Surely the phrase "playing God" is best applied not to Craig Venter, but to the adults who dress up in funny clothes and pretend to talk to (and even have a conversation with) some god or other of their human and culture-specific imagining.
Showing posts with label God. Show all posts
Showing posts with label God. Show all posts
May 26, 2010
December 30, 2009
Atheism
This amusing and sarcastic definition of Atheism is circulating on the web:
“The belief that there was nothing and nothing happened to nothing and then nothing magically exploded for no reason, creating everything and then a bunch of everything magically rearranged itself for no reason whatsoever into self-replicating bits which then turned into dinosaurs.”
There are two pieces to this attack, with the division being at “creating everything”.
Once you have the universe in existence, you can explain the creation and development of life in two ways: with or without divine intervention. Humans have always sought to find patterns, understand cause and effect, and predict the future. Divine intervention was the best explanation for many things before the rise of Greek philosophy, but it has been in retreat for the past 2,500 years.
The questions of where the Universe came from, or what could bring everything from nothing, or could there be anything before time began, are all unanswerable at present. Saying “God did it” provides no help, except to soothe people who can be soothed with muddy thinking. For where did God come from? And how? And what was before? If God can have existed before time and space (admitting that ‘before time’ is a nonsensical phrase), then so can the Universe. If God can have come into being from nothing, then so can the Universe. If someone can tell me how God came into being, we’ll be close to knowing the same about the Universe.
“The belief that there was nothing and nothing happened to nothing and then nothing magically exploded for no reason, creating everything and then a bunch of everything magically rearranged itself for no reason whatsoever into self-replicating bits which then turned into dinosaurs.”
There are two pieces to this attack, with the division being at “creating everything”.
Once you have the universe in existence, you can explain the creation and development of life in two ways: with or without divine intervention. Humans have always sought to find patterns, understand cause and effect, and predict the future. Divine intervention was the best explanation for many things before the rise of Greek philosophy, but it has been in retreat for the past 2,500 years.
The questions of where the Universe came from, or what could bring everything from nothing, or could there be anything before time began, are all unanswerable at present. Saying “God did it” provides no help, except to soothe people who can be soothed with muddy thinking. For where did God come from? And how? And what was before? If God can have existed before time and space (admitting that ‘before time’ is a nonsensical phrase), then so can the Universe. If God can have come into being from nothing, then so can the Universe. If someone can tell me how God came into being, we’ll be close to knowing the same about the Universe.
June 26, 2007
One Planet, One People, No God
After a week in Israel - the oldest, the newest, the prettiest, the ugliest, the most heart-warming and heart-wrenching and despicable (and many other contradictory superlatives) country on Earth - maybe, therefore, the most human country on Earth, for good and evil - my heart and eyes and mind are full, and my thoughts are reduced to the level of a bumper-sticker:
One Planet, One People, No God
One Planet, One People, No God
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