(June 6, 2013 at 4:35 am)apophenia Wrote: What do you build a creator god out of when mind is shown to be nothing more than an evolved clockwork mechanism? Can religion accommodate a god that is nothing but a machine?
I wonder about that. We created gods long ago and put them on paper, where they couldn't interact with us outside of our own imagination. I think that in the future we will create gods and load them into computer memory, where they will be able to interact with us and seem more real. Unless we've evolved away this crippling need to know-the-how-and-why-about-everything-right-here-and-right-now, I would expect that we will quickly blur the lines and find god in the machines.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
