Okay ATHEISTS <rolls sleaves>

Maybe so, I just said it to show that there is more than two ways of looking at things.

 

Yes.. but the mountains are not 'flattened out' ARE THEY.
Ohhh DUH

Yes a ball baring will always be under any water layer... DUH
Even a ball baring the size of earth would be totally under water with just one liter of water poured on it.

You might as well say if if everyone was dead .. food consumption would drop dramatically.

 

Yeh like looking at stars with hubble or throught the bottom of a coke bottle.

 

This is fun.. brother is especially entertaining...
I only just recently raised myself from my hysterical laughter on the floor
after his last post [the ball bearing earth] to make this one.
I cant remember laughing so much.

Actually brother youd only need 1 liter of water on a ball bearing earth.
And noah would sail a micron deep sea.. lol

Shallow draught sailing or what?....hehehheehe
DOH... dont need a kiel
Shit the sharks are horizontally 2 diminsional.
Lol the waves are 3 angtroms high.

kevin costner had it easy.
everywhere i look it says.. 'shallow.. no dive'.

 

cause i was serious..

 

Yes, you understand correctly.

Actually, I don't like this version, but I thought it might be a helpful alternative way of explaining. I disclaim it altogether now, and here's why.

Probability is useful only for predicting events. In hindsight, it's useless. What's the probability that the English colonies in North America would revolt and create their own nation in the 18th Century? Well, it's 100%. It happened. You're right; it's irrefutable.

Wow, the chain of events in the history of humankind's development, and especially the development of civilization was perfectly tuned and primed for there one day to emerge a new kind of constitutional federal republic that would have a tremendous influence on world events beginning about 150 years later. Think how remarkably improbably that was, given everything that had to happen over the millenia, in just the right order, and with just the right people involved, etc. for that to occur, and just in time too.

That's what's wrong with the "fine tuned" argument for ID. There is no applicabililty of probability theory whatsoever to events that have already occurred. You cannot determine odds now on the occurrence of events in the past. It's foolish to do so, and that's a losing argument for ID proponents. I wish they'd drop it. There should be no more talk of fine tuning, because it's a misapplication of probability theory.

It depends on what you mean. If you mean from where did the cosmos emerge, well, I would agree with you. I mentioned in another thread in this forum recently that you can pick your cosmology, any cosmology, and they all suffer from the same problem of the necessity of a First Cause (or a Prime Mover, if you prefer). God suffers from this problem just as much as the Big Bang does. I suspect the answer to this question is unknowable.

Now, if you mean the God hypothesis as in, how did the universe evolve after the Big Bang and how did we get our sun and solar system, including a nice warm planet with water and air, then you get a very different answer.

Here is where we pull out Occam's Razor and start cutting. When we understand God to be the historical answer to "Where did everything we see and hear and touch come from?" then we get the God of the gaps. As gaps in our understanding of cosmology shrink, especially beginning with Newtonian mechanics applied to our solar system more than 300 years ago and carrying forward to today, God gets smaller and smaller with each new discovery. Eventually, one comes to the realization that God as Creator is unnecessary to explain the physical world around us, and in fact there is no place for him there at all.

This is no different from using the stork to explain to young children where babies come from. God is a fiction that was useful at one time, but like the stork for young children, he has lost his usefulness in explaining where lightning comes from, where the sun goes at night, and from where and under what conditions rain falls.

Nietzsche, crazy bastard that he was, was right. God is dead.

 

Those arguments may hold up from a strictly logical point of view, but intuitively they may leave something to be desired. The first form of the argument, the tautology, simply states the obvious. If things weren't as they are, they would be different. I think the fact of our existence is amazing. According to evolutionist and atheist Stephen J. Gould, the evolutionary path that led to us had many crossroads, and the fact that homo sapiens evolved is, in that sense, an accident. The fact that life evolved and that it is intelligent and conscious (two entirely phenomena)has made, to paraphrase the poet Robert Frost, "all the difference". Otherwise, all the remarkable stuff that Carl Sagan and others go on about would be happening without an audience. Not only that, but we seem to have far more intelligence than needed for mere survival. Is our success in explaining the world using science and mathematics just a lucky fluke? Possibly, but why assume that it is? You've obviously placed your bet on a different horse, but I'm betting this isn't just the product of our good luck.

As for probabilities and fine tuning, here again I'm not convinced. You rightly say that probabilities are meaningless when applied retrospectively to predict events we know have happened, if we know how they happened, like the American Revolution. But there's the rub. With such events as the formation of the universe, the creation of life, and human evloution, we don't know for sure how they happened. For example, suppose some Martian archaeologist is digging in the ruins of the late, great planet earth and comes across a copy of the Decaration of Independence. Interesting artifact. What is it, and how did it happen? Possibly it came about by natural processes, or possibly it was the result of some kind of intelligence. Parchment may have formed from a dead animal lying in the sun, and advanced microorganisms going to work on it and whittling it down just so. Likewise, the ink might have been dropped on the page by a squid being carried overhead by some sea bird, and the words could have formed as a bunch of hyperactive worms streaked ink across the page. Given 4 billion years and a gazillion possible planets and universes, it could happen. Is it meaningless to ask what are the probabilities of that happening, on the basis of what we know of natural processes we're familiar with? Is it ridiculous to bet that it happened some other way, even though we aren't sure?

RE "fine tuning", the argument goes like this:the basic parameters of the universe involve physical constants with precisely the value needed for complex structures to arise. If these were different,the universe as we know it wouldn't exist. For example, if the expansion rate of the universe after the Big Bang had been one-billionth less, the universe would have imploded, and if it had been one-billionth more, it would have exploded, leaving only dilute gas. A minute difference in the strength of the electomagnetic field relative to the gravitational field would have prevented our Sun from forming. If the difference between the mass of the neutron and the proton were not twice the mass of the electron, it would be difficult or impossible to have chemical reactions, etc. Dr. Francis Collins, director of the genome project, concludes:"when you look at that evidence, it is very difficult to adopt the view that this was just chance. But if you are willing to consider the possibility of a designer, this becomes a rather plausible explanation for what is otherwise and extremely improbable event--namely, our existence".

There are alternative possibilities. Dawkins points out that we really don't know that these factors are independent. Some of them may inevitably be linked together in ways that we don't yet understand. Another possibility might be that some sort of force or field is responsible for the cohernce of the universe, like maybe the Akashic Field (A-Field) that Ervin Laszlo associates with the zero-point field of quantum physics. There is also the intriguing suggestion by Smolen that the order is a result of natural selection, and that the basic laws of the universe have evolved. Testing these ideas is certainly a long way off, so we'll either have to suspend judgment or resort to metaphysics or mysticism for answers.

 

I suppose you were there at the time of the flood and can tell me that suface of the earth looked exactly like it does now. Perhaps the weight of the water is what formed the mountains we have now. "Ohhh DUH" back to you!

 

You are fond of looking at things only two ways and failing to see that there may be more ways of looking at things.

 

Yes, agree you are amusing. Saying you could cover the earth with a liter of water, now that's funny! A liter of water wouldn't cover the bottom of a swimming pool let alone the suface of the earth! DOH!

 

Brother

quote you

[and the world became a ball bearing]
Then a liter of water could certainly achieve what i proposed

Occam

 

Occam

 

Okie

And this is pretty much my arguement as well.

Though ignatious is quite right in saying

there is one turtle or no end to them.

Personally, the stack of turtles is an aside.
To me this universe is an evolutionary product of millions
of previous such phenomena.
It evolved. Its laws are ballanced because it evolved.. our it would not
reproduce.

Again, but what is the mechanism for reproduction of 'verses'.
i look to singularities.
The weak force. Is overwhelming and distorts our space and time to
breaking only in one place, event horizons.
what IS below said horizon...? a new verse.
And this explains the BANG.. what ws it? The point in 'that' verse that spawded us where the 'star' achieved 'collapsed mater state'
And fell out of that verse to make this one. This is what i think is meant by infinite. An infinite number of verses can exist. For they make their own place. There is no 'place to fill'. Place is within verses.. there is no outside.
BANG. it didnt come from nowhere.
Each verse. grows a crop.each singularity transposes what allowed it
[law]into a new verse .. that grows a crop. evolution again.
reality displays organic themes. organic themes mirror reality.

My aim is to collate 'how' with observation through imagination and speculation. Could be totally wrong.
But it's a lot of fun thinking about it.

Reality owes me nothing.. it already gave me the greatest gift known.
existance.
I think it's my job to think obout that which gave me the tools to
think.
Clearly

occam

 

I suggest you try it. go outside and pour a liter of water on the ground and see how much of the earth it covers. I'll even let you put plastic down so it doesn't soak into the ground.

You back yet? A liter of water didn't cover much of the earth did it?
I suggest the next time you try to make fun of someone, that you start by first making sense yourself!

 

Dogies, occam, you're stoned again aren't you?

 

I dont live on a planet where

SO i used the water on my fern.

Occam

 

Not in the least...
Have you ever considered that 'if you dont understand what im saying'
'dont understand' may be related to yourself.. not the speaker?

Occam

 

:bigear:

Def Zeppelin,

This is probably the best post I have read on this forum. You are truly wise beyond your years. Thank the universe that there are truly intelligent people on this forum like yourself. Not that others here aren't intelligent, but it's nice to hear from some people with common sense. Keep the sense, bro.

 

Just because you know how something works doesn't mean it's not a work of God!

 

Jekyll

crud
Nature is not circular.. It is a cascading spreadsheet..[human thought is circular.As the 10 millionth repetition of the 'logic is circular statement' shows. when thought runs out.. humans never say.. ' i dont know' they say its all circular. Thus they sound clever.]
If logic is circular. HOW did einstien deduct special relativity using imagination/logic.
Time dilation is NOT conceptually/logically dirivative of
proof. As none even imagined it could exist. [except him]
In fact logic still cannot explain it even though it has now been 'proved'
Process. does not allow one to return to the cause.
Only descriptive hindsight does that.
And that is not a thing in itself or even a accurate position . [see history]
Logic is biffurcating cascade of mostly deterministic process.
I find zeppelins POV to be self defeating for humanity.
Why bother questioning? he seems to say.

I personally think that humanity has the potential to create universes
and become acausal.
To become 'direction'

Occam

PS.. there is no 'infinite' but reality
Extension. be it physical/duratioanal or conceptual.
Only exists where reality allows it.

PPS. Simplification in the above post. And errors. I'd like to draw the autodidacts in, they have the most to say..