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From: beth@sphinx.UChicago.UUCP (Beth Christy)
Newsgroups: net.origins
Subject: Re: Re. A Rational Universe
Message-ID: <860@sphinx.UChicago.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 21-Jul-85 19:44:59 EDT
Article-I.D.: sphinx.860
Posted: Sun Jul 21 19:44:59 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 24-Jul-85 21:07:19 EDT
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Organization: U. Chicago - Computation Center
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From: dubois@uwmacc.UUCP (Paul DuBois), Message-ID: <1285@uwmacc.UUCP>:
>> [Beth Christy]
>> I don't recall
>> people marvelling at the 'order' of the universe until they set up
>> theories that facilitated their understanding of it.  Primitive people
>> with no 'laws of physics' don't sit around marvelling at how ordered the
>> universe is - in fact, they make up gods to explain how UNordered things
>> are(!).
>
>A worthy hypothesis, and subject to test.  So let's test it.
>
>Presumably you consider the God of the Bible one of those invented to
>explain disorder and not order.

On the contrary, I had no such intention.  I was thinking more of the gods
of sun and rain and thunder and etc. that primitive tribes in Africa, South
America and Australia have worshiped.

>Reading Psalm 104, we find a
>counterexample to (and hence disproof of) the hypothesis:  the psalmist
>marvels at, and attributes the *order* of the creation to his God.
>
>Beth, you've fallen into the trap (just like creationists who criticize
>evolution when they don't understand what it is) of *disproving*
>something you apparently know little about, in this case making
>unsupportable statements easily found to be false by a little
>inspection.

Your "little inspection" could only have proved that not all gods are
invented to explain disorder.  It could not prove that no gods are.  I know
for a fact (although I've no references handy) that many primitive tribes
have worshiped gods that we don't recognize, and that anthropologists have
concluded that the "gods" were created to explain natural events that the
tribes were unable to comprehend otherwise.

But as long as we're here, I might as well point out that, unless you're
claiming that the author of Psalm 104 is the *creator* of the concept of
the biblical god, your "little inspection" didn't even prove that the god
of the Bible wasn't created to explain disorder.  It merely demonstrated
that people can later on attribute order and design to said god.  Which I
don't argue in the least, since such attributions are why we're talking
about this stuff in the first place.

-- 

--JB       (Beth Christy, U. of Chicago, ..!ihnp4!gargoyle!sphinx!beth)

                   All we learn from history is that
                     we learn nothing from history.