[MD] are theism and mysticism mutually exclusive notions?

[Case]

> [Platt previously]
If we were omniscient, chaos and chance wouldn't exist. 

> [Case]
> With regards to prediction of the future it just doesn't work that way.
> It is so much that we don't know what will happen as we can't know we
> have to wait and see.

[Platt]
Our ability to know is indeed limited. That's the point I was trying to
make.

[Case]
I am only adding that this gap of uncertainty is unbridgeable and we adopt
different strategies to compensate for this. 

Try finding the blind spot in your eye. There is a small but definite hole
in our visual field but our brains just fill it in. In can be unsettling to
probe it by locating it and moving your finger around inside it. 

But uncertainty is so ubiquitous we need a heavier duty spackling compound
to cover the holes. Religion, science, philosophy, mysticism and madness are
all strategies for living with it, living in spite of it, living because of
it. At least four out of five recommend we keep on living and with that last
one, it always depends.

>[Case]
>On the weirder end of the spectrum Wheeler and associates think there
> are infinite worlds splitting off from each other at each quantum
> decision point so that all the possibilities actually take place. 

[Platt]
Infinite worlds splitting off is more like theological speculation than
physics -- or so says Burton Richter in an article in "Physics Today."

http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-59/iss-10/p8.html

[Case]
Thanks for the link to Richter's article. I recommend it as well. I
especially agree that we should be wary of metaphysical wonderlands and
theological speculations in philosophy as well as physics:

"I could not resist the opportunity to discuss what I see as major problems
in the philosophy behind theory, which seems to have gone off into a kind of
metaphysical wonderland. Simply put, much of what currently passes as the
most advanced theory looks to be more theological speculation, the
development of models with no testable consequences, than it is the
development of practical knowledge, the development of models with testable
and falsifiable consequences (Karl Popper's definition of science)."

p.s. I thought I shaded Wheeler toward the weird.   

[Platt]
Well, something in life wants to survive and replicate. I call that
purposive and creative.

[Case]
I agree that we do this and we can see some reflection of this in all living
things but it is a light that dims toward the organic and can blind toward
the intellectual ends of the spectrum.

[Platt]
A weak analogy to compare a life form to a machine. The life form
wants to live; your computer could care less. 

[Case]
But I would say my computer wants it more than a rock. 
 
[Platt]
I always thought evolution worked because living things wanted to
survive, not because of some mathematical distribution, though that may
play a secondary role.

[Case]
The organism's desire to survive influences its probability of surviving,
true enough.

There's a possibility that I am wrong, though.