Looking at human enginuity as a whole, it appears what we call enginuity is merely the power of observation. The greatest research and development program is nature itself, it has years of experience.
Re-visiting a Victor Hugo quote from Les Miserables:
"After a brief silence, the old man raised his finger toward heaven, and said, "The infinite exists. It is there. If the infinite had no
me, the
me would be its limit; it would not be the infinite; in other words, it would not be. But it is. then it has a
me. This
me of the infinite is God."
A simple, yet eloquent, proof of the existance of at least
a god. And thinking about this further, I find it interesting that intellectually the usual interpretation of gods in most religions are anthropomorphized aspects of nature. Tiamat
is the ocean. Or they personify aspects of nature by, say, having Zeus throw Thunderbolts forged by Hephaestus. Thinking about that, I find it unneccessary for God, in the Christian sense, to have form. In general terms I think it would be sufficient for a monotheistic religion with an omnipotent god to consider The Universe as God. Of course, the intellectual would profess that in that case a god is nothing more than nature and physics in action. The problem is the fact that nature is
not entirely mechanized. At least, currently we are finding it impossible to define nature as an entirely mechanized stream of causation. In order for the Big Bang to have occured, scientists admit that the current laws of physics can not have been true at that time. Emperical data suggests that the speed of light was surpassed during the expansion after the initial explosion, which is an impossibility following the laws of physics. This suggests, in the least, creativity beyond mechanized logic. The arbitrary intervention in the laws of physics during the formation of what we call the Universe, therefore, suggests the possibility of sentience.
How does that tie in with the Les Mis quote? The Universe, in my opinion, appears to have a personality. Though that personality, again in my opinion, does not need any personification.
Do Andriods Dream of Electric Sheep? Great book by Philip K. Dick. A short and engaging read. Deals a lot with human empathy and what we would suggest to be moral agency. I find moral agency to be the defining separation between man and animal, though in the book it was applied to argue in favor of "retiring" non-empathic Androids.
