The Physical Presence of the God is the Earth

Discuss philosophical questions regarding theism (and atheism), and discuss religion as it relates to philosophy. This includes any philosophical discussions that happen to be about god, gods, or a 'higher power' or the belief of them. This also generally includes philosophical topics about organized or ritualistic mysticism or about organized, common or ritualistic beliefs in the existence of supernatural phenomenon.
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baker
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Re: The Physical Presence of the God is the Earth

Post by baker »

Belindi wrote: December 13th, 2020, 3:22 pm
baker wrote: December 12th, 2020, 6:17 am Because idiosyncracy is solipsism, and solipsism is the refuge of madmen.
Because people like to express their feelings by means of personifications of ideas.
I was referring to the personalization of ideas. As in, having one's own, idiosyncratic ideas about what this or that term means.
SimonP
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Re: The Physical Presence of the God is the Earth

Post by SimonP »

Greta wrote: December 13th, 2020, 4:41 pm
SimonP wrote: December 13th, 2020, 8:48 am
I find it interesting that you think the Milky Way was produced by Saggiatarius A* and not that Saggiatarius A* is a product of the Milky Way. What is your thinking here? Do you likewise consider the earth a product of the sun? And what are the local conditions in the galaxy for life on Earth to be possible that wouldn't be found for example in intergalactic space or in a different galaxy should the material from which the solar system formed have found itself there instead? Yes, I find your claim controversial and I haven't heard any serious astronomers and cosmologists put it forward. There appears to be a growing consensus that all stars originate in galaxies but that's all that's relevant to your claim.
Galaxies appear to form around supermassive black holes in the early universe. Not controversial but no one is sure yet. What we do know is that all galaxies have a supermassive black hole in the centre, so this appears to be essential for galaxies to maintain their structure. The Earth exists because of it's place in the galaxy.

What I said is so very uncontroversial that I suppose you just want to fight about foreskins again. Fighting is so predictable and boring. There have to be better ways to live a life.

As with solar systems, galaxies have habitable zones. The centre of the Milky Way - the Bulge - is replete with radiation and far too crowded with massive stars to be even remotely safe. Further, the outer reaches of the galaxy are said to be unlikely to produce life because those stars are too metal-poor. Further, the major galactic arms are said to be high in radiation that could be too dangerous for life to form in those places. Our galactic neighbourhood is in the quiet Orion Spur running off the Orion arm.

Re: the thread, supermassive black holes have a number of features that are attributed to God. They are the most "eternal" entities in the universe. They are gigantic and powerful. They create and destroy. They are effectively separated from the universe. They are not made from matter. And are effectively timeless in the centre.
Blackholes come from massive stars (or collisions involving blackholes), stars are born in galaxies, chicken and egg except stars don't depend on blackholes to be born so do massive blackholes form in other ways than by the implosion of matter after a massive star explodes? Looking back billions of years as far as we can see there's no evidence for that. This from Nasa supports galaxies come first and not the supermassive blackholes in the centres:

"One possible mechanism for the formation of supermassive black holes involves a chain reaction of collisions of stars in compact star clusters that results in the buildup of extremely massive stars, which then collapse to form intermediate-mass black holes. The star clusters then sink to the center of the galaxy, where the intermediate-mass black holes merge to form a supermassive black hole."

https://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/f ... lack-holes

No, we don't know that all galaxies have supermassive black holes in their centres. The vast majority of galaxies are small, much smaller than ours and it is open to question whether they all have a supermassive black hole. The Triangulum Galaxy is a spiral galaxy like ours, with over half the size, one of the few visible with the naked eye and it has no supermassive black hole. No there is zero evidence to suggest that the properties of the earth place it where it is in the galaxy, such a differentiation of planets based on their galactic position is news to me.

What you said even contradicted your own link and what you quoted from it!

There is a widespread hypothesis about habitable zones in galaxies but it is very far from established, however even accepting it, there is no suggestion of dependency as there is for life on an orbiting planet on it's star, so quite different from star systems.

I guess you know better than these guys about the prospect of life on planets in the galactic bulge: https://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/10/8/132/pdf

There's a hypothesis that the solar system is in a favourable spot for life but again it is very far from being established! Even if all you say is correct there must still be plenty of other comparable planets to earth out there orbiting a small proportion of the hundreds of billons of stars. Even in the small section of the Orion arm there are around a billion stars so if only 1% had earth like planets that would be 10 million earths! Results so far suggest a far higher proportion.

No, black holes are not the most eternal entities, as I pointed out they "evaporate", so for example a netorn star, a white dwarf etc are more eternal. In fact maybe the pioneer spacecraft are more eternal. They're not gigantic compared to for example galaxies, galaxy clusters, .... the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall. Gamma ray bursts are more pwoerful and far rarer than super massive black holes. What about the cosmic background radiation, isn't that more divine being everywhere, having always existed and always will? Not made from matter? That's exactly what they're made of, if they weren't then they wouldn't have mass! they're not in the centre either, there is no centre! Fi you mean in the centre of galaxies even that isn't always true. Anyway haven't we already got a god particle?
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Re: The Physical Presence of the God is the Earth

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Greta wrote: December 13th, 2020, 4:16 pm
SimonP wrote: December 13th, 2020, 8:48 am

What you quote from the link clearly shows you are wrong! What is forcing the Earth science community to rethink what drove the carbon and oxygen cycles on the early Earth is hardly details when it comes to your claim as to the record. There isn't even a consensus on what caused most of the oxygen accumulation in the atmosphere, with rival theories of a global iceage and shifts in plate techtonics - also mentioned in your link.

... Does that mean you accept you were wrong to claim we owe Saggitarius A* our "continuing lives" since you left that part out?
No and no. You need to do more than wish I was wrong. I actually have to be wrong, and I am clearly not. Why? Because what I said was very basic and common knowledge in evolutionary biology.

That is, I said that cyanobacteria caused mass extinctions, profoundly changing the Earth, resulting in oxygen being available for multicellular organisms to evolve. I noted that, like cyanobacteria, humans are causing mass extinctions and may also be opening the way for new types of beings. How the various oxygen cycles worked afterwards is yet to be ascertained.

Of course we owe Sag A* our lives. No Sag A*, no Milky Way. No Milky Way, no living Earth.
Religion blinds. On the one hand you are saying that humankind is nothing special, comparable to bacteria and on the other that the earth is special, the result of all kinds of particularly favourable conditions. The supreme beings of earth, the sun and Saggitarius A* with their humble creation humankind, and bacteria etc. a belief you will defend against reason.

There are five accepted historical mass extinction events and none of them date to that time, that is what is very basic and common knowledge in evolutionary biology. There is zero evidence that there was a sharp fall in diversity during the GOE, end of story. Multicellular organisms existed long before GOE and include some cyanobacteria. There is an hypothesis that limited oxygen supply put a damper on the evolution of multicellar organisms but not that oxygen was a prerequisit. Cyanobacteria increased not decreased diversity over 100s of millions of years, humankind has decreased diversity in tens of thousands of years. Humans have produced new types of beings however far fewer than they have caused to go extinct.
The present theory is that The Milky Way grew along with Sag A* by many much smaller galaxies joining together - colliding and not that Sag A* came into existance and started amassing surrounding mass. It's still collecting such galaxies and the sun - much younger than the Milky Way, likely owes it's existance to one, another Sagittarius, one of the many dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way, but that's another story. There is nothing to suggest that the earth is special and that there aren't lot's of living earths out there orbiting among the millions of stars in each of the trillions of galaxies beyond the Milky Way, save for religious nonsense.

But back to the bit you left out, your claim that we owe Saggitarius A* our "continuing lives", how is that even possible?
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Re: The Physical Presence of the God is the Earth

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SimonP wrote: December 14th, 2020, 12:33 pmThere is zero evidence that there was a sharp fall in diversity during the GOE, end of story. Multicellular organisms existed long before GOE and include some cyanobacteria. There is an hypothesis that limited oxygen supply put a damper on the evolution of multicellar organisms but not that oxygen was a prerequisit.
This sounds as wrong to me as your apparent inference that I'm religious. Oxygen was definitely pivotal to the evolution of large organisms, and the Great Oxygenation Even was the turning point.

http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150701 ... we-breathe
The Event that Transformed Earth

For the first half of our planet's history, there was no oxygen in the atmosphere. This life-giving gas only started to appear about 2.4 billion years ago.

This "Great Oxidation Event" was one of the most important things to ever happen on this planet. Without it, there could never have been any animals that breathe oxygen: no insects, no fish, and certainly no humans.

For decades, scientists have worked to understand how and why the first oxygen was pumped into the air. They have long suspected that life itself was responsible for creating the air that we breathe.

But not just any life. If the latest findings are to be believed, life itself was undergoing a tremendous transformation just before the Great Oxidation Event. This evolutionary leap forward may be the key to understanding what happened.

Earth was already 2 billion years old at the time of the Great Oxidation Event, having formed 4.5 billion years ago. It was inhabited, but only by single-celled organisms.

It's not clear exactly when life began, but the oldest known fossils of these microorganisms date back 3.5 billion years, so it must have been before that. That means life had been around for at least a billion years before the Great Oxidation Event.

Those simple life-forms are the prime suspects for the Great Oxidation Event. One group in particular stands out: cyanobacteria. Today, these microscopic organisms sometimes form bright blue-green layers on ponds and oceans.
Please provide your source that claims to the contrary, that the oxygen provided in the GOE by cyanobacteria did not cause a major extinction event and was not pivotal in the emergence of multicellular animals and plants.

Sure, my Sag A* thoughts were obviously a little fanciful because it's enjoyable to see so many features of a SM black hole that tend to be attributed to God - its scale, power, lack of materiality, the timelessness in the centre. If you want to play Mr Science and argue the obvious, that's your choice. But to be a science gatekeeper, first you need to get your owns fact straight - and you were wrong above in your claim that oxygen does not facilitate the evolution of multicellular, macroscopic organisms.


Many like to think that humans are so special that even our peni and clitori are sacred! People will display great fury about relative trivia like, say, the fate of a baby's foreskin - all the while chewing on the flesh of sentient animals that had been been ruthlessly tortured in factory farms.

Anthropocentrism is blinding. Humans are not discrete and independent entities - neither singly, nor together - as we like to pretend. We are not divine or supreme. We are just parts of the Earth, along with all the others parts. The Earth is a larger system that contains us, despite our misconceptions and affectations, and self-flagellating notions that we are destroying the planet. What humans are doing is what the Earth is doing (amongst other things, obviously). In the past, what cyanobacteria were doing was what the Earth was doing. Some species induce large scale state changes in the biosphere from time to time.
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Sy Borg
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Re: The Physical Presence of the God is the Earth

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As for extinctions during the Great Oxygenation Event:
... about 2.5 billion years ago ... there were no leafy plants, no animals, no insects. Although there may have been some bacterial life on land, it was the oceans that teemed with it, and even there life was far simpler than it is today. Most of the bacteria thriving on Earth were anaerobic, literally metabolizing their food without oxygen.

But then an upstart appeared, and things changed. This new life came in the form of cyanobacteria, sometimes called blue-green algae.

Cyanobacteria are photosynthetic. They convert sunlight into energy and produce oxygen as a waste product. Back then, the Earth’s atmosphere didn’t have free oxygen in it as it does today. It was locked up in water molecules, or bonded to iron in minerals.
Advertisement

The cyanobacteria changed that. But not at first: For a while, as they produced free oxygen as their waste, iron would bond with it and the environment could keep up with the production.

At some point, though, as cyanobacteria flourished, the minerals and other sinks became saturated. They could no longer absorb the oxygen being produced. It built up in the water, in the air. To the other bacteria living in the ocean—anaerobic bacteria, remember—oxygen was toxic. The cyanobacteria were literally respiring poison.

A die-off began, a mass extinction killing countless species of bacteria. It was the Great Oxygenation Event. But there was worse to come.
cyanobacteria

Up until this time, the atmosphere was devoid of the reactive molecule. But as oxygen abundances increased, some of it combined with methane to create carbon dioxide. Methane is a far more efficient greenhouse gas than CO2, and this methane was keeping the planet warm. As levels dropped, the Earth cooled. This triggered a massive glaciation event, a global ice age that locked the planet in its grip.

Things got so bad the cyanobacteria themselves were threatened. Their own numbers dropped, along with nearly all other life on Earth. The mass extinction that followed was vast.

But there was an exception: Some organisms could use that oxygen in their own metabolic processes. Combining oxygen with other molecules can release energy, a lot of it, and that energy is useful. It allowed these microscopic plants to grow faster, breed faster, live faster.

The anaerobic species died off, falling to the oxygen-burning plants, which prospered in this new environment. Certainly, anaerobes didn’t vanish from the Earth, but they were vanquished to low-oxygen environments such as the bottom of the ocean. They were no longer the dominant form of life on Earth.
https://slate.com/technology/2014/07/th ... ction.html
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Re: The Physical Presence of the God is the Earth

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baker wrote: December 14th, 2020, 7:48 am
Belindi wrote: December 13th, 2020, 3:22 pm Because people like to express their feelings by means of personifications of ideas.
I was referring to the personalization of ideas. As in, having one's own, idiosyncratic ideas about what this or that term means.
Symbols and symbolism regarding big ideas lack common referents like they did for art 'during the Renaissance'.There are new and purpose-made symbols for politicians and these are downright lies because the people who pay the wages of the symbol makers are impure.

'God' itself has fallen into disuse among thinkers because the name is used mostly by superficial moralists.
The state of art is as you say, idiosyncratic. What has definitely emerged from art right now, is anti-authority. Art (of which religion is one facet) is what can save us from mega death.
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Re: The Physical Presence of the God is the Earth

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Greta wrote: December 14th, 2020, 5:38 pm
SimonP wrote: December 14th, 2020, 12:33 pmThere is zero evidence that there was a sharp fall in diversity during the GOE, end of story. Multicellular organisms existed long before GOE and include some cyanobacteria. There is an hypothesis that limited oxygen supply put a damper on the evolution of multicellar organisms but not that oxygen was a prerequisit.
This sounds as wrong to me as your apparent inference that I'm religious. Oxygen was definitely pivotal to the evolution of large organisms, and the Great Oxygenation Even was the turning point.

http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150701 ... we-breathe

Please provide your source that claims to the contrary, that the oxygen provided in the GOE by cyanobacteria did not cause a major extinction event and was not pivotal in the emergence of multicellular animals and plants.
Yes, it would sound very wrong to you with your fix ideas gained from selective reading of popular science articles and religious blindness. If it's any comfort, Einstein wasn't someone most people would regard as religious but was still blinded by it. You are being very disingenuous turning my claim that "Multicellular organisms existed long before GOE and include some cyanobacteria" to a negation of: "Oxygen was definitely pivotal to the evolution of large organisms, and the Great Oxygenation Even was the turning point". Large organisms are not the same as multicellular organisms now are they? Multicellular organisms can be smaller than single-celled organisms right? The killer algae caulerpa taxifolia (once considered responsible for local extinction events, just as your claim for the cyanobacteria) is a single celled organism measuring up to 30 cm compared to the multicellular trichoplax adhaerens which at the very most is a hundred times smaller at 3 mm. That said multicelluarity allows for far bigger organisms like humans.

Source for my claim that the oxygen provided in the GOE by cyanobacteria did not cause a major extinction event:

https://www.sciencealert.com/earth-s-fi ... ntists-say

I am not sure where you get my purported claim that the oxygen provided in the GOE by cyanobacteria was not pivotal in the emergence of multicellular animals and plants however if you mean the one that multicelluarism preceded GOE then your own BBC source is one.
Greta wrote: December 14th, 2020, 5:38 pm Sure, my Sag A* thoughts were obviously a little fanciful because it's enjoyable to see so many features of a SM black hole that tend to be attributed to God - its scale, power, lack of materiality, the timelessness in the centre. If you want to play Mr Science and argue the obvious, that's your choice. But to be a science gatekeeper, first you need to get your owns fact straight - and you were wrong above in your claim that oxygen does not facilitate the evolution of multicellular, macroscopic organisms.


Many like to think that humans are so special that even our peni and clitori are sacred! People will display great fury about relative trivia like, say, the fate of a baby's foreskin - all the while chewing on the flesh of sentient animals that had been been ruthlessly tortured in factory farms.

Anthropocentrism is blinding. Humans are not discrete and independent entities - neither singly, nor together - as we like to pretend. We are not divine or supreme. We are just parts of the Earth, along with all the others parts. The Earth is a larger system that contains us, despite our misconceptions and affectations, and self-flagellating notions that we are destroying the planet. What humans are doing is what the Earth is doing (amongst other things, obviously). In the past, what cyanobacteria were doing was what the Earth was doing. Some species induce large scale state changes in the biosphere from time to time.
Yes, I was aware of that however it also reveals misconceptions and didn't reply to how Sag A* exerted any power over us humans. Incidently I realise now that you think the solar system was "born" and is stationary relevant to the spiral arms where it is now, in the "quiet Orion Spur", another misconception. The solar system has orbited Sag A* over a dozen times since life emerged, and been in and out of many spiral arms lots of times in the process, I've never read anything suggesting any influence this may have had on life, have you?

People who feel their identity threatened often respond in the way you do with baseless monotonous claims of their opponents being wrong, as if it makes it true. They also often resort to making up claims like you do eg: "your claim that oxygen does not facilitate the evolution of multicellular, macroscopic organisms".

We are living thinking beings quite unlike the earth and unlike cynobacteria which were not conscious of what they were doing nor had any choice even if they had known. FYI I am vegetarian. You may find the torture of babies and the use of their foreskins in beauty products trivial but then that says more about you than you probably wish to be known!
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Re: The Physical Presence of the God is the Earth

Post by SimonP »

Greta wrote: December 14th, 2020, 7:57 pm As for extinctions during the Great Oxygenation Event:
... about 2.5 billion years ago ... there were no leafy plants, no animals, no insects. Although there may have been some bacterial life on land, it was the oceans that teemed with it, and even there life was far simpler than it is today. Most of the bacteria thriving on Earth were anaerobic, literally metabolizing their food without oxygen.

But then an upstart appeared, and things changed. This new life came in the form of cyanobacteria, sometimes called blue-green algae.

Cyanobacteria are photosynthetic. They convert sunlight into energy and produce oxygen as a waste product. Back then, the Earth’s atmosphere didn’t have free oxygen in it as it does today. It was locked up in water molecules, or bonded to iron in minerals.
Advertisement

The cyanobacteria changed that. But not at first: For a while, as they produced free oxygen as their waste, iron would bond with it and the environment could keep up with the production.

At some point, though, as cyanobacteria flourished, the minerals and other sinks became saturated. They could no longer absorb the oxygen being produced. It built up in the water, in the air. To the other bacteria living in the ocean—anaerobic bacteria, remember—oxygen was toxic. The cyanobacteria were literally respiring poison.

A die-off began, a mass extinction killing countless species of bacteria. It was the Great Oxygenation Event. But there was worse to come.
cyanobacteria

Up until this time, the atmosphere was devoid of the reactive molecule. But as oxygen abundances increased, some of it combined with methane to create carbon dioxide. Methane is a far more efficient greenhouse gas than CO2, and this methane was keeping the planet warm. As levels dropped, the Earth cooled. This triggered a massive glaciation event, a global ice age that locked the planet in its grip.

Things got so bad the cyanobacteria themselves were threatened. Their own numbers dropped, along with nearly all other life on Earth. The mass extinction that followed was vast.

But there was an exception: Some organisms could use that oxygen in their own metabolic processes. Combining oxygen with other molecules can release energy, a lot of it, and that energy is useful. It allowed these microscopic plants to grow faster, breed faster, live faster.

The anaerobic species died off, falling to the oxygen-burning plants, which prospered in this new environment. Certainly, anaerobes didn’t vanish from the Earth, but they were vanquished to low-oxygen environments such as the bottom of the ocean. They were no longer the dominant form of life on Earth.
https://slate.com/technology/2014/07/th ... ction.html
All the mass extinction talk is only speculation. check your own BBC link again:
In the short term, it was probably rather bad news for life.

"Oxygen would have been lethal for many bacteria," says Schirrmeister. "It's hard to prove, because from the fossil record we don't have a lot of deposits from that time… [but] we can assume we had a lot of bacteria dying at that point."
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Re: The Physical Presence of the God is the Earth

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Belindi wrote: December 15th, 2020, 6:10 am Symbols and symbolism regarding big ideas lack common referents
Do you mean that this is deliberately so? That the purpose of spirituality is for each person to make sense of those symbols on one's own, as best as one can, disregarding their religious source texts?
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Re: The Physical Presence of the God is the Earth

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SimonP wrote: December 15th, 2020, 11:18 am
Greta wrote: December 14th, 2020, 5:38 pm
This sounds as wrong to me as your apparent inference that I'm religious. Oxygen was definitely pivotal to the evolution of large organisms, and the Great Oxygenation Even was the turning point.

http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150701 ... we-breathe

Please provide your source that claims to the contrary, that the oxygen provided in the GOE by cyanobacteria did not cause a major extinction event and was not pivotal in the emergence of multicellular animals and plants.
Yes, it would sound very wrong to you with your fix ideas gained from selective reading of popular science articles and religious blindness. If it's any comfort, Einstein wasn't someone most people would regard as religious but was still blinded by it. You are being very disingenuous turning my claim that "Multicellular organisms existed long before GOE and include some cyanobacteria" to a negation of: "Oxygen was definitely pivotal to the evolution of large organisms, and the Great Oxygenation Even was the turning point". Large organisms are not the same as multicellular organisms now are they? Multicellular organisms can be smaller than single-celled organisms right?
No, you were being disingenuous by refusing to accept my main point, trying to derail it with deliberately misleading technicalities.

My point was - and is - that cyanobacteria changed the world, just as humans are doing. This is clearly something that the Earth does - it occasionally throws up species that change everything. This is uncontroversial, except to you and creationists.

If you can't accept that, then that's the end of the discussion because it's not controversial but a matter of well-accepted record. Photosynthesising microbes changed life on Earth profoundly, providing sufficient oxygen for large multicellular animals like us to evolve. Do you deny this?

Without the extra oxygen, the world would most likely still be populated with microbes. Do you deny this?

Whether some species were already multicellular is just aimless nitpicking that entirely misses the point because, without the oxygen excreted by cyanobacteria, life would remain very small.


https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswith ... cbb3797f95
What Was It Like When Oxygen Appeared And Almost Murdered All Life On Earth?

Although it was more than 4½ billion years ago that planet Earth formed, it was just a few hundred million years later, at most, that life arose on our world. For all the years since then, it's thrived and evolved, enabling it to find a way to exist in practically every environmental niche that Earth possessed.

But 2 billion years after Earth first took shape, life almost ended. The atmosphere had slowly been altered by the gradual addition of oxygen, which proved to be fatal to the most common type of organism present on Earth at the time. For hundreds of millions of years, the Earth entered a horrific ice age which froze the entire surface: known today as a Snowball Earth scenario. It was a disaster that almost ended life on Earth entirely. Here's the story of our near-death and ultimate survival.

... The evidence we have is straightforward: right around that time, Earth's atmosphere began to display evidence for having free oxygen present within it. Slowly but surely, the oxygen content began to build, and an organism with a seemingly unlimited resource — sunlight — began to poison its environment. Oxygen, you see, is not just corrosive and flammable; it's also the cause of the greatest climate disaster in history: the Huronian Glaciation.

The cyanobacteria, experiencing massive successes, evolved into microbial mats in short order, and that early presence of atmospheric oxygen systematically removed the early methane from Earth's atmosphere. The conversion of methane into carbon dioxide and water greatly decreased the greenhouse effect from Earth's early atmosphere. Concurrently, the oxygen produced by the cyanobacteria killed off most of the other, non-oxygen-using life forms, as oxygen was toxic to them.

Considering that the Sun's energy output was much lower in the early stages, this large amount of methane was the only thing keeping Earth as a relatively temperate planet. With the oxygen destroying that powerful greenhouse gas, the planet couldn't retain its heat as well. The greatest ice age in history, which led to Snowball Earth conditions for approximately 300 million years, was now upon us.
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Re: The Physical Presence of the God is the Earth

Post by Belindi »

baker wrote: December 15th, 2020, 12:24 pm
Belindi wrote: December 15th, 2020, 6:10 am Symbols and symbolism regarding big ideas lack common referents
Do you mean that this is deliberately so? That the purpose of spirituality is for each person to make sense of those symbols on one's own, as best as one can, disregarding their religious source texts?
It is not deliberate, as far as I understand. Renaissance symbolism is quite well known thanks in part to the popularity of those novels by Dan Thingummy. By "big ideas" I did not mean those superficial ideas encapsulated in memes like the memes that enchant poor people who vote for Brexit, and for Trump.Such paltry symbols as MAGA , or British Independence.
I meant big ideas like sin, death, evil, mankind, God, cosmic Order, consciousness, good, beauty, truth.

There are people who purpose to
make sense of those symbols on one's own, as best as one can, disregarding their religious source texts
And hope of survival rests with independent thinking. NB religious texts especially The Bible are enormously useful as sources for ideas and as anthropological and historical source material.
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Re: The Physical Presence of the God is the Earth

Post by baker »

Belindi --

Good, bad, beauty, truth, death, and many others are usually considered ordinary household words, and we don't typically source them back to this or that specific religion or philosophy.

Would it be correct to say that you think that "God" is that kind of ordinary household word as well?
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Re: The Physical Presence of the God is the Earth

Post by SimonP »

Greta wrote: December 15th, 2020, 4:45 pm
SimonP wrote: December 15th, 2020, 11:18 am

Yes, it would sound very wrong to you with your fix ideas gained from selective reading of popular science articles and religious blindness. If it's any comfort, Einstein wasn't someone most people would regard as religious but was still blinded by it. You are being very disingenuous turning my claim that "Multicellular organisms existed long before GOE and include some cyanobacteria" to a negation of: "Oxygen was definitely pivotal to the evolution of large organisms, and the Great Oxygenation Even was the turning point". Large organisms are not the same as multicellular organisms now are they? Multicellular organisms can be smaller than single-celled organisms right?
No, you were being disingenuous by refusing to accept my main point, trying to derail it with deliberately misleading technicalities.
That's just compounding fallacies with another. Whether you were being disingenuous or not is not a matter of whether or not I was. I don't refuse to accept your main point, which was:
Greta wrote: April 17th, 2020, 11:31 pm "We think we are outside of "the system" when we appear to simply be the geobiosphere's current major agent of change. Other species have fulfilled that role in the past."
We then discussed agency where you stated:
Greta wrote: November 29th, 2020, 3:28 pm
SimonP wrote: November 28th, 2020, 7:20 pm
So what determines whether something biological belongs in the subset of agency or not, according to you? And again which species had you in mind?
All biology with complex nervous systems, albeit in varying degrees.

Agency has less influence on things than physics, chemistry and other complex system dynamics in determining how things are, eg. the Sun, the Earth, climate, abiogenesis, evolution, gestation, maturing, reproduction, ageing, dying ... these continue whether agency is present or not.
Since cyanobacteria lack a complex nervous system this I took as an admission that they unlike humans, don't have agency and don't belong in our subset. You went on to basically trash agency which left your other claim, that we are just the latest in a long rack of species that have our present role of not simply changing the planet, but destroying much of the biosphere through causing a mass extinction event. You gave two examples but wanted to concentrate on the one, cyanobacteria which you claimed caused a mass extinction event and which I dispute. I have provided you with a source stating that the first mass extinction event occurred just over half a billion years ago long after the time you claimed cyanobacteria caused it. Along the way you have lots of misconceptions that I can't help but try and tackle but I haven't left the main issue so how is that derailing?

Greta wrote: December 15th, 2020, 4:45 pm My point was - and is - that cyanobacteria changed the world, just as humans are doing. This is clearly something that the Earth does - it occasionally throws up species that change everything. This is uncontroversial, except to you and creationists.

If you can't accept that, then that's the end of the discussion because it's not controversial but a matter of well-accepted record. Photosynthesising microbes changed life on Earth profoundly, providing sufficient oxygen for large multicellular animals like us to evolve. Do you deny this?

Without the extra oxygen, the world would most likely still be populated with microbes. Do you deny this?

Whether some species were already multicellular is just aimless nitpicking that entirely misses the point because, without the oxygen excreted by cyanobacteria, life would remain very small.


https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswith ... cbb3797f95
What Was It Like When Oxygen Appeared And Almost Murdered All Life On Earth?

Although it was more than 4½ billion years ago that planet Earth formed, it was just a few hundred million years later, at most, that life arose on our world. For all the years since then, it's thrived and evolved, enabling it to find a way to exist in practically every environmental niche that Earth possessed.

But 2 billion years after Earth first took shape, life almost ended. The atmosphere had slowly been altered by the gradual addition of oxygen, which proved to be fatal to the most common type of organism present on Earth at the time. For hundreds of millions of years, the Earth entered a horrific ice age which froze the entire surface: known today as a Snowball Earth scenario. It was a disaster that almost ended life on Earth entirely. Here's the story of our near-death and ultimate survival.

... The evidence we have is straightforward: right around that time, Earth's atmosphere began to display evidence for having free oxygen present within it. Slowly but surely, the oxygen content began to build, and an organism with a seemingly unlimited resource — sunlight — began to poison its environment. Oxygen, you see, is not just corrosive and flammable; it's also the cause of the greatest climate disaster in history: the Huronian Glaciation.

The cyanobacteria, experiencing massive successes, evolved into microbial mats in short order, and that early presence of atmospheric oxygen systematically removed the early methane from Earth's atmosphere. The conversion of methane into carbon dioxide and water greatly decreased the greenhouse effect from Earth's early atmosphere. Concurrently, the oxygen produced by the cyanobacteria killed off most of the other, non-oxygen-using life forms, as oxygen was toxic to them.

Considering that the Sun's energy output was much lower in the early stages, this large amount of methane was the only thing keeping Earth as a relatively temperate planet. With the oxygen destroying that powerful greenhouse gas, the planet couldn't retain its heat as well. The greatest ice age in history, which led to Snowball Earth conditions for approximately 300 million years, was now upon us.
No, not just changed the world but specifically caused a mass extinction event as humans are now in the process of doing.
Greta wrote: December 11th, 2020, 3:35 pm Simon, focusing on irrelevant technicalities only serves to distract from the point I made. And no, I am not confused about species and morphological groups as you claimed, I just spoke in shorthand for online reading. Ideally criticisms should be relevant to the point being made, which I will make again for clarity's sake now that the waters are muddied.

My point was that humans are not the first kind of organism to cause mass extinctions and profoundly change the earth.

You cannot nit-pick this point away. You cannot deny that blue-green algae did this. That is a matter of record.
Once more you are being disingenuous building strawmen. I think you'll find the notion that we are like bacteria just filling a role as the latest organism to cause a mass extinction event is not what most people would consider uncontroversial and a matter of record, and would be very offended at being lunped together with creationists! On the other hand your strawman of just changing the world is something else of course.
Here is the last time I finished off your strawman:
SimonP wrote: December 13th, 2020, 8:48 amFirstly I in no way dispute that cyanobacteria vastly changed the biosphere by denying that they caused a mass extinction event.
Once more you resort to censorship when your fix ideas are challenged. No of course I don't deny that photosynthesising microbes changed life on Earth profoundly, providing sufficient oxygen for large multicellular animals like us to evolve, that's just your strawman though.

Wow, what you consider to be nitpicking! The evolution from single-celled to multicellular is not exactly considered to be trivial! So instead of multicellular you meant large multicellular animals like us. Well we don't really know do we? If I had to choose though I'd pick the evolution from single-celled to multicellular over oxygen availability. I think coming first says something. Maybe we would have seen an even greater degree of symbiosis like even larger multicellular animals that could also photosynthesise? Or maybe females that photosynthesised and males that provided nutrients? We should be careful not to limit ourselves by falling into the trap of thinking all life must evolve as we have.
Greta wrote: December 13th, 2020, 4:16 pm I said that cyanobacteria caused mass extinctions, profoundly changing the Earth, resulting in oxygen being available for multicellular organisms to evolve. I noted that, like cyanobacteria, humans are causing mass extinctions and may also be opening the way for new types of beings.
More popular science "murdering oxygen".... the evidence is that life thrived during the GOE, that it was a feast. Again look at the time scale, we're talking about five times the period since the dinosaurs for the GOE itself and hundreds of millions of years before that with pockets of oxygen with evolving aerobic life forms ready for the spring when the sinks were full. There really is so much that we don't know about this period that it's crazy for you to have such fixed ideas and even more so to think they are a matter of record.
NukeBan
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Re: The Physical Presence of the God is the Earth

Post by NukeBan »

Whenever there is a discovery. Public first resent and reject. Then they say you are not the only one to discover it. Finally they say it was so easy that everyone knows it.
Yes, this seems quite true, especially on philosophy forums. This is because many people most of the time aren't actually interested in the topic being discussed but rather their relationship with the topic, which is something else. In other words, ego rules, and the topic trails far behind. When snarky sarcasm and other such emotional expressions start creeping in to the conversation that's a big red flag that ego is taking over.
Is it possible that the physical presence of the God is the Earth?
I'm generally sympathetic to such perspectives. Whatever it is that people are referring to with the word God it's my sense that Whatever It Is is embedded in the fabric of physical reality.

I like the example of space. It's invisible, and doesn't meet a typical definition of existence (has no weight or mass etc) and yet it is real, and infuses all of reality at every scale.

I'm not sure philosophy is such a great tool for exploring such subjects. Spending lots of time in nature might be a better approach. Don't study what somebody says about reality, study reality itself. Don't settle for 2nd hand information.
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Sy Borg
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Re: The Physical Presence of the God is the Earth

Post by Sy Borg »

Simon, easy on the ad hominems.

1. The Great Oxygenation Event is not controversial, nor only the domain of popular science.

2. Most life did not thrive rather than died out during the Great Oxygenation Event.

3. Anaerobic organisms do not thrive in environments flooded with oxygen. Their metabolisms rely on enzymes that react with oxygen, causing reactions to the organisms' detriment.


So, the point stands - humans are currently causing a major extinction event and significantly changing the conditions of the Earth's surface. This is exactly what the cyanobacteria did with the Great Oxygenation Event.

The extra oxygen provided by the GOE made it possible for large, intelligent organisms to evolve. By the same token, if one lived long enough, it would be fascinating to see what happens after the Anthropocene. Many people guess total devastation - the end of everything - the same guess made by every generation for thousands of years.

More realistically, what will be interesting is what grows out of the destruction, facilitated by products of the species causing extinctions.
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