i wallowed in its poignant nihilism and i froze before Stephen Hawking's question what is it that breathes fire into the equations it makes a universe for humans to describe a bleak emptiness overtook me. no so you have to redefine god and say that god withholds benefits and uh isn't all loving and all benevolent um it's more complicated than that. then you read the bible and you sure get a very complicated personality coming through whatever that's worth i just don't like it. yeah i'm going through a whole series of questions here for you so to the believer okay then how do you explain the fine-tunedness?Yeah i'll just read you Stephen the
For many of us, the great scientific discoveries of the modern age — the Big Bang, evolution, quantum physics, relativity — point to an existence that is bleak, devoid of meaning, pointless. But in The Sacred Depths of Nature, eminent biologist Ursula Goodenough shows us that the scientific world view need not be a source of despair. Indeed, it can be a wellspring of solace and hope.
Shermer and Goodenough discuss: origins of her personal beliefs • origins life, RNA, DNA, consciousness, language, morality • myths and religions • what it means to be “religious” • religious naturalism • where the laws of physics came from • why the universe seems so strange • chance and evolution • fine tuning of the cosmos • autocatalysis and emergence • purpose of religion • ethics and morality without religion.
Ursula Goodenough is Professor Emerita of Biology at Washington University. One of America's leading cell biologists, she is the author of a bestselling textbook on genetics, is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has served as President of the American Society of Cell Biology and of the Institute on Religion in an Age of Science. She lives in Chilmark, Massachusetts, on Martha's Vineyard. Her book, The Sacred Depths of Nature: How Life Has Emerged and Evolved, is now in a second edition. She currently serves as president of the Religious Naturalist Association.