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God vs Nature

Cluelessluke
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Posted 08/18/03 - 11:23 PM:	#1
What is the difference between God and Nature? Nature being the force of gravity and everything scientific. How trees grow, why hot air rises, everything. God being a consious "being" that makes choices and has a free will that made all of existence. Now both of these, to a point, can be explained, and both of them to another point can't be explained. People explain God as, "He has always been 'here' and will always be 'here'." That is the explination for how God is here although it might sound pretty ignorent. People however don't have an explination for nature. We know it's here, all around us, the electrons going from point A to point B in my brain, which is letting me type this to talk to everyone reading this. However, where did Nature come from. Nature not being the basketball outside in the driveway, but all the "rules" of the universe. All the rules of physics and everything. Nature has either two ways of working... 1. It "knows" it needs to survive, so it makes things that it must have to survive. or 2. It makes a lot of things that seem random, and slowly takes away all the things that it doesn't need to survive. (You might be saying, "How does a set of rules need to survive?" Well, there would be no rules without something else. Every living thing on earth is worried about one thing. Survival. Humans, however have almost completly lost that instinct and because of it we have a society.) Lets say nature worked like number 1. What if it needed an all powerful being? What is Nature, being really nothing, made an all powerful "being?"

geoff23
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Posted 08/19/03 - 12:55 AM:	#2
Luke However, where did Nature come from? Nature not being the basketball outside in the driveway, but all the "rules" of the universe. All the rules of physics and everything. Same place this came from, IMO :
The poets did not win; the philosophers surrendered. (Umberto Eco)

Cluelessluke
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Posted 08/19/03 - 01:15 AM:	#3
What does IMO mean?

Erik
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Posted 08/19/03 - 01:35 AM:	#4
Cluelessluke wrote: What does IMO mean? In My Opinion.
The more we have the less we own. Meister Eckhart

Lifegazer
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Posted 08/19/03 - 01:49 AM:	#5
geoff23 wrote: Luke Same place this came from, IMO : So nature came from a machine that was programmed to produce the appearance of an existence exhibiting [mathematical] order/pattern?

geoff23
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Posted 08/19/03 - 02:00 AM:	#6
Lifegazer wrote: So nature came from a machine that was programmed to produce the appearance of an existence exhibiting [mathematical] order/pattern? Erm, no. Nature is a mathematical order/pattern. That mandelbrot set was not 'produced' by a machine. It is a self-existing mathematical structure - all the machine did was translate it into a form whereby you can more easily observe and appreciate it.
The poets did not win; the philosophers surrendered. (Umberto Eco)

Belem

Posted 08/19/03 - 02:04 AM:	#7
Geoff, That image is beautiful. Where did you get it? 2. It makes a lot of things that seem random, and slowly takes away all the things that it doesn't need to survive. This one, some people call it the theory of Evolution. belem

geoff23
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Posted 08/19/03 - 02:11 AM:	#8
Belem wrote: Geoff, That image is beautiful. Where did you get it? I typed "mandelbrot" into the Google image search.
The poets did not win; the philosophers surrendered. (Umberto Eco)

geoff23
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Posted 08/19/03 - 02:34 AM:	#9

The poets did not win; the philosophers surrendered. (Umberto Eco)

Lifegazer
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Posted 08/19/03 - 07:11 AM:	#10
geoff23 wrote: Erm, no. Nature is a mathematical order/pattern. Sure. But the origin of that order is what we are contemplating. That mandelbrot set was not 'produced' by a machine. It is a self-existing mathematical structure - all the machine did was translate it into a form whereby you can more easily observe and appreciate it. There are no mathematical structures. They exist conceptually. It takes a machine or a pen/paint (a tool) to give form to those structures. The machine did produce the form. Not the mathematics. They merely guided the production. So, if we may refer to this question again: "So nature came from a machine that was programmed to produce the appearance of an existence exhibiting [mathematical] order/pattern?". ... You can suggest that this existence is ordered. But you cannot claim that mathematics created it. The creation of an existence (a form) that is mathematical, requires the manipulation of energy by an entity/machine, to transform that conceptual-order into form.

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