Fisher and I are having a great philosophical and theological discussion and he has hit on a theme that I think requires some digging into. It's an interesting theory that I'm thinking about here which gets into a lot of interesting corners of thought. He says:
At the core of everything all matter is the same. In [fact] at one point all matter is not only identical, but becomes movement in and of itself. Thus there is no fundamental difference between a granite rock and an organic being such as a human.
Now SOMETHING has to organize these completely identical basic components into a rock on the one hand and into a human being on the other.
That something [might] be innate to these components and thus self-organizing, or it might acts upon the components from outside of the components. Whatever it is, it MUST exist.
OK now we're getting deep. Part of this logic goes directly to the question and theory of Intelligent Design, which I consider to be an interesting if misguided and undisciplined set of arguments for the existence of God which spites the theory of evolution. Firstly, I would say that as a Christian, I disagree that the theory of evolution is heretical. I make that point of disagreement with Dr. Arnn. I don't believe that man will evolve beyond a need for those things which are fundamental to our spirituality, but I understand the fear implied in the idea that mankind might have evolved from apes who have no spirituality. All I can say to that is why did God bring Jesus into the world at that particular moment? If apes needed God in their image, who is to say there is not Jesus of the Apes? And if we evolve beyond what we think of as humanity, who is to say that Jesus' second coming wouldn't be that of some trans-human being? I am not concerned with the idea of the changing or evolving nature of the soul or of intelligence and that is because I do not believe in an anthropomorphic supreme being. One of the things that leads me into strange waters is based upon my conceptualization of consciousness. When I was an undergrad I read The Mind's I which had a profound effect on my thinking. Indeed what is thought if not computation of some sort, and what are the physical rules of computation? I extrapolated this idea vis a vis Moore's Law once and made the conjecture that God might be the Sun. Huh? What? What if the nuclear vibrations of the massive fusion reactions in the Sun made patterns? Some physicist might help me out here, but if all of the nuclear activity of all the atomic particles in the Sun could be thought of as a computer, what kind of compute power would a star have? I'd say it would be infinitely more powerful than the "infinite monkeys" theory. The Sun does indeed absolutely provide for and sustain life on earth, but might it not be a super intelligence which only spends a fraction of its energy doing so? The conjecture of God as Sun also depends upon a theory of emergent behavior. Ants don't recognize the beauty of the lines they make across the forest floor. They only smell the butt of the ant in front. Humans don't recognize the patterns they make across history, we can't even all speak the same language. (I don't mean to imply Sapir Whorf here, just accounting for dissonance across time and distance). Intelligent behavior is only intelligent when there is intelligence to perceive it. In that regard the morality of human history only makes sense to God. The fate of the city only makes sense in the context of the state. The fate of the one in context to the many. A robot cannot be a human being because a robot is powered by electricity. It therefore can only simulate hunger, its emotions are of a different character. It needs what it needs but not things that humans need. If humans each had multiple sexual organs we would behave in completely other ways. So one has to be human to interpret human intelligence. Again, this is consistent with Christian ideas about God.
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