Notes for an idea.
Had thought the other day to pursue the metaphor about human life being a transient state of a vast collection of molecules that will eventually collapse and disperse, leaving nothing behind, rather analogous to the way a rainbow is a temporary pattern of water droplets and reflected light, that once dispersed, leaves nothing behind. There is no rainbow heaven.
And the naive notion that there must be something more to the human mind (or ‘soul’) than mere atoms.
And to the idea, as I mentioned in the blog once already, that this is like thinking the Bible (or any other book), is a mere collections of letters, and therefore needing some ‘extra’ substance or power to have meaning.
The exercise is this: compare the total number of words in the Bible to the total number of atoms in a human body – or the total number of molecules (proteins, etc.). Suspect the numbers in the human body are vastly higher by orders of magnitude. So if the arrangement of 26 letters can bring about such profound human meaning in a book, why is it not plausible that the arrangement of many more molecules and many more different kinds of molecules -– all of which are continually interacting with each other, at the speed of electricity, and interacting with the outside world at the same rate — cannot comprise what we pleasingly think is something profound and therefore non-materialistic?
Answers:
http://answers.reference.com/information/terminology/how_many_words_in_the_bible
That is a combined total of 774, 746 words in the Bible.
https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20091023021908AAGOeL3
So if we take roughly 2.3 x 10^13 (23 trillion) as the number of molecules in a cell, and roughly 5 x 10^13 (50 trillion) as the number of cells in the human body, we get approximately 10 x 10^26, or 10^27, or one thousand trillion trillion molecules in the human body.
Better comparison might be the number of molecules in the human brain…
http://education.jlab.org/qa/mathatom_03.html
this says: 1.519*10^26 molecules
or about three times that many atoms..
That’s how many molecules in the brain for every word in the bible?
