The Case for Theism

[Angrboda]

Hello Apophenia

You have said repeatedly your not an atheist...just what do you believe about the existence of the universe and life and what facts support your belief?

I think it's a profound mystery. I haven't found any proposed explanation for the existence of the universe that I find persuasive.

I'm inclined to take a somewhat Kantian approach, and think that the answer may be as much a result of conceptual inadequacy as evidentiary. In line with Kierkegaard's, "The supreme paradox of all thought is the attempt to discover something that thought cannot think," I think it's likely we don't have adequate concepts, philosophy or metaphysics to pose the question appropriately and answer it at this time. In ways, I'm reminded of Olbers' paradox, and the fact that many years from now, if we looked into the sky, we would see nothing, as well as some of the implications of Brane theory — all of which suggest that we may not even have access to the information we need for one reason or another. And it's entirely possible that, like the wave / particle duality, we simply aren't equipped to think intuitively about such things. But then, cosmology and physics aren't my field, so this is purely the musings of a layman.

I do have religious opinions and such, but in addition to being somewhat personal and private, they are likely not of interest or benefit to anyone else, and don't have any real accepted evidentiary value. I accept the evolutionary explanation for the evidence about the diversity, form, and pattern of life, while acknowledging that abiogenesis still has no adequate theory at this time. (I'm also a philosopher, specializing in cognitive science and philosophy of mind, and I have my own, unproven, physicalist model for the phenomena typically referred to as consciousness. It's certainly speculative, but my current thinking is that there is nothing particularly mysterious about consciousness, whether or not my model proves accurate.)

(Oh, and regards to Panspermia, the key point is that in attempting to determine whether the universe, and specifically, our local conditions, are fine-tuned for the creation of life here on this planet, one is assuming that life was created on this planet. In evaluating the probability of its natural occurrence, it's assuming that it isn't matched to the environment for other reasons that don't require a creator of the universe to explain (an extra-terrestrial origin); the point in bringing it up is not to offer a better theory, it's to point out that assuming the converse, that life originated here, and calculating your probabilities on the basis of life having been created here by natural processes, introduces assumptions into your calculation of the probability which themselves can't be justified. I don't believe in Panspermia of the bug-eyed alien type, but if you're going to make an attempt to assess the probabilities of the specific life on earth existing, you have to factor in all relevant possibilities, and exclude any unjustified assumptions.)