useless to think about the word in an abstract way - without necessary relevance to the physical world. Like, what IS math?
By the way, I do not approve of those believer that go against science, since I think belief and actual reality can go hand-in-hand, and even with God, or perhaps because of Him, one can appreciate the beauty of sciences.
I'll respect you, not your beliefs.
>what IS math?
Relations between proportions. There's no magic.
Also, Science never can't go side by side with superstition. Ever.
Math is not that easy. How does something like eg. Group Theory fits into this “definition”? And yet, it is useful to the real world.
Superstition is not religion.
I usually try avoid religious debates on HN though.
And sure, I get your overall point. I was Christian until age 26. I worked two years as a missionary in a foreign country, 90hr weeks, no pay, for my Christian beliefs. What "God" meant to everyone I encountered throughout that time, before, and after, is/was always a bit different. Ultimately we create our own personal God, and what that means can be compatible with honest and rigorous scientific inquiry. But you have to throw out large portions of the bible and accept that it's largely a work of art and useful fiction, and I will place $1000 down on a bet that the vast majority of "Christians" would bristle at such ideas.
But yeah, best to stay away from discussions of religion with anyone except your closest friends. Even then it's usually ill advised unless you have hours to sift through the nuance and are very good communicators.
"Believe" is absolutely the right word; most of us don't have the time, inclination, or ability to perform the scientific method required to demonstrate evolution, big bang, or old earth. Outside of a very small number of people, the overwhelming majority of us are taking it on faith that these theories are correct.
We all are able to take that little step inside our consciousness, trusting our innermost ancestral intuition and logic... to be grateful and humble in front of whatever is behind this universe.
I've read some books on evolution, many about philosophy and religion, and I find it all fascinating, but I didn't completely escape that feeling that it's not enough...
But, instead of saying "these explanations aren't satisfying, there must be a god behind these misteries", my position is "these beautiful explanations aren't completely satisfying, I'm left with some uncomfortable questions, and that's just part of being a human being".
I've been a devout catholic, I've been a kinda-skeptical non-denominational christian, I've been a staunch atheist and a buddhist-leaning agnostic... and I've never felt that I could find perfect answers. Some uncomfortable questioning will always be there, and it's better to try to make your peace with it before trying to solve it.
Trying to solve it is also fine, but not the complete answer.
Everything else is babblery and charlatanery.
I agree that explaining what we don’t know with God is, well.. not explaining it. But if the said believer is not blinded by the charlatany branch of his/her religion (in case of Christianity there are many such, and many are absolutely fine with sciences), then I don’t see no evil. For some people it is calming to know that their loved ones “can’t” inexplicably die in every moment in an accident, that perhaps someone is watching over them - and many other, fundamental human innate cravings that want a God. (Which of course begs the question of isn’t God just a projection)
Yet that clause won't make any religion correct.
>For some people it is calming to know that their loved ones “can’t” inexplicably die in every moment.
Same issue. Life is neither fair or unfair, it just is. There's no good or back luck per se, just events ongoing.
It sucks, I know, but thanks to science and trying to understand how the Universe works, we invented the seat belt, for example. Or automatic braking systems for car. And yet, no magic or praying involved. Just lots of hard work. You can stay quiet and do nothing, or you can have a better understanding of your surrondings to avoid the less accidents, the better.
Also, many scientists were/is religious, so let it be a personal choice, up until it doesn’t hurt others.
That's a fallacy, that won't make a religion real. Neither a paper. Just proofs and replication.
Also, nitpick but it would be absurd to call ‘religion’ not real. Like, one of the most fundamental organizations in the previous centuries is something I would not call non-existent. Whether God exists or not is a different, philosophical question - and to a degree it is similar to the how did life start on Earth question, with hypotheses that can’t necessarily be verified.
How does that logically follow? To me that is clearly just a projection of the human concept of a "creator", a person who makes things (like a house, a fire, or a website), onto the universe. I see no reason to project my human experiences and ideas onto something as vast as the universe. Whatever is "out there" or "beyond" is by definition something that far exceeds our comprehension, our human concepts. If you want to call that "god", so be it, but I don't see how that's anything more than just a placeholder for something we can't reach.
We can, on the other hand, gradually understand more and more of the laws and properties of the universe itself, and how those work together to create the phenomena we find in the universe. All those gaps in the subset of phenomena that we can observe, I am confident that we are at least theoretically capable of understanding.
As an aside, we can't communicate very well with the smartest animals, so we don't know how much they can understand. It could be more than most of us think.
I conclude that God is the origin of everything. this is something you can't prove or disprove with Science. Some might argue it's not worth thinking about, but it comes down to the individual whether they want to think about it or not.
If God is a 'being', an entity, it can be more than one, and has to have it's own origin story.
But man, our universe sure is weird. On a fundamental level. I think people under-model just how strange our universe is. Even things like Pi. Why does Pi equal Pi? What an unlikely number to define something fundamental about the universe itself. Or take the logistic map [0]. I mean, what? Why is our universe this way? Or Euler's Identity (e^(pi*i) = -1). Why e? Why pi? I get that the math works, why does the universe need those values for the math to work?
Pi is just the ratio between the diameter and all the points to the same distance from another point, in base 10.
As simple as it gets. Circle = infinite points, thus Pi = infinite decimals.
There's no magic.
Well, it has to be equal to something, right?
Why would it be the case? 1+1=3 because God exists? And thus your conclusion is false.
Those can explain how life evolves once it already exists. And there's no argument about that, we know many laws governing those processes, from molecular to population-scale models.
However, nobody was able to show that life can emerge from non-living matter.
4.5B years of evolution vs silicon monkeys pretending to be gods
You may think humans are more amazing than salamanders, but no other species agrees with you.
I really wonder, too - does a dog care as much about a salamander as a human? How about a crow? Do crows think we're interesting at all? It's impossible to say.
Ultimately you're right though, we're just creatures trying to survive in various ways. Humans have very sophisticated ways of doing it, but they aren't inherently more amazing outside of the human lens.
I'd suggest as individuals of our species, we're not much more interesting than ribosomes -- one could say that ribosomes execute all the stuff in the salamander video (hey, they print the DNA into proteins).
Humans are maybe just biological machinery in the organism of culture, like ribosomes are the molecular machinery in the organism of biology. Culture does all those amazing things, and humans just skim along the unfathomably long and multi-dimensional ticker tape of language/culture :)
Just my 2c, of course, and the way I stay humble about humanity
You would say it's not humans, but human culture that is causing global extinction event?
Well, okay.
In any case, you may find the book 'Sapiens' interesting. It argues that the fundamental change that caused sapiens to dominate all other life is our ability to abstract and conceptualize.
Respectfully, it doesn't feel like splitting hairs to me... but quite a significant frame-shift. (Defensive credentializing: I'm a former biochemist and now technologist and event facilitator, with a fascination for the always-evolving fields of social physics & complexity science.)
I'm increasingly a believer in something called the Leiden Theory of Language, or Symbiosism: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316665359_Symbiosis...
This theory proposes that language is a separate strata of organism/information that co-evolved with the host biology of the human mind. i.e. We're unique not because we're simply "the smartest biology", but rather, we're more like a cyborg of two organisms, one biological and one semiotic. As a assemblage, we have vastly overrepresented dominance of the semiotic organism compared to other creatures who host very primitive semiotic organisms.
In this frame, humans can be conceptualized as individuals, but alternatively as simply hosts to the mind, which functions as the replication machinery of the larger social organism that takes shape between minds in the strata above (organizations, nations, culture).
I'm still chewing on all this stuff, mind you :) And thank you for the recommendation -- I really need to pick up that book!
Cat's and dogs abstract and conceptualise. So do crows and whales. But more than that, before you get too carried away with the importance of this "fundamental change", consider the possibility that the ability to "abstract and conceptualise" doesn't yield a "fundamental change" at all.
How can that be?
Consider the ends to which all this abstract thought is being applied.
Why do humans spend hundreds of dollars and countless hours buying and applying makeup to their faces?
Why do humans spend thousands of hours in the studio creating the latest dance music hits?
Why do humans buy the biggest, fastest cars?
Why do humans spend weeks comparing and assessing home insulation materials from multiple vendors?
Why do humans spend thousands of years developing steel making traditions that result in the finest weaponry?
Why do humans use google maps navigation?
Are humans, with all their advanced skills at abstraction and conceptualisation, and vocabulary and communication sophistication, doing anything that birds and bees and whales and cows aren't already doing?
All us animals are just waking up every day, checking on the kids, going to work, getting hungry, fixing lunch, getting horny, feeling frustrated, lashing out, seeking to impress, preening our feathers, and, from time to time, thanking our lucky stars.
What else can we do? Technology doesn't change that. It just gives us different ways to do the same things we and other animals have been doing since the dawn of life on earth.
I like your questions.
I'm not disagreeing (unsure myself), but this talk of what "the fundamental" is, it makes me want to share about another hypothesis: that the mind's ability to operate via "recursion" is the feature from which a bunch of other things emerged. A good book that lays the case, still reading, but very thought-provoking: https://www.amazon.ca/Recursive-Mind-Origins-Language-Civili...
So if that's true, it's less about there being some fundamental core difference between us and animals. I think I agree that the same underlying drives motivate. I understand that the core drive of all life (below the particulars of our biological strata) are perhaps seeking the right alchemical mix of (1) entropy/micro-diversity and (2) cycles/periodicity and (3) compartmentalization [1]. These drive information-creation about the environment -- mapping information of the environment into the structures "trying" to buffer themselves from change in a chaotic environment. But "trying" is anthropomorphizing (and applying false agency), and in essence, this simply allows a structure of any scale or medium to "persist" better into the next tick of the engine ;) And a structure that persists tends to have information about the environment (and the environment's future) encoded within itself. This encoding in persistent structures is what we tend to read as free-will and agency.
But anyhow, in a round-about way, I'm just proposing that perhaps "recursion" was the "new innovation" that biology of human mind stumbled upon, that really expanded the capacity to persist. And language, which not a result of new drives, fell out of that new ability of minds :)
[1]: https://sci-hub.st/10.1016/j.cocis.2007.08.008
ps, sorry for rant, i get excited about this stuff! sorry if overload, and apologies for not citing the web of readings that led me here. Happy to linkshare, if you're interested, as I certainly have sources and go back to them often! e.g., [2] [3] :)
[2]: https://knowm.org/thermodynamic-computing/ [3]: https://nautil.us/issue/9/time/life-is-a-braid-in-spacetime
I agree about recursion. When I first heard about it in CS101 a lightbulb lit up. It's an elegant computational mechanism to resolve complexity, given enough stack space.
When I later heard the theory that the human neocortex is so large so as to accomodate data structures to manage social contexts of communities of 150 people, it made more sense.
Our social reckoning depends on knowing or anticipating or game theorising what other people are thinking, so as to be able to assess group dynamics. But these assessments are contingent. A might support us, but only if she doesn't know what happened with B, which only C knows about, and I trust C. But I'm not sure where D stands in all of this, and I haven't seen E for a while, but she has a connection to both C and A.
Your last paragraph describes exactly what motivates me to work on an open source platform called https://pol.is/home . Or rather, the loss of the ability to navigate those dynamics in high-volume, low-empathy digital spaces we've created, that's what motivates. The platform is big in Taiwan, and is being used to crowdsource national legislation. It allows the opinion landscape of thousands to be made legible in aggregate to all participants so that everyone can build the nuanced and deep stories around complex issues, instead of collapsing into emotional tribalism. We lose all that good stuff in online spaces, that our wetwares gives us for free in meatspace :)
Anyhow, take care, fellow traveller
Are you sure that has happened?
Do humans dominate insects, fungi, and bacteria?
Do humans dominate the biomass of Earth?
If you limited the scope of your remark to mammals, fish, reptile and birds, I would understand what you are saying. Humans have excelled at habitat destruction. Still, I would point out that the "domination" of which you speak is less than 300 years in duration, with no certainty to last beyond 500 years.
Yes, we do.
https://news.berkeley.edu/story_jump/when-it-comes-to-climat...
https://nautil.us/issue/95/escape/we-crush-poison-and-destro...
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2021/01/we-havent...
>Do humans dominate the biomass of Earth?
Yes, we do. https://www.pnas.org/content/115/25/6506 "the total plant biomass (and, by proxy, the total biomass on Earth) has declined approximately twofold relative to its value before the start of human civilization. "
>Still, I would point out that the "domination" of which you speak is less than 300 years in duration, with no certainty to last beyond 500 years.
The Cambrian explosion happened 500 million years ago. Photosynthesis is projected to last another 600. We've used all easily available complex elements, and extracted much more. It will all oxidize once were are gone, and it will not regenerate in this time period. Even if we are gone, our impact and legacy will outlive us, likely ensuring we are the last advanced civilization this world will produce.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_Earth#:~:text=Howeve....
We dominate. Arguments to the contrary seem to be an attempt to avoid responsibility.
Avoid responsibility? For what?
I understand what you are feeling when you contemplate the wonder of humankind's technological achievements, which, by some measures, necessarily narrow, far surpass the capabilities of any other species. It's worth reflecting on this feeling, which comes reflexively to anyone who is presented with the intellectual challenge that you answered with your complete response above.
When Darwin first published his theory of evolution, he got a lot of pushback from people because of this exact feeling.
19th century British humans resented being "relegated" to the relations of apes. They scorned Darwin for saying it.
Why?
I personally think humans are largely pro-social, and this reflex is partially an extension of the human tendency to innately cheer for humanity. It seems literally in our nature to promote ourselves in this way.
At the end of the day, I’m largely vegetarian (I eat some fish) because rationally I know that I can’t really differentiate my human experience from that of a cow or chicken, and I’d rather not risk that killing and eating a cow would be no different from a cow killing and eating me. Space exploration isn’t enough for me to justify killing an animal that’s ultimately not much different from me.
Perhaps somehow we could learn that that’s ridiculous and all animals are basically robots and humans are the only conscience on the universe. Until then I’d rather assume some cow out there is wondering about humans and wondering why we aren’t as clever as they are.
Just wondering ;-)
My intuition is that most animals can’t or don’t distinguish much in what life they feed on and so if they eat humans, it’s simply according to nature and not problematic in the least.
I agree with the second part of your statement, and also much of the first part, sort of... but what I'm about to write may at first glance sound like a snarky gotcha. That's not my intention at all. It is an informed, educated view, and I don't like it any more than you might, because it bursts an illusion, at least for now.
Firstly, I think animals can distinguish what they eat in a very sophisticated way. At least as sophisticated as humans. Animals, after all, feed themselves with their own energy, guile and knowledge. They don't rely on supermarkets like many humans do, so they know exactly what is going on.
I am mostly vegan, because I prefer vegan food. When I eat animals on occasion, I do it in the same spirit you described in your consideration of animals who kill humans and other animals for food. It is part of nature, and I can embrace that.
You also said this is "a choice". Ethically, morally, spiritually, and out of shared interest, I can agree with you. However, I learned something recently from a radio show that followed a group of people who set up on virgin land, trying to be self-sufficient. What they found is important for our discussion.
It isn't possible for everyone who wants to live self-sufficiently to grow enough protein to survive. The soil in most places, and the climate won't support it. In order to live as a pure vegan, we need supermarkets and globalism, or at the very least, food transit on a global scale. Those giant South American soy plantations are built on destroyed forest habitat. :-(
The people in the radio documentary had to grow animals in order to obtain protein to survive. When they ate those animals, they did it with profound respect and understanding for the value of life, having raised the animals themselves. I've heard conventional farmers speak this way about animal lives too. It's something I think we need to understand and come to grips with intellectually, because the pure choice some people have of going vegan, is not a choice for everyone on the planet, at least, not with current technology and environmental constraints.
Which yet has to be proven they are really working in the long way, because we are still on trial. Also let's see if we can retain our humanity whilst surviving as a species.
> The very existence of a salamander... says very clearly a few points.
What does the existence of a salamander "say"?
And yet there it is, and what's more the finished product comes fully loaded with all sorts of instinct about the physical world, plus an ability to learn as it goes that our AI can't hold a candle to.
And that's just the Salamander version. Feed in a different strip of ticker tape and now you're looking at your very self emerge.
It's utterly unnerving to behold.