Len says: I describe myself as a humanist. I have no sense of a super immortal intelligence behind the Universe or our existence within it. Where I can hypothesize a super civilization somewhere in the galaxy having had a million or multi-million year headstart on us as a species, I would certainly not consider them “divine.”

Immortal mind certainly doesn’t equate to divinity, but it might serve as a cosmological divinity until something better comes along. Even Behe, evidently a theist and strongest supporter of “intelligent design” theory, asserts that an “intelligent designer” need not be “supernatural.” An immortal intelligence billions of years ancient would almost certainly possess purposes and powers beyond present human comprehension. Since good astrophysical evidence assures us that the optical universe is older than 13-billion years, and that more planets than stars exist, it’s a plausible supposition that natural processes, even if no other agencies were involved, produced immortal intelligence in our Milky Way Galaxy billions of years before the formation of the star Sol and planet Earth. That is the sort of intelligence that transcends the notions of specific location, physical form, and genetic “race.” It would have the power to invest infinite physical forms of support over vast expanses of space, and certainly to affect “intelligent design” in evolving organic planetary life forms. We cannot know its purposes. Personally, I suppose the near universal existence of immortal intelligence is a logical necessity arising out of well-settled principles of physical process. But I don’t equate that intelligence with “God.” I’m just uninterested in traditional theological definitions and questions. I am interested in mind at work in the physical world.

If any supernatural God person has anything to communicate to me, he must know where I am and he will have to say it in person, not send a traditional technically ignorant prophet or priest. If he can logically define distinctions between the realities of thought and the actualities of process, reconcile the workings of an ordinary household refrigerator with the kinetic theory of gases, explain Newton’s notion of time, and seems generally less ignorant than myself, I would seriously entertain a prophet’s message. In my 74-year widely traveled life, that sort of prophet has yet to make his appearance. So from that I must conclude “God” doesn’t have anything to directly relate to me.

I had forgotten about Will Durant’s book having read it many years ago. Thank you for your comments on creation science and for your comments on Roman civilization. My perspective on the former you may probably have already surmised. I describe myself as a humanist. I have no sense of a super immortal intelligence behind the Universe or our existence within it. Where I can hypothesize a super civilization somewhere in the galaxy having had a million or multi-million year headstart on us as a species, I would certainly not consider them “divine.”

On the question of Rome, its civilization, its technology, and its failings, I am confident in pointing out the great flaws of that society – slavery and a military-centric dependency for generating wealth. Slavery provided the muscle to build infrastructure. Slavery supported the life style of the oligarchs. The oligarchs were the mafia of their time, ruthless in amassing fortunes, spending on public works to gain political favour, and buying military commissions, governorships, tax farming operations….you name it. Much of Roman technology was focused on supporting military ventures and then sustaining occupation of conquered areas for the purpose of skimming as much wealth from the native population as possible without killing the hand that fed the imperial treasury and the private treasury of the oligarchs. It was sustainable as a political experiment as long as it was expanding. By the third century CE the cracks started showing. A mafia meritocracy became a battleground for quarreling alpha seeking Romans and newly-made Roman citizens of provincial origin. Powerful families from the provinces replaced the former first families of the Roman Senate and repeated the same battles for first man status in Rome that witnessed the birth of the principate in Augustus and those who followed him. First man supremacy used Roman legions as private props for establishing rule. By the fourth century instead of collecting largesse from expansion the Roman government was paying off those outside the empire to ensure its territorial integrity. But the internal quarreling came at an enormous cost. By the fifth century the ability of the empire to maintain dominion over its provinces diminished.

There is are lessons to be learned from the Roman tale, just as there are lessons to be learned from the Ottoman Empire’s decline. Special interest groups that prop up elites tend to produce failed states in the long term. Another lesson to be learned – societies that confine their innovation and inventiveness largely to support military enterprise and expansionism eventually hit a wall if the creativity doesn’t improve the social condition for the larger society. And finally, building an elite society on the backs of the underclass leaves those at the top with no constituency in the end.

Some sources cite the dome bearing wall thickness as 25-feet. http://architecture.about.com/od/domes/ss/Pantheon-In-Rome_2.htm

The massive “drum” wall that supports the dome is not a simple circular wall of uniform thickness, but rather a number of massive interconnected arches. The point I wanted to make is the massiveness of the Pantheon’s walls is due to the excessive expense that a metal tension ring would have incurred. The great dome is fabricated of lightweight concrete in compression without inclusion of any tension elements. The reason the dome still stands intact today is because of the extraordinary massiveness of the supporting walls. The pity of it all is the massive expenditure of materials and labor that built the Pantheon might have been directed instead toward the development of blast furnaces, and, within a century or so, all the Romans might have been peddling sprocket and roller link chain bicycles and dreaming of motorized Vespa scooters. Steel pipes instead of massive masonry aqueducts to carry water to the city from the mountains might have provided safe clean water at 1/10 the costs. It wasn’t a lack of science and technology that blocked the development of steel machinery, but rather the ethical degeneracy of the ruling class.

It’s a tricky proposition to say just what role “technology” (applied science) plays in a culture’s ascendancy or decline. A principal “lesson of history” is that rational members of any and all civilizations have first and foremost attempted to use available assets, resources, and social tactics to improve their individual circumstances. The Roman Empire slid into irreversible decline while at the same time owning the world’s most advanced science and technology (examination of the ancient Roman copper mine tailings in Spain shows modern copper mining practice extracts only a trivial percentage more copper from the ore). While Rome produced and implemented iron, its economy was mainly Bronze Age, which produced ten times more bronze than iron. Rome went to Britain and Afghanistan seeking tin for its bronze alloys; it didn’t slide into decline for lack of technology. It went into decline because of an over-population of privileged class persons that neither worked, served the military, nor paid much tax. Control of all the Empire’s natural resources fell into the hands of a bloated parasitical Patrician class, who saw little incentive to replace cheap slaves and landless serfs with expensive metal machinery. The major clue to this proposition is found in the compression load architecture of the great Pantheon. Masonry walls 16-feet thick and 600-feet in circumference were a more economical means than a one-inch thick metal band to support and restrain the massive 160-foot concrete dome equatorial hoop stress.

There didn’t exist sufficient incentive for existing generations to make major investments that would only realize returns two generations into the future. Your example of China’s great fleet that was allowed to rot away is a good example of this principle. The huge economic investment of resources needed to build and operate the great fleet was highly excessive in contrast to the trivial value to the privileged classes of ivory, exotic wood, and giraffes the fleet could garner.

Technology that doesn’t turn a significant profit for the immediate generation of the patrician class will face substantial opposition because it threatens to upset the apple cart. The patrician has no intention of turning his estate and manor house over to a clever technical tradesman.

One should make a clear distinction between the false concept of “young Earth creation science” and the plausible hypothesis of “old Earth intelligent design.” Obviously, many modes of genetic selection are driving evolution of gene pools, and random mutations must play some role. But there is no scientific principle that bars existence of immortal intelligence as a plausible hypothesis. Given immortal intelligence, it follows that such intelligence might find certain evolutionary outcomes preferable to others, and such intelligence might act to influence evolutionary processes. Arnold Toynbee exhaustively and persuasively argued that every great civilization was built on a great religion (or at least a great mythos). No civilization has yet demonstrated a non-mythological technology for instilling universal ethics. The minds of every culture’s young lack sufficient sophistication to do competent ethical philosophy. The best we can do is temporarily infect the young with some sort of benign mythology that starts them on a lifelong path toward rational understanding of, and a desire for, a virtuous life; a life that rejects the overt plundering pirate or Thrasymachus’s sly options. Ideally, the best mythology would be one that allows and encourages gradual replacement of the faith of childhood with objective reason. The unwelcome truth is as a culture we are better off if many adult persons that never develop much capacity for objective reason always retain their childhood faith in religious/mythological virtue. All of history’s tragically failed cultures basically failed on ethical grounds before they failed on material grounds.

Will Durant was a fervent atheist, somewhat of a historian, and a first class intellect that published, along with his many long books, a short book: “The Lessons of History,” which sympathetically touches upon some of the same points you raise. More interestingly, Durant wrote a brilliant short story contrasting faith and reason: “Dialogue in Elysium,” apparently now in the public domain: http://platoscorner.com/ The story is of an imaginary conversation between Voltaire and Pope Benedict XIV, where the evident fraud of religion is debated. Voltaire is depicted as wry, irreverent, witty, and clever as we all know him to have been, but Durant’s Pope Benedict gives at least as well as he takes, and modern atheists should be aware of his arguments.