Science, 'frauds' trigger a decline in atheism

No BLD,
In fact, it is an assertion.

 

DCV,
Whatever....

But it is a fact. It's obviously just not one that you care to admit.

BLD

 

BillDayson:

Nicely put. I agree that your argument doesn't require any particular position on multiple universes, only that there is a possibility that the Universe could be different than it is. And either the different universe would be uninhabited or the inhabitants would be saying,"How amazing is it that the universe is exactly what was necessary for us to exist."

I agree also that labelling a "Creator" really doesn't solve anything for the scientist. It is the equivalent of saying, "That source is unknowable from a scientific standpoint," which is, of course, also true of the God idea.

Religious faith offers nothing to science.

 

Where did Bill say that his suppositions don't require multiple universes? I read his post again and again--with regard to that issue, it seems to be the linchpin of his argument.

If it turns out--and it appears it's so per the latest scientific data--that the odds are that the strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force, various and sundry elements of the universe as we know would out of sheer coincidence line up just so as to produce life, that the window for the universe to spin out such that life could be a possibility is so infinitesimally narrow that perhaps not one in 100 billion universes would line up just as ours and make life possible, how in thunder doesn't that point to at least a strong possibility of a Creator?

In my view, my athiest/agnostic friends have three options:

a). This Universe won the Lotto--nay, it won the Lotto every second, every day for a billion years; or

b). There are billions of other universes and, of course, since we're here to even clatter away on our keyboards, we can safely assume we reside in one of .000000000000000000001% of those in which all these fundamental forces of nature, the universe, just happen to exactly match that tiny window that signals the potential for life; or

c). There is some as yet undetected and fantastic natural property that just causes those things like the strong nuclear force and the thousand other little things necessary for the occurrence of life to be a potential in a universe to hit those various criteria right on the head.

Of the above, I'd say the first is one whale of a longshot, you might as well just believe in the Creator and join me in celebrating the Passover this year; the second and third require such faith in that which has neither been observed nor measured, that again, you might as well join me come April in breaking the matzah, we'd be glad to have you, there's always room at the table. Just a warning, Nosborne, before you make the trip up from Las Cruces, we do believe in Messiah.

 

But you still haven't explained why I should be convinced to accept the Jewish God by the natural state of the Universe. That still looks like a leap of faith, and an unnecessary one, at that.

BTW, I really don't think that you can justify your claims of probability with any real research. It's as much specualtion as God is, I'm afraid.

And yes, I am vaguely familiar with the four fundamental forces, etc. Vaguely, I said. Not at anything like a professional level.

Of course I will celebrate Pesach this year as every year, but never forget that Pesach, like every other Jewish holiday with the exception (maybe) of yomim noraim, is as much a national or cultural holiday as a religious one.

 

Nosborne, my friend, read my earlier post in which I clearly agreed with you that one need not necessarily believe in the God of Abraham merely because of these astonishing scientific dicoveries--I agree with you! I said that if accepting that this stuff is astronomically unlikely to have occurred by mere chance is point "A", accepting the God I worship isn't "B", it's rather "K" or "T"--look at my earlier post. You might say "Z"; very well, then, that's fine. Hey, I agree, scientific discoveries standing alone don't get you to God.

But I will say one thing: if you want to suggest that you're not stepping out far upon the end of the limb of faith to say: "There's nothing out there, no possibility we need consider" in light of the irreducible complexities we see at the molecular level and the near-miracle of our existence given the odds of the four fources lining up as they do in our universe, you're fooling yourself.

But again, I'm not saying and never said that even if you made such an admission, that it compels belief in the God you and I celebrate on Pesach.

 

Oh, dear. I really shouldn't attempt this because dealing in infinities and probability at the same time is a LONG way from my forte, BUT:

In order for your probability analysis to have any meaning at all, you need to prove:

-There is a limit to the total number of possible universes;
-There is equal probability that any one universe will occur (or at least be able to quantify relative probabilities;
-That there is no physical connection between the various "fundamental constants" such that they aren't merely expressions of the same constant at some deeper, higher energy state and therefore locked into their relative positions;
-That no universe, or a limited number of universes can support sentient life;

and a few more things.

Any ONE of these proofs would put you in line for a Nobel Prize. Without at least some handle on all of them, you cannot even guess whether our universe was pure chance a quadrillion to one or the ONLY POSSIBLE universe.

All that aside, what scientific problem does a Creator solve? Where did IT come from? If eternal, why not simply claim that the universe itself is eternal?

Indeed, some years ago, Stephen Hawking demonstrated that the Universe, from a physical and energy standpoint, doesn't need a Creator to have a beginning. (I know, I know, VERY counter intuitive but he does the math as they say.)

Look at the last chapter or so of a more recent edition of "A Brief History of Time" and may you have better luck understanding it than I did.

 

Brave assumptions.
Confirmation bias.
And a lack of...um...physiological/chemical imagination make this an interesting philosophical topic, but one lacking in relevance.

Come on, the filters are on, and, by definition, no one can take them off.

Tony

P.S. I do believe in intelligent design, but realize the limitations on arguing such.

 

I'm just suggesting that if a universe contains native sentient observers, then those observers will be natives. That means that they will find the parameters of their universe satisfactory. If they didn't, they wouldn't be there.

If condiions were different, then there might be substantially different sentient entities who find those altered conditions congenial, or else the universe might be sterile.

(Or maybe something as yet unimagined might happen.)

Whether any or all of these alternative possibilities are actualized in some way, who knows?

In other words, the universe's current parameters seem necessary to generate the precise results that this universe of ours has generated here on Earth. That's not really very surprising.

Actually, I think that if we left all the universal (and local) parameters unchanged and just reran earth's history over again, things might end up evolving quite differently. I suspect that there's lots of contingency in this as in all history, a non-linear aspect where small changes can't be counted on to have small effects. We might find it impossible to keep successive iterations evolving in precisely the same way each time, no matter how closely we tried to control things.

A problem that I see is that we seem to be starting with our own world and our own existence as a given, and then trying to work back to what parameters, conditions and subsequent events led to things turning out exactly as we see. Then some of us are surprised when our familar world seems vanishingly unlikely when seen from that perspective.

But if reality could have unfolded in an uncountable number of different ways, who can say what possibilities they might contain? If familiar human life isn't likely to recur, then perhaps some other similar or dissimilar sentient observers might appear to make similar observations about their own incredible contingency. Or maybe other things might happen that we can't even imagine from our limited perspective.

Anthropic arguments are limited by their fundamental anthropcentrism.

I'm not sure that what's ultimately going on is just an expanded version of us and our activities. (In this case, human creative acts.)

In other words, things conceivably could have turned out differently. If that were the case, then there wouldn't be human beings here on this earth posting on Degreeinfo. Who knows what might have happened instead? But whatever transpired, it would be just as unlikely and as contingent as this world.

Considering how imperfectly we understand the situation that we actually find ourselves in, we probably shouldn't be too quick to pontificate about what would or wouldn't be possible if things were significantly different than they are.

There are almost certainly countless possibilities about which man is totally ignorant.

I don't know.

What does the passover have to do with the creator? Put another way, why should we believe that any human religious myths reveal this hypothetical creator, if it exists?

And how does positing a creator really explain what you want explained? It seems like a pseudo-explanation to me, in that it tries to resolve mysteries in the empirical world by positing an unexplained and inherently mysterious supernatural agent (conveniently modeled on ourselves), located in some undefined transcendental reality. Questions have been compounded, not answered.

 

Very interesting debate!

You guys are undertaking many interesting ideas. Returning to the original article by the Washington Times that started the whole discussion, I think it is not surprising at all that some are observing a return to paganism. Institutionalized religion doesn’t help the postmodern man satisfy his spiritual needs anymore. If, for many, God died after the French revolution and the Enlightenment, the need for spirituality, however, still persists. Atheism, and even agnosticism, are very hard to deal with for the average man (how do you approach your own death in these circumstances?), and since traditional religions have been overcome, man turns to new ways (that are as silly as those thought to be overcome, I add). This is perhaps what the article refers to.

Regarding the second part of the discussion, I agree with Nosborne and Bill. It is absolutely true that if some of the initial parameters were slightly different, the results nowadays would have been completely different. For instance, water expands when is cooled and contracts when it is heated, when it changes states, I should say. This is due to the special geometry of the water molecule. Hadn´t it been like this, life probably would have never existed in the earth since we are told it all began in the bottom of the oceans (frozen water floats on liquid water which is one of those few substances that do), and that would have prevented it from happening. The same occurs with the weight or the electric charge of an electron. Had it be slightly different, theuniverse as we know it would be have been different too. I understand that one may feel tempted to see the hand of a designer behind these phenomena. What all this really shows is that if there was a creator, he was constrained to certain parameters which are sine qua non conditions for our universe. He didn’t have many options to create the world. Not a great prospect for an omnipotent God.


Regards

 

And at least it's civil!

little fauss, I'd like to pin your ears back with one more question:

Since you concede that the wonder of the natural universe doesn't point at the Jewish God, would it be fair to say that you CHOOSE to accept that particular God? In short, that you deem God to be real because you choose to believe in Him?

This is not a nasty little trap. There is a Jewish "prayer" or whatever one calls the occasional nudge Jews send Heavenward that says something like, "Protect us for remeber, oh Lord, that if we are not Jews, you will not be God."

There are also several glosses on the Mt. Sinai story, my favorite of which is that God, Blessed be He, offered Torah to many nations in turn, each of which rejected it for various reasons. Finally, He offered Torah to the Jews who said, "No, thanks." The He picked up Mt. Sinai and held it suspended over the Jewish encampment and said, "Will you accept My Torah now?" And we replied, "We will do and we will hear."

So, in a way, God forced us to believe in Him because if He didn't, He wouldn't be real.

 

I'm not saying that the recent scientific dicoveries don't point to the existence of a Creator--I think they certainly do! I'm just saying that nothing about them compels belief in any one Creator over another.

I have other reasons for believing that Abraham really was speaking to the Creator and that He did choose him to be the father of His people and later, to use a descendant, Jeshua, to redeem the world. I believe for various reasons, but most primarily the change in my life when I accepted Messiah and the witness of that change in others.

Another bit of proof: I also think it's extraordinary that God's chosen people, being such a small nation 3,000+ years ago--most of the time not even being a nation but being captives, slaves, worse--would still be together after over three millenia. Where are the great civilizations of the past? The Egyptians? Babylonians? Persians? How many of those religions of that region still are practiced? And yet, the Jews, perhaps the tiniest and least important of all, really only dominasting the Fertile Crescent for a couple generations 3,000 years ago, are still here, still active, still praying in front of the foundation of the temple in Jerusalem.

Interesting, and I think more than that, I think a sign that they really are God's chosen people. How many people could maintain an identity through the millenia when murdered at every turn by despots--Hitler really not much different than Haman or Nebuchadnezzar in this respect--forced to go without a nation for 2,500 years+, and yet, still together, still holding their scriptures and their identity. There's something to this, Nosborne.

 

Arguably, the Buddists can make the same claim.

I have no argument with your belief based on subjective experience.

I think it was Disraeli that, when the Queen asked him for proof of God's realty said, "Your Majesty, the Jews."

 

I hear your excitement - yeah.
But you claims betray you: "[T]he basic forces of nature... seem almost fine tuned to produce life...."
If so, where are the ubiquitous Little Green Men your theory predicts?
Since they aren't here, something's wrong with your claim.

 

Could you give a few names of these scientists?

 

Well, Darvin's theory of evolution has enough detail in it to be proved wrong some day. Therefore I beleive it IS a scientific theory, however imperfect.

Atheism, on the other hand, is indeed faith-based belief system, at least so far. I know of no observable predictions this hipothesis leads to.

 

Stanislav,

I think you hit it right on the head. The underlying structure of modern scientific biology is the Theory of Evolution.

Evolution, as a set of scientific principals, makes testable predictions about the development of living things.

The Christian Right understands this pincipal well enough to attack evolution by finding evidence of what they claim to be counter examples.

Intellegent Design and its bretheran "theories", however, make NO predictions, verifiable or otherwise.

Evolution is a scientific fact to the extent that it has been tested through research. Intellegent Design is a strictly religious concept that tells us nothing, and CAN tell us nothing, about the life sciences.

The ONLY reason to cloak such a religious theory in scientific garb is to try and make acceptable the teaching of religious belief in public classrooms and at public expense. This is a fundamentally dishonest activity.

 

Exactly.

Atheism: God does not exist.
Religion: God exists.
Science: Is it possible to test or disprove the hypothesis that God exists? No. Therefore the issue belongs in the realm of philosophical inquiry, NOT scientific inquiry.

 

Hmmm.....

But what if I said Zeus and Poseidon exist? Would that also be in the realm of philosophical inquiry? Or would most of you just assume that I had drank too much Ouzo the night before, or had fallen asleep struggling through the Odyssey one more time?

There comes a point where a claim is ridiculous, and does not need scientific inquiry to prove or disprove - it just IS false.

If we can so easily dismiss past gods like Mardok, Amon-Re, Hermes, and Osiris, then why does the Judeo/Christian God come in for different treatment?

Is there evidence that God exists? Could that be the reason? Do some of us hear "voices in our heads" telling us what to do? Is that God, the devil, or just delusional psychosis?

 

There certainly comes a point when a claim can be determined to be not susceptable to scientific analysis. Religion isn't, for example. Not understanding this point is the major flaw in Carl Sagan's "Cosmos", an otherwise beautiul piece of work.

However, when it comes to physical reality, I am not sure that any claim is so obviously false that it can be dismissed out of hand. For example: Under classical physics, the measured speed of light was thought to vary according to the relative velocity of the source and the measurement device, like running away from a train. The reason this isn't obvious in daily life, so the thinking went, was that you run so slowly compared with the speed light travels in the aether. You don't notice the tiny variation.

REAL obvious, right? And the average American, if he thinks about it at all, would probably think the same thing.

But, as we all ought to know, the actual experimental data from a series of repeated experiments (involving mirrors on granite blocks floating in mercury!) showed that the measured speed of light in a vacuum DOES NOT VARY!

Sometimes ins science there is great value in questioning the obvious!