near to death episodes (Endings)

by John Clinch @, London, Tuesday, March 04, 2008, 18:32 (5868 days ago) @ David Turell

I have followed the books of Paul Davies, though not for a while, and remain a great admirer. - But there's no need to posit God to explain any feature of nature. The idea that there might be an interventionist deity pootering around the universe interfering (presumably miraculously) with genesis and DNA (or equivalent) hundreds of millions of times over is faintly preposterous. - And yet we are here. It is a brute fact of existence that matter seems poised to develop consciousness. In other words, it appears to be embedded in the nature of nature to develop self-awareness and so, ineluctably, the potentiality for this must have been there from the very start. Life doesn't have to enter, stage-left as it were, in the hands of a Sky God. It was the great atheist Russell who was once an advocate of a kind of proto-consciousness to explain this, surely the most significant fact about our universe. And I will admit to being open-minded (NOTE, please, dhw) about the non-scientific notions of panpsychism or panexperientalism. - So let's not cheapen such a magnificent tableau by positing meddling deities or resurrecting the old God-of-the-gaps who is always going to get squeezed out by scientific progress. Dhw is so wrong in his approach on this. We have to raise our game and try to develop a coherent, pro-science, "Einsteinian" reverence (Dawkins' word) for our parent cosmos and leave theologians and others to decide if that is religion or not. Shoe-horning Jehovah or any other intelligent entity or being into evolutionary biology to show He's still needed is just wrong-headed and self-defeating. - [And while I'm here, in response to other postings, can we have no more references to Darwin's faith or lack of it. The man is dead a century and besides, IT'S TOTALLY IRRELEVANT to this debate.]


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