Life

[Revan]

I was wondering a few days ago... what is the meaning of life? What are we here for... why are we here? how did we come to be what we are? For what purpose were we created?

(why, i was told I think deep... )

[Worm of Despite]

kevinswatch.ihugny.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=3913&start=0&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=

[Avatar]

Well, an interesting, if slightly vague one. For a start, you're assuming that we were created, and that that creation occurred with some purpose in mind. I much prefer the idea that it was all random chance that we're here at all.

If this is so, there doesn't have to be a purpose, and it's still far more amazing than "creation" would be.

Perhaps the purpose of it is to reach the point where we are able to ask these questions in the first place?

As I've said elsewhere, the purpose of life, all life, is to Strive.

Lower life forms strive for survival, while Humans strive for improvement. Whether of themselves, or others, or the world in general is up to the individual.

There doesn't have to be a reason.
--Avatar

[sindatur]

I was wondering a few days ago... what is the meaning of life? What are we here for... why are we here? how did we come to be what we are? For what purpose were we created?

(why, i was told I think deep... )

Delenn answered this quite well on B5, "we are the universe split into multiple pieces searching to understand itself" {paraphrased}

[ZefaLefeLaH]

I much prefer the idea that it was all random chance that we're here at all.

If this is so, there doesn't have to be a purpose, and it's still far more amazing than "creation" would be.

I completely agree with you. It would be almost infinitely more amazing that we ended up here because of hundreds of trillions lottery ticket winning chances.

No one has ever won a lotto with the numbers 1-2-3-4-5-6. It could still happen. What you are suggesting is along the lines that a single individual wins the lotto every week with those same numbers 52 weeks a year, every year, without fail for his entire life. Yep, you're right, it is more amazing.

[Nathan]

What you are suggesting is along the lines that a single individual wins the lotto every week with those same numbers 52 weeks a year, every year, without fail for his entire life. Yep, you're right, it is more amazing.

Wouldn't be so hard if there was a lotto going on on every single planet, and the lottos ran for the life of the universe. It's been around a long time you know.

[CovenantJr]

Indeed. An infinite number of lotto draws, repeated an infinite number of times... There's no reason we can't be the statistical fluke.

[onewyteduck]

I don't remember where or when I initially heard this......

The Meaning of Life:

What's life?
It's a magazine.

Where can I buy it?
In the grocery store.

How much does it cost?
A quarter.

But I don't have a quarter!
That's life!

Duck

[ZefaLefeLaH]

What you are suggesting is along the lines that a single individual wins the lotto every week with those same numbers 52 weeks a year, every year, without fail for his entire life. Yep, you're right, it is more amazing.

Wouldn't be so hard if there was a lotto going on on every single planet, and the lottos ran for the life of the universe. It's been around a long time you know.

That's the problem with that type of reasoning. If we can't rationalize it, we throw incomprehensible amounts of time at it and suggest that given enough time anything could happen. But if you look at that type of reasoning, then you are merely having faith yourself: faith in chance and evolution.

On one hand you have a loving God that created everything; the universe, time, us, everything.

On the other hand, the universe suddenly exploded out of nothingness and over billions of years that explosion coalesed into galaxies and solar system. At the very least, our solar system enabled life; life which evolved over hundreds of millions of years until a bunch of protien goo became a fish that walked out of the water and became a monkey and that monkey became us. Seems a little condescending to believe that your earliest ancestor was a fish that became a monkey that started out as protein goo. If evolution is true, how come there are still monkeys? What's the purpose of a horse if not to be ridden by humans? Seems more likely to have horses from a creation standpoint.

And if you subscribe to such notions as these astronomical mathematical improbabilities and throw time at them in faith to make sense of the universe, then why not add God into the possibility of potential liklihood. I mean, as balanced as this planet is with the moon just the right size and distance from the earth to cause tides that wash over the world twice a day and are useful to most of the creatures of the earth in some manner, doesn't it make sense that it could hav been created? Such balance from the distance of the earth from the sun that just a single percent difference and either most of the world would be a constant winter or all the land would be desert! Elements so diverse and plentiful that we have huge expanses of land affected by the even larger oceans all with their own weather systems under a canopy of atmosphere that is thin enough to allow enough sunlight to our tiny world, and with an ozone layer to protect us from ultraviolet radiation, and a magetosphere to protect our world from the solar winds that would otherwise ravage the planet. There are places in our solar system like Jupiter that have winds in the atmosphere that are hundreds of miles an hour. Or moons that are covered with volcanoes. We might be seeing some hurricanes and such, but generally our planet is a paradise beyond imagination. And yet, because we live here we take it for granted how utterly perfect it truly is for life. The atmosphere, the abundance of water, the moon, the distances, the size of the planet itself, how the trees give oxygen and how we give them carbon dioxide, on & on & on & on & on.

So why is it that when you allow yourself to believe in these chances that are beyond comprehension they are so great, that you can't allow for the chance of God?

[Worm of Despite]

So why is it that when you allow yourself to believe in these chances that are beyond comprehension they are so great, that you can't allow for the chance of God?

Two reasons.

Personally, evolution gives me more than the intelligent design theory, which reads as thus when stripped of religious assertions:

"An unknown, unknowable entity did it in an unknown manner for unknown reasons."

Two, saying chance of life is incomprehensible ignores the size of the universe. We’re talking hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars, any of which might have planets capable of supporting life. Even an "impossibly improbable" event is almost a certainty (and we already know of one planet that supports life).

[ZefaLefeLaH]

So why is it that when you allow yourself to believe in these chances that are beyond comprehension they are so great, that you can't allow for the chance of God?

Two reasons.

Personally, evolution gives me more than the intelligent design theory, which reads as thus when stripped of religious assertions:

"An unknown, unknowable entity did it in an unknown manner for unknown reasons."

Two, saying chance of life is incomprehensible ignores the size of the universe. We’re talking hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars, any of which might have planets capable of supporting life. Even an "impossibly improbable" event is almost a certainty (and we already know of one planet that supports life).

I'd like to state that for Christians, these unknowns are not unknowns. But also Christians know a fair amount about science, so what you are suggesting is not unknown to me. However, I also have the benefit of understanding what you see as an array of unknowns.

I encourage anyone who reads this that disbelieves in God to get to know more about God. Otherwise, when it comes right down to it, you don't know. It's a state of the unknown.

As to your second personal validation toward simple chance, by definition there is a planet out there made of cotton candy, with oceans of molten lava that do not burn the cotton candy, and a race of smurfs who attack eachother with lollipops. I mean, basically, you're saying that since the universe is so big and so much time has past, then anything is possible. I'm sorry, that's a copout.

Look at it this way, we currently have 6 billion people on the planet. 20 years ago we had 5 billion. A few decades before that 4 billion. Add up all the people that have ever lived and not one of them could shoot lasers out of their eyes. But by your definition of chance, it should surely be.

Nope. I don't buy it. If you roll a pair of dice for 15 billion years, the chances of rolling two sixes are just as likely on the first roll as on the 400 trillionth roll. It's still random. It doesn't mean that it would be impossible to roll two sixes million times in a row. But regardless of how much time you throw at it, the chances are still the same everytime you throw the dice.

Now this is just dice. And merely a million times in a row. Not much when compared to having a planet form at just the right distance from the sun with just the right elements, get blasted by another planet, seperate so that a moon forms at just the right distance from the earth, and a thousand comets come by over the millenia, spreading just the right mixture so that protein molecules form on the ocean, and the temperature is just perfect so that this primordial soup becomes single-celled living organisms, and they seperate and something happens to them so that they become different types of single-celled organisms and something happens to them so that they become complex and something happens to them and lichen grows on a rock, crawls up the shore, becomes a tree, and a fish is made and even though there are no other fish, it becomes pregnant and makes little fishes, and they decide that there's a whole land outside the water, and it crawls on the land to become an ape and that ape becomes humans. Oh, I forgot something. All of this bypassing the fact that dinosaurs ruled the land, a huge asteroid hit the earth and killed all but little mammals. Then instead of the fish becoming an ape, it becomes a reptile bird or something that becomes a rodent, the asteroid hits, and the rat becomes an ape that becomes a human.

So that's like rolling a few hundred billion pairs of sixes all in a row.

From what I understand of your theory, you are basically stating that given enough time & space, the most improbable becomes possible and the odds of anything become 1:1 and must occur.

I would like to see that with the dice. First of all, even though there are hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars, you have to find the ones which can sustain life. Are they too close to the galatic core of their galaxy, inotherwords almost all the stars in that galaxy. So now you have we'll say 100 billion stars left. How many of those stars have planets? Remove more. How many have planets at the correct distance so that the planet's water does not freeze or boil to steam? How many planets have water? How many planets have the right material composition? The right atmosphere? A moon to pull the water and assist with the development of life? A moon of proper size and distance to affect the gravity? An orbit that is not so eliptical that the water freezes solid on one part of the year & boils during the summer? A stable enough crust system so that volcanoes are not clouding the atmosphere every year, decade, century and so that there aren't 15pt earthquakes shifting the plates about? And an ozone layer that allows any air-breathing creatures to exist without burning from ultraviolet radiation, or a strong enough magnetic field to prevent the star's solar energy from damaging the surface creatures with its pounding xrays, or simply to protect the atmosphere itself? A axis that isn't stagnant so that its poles and equator don't become belts of frozen wastes and deserts and that helps move the atmosphere the same way our seasons change the jetstreams and ocean surface temperatures to move currents and keep the planet temperate and liveable? An axis that doesn't flip over, or then the polar caps never have ice and the salt to fresh water machine that keeps our ocean fed breaks down. A rotational period that is not too slow or too fast so that the nights are cool but not winter-like in July and not stagnant like our moon so that the living area is greatly reduced.

And there is so much more, things I'm not remembering, things I don't even know about that make the search for a planet capable of life a great deal less than your hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars.

Then, even when you do have the possibility with a planet that has all these things and all the things I failed to mention, if even you do all that, you still have to bring life to it. It doesn't just spring up from the ground, unless you add God to the equation. SO you need certain types of molecules in vast quantities. How long would it take just one of these molecules to form? I've heard 10 to the 600th power billions of years or some such craziness. Inotherwords, never. And that's just for one!

Right now we're looking to see if Mars could have had life. You know what, so what if it did. It never had the chance to become sentinent life, and that's what we're really thinking about isn't it. It doesn't really matter if we find amoebas on Io. That makes no difference. We want something that is self-aware, intelligent like us or moreso. So you need a world like ours for that. And, you need all the "right" mistakes. Without the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, no people. Maybe smart dinosaurs? I don't know. The point is that for life, this planet is perfect in so many ways that it boggles imagination.

I wonder if you found 1 planet capable of sustaining life per galaxy and there were 400 billion galaxies, then you have 400 billion chances over time to roll a million pairs of sixes in a row. This is to simulate all the evolutionary mistakes that were beneficial, to simulate the protein goo existing at all & in enough amounts to even really change, and all the other things I'm not even aware of. So I wonder what the math would be for that. I'm pretty sure it would be somewhere along the lines of someone in Nebraska winning the lotto every week for the rest of his life with the numbers 1-2-3-4-5-6 every time for 65 years. Inotherwords, it doesn't happen.

Just because you throw incomprehensible amounts of time and matter at the idea of chance doesn't make it so.

I think that what's really at the bottom of this is that people would rather believe in something as impossible as this chance theory than they would want to believe in God. It's so bad that the people who read Thomas Covenant don't see the obvious analogy to God & Satan in the books. In fact, I posted something on this & was utterly refuted. Lord Foul who wants to destroy the Creator's creation and desecrate everything is imprisoned on the Land and is evil to the core. The Creator taking incognito to Thomas, trying to get him to help out, intent on using human beings in the spiritual struggle against evil. Oh, no, DON'T TALK ABOUT GOD being involved in our book! We Won't hear of it!

Why is it better to believe in having no hope for eternity, being the descendant of goo that became worms and fish that walked to become rats that became apes and then us, rather than simply believing in God? If I truly believed what you did, I'd strap some explosives to my chest, and go commit every crime I could possibly commit and just live for my own pleasure. If I ever got caught, I'd blow myself up while I smiled. There would be no reason to live. It would be worthless and merely an experience of the senses so I might as well get a whole lot of senses! I might as well live for myself completely and wholly as if only I exist because nothing else will ever matter to me ever again once I am dead. It won't matter who the president is or if there are environment issues, nothing. So I might as well see what murder, rape, arson, theft, feels like. I mean, if I'm really ruthless, I could probably make a great deal of money. I could be a mob boss if I was extremely self-serving. Deal drugs, eat only the best food & drink only the best wine, and if I ever got caught, BOOM! There would be no punishment for me. I'm too smart. I would merely cease to exist which is what I was eventually going to do anyway. At least this way I get out of feeling the dull pain of old age. BOOM! And I lived for me, because that was all that mattered.

Somehow that seems pretty hopeless. I guess for a whole lot of people in the world, it's a good thing I don't believe that way.

[Worm of Despite]

First I'd like to say thank you, Zeph. You've given me a lot to think about. Back to our regular programming.

Somehow that seems pretty hopeless. I guess for a whole lot of people in the world, it's a good thing I don't believe that way.

Yes, very.

Personally, my belief has never made me think, "Why go on living, why do this at all if there's nothing beyond this life". Maybe because the "big picture" isn't important to me. It's different for everybody. I suppose some base their entire lives around a greater meaning.

My only answer to the possibility of a Godless universe is to educate myself and to enjoy the wonders while I'm still alive, because this might be my one chance at living, and to screw it up or waste it is the most terrible thing.

Anyway, since I began by addressing the last part of your post, I'll jump to the start. Seems logical.

You spoke of knowing more about God. Well, yes, that would help fill the blanks, but it's rather subjective, isn't it? We're talking about a whole mess of religions to choose from; how can we truly be sure which one is the best for filling in those blanks? Maybe others know how, or see something I don't see, but I can't detect the proper religion.

By the way, my second validation was a copout. Theism is a copout. Atheism is a copout. Cheering for Green Bay is probably a copout. It's all a bunch of write-offs. "I don't know, so I'll say [A]." My theory was me giving my reasons, not me saying yours were wrong. You might be right, for all I know.

Science is a big bag of lies (preaching to the choir, I'm sure); the best ones are the accepted ones, until new, better lies come along. I like the system, personally. It does it for me. Then again, I don't search too hard for what does it for me. My type of people (if there are others like me) aren't overly concerned with such validation.

Back to my theory (not that it's mine). I certainly wasn't thinking in my heart of hearts that cotton candy planets were the "impossibly improbable event" in mind when I typed "impossibly improbable event". And I certainly don't believe that anything is probable because the universe is A or B. To clarify, I though that life--life as we know it--could be very possible because the universe is, uh, mind-bogglingly vast. We're talking places that might be able to support life, might not. We don't know.

Yes, I understood your dice analogy/know how precise and just right the conditions have to be for life, but when you say "it doesn’t happen", I don’t believe you. I mean, yes, you make a compelling case, but the simple fact is that we’re here, now (solipsism aside). It’s enough to make me think that somebody else might be out there, now. Sure, life is a trillion to one, but here we are.

Are you so sure of the perfection of this planet, Zeph? The earth is not homogenous. A human being cannot survive in zero oxygen, boiling water. Yet there's life there, such as methane bacteria. Life has evolved to fit existing parameters. Could it be, perhaps, that that another planet which resembles earth to the tee will still be lifeless and on the other hand a burning hot rock might still have "life"?

In the end, it's not about what I think is better. Yeah, an eternal afterlife and a loving God watching over me (or even a dead God) would be preferable to no afterlife/accidental life, but I don't buy the first, and accepting the latter just helps me get over it, because I'm the type that doesn't care if there's anything to this life. I'm here and that's all I can know or do anything about. If there's something more after life, I'll find out. Hopefully not tomorrow.

If you feel I've overlook/haven't addressed something in your post, let me know. It is, after all, 2:00 AM.

[ZefaLefeLaH]

Are you so sure of the perfection of this planet, Zeph? The earth is not homogenous. A human being cannot survive in zero oxygen, boiling water. Yet there's life there, such as methane bacteria. Life has evolved to fit existing parameters. Could it be, perhaps, that that another planet which resembles earth to the tee will still be lifeless and on the other hand a burning hot rock might still have "life"?

Yes, if a planet had a static axis & static rotation, and all other parameters for life were met, yes it would be possible for life to exist on the fringes.

[Baradakas]

Great posts, Foul and Zeph!!!! I think we are overlooking one important parameter however. What truly constitutes "life"? For Foul, methane bacteria is close enough, yet for me, cognizance is the number one factor. Awareness. Anything else constitutes the primordial state, as it were, which can truly exist just about anywhere, but really is only a building block for "life".

IMO, anyway.

[Worm of Despite]

Thanks, Barad. What constitutes life is worthy of an entirely different thread (hint hint, Darth).

In the most literal sense, a bacterium is a microorganism; it is living--just not the kind of life you and I perceive, but life, nonetheless. In terms of worth, I don't consider it as valuable as, say, a human being. Of course.

[Iryssa]

This thread reminds me of that old lady on Cold Mountain....

"Everything's got a purpose. Bird eats a seed, bird s**ts the seed out somewhere else, that grows a new plant and that grows a seed. Bird's got a purpose, seed's got a purpose, s**t's got a purpose." *grin*

I dunno if I quoted that entirely right, but you get the idea