(August 27, 2015 at 2:20 am)Ronkonkoma Wrote: "Only a mind is going to get it right. A mindless process can make the planet [Earth] quickly and permanently sterile."
-- Astrophysicist Hugh Ross.
That merely expresses the unsupported intuition of a person who sees things your way. My intuition tells me there is nothing in the supernatural category, no mind to create it all. Probably best to just disagree.
(August 27, 2015 at 2:20 am)Ronkonkoma Wrote: The reason we have the appearance of so many religions, creation stories and deities is because we live in a universe that fills us with wonder and we sense that there is a huge world beyond our comprehension. This is especially true of early civilizations that were more exposed to nature. When was the last time I saw the milky way? But Abraham probably contemplated on it every night. Either way, there is a reaching out towards the divine on the part of humanity.
Not what I had in mind but to each his own. I was thinking of how our brains have evolved to deduce the intentions of others, something we do automatically. So feelings of wonder get linked to feelings of gratitude and those get assigned to "Another".
(August 27, 2015 at 2:20 am)Ronkonkoma Wrote: Either through the archaic religions and philosophies, and more recently through science. You can see this when Stephen Hawkins concludes there is a high likelihood of aliens existing in outer space with much greater intelligence than ours.
Hawkins is likely correct that there is other life and at least some of it would be sentient and sapient. There is no way to know where we would fall on an intergalactic IQ test (if such a thing even makes any sense). The safest thing to do is assume there is as good a chance that alien life is more intelligent than us as less intelligent than us. There might be some reason to suppose it would all approach the same limit. Who knows?