Pascal's Wager

[Pete]

I don't like the implication of that statement.

What do you think it implies? What do you think I meant to imply?

Rejecting evidence implies we can see God exists but chose to ignore it.

That's not what I said and it's certainly is not what I meant. I must admit that I'm confused as to how you came to that conclusion.

What I meant by it is the fact that what people consider as evidence of something is very subjective. I also reject the claim made by people here that I'm trying to redefine the term atheist. I would like to ask people not to put words into my mouth. Agreed?

The term atheist refers to a person who does not believe that God exists. I do not reject that definition. I accept it in fact. I believe people have mistaken my comment to mean that I believe that an atheist is defined by rejecting evidence. That is not what I said, meant or implied. It is simply my opinion that this is a property of atheists, at least for many. I.e. many, if not all, atheists believe that there is no evidence of the existance of a God. I take that to be a truism. If people disagree then that's fine.

Rather based science that flies in the face of God and lack of convincing evidence from theists we come to the conclusion that he doesn't exist, ebcause the burden is on theists to prove and they fail in that.

I agree. You mentioned convincing evidence/. What you take as being non-convincing others take as being convincing. That was my point.

The nuance may not seem like much to you but it's important.

Please do not assume what I meant regarding something. If you simply ask me what I meant I will gladly tell you.

The former implies we defy logic ..

I disagree. I never said or implied that the reason for having a different opinion regarding evidence has to do with logic. It is merely a difference of opinion. Differences of opinions does not imply that one side is being logical while the other isn't.

Let me tell you, it's not easy to disbelieve something you're brought up to believe as a child.

I was raised Catholic. I was force to go to church every sunday and I had to go to a Catholic school for first and second grade. Thank God my parents didn't force me to keep going. As I grew up I came to question the existance of God. I.e. I became agnostic. And for a while I was even an atheist. So its not like I don't know what its like to disbelieve something your brought up to believe as a child.

But anyway, I kind of when on a tangent. The point I was making is Atheist is not an easy thing to suddenly decide, maybe for some people, but certainly not me.

OI understand. Believe me I do. When I was an atheist I was going steady with a girl who was a Christian. She wasn't that comfortable with me being an atheist I can tell you that for sure!

If you try for just one minute and consider everything you believe about God is false, just entertain that idea.

Is there a reason that you believe that I have never considered that?

When I was in college I had to take a class in statistical mechanics. One of the problems I had to solve as homework was equivalent to a problem one might have to calculate in trying to determine how likely it is for a functional protein molecule to form by chance. The probability was astronomically small. So small that I have never even considered a probablity to be that small. At that time I decided never to make an assumption about whether something could happen by chance unless I actually calculated it myself. It was at that point that I felt it was best not to assume that God didn't exist.

Regarding fine-tuning. I see a lot of assertions made here which I disagree with. There were claims that life could have formed in ways that are radically different than our own and thus this fine-tunning is a mislead concept. There were aslo claims that scientists don't really consider this as a problem to be solved. That is something that I've not seen demonstrated in this thread. Since there are articles published on this very topic in respected physics journals and addressed by well known scientists in various places in the physics literature I see no basis for such a claim. I've even posted a link to one such article which was to an article that appeared in Mod. Phys. Lett. in 2004 by a well known physicist Paul Davies. I've read about this subject in several places and have discussed it with physicists too.

Counter arguements to fine-tunning have been based on such things like the fact that we don't know what is sufficient for life to exist. But there are reasonable assumptions that we can make for what must be neccesary for life to exist. For example: life form must be made of atoms. That is quite reasonable. Another reasonable assumption is that life must consist of atoms other than hydrogen. That too is quite reasonable. I've not seen any arguement that life could exist in the absense of matter. Want to take a shot at it?

There is a chapter from a book regarding fine-tuning in cosmology which can be read online at
http://www.anthropic-principle.com/prepr...tuning.pdf

Again there were too many comments to address so I've left most of them alone. However I'd be more than willing to discuss them in PM and then, if requested, place my responses in the thread. I'm just not sure that people are that interested in my opinion on this so I'm not giving one in all these cases. But would be more than happy to if asked.

Best wishes to everyone and thank you all for your responses. They are all appreciated.

Pete