Entropy, Kalam, and First Cause

[Clueless Morgan]

So, a recurring theme which I observe in the explanations here is the response to my admission that I can't wrap my mind around the issue. You guys say that it's natural to not be able to understand this stuff, there are a lot of unknowns and we really don't have answers, but reality is not constrained by our ability to grasp it; if something is true then it is true, whether we understand and acknowledge it or not.

The posters in this thread aren't saying that you can't wrap your mind around the issue therefore you just have to take it on faith that we're correct and believe us, they're saying that a lot of what we want to know is conceptually unavailable to us but that we should continue to pursue scientific inquiry so that one day we can find answers to these questions.

It's perfectly okay not to understand something and to recognize that there are a lot of unknowns and I agree that reality and truth is not constrained by our ability to understand it, but you also need to recognize that knowledge is a progressive process that builds upon itself and you have to build foundations of understanding in order to reach for concepts that are currently beyond our reach. It's kind of like building a skyscraper - you can't simply start building the ground level and then jump to the twenty first floor and expect that the air will hold it in place until you build floors one through twenty; you have to building the ground level, and then use the ground level to support the first floor, then use the first floor to support the second and on and on. Eventually we progressed from walking materials up stair shafts to building cranes to hoist materials up higher and higher, but the fundamental principle that the floor below must support the floor above cannot be violated.

Science and knowledge progress the same way. The science that is done today was conceptually and technologically unavailable to us 200 years ago because we were still only building the eighteenth floor of the skyscraper. We might have been able to see the potential of the twenty-first floor, there might even have been people forging ahead on the plans of the twenty-first floor, but we still have to build the nineteenth and twentieth floors to get there.

My concern is that all of that sounds remarkably similar to what the theists tell me to believe- "God is real even if we cannot comprehend him. It may not all make sense but the fact that you can't wrap your mind around it logically or scientifically doesn't mean it is false."

The difference is, as Chuck has already pointed out, science progresses through methods of inquiry and through the gathering and analysis of actual evidence. Science has built its foundations on real, tangible, demonstrable facts about the world in which we live. Theists have built their foundations out of invisible scaffolding and are asserting conclusions they can neither demonstrate nor defend.

And, to be honest, given all of the unknowns which you guys readily admit, shouldn't we seek the explanation which has the most explanatory power for the facts which we do have?

Yes, we should, but we also need to be able to distinguish concepts with actual explanatory power and concepts that seem explanatory but are actually just baseless assertions.

As far as I can tell, the Christian understanding of God, creation, time, space, etc fits the available data very well and explains things better than all the shaky, unknown speculation atheists propose. (of course, either way it is shaky and unknown and you are going to be making guesses that can't be proven)

Aliens secretly visiting Earth and abducting humans also fits the available data of UFO sightings, people who claim to be "missing time," people who say they were paralyzed in their beds and woke up with strange scars and metal implants, people who say they have memories of being in a strange room with strange creatures doing experiments on them, etc. Does that mean that aliens secretly visiting Earth and abducting humans is the most reasonable explanation?

I hope that you agree that this is utterly absurd and that all of those things have much more probable explanations, but the exact same thing is the case with anyone who claims any god as the explanation for anything. What this all comes down to is an argument from ignorance.

Another way of putting my point: it seems like some kind of "god"-explanation is the most reasonable conclusion;

Sure, just like aliens are the most reasonable conclusion of the UFO/sleep paralysis/abduction/lost time phenomenon.

the only reason one would reject such an explanation is if he were already predisposed against the notion of god. (i.e. approaches the question with unwarranted naturalistic/materialistic presuppositions)

Wrong. This is simply you committing a fundamental attribution error: "if someone doesn't accept my god as the explanation for X then they must be biases against my god!" The reason I reject the "god" explanation is because there's no positive evidence that a god is the cause of any known phenomenon, let alone direct, or even indirect, evidence that any god exists to be that cause. Provide me with evidence of your god and that this god is the cause of the phenomenon you're trying to explain and I'll change my mind.