Re: historical trajectory

David Campbell wrote:

>
>
> A classic example of something formed by natural laws yet unique is a
> snowflake. Mathematically chaotic formulas (in the technical sense of
> something with a precise mathematical formula that is very sensitive
> to the exact starting conditions), probabilistic formulas, and a very
> large number of interacting formulas that behave simply in isolation
> can all provide good statements of natural laws without giving uniform
> results.
>
> C. S. Lewis pointed out that people have invoked both the supposed
> rarity of intelligent life and the supposed abundance of intelligent
> life in the universe as posing challenges to Christianity. He pointed
> out that the situation was not theologically all that different from
> past encounters with previously unknown human cultures, although the
> there are potentially much greater challenges to comprehending the
> status of aliens, and there may be categories (relative to salvation)
> more similar to that held by angels or demons than by humans. Based
> on the general history of interactions between human cultures, he
> speculated that the distances of space might be much-needed quarantines.
>

Much needed quarantine indeed! One can only imagine with horror what
might happen if we encountered an intelligent but innocent and trusting
species -- given what we've already done to each other on this world.
 From a Calvin & Hobbes strip: "Sometime I think the best evidence
that other intelligent life exists is that none of it has tried to
contact us."

I've probably already over-extended myself in this discussion since I
haven't read these works -- so I won't keep pushing arguments here until
I have a chance to get some more reading done.

Ted, I hadn't thought about how our removal from the center of the
universe would actually be seen as an improvement by pre-Copernican
thinkers. That is an interesting vein of thought. Now since we've
stopped thinking of heaven and hell as having spatial coordinates, we're
still having the same tug-of-war in a more abstract sense. Do you think
the dichotomy is more between Christians and non-Christians than between
scientific thinkers vs. popular culture?

--merv

> Conway Morris is an evolutionary paleontologist with expertise in the
> Cambrian radiation, as well as being a Christian.
>
> Part of his argument is the idea that physical factors provide
> significant limitations to the range of options available for
> evolution. Organisms have a limited number of possible body plans,
> only certain arrangements work well, etc. He thinks that intelligent
> life is quite likely to develop if evolution gets started. I don't
> personally think that we have strong evidence for the probability of
> developing rationality, but there certainly are enough strong patterns
> to counter the extreme claims that evolution might turn out totally
> differently if ti were run again. How different is totally
> different? Perhaps you might get mollusks as the dominant large land
> animals instead of vertebrates, but the big land mollusks would have
> to have many of the same basic features as vertebrates in order to
> function-ways to control water loss, efficent methods of land
> locomotion, effective air breathing, etc.
>
>
> --
> Dr. David Campbell
> 425 Scientific Collections
> University of Alabama
> "I think of my happy condition, surrounded by acres of clams"
>
Received on Fri, 27 Jan 2006 22:12:07 -0600