(July 23, 2011 at 12:02 pm)GodIsRealOrNothingMakesSince Wrote: There are many things i could say but that would require much typing which i don't quite feel doing. But what I will say is I think the evidence is all around you. Just look at how intricate and specific and perfectly in place everything in the world and universe is. If the planet was just a few miles closer to the sun it would be to hot and if we were a few miles farther it would be to cold for liquid water. And if the earth was just a little bit off its axis the earth couldn't support life. If certain mathematical equations of the universe were just slightly off the universe would collapse in on itself as soon as it was created or it would be completely off couldn't sustain stars or planets and therefore life. And then just look at the cell, which i believe is one of the strongest evidences. They used to call the cell the "simple cell" but in the last few years in science we've discovered just how perfectly intricate the cell is. Do your research on it. The cell is so perfectly specific and so extremely complex that some scientist are even saying that aliens seeded life here on earth. Now just think about that for a moment. That doing the same thing you claim I do and just throwing off the problem onto something else and begs the question "Well where did the aliens come from?". It just shocks me that such intelligent people would rather believe that aliens created us that God. The evidence is right there in front of them, they just don't want to admit it.
What aspect of the universe being 'intricate and specific' do you think there isn't a good naturalist understanding of? We understand in great detail how a lot of the universe operates via natural process and how these processes came to be, what the precursors are etc. The stuff we do not have a good explanation for is simply unknown and positing that a cosmic wizard willed it that way is a complete farce.
If our planet was about 10,000 miles closer or further from the sun maybe. And big deal, there are 200 trillion stars in our galaxy and 100 trillion galaxies, the chances of any one planet orbiting any given star in the 'goldilocks zone' is small but non zero, we would expect millions of them throughout the universe at minimum.
Show me this evidence that if the earth was 'off-axis' it couldn't support life - that sounds completely bullshit, especially considering there exists models showing how tidally locked planets (a much more extreme situation) could still support life in certain regions. At the least the parts of the planet that currently can't support a lot of life, such a deserts, would be in different locations on the planet, at worst there would be a much smaller percent of the planet with habitable zones.
Also you raised the apparent fine-tuning of the universe, something that I am intricately familiar with. There are at least 8 possible explanations for such a thing that come to mind, a deity is just one of those options. The fine-tuning is no more evidence for a god than it is evidence for cosmic evolution, changing laws of physics, context dependent cosmological constants, inflationary multiverses and string theory - All of these are compatible with the observed phenomenon.
As for your simple cell; The cell is indeed complicated, but we know a great deal about how it works, so much so that 99% of scientists in the relevant fields see no need to posit a deity - most of us acknowledge that highly complex systems form in nature frequently and there is no reason to presume any differently. Panspermia is also NOT the idea that "aliens seeded the earth", it is the idea that the basic building blocks of organic materials could have formed from the myriad of reactions during a very hot and volatile early solar system and if that is the case, considering the range of debris in the early solar system the chances of some landing on earth are relatively high - Not only that but we have empirical evidence demonstrating that certain organisms would easily survive such a process.
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