How to debunk the first cause argument without trying too hard

[Ronkonkoma]

I've never listened to Deepak Chopra and I don't intend to. The first part I took from Viktor Frankl. He was a holocaust survivor and psychiatrist. His ideas are based on the tradition of the german philosophers as opposed to the british empiricists.  

Every event is statistically improbable, sure, but some things are made more probable than others by our values. It is our responsibility as human beings to live according to our values. Values are an important tool for our brain, which is the organ of purpose. Much like the liver is producing bile, so the brain is producing a purpose to live for. Without that we will literally die (through direct or indirect suicide).

Ideas are very important because they affect behavior and behavior affects our material existence.

The "just right" argument is based on science and is really not beyond our capacity to understand. In fact, the sheer number of these conditions needed for life might be vastly understated for all we know, considering the fact that they multiply when we come to speaking about human life.

You can't reduce human existence to the material and strictly empiric, because that will undermine freedom, responsibility and human dignity, and lead to many more holocausts and breeches in human rights. That was my point I tried to express, doctor.

I wasn't suggesting you read Chopra. In fact, I recommend no one do so. But he's famous for meaningless "word salads", to the point that there's a joke website that lets you make up random stuff he might have said.

I've read Man's Search for Meaning  and, while I found his psychiatric evaluation of the Nazi (and capo) behaviors fascinating and insightful, he too devolved into Chopra-esque "word salad" when he started talking about his ideas for the logotherapy treatment methods. Still, the ending paragraphs of that book are among the most profound things I have ever read.

And that brings me to my main point, here. Frankl was a non-religious (secular) Jew, a highly-trained medical scientist, and spoke of God only in passing, usually when talking about someone else's point of view. Yet he devoted an entire book to the "search for meaning". And while "the Problem of Pain" is not a true argument against the existence of God, it's well-known historically that a huge portion of the Jewish community became secularists in the wake of the Holocaust, feeling as though their God had abandoned them. Many continue the old traditions out of a sense of ethnic preservation, of course.

I think you can "reduce" the human experience to the material and strictly empiric, but that doesn't imply that this is all there is to life! The sunset is no less beautiful because I understand the physics of nuclear fusion and the diffraction of wavelengths of light passing through atmosphere! My wife is not less dear to me because I understand the neurochemistry of human pair-bonding. I do not think my love for her is magic; I do think it's pretty awesome!

I would argue that believing in magical causation, awaited saviors, Revealed morality, and a life after this one cheapens our respect for this life, and reduces our ability to make this world (and our lives) better. I would argue it strongly, as I have awakened from the mental darkness of religion and I can see clearly how tightly I had to squeeze my eyes shut, before, to hold many of the ideas I held as true because they were part of my sacred scriptures and/or faith-society traditions. You're right about one thing-- we do make the meaning by our values and our decisions. But I think the Secular Humanist position is not only the only defensible one, I outright fear the insanity that I see coming from those who accept the concept of Revealed Truths™ and base their moral definitions on the views of the priests of any Bronze Age desert tribal sheepherder-warrior people.

Finally, the "just right" argument is not "based on science", it's a misrepresentation of what is known and not known in science. There are a few religiously-inclined scientists who have tried to make the teleological argument (most famously, the geneticist Dr. Francis Collins of the Human Genome Project), but scientists with more expertise in cosmology have laughed him down and pointed out his fallacies. You cannot say "it is based on science" when the top cosmologists and astrophysicists are literally writing books explaining why it is not science. If you really want to know why it doesn't work like you think it works, read this.

Humm, ok, very good, I see that you're honest. I read into the post and will read some more before I can answer it. In terms of the fine tuning, I didn't even know this argument existed. I guess I learn as we go. I don't really think in terms of categories of arguments. As such, I'm a little weary of a site that argues for the sake of debunking Christianity. In terms of the numbers, I was actually quoting from an Astro-physicist Hugh Ross at UBC who claims he was an atheist before the recent developments in Astronomy in the past 15 or 20 years, and it was the evidence of the beginning of time by Dawkin that convinced him. He said there was a lot of weight on that finding in Astronomy because the "first clause" argument depend on it, and he explains how, in a way I don't have much time to list.

I don't claim to defend Astronomy so well because I'm neither an astronomer, just a dumb country doc who doesn't know his elbow from a pimple from his ass. I'm not a fundamentalist Christian, though, I'm a Catholic. I also know about the neurobiology of bonding, and the development of personality through mother-infant bonding, which I'm so impressed about as to write an article.

On the other hand I was also impressed by the short stories of one of the greatest Russian authors, Leon Tolstoy, "what men live by". He writes about human pain and what keeps people going just like Frankl wrote about meaning. The short story starts with a fallen angel on the side of the road, naked and cold, who is taken into the home of a poor Russian peasant family, thinking he is just a man. The story ends with a demonstrations of three things that the angel had to learn about humanity. One of them was that men live by love just as they live on bread. I find this so true. And I think of those Syrian Muslim refugees traveling through Eastern Europe, coming to the Christian countries, expecting compassion and solidarity, and finding only resentment and hostility. And a dead boy washing on the shores of Greece. Died of  a lack of love as people were hearded into tiny boats at gunpoint and sent to sea with no food and water.