RE: Why are atheist...atheist?
July 14, 2011 at 9:03 pm
(This post was last modified: July 14, 2011 at 9:33 pm by theVOID.)
(July 14, 2011 at 6:34 pm)fr0d0 Wrote: Belief is a metaphysical stance. Welcome to the dark side.
+1 to examples of fr0d0 using the word metaphysical that demonstrates he doesn't get what it means.
Belief is only related to the metaphysical where it concerns the fundamental nature of reality, that means about 99.9% of everything we believe is in no way tied to metaphysics.
(July 11, 2011 at 11:53 pm)Alastor Wrote: I choose to believe God exist because I think the laws of physics just randomly or coincidently happenening the way they did out of the infinite other possible options is rediculously unlikely.
There are a number of problems with that sentence, some stated and some implied;
1. You are comparing God as an explanation to a strawman of the alternative position(s), by stating that you are comparing God as an explanation to an infinite number of other possible options means that God is necessarily more likely, the chances of any one of an infinite set of equally likely things happening is by definition infinitely small, meaning we cannot say anything meaningful about the chances of it happening - Comparing God to something that we cannot say anything meaningful about is a bias towards your chosen position.
2. You are implying that there are only two options, God and Chance, thus your probabilities are going to be false. There are also the possibilities of Inflation, Brane Theory, Cosmic Evolution, Context-dependent physical laws and computer simulations - Each one of these offers a possible explanation for why the laws of the universe are as we observe them, in order to make an intellectually honest claim about the probability of god causing the universe you MUST take into account every other possible option - You must also acknowledge that there could many more explanations that we have not yet conceived of.
3. You are (unknowingly I suspect) giving your own values cosmic mandate. To demonstrate this ask yourself the following; If the Universe was simply 'particle soup' would you still be saying that 'This must have been designed, the chance of such a complex particle soup made up of the hundreds of participants of the 'particle zoo' happening by chance is extremely low so a god must have designed it'? I suspect you wouldn't, that means you are deciding that a universe with Life is more valuable and this is nothing but a reflection of your own values - Unfortunately for you, your own subjective values are completely irrelevant, it is naught but a bias.
4. If you believe that the existence of these specific laws by chance is extremely unlikely then the existence of a being who knew about these laws, how to implement them and what they would achieve ahead of time is MUCH MUCH more unlikely.
In short, you're reasoning is about as fucked as it can get.
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