Problems with this section (Agnosticism)

by George Jelliss , Crewe, Saturday, October 31, 2009, 21:10 (5281 days ago) @ Frank Paris

My "Excuse my intervention" was just politeness, since I won't be posting regularly on this thread, which is largely a conversation between you and dhw, but my thought about God being the ball of string from which the particles of the universe are made was too amusing to pass up. At least it gave you laugh. dhw is right when he says "George would say that the ungraspable is ungraspable because there's nothing to grasp." I'm afraid I find most of your exposition pure fancy or fantasy.-I will however reply to your observation about alien life forms: "I'd be very surprised if this hasn't already happened, and happened multiple times in the history of the galaxy. I'd be shocked to learn that the galaxy isn't teeming with an interstellar civilization that is billions of years old.
Then the perennial question: where are they? I give a perennial answer: we on our primitive planet are a "designated wilderness area." If they don't want to be discovered, they won't be discovered, even if they are right under our noses (which they probably are). After all, technologically, they are billions of years ahead of us and if they don't want to be seen, there's no way in hell that we'd ever detect them!"-My guess is that the evolution of life-forms with reasoning abilities to the extent that we have them is very rare. Possibly only one or two in a galaxy. And the galaxies are too far apart for communication to occur. We could be the first of the type, because the earlier part of the evolution of the cosmos was concerned with the production of the higher elements (carbon, oxygen, etc) needed for life to evolve, so there hasn't really been that much time for our evolution to occur. It is also a very unlikely event in view of all the accidents needed to bring us about.-Incidentally the idea that there are invisible aliens all round us was apparently put forward by Humphry Davy in his last book "Consolations in Travel or The Last Days of a Philosopher". This is mentioned in "The Age of Wonder" by Richard Holmes which I've just been reading.

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GPJ