Top Story: Non-Interferring God is BS

[Death Blow]

I'd like to express something I have recently been finding among people. That being the concept of a non-interferring god.

.....A non-interferring god? So let me get this straight. You don't have any proof that god exists and you don't accept the theory that god has a hand in human affairs.

If you are like most people who subscribe to this belief, you will try to prove that god must exist through science and math, when all you are really proving is that the universe exists. Then when people poke holes in your theories, you will tell them that it's faith based and a personal truth (thus switching methods of arguement and negating any objective arguements made previously).

So my question is: If you have no proof of a god existing, why do you need to believe there is a god at all? Clearly he isn't participating in your life one way or the other. He might as well not exist.

Honestly, I think this is a cowardly perspective to hold. It says, "I'm not going to believe god is involved in my life, but just in case he is, I should still believe he exists, just in case ;) ." Just pick a side already. It's like not calling heads or tails in a coin toss, but rather saying it will land on the narrow end.

Sorry, didn't mean to ramble, just got really into this one. Responses are always welcome. (I'm an athiest btw, just in case there was any confusion).

[X]

I held i for awhile, before I knew that non-belief was an option.
(I have religious parents and went to a Catholic elementary school, so everyone I knew had some sort of belief)

However, I eventually realized that a non-interfering unknowable god is simply a belief for the sake of belief. And it isn't necessary, or even supportable.

[Tumblehome]

Welcome to the world of religious logic. :)

I can't accept your point, though. Someone who believes in a non-interfering god, rather than one who actively works in our interest, is paying more attention to the evidence. At least they acknowledge that the goings on in the universe don't signify the presence of any special being.

True believers, on the other hand, can look at a banana and say, "It's God Hisself!" And a horribly deformed child is "God's will". I'll take the former over the latter any day.

[Miss_Kitt]

That's somewhat the "deist" position: That there was a Creator, that set the stars into their paths, jinned up the Laws of Thermodynamics, Banged the Big Bang, and now has his feet up on the extra-planular bracalounger, eating celestial chips and watching the Universe like it was ESPN.

While it fails to take the simplest explanation of the absence of positive evidence for the existance of God, it's not a wholly unreasonable perspective for someone to take--especially someone who does not have a lot of science, logic, or philosophic background.

I don't think there are too many people who stay in that position for long, but I don't find it to be offensive. What's irritating are people who say, "Okay, there's no evidence for a personal, involved God, BUT I'm going to pray and believe anyway, just in case." That's totally ridiculous and self-contradictary. If God isn't involved or personal, then s/he won't care if you pray, right?? So why are you doing it?

By comparison to that kind of mental limbo, the Deist viewpoint is quite rational.

Just my thoughts, Miss Kitt

[MattusMaximus]

By comparison to that kind of mental limbo, the Deist viewpoint is quite rational.


A colleague of mine who teaches on philosophy & religion likes to refer to it as God starting up the universe and then going off to take an eternal coffee break.

I like that :)

Btw, welcome to the Forums, Death Blow!

[HansMustermann]

The concept isn't entirely impossible or illogical. Most MMOs and many MUDs explicitly forbid developers from messing with the players. And from a couple of scandals in places where that rule was ignored and the developers played favourites, it's easy to understand why it's a good idea too.

So, yes, a creator (or a whole team of creators and a publisher;)) could exist and keep their mitts off the universe they created.

On the other hand, yeah, I see no reason to postulate something based on a complete lack of evidence.

[Bikewer]

It was certainly a logical position to take for people who had no notion of the structure or origin of the universe, which was the case when Deism was popular. How else to explain the universe?

One has to wonder about motivation. Why would an "infinite" being create anything? What would be the point? The Abrahamic god-model knows everything, can do anything.... Seems kind of silly to actually do anything other than float in the void and contemplate the cosmic navel....

[Holler Hoojer]

I can understand your puzzlement, but not your judgement. Some of us are deliberate Deists, choosing to believe in God as an external ethical ground of being. There need be no "big daddy in the sky", no clock-maker, no Santa Claus, no anything except a wisdom and a compulsion for justice that transcends individual desires.

[cj.23]

I'd like to express something I have recently been finding among people. That being the concept of a non-interferring god.

.....A non-interferring god? So let me get this straight. You don't have any proof that god exists and you don't accept the theory that god has a hand in human affairs.


How does your argument here differ from this fallacy? http://skepticwiki.org/index.php/Argument_from_Incredulity We don't have proof of anything much, outside of mathematics after all.


So my question is: If you have no proof of a god existing, why do you need to believe there is a god at all? Clearly he isn't participating in your life one way or the other. He might as well not exist.

Imagine GTA. Yes Grand Theft Auto, the game. The programmer is not in your sitting room, changing things on the screen as you play, Yet they still play a massive role in your game experience, and the outcome. This is a very simple analogy to some deist interpreatations. You see how it works?


Honestly, I think this is a cowardly perspective to hold. It says, "I'm not going to believe god is involved in my life, but just in case he is, I should still believe he exists, just in case ;) ." Just pick a side already.

Already what??? I don't understand. Or do you mean you should have already picked a side? I don't think its cowardly, or not cowardly. I figure it si just how some people ragard ultimate reality - an intellectual issue, not an emotional one in the case of most deists?


It's like not calling heads or tails in a coin toss, but rather saying it will land on the narrow end.

Well that is legitimate logically. It will happne every so often with a normal coin after all. :)

cj x

[Malerin]

I'd like to express something I have recently been finding among people. That being the concept of a non-interferring god.

.....A non-interferring god? So let me get this straight. You don't have any proof that god exists and you don't accept the theory that god has a hand in human affairs.

The reason you don't think God "interferes" is because you believe in a world of physical matter goverened by its own rules (shocking that an atheist believes this, isn't it?:rolleyes: ). Suppose I claim that there are no physical objects. Everything we perceive is an immaterial object that exists in God's mind, requiring God's interference on a massive scale. How would you go about proving me wrong? Could you prove me wrong? Or are we both relying on our own sense-data to support our different views of reality?

If you are like most people who subscribe to this belief, you will try to prove that god must exist through science and math, when all you are really proving is that the universe exists.

How did the universe come to exist? The big-bang, right? What caused the big-bang? (no, this is not an irrelevant question, such as "what is North of the North Pole?"- cosmologists have plenty of theories why the Big Bang happened). Why do the physical constants of the universe have just the right values to allow the universe to be life-permitting, instead of, say, a universe where stars could not form? Luck?

So my question is: If you have no proof of a god existing, why do you need to believe there is a god at all? Clearly he isn't participating in your life one way or the other. He might as well not exist.

Why do you assume I don't have proof? What about my own spiritual experiences of feeling God in my life? That is proof to me (and countless others). What about the atheist who has a near death experience and becomes a theist? Is the OBE felt during that near death experience not evidence?

[I Ratant]

The non-interfering idea makes sense, as there's no indication of any.
"Proving" it only becomes a need when those who feel there is such an interference make it an issue.
Personal anecdotes aside, there isn't any proof of the interference, so there's no need to take the idea any more than Voltaire's idea of a diety that lost interest, if you need a diety at all.
Any personal experiences with interference seem to me from mine to be merely an awakening of logic and common sense, merely a comprehension of something I already knew, but had never realized how it should affect my life, especially when looking at the millions upon millions of instances when "supernatural interference" really could have benefited the world.
Such as the "miracle" at Fatima.
Exposing the god-hood to a few peasants in a cave, when World War One was raging right over there, that very same day!
Talk about a "light under a bushel"!
Pathetic PR at best, and obviously a pious brain fart of no significance at all.
Setting the people free from Pharoah, and then abandoning them to Hitler.
What's with that?
Make no sense at all.
Ergo, one of the two events didn't happen.
Guess which one!

[Darth Rotor]

To the OP:

Does it occur to you, given an assumed level of power (lots to the google), that "now and again interfering" and "now and again just enjoying the show" is a possible condition as well?

We are most amusing, ya see ...

DR

[MattusMaximus]

I can understand your puzzlement, but not your judgement. Some of us are deliberate Deists, choosing to believe in God as an external ethical ground of being. There need be no "big daddy in the sky", no clock-maker, no Santa Claus, no anything except a wisdom and a compulsion for justice that transcends individual desires.

Is this a form of Cartesian dualism? Do most deists accept the concept of a completely separate mind/soul and body?

Just curious.

ETA: For the record, I went through a deistic stage many years ago, and I did not cater to Cartesian dualism.

[Holler Hoojer]

Is this a form of Cartesian dualism? Do most deists accept the concept of a completely separate mind/soul and body?

Just curious.

ETA: For the record, I went through a deistic stage many years ago, and I did not cater to Cartesian dualism.

I don't know. I've never even thought of it in that way. As far as I can tell, my mind seems to be part of my body. And, I don't know if I have a soul. No evidence one way or the other. What are your thoughts on this?

[MattusMaximus]

Your thoughts mirror mine when I was going through my deistic stage. I viewed the notion of "soul" as, in the words of Laplace, an unnecessary hypothesis.

[RandFan]

Your thoughts mirror mine when I was going through my deistic stage. I viewed the notion of "soul" as, in the words of Laplace, an unnecessary hypothesis.I had a deistic stage but I was still clinging to the ID. I simply couldn't do without a soul. Not so much anymore.

[KingMerv00]

I can understand your puzzlement, but not your judgement. Some of us are deliberate Deists, choosing to believe in God as an external ethical ground of being. There need be no "big daddy in the sky", no clock-maker, no Santa Claus, no anything except a wisdom and a compulsion for justice that transcends individual desires.

Honest question: How does one CHOOSE to believe something? The idea is completely alien to me.

[KingMerv00]

How would you go about proving me wrong? Could you prove me wrong?

The burden of proof is on you.


How did the universe come to exist? The big-bang, right? What caused the big-bang? (no, this is not an irrelevant question, such as "what is North of the North Pole?"- cosmologists have plenty of theories why the Big Bang happened). Why do the physical constants of the universe have just the right values to allow the universe to be life-permitting, instead of, say, a universe where stars could not form? Luck?

Sharpshooter fallacy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy).

Also, your question may be nonsensical because "before time" may have no meaning.

[Holler Hoojer]

Honest question: How does one CHOOSE to believe something? The idea is completely alien to me.

Seriously? Most of us accept (or should) the idea that we choose to root for the Red Sox and subsequently believe really, really, really that Steinbrenner can't buy pennants. Or, we choose (I hope) to love the person whom we lusted after just recently enough to become committed. I choose to be honest with respect to stealing and don't bother with respect to lying.

[cj.23]

I had a deistic stage but I was still clinging to the ID. I simply couldn't do without a soul. Not so much anymore.

I don't actually believe in souls. :) Well I don't think I do!

cj x

[cj.23]

I had a deistic stage but I was still clinging to the ID. I simply couldn't do without a soul. Not so much anymore.

I don't actually believe in souls. :) Well I don't think I do! Not that it's particularly relevant to this discussion over all, but the notion of a soul strike me as a rather unnecessary one?

cj x

[KingMerv00]

Seriously? Most of us accept (or should) the idea that we choose to root for the Red Sox and subsequently believe really, really, really that Steinbrenner can't buy pennants. Or, we choose (I hope) to love the person whom we lusted after just recently enough to become committed. I choose to be honest with respect to stealing and don't bother with respect to lying.

Let me rephrase. How does one choose to believe in a particular objective reality? For example, if you tried really hard, could you believe yourself to be an elephant?

[Z]

I just think it's a fun idea, that there's this non-interfering (or minimal-interfering) divine supernatural entity sitting back and watching the show (or tweaking random elements for the occasional apparent random event). Such a being isn't worthy of worship or prayer, IMO, but is just fun to keep in the back of my mind, much like those trans-dimensional faeries and dragons. An alternate idea I like to entertain is that God DID exist, but died in the act of creation.

[RandFan]

Most of us accept (or should) the idea that we choose to root for the Red Sox...Why? I find the whole idea of free will a bit dodgy. I lean in favor of it but I'm not sure why we "should" accept it.

[I Ratant]

What could be the alternative or alternatives to free will?
Predestination seems extreme.

[RandFan]

What could be the alternative or alternatives to free will?
Predestination seems extreme.Does a river have free will or is it predestined to flow the course it flows?

The alternative, AIU, is that our behavior is the result of complex internal and external variables. That our decision making process is really subconscious and we only have the illusion that we are actually making conscious choices. Predestination, I think, calls for a conscious entity choosing the course for us.

In any event, our actions are like a storm or other extremely chaotic system. The variables that cause our behavior are so complex and varied that even a tiny change to any of the variables can cause major changes to our behavior.

[Skeptic Ginger]

Honest question: How does one CHOOSE to believe something? The idea is completely alien to me.You don't think one chooses to believe evidence based beliefs over faith based beliefs?

[Skeptic Ginger]

Let me rephrase. How does one choose to believe in a particular objective reality? For example, if you tried really hard, could you believe yourself to be an elephant?
Seems like a semantic quibble over the free will question of belief, but in your context, I suppose choose is the wrong verb. Thought development would be more like it.

[Skeptic Ginger]

I posted a lot on this topic in the thread, Taking a second look at untestable gods.
(http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?p=4438755#post4438755)

[I Ratant]

Does a river have free will or is it predestined to flow the course it flows?

The alternative, AIU, is that our behavior is the result of complex internal and external variables. That our decision making process is really subconscious and we only have the illusion that we are actually making conscious choices. Predestination, I think, calls for a conscious entity choosing the course for us.

In any event, our actions are like a storm or other extremely chaotic system. The variables that cause our behavior are so complex and varied that even a tiny change to any of the variables can cause major changes to our behavior.
.
Rivers, being composed of water, which has no "cohesion" are perforce "fated" to flow downhill if possible, or pool where it's not.
The decisions we make are of course processed internally, but rely on outside influences and previous experiences and anticipated experiences.
Water doesn't "look" ahead and plot its course, it must "accept" what it encounters, with no alternatives.
The conscious entity most (can't say all :) ) of us that guides us fair or foul is in our individual headbones.

[RandFan]

The decisions we make are of course processed internally, but rely on outside influences and previous experiences and anticipated experiences.
Water doesn't "look" ahead and plot its course, it must "accept" what it encounters, with no alternatives.And how are we different? If the river could look ahead and had the ability to alter course would it choose a different path? You presume that the ability to look ahead significantly alters the equation. It just changes the time frame. The "decision" could still be unconscious and still be out of our hands. How do you know that you choose? It seems to me that I choose, I will admit that, but that isn't a valid argument. My computer can change states based on the ability to look ahead. I'm not sure it has free will though.

The conscious entity most (can't say all :) ) of us that guides us fair or foul is in our individual headbones.Color me unconvinced. Though I have to say I came to terms with free will/no free will 7 years ago. I don't really care and I likely have no choice in the matter either way. I'm just trying to lay out the paramaters for you. :)

There really is no convincing argument for free will. I know, I spent months trying to argue for it thinking on many occasions I had a solid and convincing argument in its favor. I hadn't.

But when you've finished with free will let me know and we can then tackle idealism.

[KingMerv00]

.
Rivers, being composed of water, which has no "cohesion" are perforce "fated" to flow downhill if possible, or pool where it's not.
The decisions we make are of course processed internally, but rely on outside influences and previous experiences and anticipated experiences.
Water doesn't "look" ahead and plot its course, it must "accept" what it encounters, with no alternatives.
The conscious entity most (can't say all :) ) of us that guides us fair or foul is in our individual headbones.

I'd argue humans don't "look ahead", they only appear to.

Through a series of incredibly complex chemical reactions which happened in the PAST, a human's future action is set.

[Limbo]

Honest question: How does one CHOOSE to believe something? The idea is completely alien to me.


Have you read Prometheus Rising?

http://www.325collective.com/prometheus-rising.pdf

[plumjam]

Through a series of incredibly complex chemical reactions which happened in the PAST, a human's future action is set.

If this set future path of yours was detailed and presented to you now, would you be able to choose not to follow it?
*Cue Twilight Zone theme tune*

[KingMerv00]

If this set future path of yours was detailed and presented to you now, would you be able to choose not to follow it?
*Cue Twilight Zone theme tune*

No, I couldn't choose (in a metaphysical sense) but it could change the outcome because new information has been added to the system.

I can even think about thinking about it. That's called feedback (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedback). Hell, it could even become recursive (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recursive_loop).

[KingMerv00]

Have you read Prometheus Rising?

http://www.325collective.com/prometheus-rising.pdf

No, and the wiki article makes it sound too squishy for my taste. Care to summarize?

[Death Blow]

Malerin, I'm going to refer you to Occam's razor (the most obvious answer is usually the correct one). Now I may not be able to prove your theory wrong indiffinately, but which theory seems more likely, your's or mine?

CJ.23, Can you prove that your house must exist through only means of mathematics? If you can't, then it must not exist, right? You can't assume that thing exist or don't exist based on pure math. What I am saying is that it doesn't seem to make sense that god exists, yet does nothing.

[boloboffin]

Here's the appropriate thread for this video!

http://www.reallivepreacher.com/node/1387

Maybe you've never heard of Real Live Preacher. He's a guy who is that, and blogs about his constant problems with faith. He is a really nice guy, though, and he has just started vlogging as well.

Anyway, that link goes to his page, and in it he rambles on about 14 minutes before getting to his point - that belief in the Resurrection is the best gift he could give the Creator God. My mom sent it to me, hoping once again to spur me back to faith. And I watched it with an interesting feeling - what if this is the thing that does it? What if this is the argument that makes faith make sense again?

Well, it didn't. In fact, I felt bad for the guy. Why the Resurrection story? Why not just the Golden Rule, a life lived treating all people the way I want to be treated? Isn't that offering enough for a posited Creator God? Of course, I don't get to join into my childhood faith tradition on the strength of the Golden Rule alone (which says a lot about it, I'm aware). And not that I do want to do that, even.

I hope I haven't gone too far afield on the topic.

[RandFan]

If this set future path of yours was detailed and presented to you now, would you be able to choose not to follow it?
*Cue Twilight Zone theme tune*That would then just become part of the detail of the path and the path that was presented to you is false because it precludes this little detour. You are in essence lying about the future via ommision and changing the time arrow and BTW, you've got the wrong reference. Cue Back To The Future theme music. Knowing his future Marty chooses a different path but the knowledge of the future simply becomes one more variable among a lot of other complex variables including Biffs knowledge of the future which alters both Marty's past and future, twice.

Sorry but it really isn't an insight. Oh, and check out the movie, The Butterfly Effect (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0289879/).

And if you are not getting this, any true future path would have to include ALL variables including the fore-knowledge of future events and how one would react to such knowledge.

[Malerin]

Malerin, I'm going to refer you to Occam's razor (the most obvious answer is usually the correct one). Now I may not be able to prove your theory wrong indiffinately, but which theory seems more likely, your's or mine?

That's not really Occam's Razor, but I've argued against it before. Two things:

1. How do you know that materialism (the ontological theory that the universe is made up of physical objects that exist independent of us and are subject to natural law) is simpler (or multiplies less entities, if we want to be very precise) than idealism?
2. Even if I grant that materialism is the simpler theory, in order for Occam's Razor to apply to your ontological position, you would have to prove that reality is more likely simple than complex. Can you prove, or even give any evidence, that reality is ultimately a simple thing, easily understood? Is it equally probable that reality is a very complex thing that is impossible (or nearly impossible) to understand?

[Malerin]

The burden of proof is on you.

The burden of proof is on the idealist but not the materialist? Why should we assume, a priori, that physicalism is true? Shouldn't the burden of proof be on anyone who posits a specific ontological claim (materialism, dualism, idealism, etc.)?



Sharpshooter fallacy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy).

Ah, so if 1000 sharpshooters from 20 feet away all took aim, fired at you, and missed, it wouldn't occur to you that something fishy was going on? You are not a very inquisitive person! The point of the sharpshooter analogy is that, even though someone survives an incredibly improbable event, they can legitimally ask the question, Why did I survive? Was someone looking out for me? Likewise, even though we happen to exist in this universe, we are in no way precluded from asking the question, What are the odds that we should exist? Nearly all physcists and cosmologists will tell you those odds are very very low.

Assume there was a one-time lottery held just for you. If you win, you get a billion dollars. You have to correctly pick a thousand numbers (each number from 1-10) to win. You laboriously pick all thousand numbers, and lo-and-behold, you win. The probability of you winning is now 1 because you won. But are you honestly telling me you would chalk it up to luck? Wouldn't it be more reasonable to believe that someone rigged the game in your favor? Of course it would. If you flip a coin a thousand times in a row and it comes up heads each time, you'd be an idiot to still think it was a fair coin, right?

Also, your question may be nonsensical because "before time" may have no meaning.

Depends on who you ask. Like I said, there are plenty of theories about why the Big Bang happened (branes, multiverse, quantum fluctuations, cyclical universe, etc.).

[KingMerv00]

The burden of proof is on the idealist but not the materialist? Why should we assume, a priori, that physicalism is true? Shouldn't the burden of proof be on anyone who posits a specific ontological claim (materialism, dualism, idealism, etc.)?

You acknowledge that the objective world is predictable. The very fact you responded to my post without pondering if gravity will work for the next 15 minutes speaks to that. This means you accept science and the material world.

Now, get to work on showing the immaterial world exists.

Ah, so if 1000 sharpshooters from 20 feet away all took aim, fired at you, and missed, it wouldn't occur to you that something fishy was going on? You are not a very inquisitive person! The point of the sharpshooter analogy is that, even though someone survives an incredibly improbable event, they can legitimally ask the question, Why did I survive? Was someone looking out for me? Likewise, even though we happen to exist in this universe, we are in no way precluded from asking the question, What are the odds that we should exist? Nearly all physcists and cosmologists will tell you those odds are very very low.

Assume there was a one-time lottery held just for you. If you win, you get a billion dollars. You have to correctly pick a thousand numbers (each number from 1-10) to win. You laboriously pick all thousand numbers, and lo-and-behold, you win. The probability of you winning is now 1 because you won. But are you honestly telling me you would chalk it up to luck? Wouldn't it be more reasonable to believe that someone rigged the game in your favor? Of course it would. If you flip a coin a thousand times in a row and it comes up heads each time, you'd be an idiot to still think it was a fair coin, right?

False analogies aside, you didn't address the sharpshooter fallacy very well. Take a sheet of standard printer paper and crinkle it randomly. Look at the miracle before you! The odds of that exact configuration is vanishingly small, therefore God crinkled your paper! Any fool can look at the results of a random process AFTER the fact and declare a miracle.

You also assume this universe is the only one that has ever existed. As of yet, there is no evidence for a multiverse OR God. In spite of that, are taking the unexplained and choosing one explanation over another. If you had been raised in ancient Greece, you'd think the "mysterious phenomenon" of lightning to be the hand of Zues even though you have no reason to believe that.

Depends on who you ask. Like I said, there are plenty of theories about why the Big Bang happened (branes, multiverse, quantum fluctuations, cyclical universe, etc.).

All of which are mere speculation at the moment. For now, be happy with "I don't know." It ain't much, but at least it is honest.

[Holler Hoojer]

Why? I find the whole idea of free will a bit dodgy. I lean in favor of it but I'm not sure why we "should" accept it.

Bad grammar. I meant to say that, if we root for the BoSox, we should accept that we chose that.

[RandFan]

Ah, so if 1000 sharpshooters from 20 feet away all took aim, fired at you, and missed, it wouldn't occur to you that something fishy was going on? You are not a very inquisitive person! The point of the sharpshooter analogy is that, even though someone survives an incredibly improbable event, they can legitimally ask the question, Why did I survive? Was someone looking out for me? Likewise, even though we happen to exist in this universe, we are in no way precluded from asking the question, What are the odds that we should exist? Nearly all physcists and cosmologists will tell you those odds are very very low. Dude, we went over this already. You didn't read Innumeracy did you? The odds of any one person existing are so staggeringly high that thy are entirely incomprehensible yet I ask you what should be made of the fact that you exist and not the adult versions of all of the other people who could be alive but aren't and your only answer is defining silence.

[RandFan]

Bad grammar. I meant to say that, if we root for the BoSox, we should accept that we chose that.Why? Again, I'm not completely sold on the notion of free will. Can you truly eliminate the possibility that your choice was made on an unconscious level and you only think that you consciously chose it? There's reason to suppose that we don't conscously choose anything.

[Holler Hoojer]

Let me rephrase. How does one choose to believe in a particular objective reality? For example, if you tried really hard, could you believe yourself to be an elephant?

I never said God was an objective reality. You're making too much of a personal point of view. But, I must say I knew a man once who believed he was a terrier. He barked, ran about on all fours, and even bit a coworker of mine. It may be that I am as delusional as he. How would I know?

[Holler Hoojer]

Why? Again, I'm not completely sold on the notion of free will. Can you truly eliminate the possibility that your choice was made on an unconscious level and you only think that you consciously chose it? There's reason to suppose that we don't conscously choose anything.

I'm not a great fan of extreme reductionism, but I concede that is a valid point. However, I am now grown old and I try to follow the advice of that great sage, Elwood P. Dowd,

Years ago my mother used to say to me, she'd say, "In this world, Elwood, you must be" - she always called me Elwood - "In this world, Elwood, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant." Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. You may quote me.

I now think I'll choose to go out and look for easter eggs. It's a beautiful day and I have two good dogs to help.

[Beth]

How do you know that you choose? It seems to me that I choose, I will admit that, but that isn't a valid argument.

How is this argument any different than the 'brain in a vat' argument? We can't definitively say that such scenario's are ruled out, but why should we reject the evidence of our senses and presume, instead, some scenario that cannot be falsified?

If you reject the 'brain in a vat' hypothesis (and I think you do), why accept this one? What evidence is there to support the idea that free will does not exist?

[Bikewer]

I listened to an NPR segment about the problem of subliminal or subconscious processing taking place before we "decide" to do a particular thing.
The time-span involved was pretty small...

However, it seems to me that we are still processing this information (whether we are conscious of it or not) with the brain that is the result of our personal life experience, genetic makeup, etc....In other words, "I" am making that decision based on the parameters that make up "Me", regardless of whether this is entirely a conscious process.

Indeed, this subliminal processing would seem to be necessary if we are to function in the real world; would we want to "decide" to do every single action in a day's activities?

The fact that we function as smoothly as we do is a result of this sort of processing.
When it comes to major life decisions, we still retain the ability to rationally weigh the evidence, make plans, consult with others, etc. We may get that "gut" reaction as a spillover from that subliminal processing, but I think we can override it....

[I Ratant]

Considering the zig-zag courses our lives go thru as we make decisions that alter the directions, time after time, there can't be any map we're predestined to follow.
Our physical situation, our inherited genetics may direct us along some paths and not others, but quite frequently we can decide to thwart that "predestined" process and work around any genetic situations.
.
We can decide... the paths we take in life.

[RandFan]

How is this argument any different than the 'brain in a vat' argument? We can't definitively say that such scenario's are ruled out, but why should we reject the evidence of our senses and presume, instead, some scenario that cannot be falsified?

If you reject the 'brain in a vat' hypothesis (and I think you do), why accept this one? What evidence is there to support the idea that free will does not exist?I'm not at all convinced one way or the other. I live as though I have free will but I'm not sure I have a choice in the matter. Sorry if that phrase is becoming trite. My view toward free will and brain in a vat are identical. I don't care. I don't mind discussing the concepts but I'm not personaly invested in either.

As for the evidence see Free Will: Now You Have It, Now You Don’t (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/02/science/02free.html?_r=1&pagewanted=2). The evidence begins on page 2.


In the 1970s, Benjamin Libet, a physiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, wired up the brains of volunteers to an electroencephalogram and told the volunteers to make random motions, like pressing a button or flicking a finger, while he noted the time on a clock.

Dr. Libet found that brain signals associated with these actions occurred half a second before the subject was conscious of deciding to make them.
The order of brain activities seemed to be perception of motion, and then decision, rather than the other way around.

[RandFan]

Considering the zig-zag courses our lives go thru as we make decisions that alter the directions, time after time, there can't be any map we're predestined to follow.
Our physical situation, our inherited genetics may direct us along some paths and not others, but quite frequently we can decide to thwart that "predestined" process and work around any genetic situations.
.
We can decide... the paths we take in life.Ok, but why should we believe that? And is the decision a conscious one? What does it mean to say "decide"? What's happening? It seems axiomatic but it really isn't.

[shawmutt]

Imagine GTA. Yes Grand Theft Auto, the game. The programmer is not in your sitting room, changing things on the screen as you play, Yet they still play a massive role in your game experience, and the outcome. This is a very simple analogy to some deist interpreatations. You see how it works?...

I just can't wait to see the new downloadable content God is going to come out with ;)

Anyway, concerning the OP, this is along the lines of my beliefs--but only because I'm intellectually lazy on the subject and have a small vocabulary. “Life, the universe, and everything”, to me, is simply God. However, there is no rational and logical debate to be had concerning said notion. I usually don't bring it up at all, simply because it brings the anti-theists out of the woodwork. I take solace in the knowledge that a person can hold a belief in God and still be a skeptic.

Overall, my core belief is one that we just aren't that damn important. I love Carl Sagan's view of us as a "pale blue dot", and share the same view.

[HansMustermann]

I listened to an NPR segment about the problem of subliminal or subconscious processing taking place before we "decide" to do a particular thing.
The time-span involved was pretty small...

However, it seems to me that we are still processing this information (whether we are conscious of it or not) with the brain that is the result of our personal life experience, genetic makeup, etc....In other words, "I" am making that decision based on the parameters that make up "Me", regardless of whether this is entirely a conscious process.

Indeed, this subliminal processing would seem to be necessary if we are to function in the real world; would we want to "decide" to do every single action in a day's activities?

The fact that we function as smoothly as we do is a result of this sort of processing.
When it comes to major life decisions, we still retain the ability to rationally weigh the evidence, make plans, consult with others, etc. We may get that "gut" reaction as a spillover from that subliminal processing, but I think we can override it....

Well, I've heard several armchair-interpretations based on that research, including that:

- conscious decision doesn't even exist

- conscious decisions are just a post-facto rationalization of that subconscious decision

- conscious decisions actually work the same way

Etc.

But the funny thing is: the original paper they all base their adlibs on _only_ claimed that it's about _subconscious_ decisions. No more, no less, nothing else.

The extrapolation some people make that somehow it would make brain entirely deterministic, and that no other kind of decisions exist, is in fact their own extrapolation. And a bit like claiming that if one saw a steam engine once, any other kind of vehicle is steam powered too. That piece of research does _not_ in fact say anything at all about conscious decisions.

So, yes, I'll wait a bit more until deciding either way about free will. That piece of research doesn't prove _that_.

[RandFan]

- conscious decision doesn't even exist

- conscious decisions are just a post-facto rationalization of that subconscious decision

- conscious decisions actually work the same way

Etc.

But the funny thing is: the original paper they all base their adlibs on _only_ claimed that it's about _subconscious_ decisions. No more, no less, nothing else.As if there is nothing that can be concluded from that fact. I think you are minimizing the potential of such a conclusion. If subconscious doesn't obviate conscious decisions then why call it subconscious at all? Let's just call everything conscious.

[I Ratant]

Ok, but why should we believe that? And is the decision a conscious one? What does it mean to say "decide"? What's happening? It seems axiomatic but it really isn't.
.
What other explanation than free will explains the limitless choices people make every day?
The Hindu caste system constrains members of a caste to the characteristics of that caste, until a caste member decides to chuck that crap and strike off on his own.
Where does the out-of-character decision to come from, if not from free will?
Are some people "destined" to achieve a state that acknowledges their self-worth is greater than the rest of the collection of people?
And if some are so selected, what does the selection?

[RandFan]

.
What other explanation than free will explains the limitless choices people make every day?Answer: Brain functions responding to a large number of variables. By your logic we should posit free will to explain the limitless choices storms make every day? Your thesis is post hoc.

The Hindu caste system constrains members of a caste to the characteristics of that caste, until a caste member decides to chuck that crap and strike off on his own.
Where does the out-of-character decision to come from, if not from free will?You are begging the question. You posit a decision and then ask why the decision doesn't prove that a decision is being made. Any number of variables could come into play. It could be millions of variables. I have no way of knowing. That point is that some mental calculation is taking place. It could be the person was born with a stronger ego and propensity for questioning authority. Certainly there are such personality traits that exist in humans, right?

Are some people "destined" to achieve a state that acknowledges their self-worth is greater than the rest of the collection of people?
And if some are so selected, what does the selection? Is a storm destined to rain or simply block the sun?

You are asking the wrong questions. You are positing a top down process. Brain processing isn't a top down process anymore than a storm is a top down process. Like the storm, the brain is a complex dynamic that responds to many internal and external variables ad-hoc.

Before you retort would you please read up on chaos theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory). Your questions show a lack of understanding of the foundations of how neuroscience would work if there was no free will. Now, let me hasten to add that chaos theory is not an explanation of consciousness or subconscious decision making. The point is that decision making sans free will would be a complex dynamic that is altered by both large and small changes in the system.

In mathematics, chaos theory describes the behavior of certain dynamical systems – that is, systems whose states evolve with time – that may exhibit dynamics that are highly sensitive to initial conditions (popularly referred to as the butterfly effect). As a result of this sensitivity, which manifests itself as an exponential growth of perturbations in the initial conditions, the behavior of chaotic systems appears to be random. This happens even though these systems are deterministic, meaning that their future dynamics are fully defined by their initial conditions, with no random elements involved. This behavior is known as deterministic chaos, or simply chaos.

[Malerin]

You acknowledge that the objective world is predictable. The very fact you responded to my post without pondering if gravity will work for the next 15 minutes speaks to that. This means you accept science and the material world.

Not at all. Who do you assume idealism or dualism would be unpredictable?

Now, get to work on showing the immaterial world exists.

It does exist. Now give me evidence that physical objects exist. See where a priori assumptions lead us? I can just as easily claim (and with as much evidence) that reality is idealistic and ask you to prove physicalism is true. Actually, I've got an edge on you: we know that ideas exist, and ideas form the basis for idealism. We have no such knowledge that physical matter exists, or even thye knowledge that a necessary condition for physical matter exists. In any case, any ontological position either of us takes is equally compatible with the sense-data we experience. So shouldn't we be agnostic about reality?



False analogies aside, you didn't address the sharpshooter fallacy very well. Take a sheet of standard printer paper and crinkle it randomly. Look at the miracle before you! The odds of that exact configuration is vanishingly small, therefore God crinkled your paper! Any fool can look at the results of a random process AFTER the fact and declare a miracle.

Do you know what significant results are? I'll give you an example:
HTHHTHHTHTTTHTHTHTHTTHTHTHTTHTHHHTHTHTTHTHTHHHTHTT HTHT
is just as likely as
HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH HHHH

In the first case, you wouldn't have any reason to believe the coin wasn't fair. In the second case, you'd have to be an idiot to bet against heads coming up again. Yet both results are equally likely. Weird isn't it? I will submit to you that finding yourself alive after 1000 sharpshooters have all missed from 20 feet away counts as a significant result. :rolleyes:

I'll give you another one: There are two mystery bags filled with numbers. You are told that one bag has a purely random assortment of numbers, but the other is non-random. You reach into bag A and pull out numbers. The numbers are:

719425894325983472341

You reach into bag B and pull out numbers. This sequence is:

314159265358979323846

You are now asked to bet $1000 on which bag had the random numbers. Which bag would you bet on? ;) Question to you also, Rand.

If you had been raised in ancient Greece, you'd think the "mysterious phenomenon" of lightning to be the hand of Zues even though you have no reason to believe that.

I would be agnostic about it because I would realize that nobody knows for sure. There's very little agnosticism here. Kind of strange, isn't it?

[RandFan]

You are now asked to bet $1000 on which bag had the random numbers. Which bag would you bet on? Question to you also, Rand. And again this has been explained to you. You didn't even bother to buy the book did you?

You won't answer my question so how can I answer yours. You've got your fingers logged tightly in your ears and humming loudly.

The odds of you existing are astronomically high. What can we make of that?

Now, as to your question, it's not an analog. There is no alternate to compare to. We don't know how many universes there are or if the universe, inteligently designed or not, could have been any other way.

Can you make a square circle?
If I find circles in nature that are not square what should I conclude A.) they must have been desigined. B.) That is the only way the could have formed.
So, can we put this one to bed? Well you buy the book (http://www.amazon.com/Innumeracy-Mathematical-Illiteracy-Consequences-Vintage/dp/0679726012) or this one (http://www.amazon.com/Irreligion-Mathematician-Explains-Arguments-Just/dp/0809059185/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp_k2a_1_txt?pf_rd_p=304485601&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-2&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=0679726012&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=06TESHNADTDAC7HAMHJF)? Experts in the field are not blown away by your bit of mathmatical assumptions and for good reason.

[I Ratant]

...
Is a storm destined to rain or simply block the sun?
...

.
Both, neither, and at night, impossible.
There's no "destiny" involved.
Storms are physical situations dependent on atmospheric qualities at the time.
"Situational destiny" at best.

[RandFan]

.
Both, neither, and at night, impossible.
There's no "destiny" involved.
Storms are physical situations dependent on atmospheric qualities at the time.
"Situational destiny" at best.Sounds like human decision making. :) We may be making progress yet.

[HansMustermann]

As if there is nothing that can be concluded from that fact. I think you are minimizing the potential of such a conclusion. If subconscious doesn't obviate conscious decisions then why call it subconscious at all? Let's just call everything conscious.

Actually, less can be concluded from it than most people who invoke that paper seem to think. Or at least not the same things they want to support with it.

1. They explicitly talk only about decisions taken without conscious thinking. There is absolutely nothing in there about how that influences the conscious or viceversa, and they stay clear of making any such claim.

Yes, the subconscious probably plays _some_ role. But that experiment doesn't show which and to what extent and in what circumstances.

Basically, it's a far cry from (A) seeing how your gut feeling forms, to (B) proclaiming it the definitive proof that conscious decisions don't even exist at all, or all the other funny stuff I keep reading all over the place ever since.

Or to better summarize it: yes, nobody proposes to call it all conscious, but then it's a far cry from pretending it's all subconscious. There are middle grounds there.

2. But it gets better. (Time to really get geeky and lose everyone else ;)) That paper only shows this: there is some kind of a bayesian vote of that neural network up there, and when a certain threshold is reached, the subconscious decision goes "do it" or "don't do it."

But really that's all. We don't know what kind of data is used in that vote, nor how it's processed, nor what influences it, nor how that data is weighted, nor how the decision tree is pruned, nor anything else. _All_ that was visible there was just that a value goes up or down, and something happens at one of the two thresholds.

That's it. In programming terms, they saw a variable going up and down, but not what changes that variable. Technically we don't even know if it's really a bayesian vote, we just see a variable that moves sorta like that.

E.g., can your conscious logic influence that vote? Nobody knows, really.

So basically let's not get carried away with the wishful thinking, that's all I'm saying. That experiment showed one thing, and an interesting one it is too for neuroscience and to some extent for AI. But let's stick to what they actually measured, and not get carried away imagining stuff that wasn't even within their scope.

[Malerin]

And again this has been explained to you. You didn't even bother to buy the book did you?

You won't answer my question so how can I answer yours. You've got your fingers logged tightly in your ears and humming loudly.

The odds of you existing are astronomically high. What can we make of that?

Now, as to your question, it's not an analog. There is no alternate to compare to. We don't know how many universes there are or if the universe, inteligently designed or not, could have been any other way.

Can you make a square circle?
If I find circles in nature that are not square what should I conclude A.) they must have been desigined. B.) That is the only way the could have formed.
So, can we put this one to bed? Well you buy the book (http://www.amazon.com/Innumeracy-Mathematical-Illiteracy-Consequences-Vintage/dp/0679726012) or this one (http://www.amazon.com/Irreligion-Mathematician-Explains-Arguments-Just/dp/0809059185/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp_k2a_1_txt?pf_rd_p=304485601&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-2&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=0679726012&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=06TESHNADTDAC7HAMHJF)? Experts in the field are not blown away by your bit of mathmatical assumptions and for good reason.

Just a simple answer will do, Rand. I'll tell you which bag I would bet on. I would bet the bag where I drew the first 21 digits of Pi did NOT have a bunch of random numbers. Something tells me (and here I may be just in the grips of another theistic delusion) that drawing the first 21 numbers of Pi from a mystery bag probably doesn't happen by chance. That wasn't so hard, so I ask again: which would you bet on?

[I Ratant]

A square is not a circle.
Vice versa.

[shawmutt]

But a real man can make it fit.

[KingMerv00]

Not at all. Who do you assume idealism or dualism would be unpredictable?


It does exist. Now give me evidence that physical objects exist. See where a priori assumptions lead us? I can just as easily claim (and with as much evidence) that reality is idealistic and ask you to prove physicalism is true. Actually, I've got an edge on you: we know that ideas exist, and ideas form the basis for idealism. We have no such knowledge that physical matter exists, or even thye knowledge that a necessary condition for physical matter exists. In any case, any ontological position either of us takes is equally compatible with the sense-data we experience. So shouldn't we be agnostic about reality?

Let me define my position more clearly because I think we are debating past each other.

1) I think, therefore I am. (I've heard people try to rebut this but I've either disagreed with or didn't understand their opinion.)

2) I have things called experiences which I cannot describe (so I will not try to).

3) Experiences follow patterns that seem to act independently of my wishes. I call these patterns "the laws of nature".

4) My brain is subject to the laws of nature. Altering that particular structure (through chemicals for example) changes my experiences in very predictable ways and is therefore probably the source of my consciousness.

5) I am certain about nothing. But I will make best guesses.

Please describe how your position is different.

Do you know what significant results are? I'll give you an example:
HTHHTHHTHTTTHTHTHTHTTHTHTHTTHTHHHTHTHTTHTHTHHHTHTT HTHT
is just as likely as
HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH HHHH

In the first case, you wouldn't have any reason to believe the coin wasn't fair. In the second case, you'd have to be an idiot to bet against heads coming up again. Yet both results are equally likely. Weird isn't it? I will submit to you that finding yourself alive after 1000 sharpshooters have all missed from 20 feet away counts as a significant result. :rolleyes:

I'll give you another one: There are two mystery bags filled with numbers. You are told that one bag has a purely random assortment of numbers, but the other is non-random. You reach into bag A and pull out numbers. The numbers are:

719425894325983472341

You reach into bag B and pull out numbers. This sequence is:

314159265358979323846

You are now asked to bet $1000 on which bag had the random numbers. Which bag would you bet on? ;) Question to you also, Rand.

As before, you are failing to understand the sharpshooter fallacy. RandFan gave an excellent example: There are an unfathomable number of variables that had to be just right for my particular DNA sequence to come into being but that doesn't mean those variables are not subject to the laws of nature. The same reasoning holds true of the universe: If the variables had been different at the origin of time, it would only result in a different (though possibly brief) configuration. If that universe existed, would you still be marveling how unlikely THAT universe is?

Your other problem is that you assume only one experimental trial when there may be an infinite number of universes. For now, there is no evidence for God or the multiverse so I'll just say "I don't have enough information to form a useful opinion and you don't either".

If you are still having trouble, perhaps you can tell me what you think the fallacy means?

There's very little agnosticism here. Kind of strange, isn't it?

Most people here, myself included, seem to describe themselves as "agnostic atheist".

[I Ratant]

...
If you are still having trouble, perhaps you can tell me what you think the fallacy means?
...

.
It's a brain fart typical of philosophy at its self-inflated best!

[Malerin]

Let me define my position more clearly because I think we are debating past each other.

1) I think, therefore I am. (I've heard people try to rebut this but I've either disagreed with or didn't understand their opinion.)

2) I have things called experiences which I cannot describe (so I will not try to).

3) Experiences follow patterns that seem to act independently of my wishes. I call these patterns "the laws of nature".

That is where we agree. People try to refute (1) and it mystifies me that someone could doubt their own existence. We do have experiences, and they appear to be independent of us and pretty predictable.

4) My brain is subject to the laws of nature. Altering that particular structure (through chemicals for example) changes my experiences in very predictable ways and is therefore probably the source of my consciousness.

5) I am certain about nothing. But I will make best guesses.



This is where we differ. You assume (unconsciously, it appears) the materialist position (sounds kinky). For example, you assume you have a brain, that it's subject to the laws of nature, and that things such as chemicals exist. Now, it's possible you have some immaterialist definition of brain, laws of nature, and chemicals, but I doubt it. I think you believe you have a physical brain made of neurons and such and that your mind arises from this physical thing in some way. Is that correct?

As before, you are failing to understand the sharpshooter fallacy. RandFan gave an excellent example: There are an unfathomable number of variables that had to be just right for my particular DNA sequence to come into being but that doesn't mean those variables are not subject to the laws of nature. The same reasoning holds true of the universe: If the variables had been different at the origin of time, it would only result in a different (though possibly brief) configuration. If that universe existed, would you still be marveling how unlikely THAT universe is?

You and Randfan fail to grasp what are called "significant results". These are results that are just as likely as other results, yet we attach greater significance to them. I think you know this because you and Rand will not answer the very simple question I asked about betting. I'll give an even more basic example:

Suppose you're at a poker game and the same person keeps dealing. The first round goes like this:
Dealer: Royal Flush
Players: Junk hands
2nd round
Dealer: Royal Flush
Players: Junk hands
3rd round
Dealer: Royal Flush
Players Junk hands

Are you going to admit that you would stay in the game? Of course not, because you would be a total moron. But staying in is the logic of your position: a junk hand is just as likely as a royal flush, so why should you suspect the dealer of cheating, right? But of course, we do suspect the dealer of cheating (after the 2nd round, the game would have broken up), and rightly so. A royal flush is just as likely as 2D,3S,8D,4C,5H, which is a junk hand. However, a royal flush is a significant result. A junk hand is not. If the dealer in the above example had dealt himself three junk hands, nobody would leave the game. It's the same reason 20 heads in a row makes us certain that a coin is loaded and 12 heads and 8 tails don't. Both are just as likely results of 20 coin tosses, but one outcome is much more plausible given the theory "The coin is unfair" then the other. Three royal flushes in a row is astronomically more plausible on the assumption the dealer is cheating than on the assumption the dealer just got lucky.

Your other problem is that you assume only one experimental trial when there may be an infinite number of universes. For now, there is no evidence for God or the multiverse so I'll just say "I don't have enough information to form a useful opinion and you don't either".

That's true, but there's no evidence for a multiverse either. A theist is jusitifed in claiming "Well, the odds that life should have arisen are fantastic, and there seem to be two rational choices: either we're part of a huge macroverse, or something fine-tuned the constants. Since I have no evidence other universes exist, but I do have evidence of God in my life, I'll go with God". That, to me, is a solidly rational position to take. Plenty of physicists go the other way and embrace multiverse theory, even though there's not a shred of evidence that other universes exist. Both sides, theistic and atheistic, have their favorite explanations for the fine-tuning problem, even though, at this stage in the game, agnosticism is probably the most rational position to take.

If you are still having trouble, perhaps you can tell me what you think the fallacy means?

There is no fallacy. Someone surviving thousands of rifle shots from expert sharpshooters would naturally wonder why they're not dead. Wouldn't you? I would.



Most people here, myself included, seem to describe themselves as "agnostic atheist".

Which is a perfectly justified position to take. It's your belief (faith) in materialism that I'm interested in. You admit you don't believe in God because of a lack of evidence. Why do you believe in physical matter? Because you can see it and touch it?

[KingMerv00]

I think you believe you have a physical brain made of neurons and such and that your mind arises from this physical thing in some way. Is that correct?

That's close enough. I like to make the distinction that a brain is the object while the mind is a process.

You and Randfan fail to grasp what are called "significant results".

Your response to the fallacy appears to be your opinion of significant results. See #2 below.

Three objections to your analogies:

1) It is strange that all of your examples use multiple trials to establish a pattern even after you've disavowed a multiverse. How is that analogous to the formation a lone universe?

2) Why do you think a "long lasting" (no reason to think 13.7 billion years is long in any objective sense) universe with life is more significant than a short lived one without life? That's vitocentric.

Yes, I just made up that word.

3) Even if I accept your criteria for "significance", a better example is a single hand of two pair, not ten royal flushes in a row. I don't use a royal flush because this universe could be a lot friendlier to life and longer lasting.

That's true, but there's no evidence for a multiverse either.

I said that already.

Since I have no evidence other universes exist, but I do have evidence of God in my life, I'll go with God". That, to me, is a solidly rational position to take.

It would be if I accepted their evidence.

It's your belief (faith) in materialism that I'm interested in. You admit you don't believe in God because of a lack of evidence. Why do you believe in physical matter? Because you can see it and touch it?

I have sensation. My consciouness arranges those sensations into what I call the "physical world". The ultimate metaphysical cause of these sensations cannot be known with any certainty. How does your opinion differ?

[uruk]

So my question is: If you have no proof of a god existing, why do you need to believe there is a god at all? Clearly he isn't participating in your life one way or the other. He might as well not exist.

The only thing here is that "he might as well not exist" is not equal to "god does not exist".

If you are unaware of a person standing behind you and that person does nothing to attract your attention and furthermore this person tries to hide from you when ever you look around. For all intents and purposes that person does not exist to you. But that person does exist none the less though outside of your experiance. Knowledge of this persons existance never comes within your experiance.

The same would be for a non interfering god. You can carry out your life not believeing in a god within your realm of experiance. And it would be exactly the same for you as a god never existing. But this does not necessarily mean that a god does not exist within a larger realm of experiance.

That is why I am an agnostic. God is such a concept that its existance cannot be proved or disproved, because god by most definitions is either not a part of this existance or not a recognizable or detectable part of this existance. Just because we cannot experiance god does not mean that a god dosen't exist on some other level we are incapable of percieving

All you can say with certainty is that you can't really know one way or the other between a non-interfereing god and no god.

I do not know of any logical argument or law of physics that says a god cannot exist. You can come up with a probability but not a certainty.

[KingMerv00]

I do not know of any logical argument or law of physics that says a god cannot exist. You can come up with a probability but not a certainty.

I say again, most people here are agnostic atheists.

[Piscivore]

That's somewhat the "deist" position: That there was a Creator, that set the stars into their paths, jinned up the Laws of Thermodynamics, Banged the Big Bang, and now has his feet up on the extra-planular bracalounger, eating celestial chips and watching the Universe like it was ESPN.

It is also entirely logically possible that "god" is unaware he created anything. Much as we are larely unaware of the microbial "worlds" we create each time we eliminate stool. :)

To the OP:

Does it occur to you, given an assumed level of power (lots to the google), that "now and again interfering" and "now and again just enjoying the show" is a possible condition as well?
Also possible.

[Beerina]

A colleague of mine who teaches on philosophy & religion likes to refer to it as God starting up the universe and then going off to take an eternal coffee break.

I like that :)


So He's still a complete reckless and careless ass, just not an outright murderer? Sweet! :)


Wife, on month-long vacation with hubby: Honey, what did you do with the kids?

Husband: Ehh, l locked them in a room with a bucket of water, some dried beans, and a bunch of machine guns.

Wife: You're such a good, kind, and wise Man!

[Malerin]

That's close enough. I like to make the distinction that a brain is the object while the mind is a process.

Ok, so what is your evidence that the mind is brain-dependent and not the other way around? For example, suppose you are just a mind dreaming that you have a brain, and in that dream, you have decided (for whatever reason) that when something in the dream affects your dream-brain, it affects your mind. If that's the case, then mind is cause, and your brain (the whole world, even) is simply an effect of your mind.



Your response to the fallacy appears to be your opinion of significant results.

Opinion? So tell me, if I flip a coin 30 heads in a row, would you be dumb enough to give me even odds that the next toss will be tails? But 30 heads in a row is just as likely as a combination of 16 heads and 14 tails. Right?


Three objections to your analogies:

1) It is strange that all of your examples use multiple trials to establish a pattern even after you've disavowed a multiverse. How is that analogous to the formation a lone universe?

You can showcase significant results by using one-time events. The lottery example and the sharpshooter example come to mind. Just to refresh: suppose a one-time lottery is going to be held just for you and the odds of you winning are a septillion to 1. You win. No multiple trials at work at all, and yet you would still conclude that you weren't that lucky- someone rigged the game for you. That is because you winning is much more plausible on the theory that someone rigged the game for you than it is on pure chance. Bayes Theorem shows this nicely.

In the case of the universe, it is much like the lottery example. If there's only one universe (and it's non-cyclical), then the existence of life is either a fantastically improbable event, or the product of an intelligent designer. The only problem is, we don't know if there's other universes that would bring the odds down to believable levels.

2) Why do you think a "long lasting" (no reason to think 13.7 billion years is long in any objective sense) universe with life is more significant than a short lived one without life? That's vitocentric.

Good question. Why is life a significant result? Three answers:
1. We inuitively know life has more significance than, say, a rock or cloud of hydrogen atoms (if you doubt this, throw a boulder and a person over a cliff and see what you get arrested for).
2. If some type of God (or intelligent designer) was going to design a universe, life is just the sort of thing it would fine-tune the universe for. Just like 20 heads in a row is just the sort of thing we would expect from an unfair coin. A universe with nothing but Hydrogen wouldn't be very interesting.
3. Suppose you survived the sharpshooter analogy (a thousand sharpshooters all fire at you and miss). Would you think your survival was a significant result?

Yes, I just made up that word.

3) Even if I accept your criteria for "significance", a better example is a single hand of two pair, not ten royal flushes in a row. I don't use a royal flush because this universe could be a lot friendlier to life and longer lasting.

How many billions of years do you want? Compared to the way things could have gone, it's extremely remarkable that even viruses should exist.





It would be if I accepted their evidence.

Are you the arbiter of rationality? Let's say you don't accept a theist telling you they feel a higher power in their life (you think they're all deluded or lying). Are they irrational for believing this is the only universe there is? Is a physicist irrational for believing in a multiverse when there's no evidence that other universes exist?



I have sensation. My consciouness arranges those sensations into what I call the "physical world". The ultimate metaphysical cause of these sensations cannot be known with any certainty. How does your opinion differ?

I don't think the sense-data we receive is caused by physical objects that exist apart from me. That is to say, I don't think the existence of physical objects is as likely as immaterial objects.

[Skeptic Ginger]

The only thing here is that "he might as well not exist" is not equal to "god does not exist".Invisible pink unicorns might as well not exist since we have no awareness of them. :rolleyes:

If you are unaware of a person standing behind you and that person does nothing to attract your attention and furthermore this person tries to hide from you when ever you look around. For all intents and purposes that person does not exist to you. But that person does exist none the less though outside of your experiance. Knowledge of this persons existance never comes within your experiance.Apples and oranges. You've described a person existing and then hypothesized one might not be aware of the person. I might not be aware, but there is clearly evidence of the person in your hypothetical example. There is no evidence of gods, period. Gods are equal to invisible pink unicorns but not equal to something that exists but we never see.

The same would be for a non interfering god. You can carry out your life not believeing in a god within your realm of experiance. And it would be exactly the same for you as a god never existing. But this does not necessarily mean that a god does not exist within a larger realm of experiance.But it is not just that we are unaware, it is that everyone is equally unaware. The god you hypothesize has ZERO impact on the Universe. That means no one can be aware, not just that no one is aware. It's absurd. People don't bother thinking about the possibility of invisible pink unicorns. Why bother with gods?

That is why I am an agnostic. God is such a concept that its existance cannot be proved or disproved, because god by most definitions is either not a part of this existance or not a recognizable or detectable part of this existance. Just because we cannot experiance god does not mean that a god dosen't exist on some other level we are incapable of percieving

All you can say with certainty is that you can't really know one way or the other between a non-interfereing god and no god. Wrong! We can say with certainty there is overwhelming evidence god beliefs are nonsense. That leaves exactly zero evidence god beliefs are based on human encounters with real gods.

I do not know of any logical argument or law of physics that says a god cannot exist. You can come up with a probability but not a certainty.Who cares? Imagine all the ancient Egyptians toiling their lives away building a pyramid that the pharaoh is buried in to carry him off to the afterlife. I'm confident the evidence supports the prediction that a person in the future will imagine the same thing about god believers today. Go into the future and god believers today will look as ignorant as Egyptians building pyramids did in the past.


There's no reason to be agnostic about Ra and Pele. Just follow the evidence from there to the conclusion: all god beliefs are the same. Where is there any evidence this is not the case?

Put another way, how many myths does it take to form a theory explaining god beliefs? And once you explain god beliefs, there is nothing else left to waste time being agnostic about.

[fls]

The only thing here is that "he might as well not exist" is not equal to "god does not exist".

If you are unaware of a person standing behind you and that person does nothing to attract your attention and furthermore this person tries to hide from you when ever you look around. For all intents and purposes that person does not exist to you. But that person does exist none the less though outside of your experiance. Knowledge of this persons existance never comes within your experiance.

So why would you even come up with the idea of this person in the first place? And if you did, how likely do you think it would be that any characteristics you applied to this person (height, hair colour, intentions, species, etc.) matched? And what would you say to your neighbour who similarly cannot see your non-existant person, but is of the opinion that their non-existant person is a purple cat? Or your other neighbour whose non-existant person is a sentient slime-mold? Out of millions of non-existant persons, why bother selecting one or two to be agnostic about?

Linda

[Beth]

Opinion? So tell me, if I flip a coin 30 heads in a row, would you be dumb enough to give me even odds that the next toss will be tails? But 30 heads in a row is just as likely as a combination of 16 heads and 14 tails. Right?

No. 30 heads in a row is just as likely as any specific combination of 16 heads and 14 tails, but there are many different such combinations. The probability of 16 heads and 14 tails is the sum of the probability of each of those different specific combinations.

[babbits]

The notion that we have free will is based on our experience of our own decision-making. But decision-making is not the same as free will.

Decision making in turn is based on our biological makeup, and probably has its roots in the primitive options we have:

- fight or flight
- dare to compete for a sexual mate, or avoid the danger of fighting
- eat some repulsive organic material, if we are starving, or continue the search for better food at the risk of running out of strength before we find it
- sleep in the open, or find shelter

But if we really had free will, our options would be much broader than they are. Our options are predetermined by our genetics, our ecological location, the economic culture in which we struggle to survive, and a host of things beyond our control. So all we can do is select among the options that we perceive as are available to us, and make a 'choice'.

[Z]

Good question. Why is life a significant result? Three answers:
1. We inuitively know life has more significance than, say, a rock or cloud of hydrogen atoms (if you doubt this, throw a boulder and a person over a cliff and see what you get
arrested for).

Intuition is not a valid source of knowledge, and is often - more often than not - quite wrong. Significance compared to what? To a person at the bottom of the cliff, the rock might well be more significant, if it kills him; the person thrown over the cliff might have survived, after all. Further, you're using human law to justify objective significance, which of course is silly, since human law has little to do with universal objectivity. Reason 1 rejected.

2. If some type of God (or intelligent designer) was going to design a universe, life is just the sort of thing it would fine-tune the universe for. Just like 20 heads in a row is just the sort of thing we would expect from an unfair coin. A universe with nothing but Hydrogen wouldn't be very interesting.

From where do you get your certain knowledge of what a God or intelligent designer would or would not do? What qualifies you to state with such hubris what a divine creator would design a universe or reality for? Nothing. Second, the universe is not at all 'fine tuned' for life - in fact, as a whole, the universe is vastly hostile to any known form of life. Based on our observations of the universe thus far, it's fair to suggest that the universe, in fact, has been sterilized to a 99.999% sterility factor, and what little life DOES manage to survive does so briefly and without significant infestation. I mean, c'mon, Mal - are you saying if you pulled, say, a stainless steel instrument from a sterilization chamber, and a couple of bacteria still survived on it (say, two or three), that the instrument was 'fine tuned' for life? Furthermore, you clearly fail to grasp that improbable events are by no means impossible, and in fact do occur. We had a study involving six-sided dice in my high school one year, and one of the die continued to roll a 6 twenty-seven times, IIRC. We suspected this die - a casino-ready one straight from the package - might have had a manufacturing defect, but after the twenty-eighth time, up to the 100th, it rolled normally. The fact was, we hit a pocket of wild probability manifestation (for lack of a better term). It wasn't significant in any way, except as an unusual occurance (to our perception). So while, yes, we might suspect a coin is improperly balanced or being affected in some other way, that doesn't make that a necessary truth. Improbable events DO happen. And if the total number of events is large enough - say, out of 100 trillion coin flips, I suspect coming up heads a hundred times in a row might well happen more than once, even. As far as interest goes, a universe with only one pocket of short-lived, fragile, often suicidal life that is so easily snuffed out is hardly that interesting, either, from a universally aware point of view. Compared to the wonders of black holes, pulsars, multiple body star systems, and all the other wonders of our vast universe, life is kind of dull. Reason 2 rejected.

3. Suppose you survived the sharpshooter analogy (a thousand sharpshooters all fire at you and miss). Would you think your survival was a significant result?

Sharpshooters do not rely on random chance, but on skill and the quality of equipment to accomplish their purpose. For a thousand sharpshooters to miss would be significant. For even one sharpshooter to miss would be significant. An analogy that compares a skilled event to a random one is erroneous and silly. Reason 3 rejected.

Got any better game?

[Z]

No. 30 heads in a row is just as likely as any specific combination of 16 heads and 14 tails, but there are many different such combinations. The probability of 16 heads and 14 tails is the sum of the probability of each of those different specific combinations.

True - given the number of specific combinations that can result in 16 heads and 14 tails, versus the number of specific combinations that can result in 30 heads, the chances are much greater of coming up with 16 heads and 14 tails.

[Malerin]

No. 30 heads in a row is just as likely as any specific combination of 16 heads and 14 tails, but there are many different such combinations. The probability of 16 heads and 14 tails is the sum of the probability of each of those different specific combinations.

That's why I said "a" combination. "A" combination of 16 heads and 14 tails refers to a particular result: HTHTTHHHTHTHTHTHTHHHTHTHTHTTHH
If I was talking about a (or the) combination for a lock, I would be talking about a specfic sequence of numbers. Anyway, maybe I wasn't clear enough, but I didn't want to write a string of H's and T's every time I talk about probability.

[Malerin]

Intuition is not a valid source of knowledge, and is often - more often than not - quite wrong.

We use intuition all the time. What do you think ethics is based on? Pure reason? Are you a Kantian? But even Kant's ethics were attacked for their counter-intuitive results: I should tell the truth to an axe-murderer who wants to know where my friend is? I don't think so. You could argue, to play devil's advocate, that a pile of dirt has as much significance as a person, but you personally know that's wrong. People who think that way are called sociopaths.

From where do you get your certain knowledge of what a God or intelligent designer would or would not do? What qualifies you to state with such hubris what a divine creator would design a universe or reality for? Nothing.

Imagine you're told that a God exists (powerful, very intelligent supernatural being), and you are shown two universes. One is a featureless void that lasted for a billionth of a second before falling back in on itself. The other is extremely complex with blackholes, stars, life, etc. Is your claim really that, knowing such a God exists, you would have no idea which universe it created? Personally, I would bet on the complex life-filled universe.


Second, the universe is not at all 'fine tuned' for life - in fact, as a whole, the universe is vastly hostile to any known form of life.

Is that why Earth is teeming with life, and has been for billions of years? Are you on pins and needles every moment, afraid that some hostile universe-event is going to wipe you out? Anyway, fine-tuning does not make a distinction about how much life there is, but with the conditions for life to be possible at all. The chance of their being just main-sequence stars is so remote as to be nearly impossible.

Based on our observations of the universe thus far, it's fair to suggest that the universe, in fact, has been sterilized to a 99.999% sterility factor, and what little life DOES manage to survive does so briefly and without significant infestation.

Our observations of the universe are pathetically limited. We just recently learned that the nearest stars have planets. We do not know if any have life, but if there are trillions of planets in the universe, do you honestly think we're the only one with life? And you think I'm pleading for special cases?

You also have an odd definition of "brief". We know life has existed on Earth for nearly 4 billion years. Is that "brief" to you?

I mean, c'mon, Mal - are you saying if you pulled, say, a stainless steel instrument from a sterilization chamber, and a couple of bacteria still survived on it (say, two or three), that the instrument was 'fine tuned' for life?

Yes. Like I said, the odds that even viruses are around are very, very long. Here's an overview: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/teleological-arguments/#4.1

But anyway, we're not dealing with a sterile tray and a few bacteria. The Earth is full of complex creatures.

Furthermore, you clearly fail to grasp that improbable events are by no means impossible, and in fact do occur.

I never said they were impossible. It's possible to have an accidental DNA match with standard DNA testing. The odds are about a million to one. Those aren't impossible odds, yet you'll most likely be convicted on such DNA evidence (or set free, as many people have been).

My point is that when the odds are 1/ 1-whole lot of zeroes, we tend to look for other explanations.

We had a study involving six-sided dice in my high school one year, and one of the die continued to roll a 6 twenty-seven times, IIRC.

I doubt it. The odds of 27 6's in a row are 1 : 1,023,490,369,077,469,249,536

You could literally roll a die every second for as long as the universe has been around and not get that result (or any number 27 times in a row with a fair die).



We suspected this die - a casino-ready one straight from the package - might have had a manufacturing defect, but after the twenty-eighth time, up to the 100th, it rolled normally. The fact was, we hit a pocket of wild probability manifestation (for lack of a better term). It wasn't significant in any way, except as an unusual occurance (to our perception).

It is far more likely that either the person running the experiment was mistaken, you have misremembered the experiment, or are lying to make a point.

So while, yes, we might suspect a coin is improperly balanced or being affected in some other way, that doesn't make that a necessary truth.

Never said it did. My claim is that it's more likely a coin is loaded than fair if you get 30 heads in a row. And 30 heads in a row is not even in the same ballpark as the odds of 27 6's in a row. To get the result you supposedly got, you'd have to get around 70 heads in a row.

Improbable events DO happen. And if the total number of events is large enough - say, out of 100 trillion coin flips, I suspect coming up heads a hundred times in a row might well happen more than once, even.

Which is why the fine-tuning argument is defeated if a sufficently large multiverse exists. No evidence of any other universes, so far.

As far as interest goes, a universe with only one pocket of short-lived, fragile, often suicidal life that is so easily snuffed out is hardly that interesting, either, from a universally aware point of view.

One pocket? How were you able to survey all planets and come to that conclusion? And what do you mean "often suicidal"? Just how many people do you know who have killed themselves? What kind of parties do you go to? The suicide rate in America is around 13 per 100,000. Do you really consider that "often"? And if life is "easily snuffed out", why has if been around for nearly 4 billion years?

Regardless, the answer is, yes, a universe with life is more interesting than a universe without even stars.

Compared to the wonders of black holes, pulsars, multiple body star systems, and all the other wonders of our vast universe, life is kind of dull. Reason 2 rejected.

You would't have any of those either, if the values of the constants had been off by just a tiny amount.



Sharpshooters do not rely on random chance, but on skill and the quality of equipment to accomplish their purpose. For a thousand sharpshooters to miss would be significant. For even one sharpshooter to miss would be significant. An analogy that compares a skilled event to a random one is erroneous and silly. Reason 3 rejected.

Skill and equipment have nothing to do with it. It is entirely an odds based analogy based on a combination of extremely unlikely events (sharpshooters missing, physical constants having particular values). It is possible, though very unlikely, for a skilled sharpshooter with the right equipment to miss a close target. It is therefore possible for a thousand to miss a close target. It is so unlikely, though, that if they were all shooting at you, you would not believe you survived by chance. The odds of the physical constants having just the right values for life to emerge are even more fantastical. Either there are a lot of other universes, or something with a preference for life rigged the numbers.

[Z]

Malerin:

Well, several issues have become clear, reading your reply to my post. First, you have a humanicentric (sp?) point of view - that is, you relate everything to your perceptions as a human being. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does vastly limit your ability to comprehend things on a universal scale.

Second, you rely more on intuitive feelings than fact-based evidence, though this has been made abundantly clear from other posts you've made.

So, to counter-reply point-by-point:

We use intuition all the time.

We, who? I used to use it a lot, until I realized what a mess it was making of everything. Intuition is what leads to idiocy like racism, sexism, religion, etc. Since ditching intuition and favoring rationality, I've seen my life improve dramatically.

What do you think ethics is based on? Pure reason?

Ethics can be based on whatever you want them to be based on. I've adjusted my personal ethics to align with more rational ideals - to begin with, the core of my ethics is that, being human, the most rational courses of action are those which promote the survival and ultimate advancement of humanity as a whole, regardless of what those actions mean to any given individual human.

Are you a Kantian? But even Kant's ethics were attacked for their counter-intuitive results: I should tell the truth to an axe-murderer who wants to know where my friend is? I don't think so.

Not that familiar with Kant. However, if I could clearly see a link between the axe murderer hacking up my friend, and a positive result for mankind as a whole, I would tell the axe murderer where my friend was - unless, of course, I could discover a suitable alternative that had equal or better results for humanity.

You could argue, to play devil's advocate, that a pile of dirt has as much significance as a person, but you personally know that's wrong. People who think that way are called sociopaths.

I must be a sociopath, then. A pile of dirt may have far greater significance than any given person, given the right set of circumstances or point of view. Personally, I don't know that's 'wrong' at all - right and wrong are human-developed conventions without meaning in the broader universal perspective.

Nice ad-hom attack, by the way, though personally I don't see a problem with being sociopathic.

Imagine you're told that a God exists (powerful, very intelligent supernatural being), and you are shown two universes. One is a featureless void that lasted for a billionth of a second before falling back in on itself. The other is extremely complex with blackholes, stars, life, etc. Is your claim really that, knowing such a God exists, you would have no idea which universe it created?

Well, for one thing, I've been told that a God exists, and I still have my doubts, both about His existence, and about His role in the creation of this universe. But assuming, for the sake of argument, I accepted this God-creator theory, I'd be inclined to believe that either a) it created BOTH universes for different reasons, or b) it created NEITHER universe, since neither makes any sense from any perspective I can assign to a deity.

Personally, I would bet on the complex life-filled universe.

That's your choice. Personally, I haven't seen a 'life-filled' universe yet, so I'll have to hold off on judging that one.

Is that why Earth is teeming with life, and has been for billions of years?

One planet out of how many that we've postulated, observed, etc? The total livable biosphere of the Earth compared to the total observed space in the Universe? Puny and irrelevant. And 'billions of years', in Cosmic time, is only a few minutes. Also irrelevant.

Are you on pins and needles every moment, afraid that some hostile universe-event is going to wipe you out?

Not particularly. I know it's going to happen eventually to every species, but just like death, it's inevitable and therefore nothing to fret about.

Anyway, fine-tuning does not make a distinction about how much life there is, but with the conditions for life to be possible at all.

That's silly. If I 'fine tune' my engine for more power, I have distinct ideas about how much power the tuning is going to produce; I'm not merely going for a 'any increase at all' aspect. Besides, if you are discussing some all-powerful creator, why would it have to create a vast, empty, deadly universe just to populate one rock with a handful of short-lived species?

The chance of their being just main-sequence stars is so remote as to be nearly impossible.

Evidence? From what little astrophysics I've read, main-sequence stars were a near-certainty from the Big Bang on.

Our observations of the universe are pathetically limited. We just recently learned that the nearest stars have planets. We do not know if any have life, but if there are trillions of planets in the universe, do you honestly think we're the only one with life?

As a matter of fact, I don't. In fact, I imagine there are quite a few life-bearing planets in our universe. I also imagine they are vastly separated by both space AND time, and that few that do generate life ever manage to survive long enough to produce what we consider to be intelligent space-faring life. Nonetheless, if this universe were 'fine tuned' for life, I'd expect it to exist on nearly every planet and in nearly every area of interplanetary space observable. After all, Earth certainly appears to be amiable towards life, and it is, as you say, teeming with life - including in areas that we previously thought to be inhospitable to life. Yet space - even just the local spaces we're familiar with - is so inhospitable to life, that we can't find any living thing outside our own biosphere. So rather than being 'fine-tuned', it appears more 'incidentally and occasionally capable of supporting some life'.

This 'fine-tuned for life' argument is about the silliest I've ever heard.

And you think I'm pleading for special cases?

Did I say that?

You also have an odd definition of "brief". We know life has existed on Earth for nearly 4 billion years. Is that "brief" to you?

That's brief to the universe. Five minutes is a long time to me. Two, if I'm with the ex-wife.

But it's pointless to look at the universe from a humanicentric point of view, since humans haven't even existed for a fraction of the universe's time-line. We're a brief flash in the pan, compared to life in general; and life is a momentary aberration, compared to the history of the universe.

Yes. Like I said, the odds that even viruses are around are very, very long. Here's an overview: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/teleological-arguments/#4.1

That's apparently a debated point, as well. But let's skim that argument for a moment, since all that proves, imho, is that the universe is definitely NOT fine-tuned for life.

But anyway, we're not dealing with a sterile tray and a few bacteria. The Earth is full of complex creatures.

In terms of scale, it's similar to the tray/bacteria analogy. You have no sense of scale, methinks.

I never said they were impossible. It's possible to have an accidental DNA match with standard DNA testing. The odds are about a million to one. Those aren't impossible odds, yet you'll most likely be convicted on such DNA evidence (or set free, as many people have been).

And?

My point is that when the odds are 1/ 1-whole lot of zeroes, we tend to look for other explanations.

Yet we don't automatically through out the possibility that the odds just happened to go that direction, especially when, truthfully, we have insufficient evidence as of yet to properly determine what the odds really are.

For example, as you pointed out, we've only just discovered planets around other stars. Suppose that, next decade, we learn that one in every 20 planets is teeming with complex life? That would alter our perception of what the odds are significantly - after all, these 'next to impossible' odds you seem to want to use also assume something you seem to want not to assume - that Earth is the only planet in the Universe with life.

Frankly, the 'odds' used in a lot of these arguments are a lot of made-up hooey, imo. How do we really know what the chances are that stars would produce planets, or the chance that planets would produce an atmosphere that blocked deadly radiation? Have we surveyed the entire universe, studied every planet? For all we know, this is exactly how these things do develop, every time.

I doubt it. The odds of 27 6's in a row are 1 : 1,023,490,369,077,469,249,536[quote]

Doubt it all you want. I'm sure you'll sleep better at night, especially since I don't have anything to show for that particular study except half of the old paper, in the bottom of a box full of old school stuff, back home in the storage shed. And I certainly don't want anyone taking an anecdote as evidence. Nevertheless, we had it happen to us, and it has happened to other people before.

[quote]You could literally roll a die every second for as long as the universe has been around and not get that result (or any number 27 times in a row with a fair die).

Or you could roll the die 27 times and come up with the same number on a fair die - probability says so.

It is far more likely that either the person running the experiment was mistaken, you have misremembered the experiment, or are lying to make a point.

Another nice ad-hom. Keep'em coming. It is possible I have misremembered; but the 'person running the experiment' was a dice-rolling mechanism invented by three of us that consisted essentially of a three-axis tumbler (to prevent the die from simply sliding around inside the cup) and a simple release mechanism into a tray with 1-inch sides made of LEGO. We wanted to be as 'hands off' as possible. After that particular series, in fact, we tried loading the die into the cup the same exact way every time for a set of 30 just to see if that was what was causing the deviation, but during that trial, the numbers came up in a fairly even spread - one of them (I think ones but it has been a while) came up seven times, but two others came up only four, and the remainder, I think, came up five times each.

When I get home, I'll see if I can pull that out of the storage shed - I remember we also had an interesting problem with a coin flip that landed on edge three times in a row, unless that was another science fair.

Never said it did. My claim is that it's more likely a coin is loaded than fair if you get 30 heads in a row. And 30 heads in a row is not even in the same ballpark as the odds of 27 6's in a row. To get the result you supposedly got, you'd have to get around 70 heads in a row.

Still possible, if unlikely.

Which is why the fine-tuning argument is defeated if a sufficently large multiverse exists. No evidence of any other universes, so far.

The fine-tuning arguement is also defeated if a sufficiently large universe exists - and ours is looking bigger every year.

Plus, no evidence against other universes so far.

One pocket? How were you able to survey all planets and come to that conclusion? And what do you mean "often suicidal"? Just how many people do you know who have killed themselves? What kind of parties do you go to? The suicide rate in America is around 13 per 100,000. Do you really consider that "often"?

Consider the number of species that have gone extinct, and the number that may have gone extinct due to their own short-sightedness (like hunting their prey into extinction, or moving to an area that was unable to continue to support them, etc). Not willfully suicidal, but suicidal nonetheless.

And your response is notably humanicentric.

And if life is "easily snuffed out", why has if been around for nearly 4 billion years?

A drop in the bucket - and no one species (well, maybe certain microbes or the horseshoe crab) has survived all that long.

Plus, astronomically speaking, there are an awful lot of ways all life on Earth could be extinguished in the wink of a cosmic eye.

Regardless, the answer is, yes, a universe with life is more interesting than a universe without even stars.

...for some definitions of the word 'interesting'.

You would't have any of those either, if the values of the constants had been off by just a tiny amount.

Yet you might have something else entirely, or our interpretation of 'the constants' may itself be meaningless.

After all, our measurements of constants are a post-hoc rationalization, you know.

Skill and equipment have nothing to do with it.

O.o????

You're kidding, right?

It is entirely an odds based analogy based on a combination of extremely unlikely events (sharpshooters missing, physical constants having particular values). It is possible, though very unlikely, for a skilled sharpshooter with the right equipment to miss a close target.

Not really - not without significant changes in key environmental variables - changes which, if they were present, would, in fact, affect every sharpshooter equally (except, of course, those variables affecting only an individual). Having been a sharpshooter myself, I can tell you that there are very few variables that could make a sharpshooter miss at close range, and they'd have to be pretty drastic and global, sudden and unexpected, and if they did exist, would likely affect every sharpshooter present fairly equally.

It's a very, very poor analogy.

It is therefore possible for a thousand to miss a close target. It is so unlikely, though, that if they were all shooting at you, you would not believe you survived by chance.


Total disagreement.

The odds of the physical constants having just the right values for life to emerge are even more fantastical.

Actually, aren't they 1:1?

Either there are a lot of other universes, or something with a preference for life rigged the numbers.

False dichotomy. Or there is one universe, where the improbable manifested (which can and does happen). Or life was an accidental side-effect of adjusting the numbers to produce beautiful nebula. Or life is omnipresent, but we lack the ability to recognize non-organic life forms. Or the probabilities for life are much higher than we recognize, but most life has died off billions of years ago, and we're a late bloomer. Or we're the first bloomers, and every other planet is due to develop life some time in the next 100 trillion years. And so on, and so on.

Besides - where did the someone come from? If someone had to rig the numbers for life to exist, how did the numbers allow that someone to exist in the first place? It's turtles all the way down, my man.

[Malerin]

Malerin:

Well, several issues have become clear, reading your reply to my post. First, you have a humanicentric (sp?) point of view - that is, you relate everything to your perceptions as a human being. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does vastly limit your ability to comprehend things on a universal scale.

I think the more interesting question is, could you, as a human, perceive anything in a non-human way? In other words, it is tautologically true that my perceptions are colored by my being human.

Here's a better way of looking at a significant result that doesn't involve life. Let's say the Mars Rover was puttering around Mars and discovered a formation of rocks that spelled out:
Well, it's about time you Earthlings got here.
Best Regards,
Mars

Now, it's possible that is not a message at all. Just a random collection of rocks, right? However, we would disregard that remote chance and proceed on the hypothesis that it's a message. This is because a collection of rocks like that is much much more plausible on the theory of something making it than on the theory of random chance. Life is the same way. If this is the only universe, the existence of life is much more probable on the theory that some type of life form fine-tuned the physical constants than on random chance alone. If you can't see this, I would recommend reading up on the fine-tuning argument.

Second, you rely more on intuitive feelings than fact-based evidence, though this has been made abundantly clear from other posts you've made.

So, to counter-reply point-by-point:



We, who? I used to use it a lot, until I realized what a mess it was making of everything. Intuition is what leads to idiocy like racism, sexism, religion, etc. Since ditching intuition and favoring rationality, I've seen my life improve dramatically.



Ethics can be based on whatever you want them to be based on. I've adjusted my personal ethics to align with more rational ideals - to begin with, the core of my ethics is that, being human, the most rational courses of action are those which promote the survival and ultimate advancement of humanity as a whole, regardless of what those actions mean to any given individual human.

Why is "promoting the survival and ultimate advancement of humanity as a whole" the most rational? Why is it a good result, in other words? Suppose I claimed the advancemet and survival of humanity are irrational ideals. Why am I wrong? For example, say I own a chemical business and think I can get away with dumping toxic waste into a widely used river, thus saving me millions in disposal fees. After all, I don't live there so it doesn't matter to me. How would you try to persuade me I'm wrong?



Not too familiar with Kant. However, if I could clearly see a link between the axe murderer hacking up my friend, and a positive result for mankind as a whole, I would tell the axe murderer where my friend was - unless, of course, I could discover a suitable alternative that had equal or better results for humanity.

Give an example of a "positive result" for mankind.



I must be a sociopath, then. A pile of dirt may have far greater significance than any given person, given the right set of circumstances or point of view. Personally, I don't know that's 'wrong' at all - right and wrong are human-developed conventions without meaning in the broader universal perspective.

Yet you think we should act in a way that furthers mankind. So if someone doesn't act in that way, are they doing something wrong? You seem confused. On the one hand, you want to dismiss morality (they're conventions without meaning), on the other, you think people should act a certain way (to better mankind, or something). Here, I'll give you an easy one, which recently happened in my state. An 8 yr old girl was kidnapped, raped, killed, stuffed in a suitcase and thrown in a pond. Did whoever kill her do something wrong, and if so, why was it wrong? Also, was her being raped and killed any different than a tree being cut down?

Nice ad-hom attack, by the way, though personally I don't see a problem with being sociopathic.

Then how can it be an ad-hom? Incidentally, can you think of any sociopaths (or psychopaths) that have acted in a way that was "positive" for mankind?


Well, for one thing, I've been told that a God exists, and I still have my doubts, both about His existence, and about His role in the creation of this universe. But assuming, for the sake of argument, I accepted this God-creator theory, I'd be inclined to believe that either a) it created BOTH universes for different reasons, or b) it created NEITHER universe, since neither makes any sense from any perspective I can assign to a deity.

I guess I wasn't clear: You are told a god exists (it makes it's existence obvious), and then shown two universes. You know that the god created one of the universes, but you don't know which one. You are asked to guess which of the two universes it created: one is a lifeless void with nothing but subatomic particles. The other contains stars, galaxies, life, etc. You would really be puzzled about which universe it created? I think not.



That's your choice. Personally, I haven't seen a 'life-filled' universe yet, so I'll have to hold off on judging that one.

Look out the window. If you're expecting life to exist in the vacuum of space or on the surface of the sun, I don't know what to tell you, except that your expectations may be too high.



One planet out of how many that we've postulated, observed, etc?

We've only been able to observe three other planets close enough to determine if life exists or not, and there's a Martian meteorite that may or may not contain a fossil. So, for sure, we're 1/4, possibly 2/4.

The total livable biosphere of the Earth compared to the total observed space in the Universe? Puny and irrelevant. And 'billions of years', in Cosmic time, is only a few minutes. Also irrelevant.

4 billion years is not "a few minutes". Do you know how old the universe is? It is about 14 billion years old. For 28% of the universe's "life", life has existed. That is not "a few minutes". And that is just life here on Earth. Given trillions of planets, it's not a leap to suggest life might have been around for over half of the universe's current age. And there's no evidence to think that life will suddenly snuff itself out across the universe. The history of humans has been technological innovation, not decline. It is entirely possible that within 100 years, we'll be able to make a generation ship. It is also possible that other civilizations have done the same in our galaxy or others.



Not particularly. I know it's going to happen eventually to every species, but just like death, it's inevitable and therefore nothing to fret about.

How do you know this?



That's silly. If I 'fine tune' my engine for more power, I have distinct ideas about how much power the tuning is going to produce; I'm not merely going for a 'any increase at all' aspect. Besides, if you are discussing some all-powerful creator, why would it have to create a vast, empty, deadly universe just to populate one rock with a handful of short-lived species?

Again with the assumption that life exists on one-rock. And you think I'M humano-centric. Think of it this way: The universe went from zero lifeforms to billions (possibly trillions). But the amount is meaningless. The fact that life exists at all needs to be explained, either by intelligent design or multiple universes. The odds really are too fantasical to believe in chance alone.

Think of the lottery example again. A lottery just for you and the odds are 100 trillion to 1 and you win. Does it really matter if you win ten more such lotteries? No, you'll be convinced after the first that someone rigged it for you. In the same way, the existence of life as we know it demands explanation. It would demand explanation if there were a million humans or 7 billion or 3.


Evidence? From what little astrophysics I've read, main-sequence stars were a near-certainty from the Big Bang on.

"Hawking writes, "if the electric charge of the electron had been only slightly different, stars would have been unable to burn hydrogen and helium, or else they would not have exploded" http://www.geraldschroeder.com/tuning.html

There's also the value of the strong nuclear force, gravitational force constant, cosmological constant, etc. These all have to have precise values for star formation.



As a matter of fact, I don't. In fact, I imagine there are quite a few life-bearing planets in our universe. I also imagine they are vastly separated by both space AND time, and that few that do generate life ever manage to survive long enough to produce what we consider to be intelligent space-faring life. Nonetheless, if this universe were 'fine tuned' for life, I'd expect it to exist on nearly every planet and in nearly every area of interplanetary space observable.

If the universe were fine-tuned I would expect there to be life, though to what amount, I couldn't guess (more than a single bacteria, I suppose). Anyway, there are probably trillions of planets, and it's a good guess that a lot of these have life, so it's a question of billions, trillions, quadrillions of life forms, etc. To go back to the lottery example, it would be enough that you won once. Winning another thousand times would just reaffirm what you already know: someone rigged the game. We have enough life to hypothesize that someone either rigged the universe or there are a lot of universes.


After all, Earth certainly appears to be amiable towards life, and it is, as you say, teeming with life - including in areas that we previously thought to be inhospitable to life. Yet space - even just the local spaces we're familiar with - is so inhospitable to life, that we can't find any living thing outside our own biosphere. So rather than being 'fine-tuned', it appears more 'incidentally and occasionally capable of supporting some life'.

"Some life" is enough. The existence of "some life" is highly, highly improbable.

This 'fine-tuned for life' argument is about the silliest I've ever heard.

Stanford says it pretty well: "Thus, Francis Crick toys with terms like ‘miracle’, Frederick Hoyle refers to a superintellect ‘monkeying’ with physics, and Andrei Linde raises the possibility of our cosmos itself being a product of design—by some supertechnological alien culture. The character of such proposals is itself testimony to the prima facie plausibility of fine-tuning cases." http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/teleological-arguments/#4.1

Andrei Linde is not a fundie. Quite a lot of people take fine-tuning seriously. Hawking among them.



That's brief to the universe. Five minutes is a long time to me. Two, if I'm with the ex-wife.

Again, the universe has been around 14 billion years. For the last 4 billion of those years, life has existed. If you lived to be 74, that would be the equivalent of approx. 20 years of your life. Would you consider that a "brief" amount of time?

But it's pointless to look at the universe from a humanicentric point of view, since humans haven't even existed for a fraction of the universe's time-line. We're a brief flash in the pan, compared to life in general; and life is a momentary aberration, compared to the history of the universe.

The point is not the existence of humans, but the chances of there being the right conditions for any type of life.



That's apparently a debated point, as well. But let's skim that argument for a moment, since all that proves, imho, is that the universe is definitely NOT fine-tuned for life.

The precise values of the constants needed for a life-permitting universe are not debated. In all the arguments I've had on this, there's been one physcist who's disagreed (Victor Stengel). Hawking, Davies, Linde, Penrose, Hoyle, etc. all agree the physical constants have to have very precise values for life to arise.



In terms of scale, it's similar to the tray/bacteria analogy. You have no sense of scale, methinks.

Again, back to the lottery example. It doesn't matter if you won a thousand times or once. Winning a one-time lottery just for you, where the odds are astronomically low, would convince you the game was rigged. The scale of the winning (how large the prize, how many times you won) would be irrelevant. Regarding the universe, we know complex life forms exist. The odds of them existing are fanstastically low, as I've shown. That has to be explained.



Yet we don't automatically through out the possibility that the odds just happened to go that direction, especially when, truthfully, we have insufficient evidence as of yet to properly determine what the odds really are.

The longer the odds, the less "chance" becomes a satisfactory explanation. How many heads in a row would it take before you became convinced a coin was biased? No matter what answer you give, I could easily tell you that X amount of heads is just as likely as a specific combination of heads and tails, yet if a coin lands heads 100 times in a row, for example, it would be absurd to think it a fair coin. But 100 heads are just as likely as a specific combination of heads and tails. The odds are so long, that only an idiot would still be in doubt about the next toss.

For example, as you pointed out, we've only just discovered planets around other stars. Suppose that, next decade, we learn that one in every 20 planets is teeming with complex life? That would alter our perception of what the odds are significantly - after all, these 'next to impossible' odds you seem to want to use also assume something you seem to want not to assume - that Earth is the only planet in the Universe with life.

It wouldn't matter if Earth is the only planet in the universe with life. It is the fact that there is life, not the amount of it, that needs to be explained. For some reason, you're stuck on the amount of life being relevant. And these aren't claims I'm making. These are claims physicists and cosmologists have made, many of which are atheists.

Frankly, the 'odds' used in a lot of these arguments are a lot of made-up hooey, imo.

Hawking is more convincing than you, imo.

How do we really know what the chances are that stars would produce planets, or the chance that planets would produce an atmosphere that blocked deadly radiation? Have we surveyed the entire universe, studied every planet? For all we know, this is exactly how these things do develop, every time.

On issues like this, we rely on experts in the various fields of study. I've cited some of mine. Find some that support your viewpoint (that the physical constants could have a wide range of values and still produce a universe like ours).

Doubt it all you want. I'm sure you'll sleep better at night, especially since I don't have anything to show for that particular study except half of the old paper, in the bottom of a box full of old school stuff, back home in the storage shed. And I certainly don't want anyone taking an anecdote as evidence. Nevertheless, we had it happen to us, and it has happened to other people before.

Sorry, it's just not that believable that you got a fair die with a fair toss to land 27 times in a row on a single number. That would be about the same odds as dealing yourself four royal flushes in a row in 5 card stud without cheating. Not going to happen unless you're cheating. Maybe your machine was off or someone was playing a trick on you with a loaded die and then did the ol switcheroo. Both explanations are more plausible than your chance theory.



Or you could roll the die 27 times and come up with the same number on a fair die - probability says so.

Sure, and you could flip a fair coin heads 500 times in a row. I can guarantee nobody in the universe will ever do it. And if you saw someone do it, you would be a sucker to bet on tails, right?



Another nice ad-hom. Keep'em coming.

I didn't say you were cheating or lying. It was one of the possibilities that are more plausible than your story. It was (I assume) years ago. Perhaps someone played a trick on you or your memory is faulty.

It is possible I have misremembered; but the 'person running the experiment' was a dice-rolling mechanism invented by three of us that consisted essentially of a three-axis tumbler (to prevent the die from simply sliding around inside the cup) and a simple release mechanism into a tray with 1-inch sides made of LEGO. We wanted to be as 'hands off' as possible. After that particular series, in fact, we tried loading the die into the cup the same exact way every time for a set of 30 just to see if that was what was causing the deviation, but during that trial, the numbers came up in a fairly even spread - one of them (I think ones but it has been a while) came up seven times, but two others came up only four, and the remainder, I think, came up five times each.

A tray made of LEGO's. I think your machine was off or your friends were having fun with you. Do you honestly think you managed to roll a fair die 27 times in a row? You should have that die under a glass dome and resting on a velvet pillow, as the people at the Las Vegas Desert Inn did. The odds there were only 12 million to 1 (an everyday occurance compared to what you claim happened).
http://www.skygaze.com/content/facts/gambling.shtml

When I get home, I'll see if I can pull that out of the storage shed - I remember we also had an interesting problem with a coin flip that landed on edge three times in a row, unless that was another science fair.

I doubt that too:

"Using a combination of theory and experiment they concluded
that a U.S. nickel will land on its edge about 1in 6000 tosses"
http://faculty.washington.edu/altscr/Stat%20506/CoinDiaconis.pdf

Landing on edge three times in a row is 1 : 216,000,000,000. That's if you were using a nickel, which is thicker than a penny, quarter, or dime. Have you also won a powerball lottery, by chance?



The fine-tuning arguement is also defeated if a sufficiently large universe exists - and ours is looking bigger every year.

The size of our universe doesn't matter. Really, read up on the argument.

Plus, no evidence against other universes so far.

No evidence for or against, so why believe it, right? Apparently a lot of cosmologists are like theists: the theory looks good, but the evidence is lacking.



Consider the number of species that have gone extinct, and the number that may have gone extinct due to their own short-sightedness (like hunting their prey into extinction, or moving to an area that was unable to continue to support them, etc). Not willfully suicidal, but suicidal nonetheless.

That not suicide, that's extinction. Two very different things. No species I've ever heard of has caused its own extinction through mass suicide.

And your response is notably humanicentric.

Of course, I'm a human.

A drop in the bucket - and no one species (well, maybe certain microbes or the horseshoe crab) has survived all that long.

4 billion years is not a "drop in the bucket". And the question was not whether a single life form has survived that long, but your point that the existence of life is a "minute" in the history of the universe. It's not.

Plus, astronomically speaking, there are an awful lot of ways all life on Earth could be extinguished in the wink of a cosmic eye.

All very remote. In the next couple hundred years, it won't matter. We'll be off Earth by then.



Yet you might have something else entirely, or our interpretation of 'the constants' may itself be meaningless.

After all, our measurements of constants are a post-hoc rationalization, you know.

Really.



O.o????

You're kidding, right?



Not really - not without significant changes in key environmental variables - changes which, if they were present, would, in fact, affect every sharpshooter equally (except, of course, those variables affecting only an individual). Having been a sharpshooter myself, I can tell you that there are very few variables that could make a sharpshooter miss at close range, and they'd have to be pretty drastic and global, sudden and unexpected, and if they did exist, would likely affect every sharpshooter present fairly equally.

Really? So having a stroke or heart attack or being struck by lightning or a meteorite at the moment of firing wouldn't throw your aim off? You're a hell of a sharpshooter. Those things can happen, and since they can happen to one, they can happen to all.

Actually, aren't they 1:1?

Everything's that's already happened has a probability of 1, because it's happened. I'll tell you an interesting story: Mercury's strange orbit was known about long before Einstein was around, yet what was one of the strongest pieces of evidence that confirmed relatavity theory? Yep, Mercury's strange orbit. Now, how can a theory be confirmed if it predicts something that we already know to be true...

To make a long story short, it's possible to evaulate odds on things that have already happened.



False dichotomy. Or there is one universe, where the improbable manifested (which can and does happen). Or life was an accidental side-effect of adjusting the numbers to produce beautiful nebula. Or life is omnipresent, but we lack the ability to recognize non-organic life forms. Or the probabilities for life are much higher than we recognize, but most life has died off billions of years ago, and we're a late bloomer. Or we're the first bloomers, and every other planet is due to develop life some time in the next 100 trillion years. And so on, and so on.

Read up on it.

Besides - where did the someone come from? If someone had to rig the numbers for life to exist, how did the numbers allow that someone to exist in the first place? It's turtles all the way down, my man.

And a never-ending (never-beginning) series of big-bangs ;)

[Lord Emsworth]

Imagine you're told that a God exists (powerful, very intelligent supernatural being), and you are shown two universes. One is a featureless void that lasted for a billionth of a second before falling back in on itself. The other is extremely complex with blackholes, stars, life, etc. Is your claim really that, knowing such a God exists, you would have no idea which universe it created? Personally, I would bet on the complex life-filled universe.

You are presuming that what you want = what God wants. You have absolutely no basis to do that. I phoned up* God, just now, and it confirmend that this universe here was just an accident**. And that, yes, God meanwhile has managed to create that what it initially really wanted, something marvelous, splendid, and gorgeous and so totally beyond the grasp of your little finite 'mind' that you can only conceive of it as a "featureless void." (BTW, God is outside of time and space, therefore the "billionth of a second" matters not.)

*It's true. :)
**The fine tuning was all wrong.

[Malerin]

You are presuming that what you want = what God wants. You have absolutely no basis to do that. I phoned up* God, just now, and it confirmend that this universe here was just an accident**. And that, yes, God meanwhile has managed to create that what it initially really wanted, something marvelous, splendid, and gorgeous and so totally beyond the grasp of your little finite 'mind' that you can only conceive of it as a "featureless void." (BTW, God is outside of time and space, therefore the "billionth of a second" matters not.)

*It's true. :)
**The fine tuning was all wrong.

Look at it another way. Let H1= "God exists". Let H2="A macroverse exists"
Let E= "life exists"

Pr(E/(H1 OR H2)) >> Pr(E/(~H1 OR ~H2))

Basically, what this says is, the probability of life existing GIVEN the existence of God OR a macroverse is much greater than the probability of life existing given no God OR no macroverse. Pr(E/(~H1 OR ~H2) is the odds of the life-permitting values of the physical constants coming about by chance, which, as the Stanford website puts it, are "crushingly improbable".

Pr(E/(H1 OR H2)) is a disjunction of two probabilities:
Pr(E/H1): this is the probability that life exists GIVEN that God exists. Basically, if you KNEW God exists, would you be surprised at all to discover that God created a universe capable of supporting life? Or is that what you would expect, given that God exists? Personally, I would not be surprised at all. God is a thinking being, whatever else it's properties. If a thinking being sufficiently powerful to fine-tune a universe exists, it would hardly be shocking that it would fine-tune a complex universe capable of giving rise to other thinking beings, so I give Pr(E/H1) a high value. You can assign it an agnostic value, if you like. It doesn't matter: If Pr(E/H1) = .5, then
Pr(E/H1) is still >> Pr(E/(~H1 OR ~H2)).

Pr(E/H2): This is the probability that life exists given that a macroverse or multiverse exists. This depends on whether the multiverse is infinite or not. If our universe is part of a collection of 5 other universes, the existence of life would still be very surprising. If the multiverse is infinite (which is what all the theories seem to entail), life is guaranteed. In anycase, I would assign
Pr(E/H2) a high value.
So Pr(E/H2) >> Pr(E/(~H1 OR ~H2)).

Therefore, Pr(E/(H1 OR H2)) >> Pr(E/(~H1 OR ~H2)). It's either some kind of multiverse or God (or a cycical universe, but this is not a probable theory at the moment; the rate of expansion is too fast for gravity to slow it down enough for the universe to collapse in on itself). The odds of all the physical constants having the precise value needed by chance alone is just too remote. It would be like seeing a watch and believing all the pieces happened to come together by chance.

[Lord Emsworth]

Look at it another way.

OK, let's see if this is another way.

Let H1= "God exists". Let H2="A macroverse exists"
Let E= "life exists"

E = molecular life forms exist in a universe that is contigent on cosmological constants.


Pr(E/(H1 OR H2)) >> Pr(E/(~H1 OR ~H2))

Basically, what this says is, the probability of life existing GIVEN the existence of God OR a macroverse is much greater than the probability of life existing given no God OR no macroverse.

Rejected. I can stipulate:

"God" hates molecular life forms and/or reliance on cosmological constants.

And you can do squat about it. ;)


Pr(E/(~H1 OR ~H2) is the odds of the life-permitting values of the physical constants coming about by chance, which, as the Stanford website puts it, are "crushingly improbable".

Pr(E/(H1 OR H2)) is a disjunction of two probabilities:
Pr(E/H1): this is the probability that life exists GIVEN that God exists. Basically, if you KNEW God exists, would you be surprised at all to discover that God created a universe capable of supporting life? Or is that what you would expect, given that God exists? Personally, I would not be surprised at all.

Of course you would not be surprised! And neither would I be if I knew God existed where "God" is defined so that it inherently has a penchant for molecular life forms and universes that support such.

God is a thinking being, whatever else it's properties. If a thinking being sufficiently powerful to fine-tune a universe exists, it would hardly be shocking that it would fine-tune a complex universe capable of giving rise to other thinking beings, so I give Pr(E/H1) a high value. You can assign it an agnostic value, if you like. It doesn't matter: If Pr(E/H1) = .5, then
Pr(E/H1) is still >> Pr(E/(~H1 OR ~H2)).

Given that
(a) there is an infinite amount of things that "God" could take a liking or disliking to and
(b) there is an infinite amount of ways for "God" to create universes without cosmological fine-tuning at all
then Pr(E/H1) becomes infinitesimally small, no?

We as finite beings have no way to tell the mind of an infinite being. That is what I have been told - it's true. ;)

Pr(E/H2): This is the probability that life exists given that a macroverse or multiverse exists. This depends on whether the multiverse is infinite or not. If our universe is part of a collection of 5 other universes, the existence of life would still be very surprising. If the multiverse is infinite (which is what all the theories seem to entail), life is guaranteed. In anycase, I would assign
Pr(E/H2) a high value.
So Pr(E/H2) >> Pr(E/(~H1 OR ~H2)).

Therefore, Pr(E/(H1 OR H2)) >> Pr(E/(~H1 OR ~H2)). It's either some kind of multiverse or God (or a cycical universe, but this is not a probable theory at the moment; the rate of expansion is too fast for gravity to slow it down enough for the universe to collapse in on itself). The odds of all the physical constants having the precise value needed by chance alone is just too remote. It would be like seeing a watch and believing all the pieces happened to come together by chance.


The watch is best explained by Tock, which is a time-keeping being (not that She would need an inferior piece of human technology, or humans to assemble it for Her). The fine tuning argument for Tock is even stronger, because P(W/E) < 1, i.e. the probability of watches given life is strictly smaller than 100%, which means that you can build an even stronger case around Pr(W/(HT OR H2)) >> Pr(W/(~HT OR ~H2)) than around Pr(E/(H1 OR H2)) >> Pr(E/(~H1 OR ~H2)).


But fun aside, I see absolutely zero reason to agree to any of the given premises, hidden or otherwise.

I have no clue if there actually exists the possibility of the cosmological constants to be different or if we are just waving about counterfactual possibilities. It is not as if I had sufficient expertise to even judge this. And neither do I think the average Fine Tuning Argument proponent has.

God is arbitrarily (and underhandedly) defined to make molecular life supporting universes more likely, but why should I agree to this amazingly fine-tuned God? What is the probability of that particular God, given all that could be God?


And multi/makroverses? Well, just dunno. Does it have fine tuneable constants? You should consider it, then you could assert that the makroverse is fine-tuned to produce a universe fine-tuned for life fine-tuned to produce watches for Tock.


(And anyway, it is not as if "God fumbled about with cosmological constants" is a meaningful, intelligible proposition to me to begin with.)

[Z]

I think the more interesting question is, could you, as a human, perceive anything in a non-human way? In other words, it is tautologically true that my perceptions are colored by my being human.

The mark of a skilled thinker is being able to think outside the limitations and boundaries of its own condition.

Here's a better way of looking at a significant result that doesn't involve life. Let's say the Mars Rover was puttering around Mars and discovered a formation of rocks that spelled out:
Well, it's about time you Earthlings got here.
Best Regards,
Mars

Now, it's possible that is not a message at all. Just a random collection of rocks, right? However, we would disregard that remote chance and proceed on the hypothesis that it's a message. This is because a collection of rocks like that is much much more plausible on the theory of something making it than on the theory of random chance.

As that example goes - and I'm thinking things through all over again (slept on it, you know) - we're dealing with competing probabilities. The probability of it being a hoax would be considerably higher than being random chance, simply because we know how language evolved and who evolved it and so forth, etc. OTOH, if we developed a language that was based on arrangements of rocks, and one day stumbled across a message that, in rock arrangement code, said this same thing, we might not think it so unusual. For example, we could look at a certain sequence of light and dark patterns in, say, a tree trunk, and recognize a binary code for a certain number significant to us. Does that mean the code was deliberately put there, or is it mere coincidence? Even random static occasionally seems to form meanings - that is, our brains interpret patterns even when those patterns are the results of random events.

Life is the same way.

Ridiculous. We have vast examples of language being invented and used by intelligent beings. We have absolutely none (afaik) of life being invented by intelligent beings. The arisal of life is apparently a natural phenomenon that happens by chance, or perhaps happens when chance produces a set of favorable conditions. That's been our observation from day one, and that's our observation at present, and it's certainly not 'evidently' the result of any intelligent planning.

If this is the only universe, the existence of life is much more probable on the theory that some type of life form fine-tuned the physical constants than on random chance alone. If you can't see this, I would recommend reading up on the fine-tuning argument.

I've read up on the fine-tuning argument, and it's certainly not a clear-cut, obvious fact of existence. Several researchers have given interesting data that shows life can, in fact, exist if we change many of the constants, in some form or another; there are numerous theories of multiverses and bubble universes that are, of course, unfalsifiable - but they tend to pop up in the math repeatedly, which has historically been an indicator that we're on the right general track. And if this IS the only universe, we have the problem of infinite regression - if the constants that allow life to develop had to be 'fine-tuned' by intelligent life, how did the intelligent life develop in the first place? Not only are we looking into infinite regression, we're flat out looking at a paradox.

Resolve that one for me, please. How can a life-form exist to fine-tune the physical constants of our universe to allow for life-forms to exist, if life-forms couldn't exist in a pre-tuned universe? Remember, only our universe exists - you can't claim they came from another pre-tuned universe.

Why is "promoting the survival and ultimate advancement of humanity as a whole" the most rational? Why is it a good result, in other words?

It is neither good nor bad. It is rational given the premise I stated - it serves the best interest of my species as a whole, therefore ensuring a higher chance of survival of my genotype. It is evolutionarily sound and reasonable.

Suppose I claimed the advancemet and survival of humanity are ideals. Why am I wrong?

To answer that, I'd have to know the process by which you came to that conclusion. If you are not a human, but a competitor for resources, it would be entirely rational. However, assuming you are human, wishing for the suffering and extinction of your own species is irrational.

For example, say I own a chemical business and think I can get away with dumping toxic waste into a widely used river, thus saving me millions in disposal fees. After all, I don't live there so it doesn't matter to me. How would you try to persuade me I'm wrong?

Obviously, as a sociopath, you could not be convinced you were doing anything wrong; the obvious choice of action, therefore, is to prevent you from doing so against your will and, if necessary, prevent you from causing further harm to my species.

C'mon, this is grade-school ethics. Step up the effort, please.

Give an example of a "positive result" for mankind.


Supposing this axe murderer had discovered that my friend was incubating a fatal virus that, when mature, would be able to spread unchecked and kill off the entire population, and that the only way to stop this virus from maturing was to murder my friend. Obviously, his death would prove beneficial to humankind.

We can play 'let's pretend' all day, Mal.

Yet you think we should act in a way that furthers mankind. So if someone doesn't act in that way, are they doing something wrong?

As related to my personal ethics, yes they are. I cannot speak for how they are acting in relation to their personal ethics. Objectively, there are no ethics, no morals.

You seem confused. On the one hand, you want to dismiss morality (they're conventions without meaning), on the other, you think people [I]should act a certain way (to better mankind, or something).

Pay attention, lad. I'm saying there are no objective morals; I am saying I have decided to use rational thinking to embrace a subjective ethical code.

Here, I'll give you an easy one, which recently happened in my state. An 8 yr old girl was kidnapped, raped, killed, stuffed in a suitcase and thrown in a pond. Did whoever kill her do something wrong, and if so, why was it wrong?

Murder eliminates any possibility of the victim contributing to the welfare of humankind. Of course, it also eliminates any possibility that the victim might do something detrimental to humankind as well. However, we have to consider the influence of observed behaviors on the decision-making processes of others. If rape and murder go unpunished, then the impetus to commit rape and murder increases - that is, without deterrent factors, the rates of these actions increases. Since murder is, as a whole, detrimental to human advancement (i.e. if we kill off everyone, we'll never survive), it is rational to deter murder as much as possible. Rape is a more complex issue from a humanist ethical perspective, because rape itself is not a specifically detrimental process with regards to humanity as a whole; however, as with all social custom and process, humanity advances more smoothly when 'lubrication' (i.e. niceties and getting along) are applied. Rape is a violation of that social structure that provides the 'lube' to keep things smooth, and therefore undesirable. Further, as rape can and does cause both physical and emotional damage to the victim, it can be seen to be detrimental to future positive contributions to humanity from the victim and therefore should be prevented.

Also, was her being raped and killed any different than a tree being cut down?

A tree, cut down, can provide useful materials for humankind, provide feul, or simply clear the way for other projects; however, too many trees can lead to the extinction of all life on earth, so care must be taken when removing trees.

You have a very poor grasp of quality analogies, methinks.

Then how can it be an ad-hom? Incidentally, can you think of any sociopaths (or psychopaths) that have acted in a way that was "positive" for mankind?

Since I don't seem to be able to find a list of known psychopaths - and not all cases of psychopathy go diagnosed, you realize - I couldn't rationally make such a list. Can you think of any pedophiles who have acted in a way that was 'positive' for humankind? It's a similar question in some ways, and suffers a similar problem - though, actually, I can think of a few in that case.

After all, we don't even tend to consider someone a sociopath or psychopath until we observe them doing something detrimental.

I guess I wasn't clear: You are told a god exists (it makes it's existence obvious), and then shown two universes. You know that the god created one of the universes, but you don't know which one. You are asked to guess which of the two universes it created: one is a lifeless void with nothing but subatomic particles. The other contains stars, galaxies, life, etc. You would really be puzzled about which universe it created? I think not.

You don't think much, given your general responses. You're too eager to accept confirmation bias, humanicentricism, and suchlike.

First, I can't think of anything that would make it obvious that a creator god exists. Second, I have no idea how I would know that this creator god created one-and-only-one universe, but not the other. If a creator god is needed to create a universe, how did the other one get there? If the other could occur by chance, why not the first? And, as I stated before, I'd either assume this mysterious being created BOTH universes, or neither. You're guilty of a great deal of hubris here in assuming that God is interested in a cluttered assembly of matter and energy over a pristine void. You're projecting your OWN thought processes on a supreme being - assuming that this creator thinks like you think. Probably thanks to that stupid line in the Bible about 'created them in his image'.

Look out the window. If you're expecting life to exist in the vacuum of space or on the surface of the sun, I don't know what to tell you, except that your expectations may be too high.

Only if the universe was fine-tuned to life. Frankly, the universe looks fine-tuned to vast emptiness, and horribly poorly tuned to life. So far.

We've only been able to observe three other planets close enough to determine if life exists or not, and there's a Martian meteorite that may or may not contain a fossil. So, for sure, we're 1/4, possibly 2/4.

Really? I can think of six we've observed, plus a number of dwarf planets, wherein we've been able to determine that life (as we know it) can or cannot exist. Furthermore, we've got some preliminary observations of a number of extrasolar planets that clearly do not have earth-like life on them (being gas giants and all)... More like 1/20 or 1/30, I'm not 100% sure of the numbers.

Or did you mean three other Earth-like planets?

4 billion years is not "a few minutes". Do you know how old the universe is? It is about 14 billion years old.

Between 11 billion and 20 billion, assuming our observable universe is the same age as the unobserved portions we can only speculate about - and assuming that the 'Big Bang' wasn't part of a great cycle, rather than being an isolated event. A lot of conjecture there.

But I did, in a fashion, misspeak. I was meaning to refer to the life of a given species, versus the life of the universe. Yes, life on Earth may have existed for up to 28% of the life of the universe; but the existence of any given species is no more than a few minutes in the timeline of the universe.

Still, a poorly chosen use of scales. I retract.

For 28% of the universe's "life", life has existed. That is not "a few minutes". And that is just life here on Earth. Given trillions of planets, it's not a leap to suggest life might have been around for over half of the universe's current age. And there's no evidence to think that life will suddenly snuff itself out across the universe. The history of humans has been technological innovation, not decline. It is entirely possible that within 100 years, we'll be able to make a generation ship. It is also possible that other civilizations have done the same in our galaxy or others.

Yet we have no evidence of this.

Here's an interesting observation: you prefer to chuck the idea of multiple universes, due to a lack of evidence; but you prefer to embrace the idea of multiple intelligent civilizations, in spite of a lack of evidence. This is an arbitrary decision, methinks, meant only to support your concept that this universe is fine-tuned to life. I think, rather, that we should embrace or deny both concepts - either the universe is the only one we have, and evidence suggests we're the only life in it; or the universe is part of a greater multiverse, and there's a good chance there are numerous life-forms throughout the galaxy.

Either way, it'll play hell with supporting your little fine-tuning notion.

How do you know this?

Observation and projection. 99.9% of all species that have ever existed are now extinct. The chance, therefore, that we won't go extinct is so infinitessimally small as to be irrelevant, especially to your way of thinking.

I love how you're willing to apply this logic one way, but not another.

Again with the assumption that life exists on one-rock. And you think I'M humano-centric. Think of it this way: The universe went from zero lifeforms to billions (possibly trillions). But the amount is meaningless. The fact that life exists at all needs to be explained, either by intelligent design or multiple universes. The odds really are too fantasical to believe in chance alone.

Again with the assumption that improbable events cannot manifest, and that multiple universes don't exist. No evidence of an intelligent designer, but plenty of indirect evidence of multiple universes. Guess which one seems the more rational choice?

Think of the lottery example again. A lottery just for you and the odds are 100 trillion to 1 and you win. Does it really matter if you win ten more such lotteries? No, you'll be convinced after the first that someone rigged it for you.

An empty assumption. As a matter of fact, I wouldn't assume any such thing. I'd be amazed that probability manifested in just that way, and go on. Now, if I won it nine more times, I'd be less convinced each time that it wasn't rigged; but if all the evidence I gathered said it wasn't rigged, I'd go with the evidence.

In the same way, the existence of life as we know it demands explanation.

Not really.

It would demand explanation if there were a million humans or 7 billion or 3.

Nope.

"Hawking writes, "if the electric charge of the electron had been only slightly different, stars would have been unable to burn hydrogen and helium, or else they would not have exploded" http://www.geraldschroeder.com/tuning.html

There's also the value of the strong nuclear force, gravitational force constant, cosmological constant, etc. These all have to have precise values for star formation.

Not according to some researchers. F.C. Adamns and Victor Stenger, for example, apparently disagree and have published papers to that effect.

The book is by no means closed yet.

If the universe were fine-tuned I would expect there to be life, though to what amount, I couldn't guess (more than a single bacteria, I suppose). Anyway, there are probably trillions of planets, and it's a good guess that a lot of these have life, so it's a question of billions, trillions, quadrillions of life forms, etc. To go back to the lottery example, it would be enough that you won once. Winning another thousand times would just reaffirm what you already know: someone rigged the game. We have enough life to hypothesize that someone either rigged the universe or there are a lot of universes.

Or that serendipity is a motha. Sorry, I don't subscribe to your black-and-white view of the universe. I can see innumerable possibilities - including the possibility that chance just worked out beautifully this time for our own brief, meaningless existence.

"Some life" is enough. The existence of "some life" is highly, highly improbable.

Not really - especially not since you seem to think that this highly, highly improbable life exists on millions, billions, trillions of worlds.

If the universe if fine-tuned for life, it wouldn't be 99.999% hostile to all life.

Stanford says it pretty well: "Thus, Francis Crick toys with terms like ‘miracle’, Frederick Hoyle refers to a superintellect ‘monkeying’ with physics, and Andrei Linde raises the possibility of our cosmos itself being a product of design—by some supertechnological alien culture. The character of such proposals is itself testimony to the prima facie plausibility of fine-tuning cases." http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/teleological-arguments/#4.1

Andrei Linde is not a fundie. Quite a lot of people take fine-tuning seriously. Hawking among them.

Quite a lot of people take Jesus seriously, too. And Elvis. And American Idol.

People are welcome to their beliefs, their opinions, their thoughts. But just because a million geniuses think invisible sky daddies make life on Earth possible doesn't make it so.

Again, the universe has been around 14 billion years. For the last 4 billion of those years, life has existed. If you lived to be 74, that would be the equivalent of approx. 20 years of your life. Would you consider that a "brief" amount of time?

Yes.

The point is not the existence of humans, but the chances of there being the right conditions for any type of life.

It seems that several different constant values would permit any type of life. Fail again.

The precise values of the constants needed for a life-permitting universe are not debated.

Incorrect.

In all the arguments I've had on this, there's been one physcist who's disagreed (Victor Stengel). Hawking, Davies, Linde, Penrose, Hoyle, etc. all agree the physical constants have to have very precise values for life to arise.

Adams, Harnik, Kribs, Perez. That's five, then, to your five.

Sounds pretty split to me.

Again, back to the lottery example. It doesn't matter if you won a thousand times or once. Winning a one-time lottery just for you, where the odds are astronomically low, would convince you the game was rigged. The scale of the winning (how large the prize, how many times you won) would be irrelevant. Regarding the universe, we know complex life forms exist. The odds of them existing are fanstastically low, as I've shown. That has to be explained.

Your tired, boring lottery analogy is a no-go. Do you think every single lottery winner on earth is convinced the lottery was rigged? Do you seriously think every time a 1 in a trillion chance event occurs, that it was deliberately caused? Do you seriously, honestly think this? And if not, then what's the difference between all these improbable things that did occur, that you're OK with, and the improbable occurance of life existing, that you're not OK with?

The longer the odds, the less "chance" becomes a satisfactory explanation. How many heads in a row would it take before you became convinced a coin was biased? No matter what answer you give, I could easily tell you that X amount of heads is just as likely as a specific combination of heads and tails, yet if a coin lands heads 100 times in a row, for example, it would be absurd to think it a fair coin. But 100 heads are just as likely as a specific combination of heads and tails. The odds are so long, that only an idiot would still be in doubt about the next toss.

Actually, as long as you had the chance to verify the coin was a fairly balanced coin, only an idiot would not be in doubt. Chance works that way. Your incredulity notwithstanding, that's how it goes.

Basically, the sum total of your argument boils down to personal incredulity. Frankly, that's not something I'm willing to argue against, simply because it amounts to sticking your fingers in your ears and denying everything.

It wouldn't matter if Earth is the only planet in the universe with life. It is the fact that there is life, not the amount of it, that needs to be explained. For some reason, you're stuck on the amount of life being relevant. And these aren't claims I'm making. These are claims physicists and cosmologists have made, many of which are atheists.


And you're stuck on the incredulity of improbable events.

Hawking is more convincing than you, imo.

Especially when he says what you want to hear. Now, do you want to hear what else he says? He says that reality could be a multidimensional flexiverse, wherein all possible histories occur simultaneously. Or, in other words, every possible universe could co-exist right here, right now - giving a near infinite number of lifeless universes to adjust our probability understandings significantly.

Still want to use Hawking to support your pet theory?

On issues like this, we rely on experts in the various fields of study. I've cited some of mine. Find some that support your viewpoint (that the physical constants could have a wide range of values and still produce a universe like ours).

See above.

Sorry, it's just not that believable that you got a fair die with a fair toss to land 27 times in a row on a single number. That would be about the same odds as dealing yourself four royal flushes in a row in 5 card stud without cheating. Not going to happen unless you're cheating. Maybe your machine was off or someone was playing a trick on you with a loaded die and then did the ol switcheroo. Both explanations are more plausible than your chance theory.

Again, argument from personal incredulity. Only further proof that discussion of improbable events with you is pointless. Unless you're willing to suspend your overriding sense of personal incredulity, I don't think you'll ever listen to what others have to say regarding chance.

It happened. Get over it.

Sure, and you could flip a fair coin heads 500 times in a row. I can guarantee nobody in the universe will ever do it.

And how will you do that, exactly? I'm all eyes. As it is, there is at least one person who can flip a fair coin heads 100 times in a row. No reason he couldn't do it 500 times.

Coin tosses aren't exactly the best example of random determination, by the way. A coin tossed by a machine, for example, given the same start conditions each time, will come up with the same result 100% of the time. Determinism is a bitch.

Read up on it.

And if you saw someone do it, you would be a sucker to bet on tails, right?

Since coin tosses aren't random after all (having just read up on it - man, I'm a little shocked!), I wouldn't bet on a coin toss at all.

Seriously, read up on it. It's not such a good probability example after all.

I didn't say you were cheating or lying. It was one of the possibilities that are more plausible than your story. It was (I assume) years ago. Perhaps someone played a trick on you or your memory is faulty.

Actually, I just discovered what may have actually happened. We used a machine to roll the die; this machine was constructed out of spare parts, toys, etc. My theory: initially, it worked with reasonable precision, and given the same initial start condition, rolled the die exactly the same each time; but as the mechanism weakened (we had to finish our final rolls in the study by hand after the whole thing broke down - after 20 sets of 100 rolls each, plus some other rolls for other reasons), it probably began introducing random conditions (as a human roller would) that changed the outcome.

Coin flips and die rolls aren't that random if handled by a machine, it seems.

Man, where was the internet when I was in high school? Oh, right - being hogged by the military.

A tray made of LEGO's. I think your machine was off or your friends were having fun with you. Do you honestly think you managed to roll a fair die 27 times in a row? You should have that die under a glass dome and resting on a velvet pillow, as the people at the Las Vegas Desert Inn did. The odds there were only 12 million to 1 (an everyday occurance compared to what you claim happened).

Nah, just a regular old occurance, with no special significance.

I doubt that too:

"Using a combination of theory and experiment they concluded
that a U.S. nickel will land on its edge about 1in 6000 tosses"
http://faculty.washington.edu/altscr/Stat%20506/CoinDiaconis.pdf


You doubt a lot of things. You seem to live by a code of incredulity.

Landing on edge three times in a row is 1 : 216,000,000,000. That's if you were using a nickel, which is thicker than a penny, quarter, or dime. Have you also won a powerball lottery, by chance?

HAH! I'm so unlucky with the lottery - I did win $15 once on a ticket I found - but on scratch-off tickets, I've won MAYBE $20 (having spent probably close to $5000 total over the years). Given there's a 1 in 4 chance of breaking even on any one ticket, and given I play only $1 tickets, shouldn't I have made at least $1250? What are the odds of only getting 1 in 250 when the stated odds of breaking even are 1 in 4? Seems pretty unlikely - I know! The tickets were rigged against me! ONOES! I'm being persecuted!!!

:rolleyes:

That's the way the cookie crumbles, sometimes.

I've never, ever won a raffle, a door-prize drawing, or any other similar thing. I've never, ever won any random contest, with the exception of the $20 I've managed to win on scratch-off tickets and the $15 I won on Powerball (and I've probably spent about $400 on Powerball last year).

It seems like probability is working against me, doesn't it? Yet I don't think I'm being biased against. I just think that's how chance works sometime. It doesn't stop me the next time I decide to buy a ticket. Chance is funny and fickle.

Do you know, several state lottery commissions have rules in place for the off chance that a participant wins two lotteries? Either two different state lotteries, or two of the same? Even though the probability is ASTRONOMICALLY low, they still took precautions in case that happens. Why? Because, unlike you, they realise probability can manifest in the strangest ways.

The size of our universe doesn't matter. Really, read up on the argument.

Sure it does. With an event of great improbability, the more chances you give for the probability to manifest, the greater the chance it will manifest.

If the universe with all our lovely constants was only 100 feet across, would life have evolved? Not bloody likely under ANY conditions. OTOH, if it were 10,000 times larger than it is now, we might very well be expecting 10,000 more Earthlike civilizations to exist than the 2.whatever we currently expect. Then again, size itself is also a factor - mass versus gravity and all that.

Really, read up on it.

No evidence for or against, so why believe it, right? Apparently a lot of cosmologists are like theists: the theory looks good, but the evidence is lacking.

Just like evidence of extraterrestrial life. No evidence for or against, so why believe it, right? Therefore making the universe OVERWHELMINGLY hostile towards life.

Oh, you don't want to apply the logic that way? I see.

That not suicide, that's extinction. Two very different things. No species I've ever heard of has caused its own extinction through mass suicide.

Metaphorically speaking.

Look up evolutionary suicide.

Of course, I'm a human.

...with a narrow minded, limited point of view.

4 billion years is not a "drop in the bucket". And the question was not whether a single life form has survived that long, but your point that the existence of life is a "minute" in the history of the universe. It's not.

Agreed. It's more like a couple of hours. But since we have no information about how much longer the universe will exist, or how long life will exist - it's silly to make any such conjecture. As I said before, retracted.

All very remote. In the next couple hundred years, it won't matter. We'll be off Earth by then.

I do like your optimism. Unfortunately, I don't hold with it. Our space programs have begun to suffer greatly, and there are many indicators that show we're likely to suffer a global civilization crash very shortly. We could easily regress into a new Dark Age - especially if fundies and religious nutters and ID proponents get their way - and if we do, it might be a thousand years or more before we have another chance to reach for the stars. Furthermore, we're seeing a society that looks for short-term benefit right now, and generation ships - our only real way to travel interstellar distances - offer none of that. My guess is, we'll try at least once; but that before we get a chance to reach another planet and inhabit it safely, we'll be replaced by the next evolutionary link (probably machine intelligence).

I have a feeling, in fact, that any contact we make with extraterrestrial intelligences are likely to be machines, as well.

Really.

Yes, really. Think about it, carefully.

Really? So having a stroke or heart attack or being struck by lightning or a meteorite at the moment of firing wouldn't throw your aim off? You're a hell of a sharpshooter.

A stroke or heart attack is not at all likely to occur in a group of sharpshooters at the same time, unless they all have identical health issues. My chances of stroke are exceedingly low; heart attack, somewhat higher. Other sharpshooters have other chances, and it is safe to say that, in any group of people, you'll have at least one or two who will never suffer a stroke or heart attack.

And being struck by lightning or a meteorite is going to affect every other sharpshooter as well. As I said before - changes in environmental variables, and all that.

Those things can happen, and since they can happen to one, they can happen to all.

Not the stroke or heart attack issue, as explained before; and as explained before, the lightning and meteorite issue will affect everyone's aim anyway. Plus, those are observable events that would clearly not be a 'chance of missing', but an interfering external variable.

You're the king of poor analogies.

Everything's that's already happened has a probability of 1, because it's happened. I'll tell you an interesting story: Mercury's strange orbit was known about long before Einstein was around, yet what was one of the strongest pieces of evidence that confirmed relatavity theory? Yep, Mercury's strange orbit. Now, how can a theory be confirmed if it predicts something that we already know to be true...

Huh? That has to do with what, exactly?

To make a long story short, it's possible to evaulate odds on things that have already happened.

The Mercury story has nothing to do with evaluating odds, Mal.

And a never-ending (never-beginning) series of big-bangs ;)

Not necessarily. Big Bangs don't depend on conditions set by prior Big Bangs; in fact, if that was the moment of the manifestation of spacetime, there could be no prior Big Bangs, nor any pre-time in which to 'set the constants', as it were.

Read up on it.

[Malerin]

Just have time for a short reply.

1. On ethics: it's a sidetrack and I don't think we need to get bogged down in it. Your ethics seems to boil down to: that act that furthers the species is the rational act to do. I think there are problems with this and you'll ultimately be forced to give an intuitive appeal about why we should care whether our species survives or not (or simply say the question (and ethics as a whole) is meaningless)).

2. Significant results: You seem to acknowledge that a message found on Mars would most probably be from some intelligence rather than due to random chance. This is a trivial point though. It's possible to draw 20 royal flushes in a row, but I doubt you would still play poker with the person who did it. Your complaint is that life should not be considered a significant result. My response is that if nearly all the ways the universe could have gone would have resulted in life-less universes (more on this later), and we happen to be in one of the few life-filled universes that are possible, we are in the same position as a person looking at a watch: it is more probable that a universe-creator of some sort sympathetic towards life fine-tuned the constants than that it happened purely by chance. Or we are part of an infinite multiverse.

I think you realize this, as you won't admit that surviving the sharpshooter case would naturally lead you to wonder why you survived. Nobody on the receving end of a thousand trained marksmen's bullets would nonchalantly walk away after hearing the execution order and finding themselves alive. They would want to know what happened (specifically, why they're alive). This question would only occur if you viewed your survival as a significant result. If you didn't view it that way, you would only shrug when told, for example, that all 1000 sharpshooters had simultaneous heart attacks at the moment of your execution. I don't think anyone would simply shrug it off.

3. Mercury's orbit is a response to the issue you bring up about events already happening having a Pr of 1. This is known as the problem of "old evidence". Theory's are confirmed when they predict evidence, but if the evidence is already known, how can the theory gain confirmation? A prediction of an event with a Pr of 1 should not be very confirming. The problem is usually got around by looking at the evidence counterfactually. Police deal with old evidence all the time: the murder has already happened and the theories they develop to explain the murder are all dealing with an event and evidence whose Pr value is 1.



4. Did you actually read anything about F.C. Adam's paper, or just go by Wikipedia? Apparently, Adam's wasn't too concerned with whether the stars in his model universe produced carbon or not.

"Since the simulations didn't rely on the stars producing carbon, Adams points out that very different life forms to ours might be better suited to some of the universes."

http://richarddawkins.net/article,2944,Is-our-universe-fine-tuned-for-life,New-Scientist

Stenger also takes carbon out of the equation, postulating non-molecular based life forms. Check out his Monkeygod program. It lets you change a couple constants and see what kind of universes you generate.

So there are two points I would make about Adam's and Stenger's work (which also focued on only 4 constants): (1) Even if Adam's is right about star formation, it is interesting that he would exclude what we know to be a necessary condition for life: carbon. See, it's not enough to have stars. The stars have to be able to produce heavy elements when they explode. Adams, like Stenger, is relying on the possibility that non-carbon based life is possible. The problem with this is that there is zero evidence to support this and a lot of evidence against it: every lifeform we have ever observed is carbon-based. If the only way to argue around fine-tuning is to posit the existence of exotic life-forms (non-molecular based, non-carbon based) that contradict all our knowledge of biology, that's a tough path to go down. It's a life-in-the-gaps solution similar to the one theists are commonly critized for employing when science is unclear on something.

2. Stenger and Adam were only concerned with the constants relating to star formation (about 4). Even granting they're right, that still leaves 20 or so constants that have to have precise values for life as we know it to exist. So, on the best reading of this, it's 4 down and 20 to go.

The other paper (by Harnik, Kribs and Perez), suffers from the same defect, as discussed in this paper: "We point out, however, that on closer examination the proposed "weakless" universe strongly inhibits the development of life in several different ways. One of the most critical barriers is that a weakless universe is unlikely to produce enough oxygen to support life. Since oxygen is an essential element in both water, the universal solvent needed for life, and in each of the four bases forming the DNA code for known living beings, we strongly question the hypothesis that a universe without weak interactions could generate life" http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0609050

And again, their paper (A Universe Without Weak Interactions) only deals with the weak interaction, leaving 20 other constants alone. Even in the abstract, they admit two other constants cannot be tweaked to obtain a universe like ours: "Considering a similar analysis for the cosmological constant, however, we argue that no adjustments of other parameters are able to allow the cosmological constant to raise up even remotely close to the Planck scale while obtaining macroscopic structure. The fine-tuning problems associated with the electroweak breaking scale and the cosmological constant therefore appear to be qualitatively different from the perspective of obtaining a habitable universe." http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0604027

Here are some other expert opionions on fine-tuning: http://www.2001principle.net/2005.htm
http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics/quotes.html

Dr. Dennis Scania
Dr. David D. Deutsch
Dr. Paul Davies
Professor Steven Weinberg
Michael Turner
Hugh Ross
Martin Rees
George Ellis
Alan Sandage
John O'Keefe
Arno Penzias
And also Penrose, Hoyle, Hawking, Linde, Carter, and about ten other names whose quotes all support fine-tuning. You can look them up on the websites I listed. Fine-tuning seems to be like global-warming: there is a consensus position accepeted by most scientists (the constants have to have precise values for life to arise), and then there is a fringe group arguing against the consensus.

[Z]

Point one I think we can safely lay aside. The fact is, I've made what I consider a rational choice, and I haven't relied on any intuitive factor. Ethics are largely arbitrary anyway, and irrelevant in the objective sense, plus they really don't add or subtract from the discussion at hand. The argument, after all, began with pointing out that using intuition as a guide for knowledge is faulty and often wrong.

My intuition, for example, tells me the universe was created, but that the being that created either a) died in creation; b) doesn't care about the creation (or cannot interact with it); or c) lacks what we could recognize as intelligence, intent, etc. and is therefore indistinguishable from natural processes.

On point two, I really honestly think the sharpshooter analogy is really very, very poor, and not at all analogous to the formation of life. I've outlined why this is so. Your responses fail to address my points in any meaningful manner. Likewise, I find your lottery examples equally as poor. Your entire arguments seem to stem from personal incredulity, and lack any useful meaning.

On point 3, I still don't see how you related confirmation of a known, observed effect through a better theoretical model to a priori knowledge of probabilities. You appear to be talking about apples and centipedes, frankly. But it seems a minor and unimportant point.

Factually speaking, we really DON'T know what the probability of key events occuring to allow life actually are, and we really DON'T have quality values to plug in to most of Drake's Equation, so we're really shooting in the dark here.

As to point four, yes. I read this and several other works on the topic. And yes, it is interesting that he posits non-carbon life. However, I've been a sci-fi and comic reader for most of my life, and these things are FULL of alternative life forms, throughout the fictional galaxies. I'd be not at all surprised to discover a dozen different ways in which life could evolve, all around the universe. In fact, IF THE UNIVERSE WERE FINE-TUNED FOR LIFE, I'd expect to find life in vast diversity all over the universe.

So far, we haven't found much. Then again, we haven't looked far.

As to your further points, the 'fine tuned universe' argument does appear to have some support for it; however, it is also necessary to note that we are necessarily a product of such a universe, and therefore have no choice but to recognize those factors necessary for our existance as being present. We can't, for example, have discussions about why the universal constants fail to promote life if we're not here in the first place.

Another point (since you mention how few factors are 'tweaked' in these models) - many of the 26 constants (most, IIRC) deal with quantum particles, wherein changes to the constants would have no or very limited effect on the macroscopic universe. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it true that only four to six of these constants are 'required', and of those, one or two do have SOME play in them?

Not very convincing.

Furthermore, I notice you fail, again, to address my 'one planet or multiple universes' problem: why should we accept that the universe is 'fine tuned' for life if it's 99.999% hostile to all life? And if we are allowed to conjecture, to support the fine-tuned theory, that there IS abundant life throughout the universe, why are we not then allowed to conjecture that there are infinite other realities/universes/etc. that cause THIS fine-tuned universe to be the result of random chance?

One or the other, I think - and until you're willing to discuss this key point, I think further discussion with you on the topic is useless. Your analogies stink (no offense intended) and your incredulity makes me laugh. I will definitely be reading further on the fine-tuned universe theory and those who support it; but in the meantime, answer me the question on why you choose to support one unevidenced belief but not another.

Thanks!

(Nice discussion, btw - I'm rather enjoying it.)

(P.S. As an exile from the planet Xovia, I'm REALLY enjoying it. We're photon-based life, by the way, and already know the final answer to the issue of creation...)

:D

[Z]

BTW - do you have any unbiased source for this list of name-dropping and quotes? The links you've provided are notably biased and of low academic quality.

Thanks!

[Skeptic Ginger]

We use intuition all the time. What do you think ethics is based on? Pure reason? Are you a Kantian? But even Kant's ethics were attacked for their counter-intuitive results: I should tell the truth to an axe-murderer who wants to know where my friend is? I don't think so. You could argue, to play devil's advocate, that a pile of dirt has as much significance as a person, but you personally know that's wrong. People who think that way are called sociopaths.There is a similar basis for making an 'intuitive' judgment whether it be a moral judgment or an intellectual one. Morals are no more an "intuitive" judgment than knowing a species of tree you encounter for the first time is a tree. Rather, these are both products of nearly instantaneous weighing of existing knowledge in our brains. That existing knowledge results from a combination of nature and nurture in both cases. And, that existing knowledge is supplying the criteria which you are using to make a judgment you are calling, intuition.

Imagine you're told that a God exists (powerful, very intelligent supernatural being), and you are shown two universes. One is a featureless void that lasted for a billionth of a second before falling back in on itself. The other is extremely complex with blackholes, stars, life, etc. Is your claim really that, knowing such a God exists, you would have no idea which universe it created? Personally, I would bet on the complex life-filled universe.Only because you've applied attributes to the 'god'.

The odds of the physical constants having just the right values for life to emerge are even more fantastical. Either there are a lot of other universes, or something with a preference for life rigged the numbers.:rolleyes: Or it just so happens that the nature of matter and energy include the basics for life to emerge in every Universe, be they one or an infinite number.

Your argument is not logical if I am reading your post correctly. Couldn't I choose any single aspect of the Universe from a Quasar to the uncertainty principle and make the same argument as I could for life being too rare for chance? Heck, think about the fact that something had to have existed infinitely in the past for anything to exist now?

And the 'god' explanation does not solve that question. It adds nothing to the explanation except resignation to magic as the answer to something which seems impossible. It's impossible the Universe is even here. I was pondering recently that the more I think about the illogical premise of any Universe existing it could just disappear because it is not possible to be here in the first place. To be here something had to exist into the infinite past.

Anyway, I get carried away contemplating that. But trying to explain it by saying a god must therefore have been involved is ludicrous.

[Malerin]

On point two, I really honestly think the sharpshooter analogy is really very, very poor, and not at all analogous to the formation of life.

It's not an analogy for the formation of life. It's an analogy that illustrates two points:
1. When you've discovered you've survived certain death, it would naturally occur to wonder why you're still alive. But the event (the sharpshooters all missing) already happened, so it's Pr is 1. But that wouldn't stop you from marvelling over the odds of your survival and wondering why you're still alive. So just because an event happens, and has a Pr of 1 does not mean we can't counterfactually ask why should it have happened.
2. If you survive, and are astounded at the fact of your survival, than that means your survival is a statistically significant event, like 50 heads in a row or a slot machine paying out a jackpot over and over again (you know that a pitboss would fire anyone who didn't pull a slot machine after the 2nd payout, right? It's not a gambler's fallacy. The casino's reason (rightly) that it is much more probable that someone is messing with the machine than the machine happened to pay out twice in a row, even though it is theoretically possible for a machine to pay out 10 times in a row).

So the question becomes, why would your survival be a significant event? Because the odds of 1000 shooters missing you pale in comparison to the odds of someone (or something) intervening on your behalf, say by secretely messing with each rifle's sights, or replacing all the bullets with blanks, or bribing each shooter to miss, or threatening their family members if they don't miss, etc.

How this applies to the universe is we have this phenemenon (life and consciousness), which is categorically different than everything we see around us. Our whole system of taxonomy and how we classify things is based on it. We see boulder over there and person over here and we automatically put them into different categories: if the boulder gets chipped we don't care. If the person gets cut, we try to help them. It's not human-centric- we often do the same for a lame bird or wounded dog. It's life-centric. Living things are simply categorically different than non-living things.

Ok, so then we discover that the odds of life existing are fantastically low (rmember, we can evaluate the odds of events that have already happened). We're then stuck with three possibilities: 1, we got lucky. 2, the universe is cyclical or we're part of a sufficiently large set of other universes 3. Some intelligent being that likes life arranged things so other intelligent beings could exist. This may seem ad-hoc, but it's no more ad hoc than positing the existence of a watchmaker to explain a watch you stumble across. You wouldn't guess a carpenter or plumber made it. Likewise, we wouldn't assume something hostile towards life fine-tuned the constants. Now, if we were already agnostic about the existence of such a being (call it God or a superintelligent race of aliens), the fact that life exists will become more plausible given this being's existence than it would by chance alone. That would leave us with (2) and (3) as plausible choices. The only way (3) would not be a plausible choice is if the odds of such a being existing were roughly the same as the odds of life existing by chance alone. That would be an extreme version of strong atheism, and would need to be argued for by presenting evidence that the existence of such a being is not only not likely, but extremely improbable.


I've outlined why this is so. Your responses fail to address my points in any meaningful manner. Likewise, I find your lottery examples equally as poor. Your entire arguments seem to stem from personal incredulity, and lack any useful meaning.

Peronsal incredulity is not a bad thing. It's simply weighing the odds and deciding that a set of long odds are better explained by intelligent intervention than by chance. How many royal flushes would it take before you decided the dealer was cheating? Would it be rational to stay in a poker game after the third royal flush, or would you be considered a dupe? All based on incredulity.

Factually speaking, we really DON'T know what the probability of key events occuring to allow life actually are, and we really DON'T have quality values to plug in to most of Drake's Equation, so we're really shooting in the dark here.

On the presence of E.T. life, sure. But the fine-tuning argument doesn't need any more life than what we have here on Earth. It's sufficient that complex life exists at all, the odds being what they are. Assume that this is the only planet in the universe with life. OK, we're still left with the question of whether we beat the odds, there's a lot of other univereses, or something intervened on our behalf.

As to point four, yes. I read this and several other works on the topic. And yes, it is interesting that he posits non-carbon life. However, I've been a sci-fi and comic reader for most of my life, and these things are FULL of alternative life forms, throughout the fictional galaxies.

Comic books, yes. Peer reviewed scientific articles? No. We have zero evidence of non-carbon based life. The evidence we do have is that ALL life is carbon-based. If you believe in non-carbon based life, you have a faith-based belief, no different than a theist's. Actually, the theist would be on firmer ground: belief in God does not contradict everything we know of biology.

I'd be not at all surprised to discover a dozen different ways in which life could evolve, all around the universe. In fact, IF THE UNIVERSE WERE FINE-TUNED FOR LIFE, I'd expect to find life in vast diversity all over the universe.

That's a good point, and maybe we will find a diverse amount of life- all carbon-based, like what we've seen so far. Earth certainly has a diverse amount of life. Perhaps there is no set of physical constants that would allow for deep-space life to evolve; it's logically possible, but metaphysically impossible. If a universe-designer didn't want to produce miracles left and right, it might have no choice but to restrict life to fairly narrow parameters (water, carbon, oxygen all being necessary conditions).

As to your further points, the 'fine tuned universe' argument does appear to have some support for it; however, it is also necessary to note that we are necessarily a product of such a universe, and therefore have no choice but to recognize those factors necessary for our existance as being present. We can't, for example, have discussions about why the universal constants fail to promote life if we're not here in the first place.

That's true, but what can we do about it? We can't bail out of a poker game where the dealer deals himself 8 royal flushes unless we're around to see it. That doesn't change the fact that we bail out anyway. Just because we're here doesn't mean we can't counterfactually examine the improbability of us being here. Of the papers I've read against the FT argument, most take this line of attack- that if the universe had been any other way, we wouldn't be around. I think the sharpshooter and lottery analogies are a good counter to this, you obviously don't.

Another point (since you mention how few factors are 'tweaked' in these models) - many of the 26 constants (most, IIRC) deal with quantum particles, wherein changes to the constants would have no or very limited effect on the macroscopic universe. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it true that only four to six of these constants are 'required', and of those, one or two do have SOME play in them?

From what I've read, none of the values of the constants are "fixed" (they can't be derived from other values- they have to be measured). You'd have to get deep into cosmology to examine what the consequences of changing each value would be (There's a site that does this, but it's very biased). All I can do is post quotes from people in the field about the improbability of it all.

Furthermore, I notice you fail, again, to address my 'one planet or multiple universes' problem: why should we accept that the universe is 'fine tuned' for life if it's 99.999% hostile to all life? And if we are allowed to conjecture, to support the fine-tuned theory, that there IS abundant life throughout the universe, why are we not then allowed to conjecture that there are infinite other realities/universes/etc. that cause THIS fine-tuned universe to be the result of random chance?

I think the multiverse theory is just as likely as the God-based alternative. I've always said it's either God or some sort of multiverse. Fine-tuning is evidence for both theories and it's a matter of preference which one a person picks. I don't think a theist can hang his hat on it as proof for God until we find out more about the universe.

BTW - do you have any unbiased source for this list of name-dropping and quotes? The links you've provided are notably biased and of low academic quality

The quotes are, as far as I know, honest quotes from phycists, astronomers, and cosmologists:

Penrose, Hoyle, and Carter are from the Stanford site. Hawking's is from Brief History of Time. Rees wrote a book on it (Just Six Numbers). Paul Davie's is from his book The Mind of God. Andrei Linde is quoted here: http://discovermagazine.com/2008/dec/10-sciences-alternative-to-an-intelligent-creator
It also has a quote form Weinberg and Susskind:

“If [dark energy] had been any bigger, there would have been enough repulsion from it to overwhelm the gravity that drew the galaxies together, drew the stars together, and drew Earth together,” Stanford physicist Leonard Susskind says. “It’s one of the greatest mysteries in physics. All we know is that if it were much bigger we wouldn’t be here to ask about it.”

Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, a physicist at the University of Texas, agrees. “This is the one fine-tuning that seems to be extreme, far beyond what you could imagine just having to accept as a mere accident,” he says.


Each quote on http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics/quotes.html#n02 has a corresponding reference. It seems on the level. You can find other sources for quotes by googling "cosmic fine tuning".

[babbits]

This is an aside:

"Rape is a more complex issue from a humanist ethical perspective, because rape itself is not a specifically detrimental process with regards to humanity as a whole..."

Actually rape is harmful to humanity. The human offspring are notoriously dependent, to at least the age of 7 years or so. It really takes two parents to properly protect and nurture a child.

(A colt can stand and even run on the day it's born. By a few months of age, it's eating grass. Maggots just need to hatch on something edible. No parental care needed.)

So if a rapist generates a child, its chances of survival are poorer than those of a child with two parents. The mother may even abandon or kill it because she hates the memory of the rapist. So the tribe or group is not strengthened by the rapist's act. In fact, the pregnancy depletes the tribe's resources to no purpose.

Rape of a child (male or female) can cause organ damage and infection, and possibly death. This is not good for the tribe, either.

Rape of a woman who has other children can result in their father abandoning them, because his mate is now distasteful to him. This reduces their chance of survival and therefore weakens the tribe.

We can see by the Old Testament itself the high value that primitive people placed on the production of children. A barren wife could be put aside. Coitus interruptus carried the death penalty. A man had a duty to marry his brother's widow, and give her children.

[babbits]

Another basis for defining a moral value is that humans are social animals. Mutual grooming, hunting and gathering as a group, shared child care, mutual defense, being a trustworthy person -- all these behaviors are 'good'.

We feel safer in the company of our fellows if they are truth-tellers; quick to come to our aid if we get in trouble; share their food with us when they can.

I have noticed that theists seem to self-congratulate a lot. They imagine that without theism there is no morality.

But what is seen as 'good', if it furthers the well-being of a group, is good for social reasons. And for a social animal, that means it's good for survival. And that's just part of human nature. We recognize that. That's why the 'golden rule' is universal.

[ShowerComic]

It may be a cop out to those with a PhD in theoretical physics, but I've become something of an 'Agnostic Deist.' To me the term 'God' Capital 'G' has always meant guy in the sky, theistic variety. Be it Adonai choosing to lead his people out of Egypt, or Christ or Allah delivering certain rules and morals. This God is one who either can't exist or must be proven with more evidence.

Questions like why is there something rather than nothing, or is there beauty in the universe despite AIDS, e-coli, earthquakes, etc. I answer : There is beauty because I choose to view something as beautiful. (sunset, trees, etc.) was there something 'before' the Big Bang I see as an unanswerable question. Also a Deistic God isn't something I'd worship, but if the universe is due to him -- His Universe in all it's Awe is something I appreciate.

[Z]

It's not an analogy for the formation of life. It's an analogy that illustrates two points:
1. When you've discovered you've survived certain death, it would naturally occur to wonder why you're still alive. But the event (the sharpshooters all missing) already happened, so it's Pr is 1. But that wouldn't stop you from marvelling over the odds of your survival and wondering why you're still alive. So just because an event happens, and has a Pr of 1 does not mean we can't counterfactually ask why should it have happened.
2. If you survive, and are astounded at the fact of your survival, than that means your survival is a statistically significant event, like 50 heads in a row or a slot machine paying out a jackpot over and over again (you know that a pitboss would fire anyone who didn't pull a slot machine after the 2nd payout, right? It's not a gambler's fallacy. The casino's reason (rightly) that it is much more probable that someone is messing with the machine than the machine happened to pay out twice in a row, even though it is theoretically possible for a machine to pay out 10 times in a row).

So the question becomes, why would your survival be a significant event? Because the odds of 1000 shooters missing you pale in comparison to the odds of someone (or something) intervening on your behalf, say by secretely messing with each rifle's sights, or replacing all the bullets with blanks, or bribing each shooter to miss, or threatening their family members if they don't miss, etc.

A very bad analogy. Because their ability to hit or miss has so much to do with skill and equipment and almost nothing to do with chance. The formation of the universe has so little to do with skill and equipment everything to do with chance.

How this applies to the universe is we have this phenemenon (life and consciousness), which is categorically different than everything we see around us. Our whole system of taxonomy and how we classify things is based on it. We see boulder over there and person over here and we automatically put them into different categories: if the boulder gets chipped we don't care. If the person gets cut, we try to help them. It's not human-centric- we often do the same for a lame bird or wounded dog. It's life-centric. Living things are simply categorically different than non-living things.

... until you start looking closely at their component parts.

Ok, so then we discover that the odds of life existing are fantastically low

I have to object to your use of the term 'fantastically'. It's hardly scientific or objective at all.

(rmember, we can evaluate the odds of events that have already happened). We're then stuck with three possibilities: 1, we got lucky.

Nothing wrong with that.

2, the universe is cyclical or we're part of a sufficiently large set of other universes

Lots of evidence for this in the mathematics and theoretical physics; just no empirical evidence as of yet.

3. Some intelligent being that likes life arranged things so other intelligent beings could exist.

Paradoxical. How could some intelligent being come into existence before the conditions existed for them to come into being?

So 3 has to be rejected as paradoxical.

This may seem ad-hoc, but it's no more ad hoc than positing the existence of a watchmaker to explain a watch you stumble across. You wouldn't guess a carpenter or plumber made it.

But we have examples of watches and watchmakers. Of course we expect a watchmaker when we see a watch - it's not intuitive; it's based on experience. On the other hand, we have absolutely no experience with beings capable of adjusting universal constants, nor of any being capable of generating life or conditions suitable for life. We've found this thing and have no idea how it could have gotten there, or whether it was made or not.

I mean, really - when you see a mountain or a river, do you automatically start looking for a mountainmaker or rivermaker?

Likewise, we wouldn't assume something hostile towards life fine-tuned the constants.

Actually, it's more plausible, seeing as the universe is 99.999% hostile towards life.

Now, if we were already agnostic about the existence of such a being (call it God or a superintelligent race of aliens), the fact that life exists will become more plausible given this being's existence than it would by chance alone.

Incorrect, since the existence of such a being needing to fine-tune the constants for life to exist is paradoxical, as pointed out above. It has to be rejected on this ground alone, unless we claim that some conditions existed for some life to form by chance - and so forth.

That would leave us with (2) and (3) as plausible choices. The only way (3) would not be a plausible choice is if the odds of such a being existing were roughly the same as the odds of life existing by chance alone. That would be an extreme version of strong atheism, and would need to be argued for by presenting evidence that the existence of such a being is not only not likely, but extremely improbable.

Or, simply, impossible by virtue of being paradoxical.

Peronsal incredulity is not a bad thing. It's simply weighing the odds and deciding that a set of long odds are better explained by intelligent intervention than by chance. How many royal flushes would it take before you decided the dealer was cheating? Would it be rational to stay in a poker game after the third royal flush, or would you be considered a dupe? All based on incredulity.

Unless intelligent intervention were not possible, in which case personal incredulity is useless. For example, if the 'dealer' was a machine, incapable of cheating, would you still assume there was some intervention, or just accept that a wild streak of chance occured?

On the presence of E.T. life, sure. But the fine-tuning argument doesn't need any more life than what we have here on Earth. It's sufficient that complex life exists at all, the odds being what they are. Assume that this is the only planet in the universe with life. OK, we're still left with the question of whether we beat the odds, there's a lot of other univereses, or something intervened on our behalf.

Except that the conditions wouldn't allow for something to intervene on our behalf.

Comic books, yes. Peer reviewed scientific articles? No. We have zero evidence of non-carbon based life. The evidence we do have is that ALL life is carbon-based. If you believe in non-carbon based life, you have a faith-based belief, no different than a theist's. Actually, the theist would be on firmer ground: belief in God does not contradict everything we know of biology.

Non-carbon-based life forms are theoretically possible; we can even design what one might be like, simulate its processes, determine the sort of environment that would give rise to them, etc.

Can't do that with God, which is theoretically... well, which is often paradoxical, contradictory, or useless.

That's a good point, and maybe we will find a diverse amount of life- all carbon-based, like what we've seen so far. Earth certainly has a diverse amount of life. Perhaps there is no set of physical constants that would allow for deep-space life to evolve; it's logically possible, but metaphysically impossible. If a universe-designer didn't want to produce miracles left and right, it might have no choice but to restrict life to fairly narrow parameters (water, carbon, oxygen all being necessary conditions).

Parameters that it, itself, would also be bound to.

That's true, but what can we do about it? We can't bail out of a poker game where the dealer deals himself 8 royal flushes unless we're around to see it. That doesn't change the fact that we bail out anyway. Just because we're here doesn't mean we can't counterfactually examine the improbability of us being here. Of the papers I've read against the FT argument, most take this line of attack- that if the universe had been any other way, we wouldn't be around. I think the sharpshooter and lottery analogies are a good counter to this, you obviously don't.

I think they're amazingly poor analogies, in fact, and don't counter anything at all.

From what I've read, none of the values of the constants are "fixed" (they can't be derived from other values- they have to be measured). You'd have to get deep into cosmology to examine what the consequences of changing each value would be (There's a site that does this, but it's very biased). All I can do is post quotes from people in the field about the improbability of it all.

Improbable is certainly not impossible.

I think the multiverse theory is just as likely as the God-based alternative. I've always said it's either God or some sort of multiverse. Fine-tuning is evidence for both theories and it's a matter of preference which one a person picks. I don't think a theist can hang his hat on it as proof for God until we find out more about the universe.

...and can deal with the problem that no life form or intelligence could have come into existence prior to this alleged 'fine tuning' in the first place.

The quotes are, as far as I know, honest quotes from phycists, astronomers, and cosmologists:

Penrose, Hoyle, and Carter are from the Stanford site. Hawking's is from Brief History of Time. Rees wrote a book on it (Just Six Numbers). Paul Davie's is from his book The Mind of God. Andrei Linde is quoted here: http://discovermagazine.com/2008/dec/10-sciences-alternative-to-an-intelligent-creator
It also has a quote form Weinberg and Susskind:

“If [dark energy] had been any bigger, there would have been enough repulsion from it to overwhelm the gravity that drew the galaxies together, drew the stars together, and drew Earth together,” Stanford physicist Leonard Susskind says. “It’s one of the greatest mysteries in physics. All we know is that if it were much bigger we wouldn’t be here to ask about it.”

Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, a physicist at the University of Texas, agrees. “This is the one fine-tuning that seems to be extreme, far beyond what you could imagine just having to accept as a mere accident,” he says.


Each quote on http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics/quotes.html#n02 has a corresponding reference. It seems on the level. You can find other sources for quotes by googling "cosmic fine tuning".

It's a highly biased site, obviously. My point was, it doesn't present the counter arguments at all; nor does it present those who disagree, nor does it accurately present the ENTIRE discussions that each quote was plucked from.

But that's all irrelevant. You have a major problem to address: how can an intelligent being fine-tune the constants to allow life to develop, when life couldn't have developed in the first place? Or, in other words, any such being capable of fine-tuning the universe would either have to come from a prior fine-tuned universe, or come from a universe 'tuned' by random chance alone; and if could come from such a universe, there's no reason why we couldn't as well.

Of course, you have the option of saying that there's an intelligent being that can exist in spite of the universe not allowing an intelligent being to exist. But to do that, you're tossing out scientific reasoning entirely and positing a form of 'magic' - and when you open that floodgate, you're going to let everything in you DIDN'T want... like the idea that the universe magically formed to generate life without ANY intelligence at all.

So until you address the paradox, I don't think the rest of your points matter at all.

[Z]

This is an aside:

"Rape is a more complex issue from a humanist ethical perspective, because rape itself is not a specifically detrimental process with regards to humanity as a whole..."

Actually rape is harmful to humanity. The human offspring are notoriously dependent, to at least the age of 7 years or so. It really takes two parents to properly protect and nurture a child.

(A colt can stand and even run on the day it's born. By a few months of age, it's eating grass. Maggots just need to hatch on something edible. No parental care needed.)

So if a rapist generates a child, its chances of survival are poorer than those of a child with two parents. The mother may even abandon or kill it because she hates the memory of the rapist. So the tribe or group is not strengthened by the rapist's act. In fact, the pregnancy depletes the tribe's resources to no purpose.

Rape of a child (male or female) can cause organ damage and infection, and possibly death. This is not good for the tribe, either.

Rape of a woman who has other children can result in their father abandoning them, because his mate is now distasteful to him. This reduces their chance of survival and therefore weakens the tribe.

We can see by the Old Testament itself the high value that primitive people placed on the production of children. A barren wife could be put aside. Coitus interruptus carried the death penalty. A man had a duty to marry his brother's widow, and give her children.

Excellent points. Thank you.

[RandFan]

Just a simple answer will do, Rand.No because your analogy is fatally flawed. And we've gone over and over and over this. It baffles me how you just can't seem to grasp the significance.

QUESTION: What are the odds of you picking 6 numbers of a 6 number lottery?
ANSWER: 1
QUESTION: What are the odds of you picking the exact 6 numbers of the 6 that WILL be chosen in the next lottery?

The fatal flaw you are making is to suppose that there is significance to the event after it has happened. No one guessed that the world would be as it is before it happened.

So, I'll ask you one more time, what are we to make of the astronomical unlikelyhood of you existing.

Will you answer anytime soon?

[RandFan]

You and Randfan fail to grasp what are called "significant results". These are results that are just as likely as other results, yet we attach greater significance to them. I think you know this because you and Rand will not answer the very simple question I asked about betting.


Your question is beside the point. You are engaging in fallacy. You are finding what you term as an UNLIKELY event and finding significance ATER THE FACT.
Unlikely
After the fact


Your existence is unlikely but deducing some significance after the fact is pointless.
Your existence is unlikely but deducing some significance after the fact is pointless.
Your odds of existing are far greater than any analogy you can come up with yet you refuse to assign any significance to it, why? Is it because the unlikely nature of the evidence appeals to your bias?

[Malerin]

A very bad analogy. Because their ability to hit or miss has so much to do with skill and equipment and almost nothing to do with chance. The formation of the universe has so little to do with skill and equipment everything to do with chance.

Unless something fine-tuned it. You're begging the question.



... until you start looking closely at their component parts.

And do you go around doing that? If you're married, do you appreciate your spouse for the person they are, do you get out your electron microscope and look at their component parts? You're suggesting we adopt a view of life that no one, including yourself, takes seriously. And how do you look at the "component parts" of consciousness? Can you divide your consciouness in pieces? Look at it under a microscope? Consciousness and conscious experience are fundamentally different than physical matter.



I have to object to your use of the term 'fantastically'. It's hardly scientific or objective at all.

I've always liked "crushingly improbable". Or is Stanford's philosophy page also biased? Going by Penrose, the odds of planet formation alone are 10 to the 123rd. I think it's safe to call those "fantastically" low odds. You could posit the existence of non-planetary life, but you would be on very shaky grounds, biologically speaking.



Lots of evidence for this in the mathematics and theoretical physics; just no empirical evidence as of yet.

Right, and theism looks good to a lot of people (the whole "you're deluding yourself" argument). Theists are routinely raked over the coals for believing in something there's no empirical evidence for (which I don't think is true). Things have looked good on paper that have turned out not to be true (e.g., the planet Vulcan to explain Mercury's orbit).



Paradoxical. How could some intelligent being come into existence before the conditions existed for them to come into being?

It's not a paradox, it simply would not be bound by universal constraints.

So 3 has to be rejected as paradoxical.

Not if the universe-designer is outside the physical realm (dualism). There would be a question of causal interaction between the physical and the non-physical, but our inability to explain how dualism would work does not mean dualism can't work.



But we have examples of watches and watchmakers. Of course we expect a watchmaker when we see a watch - it's not intuitive; it's based on experience. On the other hand, we have absolutely no experience with beings capable of adjusting universal constants, nor of any being capable of generating life or conditions suitable for life. We've found this thing and have no idea how it could have gotten there, or whether it was made or not.

We do have that kind of experience regarding life. When you see a baby, does it ever occur to you that random parts simply combined in the right way to produce it? Or were a set of intelligent beings (i.e., its parents) involved?

I mean, really - when you see a mountain or a river, do you automatically start looking for a mountainmaker or rivermaker?

Not until I learn that the odds of a moutain even existing are 10 to the 123rd. Then I begin to wonder whether maybe something that likes orderly universes with mountains, rivers, lots of elements, life, etc. gave the universe a little nudge.



Actually, it's more plausible, seeing as the universe is 99.999% hostile towards life.

It's that .001% that makes all the difference. Esp. if you know that odds of even that .001% are "crushingly improbable". If you're walking along, does it matter if you see one watch or a thousand? You're going to conclude there's a watchmaker either way. Why he chose to make one watch instead of a million might puzzle you, but you'll still be convinced there's a watchmaker. In other words, the life that we see around us is enough to make us wonder about the odds of it all.



Incorrect, since the existence of such a being needing to fine-tune the constants for life to exist is paradoxical, as pointed out above. It has to be rejected on this ground alone, unless we claim that some conditions existed for some life to form by chance - and so forth.

Only if it's bound by universal constraints. I agree that Linde's idea that we're the result of super-intelligent aliens monkeying with the constants doesn't make much sense- what engineered it for them, and so on. Don't think this is a problem for just the theist (where did God come from?). The atheist is in the same bind (why did the Big Bang happen?). Both sides have two claims they can make: God and the universe are eternal, or God and the universe contain the cause of their own existence.



Unless intelligent intervention were not possible, in which case personal incredulity is useless. For example, if the 'dealer' was a machine, incapable of cheating, would you still assume there was some intervention, or just accept that a wild streak of chance occured?

What does it matter if it's a machine? Do you think anyone would stay in a poker game with a machine spitting out royal flush after royal flush? Would a casino just leave a slot-machine in place jackpot after jackpot? Machines malfunction and at some point the probability of a malfunctioning machine outwighes the probablity of an outcome due to random chance.



Except that the conditions wouldn't allow for something to intervene on our behalf.

Why not, if it were a supernatural being capable of intervening whereever and whenever it wants?



Non-carbon-based life forms are theoretically possible; we can even design what one might be like, simulate its processes, determine the sort of environment that would give rise to them, etc.

Except no one's ever been able to make one, nor have we ever observed one in all the places we've looked. It remains in the realm of science fiction. You could attack fine-tuning that way, but like I said, you're on shaky ground, biologically speaking: there's no evidence that non-carbon based life is possible, and plenty of evidence that carbon is a necessary condition for life. It's a life-in-the-gaps solution.

Can't do that with God, which is theoretically... well, which is often paradoxical, contradictory, or useless.

Why not? God's attributes would simply be greater than ours: we can make changes to the universe to a small degree- God can do it on a universal scale. We have some basic knowledge of the universe- God has a lot more knowledge. We love our children and marvel at their existence- God could have the same feelings for us. We're actually on better ground imagining God's existence than some weird lifeform because we already have a lot of the qualities a god would have, only on a much smaller scale. When it comes to non-carbon based life, it's not simply a matter of scale- we have no idea how such life could evolve into anything resembling a complex creature.



I think they're amazingly poor analogies, in fact, and don't counter anything at all.

Ok.



Improbable is certainly not impossible.

Never said it was. 500 heads in a row are not impossible. That wouldn't stop you from being convinced the coin was loaded.



...and can deal with the problem that no life form or intelligence could have come into existence prior to this alleged 'fine tuning' in the first place.

The "first cause" problem that atheists and theists share.



It's a highly biased site, obviously. My point was, it doesn't present the counter arguments at all; nor does it present those who disagree, nor does it accurately present the ENTIRE discussions that each quote was plucked from.

I found you plenty of quotes from non-biased sources. You can do your own research on this.

But that's all irrelevant. You have a major problem to address: how can an intelligent being fine-tune the constants to allow life to develop, when life couldn't have developed in the first place?

Because it's not constrained by those constants.

Or, in other words, any such being capable of fine-tuning the universe would either have to come from a prior fine-tuned universe, or come from a universe 'tuned' by random chance alone; and if could come from such a universe, there's no reason why we couldn't as well.

Right, which rules out any physical cosmic designer.

Of course, you have the option of saying that there's an intelligent being that can exist in spite of the universe not allowing an intelligent being to exist. But to do that, you're tossing out scientific reasoning entirely and positing a form of 'magic' - and when you open that floodgate, you're going to let everything in you DIDN'T want... like the idea that the universe magically formed to generate life without ANY intelligence at all.

Why does a theist have to toss out scientific reasoning? Do you think every scientist is an atheist? Is Gregor Mendel's ideas on genetic any less valid because he was a Catholic monk? Is Planck's work any less important because he was a theist?

If the Universe magically tweaked it's own constants to allow life to exist, that would take some intelligence, wouldn't it? In any case, you can certainly believe in God and not abandon scientific reasoning.

So until you address the paradox, I don't think the rest of your points matter at all.

It's not a paradox. God did it. :)

[KingMerv00]

Forgive me for bailing on this thread but I moved out of my apartment this weekend. Now that I've returned, I see the posts have become crazy long. Anyone care to summarize? I'm sure as hell not responding with a 10,000 word essay.

[Malerin]

Your question is beside the point. You are engaging in fallacy. You are finding what you term as an UNLIKELY event and finding significance ATER THE FACT.
Unlikely
After the fact


Your existence is unlikely but deducing some significance after the fact is pointless.
Your existence is unlikely but deducing some significance after the fact is pointless.
Your odds of existing are far greater than any analogy you can come up with yet you refuse to assign any significance to it, why? Is it because the unlikely nature of the evidence appeals to your bias?

My own existence, improbable as it is, is not a significant event because there's no outside intervention needed to make it more plausible- chance alone suffices to explain why I'm here (this person got together with that person, and on down the line (ignoring, for the moment, the whole fine-tuning problem you would eventually encounter)). A rock existing in a particular place is likewise incredibly implausible, but is not significant. Both my existence and the rock are like a string of heads and tails: incredibly improbable, but easily explained by chance alone.

Now, pulling the first 20 numbers of Pi out of a mystery bag is both improbable AND significant. It is more plausible on the theory of interference than on the theory of chance.

So I've answered your question as best I can. So answer mine: which bag would you guess is non-random: the bag where you pull out 1788925439085435832 or the bag where you pull out the first 20 digits of Pi?

[Limbo]

Forgive me for bailing on this thread but I moved out of my apartment this weekend.

Back with your family? Or did you get your own place?

[KingMerv00]

Back with your family? Or did you get your own place?

Is that on topic? Maybe you think moving back in with the parents is the sign of a trickster God? :D

[Beerina]

I'd like to express something I have recently been finding among people. That being the concept of a non-interferring god.

.....A non-interferring god? So let me get this straight. You don't have any proof that god exists and you don't accept the theory that god has a hand in human affairs.

If you are like most people who subscribe to this belief, you will try to prove that god must exist through science and math, when all you are really proving is that the universe exists. Then when people poke holes in your theories, you will tell them that it's faith based and a personal truth (thus switching methods of arguement and negating any objective arguements made previously).

So my question is: If you have no proof of a god existing, why do you need to believe there is a god at all? Clearly he isn't participating in your life one way or the other. He might as well not exist.

Honestly, I think this is a cowardly perspective to hold. It says, "I'm not going to believe god is involved in my life, but just in case he is, I should still believe he exists, just in case ;) ." Just pick a side already. It's like not calling heads or tails in a coin toss, but rather saying it will land on the narrow end.

Sorry, didn't mean to ramble, just got really into this one. Responses are always welcome. (I'm an athiest btw, just in case there was any confusion).

It's a half step. Be gentle with them. There's still all kinds of wiring in their brains subtly praising them for not giving up on it entirely.



And to you folks, and you know who you are: Next step, realize such a god is not deserving of worship, so just give up on giving it any kind of a shred of respect. Then why bother presuming it exists at all, except, perhaps, as something to be spat on?

[Skeptic Ginger]

Forgive me for bailing on this thread but I moved out of my apartment this weekend. Now that I've returned, I see the posts have become crazy long. Anyone care to summarize? I'm sure as hell not responding with a 10,000 word essay.In summary, it's the fallacy that if something is rare enough, the gods must have done/caused/made it

[Skeptic Ginger]

Here's an interesting clip on the nature of coincidences that addresses the commonness of rarity.

The best point is that such things are determined in retrospect. So of course they look like the impossible happened.

98OTsYfTt-c&feature=player_embedded

[Limbo]

Is that on topic? Maybe you think moving back in with the parents is the sign of a trickster God? :D


lol

No I'm just curious. Everyone moves in with the parents once in a while. ;)

[RandFan]

My own existence, improbable as it is, is not a significant event because there's no outside intervention needed to make it more plausible- Then you have your answer about the origin of the universe. No other explanation is needed. No outside intervention is needed.

Now, pulling the first 20 numbers of Pi out of a mystery bag is both improbable AND significant. It is more plausible on the theory of interference than on the theory of chance. No. Only if you determine ahead of time what the pattern is. You are comparing two events. There IS NO such comparison for the earth. What is frustrating is that you've been told over and over why your example is not an analog. You are comparing apples and oranges. It doesn't work. It's also special pleading. That you exist is unlikely. That the universe exists, you say, is unlikely. Neither example has any meaning. Neither can be compared to your example.

So I've answered your question as best I can. So answer mine: which bag would you guess is non-random: the bag where you pull out 1788925439085435832 or the bag where you pull out the first 20 digits of Pi?The question is fallacious as it applies to the discussion because there is no analog with the creation of the universe. We don't have a comparison. We don't have a predetermined set of numbers to compare it to. I can say that one bag is non-random but it has no bearing on the proposition of a designer or creator.

BTW: Dawkins thoroughly addresses your argument in his newest video (http://richarddawkins.net/article,3752,Richard-Dawkins-at-American-Atheists-09,Richard-Dawkins). I think it starts about :40:00.

[KingMerv00]

In summary, it's the fallacy that if something is rare enough, the gods must have done/caused/made it

Ah, so no change then.

[Malerin]

Then you have your answer about the origin of the universe. No other explanation is needed. No outside intervention is needed.

No. Only if you determine ahead of time what the pattern is.

I have no idea what the pattern will be ahead of time. I pull out 20 numbers from one bag. They're meaningless to me. I pull out 20 more, and they're the first 20 digits of Pi. Hmm, wonder which one was non-random :rolleyes:

You are comparing two events. There IS NO such comparison for the earth. What is frustrating is that you've been told over and over why your example is not an analog. You are comparing apples and oranges. It doesn't work. It's also special pleading. That you exist is unlikely. That the universe exists, you say, is unlikely. Neither example has any meaning. Neither can be compared to your example.

The question is fallacious as it applies to the discussion because there is no analog with the creation of the universe. We don't have a comparison. We don't have a predetermined set of numbers to compare it to. I can say that one bag is non-random but it has no bearing on the proposition of a designer or creator.

BTW: Dawkins thoroughly addresses your argument in his newest video (http://richarddawkins.net/article,3752,Richard-Dawkins-at-American-Atheists-09,Richard-Dawkins). I think it starts about :40:00.

I'll check out the video (only cause it's easier than reading a stats book!), but I notice you still won't answer my question. Ah well.

[Malerin]

It's a half step. Be gentle with them. There's still all kinds of wiring in their brains subtly praising them for not giving up on it entirely.



And to you folks, and you know who you are: Next step, realize such a god is not deserving of worship, so just give up on giving it any kind of a shred of respect. Then why bother presuming it exists at all, except, perhaps, as something to be spat on?

Ouch, someone got bullied by God as a kid.

[Malerin]

Rand, are you sure you're an atheist? For a group of atheists, there sure is a lot of worship going around. You'd think Dawkins was a god of some kind...

[RandFan]

I have no idea what the pattern will be ahead of time. You DO know what the pattern of Pi is. THAT'S the point. It's the point I keep making. That someone will win the lottery is a fact. Knowing who will win the lottery before it happens is a statistical impossibility.

I pull out 20 numbers from one bag. They're meaningless to me. I pull out 20 more, and they're the first 20 digits of Pi. Hmm, wonder which one was non-random :rolleyes: You know what the first 20 digits of Pi are, right? To state what will happen in the future based on what you know right now is the point.

I'll check out the video (only cause it's easier than reading a stats book!), but I notice you still won't answer my question. Ah well.I did answer the question. It goes without saying that one is likely not random. However it misses the point. It's not an analog of the creation of the universe.

[RandFan]

Rand, are you sure you're an atheist? For a group of atheists, there sure is a lot of worship going around. You'd think Dawkins was a god of some kind...I don't pray to Dawkins. I don't think he is possesed of any mystical or magical properties. I don't think Dawkins is infalible. There are a number of things I disagree with Dawkins on. He's a human quite capable of being rude and at times obnoxious.

Why do you say I "worship" Dawkins? How exactly?

[Malerin]

God, that man is annoying. You guys need another spokesman. Anyway, Dawkins mischaracterizes fine-tuning (it's not just six numbers, he got that from the title of Rees's book), and his objections are standard fare: God just shifts the problem up a level (God would need some sort of fine-tuning? That one wasn't clear), the constants are set at certain life-permitting levels (Dawkins criticizes this rightly because it would lead one to wonder why all possible universes would have to be life-permitting ones), Victor Stenger's rejection of fine-tuning (pitifully outnumbered by fine-tuning proponents, at the moment), and finally multiverse theory. Nothing new here.

They never panned to the audience (in the part I watched). I wonder how many people were there. Oh, and there was a funny bit where he asked if anyone had read Hoyle's book and got no response. Maybe cause it was written in 1957? Not exactly on the bestseller list anymore, Richard!

So anyway, Rand, since you don't think 500 Heads in a row are any different than a specific combination of heads and tails, we should get together and bet on some coin tosses sometime. Bring lots of money :)

[Malerin]

I don't pray to Dawkins. I don't think he is possesed of any mystical or magical properties. I don't think Dawkins is infalible. There are a number of things I disagree with Dawkins on. He's a human quite capable of being rude and at times obnoxious.

Why do you say I "worship" Dawkins? How exactly?

I was being facetious. He seems to be very popular at the moment. Had a fight with the misses lately?

[RandFan]

God, that man is annoying. You guys need another spokesman. Anyway, Dawkins mischaracterizes fine-tuning (it's not just six numbers, he got that from the title of Rees's book), and his objections are standard fare: God just shifts the problem up a level (God would need some sort of fine-tuning? That one wasn't clear), the constants are set at certain life-permitting levels (Dawkins criticizes this rightly because it would lead one to wonder why all possible universes would have to be life-permitting ones), Victor Stenger's rejection of fine-tuning (pitifully outnumbered by fine-tuning proponents, at the moment), and finally multiverse theory. Nothing new here. Rhetorical and does not address Dawkins arguments. And are you really suggesting that theoretical physicists are running to embrace "fine tuning" as being proof of something? Shirley you jest.

And yeah, god does in fact tell us absolutely nothing about how the universe was created. It's a perfectly valid point.

So anyway, Rand, since you don't think 500 Heads in a row are any different than a specific combination of heads and tails, we should get together and bet on some coin tosses sometime. Bring lots of money :)You've made this point before and I don't know how many times I can make the same rebutal and refer you to Innumeracy. If you don't understand why a predetermined pattern (500 heads in a row is a pre-determined pattern) isn't a valid comparison to your existence or the existence of "fine tuning" then I don't know what else to say. If you consider your existince significant you are doing so in hind sight. Same with the universe. BOTH are viewed in hind sight. Oh, and BTW, ANY patern of 500 flips is as unlikely as 500 heads in a row. I challenge you to pick a precise pattern before OR flip the same pattern twice.

I'm getting really tempted to offer buying you Paulos' book (http://www.amazon.com/Innumeracy-Mathematical-Illiteracy-Consequences-Vintage/dp/0679726012). But like they say, you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink. I can't force you to accept that your argument is a fallacy.

[RandFan]

I was being facetious. He seems to be very popular at the moment. Had a fight with the misses lately?It's a real claim made by many theists. I've no way to tell if you are being facetious or not.

[thesyntaxera]

Then you have your answer about the origin of the universe. No other explanation is needed. No outside intervention is needed.

Unless I am mistaken I don't believe the they have quite got a grasp on that one. I mean, what evidence is there to suggest otherwise that action wasn't required? I know this is a broad question, but it seems to me that both sides of the debate are suffering from a nasty case of assuming too much.

**by debate I mean the bigger picture, not just this thread**

[KingMerv00]

About the fine-tuned universal constants:

We have no evidence to estimate how likely or unlikely the current configuration of constants is. If, it turns out that the constants are dependent on one another the probability would be much greater that they would be as they appear now. Perhaps the odds are not 1:infinity but 1:3. We simply don't have enough information to make an educated guess.

Also, I'm still failing to see how our universe is significant in any objective sense.

[Skeptic Ginger]

Ah, so no change then.Fraid not. There are only so many arguments one can make that there is evidence supporting god beliefs. Once the arguments have been discredited, all that is left is to recycle them.

[Z]

<moronically long post removed>
It's not a paradox. God did it. :)

Right. In other words, it's magic. Logic and reason are out the window, and there's no reason to even consider the odds for or against creation.

The moment you decide that the Creator is unconstrained by the rules you constrain everything else to, that's a cosmic fail. If some Creator existed that doesn't need to be created or to have the cosmic constants tweaked for its own existence, then the rules are out the window anyway. You want to invoke a Creator that's inherently illogical and irrational to counter incredible odds that manifested and, reasonalby and logically, certainly could have manifested anyway. It's a child's response to the realization, ultimately, that they have no argument after all.

Go ahead and posit God all you want - it's just a declaration of 'It's magic! It works because I say it does!'

But until you can reasonably deal with the creator paradox, without resorting to throwing logic and reason out the window, your argument is irrelevant.

Thanks for playing, Mal!

[uruk]

Invisible pink unicorns might as well not exist since we have no awareness of them. :rolleyes: Our awarness or non-awarnes of something is not requesite for something to exist. The universe existed long before we did. The universe existed long before there was anything capable of percieving it's existance.

(Although invisible and pink are mutualy exclusive traits.)

Apples and oranges. You've described a person existing and then hypothesized one might not be aware of the person. I might not be aware, but there is clearly evidence of the person in your hypothetical example. There is no evidence of gods, period. Gods are equal to invisible pink unicorns but not equal to something that exists but we never see. What is that clear evidence of the person's existance if they remove the evidence of thier existance?

The analogy I used makes the assumption that a god exists. We are the person who is unaware of the existance of a god due to the action of the god purposly hiding from us. We cannot find evidence for the existance of something that actively eliminates evidence of it's existance.

All you can say with certainty is that you have seen no evidence for the existance of a god or gods. That does not necessarily mean that the evidence doesn't exist either. You just have never come across it. And if there is a god or gods that actively removes evidence of it's existance then there will be no evidence to find.

But it is not just that we are unaware, it is that everyone is equally unaware. The god you hypothesize has ZERO impact on the Universe. That means no one can be aware, not just that no one is aware. It's absurd. People don't bother thinking about the possibility of invisible pink unicorns. Why bother with gods? Again this does not negate the possibility of there being a god or gods. If they choose not to be detected then we will not detect them.

Wrong! We can say with certainty there is overwhelming evidence god beliefs are nonsense. That leaves exactly zero evidence god beliefs are based on human encounters with real gods. Maybe, but that still does not negate the possible existance of a god or gods. All that just says that our god beliefs are more than likely nonsense and that type of god more than likely does not exist. Particularly the illogical god description.

But then who said that gods had to conform to our belief system.

Who cares? Imagine all the ancient Egyptians toiling their lives away building a pyramid that the pharaoh is buried in to carry him off to the afterlife. I'm confident the evidence supports the prediction that a person in the future will imagine the same thing about god believers today. Go into the future and god believers today will look as ignorant as Egyptians building pyramids did in the past. Maybe, maybe not. We might be headed for another dark age in the future and god beliefs will run rampant again. I can't tell the future, can you?


There's no reason to be agnostic about Ra and Pele. Just follow the evidence from there to the conclusion: all god beliefs are the same. Where is there any evidence this is not the case? I am not agnostic about any god belife we have had in the past or present. I am fairly certain that pretty much all god belifes we have are inconsistant and illogical. I am agnostic about the possibilty of the existance of a "thing" that may be the cause of this existance. Science has not yet and may never be able to describe the full nature of this existance. Certainly within my lifetime.

I know that that there is no reason to think that there was some some "thing" that was the cause of all this, but then there is reason to not think that either. At least not yet.

Put another way, how many myths does it take to form a theory explaining god beliefs? And once you explain god beliefs, there is nothing else left to waste time being agnostic about. The thing I am calling my hypothetical god is beyond our realm of experiance. itis non interactive an therefore undetectable by our realm of senses and cognition. We are incable of concieving it. Just because we can't wrap our little brains around this god does not mean that it cannot exist. Our awarness or knowledge of or ability to describe or concieve something does mean that this thing cannot exist.

In fact the existance of a god does not even require that we exist either.

[uruk]

So why would you even come up with the idea of this person in the first place? And if you did, how likely do you think it would be that any characteristics you applied to this person (height, hair colour, intentions, species, etc.) matched? And what would you say to your neighbour who similarly cannot see your non-existant person, but is of the opinion that their non-existant person is a purple cat? Or your other neighbour whose non-existant person is a sentient slime-mold? Out of millions of non-existant persons, why bother selecting one or two to be agnostic about?

Linda
That is the thing about analogies, particularly bad analogies, that it easiy to get lost in them or the intended idea not be transmitted.

Let me refine the analogy a bit. lets say that the unaware person represents us or all sentient species within the universe. The person who is hiding represents a god. Not necessarily any god that has been worshipped or described in history. Lets just say the basic requsite for a god is that it either created this existance or has the ability to do so.

That means that this god is hiding from all observers. Both sentient and physical (meaning any interaction with the mechanics of this universe or existance) This god is actively removing any evidence of its existance to any observers and it does not interefere or interact with us. Lets say it just chooses to observe.

There is nothing we can do to find evidence of it's existance or prove that it exists.
None of our efforts to prove or disprove this god affects the actual existance of this god.

We can go about our merry way not believing in it's existance or even trying to look for it for that matter. For all intents an purposes this god does not exist to us. It doesn't care wether we acknowledge it's existance or not. It just want to observe us for whatever infoathomable reason it may have.

But all this has no bearing on the existance of that god or being or "thing" at all.

Who can say with any certainty that this kind of god cannot exist on some level?

[fls]

That is the thing about analogies, particularly bad analogies, that it easiy to get lost in them or the intended idea not be transmitted.

Let me refine the analogy a bit. lets say that the unaware person represents us or all sentient species within the universe. The person who is hiding represents a god. Not necessarily any god that has been worshipped or described in history. Lets just say the basic requsite for a god is that it either created this existance or has the ability to do so.

I got your analogy the first time. What I tried to do was to use your analogy in order to get an answer to the question that is at the heart of this discussion. Why would it occur to anyone to make-up a non-interfering god in the first place?

I have no problem imagining all sorts of magical, mystical entities, all carefully crafted to avoid detection so that I can confidently declare "well, you can't prove that my invisible pink unicorn isn't making bunny ears over your head, so nyah, nyah, nyah." But why are you taking my made-up creatures seriously?

Linda

[KingMerv00]

Who can say with any certainty that this kind of god cannot exist on some level?

It really isn't about believing in God. It is about having a good reason to believe in God.

[Lord Emsworth]

Who can say with any certainty that this kind of god cannot exist on some level?

In fact there are all kinds of Gods that exist on all kinds of levels. In any case I think that the "kind of god" that you are alluding to is semantically empty and meaningless.

[Skeptic Ginger]

Our awarness or non-awarnes of something is not requesite for something to exist. The universe existed long before we did. The universe existed long before there was anything capable of percieving it's existance.That's not the point. We were not aware of the Universe before it existed, now were we?

Anyone can define an untestable god. So what? I can define an untestable invisible pink unicorn too. The point is it's time for the scientific community to stop the double standard of defending the possibility of gods based solely on the fact one can imagine gods. Are you agnostic about invisible pink unicorns and do you tell everyone who says Harry Potter is a fictional character that, "he could exist, you can't be sure he doesn't"?


(Although invisible and pink are mutualy exclusive traits.)Not if the unicorn is pink when visible but becomes invisible. Invisible people can see the pink. I can make up my myth so you can't debunk it.

What is that clear evidence of the person's existance if they remove the evidence of thier existance?
[ship, blah blah blah]I repeat, anyone can define an untestable god. So what?

I am not agnostic about any god belife we have had in the past or present. I am fairly certain that pretty much all god belifes we have are inconsistant and illogical. I am agnostic about the possibilty of the existance of a "thing" that may be the cause of this existance. Science has not yet and may never be able to describe the full nature of this existance. Certainly within my lifetime.

I know that that there is no reason to think that there was some some "thing" that was the cause of all this, but then there is reason to not think that either. At least not yet.Yes there is a reason to not think it.

There are two competing scientific principles here. Principle one, the one you are arguing, is there are no limits on potential scientific discoveries. No facts are absolute in science. What we believe is a fact today, may very well be incorrect.

But the second principle rarely considered when addressing all those people's god beliefs that are hard to ignore, is the principle of following the evidence. And that evidence clearly supports the conclusion that all the god beliefs throughout human history have been demonstrated to be myths. The hypothesis that people make god beliefs up is easily demonstrated. The hypothesis that there is no valid evidence of any real encounters between gods and people is supported by the evidence.

The evidence supported god theory then is, people made up god beliefs. There is no evidence gods exist.

That's it. We don't need to add all the apologies for why we shouldn't tell 80% of the people on the planet they believe in myths. We don't add those caveats every time we discuss the potential for a real Harry Potter world or invisible pink unicorns.

[Skeptic Ginger]

It really isn't about believing in God. It is about having a good reason to believe in God.I think it's more about how difficult it is to confront people with the fact their core belief is in a myth.

[uruk]

I got your analogy the first time. What I tried to do was to use your analogy in order to get an answer to the question that is at the heart of this discussion. Why would it occur to anyone to make-up a non-interfering god in the first place? My bad.

I would think that there are several reason as to why a person would come up with a non interfereing god.
1. Some desire to attribute some causation to the creation of this existance to an intelligence while trying to avoid the logical pitfalls of the pantheon of the god myths we have.

2. To still cling to the notion that there is a supreme entity of somesort while trying to reconcile the lack of evidence for the existance of that entity.

3. To explain why prayer is only randomly effective.

I'm sure there are more that I can't think of at the moment.

I have no problem imagining all sorts of magical, mystical entities, all carefully crafted to avoid detection so that I can confidently declare "well, you can't prove that my invisible pink unicorn isn't making bunny ears over your head, so nyah, nyah, nyah." But why are you taking my made-up creatures seriously?

Linda A made up bunny or unicorn is not in the same philosophical arena as the idea of a god. An invisible bunny or unicorn is not given the attribute of creating a universe. A god is. You can say your god is an invisible bunny or invisible pink unicorn But the bunny or unicorn attribute is irrelevent to the concept of god.

The concept of god is deeply ingrained in us. Don't you think it says something about our species psychological make up or wiring that just about every culture on the planet initially had a god or a supernatural belief? It is almost as if that we are by default wired to believe in a god and the supernatural in the absence of knowledge.

As we learn more about ourselves and the universe around us the need for a god falls away.

It is easy for us to dismiss invisible bunnies and pink unicorns because they do not hold all the baggage that a god concept holds for us.

Most people do not believe in unicorns, leprecauns, Zeus, mermaids, invisible bunnies and pink unicorns and soforth, but yet the god belief persists. Why? What is it about us as a species that still clings to that notion?

[Beth]

The point is it's time for the scientific community to stop the double standard of defending the possibility of gods based solely on the fact one can imagine gods. Could you give me an example of this 'double standard'? Because I just don't see it myself.

Most people do not believe in unicorns, leprecauns, Zeus, mermaids, invisible bunnies and pink unicorns and soforth, but yet the god belief persists. Why? What is it about us as a species that still clings to that notion?

I suspect that such a belief has been evolutionarily advantageous for us. The other other explanation I find credible (but not persuasive) is that some sort of god actually does exist. I don't see why else it would have persisted for so many millenia.

[uruk]

It really isn't about believing in God. It is about having a good reason to believe in God. What one finds as a "good reason" is relative to the individual.

The fact remains that the existance of a god cannot be proved or disproved. That seems to be enough for some people.

Science even realizes that there are some aspects to our universe in which we may only ever to be able to hypothesize on. We may never be able to find evidence or even be able to comprehend certain things.

The difference between science and religion in this aspect is that science admits it's limitations.

What "good reasons" do we have to hold on to certain hypothesis for which there may never be evidence to support them?

[KingMerv00]

What one finds as a "good reason" is relative to the individual.

So people claiming that ESP exists is just as good as testing for ESP?


What "good reasons" do we have to hold on to certain hypothesis for which there may never be evidence to support them?

None.

[uruk]

In fact there are all kinds of Gods that exist on all kinds of levels. In any case I think that the "kind of god" that you are alluding to is semantically empty and meaningless.
Semantics and meaning are human constructs.

The existance of the universe does not depend on our definitions, thoughts or even our own existance. Why would a non-interactive god's existance depend on those things?

[uruk]

So people claiming that ESP exists is just as good as testing for ESP?
People can come up with reasons to believe something that is sufficient or good enough for them. It happens all the time. It's one reason the god belief persists.

None. Exactly, yet they still hold on to pet hypothesis even though there's no good reason to do so. Personal choice perhaps?

[RandFan]

Unless I am mistaken I don't believe the they have quite got a grasp on that one. I mean, what evidence is there to suggest otherwise that action wasn't required? I know this is a broad question, but it seems to me that both sides of the debate are suffering from a nasty case of assuming too much. Give me a parsimonious theory that isn't recursive and doesn't rely on appeals to unkown forces.

Until you do that then this side of the debate will accept as an answer "I don't know".

Oh, and BTW,

Motion of the sun and planets? Turned out no supernatural force was necassary.
Circulatory system? No supernatural force was necassary.
DNA?
Structure of matter?
Energy?
Radio waves?
Propigation of light?
Osmosis?
Etc., etc., etc????
The gap for god to hide in keeps shrinking.

[uruk]

[quote] Anyone can define an untestable god. So what? I can define an untestable invisible pink unicorn too. The point is it's time for the scientific community to stop the double standard of defending the possibility of gods based solely on the fact one can imagine gods. Are you agnostic about invisible pink unicorns and do you tell everyone who says Harry Potter is a fictional character that, "he could exist, you can't be sure he doesn't"? I don't think the scientific community is trying to defend a specific kind of god or one soley based on ability to imagine one.

Who was it that said that anything has the possibility of existing for which nothing has yet been discovered that would prevent it existance? That's not the exact wording but I believe it is the general idea. Was it Murry Gell-Mann?

If there is nothing that would prevent the existance of a god in the general sense, then there exists a possibility for it's existance.

Many of our traditional or specific god beliefs have many logical and attribute contradictions that would decrease those particular types of god's possibility to exist.

Made up gods and invisible pink unicorns and Harry potter have an extremely low possibility for existance because they exhibit many logical problems and they are ideas that were admittedly created by thier authors. It doesn't matter if other people believe whole heartedly that Harry Potter is real, the fact remains that Harry Potter was created by a person. And that can be objectively supported by the logical contradictions inherent to the idea of his existance in our reality. In other words, there are reasons or attributes for which we can exclude thier existance.

Now it is harder to find reasons to exclude the existance of a god in it's most basic conception. Meaning it is easier to exclude the existance of the Christian god then the basic concept of a god in general.



Not if the unicorn is pink when visible but becomes invisible. Invisible people can see the pink. I can make up my myth so you can't debunk it. The more specific the attributes of the unicorn the easier it is to exclude it's existance. If the invisible pink unicorn was an idea made up by a person then the possibility for it's existance decreases radicaly. A unicorn is a horse with a single horn on it's head. Horses exists, animals with a single horn on it's head exist. So the possibility for a horse with one horn on it's head having existed at one time remains a possibility however remote.

And someone at some time in the future could geneticaly manipulate a horse to produce one with a horn on it's head. Pink is also a possibility. Invisibility is a less likely attribute. There are physical problems with the concept of invisibility that make it highly unlikely to have an invisible animal.

If you add all that up, there are significant reasons to exclude the existance of invisible pink unicorns. Is it a statistical zero? Probably Is the probability zero for all intents and purposes? More than likley.

That's what I believe about the existance of god. For all intents and purposes the probability or possibility for the existance of god is pretty close to zero, but it is not actually zero. The more specific the defintion of god is the closer to zero it gets.


Yes there is a reason to not think it.

There are two competing scientific principles here. Principle one, the one you are arguing, is there are no limits on potential scientific discoveries. No facts are absolute in science. What we believe is a fact today, may very well be incorrect. Possibly. Our understanding grows by leaps and bounds. There may also very well be limitations to what we can know. Concepts like "where is our universe" and "what was before Big Bang' may very well be beyond our abilities to comprehend. This also may be true with god.


But the second principle rarely considered when addressing all those people's god beliefs that are hard to ignore, is the principle of following the evidence. And that evidence clearly supports the conclusion that all the god beliefs throughout human history have been demonstrated to be myths. The hypothesis that people make god beliefs up is easily demonstrated. The hypothesis that there is no valid evidence of any real encounters between gods and people is supported by the evidence. But this just says that our past beliefs of god are incorrect and false and that many have been made up. It does not necessarily rule out the existance of god or put the possibility of the existance of a god at zero.

For some reason that may very well have to do with the physical nature of our brains, the god concept seems to be a default concept. And science has led to an indication that "something" "outside" (whatever meaning that may have) this universe initiated it in some yet unkown fashion. Big Bang is an initial point of existance. It is the begining of space/time for our universe.

It could very well be just colliding membranes, strings or dimensions or whatever it is that is underlineing the uncertainty principal, but we don't yet know and we may never know.

It could also be something that is akin to the most basic attribute of a god. That is a creator or initiator. It may not be a god by any definition that we can concieve as god.

And either way you go, god as initiator or universe as always having existed you still end up with the "turtles all the way down" anomoly. So one idea is no more or less irrational that the other. Or at least by our level of comprehension.

The evidence supported god theory then is, people made up god beliefs. There is no evidence gods exist. The evidence only supports our particular god concepts were made up, it is not evidence against the existance of god. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

That is what I mean by the existance of a god is not dependent upon our concepts. Either a god or gods exist in some form or they don't. Our belief or disbelief in a god or gods or our definitions of god has no bearing on thier existance or non existance.

Just like our perceptions or definitions of this universe has no bearing on the existance of this universe.

That's it. We don't need to add all the apologies for why we shouldn't tell 80% of the people on the planet they believe in myths. We don't add those caveats every time we discuss the potential for a real Harry Potter world or invisible pink unicorns. The god myth is different than Harry Potter and pink unicorns fantasies. One false belief is window dressing for a code of conduct and coping mechanizim while the other is entertainment. They hold different socialistic meaning.
If you take away harry potter and pink unicorns you only piss off a few people. You take away a god myth and you have riots in nations.

[fls]

My bad.

I would think that there are several reason as to why a person would come up with a non interfereing god.
1. Some desire to attribute some causation to the creation of this existance to an intelligence while trying to avoid the logical pitfalls of the pantheon of the god myths we have.

2. To still cling to the notion that there is a supreme entity of somesort while trying to reconcile the lack of evidence for the existance of that entity.

3. To explain why prayer is only randomly effective.

I'm sure there are more that I can't think of at the moment.

But none of those are reasons to come up with a non-interfering god. They are simply reasons to maintain belief in something called "God". But the subject of that belief is BS in the sense that it doesn't matter in the least whether or not it exists. It's really about belief in belief, not belief in God.

A made up bunny or unicorn is not in the same philosophical arena as the idea of a god. An invisible bunny or unicorn is not given the attribute of creating a universe. A god is. You can say your god is an invisible bunny or invisible pink unicorn But the bunny or unicorn attribute is irrelevent to the concept of god.

"Creating a universe" is also irrelevant to the idea of a god. If you are BSing, anything is up for grabs.

The concept of god is deeply ingrained in us. Don't you think it says something about our species psychological make up or wiring that just about every culture on the planet initially had a god or a supernatural belief? It is almost as if that we are by default wired to believe in a god and the supernatural in the absence of knowledge.

We may be hardwired to believe in belief, but we aren't hardwired to believe in gods or the supernatural. Gods and the supernatural are merely the side-effect of increasing knowledge. We look for patterns and postulate entities to account for those patterns (animals or forces of nature, for example), but those entities are meant to be part of the universe. And we tend to think of these entities as agents somewhat like ourselves, but with more abilities - i.e. there's an element of conscious thought or capriciousness behind those things like the weather or the movements of the heavenly bodies or the creation of the universe. But as we acquire more knowledge about these processes, and discover that they don't require a capricious agent, we no longer have a place for the characters in our stories to act. As the stories have become important to us for other reasons, we've simply created a new realm in which they take place. But there's no way to distinguish the supernatural a priori.

As we learn more about ourselves and the universe around us the need for a god falls away.

It is easy for us to dismiss invisible bunnies and pink unicorns because they do not hold all the baggage that a god concept holds for us.

Which is why they are brought up as examples - it makes it easy to see that the only difference between god beliefs and other BS is the baggage, not that there is any inherent usefulness to gods.

Most people do not believe in unicorns, leprecauns, Zeus, mermaids, invisible bunnies and pink unicorns and soforth, but yet the god belief persists. Why? What is it about us as a species that still clings to that notion?

Narratives perform a powerful social function as well as belief in belief.

Please note that when I am referring to BS, I am using the concept as outlined by Frankfurt in On ******** (http://press.princeton.edu/titles/7929.html), whereby the purveyor is uninterested in whether something is true or false, but rather uses it as true to serve a particular purpose. Anything whose existence has not been prevented can serve as BS.

Linda

[Skeptic Ginger]

Could you give me an example of this 'double standard'? Because I just don't see it myself. Is there an equivalent word for 'agnostic' that applies to non-theist conclusions? Are some people 'agnostic' about evolution theory?

Is it possible Harry Potter's world is real? Technically, it is just as possible as heaven existing. But does the scientific community discuss the caveat, "but we can't disprove it", when discussing fiction such as Harry Potter?

How many god beliefs need to be demonstrably mythical before we can say the pattern appears universal to all god beliefs? How many different tree species need you see before you conclude there is a recognizable pattern for a tree species? Why do we not discuss the recognizable pattern of god beliefs as a scientific subject rather than saying, science doesn't test for gods?



I suspect that such a belief has been evolutionarily advantageous for us. The other other explanation I find credible (but not persuasive) is that some sort of god actually does exist. I don't see why else it would have persisted for so many millenia.Sometimes the evolutionary advantage has other consequences. It's an advantage to have a brain that looks for causal relationships. It's a side effect to assume causal relationships when there are really only temporal relationships.

[Skeptic Ginger]

I don't think the scientific community is trying to defend a specific kind of god or one soley based on ability to imagine one.

Who was it that said that anything has the possibility of existing for which nothing has yet been discovered that would prevent it existance? That's not the exact wording but I believe it is the general idea. Was it Murry Gell-Mann?

If there is nothing that would prevent the existance of a god in the general sense, then there exists a possibility for it's existance. You are just repeating the same thing, one can describe a god that we can't prove doesn't exist. We got that part.

Many of our traditional or specific god beliefs have many logical and attribute contradictions that would decrease those particular types of god's possibility to exist.

Made up gods and invisible pink unicorns and Harry potter have an extremely low possibility for existance because they exhibit many logical problems and they are ideas that were admittedly created by thier authors. It doesn't matter if other people believe whole heartedly that Harry Potter is real, the fact remains that Harry Potter was created by a person. And that can be objectively supported by the logical contradictions inherent to the idea of his existance in our reality. In other words, there are reasons or attributes for which we can exclude thier existance.

Now it is harder to find reasons to exclude the existance of a god in it's most basic conception. Meaning it is easier to exclude the existance of the Christian god then the basic concept of a god in general.Nonsense. I can exclude the existence of gods based on the same thing you are excluding Harry Potter's world, someone made it up. The evidence overwhelmingly supports the conclusion people made god beliefs up and there is no evidence real gods ever interacted with people.

The problem is after we follow the evidence and find it supports the conclusion gods are fictional characters, the scientific community wants to make an exception and give the fiction plausibility. While there are fictional concepts with real Universe evidence that gives the fiction plausibility, there is no such real Universe evidence for gods. Why does god fiction have more value than Harry Potter fiction?



...That's what I believe about the existance of god. For all intents and purposes the probability or possibility for the existance of god is pretty close to zero, but it is not actually zero. The more specific the defintion of god is the closer to zero it gets. Actually, any attribute other than "non-interfering" gets you to zero. Name another that doesn't. Interferes only on other planets? :rolleyes:


Possibly. Our understanding grows by leaps and bounds. There may also very well be limitations to what we can know. Concepts like "where is our universe" and "what was before Big Bang' may very well be beyond our abilities to comprehend. This also may be true with god.Again, you repeat the same argument. The argument is a principle of the scientific process. Science seeks explanations but not proofs and all 'facts' are tentative.

You can only use it to defend a non-interfering god concept and a non-interfering god cannot logically make anyone aware of its presence.


But this just says that our past beliefs of god are incorrect and false and that many have been made up. It does not necessarily rule out the existance of god or put the possibility of the existance of a god at zero.It does, however, leave zero evidence left upon which to bother contemplating non-interfering gods. There is a reason to contemplate before and outside the Universe. Other things in the Universe are finite so have 'outsides' and are not created out of nothing so have 'before' existences.

For some reason that may very well have to do with the physical nature of our brains, the god concept seems to be a default concept. And science has led to an indication that "something" "outside" (whatever meaning that may have) this universe initiated it in some yet unkown fashion. Big Bang is an initial point of existance. It is the begining of space/time for our universe.Neuroscience is going to eventually explain the mechanism of god beliefs. Once we see it is merely a mistake of perception, then what will the scientific community say? "Yes but gods could still exist."

It could very well be just colliding membranes, strings or dimensions or whatever it is that is underlineing the uncertainty principal, but we don't yet know and we may never know.

It could also be something that is akin to the most basic attribute of a god. That is a creator or initiator. It may not be a god by any definition that we can concieve as god.

And either way you go, god as initiator or universe as always having existed you still end up with the "turtles all the way down" anomoly. So one idea is no more or less irrational that the other. Or at least by our level of comprehension.God and turtles are a fabricated layer of explanation which add nothing. Maybe it's gods all the way down. These are useless layers.

The evidence only supports our particular god concepts were made up, it is not evidence against the existance of god. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Back to arguing what is not disagreed with. The point is not that the scientific principles are wrong. The point is there is evidence god beliefs are human imagination and there is no reason to say more than that. No evidence left over to ponder. Time to call god beliefs what they are. Fiction.

That is what I mean by the existance of a god is not dependent upon our concepts. Either a god or gods exist in some form or they don't. Our belief or disbelief in a god or gods or our definitions of god has no bearing on thier existance or non existance.

Just like our perceptions or definitions of this universe has no bearing on the existance of this universe.

The god myth is different than Harry Potter and pink unicorns fantasies. One false belief is window dressing for a code of conduct and coping mechanizim while the other is entertainment. They hold different socialistic meaning.
If you take away harry potter and pink unicorns you only piss off a few people. You take away a god myth and you have riots in nations.Now you are arguing for the social benefits of god beliefs. That's a different subject.

[Beth]

Is there an equivalent word for 'agnostic' that applies to non-theist conclusions? Are some people 'agnostic' about evolution theory? Yes.

Is it possible Harry Potter's world is real? Technically, it is just as possible as heaven existing. Yes

But does the scientific community discuss the caveat, "but we can't disprove it", when discussing fiction such as Harry Potter? No. Is this what you consider treating them differently? Because I don't see it that it way. I think if a significant portion of the general public was of the opinion that Harry Potter was real, they might. You hear it when they are discussing "The Matrix".

How many god beliefs need to be demonstrably mythical before we can say the pattern appears universal to all god beliefs? How many different tree species need you see before you conclude there is a recognizable pattern for a tree species? Why do we not discuss the recognizable pattern of god beliefs as a scientific subject rather than saying, science doesn't test for gods? I believe that people DO discuss the recognizable pattern of god beliefs as a scientific subject. Testing for gods is another question.

Sometimes the evolutionary advantage has other consequences. It's an advantage to have a brain that looks for causal relationships. It's a side effect to assume causal relationships when there are really only temporal relationships. Maybe. I am disinclined to presume religious beliefs are a side-effect when the beneficial aspects are becoming rather well documented.

[Skeptic Ginger]

Yes. What is that equivalent word for agnostic then, Beth? Or did you misunderstand my post?
Yes
No. Is this what you consider treating them differently? Because I don't see it that it way. I think if a significant portion of the general public was of the opinion that Harry Potter was real, they might. You hear it when they are discussing "The Matrix". Are you agnostic about Thor or Ra or Pele? Yet after god beliefs are discredited one after the other, no general conclusion is drawn. That does not occur with other scientific evidence evaluations.

Remember, you asked for examples of a double standard, not evidence of my position vs yours.


I believe that people DO discuss the recognizable pattern of god beliefs as a scientific subject. Testing for gods is another question.But only separate from the usual discussions that science doesn't test for gods.
Maybe. I am disinclined to presume religious beliefs are a side-effect when the beneficial aspects are becoming rather well documented.How does benefit make it less of a neurobiological function?

[Beth]

What is that equivalent word for agnostic then, Beth? Or did you misunderstand my post? I meant that I know people who are 'agnostic' about evolution theory.

Are you agnostic about Thor or Ra or Pele? In the same way that I am agnostic about Jesus? Yes.

Remember, you asked for examples of a double standard, not evidence of my position vs yours. Yes. So how is this a double standard? Harry Potter and the Matrix, Thor and Ra and Pele and Jesus are all being treated equally by science as near as I can tell.

How does benefit make it less of a neurobiological function? It doesn't. It makes the hypothesis that 'it's evolutionarily advantageous' more likely than the 'it's the side-effect of a neurological function' hypothesis.

[Skeptic Ginger]

I meant that I know people who are 'agnostic' about evolution theory. So do I. My point was there is a special word for it regarding god beliefs, but no word for it regarding other scientific theories. That is a double standard.

I understand the argument the words, agnostic and atheist, derive from the volume such beliefs incur. But many times in scientific discussions, god beliefs are treated differently than other non-evidence based beliefs and this is one of those differences.


In the same way that I am agnostic about Jesus? Yes.
Yes. So how is this a double standard? Harry Potter and the Matrix, Thor and Ra and Pele and Jesus are all being treated equally by science as near as I can tell. Really? Does the scientific community ignore the fact there is no evidence outside the Bible that the historical Jesus existed or are they more likely to leave this question unaddressed? You have to look hard to find any serious scientific writings on this matter. There are plenty addressing the fact there is no evidence for a world wide flood. Science is more than willing to address evolution and geology. But they stop short of challenging the Jesus myth.



It doesn't. It makes the hypothesis that 'it's evolutionarily advantageous' more likely than the 'it's the side-effect of a neurological function' hypothesis.The video I mentioned makes the case for it being a side effect. I think that jury is still out.

[uruk]

But none of those are reasons to come up with a non-interfering god. They are simply reasons to maintain belief in something called "God". But the subject of that belief is BS in the sense that it doesn't matter in the least whether or not it exists. It's really about belief in belief, not belief in God. The non interfering god is a type of god that is imediatetly arrived at by society. The noninterfering god is what is the result of trying to prove the existance of god after eliminating everything that is illogical and disprovable about god. You end up with a description of god that is incapable of being disproved because there are no attributes left that can be tested or argued.

The god belief itself is the result of existential fear combined with the brain's tendancy to organize info into patterns. We have an inate desire to understand things, or at least try to explain things. When our knowledge is incomplete we fill in the gaps. We tend to try and explain things in reference to something we feel we already understand. We tend to use analogies quite a bit..

And in early man, the thing we felt we undestood was us.

We knew we built things, things with patterns and design. And in nature, we easily recognise patterns, things that looked like designs and reoccurences in world around us. The assumption we natural arrived at was that a consciousness similar to ours, because of the percieved patterns and designs, but greater in power and ability because of the magnitude of what was around us was responsible for everything.

The other thing that a god belief gave us was some sense of control over the things we really had no control over but affected us. Praying and scacrificing and ritual gave us the sense that we could appease or manipulate or bribe and exert some control over those things.

"Creating a universe" is also irrelevant to the idea of a god. If you are BSing, anything is up for grabs. I don't think so. the inital reason for coming up with a god in the first place was to explain things we didn't undestand but awed and frightend us. And since nature affected us to great extent we needed the god who we had control over via prayer and ritual to have control over all those things in nature that affected us. And what better god to appeal to than the god that created everything.

Besides, if you winnow down all the god beliefs to the most basic and common you end up with creator.

And in the case of a noninterfereing god, a non interfereing god that did absolutly nothing is a useless god. The non interfereing god had to have atleast one attribute that was still undisprovable. That attribute is one of creator. Our scientific understanding is not yet sufficient to explain or provide evidence for what created this universe. So that are is still safe to provide an attribute to a god.
And one thing a practicaly useless god still provides is the possibility for an afterlife. That is something that still concerens even the most diehard athiest. Even if you claim that non-existance holds no fear for you there is still that last part of you that wants to cling to continued existance. It's hard wired into us all. If given the choice between existance and non-existance, what would you choose?



We may be hardwired to believe in belief, but we aren't hardwired to believe in gods or the supernatural. Gods and the supernatural are merely the side-effect of increasing knowledge. We look for patterns and postulate entities to account for those patterns (animals or forces of nature, for example), but those entities are meant to be part of the universe. And we tend to think of these entities as agents somewhat like ourselves, but with more abilities - i.e. there's an element of conscious thought or capriciousness behind those things like the weather or the movements of the heavenly bodies or the creation of the universe. But as we acquire more knowledge about these processes, and discover that they don't require a capricious agent, we no longer have a place for the characters in our stories to act. As the stories have become important to us for other reasons, we've simply created a new realm in which they take place. But there's no way to distinguish the supernatural a priori. But without an advanced understanding of nature, the god / supernatural belief is the default belief.
The initial things we understood were us and animals. That is why the early gods were variations on people and animals. Once you arrived at the "greater ability than us" part that leads to the supernatural and the god. A god by default is an entity that has greater ability than us. And if that ability has no explination based on what we understand of nature it becomes supernatural.
Practicaly every cuture that we know of has had a god/supernatural belief early in it's recorded history. Some of the earliest human artifacts delt with a supernatual belief system. It seems as the god/supernatual is a default belief system that results from our mental wireing.

It is increasing knowledge that pushes god out of our belief system.

Which is why they are brought up as examples - it makes it easy to see that the only difference between god beliefs and other BS is the baggage, not that there is any inherent usefulness to gods. The inherent usefullness of gods were to assuage our fears of haveing no control over nature. Gods allowed us to feel that we were exercising some control over the things that were greater than us as well as the frear of death and the existentialistic nature of our existsance via prayer and ritual.
Fear is a powerful and intergal part of our psychological and sociological make up. Fear is a large part of the survival instinct. And quite alot of our behaivior is driven or influenced by fear.

~snip~
Linda[/QUOTE]

[fls]

I don't think so. the inital reason for coming up with a god in the first place was to explain things we didn't undestand but awed and frightend us. And since nature affected us to great extent we needed the god who we had control over via prayer and ritual to have control over all those things in nature that affected us. And what better god to appeal to than the god that created everything.

Besides, if you winnow down all the god beliefs to the most basic and common you end up with creator.

And in the case of a noninterfereing god, a non interfereing god that did absolutly nothing is a useless god. The non interfereing god had to have atleast one attribute that was still undisprovable. That attribute is one of creator. Our scientific understanding is not yet sufficient to explain or provide evidence for what created this universe. So that are is still safe to provide an attribute to a god.

If we understood how the universe was created, but did not have an understanding of Gravity, then God would have the attribute of Mover of Heavenly Bodies and not of Creator. That is, God still retains the attribute of Creator simply because of convenience, rather than necessity. It will be changed to something else as we continue to fill in the details. If it was convenient to the invisible pink flying unicorn myth to have the power of creation, we could add that in as well.

And one thing a practicaly useless god still provides is the possibility for an afterlife. That is something that still concerens even the most diehard athiest. Even if you claim that non-existance holds no fear for you there is still that last part of you that wants to cling to continued existance. It's hard wired into us all. If given the choice between existance and non-existance, what would you choose?

But the choice isn't between existence and non-existence, but rather belief in continued existence or not, which goes back to the issue of belief in belief. If we knew there was an afterlife, just like we know that we may have offspring, 'belief' wouldn't be required.

But without an advanced understanding of nature, the god / supernatural belief is the default belief.
The initial things we understood were us and animals. That is why the early gods were variations on people and animals. Once you arrived at the "greater ability than us" part that leads to the supernatural and the god. A god by default is an entity that has greater ability than us. And if that ability has no explination based on what we understand of nature it becomes supernatural.
Practicaly every cuture that we know of has had a god/supernatural belief early in it's recorded history. Some of the earliest human artifacts delt with a supernatual belief system. It seems as the god/supernatual is a default belief system that results from our mental wireing.

We need gods to be 'bigger' than us and to account for things that we cannot/could not do. Is that sufficient for something to be 'supernatural'? Under those conditions, Gravity would be supernatural. I suspect that what makes something 'supernatural' is our tendency, before we fully understand it, to view it as a capricious agent - humanlike. What makes these things supernatural isn't their abilities, but rather that something inanimate is animated

Linda

[uruk]

You are just repeating the same thing, one can describe a god that we can't prove doesn't exist. We got that part. It's more than that. If there is nothing that is discovered that shows that a god cannot exist then there is a possibility, how ever small, for a god to exist. Showng that all descriptions of god were created by human beings has no bearing on this.

Nonsense. I can exclude the existence of gods based on the same thing you are excluding Harry Potter's world, someone made it up. The evidence overwhelmingly supports the conclusion people made god beliefs up and there is no evidence real gods ever interacted with people. This does not negate the possibility for the existance of god. It just says that all our descriptions are made up and false. This would be irrelevent to wether a god actually exists or not.

The problem is after we follow the evidence and find it supports the conclusion gods are fictional characters, the scientific community wants to make an exception and give the fiction plausibility. While there are fictional concepts with real Universe evidence that gives the fiction plausibility, there is no such real Universe evidence for gods. Why does god fiction have more value than Harry Potter fiction? The only possble evidence for the existance of a god as initiator or creator is the existance of the universe itself. We have no evidence for what initiated this universe. None. We only have hypothesis base on mathmatical constructs based on assumptions. As you go beyond this universe or pre-Big Bang all bets are off so to speak. There is no reference that we can go by once you get beyond the universe. Any explination is unverifiable. At least at present.

Any scientific explination for what is ouside this universe is just as unverifiable as the god as creator explinantion or any other for that matter. Which way you lean on the subject depends on your inital assumptions and predjudices.

Actually, any attribute other than "non-interfering" gets you to zero. Name another that doesn't. Interferes only on other planets? :rolleyes: God as initiator or creator. The state or conditions outside of this universe and or pre Big Bang presently exists outside our capability to explain or verify. There is no way to verify God-as-creator.


Again, you repeat the same argument. The argument is a principle of the scientific process. Science seeks explanations but not proofs and all 'facts' are tentative.
And science has no verifiable explinations for what is outside this universe. A god-as-creator is but one of many explinations.

You can only use it to defend a non-interfering god concept and a non-interfering god cannot logically make anyone aware of its presence. A god-as-creator can become a non-interfereing god after the moment of creation. Before creation there is no universe to be interfered with.


It does, however, leave zero evidence left upon which to bother contemplating non-interfering gods. There is a reason to contemplate before and outside the Universe. Other things in the Universe are finite so have 'outsides' and are not created out of nothing so have 'before' existences. There is if this universe is a result of a god. We have no point of reference as to what is out there except that it is not here.


Neuroscience is going to eventually explain the mechanism of god beliefs. Once we see it is merely a mistake of perception, then what will the scientific community say? "Yes but gods could still exist."Yes. because the existance of a god is not dependent on us. A god would exist independent of us same as the universe would exist independent of us. we are not required for the existance of a god.

God and turtles are a fabricated layer of explanation which add nothing. Maybe it's gods all the way down. These are useless layers. By who's standards? Ours and our limited understanding of this universe? It is not useless if this universe actualy is the result of a god. There is nothing about this universe, much less outside this universe, that says it has to conform to our assumptions and predjudices.


Back to arguing what is not disagreed with. The point is not that the scientific principles are wrong. The point is there is evidence god beliefs are human imagination and there is no reason to say more than that. No evidence left over to ponder. Time to call god beliefs what they are. Fiction. Of course the god beliefs we come up with are fiction. We made them up. But that does rule out something that we are unaware of that acted as a creator or initiator to this universe that would loosely fit the the most basic and general descrption of a noninterfering god.

[uruk]

If we understood how the universe was created, but did not have an understanding of Gravity, then God would have the attribute of Mover of Heavenly Bodies and not of Creator. That is, God still retains the attribute of Creator simply because of convenience, rather than necessity. It will be changed to something else as we continue to fill in the details. If it was convenient to the invisible pink flying unicorn myth to have the power of creation, we could add that in as well. It's a big stretch to have an understanding of the creation of the universe and not have an understanding of gravity but I think I get your point. I would really doubt the god belief would could still exist at that point.

A god as mover of heavenly bodies would turn into a mechinisim of the universe or an explination rather than a god that had a usable attribute of being able to control the universe. A god that only moves the heavenly bodies would not have the same importance to a society as a god that could prevent floods or protect crops or help to defeat enemies.

As our understanding of the universe grows all other attributes of god other than creator would fall away to what the non-interfereing god has become. Simply a mechinisim of creation and something to pin an after life belief on.

If then we found the reason of creation and it did not include a god or superbeing then the remaing fear to be assuaged by a god would be an afterlife belief. A god would become a facilitator of the afterlife.


But the choice isn't between existence and non-existence, but rather belief in continued existence or not, which goes back to the issue of belief in belief. If we knew there was an afterlife, just like we know that we may have offspring, 'belief' wouldn't be required. I think I see your point, belief is just a gap filler for a lack of definite knowledge. Even science has its version of beliefs. They are called assumptions.

If we discover that a god does exist then there is no belief in god but rather knowledge of the existance of god.

But belief is a necessity. It is belief that gives us a handle on which to progress futher when knowdedge is lacking. It can be a place holder in lieu of actual knowldege in order to cope with those things that we fear or have no power over or to have a refrence point. Certainly it has it drawbacks but it has helped to get us where are today. For good and bad.

[Skeptic Ginger]

If we understood how the universe was created, but did not have an understanding of Gravity, then God would have the attribute of Mover of Heavenly Bodies and not of Creator. That is, God still retains the attribute of Creator simply because of convenience, rather than necessity. It will be changed to something else as we continue to fill in the details. If it was convenient to the invisible pink flying unicorn myth to have the power of creation, we could add that in as well. ....
LindaI like that one. Another fls insight for my book.

[Skeptic Ginger]

....
Of course the god beliefs we come up with are fiction. We made them up. But that does rule out something that we are unaware of that acted as a creator or initiator to this universe that would loosely fit the the most basic and general descrption of a noninterfering god.We are viewing the issue from different vantage points. I understand yours. It is the more common view in the scientific community currently.

I happen to think it will not be the most common view in the scientific community in the future and represents a double standard not afforded the same scrutiny other scientific evidence is afforded.

I can make up all sorts of things and declare science is unable to prove such things don't exist. For things which humans fantasize, why is the argument made almost exclusively when discussing the possible existence of gods?

[fls]

It's a big stretch to have an understanding of the creation of the universe and not have an understanding of gravity but I think I get your point. I would really doubt the god belief would could still exist at that point.

Well, belief in useful gods already shouldn't exist. We've already taken away most of their useful functions (as you have pointed out), and there's no reason to think that what's left is due to a capricious/animated force instead of an impersonal force or event like everything else. I don't think gods really serve as any sort of explanatory process any more, but rather serve as a placeholder for belief in belief. As long as belief is important, people will find something for gods to do. I suspect it won't be any different once we have creation figured out. :)

I think I see your point, belief is just a gap filler for a lack of definite knowledge.

That's where gods are placed (in the gaps), but I don't think that we need them as a gap filler any more. It's already obvious that a lack of definite knowledge can eventually succumb to continued scientific inquiry, so it's already obvious that whatever fills those gaps is not going to be god-like. And when we discover whatever it is that fills in that knowledge gap, it no longer occurs to us to call it 'God'. Which is why it doesn't really make sense to say that God could exist by making reference to future discoveries. Those things that led us to form the ideas of gods no longer suggest gods to us, they suggest things like weather or gravity or evolution instead. And if some future discovery does lead us to form the idea anew, it will be something different than what superstitious shepherds were talking about thousands of years ago in an age of ignorance, even if some people are inclined to dredge up their old name for it. And even so, there's no indication whatsoever that future discoveries will be of a type that would lead us to form the idea anew anyway. Any of Gravity, Dark Energy or the Big Bang could have been God, but it didn't occur to us to pick any one of those because we recognize that they are not really god-like.

But belief is a necessity. It is belief that gives us a handle on which to progress futher when knowdedge is lacking. It can be a place holder in lieu of actual knowldege in order to cope with those things that we fear or have no power over or to have a refrence point. Certainly it has it drawbacks but it has helped to get us where are today. For good and bad.

I agree that belief may be necessary. But that doesn't tell us anything about the existence of the subject of that belief, because one of the defining characteristics will be that it doesn't appear to exist, but it could exist. To say that God could exist is merely stating a tautology and is therefore meaningless as a knowledge statement.

Linda