Another Aged One
The cardinals have just picked a new pope--76 year old pope francis. In most organizations it wouldn't be acceptable to choose someone past retirement age for the top position. There seems little point in going through the trouble of a conclave if the outcome ensures the process will have to be repeated rather soon....The catholic church, however, has no choice. It has become a gerontocracy. Not surprisingly, an archaic belief is upheld by men of the past. Within a few decades, only a handful of the present adherants will remain. They'll be replaced by a whole new order.
posted by starman at 3:31 AM
7 Comments:
A lot of Catholics have chosen to join Protestant churches. They have become disillusioned with Catholicism.
Neal Robbins
As for God, I just feel almost forced to believe that the elements--I mean the great, famed periodic chart--had to have been created; it is just too beautiful and complex to have existed from the beginning without ever having been created. Could you believe that? I DO believe that some things, like the real numbers, the Fibonacci set, and the 5 regular polyhedra, DID exist from the start and did not have to be created, but the Elements seem to me to be sufficiently more beautiful and complex than the real numbers etc., as to almost require an act of creation. The Creator must have been a Mind--that could have evolved from very simple primordial particles, I guess. I would like to know how you, Tim and Neal and anyone else, conceive of the origin of the periodic chart. Perhaps you might also contemplate that it could have evolved from simpler things (I used to think that when I was young, I thought it all just started with simple hydrogen (so simple, I thought, that it could have existed from the beginning without having been created) and then just kept joining nuclei together in greater and greater numbers to evolve all the other elements. I can no longer believe that, because each element is so unique marvelous and beautiful--carbon, for example, is certainly not simply anything at all like 6 hydrogens (deuteriums)joined together.)
My implicit axiom is that whatever existed at the Start had to have been simple.
It's common knowledge that only simple hydrogen and helium existed at the start and the other elements resulted from nucleosynthesis. No creation was needed. Indeed whatever existed at the start had to have been simple. It's for precisely this reason that I long ago rejected an initial "creator." You've seen my writings. :)
I'm glad we agree on the axiom that whatever existed from the Start must have been simple, but I still don't feel that you are sufficiently acknowledging the beauty and complexity of the periodic chart.
Consider, for example, the remarkable element carbon, with its fantastic variety of organic compounds--food, wood, rubber, plastics, blood, hormones, medicines--these wouldn't seem to follow automatically from just combining hydrogen/helium atoms, it seems to me! You don't get such an amazing element without having planned for it, can you believe so? And its marvelous crystalline forms, graphite and diamond, and its exceptionally high melting point and so forth. And then there's the amazing compound H2O, with all its properties that make life not only possible but rich, like the way the solid form is lighter than the liquid and its anomalously high boiling point when compared with analogous compounds like CH4 and
NH3, HF etc. And then there's the pretty tho stinky element, yellow sulfur, and so on and on and on. I just can hardly see how you could imagine that these wonders result simply from crunching simple H/He nuclei together?
I raise these questions because they tie into the question of what is to become of the Catholic (or Protestant, or any other) church in the future, which, I think, must depend on what it is possible for smart, educated people to believe.
I feel almost forced to believe that the periodic table had to have been designed (and once it was, the evolution of intelligent life was inevitable--no further input from the Designer was needed). Whoever designed it obviously, then, obviously wanted life to be fruitful and multiply--but that doesn't mean that they wanted EVERY lustful thought to result in a baby--so I don't think birth control is immoral as if it defied God's will. So that is just one example where I think the Church will eventually have to change its position...if it is to have a future among ever-better-educated people.
I don't think Stephen Hawking, the great exert on Universe origins, would concur on the need for a creator. :) Consider also the claim that our Universe is just one of countless trillions with varying properties. Just like we know Earth just got very lucky by chance, as hundreds of other planets appear certain to be lifeless, the same may be true of our Universe. Given so many planets and universes, what appears to have been miraculously designed is more plausibly interpreted as the fortuitous outcome of chance.
I would like to see how Hawking would explain how anything so marvelous and complex as the periodic chart of elements could have happened without being created; does his book have an index in which you could look to see whether he has addressed that particular issue which seems to me to be the strongest argument for creation? I suppose I could look this up in the library, I will try to remember to do that tomorrow.
Yeah too, one of the hardest puzzles is why does anything exist at all when intuitively it seems far more likely that a universe--any randomly-chosen one--would most likely have nothing in it at all; and my answer to that is (like yours) precisely that the odds against a given universe having anything probably are quadrillions to one, only we just lucked out in being born into that very tiny minority of universes that do have something!
Let me know if you find his book. As far as I know the periodic table is not used as an argument by creationists. The supposed improbability of life is.
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