(November 13, 2017 at 9:11 am)alpha male Wrote:(November 12, 2017 at 11:58 pm)emjay Wrote: As to Occam's Razor... yeah, but then it's just turtles all the way down isn't it? If there was always something rather than nothing, which I believe is possible, then there is no need to 'multiply entities needlessly' by adding a God,
On what evidence do you believe that an eternally existing universe is possible?
Energy cannot be created nor destroyed.
On what evidence do you believe that an eternally existing god is possible?
(November 13, 2017 at 9:11 am)alpha male Wrote: You're still behind. Science no longer thinks that the Urey-Miller experiment replicated early conditions on earth.
Yet it still shows us that the process is likely similar even if the conditions were not exactly the same.
(November 13, 2017 at 9:11 am)alpha male Wrote: Oh wow, you even confirmed the point. Time = magic.
Define magic. How about some effect where the cause is not only unknown but can't ever be known? Think of the idea of wizards and you'll see that the definition fits. That is also the very hallmark of christian belief. No christian ever tries defining what a soul is, or a holy spirit, or what a god is or how it or prayer could possibly work. Because to do so means that you then have something that is falsifiable and can be shown to be false. You are the perfect example of this by not even trying to explain how your beliefs could in any way be plausible.
Yet waiting for a statistically rare event has been shown to take time in practice on average. If I gave you a bucket load of 6 sided dice and you tipped them all on the ground, the probability of them coming up all 6's is a statistically rare event. If I gave you a task of doing just that, how long would you ask for to complete that task in the knowledge that you were likely to manage just that? This isn't magic, it's just a lower probability requires more time to happen on average. Now if we tasked every person on the planet to do the same thing, then we can calculate a much higher chance of success happening within the near future.
That said, I don't even assume that life is a statistically rare event. Again it's the theists making the assumption to make it sound less likely. It assumes that in the few million years since the Earth formed that a chemical soup was stable and doing the equivalent of rolling dice. But in reality the Earth wasn't even habitable for life when it first started to form and took a long time to cool down. We just don't know how long it took once the Earth became habitable for life to appear. Evidence is, not long.
(November 13, 2017 at 9:11 am)alpha male Wrote: But now, with most of science agreeing that the universe had a beginning, you don't have an eternal universe, and an additional entity becomes necessary.
We don't know that the universe had a beginning. All we know is that at some point which we call the Big Bang, all energy and space-time was condensed into one small point. We don't know what happened before that. What we do know though is that since the Big Bang, energy cannot be created nor destroyed so is essentially eternal. All All matter in the universe has come from energy, so yes, the universe does seem to be eternal.
Adding an additional entity to explain what we observe is not in keeping with the principle of Occam's razor if it ends up relying on more assumptions as a result. Your god character does exactly that and does not even help solve the initial question, it just pushes the solution further away like a homunculus fallacy. This is because the same questions that we can ask of how an eternal universe came into being can now be asked of how an eternal god came into being. All you have achieved is to add an unnecessary component. And to think that you did this by evoking Occam's razor!
