RE: The absurd need for logical proofs for God
December 11, 2020 at 12:18 pm
(This post was last modified: December 11, 2020 at 12:19 pm by Angrboda.)
(December 9, 2020 at 9:48 am)Klorophyll Wrote:(December 8, 2020 at 10:47 pm)Angrboda Wrote: Not true. It's highly relevant, as if life conforms to the universe regardless of whether the universe is conformed to life, then the existence of life says nothing about design.And now you run into the obvious problem... what would say anything about design, then ? If you think life with all its complexity isn't .. enough ..
Besides.. can you define design for me please ? Nobody so far gave a good definition.
I'm going to assume that you are using 'you' here in the third person plural and not meaning me specifically and ask what bearing this has on what I said? If you mean me personally, that I supposedly have a problem, then I'll point out that I am not making an affirmative case here; you are. As such, the responsibility for answering these questions is yours, not mine. I have no obligation to answer them. You, however, do.
(December 9, 2020 at 9:48 am)Klorophyll Wrote:(December 8, 2020 at 10:47 pm)Angrboda Wrote: That's assuming there is a reason behind our being here, which is a form of begging the question. If there is no reason for our being here, then there is no accounting for it.I'm not sure what you mean by reason. In any case, there is a cause to this universe, and one is forced to pick between first cause and infinite regress. There is no third option, no agnostic position.
(December 8, 2020 at 10:47 pm)Angrboda Wrote: It's not exactly clear what you're trying to express here. If you're suggesting that natural processes cannot explain life, then I'd say you're mistaken. You seem to mix parts of unrelated arguments freely, so it's not clear why you introduce the question of beginnings. However, the fact that something needs a beginning doesn't lead to the conclusion that any specific endpoint was intended at that beginning. Life is a possible endpoint that might have been intended. Or, perhaps God likes heavy elements and designed the universe toward that end, and life was just an accidental byproduct. Or perhaps God had no further thought to the universe than that he found this set of constants more aesthetically pleasing than any other, and he didn't care about life or any of the rest. It echoes a point in a summary of objections to the common claim that the universe was fine-tuned for life that I'll link you to shortly. The fact is, only the designer can inform us of his/her intentions, the universe itself is mute and uninformative with regards to any designer's intentions. If I hand you a screwdriver, you might infer that I want you to tighten some screws. Unbeknownst to you, I actually want you to use it to hammer some nails. What you think the screwdriver might be best suited for is irrelevant.
So, no, you haven't provided any compelling justification for believing that the universe was fine-tuned for "life" -- whatever that might be defined as.
And finally, you're wrong about the necessity of starting points. The Hawking-Hartle No-boundary proposal dispenses with beginnings, as does Roger Penrose's Conformal Cyclic Cosmology model. And those are just two models that we know about from modern physics. It's possible the explanation for the existence of the universe is something we haven't yet imagined. As Rumsfield said, there are always the unknown unknowns. So suggesting God, design, or creation events are necessary explanations because we lack alternatives becomes an argument from ignorance, with the corresponding conclusion that such arguments are invalid, and their conclusions not reliably true.
First of all, the models you're talking are proposals deduced from mathematical formulations, they're not related to any empirical observation, so you can't rely on them to run away from the problem of the first cause.
Secondly, it's logically forced that there either is a first cause or an infinite regress, this has nothing to do with appeal to ignorance or lack of imagination. Finite or infinite, not both, no third option. Now you say the universe itself is the first cause, I say everything we know about modern physics, most importantly the BB, makes your proposal highly unlikely.
First causes are an interesting topic in their own right, but as noted, they do not in themselves imply that the universe is fine-tuned for life, regardless of how you answer them, so in the context of our current discussion about whether the universe is fine-tuned for the existence of life, your objections are irrelevant and constitute red herrings. If you want to concede that you have lost the argument regarding fine-tuning and life so that we can change the subject and discuss first causes, I'd be more than happy to answer your concerns and objections which you have voiced here. I addressed them initially out of courtesy, but if you are going to insist on them being addressed, I'm going to insist that you finish what you started or acknowledge defeat and accept that the universe is not fine-tuned for life. Otherwise you need to provide some cogent objections to my points, because these red herrings aren't relevant.
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