Mormon Transhumanist Association

Thanks for the summary, Lincoln.

Great post. Tight and well structured line of reasoning.

A decent argument, and maybe true, but it depends completely on the assumption that the origin of life is extremely improbable.    If the initial origin of life is so "difficult" as to be a miracle, then, yes, of course it suggests a godly creator.

But, we don't know that.    It might be that if you take a lifeless ocean, stir well and warm to 20C, life emerges every time as a simple consequence of chemistry.    In that case, who needs a creator to make life?

Reality could be anywhere in between.

But, the point is that the existence of life does not prove the need for a creator unless we could prove that life is extremely improbable.   At the moment, we don't know enough about life, so we cannot use this argument to prove God.

Hi Greg. Thanks for commenting. I agree that this is not an argument for the existence of God. I don't think there are any. God is posited, not proven, except within the context of a position -- and my position includes as much faith in the immanence of God. However, combine these thoughts with the simulation argument and you've got plenty of room for reflection on the possibility that advanced intelligences are responsible for at least aspects of our existence.

By the way, I should add that I do not think the first instance(s) of simple life were the consequence of any supernatural miracle. So far as I am concerned, gods are as much the product of natural evolutionary processes (even if unfamiliar to us) as we are . . . but that's a natural miracle -- truely sublime.

PingBack from http://richarddawkins.astrogear.info/2008/02/12/chapter-four-of-the-god-delusion-by-richard-dawkins/

Well, unfortunately your article is pretty much rhetorical only, as you don't actually counter-argue Dawkins', you simply diminish and quote him out of context making it seems like Dawkins' is being naive all the time. Let me be fair here:

First of all, to be very clear, the Boeing 747 metaphor story is not authored by Dawkins'. It was devised by Fred Hoyle as a way to argue that in the same way a Boeing 747 couldn't 'simply happen', so couldn't we, complex beings. Therefore, God must have designed us. This is a creationist argument. Dawkins' simply debunk it again. You correctly stated that but you completely missed the point that a Boeing 747 indeed didn't simply 'came to be', we humans designed it. The main confusion is what everybody thinks about Natural Selection: it doesn't happen by 'chance'! The mutations are random, indeed, but the process is absolutely not random. Please, refer to the Origin of the Species for a better elaboration.

Then you fall into the exact mistake that Dawkins spend most the 4th chapter trying to explain: Natural Selection doesn't deal with the initial step: for this we need the Athropic Principle. Natural Selection follow from this point on only.

You only quoted that Dawkins stated "one of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding". And you sounded offended. But don't be because the full paragraph reads more like this:

"(...) as I shall repeat in Chapter 8, one of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding. Admissions of ignorance and temporary mystification are vital to good science. It is therefore unfortunate, to say the least, that the main strategy of <b>creation propagandists</b> is the negative one of seeking out gaps in scientific knowledge and claiming to fill them with 'intelligent design' by default."

Acknowledge here that his target in this particular paragraph are the creationists. I also fail to understand why you say "This is a poor observation, illustrating that Dawkins is better at science than engineering" when referring to the Dawkins rebutal of the 'organs are too complex not to have been designed'. Again, here is the more complete context:

"Evolved organs, elegant and efficient as they often are, also demonstrate revealing flaws - <b>exactly as you'd expect if they have an evolutionary history, and exactly as you would not expect if they were designed</b>. I have discussed examples in other books: the re-
current laryngeal nerve, for one, which betrays its evolutionary history in a <b>massive and wasteful detour</b> on its way to its destination. (...) Therefore, to explain the evolution of complex life, we cannot resort to the same kind of statistical reasoning as we are able to apply to the origin of life. The events that constitute run-of-the-mill evolution, as distinct from its singular origin (and perhaps a few special cases), cannot have been very improbable."

"This distinction <b>may seem puzzling</b>, and I must explain it further, using the so-called anthropic principle. (...) The anthropic argument is usually applied to the cosmos, and I'll come to that. But I'll introduce the idea on a smaller, planetary scale. We exist here on Earth. Therefore Earth must be the kind of planet that is capable of generating and supporting us, however unusual, even unique, that kind of planet might be."

He goes on and on detailing and explaining exactly what this means, the athropic principle and what we already know about cosmology and the event of the origin of life. Then you seem confused about the concept of improbability. Again, it was not Dawkins who 'stated' this, he is only quoting previous body of knowledges that are well understood. Therefore, your statement, "An unstated implication is that the improbability of super intelligent life, such as a God, would not be much more than the improbability of human life" is wrong. Here a small snippet of a much longer explanation that I recommend people read in its entirety from the book:

"(...) however improbable the origin of life might be, we know it happened on Earth because we are here. Again as with temperature,
there are two hypotheses to explain what happened - the design hypothesis and the scientific or 'anthropic' hypothesis. The design
approach postulates a God who wrought a deliberate miracle, struck the prebiotic soup with divine fire and launched DNA, or something equivalent, on its momentous career. Again, as with Goldilocks, the anthropic alternative to the design hypothesis is statistical. Scientists invoke the magic of large numbers. (...) Suppose it was so improbable as to occur on only one in a billion planets. (...) even with such absurdly long odds, life will still have arisen on a billion planets - of which Earth, of course, is one. This conclusion is so surprising, I'll say it again. If the odds of life originating spontaneously on a planet were a billion to one against, nevertheless that stupefyingly improbable event would still happen on a billion planets. The chance of finding any one of those billion life-bearing planets recalls the proverbial needle in a haystack. But we don't have to go out of our way to find a needle because (back to the anthropic principle) any beings capable of looking must necessarily be sitting on one of those prodigiously rare needles before they even start the search. Any probability statement is made in the context of a certain level of ignorance. If we know nothing about a planet, we may postulate the odds of life's arising on it as, say, one in a billion. But if we now import some new assumptions into our estimate, things change. A particular planet may have some peculiar properties, perhaps a special profile of element abundances in its rocks, which shift the odds in favour of life's emerging. Some planets, in other words, are more 'Earth-like' than others. Earth itself, of course, is especially Earth-like!"

Then you go on saying: "We do not know whether that transition took place on Earth. It may have occurred elsewhere in our star system or galaxy. It may even have occurred outside our time and space, in a parallel universe. Who knows?" Actually we 'know'. Well, not necessarily in the way of being there some billion years ago to 'see with our own eyes', of course. But we have tons of hard evidence that all life that we know of have roots in this planet. Everything that every living being is, is an accumulation of billion years of evolution and natural selection. One could try to argue that maybe some alien race brought us here at some point. Can be, but for that claim we have zero evidence. Given 1 hundred years of laborious collecting of hard evidence, meticulous analysis from many generations of scientists and no flaw found to the Theory to this day against some wannabe fantastic possibility with zero evidence ... why bother?

This comment is already very long, and as you all can see, the rebutal to every point in this article is in the chapter of the book itself. This chapter is very long, it is not an academic research, it just cites them but they exist and can be freely found in libraries and universities for scrutiny. And as a last rebutal, you see that Dawkins cites - but not totally concur - the idea of a multiverse. It is being researched right now, as we speak, as an alternative to the Big Bang theory (and yet another reason to avoid the idea of a creator). Dawkins quotes theories that are still being considered, researched and for which there is no conclusion right now. Then you cite Joseph Smith trying to draw a parallel like 'Joseph already knew it, douchebag'. Well, not exactly, for one, the theories are very very different. In the multiverse theory there are a lot of evidence and studies suggesting such a thing, like String Theory. On the case of Joseph, it is just wishful thinking that hardly serves as 'evidence' for anything.

So, I hope people don't eat everything they read in a blog. Buy the book and read for yourselves. It is far more elaborated than the author of this post seems to portray.

"(...) It is a strange fact, incidentally, that religious apologists love the anthropic principle. For some reason that makes no sense at all, they think it supports their case. Precisely the opposite is true. The anthropic principle, like natural selection, is an alternative to the design hypothesis. It provides a rational, design-free explanation for the fact that we find ourselves in a situation propitious to
our existence. I think the confusion arises in the religious mind because the anthropic principle is only ever mentioned in the context of
a life-friendly place. What the religious mind then fails to grasp is that two candidate solutions are offered to the problem. God is one.
The anthropic principle is the other. They are alternatives."

Hi Fabio. Thank you for commenting. I hope, as you've recommended, that persons who question my analysis will take the time to read the book for themselves, and to compare my criticisms with Dawkins' text. If there are weaknesses in my criticisms, I hope others will persuade me of them. With that as context, I'll respond to some of your comments.

You state that I do not counter-argue Dawkins. This is both accurate and inaccurate. It is accurate in that I am a proponent of evolution theory, and also recognize serious problems in various religious ideas and practices that Dawkins attacks. It is inaccurate in that I have pointed out significant errors and exceptions in Dawkins' reasoning and definitions. You pointed out that I make Dawkins seem naive at times. You are correct, and that is intentional. Dawkins is, indeed, relatively naive in theological matters, as demonstrated by the criticisms I have proposed. I hope, however, that I have at no time given the impression that I consider Dawkins naive in biological matters, and will repeat my admiration for his work.

You implied that I misattributed to Dawkins the origin of the Boeing 747 metaphor. However, I explicitly attributed the origin of the metaphor to intelligent design advocates. Additionally, you suggested that I misrepresented Dawkins' use of the argument. However, if you will review the book, you will see that Dawkins used the metaphor precisely as I have described: to argue that the creator of something as complex as a Boeing 747 must be EITHER natural selection OR something more complex than the Boeing 747. From there, he argues that something more complex than the Boeing 747 would itself require that its creator be EITHER natural selection OR something more complex still, and so on. His point, in the end, is that something as complex as a God, if such exists at all, would have to be the result of natural selection. I almost entirely agree with this argument. My only reservation is his rather quick dismissal of the current existence of a God that has already resulted from natural selection. This is not, as you suggest, falling into the mistake Dawkins identifies. The mistake he identifies is that of thinking that greater complexity can come before lesser complexity. I'm actually quite willing to share that perspective with him (despite my capacity to imagine problems with it). I'm quite willing to understand God as the result of natural selection.

You claim that Dawkins intended his comment about religion encouraging ignorance to be directed narrowly at "creation propagandists". However, he clearly framed the criticism as an example of a broad generalization, stated as "one of the truly bad effects of religion". If, indeed, Dawkins intended the criticism to so narrowly as you claim, he should have better considered the syntax. If he were willing to recognize that some important interpretations of almost all religions simply do not encourage ignorance, I would have no disagreement with him here. However, such recognition from him would run counter to the goal of his book, which is obviously to cast religion GENERALLY as encouraging ignorance.

You mentioned that you do not understand my criticism of Dawkins' engineering awareness. I'll elaborate. Good engineers are always wasteful and all engineered systems contain defects. Engineers concern themselves with practicalities, and try not to invest time with that which is deemed to fall outside the scope of practical consequence. In information engineering, for example, when lines of code becomes a relatively non-scarce resource, it becomes valuable to "waste" them in order to make your code more readable to other human engineers that may try to read the code later. When processing power or data storage become relatively non-scarce resources, it becomes valuable to "waste" them to produce graphical user interfaces and free online storage of spam email. All of this could be done "much less wastefully" using machine language, command prompts and heavy-handed administration; however, engineers recognize that wasting some things is, on the other hand, gaining other things. In summary, it is simply incorrect to argue that waste or flaws in a system indicates an unintelligent creator. This doesn't mean that the wasteful or flawed system could not be the result of evolution, but it does mean that Dawkins engineering observation in this matter was poor.

You claim I'm wrong to claim that, given Dawkins' arguments, super-intelligent life may not be much more improbable than intelligent life (like humans). My claim is derived from Dawkins' assignments of probability. He claims that the initial origin of life appears to be far more improbable than the subsequent evolution of intelligent life from that basic life. From that, I'm left with the understanding that it is more likely that multi-celled life forms will evolve from basic life forms than it is that basic life forms will emerge in the first place. Likewise, I understand from Dawkins that it is more likely that plants and animals will evolve from multi-celled life forms than it is that multi-celled life forms evolve from single-celled life forms. Again, I understand the evolution of humans from apes is more likely than the evolution of plants and animals from multi-celled life forms. From there, unless you can think of a good reason why humans might prove to be the pinnacle of evolution, I imagine it is more likely that super-intelligent creatures will evolve from us than that we evolved from apes. Again, as I understand Dawkins, this argument results directly from the probabilities that he assigns -- whether the assigned probabilities are right or not is another matter. You suggest that Dawkins' description of the anthropic principle somehow contradicts what I'm claiming, but it does not. You see, I am NOT arguing that the original emergence of basic life required God. To the contrary, I am of the opinion that, barring a truly infinite regress, the original emergence of basic life did indeed occur WITHOUT God because God would be the product of such a process. This may be the source of our misunderstanding because this is not a typical theological perspective; however, it is an authentic Mormon perspective, stemming from Joseph Smith's claim that God did not create all things, but rather "found himself" in an environment and set about organizing it.

You state that we know where the transition from no life to basic life took place, and claim that there is "tons of hard evidence that all life that we know of has roots in this planet". Here you misunderstood my claim. I fully agree that life as we know it evolved on this planet. However, there is no evidence that the initial emergence of basic life occurred on this planet rather than transplanting itself from elsewhere. If ever we discover evidence that it occurred on this planet rather than elsewhere, that's fine and present no problem for the arguments I have presented in my critiques of Dawkins' book. My criticism, however, is that we just don't know where basic life emerged, mostly because we don't even know how it happened at this point. Until we know that, there's no rational way that we can point at any evidence for it occurring on this planet.

Finally, I'll comment that my goal in quoting Joseph Smith, or any other religious figure, is certainly not to detract from the importance of scientific authorities. Rather, my goal is to promote awareness of compatibility between religion and science, which is essential to human progress. Science simply cannot provide ethical or esthetic frameworks for life, present or future. We need religion and other aspects of human culture for that purpose, which is not to say that just any religion or cultural aspect will suffice. We do need to consider the practical ramifications of our faith, and that is where science excels.

God and the anthropic principle are not merely mutually-exclusive alternatives, except in over-simplified thinking on both sides of the conflict.

I re-read your article and I think I get your point. I'll get to that.

First some remarks: I think we almost agree on the Boeing 747 matter, so I'll skip it altogether.

About the 'engineered organs', let me be clear about this: "Evolved organs, elegant and efficient as they often are, also demonstrate revealing flaws - exactly as you'd expect if they have an evolutionary history, and exactly as you would not expect if they were designed."

He is not saying that 'ok, so if it was intelligently designed it would be flawless'. Absolutely no. Read again: organs doesn't have arbitrary flaws: it has the exact kind of flaws that were consequences of millions of years of natural selection, exactly the kind of path that makes no sense in a intelligently designed plan.

For instance. Why do we have hernia? What's the purpose of that. Why would an intelligent engineer add that? Better yet, why would a supposedly higher being put such an obvious flaw? "Many of our human ailments, from lower back pain to hernias, prolapsed uteruses and our susceptibility to sinus infections, result
directly from the fact that we now walk upright with a body that was shaped over hundreds of millions of years to walk on all fours."

So, for almost everything we can trace back an ancestor. Why our eyes can't see the full light spectrum like ultraviolet and infrared and so on. If you try to fake a natural phenomenon, you can achieve a good enough behavior that a casual observer would overlook, but proper analysis would reveal as fraud. On the other hand the outcome of a natural effect can be traced and properly explained. Meaning: if everything were intelligently design we would find several flaws, but none of them would necessarily make any logic.

Or one could say: the intelligent designer was so clever that he made it like so we would be puzzled by this very question someday. He likes to trick us. Or another one: he didn't necessarily 'designed' all the intricate details. Let us assume that he simply created coherent physical and biological laws, dropped a few ingredients and let everything boil down to its current state 'naturally'.

Then we fall back again to the ultimate question? If God created us (in whatever way), who created God?

Finally you could argue about the multiverse explanation, that in at least one of them, there were a universe before us, where life happened and some form of life evolved to gain almost God like attributes and perhaps he created our universe to his own wills. Somethink like The Matrix or the 13th Floor or Plato's Allegory of the Cave.

Ok, I got it: it "could" be. The problem is that for this allegorical idea there is zero evidence. And I mean zero. It is as probable as Santa Klaus or the 7 Dwarfs or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. It is not even calculable as there are not references, no set of variables.

Unfortunately we can't afford to spend limited resources on folklorical ideas, otherwise it would be as valid to investigate Santa Klaus flying over the skies by Xmas' Eve. That's a purely economical reason.

Now, Dawkins do cite multiverses. He acknowledges that they are nothing but theories with no hard evidences available just yet. Max Tegmark proposes that all structures that exist mathematically exist also physically. So, as multiverses are mathematically possible (now this is big set of literature to digest ...) it 'could' be possible.

As Dawkins also says, he is reluctant to support such an idea. On the other hand it is extremely more probable than the notion of a God.  That's the idea.

If we need to construct a whole world of phantasy, with multi-universes, possible intelligent and highly advanced civilizations in some of them such as that they are in  a evolutionary stage that makes it attainable for them to create other universes and, possibly we are one such a universe. We are out of the realm of science an into the realm of science fiction.

The main problem that we have with religion in general is what I said before: indoctrination. God is the ultimate idea that can't be discussed, can't be argued against. So, many modern non-radical religious people try to bend science so it fits the God Theory. The problem is that's the wrong way of doing science: we can't start from a conclusion and then try to fill in the explanation for that and call it a day. We start from a hypothesis - the God Hypothesis - and we need to find evidence to support it. Very well, it has been what? 2 thousand years? 5 thousand? Depends on the religion. Anyway, up until now, there is not a single thread of evidence to support it. It is time to dismiss it. Zeus, Thor and an army of other demi-gods were already thrown out to the realm of mythology. That's only one to go. Seems harsh, I know. That's the core of The God Delusion: argue about the God Hypothesis and why it is not necessary in practice to have a healthy, moral, fulfilled civilization.

On the matter that maybe in some million years we evolve to be God like. Again, this goes into the speculative realm of science fiction. Could be. Could not be. Who knows. But it is not economically practical to pursue such matters. If it has to be, it will eventually come. There are already many theories on how homo sapiens could evolve - or be extinct before that. Anyway, Earth itself has no more than 4 or 5 billion years ahead before the Sun runs out of hydrogen to burn. That's for sure. Unless we find out a practical way to devise worm holes into a Earth-like region of the universe (or the multi-verse?) we are doomed to be destroyed along with the Earth anyway. Bearing in mind that it takes hundreds of light-years just to go to some of our neighbor galaxies, let alone across the universe. Travelling such distances requires humongous amounts of energy, and it is not free. Worm holes? Who knows alright? Still in the realm of science fiction though. Let's leave that to George Lucas. Eventually we may find a way, but we are not postulating nor indoctrinating anything right now. Researchers are on their way. It might take generations to come to something. If it is possible, we will find out, but we are not going to postulate anything right now.

That's the core of the problem: not assuming anything up front as 'truth', not considering any text as 'holy' or 'utterly important' without rigorous analysis. And letting options open for us to dismiss serious research that ends up being proved wrong. By not having any fixed leash, we will improve faster. Until we have holy books, holy ideas, not-open-for-discussion subjects, we will improver slower. That's for sure.

About your last statement, God and the anthropic principle are necessarily mutually-exclusive alternatives. That's the definition of the principle. Although it is nowhere near the status of 'Law', it's still far more coherent than the God Hypothesis. Refer to Brandon Carter, Roger Penrose and others to understand the principle. Dawkins do explain it well enough for the target audience of the book, it is a very lengthy explanation and no where near a oversimplification.

We don't know all the answers, no scientist, not even Dawkins, ever claimed that. There are lots of astronomers, physicians, mathematicians, cosmologists and several others gathering information, evidence, simulating complex situations. None of them are indoctrinated by any particular bed time story. They have the full range of possibilities to explore without being censored. If any of the previous theories proves to be wrong, it will be discarded, no hard feelings. That's freedom.

Now, I am not in any way saying that mormonism is like the other fanatical religions. I do not know it's core, so I will not discuss it. But other religions are showing themselves very bad right now. It is necessarily slowing us down a whole lot. It is not economically optimized. We are wasting valuable resources for nothing. That's why people such as Dawkins, Dennett, Sam Harrins, Hitchens and others are so aggressively attacking them in the open. We have been persecuted for centuries. It's about time to say 'enough is enough'. There is not other way to do that without attacking the foundation of almost every religion: indoctrination.

If your religion motivates learning and critical thinking, cool. Though I can't see how critical thinking is compatible with any religion, because sooner or later I would want to criticize this religion itself and it would have to hold against scrutiny. If it is only a philosophy, that's ok too. But the question has to be raised the same way people scrutinize science constantly, which is a very good fine tuning method to stay closer to the truth. If the question is censored or can't be further explored, then it truly doesn't motivate critical thinking as in science there is nothing we can't openly argue against. If Darwinism itself is strongly proven wrong someday, we will dismiss it.

Sorry to invade here again, but for another perspective on why we, atheists, are so pissed off:

http://richarddawkins.net/article,2352,n,n

We are the blatant minority, that's no denial on that. For every word we raise, dozens of rocks are thrown against us. For a moment, it almosts gives us the desire to give up and say 'Godspeed'.

And for those that are not so interested in reading the entire God Delusion, here is the very small summary that Dawkins usually use as a 'sales pitch' for the book:

http://richarddawkins.net/article,2353,n,n

Best Regards

Thank you for your response, Fabio.

While I entirely embrace the idea that we are the result of evolution, I continue to disagree with your assessment that designed systems do not contain the sorts of flaws we find in the human body. You ask what the purpose of a hernia is. I ask, in return, what is the purpose of a hull breach in a Boeing 747? You ask why a super-intelligent being would put in the human body such an obvious flaw as a hernia. My response is that all Boeing 747 engineers don't intend their creation to be impermeable in all possible situations, and wouldn't even if they could because of design tradeoffs. To the point, I consider human creations to be the result of evolution quite as much as the rest of the natural world. Our intelligence, however, allows us to evolve our creations much more rapidly than what we observe in the relatively unintelligent world around us.

Please know that I reject the idea that God is playing tricks on us. To the contrary, I advocate the idea that God is teaching us (or evolving us) to become God. Why, then, does God not just create us immediately as God? Well, either that's not possible or we're the first beings that will realize that possibility. Due to overwhelming probability, I think the former -- which, as you'll recognize, entails that the God I'm describing must have limitations, and is certainly not omnipotent in the classical sense. Stemming from this, I also reject the idea that God created everything. Rather, I think God increases the probability of universes like our own, as well as the probability of universes of increasing interest to intelligent and super-intelligent beings. The God I'm describing here would be an evolutionary advantage (in terms of survival) among universes within a multiverse.

You ask, if God created us then who created God? My answer is that, barring an infinite regression of Gods, evolution is among the mechanisms by which the first God was created. If the capacity of God (creation of intelligent universes like our own) is possible, and if we attain and exercise it with any regularity, we are almost certainly neither the only nor the first to do so. Indeed, as the Simulation Argument goes, we would almost certainly already be living in a world created by a God.

You mention that there is no evidence that we are living in a computed world. I agree. However, evidence or the lack thereof is not the only matter to consider in relation to this question. There is also a practical matter to consider, consequent to a negation of the Simulation Hypothesis: if we are not living in a computed world, we almost certainly will never attain or exercise the ability to produce computed worlds ourselves. That might not matter to you. However, it does matter to me. Moreover, there is an important class of truths that are created only subsequent to faith in them. I do not want to see human creativity bounded, and so try to recognize and embrace the logical consequences of that hope. You can see, then, that I will disagree that the Flying Spaghetti Monster is an appropriate analogy. Whereas the existence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is reflected in no practical ramifications for me, the existence of the sort of God I am describing does.

You state that a multiverse is extremely more probable than a God. As I mentioned in my previous post to you, I don't think you've appropriately considered the probabilities, particularly given that we are already experiencing a universe that contains intelligent life. While I agree that Gods are less probable than a lifeless universe, I don't think they are much (if at all) less probable than intelligent life like humans, unless we're almost certainly doomed to destroy ourselves.

I agree that much of this (but not all) goes beyond what we currently know about our universe, its origins and its environment. However, perhaps unlike you, I am fine with that. I recognize a great deal of value in faith. It is the origin of discovery and creation. Without it, there would not be science (let alone technology), whose methodology depends on faith. To understand this, you may need to restrain yourself from thinking of faith as it is often portrayed among atheists, as something akin to irrationality, dogmatism or love of ignorance. There is nothing in the definition of "faith" that necessitates any of those features. Faith is trust in and will toward discovery and creation of its target. Robust faith in God is to discover and join her to the extent she already exists, and to create and become her to the extent she does not yet. Wishful thinking, alone, is not faith. Faith is action.

Whether there is evidence for God is not of primary importance. God is posited, not proven, except within the context of a position. There is plenty of evidence for some understandings of God, whereas other understandings lend themselves to refutation, wondering or apathy. I should mention, at this point, that the God I describe above is actually only an aspect of my understanding of God. There are imminent aspects of God, manifest in a sort of esthetic in my life, that I value as much.

Trying to bend results to fit hypotheses may be a poor way of doing science, but it happens to be an excellent way of doing engineering, if it proves possible. Science is knowledge. It describes part of the possible. Given that knowledge, we set out to reshape the world toward that which we desire. Technology is power. It leverages our knowledge, but then transcends it to the point of revealing more of the possible. For intelligent beings like humans, none of this can be accurately described as unintentional. To the extent "intent" has any meaning, we intend knowledge and power according to our interests. Where we do not discover, we try to create; where we have trouble creating, we try to discover more, until we can create that which we were seeking in the first place. This is faith. Imagining the age of the Sun, the speed of light, the vast distances of space, or anything else to be hard limits to possibilities is a pessimism I do not share. Neither do I share the apathy that would like to relegate this to inconsequential fiction; to the contrary, as is readily demonstrated among engineers of all sorts, our imaginations are already hard at work creating the future in ways we never before imagined.

For what it's worth, I don't consider Zeus, Thor or any other Gods to have been "thrown out" to the realm of mythology. They always were mythology, in the formal sense of that word, as are all of our modern Gods. There are certainly fictional aspects to mythology, but that hardly captures its full essence, and ignores its value. As we create our Gods, they create us. The Simulation Hypothesis is already at work at lower resolutions, and has been at least since the first intelligence imagined transcending itself.

You suggest that religion is not essential to a healthy, moral and fulfilled civilization. That's a hypothesis for which there is no more evidence than there is for many Gods. I think quite the opposite, that religion is essential to our long term survival, although in a more complex manner than you might suppose, offhand. I anticipate (perhaps even "hope" for) increasing secularization in the near term, as our civilization proceeds with tracking at a communal level what many individuals have personally experienced as stages of faith.

You suggest that we should not assume anything to be true. That, however, is impossible. There is no progress without assumptions, and progress is only ever meaningful within a context of assumptions. Science depends on all sorts of assumptions, such as uniformity and causality. Hypotheses themselves are assumptions. We cannot prove or disprove that which we do not assume. None of that means we have to be dogmatic. There, I generally agree with you. To the extent that we disallow questions, whether of secular or spiritual matters, we're damning ourselves.

You've repeated that God and the anthropic principle are mutually exclusive. Again, I disagree. The mutual exclusion of the two depends entirely on your understanding of God, and thus they are wholly mutually exclusive only to the extent that someone (whether in position or negation) is dogmatic about a particular definition of God. As I understand God, God is as compatible with the anthropic principle as you are, given that you are more intelligent than someone that is both familiar with the anthropic principle and unfamiliar with you.

You mention that scientists are not indoctrinated in any bedtime stories. That's simply not true. As a good psychologist will confirm, all sorts of bedtime stories are informing both their observations and their decisions. You claim also that there will be no hard feelings between scientists. That too, is inaccurate, as anyone that has known scientists can attest. Scientists, like all humans, are interested creatures. The benefit of science arises not from the scientists themselves, but from the methodology, which has repeatedly demonstrated its excellence as an epistemic tool for the discovery of communal truth, despite our individual interests. I use "communal" to preface "truth" because that's as much as science can ever claim, although it's a lot more than mere relativism. Put another way, then, the benefit of science is its influence toward respect for others' observations. It is, indeed, an act of compassion, and a moral duty in epistemic matters.

I strongly agree with you that religion too often takes on itself an antagonism toward science, which results not only in the waste and persecution you mention, but also in prolonged suffering for humanity generally. An important part of what we do, here at the Mormon Transhumanist Association, is try to persuade religious persons better to see the value of science and technology, quite as we try to persuade secular persons better to see the value of faith and spirituality. The competition that some create between science and religion is unnecessary and immoral.

I also strongly agree with your final words about the importance of criticism, particularly in religious matters, and thank you sincerely for the example of respectful and thoughtful criticism that you have provided here.

Hey, I'm probably being boring but about the 747 matter again, we are missing the point here. The intelligent design approach is that something as complex as a 747 boeing can't be formed by 'randomly' assembling its pieces. It requires some kind of intelligent being to assemble them in a minimaly usable form. That's how creationists dismiss Darwinism. It seems that you are not a creationist so I am probably missing my point here, but just to be clear: the 747 is not the result of random mutations under the scrutiny of 'natural' selection, it is 'artificial' selection. It is the same thing we do with agriculture where we manually select and mix breeds to produce better crops faster than nature alone can.

The problem with evolution is that most people think that Darwinism evolution is based on pure chance. Randomness. That's not true. What do happen are random mutation and genetic defects. Once they happen then natural selection takes place and forces the environment upon it. If those mutations prove to be improvements, they survive and can find room to improve. If they fail they either perish or new mutations make a detour. This kind of very very slow process results in the kinds of biological masses we have today and we can trace their evolution path down the road until a common ancestor.

For those interested, I would recommend 'The Blind Watchmaker', also from Dawkins where he elaborates on this more general 'blind watchmaker' problem.

About the God you describe. You argue than one possibility is that yes, God created the environment on which we can 'freely' evolve, and this God by itself could be the result of another God from this or another Universe, and so on and so forth. So we have 2 ends for this: either we have an infinite set of Gods succeeding Gods or we have to find an origin point.

So, it is easier to simply think that the Universes always existed, maybe being destroyed and recreated or the multi-verse approach, but without any need to put a character as a God in between. It is simply not necessary for a good enough explanation. No need to try to fill in with an anthropomorphic explanation. If the Universe indeed had a starting point, again, there is no need to put a God to be the trigger point, otherwise one would need to explain the origin of God himself. And if God maybe always existed, it is still easier to say that the Universe simply always existed. In all cases, putting a God-character only makes the explanation more complex than it need to be.

I also agree with your definition of faith and yes, science requires faith. But faith is a tool for the job, not an end as other religions preach. We have to have faith to start something, otherwise none of us would even leave our beds every morning. We do so because we have faith on, at least, moving forward.

I probably wasn't very happy choosing words. You are right, human beings don't like to be proved wrong. So if I have a reknowned theory of something, and somebody else comes in and proves me wrong, I can get angry, I can deny it, I can do all sorts of things. The problem is that if it doesn't work, it doesn't work, no matter how hard I scream. The scientific method at least gives us tools to argue and at least come to a reasonable end. We try to separate what work from what not. So, generally, as a community, we have means to enforce what works and what doesn't through generally accepted and repeatable methods. Someone thinks Evolution is wrong, please step forward and lets us see the explanation, but it better be good.

About a secularist civilization, we really don't know: we never tried! At least, not in our recent history, a few hundred years up to now. That's the problem, religion imposes artificial barriers that are absurd. We can't argue against it, even if we can prove them wrong it is not accepted. The problem is not that secular people can be wrong. Of course we can. The problem is when religion people is wrong but it is considered 'immoral' to question them. Why is that? I can argue against someone elses political views, but I can't touch on the matter of their religion tastes. Why does religion have to have more privileges? That's what I consider not practical.

Fortunately many democratic states are separated from the church. Some more than others, of course. Religion still walks around the state. At least here Churches doesn't have to pay taxes. Businesses founded around Church have government benefits that no other private business can reach. Laws are approved without all the necessary reasoning - alas embryo stem cell research. Fortunately some more reasoned countries allowed it so we are not completely wasting our time.

Ultimately I, personally, don't need a God, don't need a set of predefined and unquestionable rules. Our state already has a constitution and an extensive set of laws designed to enforce good behavior and pacific populations. I can't buy a gun here. I will be arrested for robbery. I will be persecuted for aggression and so on. All good and dandy. I don't need more than that.

Human behavior, to an extent, is also molded through natural selection. There is no such thing as 'right' or 'wrong'. What is wrong to me, can be right to you. In a well behaved civilization there are some rules that although I can disaprove, in general, are needed to keep us from fighting each other. That's why we have laws and lawyers. But I can't try to force my point of view on you or whatever. We can do what we are doing here: discuss. But this is the kind of discussion that can't have a winner because I will not convince you and you will not convince me. That's fine. At least we were civilized and talked. Back to the point, 'right' and 'wrong' varies according to culture, period of time, geographic location and so on. What was considered 'right' 5 centuries ago is not acceptable today. That's why it bothers me to have indoctrination brain wash children's mind to accept absolutes. Children should have a religion free education and incentive to improve their critical thinking. Not rebel thinking, mind you! Be critical is not being negative, is exercising thinking for yourself without any artificially enforced absolute. Nothing is out of the question. If our current laws are obsolete, we can argue against them and ask for refinements and revisions. Slavery was ok 2 centuries ago. It is not today. Critical thinking freed us from that. That's one small example of 'right' becoming 'wrong' due to reasoning. If such a thing was set in stone, in an unquestionable holy book that can't be argued against .... oh wait, there is such statement, and there is such a book! (sorry, I was sarcastic, I know, couldn't resist).

So, as you might imagine, I am an atheist :-) Don't worry! I don't bite! So, for other religions point of views, I was supposed to be a maniacal child rapist of some sort, or a suicidal depressive being. Guess what, I am not! :-) I have the freedom to do whatever pleases me - within the boundaries that what pleases me doesn't hurt others, of course. I respect people, I am married, myself and my wife never had a serious argument in 5 years because both of us exercise reasoning all the time, so we don't need to throw absolutes in each other's face. My family is agnostic and we live like everybody else does. I have friends from very different cultures, places, races, religions, and we all do good. Actually most of them label themselves in some religion but they actually cherry pick bits and pieces from each to justify themselves. That's ok to cherry pick, they are reasoning as well, without having to walked a pre-determined path.

Then I ask them: "if you are already pick and choosing only the bits that make sense to you, you are an intelligent being that's reasoning, so why do you need that religion X or Y?". They doesn't have an answer. I would speculate that they were raised with such intense family pressure towards a particular religion that the brain wash almost worked. Today they simply can't walk away from it. They know they can't follow it word by word, they have no patience to go to their church (unless for occasions of marriage or something like this), but they can't argue against it. That's the point that makes me nervous: they know some things are wrong, but are not willing to question, they are not willing to argue. They are all grown man, with free will at their disposal, but there are subjects that are considered 'tabu'.

Ok, I won't push them, of course. As I have free will to do whatever I wan't, so do they, and let me respect it. There are millions of things that I don't know. There are billions of things that science can't grasp right now. But can religion? Of course not. For example: science doesn't know the origin of life. Did it happen here? Did it start in outer space and maybe a comet brought the seeds here? Who knows. I don't know. Science doesn't know and no Religion knows it as well. But, we don't have absolutes: we are open to whatever serious theory that comes along. If you have evidence, and logically palatable explanation, we can consider it. But to just say "I believe so, so it has to be like that", or "my holy book says so, so it has to be like that", well, that don't help, right? :-) Just adds noise to the problem. And I always say: "if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem".

There are questions that will probably go unanswered and that we will never be able to answer. That's unfortunate, but that's how it is. We will do our best to try to answer whatever we can, but we recognize our limitations. But the point is: as we don't have God filling every empty gap that we still didn't explain, we are better equiped to explore without feeling guilt of 'breaking' any artificial dogma.

About 'Personal Gods'. Some people feel better by believing in their spirits, angels, some inner God or whatever. I am totally ok with that. Makes them feel better, doesn't harm anyone else, and until that person don't try to force this to others, that's totally ok.

The next chapter (#5) of the God Delusion will do something that you may not like: try to explain why people that doesn't believe on some sort of God can be as happy and as comforted as anyone else. "Unweaving the Rainbow" is another book from Dawkins where he elaborates better on this particular matter: we can have very fulfilled lives, we can be creative, we can be artists, we can be totally happy, civilized, with all sorts of good relationships without any kind of religion.

Well, I think I already talked too much :-) Sorry to bother.

Cheers.

Fabio, thanks again for engaging in this discussion.

I agree, for the most part, with your description of evolution in the first few paragraphs of your post. You're correct that I am not a Creationist in the counter-evolution sense of that label. However, I do, as a rational consequence of my faith in our potential to become creators of universes such as the one in which we currently live, posit that such creators almost certainly already exist. To the extent they do, let's discover and join them. To the extent they do not, let's create and become them -- although succeeding in this latter pursuit, outside the context of the former, will be almost impossible.

You suggest that there is no need for God in our explanation of the origins of the universe. I almost agree, so long as we are strictly looking backward. However, looking forward, and given the sort of future I value, there certainly is need of faith in God. If there is no God of the sort I have described then we almost certainly will not become such beings ourselves. You may not care. I do. Moreover, caring, in matters such as this, may be essential to realization. My faith, here, is a practical calculation, reflecting my desires. Does that prove anything? No. It proves nothing. However, again, proof is not of primary importance here. God is posited, not proven, except within the context of a position, and some positions can be proven only subsequent to faith in them. This does make the explanation of the universe more complicated than it needs to be for meaningless existentialism. It does not, however, make it more complicated than it needs to be for eternal life. We are quite free to choose whether to express our faith in this matter or not. There truly is no rational necessity on either side of the matter. What do you desire? Maybe it won't matter, but why not bet that it will?

I think we agree on the value of faith. It should be aimed at knowledge and power, rather than at ignorance and impotence. Moreover, unless we ever become omniscient and omnipotent (which, except as ideals to be pursued eternally or as economic descriptions for great knowledge and power, make no sense to me), we'll always need faith. It will remain an essential principle of action.

I agree with your characterization of science. It helps us, as a community, counter the weight of our individual biases, and achieve a communal truth of far greater applicability.

I agree that religion would benefit, quite as much as any other aspect of our culture, from careful criticism. Too many religious persons are too afraid of their own limitations. We should be prepared to learn. The Bible teaches that eternal life is to know God. So far as I am concerned, that is an invitation to embrace eternal progression in knowledge. No one has all the answers -- not even God, I suspect.

You say that you don't need God, because you don't need predefined and unquestionable rules other than those provided by your state. Observe that your God (the one you're saying you don't need) is an annoying little tyrant. I don't need that God either. What DO you need? What DO you desire? The God worthy of worship asks you these questions.

You suggest moral relativism, but appeal to the need for laws and use "should" to describe the kind of education you desire for children. There are many degrees of ethics between relativism and absolutism. Law is to a community as will is to an individual. Good is to a community as happiness is to an individual. Here's how Joseph Smith described it:

"Happiness is the object and design of our existence; and will be the end thereof, if we pursue the path that leads to it; and this path is virtue, uprightness, faithfulness, holiness, and keeping all the commandments of God.  But we cannot keep all the commandments without first knowing them, and we cannot expect to know all, or more than we now know unless we comply with or keep those we have already received. That which is wrong under one circumstance, may be, and often is, right under another. God said, "Thou shalt not kill;" at another time He said, "Thou shalt utterly destroy." This is the principle on which the government of heaven is conducted -- by revelation adapted to the circumstances in which the children of the kingdom are placed."

I'll stop for now by mentioning that you've been no bother, so please don't apologize. I've enjoyed the discussion. Many of your concerns resonate with me. There are, indeed, many problems within religion and among religious persons. No question there.

This discussion reminds me of some other interesting readings. Unfortunately I don't remember the references so I'll try my best to summarize it. On the matter of moral relativism and the need for laws, let me clarify this. Although good and evil are purely circunstancial notions, Good people will do good things and Evil people will do bad things, period. We don't necessarily need religion or lack thereof to make evil people. Meaning, I don't commit murder, I never raped someone or intend to, I never robbed poor old ladies in the street and so on. I don't need religion to tell me that I shouldn't behave like that.

Now comes the unreferenced theory. Some scientists argue that darwinian natural selection can explain more than simple biology evolution. It also explains population behavior. In essence, because of our larger brains compared to any other mammal in the planet, we need to be born before we are ready to. We are basically born premature. Most other animals, when they are born, they can at least go on walking right away, humans can't do that. Skipping a lot of explanation here, one thing led to another and we developed society like structures where we started to behave in groups, like tribes, one looking after the other for the general well being of the tribe.

So, we still have animal like instincts but our brains were shaped to this community style of behaving. There is no 'good' or 'evil' per se, but the point is the individuals that decide to behave against the well being of the general population were usually naturally selected to perish. They would not be able to left offsprings or they would be simply killed or not survive without the help from others. It's not a rule written in stone, it's simple behavioral evolution.

Fast forward to now. Homo sapiens became masters of their own evolution. We started from a naturally developed behavioral foundation and evolved from there. As we can think from ourselves and make decisions that other animals can't, we slowly shaped what we now call 'civilization'. There's a lot of things for a small child to learn. They already have some basic instincts imprinted in their genes, but for the human system to work they have to learn outside information that is taught by its parents and outside tribe.

So we pass forward our genes and we also pass information forward to new generations. That's what we call a meme: bits of cultural information that are reshaped and evolve much like biological units under natural selection.

So, as far as I don't have defective genes, and as far as I was able to absorb the needed memes from the society around me, I will behave as well as anybody else. I can improve upon these and keep on going. Written Laws are just mechanisms to make things clearer. We generally know most of them without never reading in detail all the written law books because most of them are simple descriptions of common sense behavior.

That's what I meant when I mentioned laws and such. There is no need for an explicit and arbitrary set of rules. There is no need to worship anything as no other animal does so to survive. We usually follow a series of well known (and evolving) behaviors that guarantee our survivor as a civilization. Natural selection will take care of those that deviates from the survivor game.  Of course, this is just a theory, but it serves a good deal to make reasonable models for populations.

On the matter of the existance of a God, of course I can't disprove it. Though I don't need to. Those that wants to convince me that such a God exists, are the ones who have the Burden of the Proof. Meaning, it's not up to me to prove that God doesn't exists. Ok, so we eliminate this one category. Then, people that have a Personal God doesn't need proof they just believe in it. It's like your God-from-the-future. That's ok, because its not harmful, its not radical, you don't behave against the civilization by doing so. At the same time it motivates you, comforts you. I don't see any reason to go against it.

I emphasized the 'should' in 'children should have a religion free education' because of simple probability. A catholic child is a catholic because, by pure chance, it was born in a catholic group. A muslim child is muslim simply because it was randomly born in a muslim family. How weird is that? I was supposed to be a xintoist-buddhist child. I went to religious association when I was a kid. And fortunately my parents were more practical than religious. Since I was very young I had access to all sorts of information. Encyclopedias. Science magazines. TV documentaries and so on. They did such a good job that when I was 9 I decided for myself that I didn't want to practice religion and that I would leave the weekly goings to the church. And they never complained. That's a things that made a great difference in my life and I feel very bad for all the children that can't have that kind of choice (they would be beated to death for saying so in some families).

So, I am not those ex-catholics that became frustrated with God and then became atheists or anything like that. I didn't have anything to complain by age 9. I never had a frustration up to that point, I had a good middle-class life. The whole point was: no censoring in the information I got and the understanding of free will and taking responsabilities from my own choices. Meaning, that I didn't want to say 'the Bible said so, so I don't have responsabilities because it was already chosen for me'. That seems cheating to me.

The reason of me being an Atheist is not to be 'against-religion'. I don't have problems with that (unless a radical freak comes to push it on my face, than I'll go berserk). Personally, to me, being an Atheist is having the full range of choices available to me, without any kind of indoctrination biasing my choices. I have to reason, then carefully choose. And whatever choice I make, it's my responsability alone, for the good of the bad. If win big, the reward is totally mine (I policy myself to never say 'thanks God', because its my reward alone). If fail big it's also my guilt alone, and no one elses. It means that I have to be study and learn more and more to increase my good choices, learn from previous mistakes and so on.

The concept of 'meme' was first coined by Dawkins in his 70's book 'The Selfish Gene'. There is yet another concept called the 'mind-virus', explored by Dennet in 'Breaking the Spell'. The summary would be: cultural and information bits - memes - are both good and bad. Like there are biological structures called viruses or bacteria that are bad to us. Radical religion could be considered such a 'mind-virus'.

One question that remains open to scrutiny. If we do consider all sorts of information as a meme, and if we consider religion as a meme. One has to wonder: if it was a very bad stuff, natural selection should have eliminated it thousands of years ago. If it survived to this day, there has to be something about it that's necessary in general for the well being of the general population.

Another way of thinking about this it that we have a lot of bacteria in our intestins, without witch we wouldn't be able to digest our food. It's a symbiotic relationship. Maybe religion fits this bill. But for us to know that, all religions should be open to scrutiny, we should be able to openly study all of them even in their most vexatory details and hidden secrets. No holy scripture should be held as confidential. One day we will have those answers. Until then, I won't hold my breadth though. Life is too short to worry about that.

Fabio,

While I am not a moral absolutist, I disagree with your assessment that good and evil do not exist. They do exist quite as meaningfully as any other abstraction we apply to our experience. To say good and evil do not exist is consistent with claiming that truth does not exist, beauty does not exist, or even YOU do not exist. However, that is contrary to my experience and that of almost all other humans. Our similar anatomies and shared environment provide much common experience, and we need appeal no further than such common experience for the existence of good and evil. Likewise, this is the foundation of science, which cannot appeal to any objectivity beyond shared subjectivity. This lack of absolute appeal should not be regarded as making religion or science somehow weaker. To the contrary, it should be regarded as making them stronger because it makes them more pertinent to us in the only way that matters: our experience. In addition, this should not be regarded as anything contrary to evolution theory. I am confident that our epistemics, ethics and esthetics have evolved and will continue to evolve, and that both science and religion have been and will continue to be factors in that evolution.

Regarding burdens of proof for God, I suspect we've not yet understood each other on this matter. I am not claiming that there is or even can be proof for God, outside of one's willingness to associate an experience with God. As I mentioned before, God is posited, not proven, except within the context of a position. To see God in the world, you first must choose to posit God in the world. There is no way to compel such vision. I have faith in God because of the positive practical consequences I perceive this faith to have in my life and others' lives.

I disagree with your statement that persons are born into families with particular religious associations by chance. That seems to disassociate identity from the reality of our experience. The reality is that our identities are associated with the identities of our parents. We share much of their genetic makeup. Moreover, they are of a particular religious persuasion (or not) as a consequence of their choices, the choices of their ancestors, and the choices of various other persons in their environment (present and past). There is much more than pure chance involved in our religious affiliations, and in our genetic and cultural inheritance. You would not be who you are today if you had not made the choice you made to leave Christianity at age nine. I don't consider that mere chance.

I also disagree with your assessment of radically individualistic responsibility for your ideas and behaviors. Your choices are limited by all sorts of things, both that which we can imagine (like your dependency on oxygen) and much that we cannot imagine due to our anatomical limitations. You live in a world with abundant laws, whether formalized by religions or governments, or informally enforced group and cultural norms esteemed by individuals and communities with more power than you. Moreover, you are not an island unto yourself, as the poet says. Each of your actions affects others, with cascading consequence. The risks and rewards simply are not yours, alone. That's a fantasy that does not match our experience. From this recognition of inter-relation stems ethics. Good and evil are to a community as happiness and misery are to an individual. Law is to a community as will is to an individual. These principles hold true whether goods, evils and laws are formalized and codified or not. That's just how communities work.

I agree with your assessment of religion as an evolved meme, and I expect that it will continue to evolve. My hope and faith is that it will increasingly contribute to our salvation and exaltation, both as individuals and communities.

Hello again, I think I definitely have bad choices for words :-) About Good and Evil I should've emphasized 'absolute good' and 'absolute evil'. Those don't exist. There are indeed established notions of 'goods' and 'evils' within communities. But there are things in one country that is considered ok (like smoking marijuana in Netherlands) and bad in others. I even heard that they approved a new law in Netherlands allowing couples to do sex in public town squares (!) That would definitely not be accepted in my country :-) In my country the death penalty it is constitutionally prohibited whereas in other countries as China it is a legal tool. Some countries allow abortion and euthanasia, and other countries don't. And the list goes on and on. Even in small groups of people, there will always be disagreements between what someone considers 'good' and others consider 'bad'.

It is like what we consider 'beauty'. As the greeks said, 'Beauty is in the eye of the Beholder'. Without proper context the notion of beauty has no meaning whatsoever. Someone that understands and enjoy painting will see utter beauty in a Picasso painting. Someone with no artistic background will only see disarranged and 'ugly' strokes. If someone else's 5 year old son draws a picture written 'I love you dad', this father will see beauty. A 3rd party will probably say 'yeah, good enough for a 5 year, but I think my son draws better'.

Smelling is the same thing. For some people one kind of perfume will represent total bliss. For other people with different backgrounds, that perfume will smell really bad. Tastes, food is the same thing. What I, as a japanese, consider absolutely delicious, some friends of mine consider pure crap (damn) :-)

That kind of notion, of beauty, of good and evil, has no place in science. We can obviously observe, analyse and describe the models that leads someone to pick and choose something, but we can't define what 'beauty' is. That totally depends on the individual and/or group of people with a particular common background.

About the Burden of Proof of God, I am sorry if I didn't make myself clear. I am definitely not talking about you and/or your religion in particular. More so because you never implied a God as an absolute here in the first place. I was just commenting in general about people that are convinced that I have to accept their truth as my own. They usually approach me saying: 'what, you don't believe in God? So prove it He doesn't exist', which is, obviously, a fallacy as I was not the one that created the statement in the first place. But if someone has a Personal God, or someone 'sees' God in their experiences and so forth, I definitely have no business in trying to disprove him. I have no problems with that. I won't ever try to disrupt someone elses point of view just because it's incompatible with my own, and I expect reciprocity. Pacific discussions are ok, as this one were having. We can always learn something new.

About children and chances. As I said, I am not the correct person to speak of truths, of course. But let me try to reason a little bit more. So, let's say this kid was born in a catholic family. It also happens that this kid's folks are also Republicans. His whole family has a tradition of being Republican. Does it make sense that this kid can't choose to be a Democrat when he analyses pros and cons later in his life? Does his father has any right to force him to be a Republican? We can pick any example of tradition and all of them can be disrupted and this should not be considered disrespectful. So, in the same way, this child should have the full opportunity to choose another religion that fits his point of view or even no religion. No one should have no saying about that.

About responsabilities and communities. We all have responsabilities with ourselves, our families, our surrounding communities and the future generations. I am not a revolutionary type of guy. But I do admire those that, reading back in history, had the guts to stand and fight against what they believed was wrong, even if they had to go radically against their families and communities.

One such an example would be the American Independence. If everybody were content on just following the rules and be quiet, who would stand against the great crown of England? Or what would be the current state of slavery in American if it was not for people like Abraham Lincoln and the Union of free states in the legendary Civil War? Hitler and the whole German were not 'purely' evil, they actually believed in their dogmas and from their point of view, they were fighting for what they considered 'right'. So it's very very difficult to choose. No one person, or single community knows everything and we can only analyze back in retrospective. Whatever we do, we have full responsabilities for our actions. If we do wrong, we should be held responsible and punished. If we do win, we should accepts the rewards and feel victorious for ourselves. No one 'stated' that those people should fight or something.

And it doesn't have to be big historical wars, everyday we have an small fight, and small victories that we should pursue. And we have to value them as our own. A small step for one man, a big step for mankind, as Armstrong would say. And the way to the Moon and the big discoveries are by means of understanding and reasoning. Is there a God in such moves? Perhaps. Is 'He' responsible for the victories? No, that's undervalueing all those extraordinary men and women's efforts.

I think that sounded too shallow, but that's more or less what I mean. It's not to be taken 'literally' though. It's just a general idea on how much far one can go without being restrained all the time, and without having to bear the notion of unbreakable stone walls. If we don't have any kind of limitation and if we don't just fantasize but actually do practical things, we do move forward faster. We make mistakes along the way - some of them big - but we are flexible: we learn and we keep going.

I may be steering a little bit far from the original discussion, but as a final regard, I have to say that I am a big fan of your founding fathers. People like Jefferson that not only say pretty words, but actually were in action. They were spot on about the First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

And Jefferson's regard about it in the letter to the Danbury Baptists: "Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church & State."

Unfortunatelly real life lies in a grayer area that the text would suggest, with powerful religious organizations very active in politics. But the intent was very well balanced. And just to make it clear: I am not a pro-atheist state (as Albania). Most people correlate atheists with totalitarian states like the old USSR, China and other socialist or communist governments. That's an error. I'd rather have a secular state, with clear separation of church and state as in the USA and France. That way everybody else is free to exercise whatever religion one may deem without disrespecting different points of views. Fortunately most modern republics follow the secularism framework.

Fabio,

I think we almost agree regarding the nature of morality. I still think, however, that you are downplaying the extent to which we can discern and abide by laws that are applicable to humanity generally, with only extraordinarily rare exceptions. That said, I do think, as you seem to suggest, that laws should reflect a communal reconciliation of individual wills and desires, to the extent they are not oppressive. Moreover, I would argue that such is exactly the sort of law-making that Mormonism attributes to God.

I agree that children (as all persons) should be free to change religious, political and other ideological identifications. Of course, I also believe I should be free to persuade my children (and all persons, except perhaps others' children to some extent) of the value of my religious, political and other ideological identifications.

I also agree that we should recognize goodness and excellence in persons. We need not negate persons' goodness and excellence by attributing everything of value to God in an exclusive way. However, I will add that, so far as I am concerned, everything good and excellent IS of God, by definition (not hypothetically). Indeed, to the extent that you become good or excellent, YOU BECOME GOD. That is the heart of Mormonism.

Finally, I agree with you that there is much value in the secular state. Without it, Mormonism probably would not have managed to survive -- even with the secular state, Mormonism almost did not survive. Other valuable ideologies surely will continue to emerge from our human community, as we give place for them. From my perspective, that's how God works: inspiring us with knowledge and endowing us with power, in accordance with our wills, desires and laws.

Hey, I think this was a good discussion. I see your points and I think they are valid. As I said, I never learned the Mormonisms principles and dogmas, so I won't make any assumptions about it. As far as you represented it, it feels ok to me.

About me downplaying, you're probably right. The justification is that I tend to oversimplify things in my writings to a level where I can depict a model that's easier for a 3rd party to understand. Maybe it's my math background, seeking for the simpler formula.

About children having the right to choose and you having to right to try to persuade them. That's ok. "Trying to persuade" means "arguing about it", "being open about it". That fits the bill. What I totally disaprove is obligation, persuation through means of force. Physically forcing something, beating on a kid for having a different point of view is being an animal and I disaprove that. Conversation, arguing is very good because it makes children think and exercise all the possibilities of the wonderful brain that they possess. It would be a shame to under-utilize it.

I also kind of like your idea of 'becoming God'. Ultimately that's our goal. I would recommend again reading "The Power of Myth", by Joseph Campbell. This is not a religious documentary. Campbell is a mythology researcher. He investigated mythology all over the world, through many different time periods. He explain in this excelent PBS TV documentary with Bill Moyers, the role of the "Hero with a Thousand Masks".

I am not saying that this is the truth, but personally, I think that each generation needs a Role Model of some kind. For some it's God. For others it's some celebrity, it's Elvis. Mythology fill in the gap of the need for the Hero. And everybody wants to be the Hero and the traditional "Hero Arch" is the simplification of what everyone of us goes on through life. We are all Heroes.

Fabio, I like Campbell, and have read "Hero with a Thousand Masks" -- excellent stuff! Please consider becoming involved in the Transhumanist movement. Check out the World Transhumanist Association, here: http://transfigurism.org

Thanks for the invitation, but I will decline :-) In this kind of thing I tend to stay neutral - yeah, I know, sounds quite coward to not pick a side :-) But don't get me wrong! I am not against Transhumanism per se. I am definitely not a neo-Luddite nor I agree with either Theodore Kaczynski or even Bill Joy. In that matter I lean toward the Transhumanists. But I don't like the idea of organized movements with too broad and unexplicable goals. It's hard to have focus and not have too much diversion. I prefer short term goals and a more straight and clear set of goals at a time. I know, It's not nearly like joining Opus Dei, of course, but still there's something about this notion that doesn't quite fit me. For me to join something requires a whole lot of convincing, no one ever had the patience for that much :-) That's why I stay neutral.

I understand, but maybe in time we'll be able to persuade you that some ideas are worth active commitment and contribution -- worthy of our practical faith.