I realize most of you think I'm incredibly ignorant and you are correct. , especially when it comes to responding to various comments about my threads. I don't want you to think I'm posting a thread, then running from it. I plead ignorance with regard to the technology I'm using. Hopefully, I'll learn how to do what comes so easy to most of you. I was born in the 40's and am computer-challenged. Sorry.
No idea what you're talking about here. You have demonstrated that you can manage to 1) start a new thread, 2) post in the thread, 3) read the replies, and 4) post a follow-up reply.
What about the tech has you so baffled, when you seem to be managing the necessary steps just fine?
ETA: what a nice PM!
I see better now, and apologize for being brusque.
Anyway, I honestly do not understand how you can demand so much from a human being, intellectually speaking, yet feel NATURE is the result of mindlessness. How can orderliness of such dizzying magnitude exist without any intelligent input?
Since I've no idea what any of this means, I can't answer it. I don't have an orderly mind, by any stretch. My mind is often chaotic and disorderly, but it still manages to get me through the day.
I also don't know what the "orderliness of nature" means. Take a forest, for example. The natural way for a forest to cleanse and renew itself is through fire. Fire in nature is not orderly in any sense. It can leave areas of overgrown deadfall completely untouched, when it races along the treetops instead of along the ground. It can burn into areas that don't really need cleansing and destroy habitation. It can do other strange, disorderly things.
When people, nice, orderly people, get into the mix, it gets even worse. Orderly people used to think that letting forests burn seemed a bad idea, so they went around in an orderly fashion, stopping every little fire that started up. Until the forests became so choked with deadfall and dead undergrowth that the least little spark would cause a mammoth conflagration.
We have wildfires every summer here in Colorado. Several years, they've caused great damage, loss of property, loss of natural resources, and loss of life. But for the last few years, the forestry service has been using controlled burns, because they've finally realized their mistake in being orderly and letting years pass while four feet of dead, dry pine needles piles up on the forest floor....
Many people thought the fires in Yellowstone years back were a tragedy; that the park would never be the same. And it's not: it's
much better. But there was nothing orderly about the lightning fires that reset the cycle.
I wish you guys would stop being such wise guys long enough to seriously attempt to answer this question. You see, I "HONESTLY" feel that order requires intelligent direction.
I honestly need to see examples of this order you speak about, as I am having a hard time coming up with any, myself, without imposing my natural bias as a human upon them to make them appear orderly.
Simply try to explain why you "believe" this is not true. Give me an example of order without intelligent direction. I just don't think you can. However, if you can, I will convert to atheism, OK?
There's a problem there, at least for me: I don't care if you "convert" to anything, least of all atheism. I don't recruit. My belief, or the lack thereof, is my own. I'm not trying to convince or convert you to anything, so your proposed bargain is empty to me.
I feel you're begging the question by assuming there is an order in nature. I watch a lot of nature documentaries, and I often see examples of utter chaos somehow resulting in something desirable. How orderly is it for two animals to begin the reproductive process, only to abandon either the eggs or the newly-born or hatched offspring to predators, so that perhaps one in a hundred or a thousand might possibly survive, or might not? And yet, somehow, enough of them do that the species is maintained...but then again, some of them don't, and species become extinct.
Tornadoes and hurricanes...those are orderly examples of nature at work? Ever seen a tornado obliterate one house, while leaving the one right next door untouched? Or seen a wildfire (note, not an
orderly fire but a
wild one) skip several houses in a block, at random, while one in the middle of the block gets burned to the ground?
Is "orderly" the correct word for severe rains that last for days, flooding the land for several miles, disturbing or destroying habitat, food sources, and breeding grounds?
And let's not forget things like cancer...cancer is orderly? I thought cancer was mitosis gone wild, random, out of control?
You're going to have to produce several examples of this orderliness you feel permeates the natural world, before I can even consider the concept as valid or sound.
What order I see in the world is largely a product of my applying my notions of said upon processes I observe, but not being able to do that consistently puts a rather large and disorderly hole in the notion.
It didn't take long to discover that this site is to atheism what the Catholic church is to homosexuals. In my experience, atheists always seem to be people nobody likes very much, so they had to be different by claiming to be an atheist, to justify why nobody likes them.
