Monday, July 07, 2008

Munificent

I've been corresponding through Facebook with a guy I never met about God and science. And it's perplexing. It's interesting. He's smart and articulate. Extremely so, actually.

It was all pretty ridiculous. There was this group on facebook that I was going to delete from my profile, cause it was a dumb group. But there was a post on there...something like, "Why all the standard religious arguments are wrong." And I read it. And it was full of creationism deflated, causation defeated, and a disquisition of other such things by way of lofty and scientific and excessive, even exhaustive language. I didn't understand a lot of it.

But for some reason, I replied to it anyway. About language. I talked about language. I talked to a physics major about language with the disclaimer that I was a nursing student. :| How his language wasn't attracting who he wanted to attract. How if he wanted to really wanted to find a Christian who made sense, he'd have to learn their language and then combat on that level. He thought that was intriguing for some reason.

Really, it was sort of a cop out, wasn't it?

No matter; the dialogue wore on. And it was revealed in our discussion my journey with this whole God thing. The questionings during my freshman year. And I said something like, "I had an advantage over you in my make because I knew where I'd end up in my journey from the beginning."

And he caught the paradox and threw up a large contradiction which took me time to hurdle, even in myself. He called it intellectual dishonesty. He said that knowing your end before you get there is deceiving yourself. It's not scientific. It's not honest. It cannot be trusted.

I thought about that for a long time. Because he was right. Sort of. If you're determined to find something, you'll probably find it, even if it's not there.

But there's another kind of honesty. And the reply to him containing words such as "reflexive" and "honesty" is where our conversation waits intrigued.

He calls himself an apatheist. That is, he is apathetic about theism. Doesn't really care one way or another. But I think it's obvious that's not true. And I told him that. Why the harangue of it then? He said it really was true. Eh...I care. I care a lot.

Here's something I found while creeping on Munificent's myspace.

Humans, therefore, are also in a constant state of flux. Viewing individuals or societies as separate and distinct is to ignore the infinities of interactions that proliferate and rebound upon one another, like a pebble cast upon the still surface of a pond. Once disturbed, the surface fluctuates chaotically in a geometrically increasing fashion, and will never die down. For the pebble is not the only entity acting upon this motion; Brownian Motion caused by particles within the pond itself serve to maintain an increasing state of chaos; minute whorls of air kiss the surface arbitrarily, serving to further increase the loss of order. And as the surface continues to fluctuate it interacts with the air above it, feeds the unpredictable motion of atmospheric particles as the pond evaporates and simultaneously cools its surroundings. And as this progressive ripple of entropic increase propagates, we find that it will never end; an immeasurable amount of other interactions, from other entities, serve to increase the number of events acting upon any individual objects towards infinity.

1 comment:

Rob F. said...

And it's like information is perpetually being created. Because it's not predictable. But it forms a pattern if plotted. Random order. I think it's brilliant. Those who don't believe in God could argue that the constant motion of chaos is evidence for the creation of information from the beginning. Those who believe in God could argue that fingerprints from a Higher Order are strewn about the universe, a common thread woven between planetary orbits and a pebble cast upon the still surface of a pond.