If we observe a billion examples of evolution on other planets and discover that life never gets to the multicellular stage on any of them, that would be evidence that we were either really lucky, or something intervened. Such a finding would definitely give a boost to the hypothesis that evolution here wasn't completely natural. — RogueAI

It is interesting that as soon as the ancient earth was ready to sustain primitive life, life got started right away.

I believe in evolution but the Theory Of Evolution is woefully incomplete. I don't believe mutations can create a person, the works of Shakespeare, a Mozart symphony...

If you consider it in terms of photons time travel is not possible.
Suppose on Jan 1, 2000, there is a light source at A. Photons travel to B.
Now a time traveler leaves on Jan 1, 2010 and appears on Jan 1, 2000, at C, the mid point between A and B.
The time traveler blocks the light and it does not reach B.
So, does the light reach B or not?

The original singularity of our universe would be considered uncaused and self caused at the same time, according to how science approaches it. — Gregory

Why would the singularity be uncaused? Eternity precedes time.

The fact that different religions have some overlap doesn't explain why people emphatically categorize themselves as belonging to different religious groups, and why these groups are geographically isolated. — Brendan Golledge

The essential teaching of religion is The Way. I am the way. It is the Tao or Right Living as the Buddhists would say. The external forms of religion vary for lost of reasons but they are secondary and have many causes.

I was just asserting that this thing we experience was interpreted in a religious context in the past, whereas it is interpreted in a psychological context today. — Brendan Golledge

But what is the psyche? Ask a psychologist and see how funny the answer is. Spirit is the traditional word. Modern psychology has drained all spiritual reality of its substance and replaced it with abstraction. It is largely a tautology that has relabeled everything spiritual and convinced many that "it's just psychological" - an expression that tells us nothing. Semantics. "English is what Chinese would speak if Chinese was English" :confused:

"If you doubt that truth for humans is socially constructed, then answer me this (I would genuinely like an answer if you have one): If truth for people is not socially constructed, then why are religious and political beliefs correlated to geography?"

Different societies have different languages to express spiritual matters but the differences are often secondary and not a measure of 'truth'. For example Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism, Christianity and Judaism have much in common.

"How did people believe that they experienced God? I have read that the word “unconscious” was used for the first time in Germany in the 18th century. If people didn’t even have a word for the thing, it’s likely that they didn’t have a concept of it either. But if there is no unconscious to make your thoughts and feelings pop into your head, where do these things come from? Ancient people believed that they came from polytheistic gods (Ares = anger, Aphrodite = lust …) and demons and angels. They believed in their gods because they really did experience them. We just do not today believe in their interpretations of their experiences."

You seem to be saying that 'the unconscious' explains things. But that is a tautology. What is the unconscious? To answer that you have to know what the mind is. It seems to me that the unconscious is 'knowledge beyond language'. That is, knowledge that enters our minds through awareness but is not yet translated into conscious language.

"It seems logical that there is a limit to what God can add to himself personally, since he is infinity, and anything added to infinity is still infinity. So, God does not add to himself directly, but creates an infinity (or at least a very large number) of finite things."

Not necessarily. You can have an infinity of odd numbers 1, 3, 5, 7,...

And to that you can add something different; even numbers 2, 4, 6,...

1. consistent replacement of supernatural explanations of the world with natural ones.

It is moot whether these natural explanations are such. Each case would have to be discussed individually.
Often 'supernatural explanations' are very secondary to essential religious teaching.

2. inconsistency of world religions

Religion is a language that is meant to express spiritual truths.
As such it is subject to all kinds of distortions and mistranslations (not just literal).
But essential religious teaching is concerned with The Way or The Tao. There is a right way of being
and a wrong way.

3. weakness of religious arguments, explanations, and apologetics

Debatable.

4. increasing diminishment of god

Unclear what this means. Human knowledge does not diminish God.

5. fact that religion runs in families

That can be true of atheism. Also, consider a spirit that desires to be born into a religious family (birds of the feather...)...

6. physical causes of everything we think of as the soul

Physical systems are associate with mind. Correlation is not necessarily causation.

7. complete failure of any sort of supernatural phenomenon to stand up to rigorous testing

Many would disagree. Besides, why would God submit to this?

8. slipperiness of religious and spiritual beliefs

Vague.

9. failure of religion to improve or clarify over time

True to an extent but that tells you more about human failure than anything else.
Even religion can become neglected, distorted.

10. complete lack of solid evidence for god's existence

Debatable. In fact that is the debate.

And I'm saying your statement is nonsense because science is not used to address "the big questions" so it can't be even "no improvement" on them. That 's like saying: "Well finally that bachelor has stopped beating wife — 180 Proof

Well that's just semantics. In common parlance 'science' has a broader meaning and the word is used loosely.

Here's a headline: "Security Council meeting called to discuss Moscow's recent devastating attacks on the key port of Odesa immediately following its refusal to ..."

Now, we are not going to split hairs over what 'Moscow' means in this context.

I guess you do not understand this my point... — 180 Proof

I do. I was responding to this-

I find "supernatural magic" and "G did it" to be non-explanations — jorndoe

I'm simply saying that science is no improvement on philosophy/religion when it comes to the big questions. I'm not criticizing science or saying it should be anything other than what it is.

Well, how has science answered the big questions such as the ones I pointed out? Science is not philosophy so there's no point in pretending it is. It is not an improvement on philosophy. Besides, philosophy/religion is far more sophisticated than 'God did it'.

you make a category mistake, EnPassant, when you criticise science for not doing philosophy and/or employ philosophy to undertake scientific tasks. — 180 Proof

I'm not criticizing science. I'm simply saying it is not an improvement on 'God did it'.

We are talking about the big questions. Philosophical questions. What is existence? What is eternity? Is it conscious? Why is the universe mathematical? Why are molecules assembling themselves into living creatures. Science does not explain these things. It gives secondary explanations concerning the mechanics of what is happening and these explanations are normally based on observation. So scientists describe what they see happening. Science is, for the most part, descriptive.

We are talking about the big questions in this thread. Science does not answer them. When science does answer lesser questions it is normally an explanation based on observations and descriptions of some other unexplained thing. Ultimately science just says 'This is the way stuff is happening'. All well and good but it does not explain what stuff is. It just describes what it is doing.

I think it is a mistake to absolutize these statements. They are just rules of thumb and there are always exceptions: the iron behind the velvet. Sometimes even war is justified (eg The Battle of Britain).

I find "supernatural magic" and "G did it" to be non-explanations (previously ... Nov 9, 2022 ... Jun 4, 2022). They could (literally) be raised to explain anything, and therefore explain nothing. — jorndoe

To be precise, science explains nothing either. Science describes the physical world: Hydrogen + Oxygen = water. But what is hydrogen? Well, a proton and an electron. What is an electron? No explanation. Nobody knows what an electron is. Science tells us what electrons do but does not explain what they are. All of science is in this situation so nothing is explained.

Religion: God did it. Fair enough.
Science: It is happening. Fair enough.

But what is an electron?

Like Jurassic Park the novelty of digital art grabs you but it cannot hold for long. It becomes tedious. These days computer art makes me feel queasy. I enjoyed Jurassic Park but I could not sit through yet another digi movie.

Perhaps mathematics and the logic on which it’s based rest on presuppositions about the world rather than the world itself. — Joshs

Mathematical truth is not a supposition. It is logical independently of what we think.

It is the other war around; the universe is embedded in mathematics. pi is a geometric proportion but it can, with infinite precision, be expressed as infinite series -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz_formula_for_%CF%80

Numbers are eternal objects and the universe is designed around them.

Numbers exist by purely abstract means. Namely iteration and partition (Set Theory)

Start with /
iterate //
again ///
etc //////////////////////////////////////////...

Partition each step: {/} {//} {///}...

= 1, 2, 3,...

Now set them in proportions as in Leibniz's formula-

1/1, 1/3, 1/5, 1/7,...

And, very simply, we go from set theory to pi to space. Now add time and you've got the basis for a universe. Numbers are the 'atoms' of spacetime.

I'm talking about individual revelation from God or His teachers. There is no other way.

As life develops, that unity dissolves. So, if you assume a divine unity, such a progression always results in a falling away from unity, as intentional beings by definition have their own purposes. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Why must it fall away from unity/good? It is possible to evolve towards the good. Not all intention is against the good.

Human beings cannot discern spiritual truth by their own means. It must be given to them. Philosophy has failed in its task to answer the big questions. We must be guided by revelation and awareness.

Lucifer and the angels were spiritual, not physical beings. They descended into 'veils of matter' (Origen). The fall led to physical existence.

Press two north poles of two magnets together. You will feel (close your eyes) something solid between the magnets. Solidity is only energy fields pushing/pulling each other.

The fall of creation happened before the physical universe was created. Life in the fallen universe is imperfect because perfection is spiritual, not physical. Perfection is life made free of evil.

Except extraterrestrials visiting earth wouldn't be a miracle. There's no violation of a law of nature. Why should we prima facie think alien visitation is a low probability event? — RogueAI

Hynek suggested they get here via the Astral Plane - what some call extra dimensions or, more traditionally, the spiritual world. Many of the reported sightings suggest they are spirits but many also suggest they are biological beings. Perhaps they are both.

The main requirement would be that the humanoid form is optimal.

I agree with all your points. The genetic stuff is a complete red flag. Why should alien life have 70% genetic similarity to life on earth? Seems implausible. — flannel jesus

Someone once said the humanoid form is universal. I think it was Orfeo Angelucci.

Some children are bad as soon as they learn how to express badness in a human context. Likewise with some good children. When consciousness loves something beyond the self it becomes light. Inward consciousness, that loves itself only, becomes darkness. Evil is synonymous with ego. Goodness is synonymous with love of something beyond the self.

Be careful not to confuse 'nurtured' with merely learning to express what is already inherent.

Well you can call it the source of all that is, if you want to avoid the religious. Personally I think the emergence of existence into being (life) is an intelligent evolution.

See my last answer.

It seems to me that (ontological) space has the potential for any number of dimensions. Physical matter can manifest 4 dimensions. I suspect that dimensions are an emergent property of matter. 4 dimensions is the limit that matter can manifest. If matter evaporates back into energy the 4 dimensional spacetime would evaporate and we would be in a quantum universe of X dimensions.

In the 'beginning' existence and God are the same thing. Existence is not a verb, it is a noun. God becomes/creates. Contingent creation is a property of existence. Imagine a lump of bronze representing existence; it is. The bronze can be shaped into a horse, an eagle etc. 'Horse' and 'eagle' are properties.
The verb for God is 'becoming' ie. evolving properties.
More than one apple? There is existence and it can have many apples as properties. Pantheism? No. Existence is eternal. It becomes creation.

Physical space is an emergent property of matter. It is a physical object just like a table or a chair. Physical spacetime has an extra dimension, time. If the physical matter in the universe evaporates back to pure energy, physical spacetime disappears and we are left with the spacetime of energy. We would no longer have a 4D space. We would have something more exotic. Scientists speculate that quantum spacetime has 11 dimensions.

But I'm not talking about imaginary existences.

When we ask 'where' a particle is we must specify which spacetime we are talking about, quantum or physical spacetime. Since particles don't exist in physical spacetime and we can't map quantum spacetime, we don't know where the particle is.
We can only detect trace effects* that the particle leaves on physical spacetime.
This is why Bohr said it is meaningless to ask where a particle was prior to detection because it has no location in 4D spacetime. 'Detection' is when a particle leaves a trace effect in physical spacetime.

*eg a spot on a photographic plate.

Do you understand what existence is? What a positive existence, as opposed to nothingness, means? If you don't you will not understand what I'm saying.
Assume X has the property 'existence'.
Now ask; does X exist distinct from its property 'existence'?

Two answers:
1. X does not exist. Therefore it cannot have properties, let alone 'existence'.
2. X exists. This makes existence as a property superfluous, since X exists anyway, whence X is existence.

This proves existence cannot be a property.

Existence is not a property of God. Existence IS God. All contingent things are properties of existence. Existence is what is from the beginning. It always is. Creation is when existence/God acquires properties.

Generally speaking 'space' is used in two senses; geometric space and ontological space. In physics there are two geometric spaces, the quantum spacetime of energy and the ordinary spacetime of material objects. Since these two geometries are different the universe consists of two spacetimes, two universes. Particles live in quantum spacetime and large objects live in physical spacetime. This is why location is so ambiguous in physics; where is a particle? It is nowhere if by 'where' we mean a location in 4D spacetime. It is elsewhere, in quantum spacetime.
In an ontological sense both spacetimes are 'here' in ontological space but being distinct geometries they are distinct universes.
The geometry of a space is determined by the objects that inhabit that space. Two different geometries can exist in the same ontological space.

The difference is merely semantic. Experience is knowledge.