Not exactly. I'm telling you that it does make sense that Religion has always filled the void where there was no explanation for how things worked.
That's true..."god of the gaps." God, for many, has filled in the gaps in human knowledge. And as we are able to accurately model more and more things in the universe, we stop ascribing mystical explanations to those things. Shouldn't we learn from that and stop defaulting to mystical explanations even before we fill in a gap? Maybe it's okay to take the position of "We just don't know this now, but maybe we will in the future" rather than "There must be an explanation and if science can't provide an explanation, it must be god."
It's ultimately a matter of our belief systems and the plausibility of the explanations. God sneezed and the Big Bang happened, or string theory. Take your pick. Neither can be actually proven at this point.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean. If you're trying to equate God, the Big Bang and string theory as "unproven explanations," I don't think that washes. Nothing in science can ever be proven beyond a doubt, but the Big Bang has observational evidence supporting it (the expansion of space, the distribution of background cosmic radiation, etc) and string theory has mathematical evidence supporting it. What evidence does "God did it" have behind it? They are all "belief systems," but the difference is from whence the belief springs: evidence or faith?
Very religious people tell me they see evidence of God's work everywhere - in a flower or a tree, for example. I don't find the beauty of mathematics any more compelling than religion (something more concrete than a bunch of theories would do). I find the first post to be an awful argument for religion, the third point was interesting in an OT way, FWIW.
From what I see, religion is something like a mass illusion. I recently read about a neuroscientist who built this helmet that creates a magnetic field over one spot in the brain. People who wear it have religious experiences. So it seems built in.
Yeah, I saw that recently...on "Through The Wormhole with Morgan Freeman" on the Science channel. The evolutionary reasoning for why we'd have such an area of the brain is that the other side of the brain has the faculties that allow us to recognize and predict our own deaths, unique among species. This part of the brain is responsible for our sense of identity, our own presence (which we know will end). This would cause a great deal of anxiety, potentially enough, at least early in our history, to degrade our functioning. So we developed another part of the brain that reassures us that there's something beyond our physical presence, that will endure forever. That is infinite and therefore allays our anxieties. This part of the brain allows us to feel a presence outside of us. Experiments with that helmet have induced something like 80%+ of wearers to feel that there was a presence in the room with them while they were wearing it. It was pretty interesting.
If you ask me the strongest source of evolution is solar radiation that gets through our ionosphere and knocks chemicals loose. often known as cancer.
No, from scratch would mean forcing pair production of electron/positrons and protons adn anti-protons. then somehow separating the anti-matter and getting the matter to group up into atoms, and THEN where you picked up.
this idea isn't very likely BUT, what if it's actually useful in a 6th sense kind of way. What if like sharks, we could sense EM fields generated by other animals. like a silent predator sneaking up on you. But like I said, it's probably a bunch of bullshit stoner hypotheticals
good point, I use that because I'm too lazy to look up the source of that. But yes, nobody has a truly accurate record of history, especially history when humanity did not exist. I think the thought process is based off finding chemical compositions from spectroscopy off comets/meteors.
They believe the oceans came from numerous comet impacts, and a drop of water at a time. Yet there's clear evidence in the oldest rocks (only 2M years younger than the earth) that there was a large amount of water at the time. Is it just possible the water was here, and many other places in the solar system all along?
I think the biggest issue about having water, is the need to have an atmosphere. So if there was an atmosphere early on, then I suppose it could be...
Or it was within the rocks that accreted to form the earth. Though 2/3 of the earth's surface is water, the surface is just a very thin layer of the whole sphere.
aah that does sound familiar! Something about a comet they recently realized has water inside the rock and they are now having to re-think their definitions of comet versus meteor. So since the earth was mostly debris clumped together, why would earth-forming debris be any different than the comets that have water in it already.
