(September 17, 2012 at 7:50 pm)Reasonable_Jeff Wrote: I've heard atheists say,
“I believe that the universe was created out of nothing by chance.”
But chance can’t create anything. It’s a word that we use to describe or talk about probabilities. If I flip a coin the chances of it landing heads up if flipped (assuming it doesn’t land on its side) is 50%. But if it does land heads up, chance didn't "cause" it to flip, I did. "Chance" doesn't stand in casual relation to things.
“Chance” as the cause of the universe seems silly.
What do you guys think?
I think you are using a classic debating cipher from the theist playbook: the anonymous, untraceable source. Pretend-Doctor Kent (FPC Inmate #06452-017) Hovind used to do that all the time. If you wanted to start a topic about probability and how it affects the physical world, all you needed to do was open with something like "Hey, what do you guys think about..." and then present your case. There was no need to give birth to some fictional atheist strawman. If you represented your atheist sources accurately, then they and you are grossly misinformed.
The notion that chance - often combined with the word random, depending on devoutness of the speaker and the credulity of the audience - is responsible for the creation of everything is not a scientific one and is most certainly not an atheistic one. We don't know enough about the conditions at the moment of the Universe's formation to form any concrete opinions on the matter. This is not to say that all bets are off and all opinions are equally valid however. We do know something about the conditions immediately following the moment of conception and learning more all the time. There are models of how the baby Universe 'evolved' going back practically to what is known as the 1 Planck Time Era, 10 to the minus 43 seconds after the Big Bang.
Chance does have a rôle to play in the formation and development of systems, but it's chance filtered by other processes, such as many generations of natural selection, not chance acting alone.
At the age of five, Skagra decided emphatically that God did not exist. This revelation tends to make most people in the universe who have it react in one of two ways - with relief or with despair. Only Skagra responded to it by thinking, 'Wait a second. That means there's a situation vacant.'
