Split from Welcome FAQ thread - Is there a God? Discuss

[d000hg]

He is an evolutionary biologist

But nobody else who does documentaries makes a big deal as much about their own specialities. The bee in his bonnet gives the impression of being personal rather than professional, is what I mean.

[shaunbhoy]

You remind me of the chatter round the water cooler when secretaries gather. There are words being exchanged but the net result at the end is as if nothing had been said.

I am sure that when the secretaries gather to chat, mindful of the fact that you are hovering nearby like an unwanted odour, they are fairly circumspect about what gets discussed.
Last thing any of them would wish to get a vision of is the unsavoury thought of you knocking one out in the Gents after any juicy titbits had been aired.

[sasguru]

I'm surprised by the elementary lack of logic shown by some who should know better.
If I was to say I believed in elves and goblins (which many still do) you would pooh-pooh me and rightly ask for evidence.
Since you believe in God, I am asking you for evidence, since I have not seen any and see no reason to posit this God figure.
You don't expect scientists to spend time disproving the existence of elves and goblins do you? Or the flying spaghetti monster, come to that.

[shaunbhoy]

You don't expect scientists to spend time disproving the existence of elves and goblins do you? Or the flying spaghetti monster, come to that.

Ah yes, but the flying spaghetti monster's wife came on this very forum to verify his existence(s). Best to leave him out of this.

[SupremeSpod]

I'm surprised by the elementary lack of logic shown by some who should know better.
If I was to say I believed in elves and goblins (which many still do) you would pooh-pooh me and rightly ask for evidence.
Since you believe in God, I am asking you for evidence, since I have not seen any and see no reason to posit this God figure.
You don't expect scientists to spend time disproving the existence of elves and goblins do you? Or the flying spaghetti monster, come to that.

Does it really matter?

Your "surprise" is your concern, just like others "beliefs" are theirs.

[EC4N]

I'm surprised by the elementary lack of logic shown by some who should know better.
If I was to say I believed in elves and goblins (which many still do) you would pooh-pooh me and rightly ask for evidence.
Since you believe in God, I am asking you for evidence, since I have not seen any and see no reason to posit this God figure.
You don't expect scientists to spend time disproving the existence of elves and goblins do you? Or the flying spaghetti monster, come to that.

If you walked on the beach and saw some pebbles neatly arranged to form the name 'sasguru', naturally you would assume someone had put them there. What about this entire universe, the planets, the existence of gravitational pull, the sun and the moon (two major signs of God), the earth itself with all its intricacies and the complex nature of your own body. With what logic would you explain their existence? It wouldn't surprise me if you said oh it all happened by chance as a result of some big bang because some of the biggest atheists are scientists.

[shaunbhoy]

What about this entire universe, the planets, the existence of gravitational pull, the sun and the moon (two major signs of God), the earth itself with all its intricacies and the complex nature of your own body.

Are Poverty, Disease, Floods, Earthquakes etc. all "major signs of God" too, or does he only get assigned benign things?

[doodab]

Does it really matter?

Your "surprise" is your concern, just like others "beliefs" are theirs.

You may argue that beliefs are private, a personal choice, and so on, but there is clearly a point at which ones beliefs become others concern, otherwise no one would object to ritual sacrifice or islamic militant suicide bombers or bad science.

If we accept others beliefs without questioning them and probing their weaknesses we devalue the ones that do stand up to rational scrutiny. It's facile to suggest that one set of ideas shouldn't be open to questioning when other, more obviously wrong ones, are fair game.

[doodab]

Ok, lets assume the existence of god, and assume that he made the universe.

I have some questions:

• Why does the universe appear to follow mathematical rules?
• How do you explain the coincidence that if the rules & fundamental constants therein were slightly different, the universe wouldn't be the way it is and may not support life?
• Do you assert that random chance and it's consequences don't play a part in the universe?

The rules that the universe appears to follow would seem to place limits on God's ability to interfere with things locally without being detected, so it's reasonable to think that god's shaping of the universe is restricted to it's initial creation and subsequent unwinding (although he probably sees all eternity at once and hence perceives it as a complete work), with any adjustments / interference taking the form of tweaks to the initial conditions leading to different outcomes.

The sensitivity to the parameters would seem to place limits on the options available to him. Although he might be able to select any values for the various constants, his choices would inevitably have the same results as would occur were those choices to be made by some other means, so assuming he wished to create the universe as it is, he would be forced to choose the values we see.

Were there to be truly random chance, that would imply that however carefully god tweaked the initial conditions he would still be reliant on an element of luck to ensure the outcome he desired. A lack of random chance seems to imply an absolute determinism, i.e. that there is no free will, which cannot be ruled out of course.

It's possible to conceive of scheme that overcomes some of these difficulties by seeing each seemingly random event as a choice that god can make, however even in this case he would be somewhat constrained as the choices he made would, en-masse, need to look like random chance to escape detection. This would seem to place essentially the same constraints on his behaviour as leads to classical physics emerging from quantum theory at large scales, thus somewhat limiting his powers.

To me, it seems that even if god exists and created the universe, his hands were somewhat tied.

The deeper point is that although we may not have any direct evidence for or against the existence of god, we can certainly make some inferences about the nature of such a thing based on what we observe.

[sasguru]

Ok, lets assume the existence of god, and assume that he made the universe.

I have some questions:

• 1. Why does the universe appear to follow mathematical rules?
• 2. How do you explain the coincidence that if the rules & fundamental constants therein were slightly different, the universe wouldn't be the way it is and may not support life?
• 3. Do you assert that random chance and it's consequences don't play a part in the universe?

1. Why shouldn't it? Perhaps following mathematical rules are a precondition for its existence.
2. Recent research suggests that the rules of physics may be different in different parts of the universe. Perhaps the fact they are what they are in this part is the reason life exists here and may not elsewhere.
3. I tend towards thinking that the universe fundamentally works on probabalistic principles, but this does not imply lack of order or randomness as it is usually thought of. It depends on the scale. If you open a divider in a compartment between a gas and a vacuum, the gas will expand to fill the vacuum. But that is due to the random nature of the movement of the molecules. Its not impossible that these movements may lead to the result of the gas staying on its side of the compartment, its just massively, overwhelmingly unlikely that that will happen.


The problem with positing a higher intelligence to explain the order of the universe is you have to explain why the order of that higher intelligence exists i.e. you have begged the question.
And even if I were to accept that a higher intelligence created the world I live in, I'm fairly certain he/she/it does not intervene in it.