»Purpose of life«

Quote:

Agent Smith: The purpose of life is to end

We all know that Smith was talking about death. So what do you think of life? I tried to find it out but I can't. Someone said that we all live in this world is to imporve the world and wait for the coming of God. I would say what if all people die? If all people die and everything will stop. Then the purpose of life is nothing. What do you think?

I believe what smith was getting at was some of the main ‘meat’ in the whole story.

His use of understanding evolution as the way to explain life is seen as he interrogates Morpheus in M1. Again here at the end as he questions Neo we hear the thoughts of an evolutionists mind.

I believe apart from the fact that mankind had passed down their empty way of life to the machines as well as trying to rob them of their own purpose, this is what the movie is challenging.

If we have a fundamental evolutionary view of life there is no purpose except to end. What is the purpose to continue to fight on... WHY Mr Anderson WHY?

Neo represents Zion, which from a Christian standpoint represents that spirit or Hope that exists within mankind and strives toward the belief that there is a deeper meaning to our existence. Purpose.

This may help further, click: matrix-explained.com...

I believe the purpose of life is to be. In order to be, life has to evolve, to grow, in a dynamic interplay with a constantly changing world.

Death is only a means for life to evolve.

We as individuals carry the code of life, the DNA. With each individual, the DNA tries a slightly different approach to evolve and to adapt to the changing world. Those individuals that succeed, pass on their code to new life, again slightly changed by merging it with another individual's code.
Individuals carrying "old" code have to die in order to make room for the "new", evolved life.

And if you choose the metaphysical, spiritual approach, the purpose of life is not only to grow, but eventually to transform into another form of existence.

I believe growth and change are one major aspect of the trilogy.


I believe when Smith says "the purpose of life is to end" and when he makes his crater speech, he is completely deluded. He doesn't see the bigger picture.

"Is it freedom or truth, perhaps peace - could it be for love? Illusions, Mr. Anderson, vagaries of perception. Temporary constructs of a feeble human intellect trying desperately to justify an existence that is without meaning or purpose".

Freedom, peace, love, truth. Illusions? Or means to evolve?

Machines/programs are born for a defined purpose ("without purpose we would not exist), their path through life has been destined, with very limited possibilities of deviation. Whereas humans are born for no other purpose than carrying on the code of life.
Smith says this fact makes human life worthless.
I say, a life that has been born for no specific purpose, will not necessarily live a life without purpose. But rather than being bond to, and being limited by (!) a given purpose, purposelessly born life has the flexibility to find its own purpose. But it is not limited to this purpose and can change it in adaptation to changing circumstances.
Machine life changes with the individual, based on Goedel's incompleteness theorem. Human life can also change within the individual.
Machine and man represent the opposite principles of static and dynamic change. The path Neo walks from being Thomas Anderson to becoming the enlightened One in the end of Revolutions represents the climax of dynamic change in a human. No machine created for a purpose could possibly have gone through this transformation.

And I believe, that is the huge significance of Sati!
She is a program created without a purpose. She is neither bond to, nor limited by a purpose. She represents dynamic change and transformation, new to machine life. Sati is a new machine generation.

Considering the eastern worldview that changes in nature are a manifestation of the dynamic interplay between polar opposites, the deluded Smith is not much more than a means to bring about change.
Smith represents death, the polar opposite of life. The unbalance in this relationship, the threat Smith/death imposes on life, causes life to change.

Although not very clear of your answers...

"If there is no purpose of life, then we are born to find or make some purpose of life"

Am I right?

I completely agree with tozy. The purpose of life is to exist. We are here to experience the different aspects of the human condition and to grow and change.

And of course Sati represents this aspect the most.

For once, Akshat,... for once!

Gundamdriver,

I believe in the bigger picture, there is a purpose to the life of each individual. In the biological sense, we are born for the purpose of carrying on and improving the code of life (DNA). In the metaphysical/spiritual sense, I believe our purpose is to grow and transform life spiritually.

Programs are created for a purpose. They are bound to this purpose and they are limited by it. If you create a calculating program, you won’t be able to paint with it. So, this program is limited to calculating. And if you didn’t need a calculating program, you wouldn’t create it.

But when your parents made you, they didn’t do it for the purpose that you would become a carpenter, or a doctor or whatever. You are a product of love.
Within the limits that your environment and circumstances create for you – we are all victim to causality – you are free to choose whatever purpose you will have in your life. And – within the limits of causality – you are free to change your purpose whenever you see fit.

It seems that mankind cannot live without a purpose. We seek to have a purpose in our lives. Only, apart from the above mentioned “bigger-picture” purpose, our purpose is not a given one, rather it is a chosen one.

Quote:

The purpose of life is to exist.

U should replace the word "exist" with "live it"
becuz being on live support or being a loner/hermit is existing but to experience things and further ur understanding and interacting is "living it" so i agree but its kinda contradictory 2 use the word "exist"

I like your summing up Akshat Gupta.

And I also agree. Principally.

But the journey leads one to ask, where do we define our growth our change from? Why do we feel the ‘good & the bad’ and the need to evolve to something?

How do we define true value/purpose?

Absolutes.

Surely it cant be left down to ‘everyone doing what’s right in their own eyes’ as these understandings differ and conflict in many ways as well as 'evolve' or change as we see from our worlds history. That may be the journey, but where is the destination and why?

Gundamdriver wrote:

Quote: Agent Smith: The purpose of life is to end We all know that Smith was talking about death. So what do you think of life? I tried to find it out but I can't. Someone said that we all live in this world is to imporve the world and wait for the coming of God. I would say what if all people die? If all people die and everything will stop. Then the purpose of life is nothing. What do you think?

life is a big cosmic accident. consciousness is a tool that your genetic material uses to ensure that your dna gets passed on. therefore, one can choose to define their own purpose, or one can adopt nature's purpose for them: to gain enough power and prestige to attract a fertile mate, procreate, die, and become worm food. doesn't seem like that difficult a choice to me, but it seems that most people blindly go through life accumulating money, trying to impress potential mates, and copulating like there's no tomorrow. but when you're born into an existence without any real purpose, you're free to choose your own purpose. in that case, your purpose could be to experience and learn as much as possible, to enrich the lives of others with artistic works, to change political power structures so that the lives of the exploited and oppressed become less painful, or anything you want.

d

Inevitability wrote:

Surely it cant be left down to ‘everyone doing what’s right in their own eyes’ as these understandings differ and conflict in many ways as well as 'evolve' or change as we see from our worlds history. That may be the journey, but where is the destination and why?

conflict and contradiction are inherent to all of existence. there are quantum particles that exist in more than one place at the same time. cubism showed us that there is no objective reality. only our own percpetions mean anything. perspective is the key to understanding physics, art, and all of life. conflict and disagreement is reality. there is no absolute truth. no one's perspective is any more or less valid than anyone else's, and when one starts to believe otherwise, they go down the road of ego-slavery. this is where dictators and tyrants come from.

the destination is death, at which point everything ends for the person who just died. again, perspective is everything. personal death may as well be the end of all existence; what does it matter of the rest of the world carries on without you if your consciousness blinks into nothingness when you die?

your end is the end of everything, because without you, the universe that you knew no longer exists. only the universes that exist from the perspectives of others go on existing.

d

Some of your reasoning dedalus sounds similar to Smith's, the result and inevitable conclusion of adopting fundamental evolution...

'vagaries of perception. Temporary constructs of a feeble human intellect trying desperately to justify an existence that is without meaning or purpose'

Consequences.

Accepting the theory of evolution is much more than an intellectual option. It means pinning one’s thinking to a materialistic belief-system that has far reaching consequences. William Provine, Professor of History and Biological Sciences at Cornell University, who calls himself a total atheist gives us more than an inkling of where it leads...

'Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear... There are no gods, no purposes, no goal-directing forces of any kind. There is no life after death... There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no meaning to life, and no free will for humans, either.’

This makes it clear that evolution is not some kind of toy we can bring out occasionally for our interest or amusement. It radically affects every part of life. If the world is just there, if life is the result of a fascinating fluke, and if we ourselves are nothing more than biological accidents, we are faced with an avalanche of questions.

It raises more questions than it answers and requires enormous amounts of faith to truly believe in its probability.

Things do not happen by chance.

With a book the words do not fly through the air and happen to land in the right order. So a book must have an author. A painting must have a painter, a building an architect, a robot a creator etc

Isn’t it reasonable to suggest the same principle is true with this unique and enormously complex, wonder-filled world? To say it all happened by chance and has no inherent meaning is to through all logic and reason out of the window and become a fool.
I think it reveals more about us than it does about reasoning or common sense.

Unfortunately much of our society's predisposition teaches us this very thing, robbing our senses and reducing our lives to materialistic emptiness.

I Rebel!

There are no easy answers.

Like Council Hamann said: ‘I don’t understand... but I do understand there is a REASON for it to be’

If our brains are more complex than computers, our eyes more sophisticated than cameras then why do we reason they could just ‘evolve’ without any intervention?

Could you logical believe that if I were to jumble all the words and letters on this post to a meaningless mess, they would by themselves ever come to make any kind of sense, let alone the intelligence that is being communicated through what your now reading?

It takes enormous amounts of faith to truly believe in this kind of probability, as well as much supporting evidence.

The theory of evolution has been called ‘the most powerful and the most comprehensive idea that has ever arisen on earth’. It has been so passionately argued and so heavily promoted in the mass media that millions of people with no scientific expertise assume it must be true.


Evolution - Fact or fiction?

What you should know:

If life arose, developed and became increasingly more complex through a random evolutionary process, fossils should indicate that there were countless transitional stages between the different species.

In 1981 a spokesman for the American Association for the Advancement of Science claimed that 100 million fossils, identified and dated, constitute 100 million facts that prove evolution beyond a doubt whatsoever.

To Darwin’s embarrassment and frustration, the fossils did no such thing. He expected an ‘inconceivably great’ number of intermediate and transitional forms, but geologists discovered species, and groups of species, that appeared to have neither predecessors nor successors. Darwin soon realized that the absence of any finely graduated organic chain was ‘the most obvious and serious objection against the theory [of evolution]’, and his response was to suggest that later discoveries would fill in the gaps.

This has not happened: the evidence we find in the geological record is not nearly as compatible with Darwinian natural selection as we would like it to be…We now have a quarter of a million fossils species but the situation hasn’t changed much. The record of evolution is surprisingly jerky and, ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin’s time… so Darwin’s problem has not been alleviated.

It is not even possible to make a caricature of evolution out of the palaeobiological facts. The fossil material is now so complete that the lack of transitional species cannot be explained by the scarcity of the material. The deficiencies are real; they will never be filled.

Don’t let Darwin make a Monkey out of you!

Don’t let the Matrix (this so called reality, we call the civilised world) tell you who you are.

Listen to the Oracle - ‘the Heart never speaks but you must listen to it to know’

Inevitability wrote:

Your reasoning dedalus sounds a lot like Smith, the result and inevitable conclusion of a fundamental evolutionist. Consequences. Accepting the theory of evolution is much more than an intellectual option. It means pinning one’s thinking to a materialistic belief-system that has far reaching consequences. William Provine, Professor of History and Biological Sciences at Cornell University, who calls himself a total atheist gives us more than an inkling of where it leads... 'Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear... There are no gods, no purposes, no goal-directing forces of any kind. There is no life after death... There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no meaning to life, and no free will for humans, either.’ This makes it clear that evolution is not some kind of toy we can bring out occasionally for our interest or amusement. It radically affects every part of life. If the world is just there, if life is the result of a fascinating fluke, and if we ourselves are nothing more than biological accidents, we are faced with an avalanche of questions.

i agree wholeheartedly, so far.

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It raises more questions than it answers and requires enormous amounts of faith to truly believe in its probability.

here's where you lose me. believing in evolution requires no more faith than believing in a chair; the physical evidence is right in front of our faces. now, i don't presume to be able to explain exactly how evolution functions, and neither does anyone else, except the most arrogant evolutionary scientists. but it seems clear that evolution is the process that controls life. believing in it requires much less faith than believing in, say, a god who hangs around behind the scenes but gives no evidence of his existence, or beleiving in some sort of universal purpose of which no one can be truly aware. here's why: perspective. my universe consists of what i'm aware of. your universe consists of what you're aware of. until you find out about something, for all intents and purposes it may as well not exist.

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Things do not happen by chance.

again i must dissent. how do you know that things do not happen by chance? what was so important about the fact that i tried to open my office door with my house key this morning? did the universe make that happen for a reason? if so, what could that reason be? would the rest of history really have turned out differently if i had tries the correct key the first time?

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With a book the words do not fly through the air and happen to land in the right order. So a book must have an author. A painting must have a painter, a building an architect, a robot a creator etc

no argument from me on those points.

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Isn’t it reasonable to suggest the same principle is true with this unique and enormously complex, wonder-filled world?

maybe. but don't forget, the human psyche finds great comfort in the thought of a nurturing, caring, loving god, and we therefore do everything in our power to convince ourselves that such a god exists. and for every wonder in this world, there are a hundred horrors. some of us live priveleged lives in industrialized nations, and we have time to sit around discussing the wonders of life. what about the victims of genocide being tortured and massacred in the sudan as we speak? what about the tibetan political prisoners who get their tongues sawed out for speaking out against the chinese government? i doubt the world holds much wonder for these people.

and what about the things we know go on with non-human animals? there's nothing wonder-filled about a wasp laying eggs in a live caterpillar that gets eaten from the inside out when the larva hatch. an antelope getting torn apart while it is still not only alive but conscious might not see much wonder in the world.

plus, your analogy might not really be a valid one. we know that books, paintings, etc, are part of a vast process of production and consumption. the universe was around before we got here, so we can't really say that it is part of a similar process, and we therefore can't say that because artworks have authors, the universe had to have one. all analogies break down when you really start to analyze them, and this is the point at which yours starts to break down for me.

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To say it all happened by chance and has no inherent meaning is to through all logic and reason out of the window and become a fool.

hmm. how so? i think saying that there is no inherent meaning is quite liberating, and frees us to be who we want to be and do what we feel is best. with no god to dictate what is right and wrong, we can evaluate our world and decide for oursleves what is right and wrong. and based on all the atrocities committed in the name of god and or gods throughout human history, i'd say that choosing for one's self leads to less pain and misery than hoping that one;s god's definitions of right and wrong are the best definitions.

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I think it reveals more about us than it does about reasoning or common sense.

i couldn't agree more. we're back to perspective. we are our universe, since every person's universe consists only of what that person can perceive.

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Unfortunately much of our society's predisposition teaches us this very thing, robbing our senses and reducing our lives to materialistic emptiness.

i agree.

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I Rebel! There are no easy answers. Like Council Hamann said: ‘I don’t understand... but I do understand there is a REASON for it to be'

of course there is a reason. choice. one's own personal choice, choice based upon one's own value system, not a fake choice made by blindly adopting the value system of a god, whether that god be supernatural in nature (like jehovah, allah, buddha, etc.) or material in nature (nations, political doctrines, etc.).

my reasoning is very much like smith's, but smith stops before i do. he stops when he gets to point where he's able to realize that there are forces shaping him that are beyond his control. but i recognize the power of choice. choice can't change the world, but it can change the chooser, and if one's universe is made up only of what one can perceive, changing one's perceptions can, in a way, change one's world / universe. my life, like everyone's, is shaped by forces i will never be able to control or understand fully. evolutionary, economic, chemical, psychological, you name it. but once in a while i am allowed to make a choice. once in a while i am allowed to shape the chaos of the universe with a choice. it might result in no changes, or it might do more. who knows? all i know, and all i need to know, is that i was born into a universe with no pre-assigned meaning, and that i am therefore free to assign my own meanings to that which holds importance for me.

d

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Things do not happen by chance

I think you misunderstood me a bit. I don’t mean everything like your example of the keys etc. Read it in context.

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perspective. my universe consists of what i'm aware of. your universe consists of what you're aware of. until you find out about something, for all intents and purposes it may as well not exist

I agree, but once found, perspective is developed.

Not all of life’s mysteries can be explained scientifically. I think Jody Fosters experience in the film ‘Contact’ helped to reveal that.

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maybe. but don't forget, the human psyche finds great comfort in the thought of a nurturing, caring, loving god, and we therefore do everything in our power to convince ourselves that such a god exists

I hope that what I have said so far is not biased in such a direction, but rather based on reason and common sense.

But if it is true of our psyche, why do we inherently believe in such a thing? Why do we need such comfort and love?

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for every wonder in this world, there are a hundred horrors.

I'm not sure about a hundred? but good point. But this does not explain the absence of God, only mankind’s ability to commit evil and a possible fallen world/nature.

I also want to pause for a moment, to acknowledge the many ‘horrors’ you mentioned and the people that occupy them.

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with no god to dictate

I feel this is one of the biggest assumptions we commonly make about a Supreme Being should he exist.

Who said he was a dictator?

If we are looking to mankind’s examples for a representation then I believe that could be contributory to the reason for this widely accepted misconception/assumption.

There is just as much bad that can be said about man made religion as good, this is true.
But this doesn’t bring us any closer to the answers.

In fact it is said that because of love for us, God has not forced us to obey him, but agonisingly waits for us to return.

What if this were true?

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until you find out about something, for all intents and purposes it may as well not exist

I believe a point in the Matrix in context of the Machines is that other perspectives didn’t exist for them. Humans being their masters/parents taught them all they knew. And just look at what that was! Hence... 'it was your life that taught me the purpose of all life’

So Smith's adoption of the destructive virus type of behaviour he had come to know of humans is what he understands. So his choices are limited through lack of perspective.

Many in life lack perspectives because of upbringing, environment, education etc, a bit like the unfortunate's you mentioned encountering ‘horrors’. Although it could be considered that they gain perspectives, negative ones.

Also, another perspective to consider...

Life is short, but eternity is long.

What if this reality, this ‘perspective’ is only like Morpheus said... electrical signals interpreted by our brain? ...but what constitutes conscious feeling thought and choice is of a spiritual nature? And once this shell/body that we perceive to be our reality is gone we awake as Neo did to find reality itself? Like when one awakes from a dream.

What if this life constitutes our choice and that choice confirms our destiny?

What if were wrong and this life does go on forever?

Can you truly say in your heart that there is no afterlife, no deeper meaning to our existence, no Supreme Being? It’s the biggest gamble with the highest steaks.

Imagine a large circle that represents the total sum of all knowledge. Now draw a circle within it that you believe may represent the total sum of knowledge/wisdom you will acquire in your lifetime.

Not very big is it?

There is so much in this world that I do not understand, but I do understand there is a REASON.

I only hope that we understand that reason before its too late.

(Sorry if this seems a bit heavy, but some things in life are too important to water down. We all have to face it sooner or later. It is inevitable!)

Inevitability wrote:

If our brains are more complex than computers, our eyes more sophisticated than cameras then why do we reason they could just ‘evolve’ without any intervention? Could you logical believe that if I were to jumble all the words and letters on this post to a meaningless mess, they would by themselves ever come to make any kind of sense, let alone the intelligence that is being communicated through what your now reading?

no. but words are not bits of genetic material that spontaneously mutate to lead to newer and more varied forms of life. words sit on a page or on a computer screen, and they do not contain genetic material that will mutate. organisms, however, do, and that's why natural selection can account for every biological phenomenon you could ever think of. i therefore must reject your analogy.

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It takes enormous amounts of faith to truly believe in this kind of probability, as well as much supporting evidence.

well, a misconception most people have about natural selection is that there is some sort of conscious, driving force behind it. but it's really much simpler than that. all life forms undergo spntaneous genetic mutation, sometimes the result of environmental stimuli. the organisms whose spontaneous mutations give them substantial advantages over other organisms in a particular environmental context have more opportuntites to reproduce, and those spontaneous mutations become the norm as more and more of the advantaged organisms reproduce. over millions and millions of years, these mutations can become stacked and can result in some very complex combinations. but that doesn't seem very miraculous to me. millions of years is a long time. now, if an organism was an amoeba one day and it woke up the next day with a complex nervous system and four limbs and a consciousness, then i would say that natural selection might not be enough to account for the change. but give dna a billion years, and of course things like eyes and brains will pop up. that seems not so much a leap of faith as a simple understanding of the process of natural selection.

d

Inevitability wrote:

The theory of evolution has bee called ‘the most powerful and the most comprehensive idea that has ever arisen on earth’. It has been so passionately argued and so heavily promoted in the mass media that millions of people with no scientific expertise assume it must be true. Evolution - Fact or fiction? What you should know: If life arose, developed and became increasingly more complex through a random evolutionary process, fossils should indicate that there were countless transitional stages between the different species. In 1981 a spokesman for the American Association for the Advancement of Science claimed that 100 million fossils, identified and dated, constitute 100 million facts that prove evolution beyond a doubt whatsoever. To Darwin’s embarrassment and frustration, the fossils did no such thing. He expected an ‘inconceivably great’ number of intermediate and transitional forms, but geologists discovered species, and groups of species, that appeared to have neither predecessors nor successors. Darwin soon realized that the absence of any finely graduated organic chain was ‘the most obvious and serious objection against the theory [of evolution]’, and his response was to suggest that later discoveries would fill in the gaps. This has not happened: the evidence we find in the geological record is not nearly as compatible with Darwinian natural selection as we would like it to be…We now have a quarter of a million fossils species but the situation hasn’t changed much. The record of evolution is surprisingly jerky and, ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin’s time… so Darwin’s problem has not been alleviated. It is not even possible to make a caricature of evolution out of the palaeobiological facts. The fossil material is now so complete that the lack of transitional species cannot be explained by the scarcity of the material. The deficiencies are real; they will never be filled. Don’t let Darwin make a Monkey out of you! Don’t let the Matrix (this so called reality, we call the civilised world) tell you who you are. Listen to the Oracle - ‘the Heart never speaks but you must listen to it to know’

well, let me propose the possibility that there are still fossils we have yet to find. or are you suggesting that every fossil in the earth has been dug up and catalogued already?

well, okay, let's say for the sake of argument that there is not enough fossil evidence to support any evolutionary theories. where does that leave us? with a god? you urge me not to let the matrix tell me who i am? should i let a god tell me who i am? what's the difference? and i have listened to my heart . . . it told me that no world in which so many innocent beings are subjected to so much underserved suffering could be the product of a god. or, if indeed a god has created this universe, he's a psychopath who gets his rocks off on watching people in pain. in which case he can promptly bugger off and leave me to my delusions.

d

Inevitability wrote:

What if this life had been our choice all along and that choice confirms our destiny?

if i don't remember making the choice, i didn't make it.

d

Inevitability wrote:

Life is short, but eternity is long. ... Can you truly say in your heart that there is no afterlife, no deeper meaning to our existence, no Supreme Being? It’s the biggest gamble with the highest steaks. Imagine a large circle that represents the total sum of all knowledge. Now draw a circle within it that you believe may represent the total sum of knowledge/wisdom you will acquire in your lifetime. Not very big is it? There is so much in this world that I do not understand, but I do understand there is a REASON. I only hope that we understand that reason before its too late. (Sorry if this seems a bit heavy, but some things in life are too important to water down. We all have to face it sooner or later. It is inevitable!)

yes, eternity is long. and if i am going to end up in some eternal afterlife, i sure as hell don't want to spend it with the god that thought it would be okay to design us in a way that forces us to kill and consume other organisms in order to stay alive! or the god that thought it would be okay to let crack babies be born into a few hours of intense agony followed by death. suffering is the most important issue in any theological discussion. if you believe in a god, you believe that god allows suffering. some suffering helps us grow as people, but some suffering, like a woman being kidnapped, sexually abused, and murdered (happened in my town a few weeks ago) doesn't seem to accomplish much to me. any god who allows people to die in fear and pain because it might be part of his "plan" for us is a twisted maniac of a god. and we are the rats in the laboratory of the universe. i deny this god with every fiber of my being. if hell is what awaits me, so be it. i'd rather burn for eternity than spend the afterlife kneeling at the blood-soaked feet of the god who sits back and pares his fingernails while people and animals suffer and die every day.

i appreciate the gravity of this discussion and don't mind the "heaviness." i hope you're right about all this. i'd love to be wrong here. i'd love to find out that there is a nurturing, loving god who cares for us and whatnot. but i've never seen anything to suggest that this is the case. and i'm fresh out of faith.

d

[quote="Inevitability] but don't forget, the human psyche finds great comfort in the thought of a nurturing, caring, loving god, and we therefore do everything in our power to convince ourselves that such a god exists.

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I hope that what I have said so far is not biased in such a direction, but rather based on reason and common sense. But if it is true of our psyche, why do we inherently believe in such a thing? Why do we need such comfort and love?

because most of us have that comfort and love when we're in the womb. then we get shoved out into the world and that level of comfort and love is gone forever. so we invent fictions in order to make ourselves believe that we will someday feel that love again.

also, we might not inherently feel this need. it might be conditioned into us by a power structure that needs us to be religious. it's an issue of social control. powerful people encourage belief in god and heaven so that exploited people will be complacent about their exploitation. the reasoning goes thusly: "yeah, my life sucks and i have a shite job that pays me next to nothing, but when i die i'll go to heaven, so i guess i won't kill my boss."

d

by the way, inevitability, you're very smart and i'm enjoying our exchange immensely. it's nice to know that two people can disagree without having to get pissy with each other.

d

[quote="dedalus"]

Inevitability wrote:

The theory of evolution has bee called ‘the most powerful and the most comprehensive idea that has ever arisen on earth’. It has been so passionately argued and so heavily promoted in the mass media that millions of people with no scientific expertise assume it must be true. Evolution - Fact or fiction? What you should know: If life arose, developed and became increasingly more complex through a random evolutionary process, fossils should indicate that there were countless transitional stages between the different species. In 1981 a spokesman for the American Association for the Advancement of Science claimed that 100 million fossils, identified and dated, constitute 100 million facts that prove evolution beyond a doubt whatsoever. To Darwin’s embarrassment and frustration, the fossils did no such thing. He expected an ‘inconceivably great’ number of intermediate and transitional forms, but geologists discovered species, and groups of species, that appeared to have neither predecessors nor successors. Darwin soon realized that the absence of any finely graduated organic chain was ‘the most obvious and serious objection against the theory [of evolution]’, and his response was to suggest that later discoveries would fill in the gaps. This has not happened: the evidence we find in the geological record is not nearly as compatible with Darwinian natural selection as we would like it to be…We now have a quarter of a million fossils species but the situation hasn’t changed much. The record of evolution is surprisingly jerky and, ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin’s time… so Darwin’s problem has not been alleviated. It is not even possible to make a caricature of evolution out of the palaeobiological facts. The fossil material is now so complete that the lack of transitional species cannot be explained by the scarcity of the material. The deficiencies are real; they will never be filled. Don’t let Darwin make a Monkey out of you!

i'd also be curious to know what your source was here. the scientific community is certainly full of dissent, and after all this is only one take on the matter. i wonder what an evolutionary biologist would have to say about this information if given a chance to respond.

d

I'll start out by saying I am a Theistic Evolutionist. Evolution occurs, but I think there was some "force" call it God, call it what you want, that got the ball rolling and keeps it in motion. I think of God more in terms of an energy than some magical being remaining hidden.

Previous quote referring to evolution "It has been so heavily debated and promoted in the mass media." I have to disagree with this statement. The majority of people look down upon those who believe in the slightest notion of evolution. Somehow believing that natural selection takes place over decades resulting in the change of entire species over time is impossible. Yet believing in a super-being who magically brought everything into existence but chooses not to show him/herself to the very beings he/she created is perfectly fine. I choose to keep more of an open mind than most.

Its well-known that animals develop certain qualities that help them survive, and the ones who dont, they die off. Thus only the strongest have their DNA passed on to the offspring. As for no transitional fossils being recovered? That's bunk. There are plenty of fossils showing changes occuring in species ranging from mesquitoes to humans. Yes, humans. Our own beginning can be traced back to Australopithecus. As you move further in time and look at fossil evidence you see definite changes going on in the species. Changing brain capacity and bone structure. Follow the trail from Africa to Europe and Asia.