(December 3, 2015 at 4:40 am)robvalue Wrote: If God was required for there to be stuff, and there is stuff, then there must have been God.
Tautology.
The organization of the material universe is what matters. Without design, the Big Bang material wouldn't have coalesced; it would still be going unorganized (like little bb's continuing to separate further and further). The universe's expansion rate has been balanced at just the right rate to make advanced life possible. if the expansion rate were too rapid, stars and planets would not form since gravity wouldn't have adequate time to pull together the gases and dust that make up these bodies. If the expansion rate weren't rapid enough, the stars formed would rapidly collapse and become black holes or neutron stars. What determines this expansion rate is gravity and dark energy (a property that stretches the universe's space/time surface. In the book 'The Grand Design' by Hawking, Modinow, of which I have in eBook form, in chapter 7 this statement is made. "the laws of nature form a system that is extremely fine-tuned, and very little in physical law can be altered without the possibility of the development of life as we know it". Goes on to say that the Cosmological Constant (the energy density that causes the universe's expansion, referred to as dark energy) has a value 10^120 (as a comparison, the est. atoms in the observable universe is 10^80. (). Continuing - "the one thing that is certain is that if the value of the Cosmological Constant were much larger than it is, our universe would have blown itself apart before galaxies could form--once again--life as we know it would impossible".
Atheist Credo: A universe by chance that also just happened to admit the observer by chance.