spin

I think it's pretty extraordinary, the number of people who make this sort of statement without ever considering the full range of extraordinariness involed in what they are trying to deal with. For example there seems to be no thought about the extraordinary number of balls of rock in space which somehow don't manage to support the necessities of life. For example there seems to be no thought about the extraordinary length of time involved in the development of this planet to get to the stage of permitting the extraordinary things this writer is contemplating.

There is an old thought: give a room full of monkeys, each with a typewriter, enough time and eventually one of them will write the complete works of shakespeare, or the bible.


spin

Vorkosigan

Off to GRD

Triple Six

The size of the universe is what is "extraordinary". The odds become quite reasonable when you take the size of the universe into account. What truly is hard to comprehend is why a god would bother to make such a universe to then reveal himself to a few poorly educated Middle Eastern tribesmen.

Triple Six

Damn! Beaten to the punchline.

Miss Anne Thrope

inquisitive01, if a God did create the universe, and only Earth has life, why all that extraordinary waste? Way to derail a thread, by the way.

Meanwhile, back on topic:

Something somewhat similiar to that happened to me not so very long ago. I tend to arrive to work early, and I tend to bring whatever I'm currently reading with me. The book was about Mitochondrial Eve and a coworker asked me about it. I explained what mitochondria were, and why anyone should care, and who Mitochondrial Eve was.

She said simply, "That's not what the Bible says."

And I said, "Well, no it doesn't."

And she said, "Well, there you go."

So there you go. If the Bible doesn't say it, it can't be true.

Kaiser_Soze

I like to think that those monkeys would be intelligent enough to bin the bible after they'd written the first page or two!

Kosh

Oh puuullllllease! Let's take the argument from incredulity (and lack of education) to E/C.

jbernier

Is that last line that important, though? What I mean is this: Perhaps the stories did not happen as the Biblical text describes. Perhaps there was no conquest. Perhaps there was no Exodus. Does that invalidate the fact that these stories have been and still are meaningful within particular communities? Does it invalidate the fact that the story of the Exodus has been perhaps the central narrative of Jewish thought, community and practice for millenia? Take the expression "Children of Abraham": Is this really a statement about a patriarch who may or may not have existed 4000 years ago or is it a statement about the nature of the relationship among a certain group of people (i.e. the Jewish people) today? It certainly knocks down a naive Biblical literalism but is a naive Biblical literalism necessary for a Biblical faith?

jbernier

The bottom line is that, yes, it is amazing that life came into existence here on earth. Perhaps this was the less likely occurence before the fact but once it did occur it can be said to be 100% probable that the universe came into existence. Thus the question "How likely was it to happen?" becomes academic at this point; the question is "What specific mechanism produced this occurence?" Incredulity at the occurrence of something that we know to have occurred does not speak to that specific mechanism in any sense.

Again, though, what hath this to do with (say) the conquest or the exodus?

jbernier

I saw no argument from lack of education. Could you point it out to me, please?