RE: God and Big Bang
April 10, 2017 at 4:06 pm
(This post was last modified: April 10, 2017 at 4:07 pm by Fake Messiah.)
(April 10, 2017 at 12:05 pm)Alex K Wrote: If one of the quark masses were not much larger, protons would decay and there would only be hydrogen gas. You can't tell me that would be an equally valid but different backdrop for some form of intelligence.
Well give it 14 billion years and anything is possible. The bottom line is, I think, that you can't argue if life, as we know it, depends sensitively on the parameters of our universe. But it certainly doesn't stop William Lane Craig and many other theist authors to argue that this is indeed like that and it is therefore evidence for god.
Biology of life are still big misery to science. Sure we know a lot about life on Earth and how it developed but all life on Earth is essentially the same; chemically we're identical to bacteria or begonias. It's as though you said to a physicist: "You're going to study gravity now, but you can't go out of this room, and you can't look at anything that has a gravitational influence except what's within this room. Here are two big lead spheres. Measure how much they attract each other and try to devise a general theory." Well, that's very difficult.
Certainly Isaac Newton did it not make his fundamental discoveries by being in a laboratory, but by looking at the motion of Moon and the moons of Jupiter and so on, and things on the earth as well. By making those connections he was able to make a general law of gravitation. Well, the biologists have mighty few general laws, and that's because they have mighty few cases - like one.
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"