Evolved Gods, and Origin

loquax said:

In my SF WIP, I have an artificial intelligence who has, to quote the text, "fulfilled every aspect of Godliness bar creator"

Like OSC's "Jane" character, He appeared as the final step of the Internet's evolution - the point where it suddenly became self-conscious, not long after the introduction of quantum processing.

A main idea of the novel is that eventually we as humans will create our own collective consciousness, resulting in two Gods on earth - one artificial, one organic, but both natural.

The overall message here is that I believe if ever there were to exist such a thing as a "god", it would arise from an accelerated evolution of consciousness, as predicted by Kurzweil's Singularity theory. Thus God has a naturalistic origin, whose creation is inevitable in the timeline of universal evolution.

But, as I mentioned before, nowhere do I try and tackle the concept of ultimate origin. Of course, I have my own theories, but they don't belong in the novel, as they would cloud my central points.

So to the point of discussion. The biggest hurdle science has to jump in proving the non-existence of a supernatural god is discovering what happened before the big bang. In my created universe this question is NEVER pondered upon, and I know that in much atheistic literature the subject is avoided, because it is one of the few great questions we can only answer with "we don't know".

What I'm wondering is if this even matters. Can we disregard creation in our arguments, or must we attempt some lame philosophical explanation? I'm quite happy to say "i don't know" and leave it at that, but I know many theists aren't satisfied with such a statement.

Does it show weakness in our non-belief, or can it be accepted for what it is - a simple lack of knowledge? Does our atheism have any clout at all when we admit ignorance? Or does our very readiness to admit ignorance give us a vein of honesty, and therefore more clout in our arguments?

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Well...I'm not an atheist, but it seems that discussing the cosmos strictly in terms of actual evidence is a good basic approach. As Kant showed, reason alone (ie without good observational protocols) can't come up with a good scenario for situating any universe within any time structure. We do however know a lot about how this universe has behaved in the last 15 billion years and I can't see anything misleading about focusing on that especially since posing a time structure "before" there are any well-defined manifolds on which to situate it...seems inherently highly speculative.

loquax said:

In my SF WIP, I have an artificial intelligence who has, to quote the text, "fulfilled every aspect of Godliness bar creator" 8<---Snip---8<

So to the point of discussion. The biggest hurdle science has to jump in proving the non-existence of a supernatural god is discovering what happened before the big bang. 8<---Snip---8<

What I'm wondering is if this even matters. Can we disregard creation in our arguments, or must we attempt some lame philosophical explanation?

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Yes, I think we can disregard it.

Bear in mind that it's only European and Middle-Eastern atheists who have to deal with monotheists. A lot of Oceania and Africa was (and still largely is) polytheistic. Polytheistic religions have plenty of deities who are created, not creators. Often they just take stewardship roles over chunks of creation - either over physical parts of the world (e.g. rivers), or metaphysical parts (e.g. love or fortune).

To my mind, monotheists have a much harder job than polytheists. They must demonstrate not only that a god exists and is active in human affairs (and is not an alien or a natural force but a sentient metaphysical being), but that this particular god is unique, and created not just some things but everything.

If the first proposition is a very hard sale, the second and third are almost impossible (if this invisible, intangible, ubersmart and highly potent metaphysical being chooses to lie or pretend to be the only such deity, or to claim excessive credit for distant past events, how am I supposed to detect that!?)

Quite seriously, if someone were to furnish me strong evidence of one metaphysical sentience, the very next thing I'd do is start looking for the rest of them.

(And if I didn't find them, I'd wonder whether the last remaining one had eaten its fellows - as spiders and fish sometimes do)

Further to 'evolved gods', something else the monotheists typically lay claim to (and must therefore substantiate) is that their single deity is immutable.

Polytheistic deities generally do change and evolve over time. Often these are a source of myths (e.g. as in how Apollo became a patron of serpents).

In terms of demonstrating monotheistic immutability there are critical times I think it needs to be shown:

• At the creation of the universe
• At the creation of man
• Any time the status of humanity changes (e.g. in the Fall from Eden)
• Any time God changes its mind - e.g. showing sudden clemency or spite, or changing sides in human affairs
• During any divinely-created epoch (e.g. Biblical flood)
• Any time the number of miracles goes from "lots of big ones" to "just a few little ones"
• Any time that the religious doctrine changes markedly (e.g. in switch from Old to New testaments or from 'salvation through faith' to 'salvation through deeds' etc...)

Some of these, I think you'll agree, are a stretch. If there were a single metaphysical eternal being and it had been involved in human affairs in the ways commonly claimed, I infer that it has also been learning from the experience. In particular, I think it's been brushing up on its notions of compassion, justice, politics and human psychology since the early days of our civilisations when it was into pillars of salt, destruction of cities, plagues that killed firstborn, and messing with human bodies.

And this of course has impacts on claims of divine infallibility.

As a judeo-poly-atheist I say, "What ever rocks your boat."

And may all boats be rocked in a good way.

rambling again

Ruv Draba said:

Further to 'evolved gods', something else the monotheists typically lay claim to (and must therefore substantiate) is that their single deity is immutable.
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Obviously there is no physical proof that I can show you, but I maintain that there is a Creator God Who is Unchanging. If God created the univers then God must exist outside the universe and outside our space time continuum. All of creation would be to God, merely an instant. What changes is Humanity's perception of God based upon varying degrees of human ignorance. We are evolving on a spiritual level. We are maturing as a collective species.

When fractal theory is applied to the species and the species is reduced to an organism we have various stages of development. An infant has a different set of rules than a teenager, not because the parent has changed, but the ability of the child and the parent's expectation of the child have changed based on the degree of maturation.

In the pre-Christian era, we were infants. All that was expected of us was to survive and we required frequent intervention by the parent. Our rules were strict because we were too immature to understand the "why". We had rules like, "Don't eat pork," merely because we didn't understand when it would be appropriate to eat pork.


In the immediate post Christian era, we are toddlers. Now it was not enough to simply survive, now we had to get along with our siblings. The rules are changed to reflect our burgeoning intelligence, but we are far from being truly intelligent. Now we can eat pork, "but cook it all the way." Again, it's not God who is changing, but rather our increasing intelligence allows us to see a little of the "Why".

Currently, it is not enough to simply get along with our siblings, we are also now expected to keep our room straightened. We have the intelligence, but many will have to be dragged kicking and screaming into childhood because there is a certain degree of safety in not having to mature. Now we don't have to cook pork to well done because we can study and examine pork and start to decide when we won't get food poisoning or trichinosis etc and we can farm in such a way that we don't have to starve a person to feed a pig. (Which in most of the middle east was the case)

My hope is that we will master this skill and then be allowed out into the neighborhood. Who knows what life forms God has created down the street that we might interact with them and in so doing learn more the magnificence of God? If God is omnipotent, then God doesn't need us and the only reason I see that is logical as to why God created us is because God felt like it. This assumes that God must like to create. God derives some pleasure from it. Therefore it seems unlikely that God would start or stop with Earth and most likely there are and will be other sapient life forms with whom we might have similar discussions. Who knows? maybe some on this board are not even from Earth and are merely interacting with us through some as yet unknow to us telecommunication technology?

Ultimately I believe that that is our purpose, to study and constantly learn more about the universe and hence learn more of the nature of God. I question if mankind will do that within the lifespan of this planet, so I think we need to go out to the stars so as to not have all our eggs in the one proverbial basket.

loquax said:

So to the point of discussion. The biggest hurdle science has to jump in proving the non-existence of a supernatural god

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I think the evolutionarily sound atheist society doesn't prove atheism, so much as allow theism to naturally and normally become irrelevant. Just like nobody seriously believes that the sun revolves around the earth anymore, or that the earth is flat, or that gnomes steal your underpants. In a futuristic atheist society, I don't believe it's necessary to have or show proof that atheism is accurate - you can simply accept it as fact and regard dissenting viewpoints as the province of crackpots.

So in your society, no, I don't think you have to show any proof of what really happened. I think any effort to soapbox the question will be more offensive than anything. Just like medieval christian culture simply couldn't fathom the idea that anyone of reasonable intelligence wasn't a christian, an atheist society will be similarly unconcerned with people who aren't atheist. The idea would simply be foreign, and anyone who entertained it in any serious fashion would be considered a bit crazy.

GeorgeK said:

Obviously there is no physical proof that I can show you, but I maintain that there is a Creator God Who is Unchanging.

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Well, according to the stories I've heard, a perfect Creator created a Universe just to give humanity a place to live, but made it far too big for us, gave it squillions of years of history before us, put us out on the edge, screwed up with a few thousand extinct species before humanity appeared, used to perform abundant miracles, be downright punitive, racist and genocidal but 2,000 years ago suddenly got shy, kind and forgiving and EEO, and also created intermediaries like angels to act through, some of whom rebelled and became Evil (but the others are okay, honest!). And this Creator is perfect and unchanging and doesn't make mistakes and hence can't learn from them.

You know how when you catch kids out in a lie they just keep embellishing? Doesn't this look like that to you?

If God created the univers then God must exist outside the universe and outside our space time continuum.

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Er... 'universe', 'space time continuum'... As a fiction writer I'll happily use those phlebotenum terms to dress up the lies I call my fiction but as a thinking human I use neither of them because I don't even know what they mean. What's 'the Universe'? It's a word we made up for the stuff we can find today and the stuff we might find out tomorrow, but we don't really know much about the tomorrow stuff; it's all guesswork. And what for pity's sake is a 'Space Time Continuum' other than bad 1950s dialogue?

Let's agree to talk about stuff we know, like 'The Heavens and the Earth'. We know the Earth. You can fly around it. We have pictures of it from space. It's round and blue and pretty and surrounded by junk. We know the Heavens. They're just the visible stars, and some weird stuff that we can't see yet know is there cos of how other things act - like black holes.

A Creator made those things? Okay, let's go with that.. But you don't need to be outside of time or space to do that. You just gotta be able to make some dust out of light (presumably you can glow when you want to), and then throw the dust together with awesome levels of force. Then you can hang around and watch what happens.

All of creation would be to God, merely an instant.

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Yep. Okay. If I believe the dust-chucking, I'll happily swallow millennia as instants.

What changes is Humanity's perception of God based upon varying degrees of human ignorance.

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Okay, but here we get into trouble again.

You see, humanity has locked in its perceptions of your creator as dogma. It's bound to Eternal Truths written between 8,00 and 3,000 years ago when we were a lot dumber about the world and each other. If we agree that human perceptions are fallible (and we'd be dumb to argue with that), then we oughtn't to consider anything written by humans as reliable and beyond question - including those texts that people claim were divinely inspired. We ought to refresh, renew and replace our stock of knowledge about the world periodically when our knowledge undergoes revolution.

We also ought to consider that our religious leaders have no a priori claim to tell us what to think. No, instead each person must build up his own stock of knowledge painfully, questioningly in his own life.

But wait.. that's not what the big monotheistic religions want us to do, is it?

We are evolving on a spiritual level. We are maturing as a collective species.

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I agree with a) but not necessarily b).

Evidence for developing (I won't say evolving) spiritually:

1. the number of people who can live together in the same place without warring. It used to be hundreds, then thousands, and now it's in the hundreds of millions. Nice one, humanity!
2. the amount of free time we have to think and care about stuff. For the last hundred or so years, we get around 8 hours a day free to think about stuff. A chance to admire how great everything is, to help one another and to improve ourselves. Well done!

Evidence against:

1. Reality TV. Okay, let's call that a brief and failed experiment.

Evidence for maturing as a species:

1. We're breeding outside our local gene pools
2. Our population is expanding
3. That should create more genetic diversity and some interesting developmental paths for humanity

Evidence against:

1. We're getting better and better at not dying - not from reasons of genetics but because we have knowledge and technology that carries from generation to generation

I think that we were developing as a species, but now suspect that development to be arrested. On the other hand, we've mapped the human genome. That will give us options to create species-level changes if we choose to coordinate on it. I'm not sure what options we'll take though.

When fractal theory is applied to the species and the species is reduced to an organism we have various stages of development.

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Fractal theory is cute and very pretty math; it's good for modelling flowers and snow and smoke. It's not purported to be a model of everything. As a writer I'm happy to use 'Fractal theory' as phlebotenum. As a thinking human I'm not.

We had rules like, "Don't eat pork," merely because we didn't understand when it would be appropriate to eat pork.

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Bwaaaap! The reason for not eating pork is that pigs are weird. It's a middle-Eastern peculiarity that has nothing to do with being able to eat pig-meat safely. Pigs were native to Europe and Asia and the people never had trouble eating them there. We have thousands of years of history to show that most taboos (other than those against incest) are largely dumb and superstitious. Middle Eastern porkophobia is one of these. If you know how to eat seafood or chicken in a hot climate, you can work out how to eat pork.

If God is omnipotent, then God doesn't need us and the only reason I see that is logical as to why God created us is because God felt like it. This assumes that God must like to create.

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Well if so, it's not happening terribly often. Sure, maybe that's just a matter of time-scale, but on the other hand, the same people claim that miracles are happening every day.

maybe some on this board are not even from Earth and are merely interacting with us through some as yet unknow to us telecommunication technology?

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From my experience they're using mundane technology, but are just not on the planet

I question if mankind will do that within the lifespan of this planet, so I think we need to go out to the stars so as to not have all our eggs in the one proverbial basket.

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Or maybe we just don't have the smarts or resources to do that, and we'll die out eventually like anemones in a drying rock-pool. We're an apex predator, a great communicator and a very handy tool-user, but I don't think that guarantees a manifest destiny. We're a very young species in comparison to the saurians say. Maybe species development's just a lottery. Maybe life is even rigged against the survival of individual species. Wanting it so don't make it so. Just ask the flat-earthers.

Even putting the issue of God aside evolution is a different issue to abiogenesis (initiation of life). Some people are just fundamaentally uninterested in origin issues and I would be one of them. I am more interest in what is here now and where it is going.

veinglory said:

Even putting the issue of God aside evolution is a different issue to abiogenesis (initiation of life). Some people are just fundamaentally uninterested in origin issues and I would be one of them.

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I don't rate origin questions as terribly important in themselves, but religion uses invented origin premises to create a frame in which social policy is formed. The premise of divine creation influences everything from education policy to bioethics and reproductive rights. So it's not just a competing hypothesis but a political stick.

loquax said:

You speak of learning, and changing perspectives, yet you maintain that the core notion of God is an unchanging truth, despite our advances and maturation? Why does your proposed theory not apply to this concept? .

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God is not people. People change, learn and evolve. God, being outside our space time continuum does not change from our perspective

loquax said:

Surely if you believe in it, you can forsee a possible future where we "outgrow" the notion of God and His necessity, both hatched in the earliest stages of man.

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Not out grow, but maybe in a best case scenario approach something angelic, which is still less than God. Being made of meat, we can't completely do that, unless we find or are given some means to transend this dimention.

Ruv Draba said:

Well, according to the stories I've heard, a perfect Creator created a Universe just to give humanity a place to live, but made it far too big for us, gave it squillions of years of history before us, put us out on the edge, screwed up with a few thousand extinct species before humanity appeared, used to perform abundant miracles, be downright punitive, racist and genocidal but 2,000 years ago suddenly got shy, kind and forgiving and EEO, and also

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I doubt the validity of those stories

Ruv Draba said:

created intermediaries like angels to act through,

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I doubt the entire purpose of angels is to act as intermediaries for people. I don't believe that we are the pinnacle of creation.

Ruv Draba said:

some of whom rebelled and became Evil (but the others are okay, honest!). And this Creator is perfect and unchanging and doesn't make mistakes and hence can't learn from them.

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It stands to reason that a perfect and omniscient being would have nothing to learn, only to enjoy teaching the creations.

Ruv Draba said:

You know how when you catch kids out in a lie they just keep embellishing? Doesn't this look like that to you?

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I think you are confusing me with an evangelical

Ruv Draba said:

Er... 'universe', 'space time continuum'... As a fiction writer I'll happily use those phlebotenum terms to dress up the lies I call my fiction but as a thinking human I use neither of them because I don't even know what they mean. What's 'the Universe'? It's a word we made up for the stuff we can find today and the stuff we might find out tomorrow, but we don't really know much about the tomorrow stuff; it's all guesswork. And what for pity's sake is a 'Space Time Continuum' other than bad 1950s dialogue?

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try a physics textbook at the collegiate level

Ruv Draba said:

Let's agree to talk about stuff we know, like 'The Heavens and the Earth'. We know the Earth.

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I disagree. There is far more that we don't know than we do know about the Earth

Ruv Draba said:

You can fly around it. We have pictures of it from space. It's round and blue and pretty and surrounded by junk.

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true

Ruv Draba said:

We know the Heavens. They're just the visible stars, and some weird stuff that we can't see yet know is there cos of how other things act - like black holes.

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theorizing is not the same as knowing. We have some guesses about the universe.

Ruv Draba said:

A Creator made those things? Okay, let's go with that.. But you don't need to be outside of time or space to do that.

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I disagree

Ruv Draba said:

You just gotta be able to make some dust out of light (presumably you can glow when you want to), and then throw the dust together with awesome levels of force. Then you can hang around and watch what happens.

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So you are assuming that God was a cognizance and part of the primordial matter prior to the big bang? I hadn't considered the possibility. I don't know, will need to do some thinking.

Ruv Draba said:

Yep. Okay. If I believe the dust-chucking, I'll happily swallow millennia as instants.

Okay, but here we get into trouble again.

You see, humanity has locked in its perceptions of your creator as dogma.

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any individual is not humanity. Dogma is only appropriate in what is known. I don't have dogma about the nature of creation, only theories that make sense to me

Ruv Draba said:

It's bound to Eternal Truths written between 8,00 and 3,000 years ago when we were a lot dumber about the world and each other.

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no, not bound, but yes people were less informed.

Ruv Draba said:

If we agree that human perceptions are fallible (and we'd be dumb to argue with that), then we oughtn't to consider anything written by humans as reliable and beyond question - including those texts that people claim were divinely inspired. We ought to refresh, renew and replace our stock of knowledge about the world periodically when our knowledge undergoes revolution.

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I believe that's what I've been saying

Ruv Draba said:

We also ought to consider that our religious leaders have no a priori claim to tell us what to think. No, instead each person must build up his own stock of knowledge painfully, questioningly in his own life.

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Agree 100%, people go to Heaven as individuals, not groups. I think it unwise to entrust anyone with your soul.

Ruv Draba said:

But wait.. that's not what the big monotheistic religions want us to do, is it?

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I'm not a member of them. I doubt you've even heard of my religion.

Ruv Draba said:

I agree with a) but not necessarily b).

Evidence for developing (I won't say evolving) spiritually:

1. the number of people who can live together in the same place without warring. It used to be hundreds, then thousands, and now it's in the hundreds of millions. Nice one, humanity!
2. the amount of free time we have to think and care about stuff. For the last hundred or so years, we get around 8 hours a day free to think about stuff. A chance to admire how great everything is, to help one another and to improve ourselves. Well done!

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neither agree nor disagree, have to ponder

Ruv Draba said:

Evidence against:

1. Reality TV. Okay, let's call that a brief and failed experiment.

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lol! I can see why you'd say that.

Ruv Draba said:

Evidence for maturing as a species:

1. We're breeding outside our local gene pools
2. Our population is expanding
3. That should create more genetic diversity and some interesting developmental paths for humanity

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That's not evidence for maturation, merely a biologic imperative to spread the genes

Ruv Draba said:

Evidence against:

1. We're getting better and better at not dying - not from reasons of genetics but because we have knowledge and technology that carries from generation to generation

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No, we are not preventing death, merely postponing it

Ruv Draba said:

I think that we were developing as a species, but now suspect that development to be arrested.

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I've seen many scientific articles to support that claim...physically, but not necessarily spiritually

Ruv Draba said:

On the other hand, we've mapped the human genome. That will give us options to create species-level changes if we choose to coordinate on it. I'm not sure what options we'll take though.

Fractal theory is cute and very pretty math; it's good for modelling flowers and snow and smoke. It's not purported to be a model of everything. As a writer I'm happy to use 'Fractal theory' as phlebotenum. As a thinking human I'm not.

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you are certainly entitled to your opinion

Ruv Draba said:

Bwaaaap! The reason for not eating pork is that pigs are weird. It's a middle-Eastern peculiarity that has nothing to do with being able to eat pig-meat safely. Pigs were native to Europe and Asia and the people never had trouble eating them there. We have thousands of years of history to show that most taboos (other than those against incest) are largely dumb and superstitious. Middle Eastern porkophobia is one of these. If you know how to eat seafood or chicken in a hot climate, you can work out how to eat pork.

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If you look at the history of agriculture, in the Mid East there are not food sources available to pigs that are not also available to people. Everywhere else there are "mast", food sources that people don't eat that pigs can. Only there were people so starving that pigs were not a logical food source on a population scale because they directly competed with people for food. You are right that only in the middle east does this tabboo exist and my guess for the reason is stated above. I was using it as an analogy, not as a proof. In the pre-industrial era famine was much more common and literally to feed a pig meant one less person could eat

Ruv Draba said:

Well if so, it's not happening terribly often. Sure, maybe that's just a matter of time-scale, but on the other hand, the same people claim that miracles are happening every day.

From my experience they're using mundane technology, but are just not on the planet

Or maybe we just don't have the smarts or resources to do that,

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you lost me

Ruv Draba said:

and we'll die out eventually like anemones in a drying rock-pool. We're an apex predator, a great communicator and a very handy tool-user, but I don't think that guarantees a manifest destiny.

Agree

We're a very young species in comparison to the saurians say. Maybe species development's just a lottery. Maybe life is even rigged against the survival of individual species. Wanting it so don't make it so. Just ask the flat-earthers.

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If I've ever expressed anything suggesting even remotely that people are guarnateed anything, I was overmedicated. Again, I'm not a fundamentalist

GeorgeK said:

God is not people.

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How do you know?

I mean, soylent green is people.

GeorgeK said:

try a physics textbook at the collegiate level

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Been there, done that, got a doctorate. 'Space-time' means something to physicists. 'Continuum' means something to mathematicians. Putting them together in a religious context means exactly nothing at all though. It's like dilithium crystals or reversing the polarity of the neutron flow - pure phlebotenum.

There is far more that we don't know than we do know about the Earth

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Inasmuch as we know much at all, Earth's what we know most about.

So you are assuming that God was a cognizance and part of the primordial matter prior to the big bang?

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No, just showing that you don't have to invent phlebotenum to posit divine creation - especially when we're not really quite sure how space and time work.

Terse and fragmented thoughts elided

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If you look at the history of agriculture, in the Mid East there are not food sources available to pigs that are not also available to people.

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Dude, pigs are omnivorous and happily scavenge. They eat stuff humans won't touch including insects, worms, tree bark, rotting carcasses, garbage, and even other pigs. Along with goats and poultry they're one of the most farmable animals in the world - they live happily in temperate zones, tropical zones, forests and savannah. Other than a tendency to sunburn, they do just fine in Africa. The ancient Egyptians used to farm pigs, which were sacred to the god Set, and the warthog is a native African pig too.

Piggyphobia is just another taboo. All cultures have them. Most are ignorant and silly, but people invent reasons for them anyway and get very affronted if you challenge them.

Ruv Draba said:

Been there, done that, got a doctorate. 'Space-time' means something to physicists. 'Continuum' means something to mathematicians. Putting them together in a religious context means exactly nothing at all though. It's like dilithium crystals or reversing the polarity of the neutron flow

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I guess that depends upon whom you studied under. I grant that terms' definitions can change radically from University to University.

Ruv Draba said:

- pure phlebotenum.

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I'm still trying to gather an accurate definition of this. What does it mean to you?

Ruv Draba said:

Inasmuch as we know much at all, Earth's what we know most about.
No, just showing that you don't have to invent phlebotenum to posit divine creation - especially when we're not really quite sure how space and time work.

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Know? no. I'm going by predominant theories that make sense with my observations. I'd be happy to change my definition, if you have more convincing evidence.

Ruv Draba said:

[/i]
Dude, pigs are omnivorous and happily scavenge. They eat stuff humans won't touch including insects, worms, tree bark, rotting carcasses, garbage, and even other pigs. Along with goats and poultry they're one of the most farmable animals in the world - they live happily in temperate zones, tropical zones, forests and savannah. Other than a tendency to sunburn, they do just fine in Africa. The ancient Egyptians used to farm pigs, which were sacred to the god Set, and the warthog is a native African pig too.

Piggyphobia is just another taboo. All cultures have them. Most are ignorant and silly, but people invent reasons for them anyway and get very affronted if you challenge them.

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Actually I have a farm and one of the wildflock animals I have is pigs (although technically a domestic flock of pigs is called a sweinherd). In temperate and jungle climates they do not really compete with people, but in desert they do. The Mid east is a desert since the Lebanese sold their cedar forests to the Romans. Since I don't consider the Bible verbatim, I think in my climate pigs are a logical food source. They eat the winter kill, the garden scraps, and if I have my way, when I'm dead, me. Everything should be recycled.

loquax said:

But the Sun changed from a God to a star. Zeus changed from a God to a myth. So did 99% of Gods ever worshipped on this strange planet.

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No, the sun doesn't even notice us. You are talking about people's perceptions.

loquax said:

What makes you think your God won't change

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Again, people's perception.

loquax said:

other than blind faith initiated by word of mouth and scriptures all tailored by your fellow, ignorant humans? And if your concept of God was invented entirely by you, after much thought and deliberation, do you consider your opinions infallible?

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An opinion is an opinion, not necessarily the truth

loquax said:

Gods do change,

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again, people's perception

loquax said:

and precisely because of the evolution of our understanding of them. The only thing that stops gods from changing is devout religious types who insist that they do not.

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A person or any group or all of people would have no impact on changing a perfect being

loquax said:

History repeats itself; it's only a matter of time before your God becomes a long forgotten memory of human folly. And I'd be a fool myself to think that new Gods won't take His place.

/harshness

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and?
again, people's perception. My belief system in no way alters God. If God is omnipotent, then it doesn't matter if nobody or everybody believes in God. God would be unchanged.

GeorgeK said:

Ruv said:

Pure phlebotenum

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I'm still trying to gather an accurate definition of this. What does it mean to you?

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Phlebotenum (aka Phlebotinum) doesn't have a meaning, which is the point. It's from the lexicon of TV writers and used to describe "the magical substance that may be rubbed on almost anything to cause an effect needed by a plot". So dilithium crystals (the stuff that lets the USS Enterprise achieve warp speed in Star Trek), a sonic screwdriver (used by the Doctor to modify almost any electromechanical device in Dr Who), nanotechnology (which does the same job as magic in lots of Sci Fi stories), or luminol (a substance which, while it really exists, can be used to prove anything in the CSI franchise).

Similarly, saying outside the space-time continuum is like saying beyond the dimensionality of human existence, or a standing wave in the subspace hypersphere. It's pure phlebotenum.

Actually I have a farm and one of the wildflock animals I have is pigs (although technically a domestic flock of pigs is called a sweinherd). In temperate and jungle climates they do not really compete with people, but in desert they do.

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More than goats, poultry and cattle, and enough so that even the wealthy would shun them? The biggest problem with pig-farming in the Middle East I think wouldn't be feeding them but keeping them cool, yet it's clear that pigs survived there anyway. The Ancient Egyptians managed to farm them; the Old Testament is full of references to swine, and so are the other ancient texts from the region, as this one of the Assyrian King Ashurbanipal after he subjugated Akkad (from the book of Nahum):
- so you have to figure that from ancient times the swine were either being farmed in the Middle East, or foraging just fine on their own (maybe on His Majesty King Ashurbanipal's military ventures. )

There's also this argument: if farming pigs were simply uneconomical then you don't need religious proscription to prevent it. Simple economics will do the job. We don't have religious proscriptions these days saying: Investeth not in the Schemes of the Pyramids; neither shalt thou give thy personal details to any man from Nigeria; nor buy thee no acre that farmeth the ostrich; nor court thee no maid of Russia whose kindred thou knowest not. (Though maybe we should! )

I think that your assertion is originally attributable to American Anthropologist Marvin Harris, who was a proponent of cultural materialism, and a fan of Karl Marx. But I think it's pretty clear nowadays that not all taboos have materialistic origins, just as not every time we sneeze, it's a symptom of class war.

loquax said:

I'd like to see you raise a point that doesn't fall under "perception".

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Theology

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Ruv Draba said:

Similarly, saying outside the space-time continuum is like saying beyond the dimensionality of human existence,

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exactly my point

Ruv Draba said:

or a standing wave in the subspace hypersphere.

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I'll take your word for it. I don't remember a lot of the physics

Ruv Draba said:

It's pure phlebotenum.

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So phlebotenum is simply a less obvious form of ad hominem. It's merely a veiled insult rather than any logical proof.

Ruv Draba said:

More than goats, poultry and cattle, and enough so that even the wealthy would shun them?

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Yes, if....
The Middle east as we know it is a big place. Much of it is fairly inhospitable desert, but there are oases and river valleys that at least archeologically were lush. The big "powers that were" guarded these areas and many an ancient war was fought over the access to water and or arable land. The ancient Israelites were the ones to write the books that would eventually make their way into the old testament. Most of the stories refer to the Israelite life as one of a desert nomad/raider and not an agrarian society until much later in their history (after the books were written). Societal tabboos usually harken back to the old days when things were rough. Especially when things are steeped in religion, the reasons for tabboos can easily become lost.

Pigs won't follow you around all day the way that goats and sheep often do. They have what are considered very poor flocking instincts. When a threat shows up, they scatter. They are also very difficult to leash in any reasonable manner to expect it to last for a 20 mile trek. They would be very inefficient to have in that kind of society. You would end up expending more energy restraining and feeding them than you would get from eating them. They have no wool. Their teats are too small to effectively milk by hand. The only product obtainable from them without slaughtering them is manure, which is only useful if you have a farm. They are not an animal built for wandering. They are an animal built for a permanent settlement, which was a rare thing for the authors of the Old Testament. Even those who were wealthy would quickly realize that pigs as livestock for nomads is a recipe for the poorhouse and then the grave.

Of the nature of pigs, I know this to be true. Whether those are the ultimate reasons for the taboo, nobody can truly know, but it is a logical assumption given the evidence and fits the lifestyle of the authors.

So phlebotenum is simply a less obvious form of ad hominem. It's merely a veiled insult rather than any logical proof.

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No; it's humour applied to a logical perspective, and not veiled - I supplied a link on first usage.

Pigs won't follow you around all day the way that goats and sheep often do. Interesting and very plausible reasons that pigs are not friends to nomadic cultures elided.

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Except that Jews are documented as slaves in Egypt (a place of many cities and fixed farms), and thereafter (following the conquests of Moses), had capitals like Samaria and Jerusalem. A fixed capital requires fixed farmland around it and a fixed water source. That's not a nomadic culture.

If I had to imagine a reason for the taboo, I'd first look to the fact that we know Egyptians had pigs, that they oppressed and enslaved the Jewish people to such an extent that the Jews eventually fled, and that Jewish people were swineherds to the Egyptians -- a job they hated. I can easily imagine them seeing pigs as a symbol of the oppressor and therefore hated; I can't see farming theory being the cause when these guys used to farm them. It looks cultural rather than materialistically-driven.

No idea about the Islamic version - the when or the why. Did Mohammed invent the taboo, adopt it or inherit it? But bear in mind that there were and are many cities in the Middle East (it was the Cradle of Civilisation after all, and Mohammed himself lived in and around the city of Mecca in the early part of his life). The nomads of the Arabian peninsula weren't self-sufficient - they supplemented their needs by raiding oases and cities. So over all, the 'nomadic' argument doesn't look plausible to me.

Ruv Draba said:

Except that Jews are documented as slaves in Egypt (a place of many cities and fixed farms), .

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Well that depends upon your idea of slavery. Not many groups of slaves could just decide, "Well on the 27th of this month we will just leave..." That doesn't quite fit the modern idea of slavery (meaning last 3 centuries) No, I think, the jews stayed in Egypt because their nomadic life was just that bad.

Ruv Draba said:

and thereafter (following the conquests of Moses), had capitals like Samaria and Jerusalem. A fixed capital requires fixed farmland around it and a fixed water source. That's not a nomadic culture..

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again, late enough that it was after the books were written and neither are in the Nile River valley

Ruv Draba said:

If I had to imagine a reason for the taboo, I'd first look to the fact that we know Egyptians had pigs, that they oppressed and enslaved the Jewish people to such an extent that the Jews eventually fled, and that Jewish people were swineherds to the Egyptians -- a job they hated. I can easily imagine them seeing pigs as a symbol of the oppressor and therefore hated; I can't see farming theory being the cause when these guys used to farm them. It looks cultural rather than materialistically-driven..

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Guesses are guesses, and your's is as valid as mine

Ruv Draba said:

No idea about the Islamic version - the when or the why. Did Mohammed invent the taboo, adopt it or inherit it? But bear in mind that there were and are many cities in the Middle East (it was the Cradle of Civilisation after all, and Mohammed himself lived in and around the city of Mecca in the early part of his life). The nomads of the Arabian peninsula weren't self-sufficient - they supplemented their needs by raiding oases and cities. So over all, the 'nomadic' argument doesn't look plausible to me.

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I'm lost, how do Islam and Arabs come into the discussion?