RE: Would you be an atheist if science and reason wasn't supportive of atheism?
December 5, 2012 at 2:11 am
(This post was last modified: December 5, 2012 at 2:11 am by Vincenzo Vinny G..)
(December 5, 2012 at 1:51 am)Zen Badger Wrote:(December 5, 2012 at 1:17 am)Vincenzo "Vinny" G. Wrote: Simple question.
This will weed out the realists and the rationalists from the rest.
For science to be against atheism it would've found verifiable evidence for god.
So I for one would accept the existence of said "god".
As to whether I would worship this entity, that's another thing.
I used to think this.
But I think most sophisticated Christian philosophers and academics posit a new probabilistic avenue for science supporting God.
It boils down to comparing probabilities. What's the probability the universe, the earth- the world we live in came about due to unguided naturalistic processes, versus with the existence of God.
What this argument does is show that considering only unguided processes (evolution, natural selection, etc), universes that support life are just mindbogglingly unlikely to come out in such a way as to actually be sustainable for any long period of time, LET ALONE long enough to sustain life of any kind, LET ALONE life as complex as human life.
In fact, this has become something of a mainstay in Cosmology (study of the universe), being called "the anthropic principle". Anthro = human.
I had to look this up, but Roger Penrose calculates that the odds of the initial conditions of the universe coming about in such a way is 1 in 10^10^123.
10^10 is 10 billion, by the way.