Life defies
I can't relate to the idea of that a creator made us in his own image, that he watches us, and at the moment of our death judges our lives by the rules he communicated with his chosen prophets, sending us on to the realm of heaven or hell depending on how our soul weighed on his celestial scales of good and evil.
I can see how the variants of the creator meme that humanity has followed over the millennia would be a civilizing force, providing structures, boundaries and consequences for communities to abide by. Many of our great works of art and architecture have been inspired by the desire to glorify or pacify a creator. On the flip side many people have been subjugated by the tenets of a creed, persecuted for their contradictory religious views, and wars have been prosecuted in the name of faith.
When I look at the natural world, its physics, chemistry and biology, I am struck by how life defies both Occam's razor and the second law of thermodynamics.
If the simplest explanation is usually the correct one (Occam's razor) how then do we reconcile this with the complexities of multicellular organisms, DNA and consciousness. Given the hot chemical soup that existed in the early Hadean eon of our planet's development could the evolution of life be considered a natural, simple, and inevitable progression? Is it plausible that random chemical reactions would become self-sustaining, self-replicating, growing ever more complex and specialized?
The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of an isolated system can never decrease. The increasing complexity of evolving life would seem to refute the idea that systems tend towards more random configurations with increasing entropy. Life is anti-entropic. How can that be?
Finding myself unable to cleave either to the religious view that life was ordained, or to the scientific view that life randomly developed I shake my head and don the "agnostic" label.
I can see how the variants of the creator meme that humanity has followed over the millennia would be a civilizing force, providing structures, boundaries and consequences for communities to abide by. Many of our great works of art and architecture have been inspired by the desire to glorify or pacify a creator. On the flip side many people have been subjugated by the tenets of a creed, persecuted for their contradictory religious views, and wars have been prosecuted in the name of faith.
When I look at the natural world, its physics, chemistry and biology, I am struck by how life defies both Occam's razor and the second law of thermodynamics.
If the simplest explanation is usually the correct one (Occam's razor) how then do we reconcile this with the complexities of multicellular organisms, DNA and consciousness. Given the hot chemical soup that existed in the early Hadean eon of our planet's development could the evolution of life be considered a natural, simple, and inevitable progression? Is it plausible that random chemical reactions would become self-sustaining, self-replicating, growing ever more complex and specialized?
The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of an isolated system can never decrease. The increasing complexity of evolving life would seem to refute the idea that systems tend towards more random configurations with increasing entropy. Life is anti-entropic. How can that be?
Finding myself unable to cleave either to the religious view that life was ordained, or to the scientific view that life randomly developed I shake my head and don the "agnostic" label.
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