Quote:
Originally Posted by kinetic
Carl,
I woke up this morning and looked out over my dew covered lawn
at 5am, the kookaburras starting to stir, the whole house still asleep.
Pure heaven, these hours before dawn.
I saw Jupiter, shining beautifully through some thin, high cloud.
I thought: what a truly wonderful thing we are, a collection of cells which
are mostly water, but assembled in a way that I could stand there and
take in the light from Jupiter, know what it is, read about it in a book,
live in an age where the smartest few of our species had sent a spacecraft
across the gulf of space between it and sent back photographs of it.
What an amazing assembly of these cells we call life, we are.
Then I thought of this thread, that I have been following a while.
I hope this research can one day find what it is in our make up,
maybe right down to the cells and genome etc, what it is that
also makes us want to kill each other, destroy animal habitats, cause
us to make whole species extinct .....where does that great evil come
from...
Steve
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Yep, mate, it makes you wonder, doesn't it. Although, the thought of getting up at 5am for some people is tantamount to crazy, so you could say in those terms what you wrote there is "prozac-ick"
Science is great at discovering the mechanics behind the reasoning for something's existence, but when it boils down to the why of it all, it falls very short. In most cases it fails, especially when it comes to the big questions. Scientists can pontificate all they like about "the natural order of things", "random chance" and "as a consequence of the physical laws of nature", but they know themselves deep down, even if they don't want to admit it to themselves because of their training and mindset, that there's a whole lot more to the meaning of existence than just pure, randomly contrived, physical laws which just happen to pop into existence in an event which they have little real understanding about. There's a lot more going on here and they don't want to admit it, or would rather see it go away, so they can get back to working within their limited paradigm of knowledge.
Science is limited by its own way of doing things, in how it sees and measures the reality of this world. Yes, we will discover a great many things using science as our tool for discovery, but there are other things in reality which no matter how well we understand the mechanics of their workings and how they came to being, we will always be grasping for the why of their existence. To understand will require an intuitive reasoning that is beyond the boundaries of how science operates at present. It may even require something that science abhors in every sense...faith. Not faith in a religious sense, but faith in our abilities to look past the obvious, the "scientific", and see the meaning behind the why of things. To feel that what we have deduced from our reasoning and our insight is correct...even if only approximately. We will never know exactly why, because that would require us to have perfect knowledge of everything, and despite what many scientists may say or think, that is something we can never achieve. We may have access to all the knowledge, but we could never assimilate it all at once. That would mean we would be God (in the strictest definition) and that is something we are not.