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RE: Fine Tuning Principle: Devastating Disproof and Scientific Refutation of Atheism.
July 22, 2023 at 7:39 am
Theists never ever seem to grasp that the Fine Tuning Argument is self-defeatingly circular. WHY they never understand this is left as an exercise for the student.
Boru
‘I can’t be having with this.’ - Esmeralda Weatherwax
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RE: Fine Tuning Principle: Devastating Disproof and Scientific Refutation of Atheism.
July 22, 2023 at 7:40 am
(July 22, 2023 at 7:36 am)Nishant Xavier Wrote: Is that what you think is going to happen? Well, no wonder studies show Religious Belief and Depression are inversely related, while Depression sadly seems to be rather high among Atheists. I guess it's logical: If we're all going to die and there's nothing to hope for, well, what else would such a belief lead to? Let me tell you what's going to happen instead: After the Gospel is preached in every nation and to every last tribe, as Christ said it would be in Mat 24 and elsewhere, then Anti-Christ, a Fake Messiah, will appear, claiming to be the True Messiah, which Jesus Christ was. Now, after this Anti-Christ, for 3.5 years, deceives many, and causes the greatest persecution ever, then Jesus Christ will establish His Messianic Kingdom of Peace for 1000 years, as is spoken of in Revelation 20. During this time, the Animal Creation will also be ransomed and restored, as is spoken of in the Prophet Isaiah; the wolf will live with the lamb, and all will be well. An All-Powerful God will gloriously intervene in Creation so as to bring this about.
Here is Revelation 20:
"4 I saw thrones on which were seated those who had been given authority to judge. And I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded because of their testimony about Jesus and because of the word of God. They had not worshiped the beast or its image and had not received its mark on their foreheads or their hands. They came to life and reigned with Christ a thousand years."
The Bible begins with the Creation of the Universe, and it ends with the end of the present world, and the Beginning of the New Heavens and Earth, a renewed Creation, a restored Universe. All this is only possible after all or most accept the Gospel and begin to live in Love and Peace.
Here is Isaiah 11:6: "The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them."
It strikes me that beyond all the evidential reasons to believe in God and the Gospel, this is a practical one: atheism leads to nihilism and hopelessness, in the long run at least, because of what it predicts will ultimately happen. But Christianity to confidence, peace and happiness, because of what it predicts will ultimately happen. We will see how things come to pass, but Christianity gives us something to look forward to.
Once again you've overlooked perfectly valid possibilities. Atheism need not lead to nihilism and hopelessness, though some may interpret it that way. You repeatedly show that you lack the imagination necessary and are repeatedly falling back into arguments from ignorance based upon your falsely restricted set of options.
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RE: Fine Tuning Principle: Devastating Disproof and Scientific Refutation of Atheism.
July 22, 2023 at 7:50 am
My atheism absolutely gives me things to look forward to. Most importantly, that I will - literally - become one with the universe. All of the bits and bobs that make me me will continue forever, recombining in patterns that I can’t even begin to imagine. It’s a legitimate form of immortality, as opposed to the pie-in-the-sky rubbish promised by the religionists.
Only slightly less important is the fact that my atheism frees up my Sunday mornings.
Boru
‘I can’t be having with this.’ - Esmeralda Weatherwax
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RE: Fine Tuning Principle: Devastating Disproof and Scientific Refutation of Atheism.
July 22, 2023 at 8:29 am
(This post was last modified: July 22, 2023 at 8:31 am by Fake Messiah.)
(July 22, 2023 at 7:36 am)Nishant Xavier Wrote: Is that what you think is going to happen? Well, no wonder studies show Religious Belief and Depression are inversely related, while Depression sadly seems to be rather high among Atheists.
And there he goes into non-sequitur.
Who said that I was depressed? I am not depressed, but you are delusional. You claim to know science and yet you are oblivious to global warming and other pollution that is making this planet uninhabitable very fast. The conditions for life are very delicate and thus are very easy to put in a devastating unbalance, and if the universe was so fine-tuned for life then life would not be so fragile.
Another reason this planet is becoming anti-life like all other planets is that people are too stupid to understand, like you, which is another argument against intelligent design.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
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RE: Fine Tuning Principle: Devastating Disproof and Scientific Refutation of Atheism.
July 22, 2023 at 8:35 am
(This post was last modified: July 22, 2023 at 8:51 am by The Grand Nudger.)
You might have it backwards Nish. It's not that the universe is tuned for life, but that life as we know it is tuned for the universe as we know it. The usual example is that of a puddle water, certain that the hole was custom-made to fit.
For a deeper dive, consider that someone might have bullshitted you about atheism having a chance god. This is a rhetorical device to avoid things like biology, geology, solar system formation. No one thinks that "chance" describes processes like this accurately. You were set up to fail.
You weren't just set up to fail, you were set up to be an insufferable prick while you failed. Don't you think there might be some terrible reason, for example, that atheists seem to feel a bit down? Maybe they largely come from believing families, and got the same treatment from their parents and peers.... as children..... that you think is appropriate here, with us, as grown strangers? Maybe worse. Or maybe it's that believing society, as a whole, is more ready to trust a foreign muslim directly after 9/11 than the atheist who grew up right next door to them and they've known their whole lives. Largely, again, because of the fucked up shit that the people who set you up to fail keep peddling.
What I see, every time you launch yourself into one of these, is pure projection. I see a nihilist who believes that life doesn't have any meaning. That god merely grants things meaning that the things don't themselves possess. I see a person with terrible political positions that have failed time and time again. I see a person who wants to harm children. I see a person who's externalized their own fears, and shame, and idiocy so well that they fail to realize that they are everything they feel like they're railing against. Good luck with all of that shit.
I am the Infantry. I am my country’s strength in war, her deterrent in peace. I am the heart of the fight… wherever, whenever. I carry America’s faith and honor against her enemies. I am the Queen of Battle. I am what my country expects me to be, the best trained Soldier in the world. In the race for victory, I am swift, determined, and courageous, armed with a fierce will to win. Never will I fail my country’s trust. Always I fight on…through the foe, to the objective, to triumph overall. If necessary, I will fight to my death. By my steadfast courage, I have won more than 200 years of freedom. I yield not to weakness, to hunger, to cowardice, to fatigue, to superior odds, For I am mentally tough, physically strong, and morally straight. I forsake not, my country, my mission, my comrades, my sacred duty. I am relentless. I am always there, now and forever. I AM THE INFANTRY! FOLLOW ME!
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RE: Fine Tuning Principle: Devastating Disproof and Scientific Refutation of Atheism.
July 22, 2023 at 8:49 am
If the universe is fine tuned for life, why is 99.9999% of it so lethal?
Hard vacuum, radiation, too hot, too cold, toxic atmospheres... the list goes on...
The meek shall inherit the Earth, the rest of us will fly to the stars.
Never underestimate the power of very stupid people in large groups
Arguing with an engineer is like wrestling with a pig in mud ..... after a while you realise that the pig likes it!
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RE: Fine Tuning Principle: Devastating Disproof and Scientific Refutation of Atheism.
July 22, 2023 at 8:54 am
Pishant, when is your tiny, tiny, little mind ever going to realize your stupid fantasy is absolutely ridiclous, and only morons believe this garbage?
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RE: Fine Tuning Principle: Devastating Disproof and Scientific Refutation of Atheism.
July 22, 2023 at 10:07 am
(This post was last modified: July 22, 2023 at 10:08 am by GrandizerII.)
(July 22, 2023 at 6:30 am)Nishant Xavier Wrote: Physicist Paul Davies teaches: "There is now broad agreement among physicists and cosmologists that the Universe is in several respects ‘fine-tuned' for life” (Cosmic Jackpot, Why our Universe is just right for life), while even Steven Hawking admits: "The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life." (A Brief History of Time).
Adequate context for these quotes missing.
Quote:Sir Martin Rees mentions 6 of these Cosmic Constants in the Book, Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces that Shape the Universe. Sir Martin Rees is a leading researcher on Cosmic Evolution and renowned authority/expert in his field.
Six constants only doesn't mean the universe is, therefore, fine-tuned for life. A lifeless universe could also have been "governed" by six constants only.
Quote:Let’s formulate the Fine Tuning Argument in logical steps:
1. The Life-Permitting Possible Configurations of the Universe are vanishingly small compared to the Life-Precluding ones (as amply admitted/documented by the above Scientists/Researchers).
2. Thus, on Chance alone, it’s reasonable to say no life at all should ever have existed.
3. Therefore, granted the existence of life, Design is a vastly superior explanation to chance, for the fact of why life exists at all in the first place. Chance just isn’t very good at creating life, it turns out, unfortunately for Atheists, because the life-permitting range is mind-bogglingly narrow.
P1, as it is worded, doesn't follow from what was said prior to that. Conditions for life could be varied considerably without doing away with the case that the universe would still be fine-tuned for life.
Regarding P2, it's also reasonable to say that life could still have emerged on chance alone. There is nothing magical about natural processes eventually leading to what we label "life".
Conclusion, therefore, unwarranted.
Quote:An analogy: 10 sharp-shooters are shooting at you, while you’ve been lined up before them in a firing squad for various crimes. Now, on chance alone, it’s a vanishingly small likelihood that you will ever survive this, because they're all not going to miss by chance. Nevertheless, if it turns out that you did survive, then given the evidence of your survival, the most Logical Explanation is not only Intelligent Design, but even Benign Design.
Could be I was "rigged" to survive because someone was there to protect me from death but without anyone noticing their presence, or could be I got lucky (can happen, believe it or not). To decide what the best explanation is here, you need to dig deeper and not just quickly jump to conclusions.
Quote:[Please note, if some of these constants were even slightly altered, galaxies, planets or stars wouldn’t even form in the first place, or the Universe would have re-collapsed long ago into nothingness. Therefore, life would never form because there would be no Planets for it to form on!]
Says who? You appear to be adding extra words here.
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RE: Fine Tuning Principle: Devastating Disproof and Scientific Refutation of Atheism.
July 22, 2023 at 10:30 am
The problem with changing the constants of the universe "argument" is that it is all just speculations upon speculations. No one can say for certain how would the universe look like with different constants, that it would not support life, or that constants can be different in the first place. It's all again back to imagining things.
Besides, some physicists calculated that the universe with different parameters could still have life in it (although different than in this universe), but I don't doubt that people like Nishant would care for that because they have their agenda to push and because, as I said, it is all just speculations to begin with.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
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RE: Fine Tuning Principle: Devastating Disproof and Scientific Refutation of Atheism.
July 22, 2023 at 11:14 am
I did not say you were depressed, FM. I was pointing to a general trend among the non-religious: "Of the 178 most methodologically rigorous studies, 119 (67%) find inverse relationships between R/S and depression" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3426191/ Man was never meant to live without God. True, your Sunday mornings may be occupied in going to Church etc, but then you receive so many blessings for fulfilling your obligations to Him in that way, from receiving Him in Holy Communion, to so much else, both in this life, and the next, and that's how we were always meant to live. God created us for Perfect Happiness in the life to come, and a fair degree of happiness here in this life as a foretaste of eternal bliss, provided we are ready to faithfully serve Him, our Creator, and the Designer of the Universe, Who gave us so many good things including life itself, not to mention the faithful Promise of Eternal Life and Eternal Happiness to be received in its due time. The researchers above postulated various reasons why the Religious are more happy than the Non-Religious, and those are fine; imo, the Promise of Eternal Happiness also plays a great part in it, because when you believe/know you will be Eternally Happy one day, in a sense you already begin to be happy anticipating it.
There are conditions, of course, to attain that happiness, but those are very simple: love God, keep His commandments, accept Christ as Savior, confess when we fall short/sin, try to amend etc.
GN, and do you think 360 MN Christians, some of them in Atheistic countries like North Korea, have it better than you do? Everyone should treat everyone well irrespective of our beliefs, so that that can lead to human flourishing in time. But just saying, come to Church, give your life to Christ, and He will fill your soul with joy, is not persecution. What happens in North Korea to Christians is, though, but because God is with them, they are able to endure and to overcome it. God Bless them.
Grandizer, here is more on the book I mentioned, which could help clarify the matter: https://www.eclectica.org/v4n2/skea_rees.html
" The first is a ratio of the strength of the electrical forces that hold atoms together divided by the force of gravity between them. It is very large, about 10^36, and were it a few zeros shorter, only a short-lived miniature universe could exist and there would be no time for biological evolution.
The second number is also a ratio and is the proportion of energy that is released when hydrogen fuses into helium. This number is 0.007, and if it were 0.006 or 0.008 we could not exist."
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