Evolution: The Scientific Evidence

[mfgoode]

Originally Posted by xilman

I can postulate that the moon is made of green cheese.


Paul

Paul, you have misinterpreted the two statements I have made.

Whereas one can easily postulate things material and of energy, in the same vein it is not so easy with things which are more subtle. Some of these are time, geometric figures and more generally those things which constitute what Plato defines as Ideas.

The concept of numbers is a good example. Two apples are different to two pears, yet they have something ethereal but common to them and that is the number two. These objects exist in the mind which may be called ethereal. They are purely mental constructs.

A line is defined as that which has length but no thickness. If it has no thickness then how do we perceive it? Yet we can measure it between its extremities which we call points.

Then again points are dimensionless and only have position. How can we conceive it? Or measure them ?

A circle is bounded by a curved line. We cannot see it but only perceive it in the Minds eye. Yet we can differentiate it from what lies outside of it.

Here is an extract from Sadhguru Vasudev.

‘What I am comparing is gross energy versus subtle energy.
Energy if it vibrates takes form.

We have to draw a line between what is physical and what is beyond the physical energy.

When we talk about energy as modern science does we are still talking about physical energy. This is referred to as ‘prana’ which is the source of all physical creation.

Beyond that is also energy. This energy is not manifest as physical. That’s what we call the etheric body or bliss body or as popularly put as nothingness.

Nothingness is bliss. It does not make sense logically. One can speak logically only up to ‘prana’

When we say nothing it would be better understood if a hyphen is put between no and thing because it is no-thing anymore, but still it is and that is where logic ends. That’s where modern science ends- with the physical.

The whole spiritual process is to go beyond the physical, to know something that is not physical (that is in the realm of the Platonic Idea)

That which is not physical has no dimension. That which has no dimension has no sense, here and there, now and then-nothing like that. Only the physical has now and then
.
That which is not physical does *not* subscribe to all these limitations.’

I hope the distinction is crystal clear.

Mally

[T.Rex]

Originally Posted by Prime95

One thing that has been perplexing me of late: homosexuality and evolution. Current belief is that homosexuality is a genetic trait rather than caused by one's upbringing. That leads to the troubling question: if homosexuality is genetic, what traits do homosexuals have that give them a "better chance of reproducing and thus passing their genetic traits"? It seems to me that evolutionary pressures would have wiped out such a gene.

My best guess is that it is either a recessive gene and/or part of a group of genes that do have beneficial traits and that most of the time when the male and female genes are mixed together the beneficial traits appear and much less frequently the homosexuality trait appears.

How do you explain the apparent paradox? Any ideas on what these beneficial traits might be? Any other thoughts?

I think I remember I read that sometimes evolution does not favor the gene of one individual but the gene of his brothers or sisters, who share many genes.
So, since a male homosexual individual will never have to spend time taking care of his children, one can see that he has time to help his brothers and sisters : this may be an advantage compared to other families/tribes without homosexual individuals.
So, part of the genes of the homosexual individual will continue to live through his nephews and nieces.

Just an idea. That works for ants, at least !
T.

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by Jwb52z

Without a reason, the way I meant it, we might as well just blow up the planet right now and be done with it because it's all pointless crap that's not worth even bothering with at all. Well, we do that or all become nihilistic and lazy and die. I know it's not this way for you or the general scientist, but for many of us, without an ultimate purposeful reason for everything, it's just not worth it to bother with anything because nothing really matters because it's all arbitrary and just a bunch of, "Who cares in the first place?".

So basically what you're saying amounts to, "I don't *want* to believe in evolution, not because I don't believe in the science behind it but because its implications are terrifying to me."

That is a quite understandable emotional response - But it's not science, nor is it a valid reason to hinder those who wish to pursue the actual science, whatever its factual implications may turn out to be.

Darwin himself was well aware of the it's-awfully-lonely-out-here implications of his theory, and suffered no small amount of emotional distress as a result. While his wife Emma could take some solace in her Christian faith on those two terrible occasions when they lost young children to sickness, he had no such comfort, and in fact the death of those children in a very real and frightening sense brought home the literal meaning of "survival of the fittest." But whereas many others would have (and did) sought solace in embracing religion in difficult times, his sense of rationality, of the importance of seeking truth however frightening the pursuit might be, was too strong to allow him that sort of self-delusional emotional refuge.

I have a strong suspicion that just this sort of existential angst is the *real* motivation behind virtually all of anti-evolution sentiment. You can cloak it in religion, but what is religion (and the myriad of other comforting-but-irrational beliefs various cultures use to help assuage their grief and soothe their children when they're frightened) than a way humans have historically dealt with the kinds of existential fears that we, of all animal species, appear to feel most keenly?

[xilman]

I claimed that I could postulate that the moon is made of green cheese, which elicited the response:

Originally Posted by mfgoode

Paul, you have misinterpreted the two statements I have made.

I don't think so. I believe you may have misunderstood my response. There are times when I hope that subtlety may be understood. In this case, it clearly was not.

To become blatant therefore: you can postulate anything and everything you want. Whether or not your postulates are worth anything to anyone else depends entirely on how well they match others' observations and/or how much they are useful to them for developing their own ideas. You may believe that your postulates are useful in that sense. Others, for reasons they think convincing, may not find them useful.

Originally Posted by mfgoode

That which is not physical does *not* subscribe to all these limitations.’

I hope the distinction is crystal clear.

Mally

Very well, I postulate that the straight lines of Euclidean geometry make beautiful music.


Your turn.


Paul

[ewmayer]

Nice pair of articles in the Health ("Pas de Deux of Sexuality Is Written in the Genes") and Science ("Seeking the Keys to Sexual Desire") sections of today's New York Times. I've attached a copy of the first, partly in case the link goes stale, but also because it cites some very interesting data which bear upon the "why has evolution not eliminated homosexuality?" discussion of the past week -- here's an excerpt:

"Researchers have devoted considerable effort to understanding homosexuality in men and women, both for its intrinsic interest and for the light it could shed on the more usual channels of desire. Studies of twins show that homosexuality, especially among men, is quite heritable, meaning there is a genetic component to it. But since gay men have about one-fifth as many children as straight men, any gene favoring homosexuality should quickly disappear from the population.

Such genes could be retained if gay men were unusually effective protectors of their nephews and nieces, helping genes just like theirs get into future generations. But gay men make no better uncles than straight men, according to a study by Dr. Bailey. So that leaves the possibility that being gay is a byproduct of a gene that persists because it enhances fertility in other family members. Some studies have found that gay men have more relatives than straight men, particularly on their mother’s side.

But Dr. Bailey believes the effect, if real, would be more clear-cut. “Male homosexuality is evolutionarily maladaptive,” he said, noting that the phrase means only that genes favoring homosexuality cannot be favored by evolution if fewer such genes reach the next generation.

A somewhat more straightforward clue to the origin of homosexuality is the fraternal birth order effect. Two Canadian researchers, Ray Blanchard and Anthony F. Bogaert, have shown that having older brothers substantially increases the chances that a man will be gay. Older sisters don’t count, nor does it matter whether the brothers are in the house when the boy is reared.

The finding suggests that male homosexuality in these cases is caused by some event in the womb, such as “a maternal immune response to succeeding male pregnancies,” Dr. Bogaert wrote last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Antimale antibodies could perhaps interfere with the usual masculinization of the brain that occurs before birth, though no such antibodies have yet been detected.

Possibly an evolutionary adaptation to try to balance the ratio of the sexes of the children a woman has? But that would imply that a similar immune-reponse effect should be seen after a woman has one or more girls, which does not appear to be the case. Hmm ... Maybe having too many boys in sequence raises the probability of fatal internecine rivalry to an extent that specific mechanisms against it have evolved? That would neatly explain why the effect is only seen for multiple male-child births in sequence. In any event, quite interesting stuff.

Full article text:

Pas de Deux of Sexuality Is Written in the Genes

By NICHOLAS WADE
Published: April 10, 2007

When it comes to the matter of desire, evolution leaves little to chance. Human sexual behavior is not a free-form performance, biologists are finding, but is guided at every turn by genetic programs.

Desire between the sexes is not a matter of choice. Straight men, it seems, have neural circuits that prompt them to seek out women; gay men have those prompting them to seek other men. Women’s brains may be organized to select men who seem likely to provide for them and their children. The deal is sealed with other neural programs that induce a burst of romantic love, followed by long-term attachment.

So much fuss, so intricate a dance, all to achieve success on the simple scale that is all evolution cares about, that of raisingthe greatest number of children to adulthood. Desire may seem the core of human sexual behavior, but it is just the central act in a long drama whose script is written quite substantially in the genes.

In the womb, the body of a developing fetus is female by default and becomes male if the male-determining gene known as SRY is present. This dominant gene, the Y chromosome’s proudest and almost only possession, sidetracks the reproductive tissue from its ovarian fate and switches it into becoming testes. Hormones from the testes, chiefly testosterone, mold the body into male form.

In puberty, the reproductive systems are primed for action by the brain. Amazing electrical machine that it may be, the brain can also behave like a humble gland. In the hypothalamus, at the central base of the brain, lie a cluster of about 2,000 neurons that ignite puberty when they start to secrete pulses of gonadotropin-releasing hormone, which sets off a cascade of other hormones.

The trigger that stirs these neurons is still unknown, but probably the brain monitors internal signals as to whether the body is ready to reproduce and external cues as to whether circumstances are propitious for yielding to desire.

Several advances in the last decade have underlined the bizarre fact that the brain is a full-fledged sexual organ, in that the two sexes have profoundly different versions of it. This is the handiwork of testosterone, which masculinizes the brain as thoroughly as it does the rest of the body.

It is a misconception that the differences between men’s and women’s brains are small or erratic or found only in a few extreme cases, Dr. Larry Cahill of the University of California, Irvine, wrote last year in Nature Reviews Neuroscience. Widespread regions of the cortex, the brain’s outer layer that performs much of its higher-level processing, are thicker in women. The hippocampus, where initial memories are formed, occupies a larger fraction of the female brain.

Techniques for imaging the brain have begun to show that men and women use their brains in different ways even when doing the same thing. In the case of the amygdala, a pair of organs that helps prioritize memories according to their emotional strength, women use the left amygdala for this purpose but men tend to use the right.

It is no surprise that the male and female versions of the human brain operate in distinct patterns, despite the heavy influence of culture. The male brain is sexually oriented toward women as an object of desire. The most direct evidence comes from a handful of cases, some of them circumcision accidents, in which boy babies have lost their penises and been reared as female. Despite every social inducement to the opposite, they grow up desiring women as partners, not men.

“If you can’t make a male attracted to other males by cutting off his penis, how strong could any psychosocial effect be?” said J. Michael Bailey, an expert on sexual orientation at Northwestern University.

Presumably the masculinization of the brain shapes some neural circuit that makes women desirable. If so, this circuitry is wired differently in gay men. In experiments in which subjects are shown photographs of desirable men or women, straight men are aroused by women, gay men by men.

Such experiments do not show the same clear divide with women. Whether women describe themselves as straight or lesbian, “Their sexual arousal seems to be relatively indiscriminate — they get aroused by both male and female images,” Dr. Bailey said. “I’m not even sure females have a sexual orientation. But they have sexual preferences. Women are very picky, and most choose to have sex with men.”

Dr. Bailey believes that the systems for sexual orientation and arousal make men go out and find people to have sex with, whereas women are more focused on accepting or rejecting those who seek sex with them.

Similar differences between the sexes are seen by Marc Breedlove, a neuroscientist at Michigan State University. “Most males are quite stubborn in their ideas about which sex they want to pursue, while women seem more flexible,” he said.

Sexual orientation, at least for men, seems to be settled before birth. “I think most of the scientists working on these questions are convinced that the antecedents of sexual orientation in males are happening early in life, probably before birth,” Dr. Breedlove said, “whereas for females, some are probably born to become gay, but clearly some get there quite late in life.”

Sexual behavior includes a lot more than sex. Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University, argues that three primary brain systems have evolved to direct reproductive behavior. One is the sex drive that motivates people to seek partners. A second is a program for romantic attraction that makes people fixate on specific partners. Third is a mechanism for long-term attachment that induces people to stay together long enough to complete their parental duties.

Romantic love, which in its intense early stage “can last 12-18 months,” is a universal human phenomenon, Dr. Fisher wrote last year in The Proceedings of the Royal Society, and is likely to be a built-in feature of the brain. Brain imaging studies show that a particular area of the brain, one associated with the reward system, is activated when subjects contemplate a photo of their lover.

The best evidence for a long-term attachment process in mammals comes from studies of voles, a small mouselike rodent. A hormone called vasopressin, which is active in the brain, leads some voles to stay pair-bonded for life. People possess the same hormone, suggesting a similar mechanism could be at work in humans, though this has yet to be proved.

Researchers have devoted considerable effort to understanding homosexuality in men and women, both for its intrinsic interest and for the light it could shed on the more usual channels of desire. Studies of twins show that homosexuality, especially among men, is quite heritable, meaning there is a genetic component to it. But since gay men have about one-fifth as many children as straight men, any gene favoring homosexuality should quickly disappear from the population.

Such genes could be retained if gay men were unusually effective protectors of their nephews and nieces, helping genes just like theirs get into future generations. But gay men make no better uncles than straight men, according to a study by Dr. Bailey. So that leaves the possibility that being gay is a byproduct of a gene that persists because it enhances fertility in other family members. Some studies have found that gay men have more relatives than straight men, particularly on their mother’s side.

But Dr. Bailey believes the effect, if real, would be more clear-cut. “Male homosexuality is evolutionarily maladaptive,” he said, noting that the phrase means only that genes favoring homosexuality cannot be favored by evolution if fewer such genes reach the next generation.

A somewhat more straightforward clue to the origin of homosexuality is the fraternal birth order effect. Two Canadian researchers, Ray Blanchard and Anthony F. Bogaert, have shown that having older brothers substantially increases the chances that a man will be gay. Older sisters don’t count, nor does it matter whether the brothers are in the house when the boy is reared.

The finding suggests that male homosexuality in these cases is caused by some event in the womb, such as “a maternal immune response to succeeding male pregnancies,” Dr. Bogaert wrote last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Antimale antibodies could perhaps interfere with the usual masculinization of the brain that occurs before birth, though no such antibodies have yet been detected.

The fraternal birth order effect is quite substantial. Some 15 percent of gay men can attribute their homosexuality to it, based on the assumption that 1 percent to 4 percent of men are gay, and each additional older brother increases the odds of same-sex attraction by 33 percent.

The effect supports the idea that the levels of circulating testosterone before birth are critical in determining sexual orientation. But testosterone in the fetus cannot be measured, and as adults, gay and straight men have the same levels of the hormone, giving no clue to prenatal exposure. So the hypothesis, though plausible, has not been proved.

A significant recent advance in understanding the basis of sexuality and desire has been the discovery that genes may have a direct effect on the sexual differentiation of the brain. Researchers had long assumed that steroid hormones like testosterone and estrogen did all the heavy lifting of shaping the male and female brains. But Arthur Arnold of the University of California, Los Angeles, has found that male and female neurons behave somewhat differently when kept in laboratory glassware. And last year Eric Vilain, also of U.C.L.A., made the surprising finding that the SRY gene is active in certain cells of the brain, at least in mice. Its brain role is quite different from its testosterone-related activities, and women’s neurons presumably perform that role by other means.

It so happens that an unusually large number of brain-related genes are situated on the X chromosome. The sudden emergence of the X and Y chromosomes in brain function has caught the attention of evolutionary biologists. Since men have only one X chromosome, natural selection can speedily promote any advantageous mutation that arises in one of the X’s genes. So if those picky women should be looking for smartness in prospective male partners, that might explain why so many brain-related genes ended up on the X.

“It’s popular among male academics to say that females preferred smarter guys,” Dr. Arnold said. “Such genes will be quickly selected in males because new beneficial mutations will be quickly apparent.”

Several profound consequences follow from the fact that men have only one copy of the many X-related brain genes and women two. One is that many neurological diseases are more common in men because women are unlikely to suffer mutations in both copies of a gene.

Another is that men, as a group, “will have more variable brain phenotypes,” Dr. Arnold writes, because women’s second copy of every gene dampens the effects of mutations that arise in the other.

Greater male variance means that although average IQ is identical in men and women, there are fewer average men and more at both extremes. Women’s care in selecting mates, combined with the fast selection made possible by men’s lack of backup copies of X-related genes, may have driven the divergence between male and female brains. The same factors could explain, some researchers believe, why the human brain has tripled in volume over just the last 2.5 million years.

Who can doubt it? It is indeed desire that makes the world go round.

[ET_]

If I decided to write a factorization program, the first thing I should avoid is a "do-it-yourself" behaviour. I would "go study the subject, read the books, talk with people who already performed and resolved my idea"(C).

In other words, I'd never try to trial-factor n by each and every natural between 2 and n-1, even if this algorithm is not wrong by itself. It's just not efficient.

I could try limiting trial-factoring only to the square root of n, for instance. And starting from 2 would make my final n smaller, limiting my bounds.

But then, I would learn more affordable and efficient methods to factorize, like Pollard, QS, NFS. I could even make use of "statistical factoring" (I beg your pardon in advance for this misuse of the term) by ECM.

The whole picture is that, while the search for factors by trial-factoring is correct, there are tenths of other factoring system in our reality that are more aggressive and efficient: fixing my attention only to the first one would led me to a waste of time and resources and, even worse, would take my attention off (out?) from new studies in number theory, studies that I could reuse in my new projects.

Now, let's go back to topic.

Genetic roots of homosexuality seem to me like trial-factoring a number n from 2 to n-1. There is no indication of psychology, sociology, social groups behaviour, sub- and inconscious pulsions, tribal and ancestral roots, will, need for change, contestation, revolutionary ideas. Progress.

Every change is put under the Science magnifying glass, but the search for the First Causes obfuscate the whole reality. A Human, being he straight or homosexual, should in my opinion be considered as part of his environment: when we accept that a behaviour that we consider deviant is due to his genes, we may as well consider acting following just a bit more sophisticated idea of Lombroso's physiognomic.
Now we know that it may be correct in limited contextes, bus as an effect, not as a cause.

There is another "small" part of the context that should be put on light about this thread: once we know that a gene is responsible for homosexuality or madness or evilness, should we try to modify it or not? And if not, what is all the buzz about it?

Luigi

P.S. #1: The idea that homosexual tendencies appear in different disguises in men and women should, by itself, show that those tendencies are driven most by our environment than by genes themselves.

P.S. #2: I am not homosexual, just like talking taking the devil's part...

[Jwb52z]

Originally Posted by jinydu

But even if you were granted the assumption that the universe had been created by an intelligent God, how would you know that this God is perfect? How would you distinguish between a universe created by a perfect God and a universe created by an imperfect God?

In any case, what is your definition of "not arbitrary"? Is it "having a purpose assigned by an intelligent entity"? If so, then a universe that was created by a God has a purpose regardless of whether the God is perfect or not. If your definition of "not arbitrary" requires that the entity be perfect, as seems to be the case, then what is your definition of "perfect"? How is the Conservation of Energy, for instance, imperfect?

It's more like that because God created everything in the universe that He is in charge of it, so His wishes, or whatever you want to call them, are not arbitrary by definition because God isn't human. First of all, it's not just "an intelligent entity" of any kind, it's God Himself that I use in my defining of things for this attempt at explanation. Perfection simply means "without fault or the ability to have fault" as far as God goes. The reason things in the universe as we know it are not perfect, from a Biblical standpoint is that sin "entered the world" in Eden.

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by ET_

once we know that a gene is responsible for homosexuality or madness or evilness, should we try to modify it or not? And if not, what is all the buzz about it?

Well so far the discussion has been along evolutionary-adaptivity lines, i.e. if a genetically determined (or influenced) trait seems to hinder the reproductive success of its owners, how could it persist?

Your question above seems to be in the vein of "conditions which tend to cause harm to the individual or to society" - for conditions where this is unambiguously true (e.g. Down's syndrome or schizophrenia) there is a very valid question about e.g. prenatal testing. On the other hand, being gay seems to me no more harmful (to the gay person or society - no longer speaking of evolution and its relentless, blind pursuit of reproductive success) than being left-handed, and both conditions share some common history in terms of their owners being irrationally stigmatized. (Gay lefties, on the other hand, are completely beyond the pale, IMO. Gay switch-hitters, I'm on the fence about ... I'd say if they can maintain a batting average of at least .250 from both sides of the plate, fine. ;))

There are also conditions that raise especially delicate issues because they are right at the border of the harm-versus-stigma argument, for instance congenital dwarfism (specifically, Achondroplasia). This is an autosomal dominant genetic disorder (people who have it have one normal copy of the gene in question and one mutated copy), so children of 1 parent who suffers from it and one normal parent have a 50% chance of inheriting the mutated gene and a 50% chance of being normal; children of 2 achondroplastic parents have a 25% chance of inheriting 2 copies of the gene (which is lethal and results in stillbirth), a 50% of inheriting one copy, and only a 25% chance of being normal. Now the tricky part is that although Achondroplasia comes with clear medical risks, these are not so great as to make the person unable to live a quasi-normal life or pose any danger to society at large. So the question arises: does society have a right (which at least here in the U.S. will typically rest on a compelling-interest standard being met in the eyes of the courts) to intervene in any way in the reproductive decisions of persons with the condition? This raises difficult ethical and legal issues. I'm generally very leery of the government-in-the-bedroom thing, but on the other hand, given the known health risks and high chance of a child inheriting the mutated gene, I admit to being rather disturbed at this recent popular TV show "Little People, Big World" featuring a couple with the condition and their children, which seems to focus only on the social-stigma issues of the disorder.

[Jwb52z]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

So basically what you're saying amounts to, "I don't *want* to believe in evolution, not because I don't believe in the science behind it but because its implications are terrifying to me."

That's not quite it. It doesn't scare me except for the fact that it would make humans unimportant, which is not exactly scary, but unpleasant.

Originally Posted by ewmayer

That is a quite understandable emotional response - But it's not science, nor is it a valid reason to hinder those who wish to pursue the actual science, whatever its factual implications may turn out to be.

I am not one of the ones advocating stopping science from discovering anything. The only thing close I ever said was to establish a barrier or distance between the exact details of scientific discoveries that would/could fundamentally change the worldview of people for whom that knowledge would be unsettling, scary, or repugnant and the like until such time as the minimum adverse affect on the society could be achieved. I mean, there are some breakthroughs that could happen that I think humanity would not be ready to know about without it causing a problem in the world. I wish I could find the exact post I am thinking of that I made, but I can't.

Originally Posted by ewmayer

Darwin himself was well aware of the it's-awfully-lonely-out-here implications of his theory, and suffered no small amount of emotional distress as a result. While his wife Emma could take some solace in her Christian faith on those two terrible occasions when they lost young children to sickness, he had no such comfort, and in fact the death of those children in a very real and frightening sense brought home the literal meaning of "survival of the fittest." But whereas many others would have (and did) sought solace in embracing religion in difficult times, his sense of rationality, of the importance of seeking truth however frightening the pursuit might be, was too strong to allow him that sort of self-delusional emotional refuge.

See, I would like to minimize or eliminate those kinds of distress in the world because, really, the only people who NEED to know some things in science are the ones who work in science. The rest of the world could go on quite happily without certain knowledge. It's like the old saying, "I don't have to know how it works, I just want it to work."

Originally Posted by ewmayer

I have a strong suspicion that just this sort of existential angst is the *real* motivation behind virtually all of anti-evolution sentiment. You can cloak it in religion, but what is religion (and the myriad of other comforting-but-irrational beliefs various cultures use to help assuage their grief and soothe their children when they're frightened) than a way humans have historically dealt with the kinds of existential fears that we, of all animal species, appear to feel most keenly?

Well, it is said that humans are the only species who are aware of their own mortality. I have the feeling that you'll tell me that science has now disproved that idea as well. Let me ask you this though, as you know more about it than I do. What is the point of living or doing much of anything if science is completely correct about everything?

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by Jwb52z

What is the point of living or doing much of anything if science is completely correct about everything?

Science is far, far from being there - and I expect most scientists wouldn't want to ever see "the end of science", in this sense of it being "finished". Science is a method of gaining understanding about the physical world and its phenomena - as it has shown, even deceptively simple systems can give rise to amazingly complex phenomena, and I doubt we'll ever understand more than a small (but hopefully quite important) fraction of it all. The fun is in the process.

I don't understand how "potentially godless" translates to "pointless," nor why anyone would see the universe as any less of an amazing place without an imaginary white-bearded dude "up there" somewhere, allegedly running the show. Like other creatures, you can still delight in seeing your children and other young relatives grow up and have children of their own. You don't need to believe in God to love one another. And perhaps as a human, since we are uniquely capable of communicating ideas and creating works that outlive us, one "point" might be to try to do some things which bring us our fellow humans some joy, whether that be the joy of understanding something about the world which we didn't know before, or the joy of reading a great novel, listening to great music or watching an amusing play or well-played game of (whatever).

(Failing that, there's always fart jokes. :))

But there seems to be an implicit question in your post, something along the lines of "we appear to be beings with an innate tendency to the spiritual - is that (or should it be) lessened by embrace of rationalism?" It's an important question, but it's a metaphysical one, and I certainly don't claim to have the answer to it.

[jinydu]

Originally Posted by Jwb52z

It's more like that because God created everything in the universe that He is in charge of it, so His wishes, or whatever you want to call them, are not arbitrary by definition because God isn't human. First of all, it's not just "an intelligent entity" of any kind, it's God Himself that I use in my defining of things for this attempt at explanation. Perfection simply means "without fault or the ability to have fault" as far as God goes. The reason things in the universe as we know it are not perfect, from a Biblical standpoint is that sin "entered the world" in Eden.

But can't you see that what you say here does not necessarily follow from your previous post? You are only adding in further assumptions.

In logic, one does indeed begin by setting up a collection of assumptions. However, at one point, one must stop (preferably after a relatively small number of assumptions). Then, one uses the assumptions to prove new things that are (preferably) not obvious from the assumptions.

All you have done is add more and more assumptions:

1) In order for the universe to be not arbitrary, it had to have been created by a God.

2) This God must have been perfect.

3) There was some event (at Eden) that caused the universe to stop being perfect.

When will you get to proving non-trivial things (i.e. things do not obviously follow from the assumptions) rather than just making more assumptions?

Also, you seem to be defining "non-arbitrary" as "something created by God". While you are of course free to define the word "arbitrary" to have any meaning you want, your new definition may lack some of the features of the old definition. In particular, I don't see how "arbitrary" (your definition) implies "purposeless". For instance, the Second Law of Thermodynamics says that the total entropy of the universe always increases or stays the same. So why can't increasing entropy be considered a "purpose"?