The feeling of religious awe when looking at something with the beauty and complexity of DNA is the same regardless of your belief in God or lack thereof.
I totally agree with you. Awe comes from seeing that is so incredibly well designed. You are right, you don't have to believe in God to appreciate it. The original authors quote was:
Show me a religion that is willing to change its belief in a supernatural being after centuries of mounting evidence to explain away the mysteries that underpinned such superstition.
This guy makes the mistaken assumption that the evidence rules out the possibility that God exists. I just think that is a very faulty "leap of faith"
Assigning "miracle status" to DNA gets logically messy since if DNA is so "special" that God must have developed it, then who developed the "special" God.
There's another kind of ballsy assumptions that many people make, that they have the ability to comprehend something sophisticated enough to make them. Kind of like the pot really understanding what a potter is. So to me, if God is smart enough to put together DNA, am I smart enough to comprehend him? There are thousands of PhDs studying molecular biology, and they've barely scratched the surface of how it all works. Complexity does NOT generally come from randomness. Randomness leads to randomness.
Scientific dogma says nothing about the existence of God.
Agreed, it shouldn't. Science is completely about observing that which is. It's ironic, however, that some of the first scientists were Christians. Before them, the Greeks and Romans had a very random type of cosmology. The first scientists felt that because God created an ordered world, it was worthy of being studied, and that there would be a rational link between cause and effect.
Unfortunately, the scientific dogmatists since the "Great Awakening" (may have that name wrong, I'm not a history buff) have slid into the trap of thinking that since they can see how things fit together, they can effectively say there is no root cause, and therefore, there is no God. Thus the original authors fallacious assumption that those who acknowledge God's presence are somehow foolish or stupid. Thus the T-Shirt comment!
It's just that as far as explaining how the Universe works, God is considered irrelevant.
That's too bad. That's like saying something like "Linux is great, but Linus and the open source community are irrelevant", when in fact they are not irrelevant, and want to make a really good thing that serves a lot of folks.
Show me a religion that is willing to change its belief in a supernatural being after centuries of mounting evidence to explain away the mysteries that underpinned such superstition.
Your comment reminds me of a great T-shirt I once saw. On the front it said:
God is dead.
-- Nietzsche
and on the back it said:
Nietzsche is dead.
-- God
What science are you talking about? Have you ever studied anything about DNA? It's the most amazing piece of code ever written. No scientific dogmatist is ever going to convince me that that incredible sequence happened because of a lot of coin flips by random forces.
Ever seen a software program without an software developer behind it? (for the wise guys, somebody had to write the first code generator...)
You may want to take a look at XML Spy as an XML Editor. It's a commercial product (about $199), but I've used it to build a DocBook file, and then used the DocBook XSLT scripts to generate HTML.
I've also used it to generate custom DTDs, which worked pretty well.
The product can import Word files (converts Word Styles to element types). What they really need is an XSL script to generate Word formatted files. That would be great!
I'm not sure your basic office folks are quite ready for it, but with a little training, they might be weaned off of Word.
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I totally agree with you. Awe comes from seeing that is so incredibly well designed. You are right, you don't have to believe in God to appreciate it. The original authors quote was:
This guy makes the mistaken assumption that the evidence rules out the possibility that God exists. I just think that is a very faulty "leap of faith"
There's another kind of ballsy assumptions that many people make, that they have the ability to comprehend something sophisticated enough to make them. Kind of like the pot really understanding what a potter is. So to me, if God is smart enough to put together DNA, am I smart enough to comprehend him? There are thousands of PhDs studying molecular biology, and they've barely scratched the surface of how it all works. Complexity does NOT generally come from randomness. Randomness leads to randomness.
Agreed, it shouldn't. Science is completely about observing that which is. It's ironic, however, that some of the first scientists were Christians. Before them, the Greeks and Romans had a very random type of cosmology. The first scientists felt that because God created an ordered world, it was worthy of being studied, and that there would be a rational link between cause and effect.
Unfortunately, the scientific dogmatists since the "Great Awakening" (may have that name wrong, I'm not a history buff) have slid into the trap of thinking that since they can see how things fit together, they can effectively say there is no root cause, and therefore, there is no God. Thus the original authors fallacious assumption that those who acknowledge God's presence are somehow foolish or stupid. Thus the T-Shirt comment!
That's too bad. That's like saying something like "Linux is great, but Linus and the open source community are irrelevant", when in fact they are not irrelevant, and want to make a really good thing that serves a lot of folks.
Your comment reminds me of a great T-shirt I once saw. On the front it said:
and on the back it said:
What science are you talking about? Have you ever studied anything about DNA? It's the most amazing piece of code ever written. No scientific dogmatist is ever going to convince me that that incredible sequence happened because of a lot of coin flips by random forces.
Ever seen a software program without an software developer behind it? (for the wise guys, somebody had to write the first code generator...)
You may want to take a look at XML Spy as an XML Editor. It's a commercial product (about $199), but I've used it to build a DocBook file, and then used the DocBook XSLT scripts to generate HTML. I've also used it to generate custom DTDs, which worked pretty well. The product can import Word files (converts Word Styles to element types). What they really need is an XSL script to generate Word formatted files. That would be great! I'm not sure your basic office folks are quite ready for it, but with a little training, they might be weaned off of Word.