something about religion...

on SEB, I found this interesting...

http://stupidevilbastard.com/index/seb/comments/why_would_god_bother_at_all/

I'd have a different/related take on the idea...I have to disagree with the notion that God knows everything past, present and future...life would be uninteresting...he'd be overmuch like Dr Bloody Bernofski.

Likelier: suppose you were God, and you *could* create the universe, why would you do it? I imagine that you'd do it because it would be an interesting experiment, and you'd do it in such a way that you *couldn't* know how it would go in advance...thus the laws of physics and chemistry that include creation-flavored processes, and entropy, and lots of randomness to prevent perfect prediction.

You'd create the universe with the explicit intention of having intelligent life evolve in it, even if that takes a while, and you'd watch what happened. You probably wouldn't take direct interest in any single individual life, you'd just watch things in general, see what they invent.

And you'd design/create the universe in such a way that life would be reasonably common. Not ridiculously so, but interestingly so. What would be the point of making a universe with a gazillion galaxies, each with a gazillion stars, if you were only going to have life on one planet?

I imagine that being the case because that's what I would do. In fact, I've thought about creating a "universe" of sorts, or rather a simulation of a tiny subset, as a computer program. It'd be some like Spore (computer game), but not identical, because I'd be in tinkering with various aspects (not being omniscient like God, I'd have to be changing the underlying "physics" of the simulation to cause more things to happen; i.e., more life, more variable life...let's face it, rocks orbiting/spinning around is not too exciting).

Life and evolution are so much more interesting than total predestination.