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To: betty boop; StJacques; tortoise; Doctor Stochastic
Thank you so much for the ping to your excellent post and conversation with StJacques!

I would love to engage both of you and several other professional mathematicians on the forum in a wide ranging discussion of complexity and evolution. But there are several different kinds of complexity involved, ditto for information, randomness and entropy - so to get the conversation started, we'll need to first agree to some definitions and meanings. On another thread, I've offered some general categories, if y'all would care to engage the debate. But, truly, I believe any discussion of origins or abiogenesis will quickly stall without taking that first step.

We have a similar need to arrive at some common understandings in the discussion of time and timelessness. As betty boop so beautifully pointed out, we who inhabit dimensionality (including one or more temporal dimensions) have great difficultly in apprehending the meaning of timelessness. That is true also of any "thing" which is non-spatial and non-corporeal.

The fact that our vision and minds are limited to four dimensions (three spatial and one temporal) although we can deduce that other dimensions likely exist - IMHO - is a good indication that there is a "beyond".

I believe StJacques is agreeing that the fact of a beginning (space/time) is also a very strong pointer. To that I would add the unreasonable effectiveness of math.

Hopefully, should we engage in the "complexity" debate, more people will agree that information (successful communication, not message) in biological systems is yet another such pointer.

At any rate, whereas such ponderings do not rise to the level of revealed Truth (Jesus Christ, the Word of God) - just doing the meditation can be important to Lurkers as well:

For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, [even] his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse: - Romans 1:20


267 posted on 12/12/2004 2:52:52 PM PST by Alamo-Girl
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To: Alamo-Girl; betty boop; tortoise; Doctor Stochastic; PatrickHenry
Alamo-Girl this is a response to your post #267. I think I must refer to my response on the other thread since I see I need to respond to betty's post below.

But I must state something here, that I have said in the response I linked above and which I'm likely to repeat. I do not think it will be useful to engage in a debate that attempts to engage complexity as the only acceptable result of attempts to point out problems with other theories. All scientific theories have problems, that is why we have scientists. I want to argue against something tangible or, to put it another way, I am not prepared to enter into a discussion in which I must do nothing but defend current scientific theories while not having the opportunity to question competing theories that are clearly stated. I think that would be unfair.
269 posted on 12/12/2004 7:09:45 PM PST by StJacques
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To: Alamo-Girl; StJacques; cornelis; PatrickHenry
The fact that our vision and minds are limited to four dimensions (three spatial and one temporal) although we can deduce that other dimensions likely exist - IMHO - is a good indication that there is a "beyond".

Excellent point, A-G!

278 posted on 12/13/2004 6:46:34 AM PST by betty boop
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