What Is The Point Of Prayer?

[Esquilax]

That's not what I'm asking about. Where did the laws of physics that created the BBT we understand originate? Why did it happen the way it did and not some other way that wouldn't have produced life?

Because it didn't. Things ended up this way, and not some other way. The fact that it could have ended up differently in no way makes the current state of things miraculous, any more than the fact that a light switch has an off position makes a turned on light a sublime miracle. For all we know, the laws of physics could just be an inherent property of the universe, a cascade of interlocking consequences that, while very complex, merely happened one after the other in a sequence we haven't yet fully unraveled.

The best we can say is "we don't know yet." But you're making a knowledge claim about what did happen, and you need to prove that. Science not having an answer yet doesn't make god the correct answer, nor even the most likely one. Evidence will do that, one way or the other.

And we know for a fact life wouldn't exist in this universe had anything happened differently.

You can't say that, because you don't know the full range of other possible universes, nor the full range of possible life. Sure, life might not have arisen as we know it, but that doesn't mean there's only one combination of physical laws that can ever lead to life.

Unless you're claiming absolute knowledge on this point?

The that something of this magnitude was a purely some kind chance coincidence that doesn't exist for any kind of specific purpose is a very big claim to make. This isn't a trivial thing to believe in.

We don't believe that. Do you understand the difference between the statements "I don't know the answer, but I don't believe yours just yet," and "You're wrong, and the opposite of what you believe must be true?" Because the atheist position is the former, while you're making the common theist mistake of assuming our dissent means the latter.

The science behind the BB and the cosmological formation of the universe is perfectly fine I'm not trying to argue about that.

Then why did you intimate that there wasn't sufficient proof to believe it, complete with strawmen?

Reason as in it was intentionally created for the purpose of forming/evolving organic life/civilisations and all that kind of thing. It makes sense that the most complex final outcome was the initial direction behind it. Otherwise it "just happened" by chance.

Sure, I guess, if you've just gotta have a binary directed/chance dichotomy. But you understand that the chances of it happening were one hundred percent, right? I mean, it did happen.

You know this is all a bit unlikely.

You can't make a claim on probabilities here, because you can't possibly have enough data. For one, you don't have any other universes to compare it to. For two, even you don't know the process by which the universe began, you just believe in one strongly.

You have a habit of making claims you can't possibly support. My advice is to dial it back a bit.

Evolution happened of course but clearly there was certainly some kind of progression over a global scale of increasing organisation and complexity and organisation overtime and we're the final most complex product. If the universe as a whole was directional toward life then life can be directional towards sentience and civilization.

Again, this is something that needs to be demonstrated, and not asserted. Also, your claim that life progresses toward complexity is completely screwed up by the multiple examples of life evolving toward simplicity, even backward along their evolutionary pathways. Plasmodium parasites often discard attributes, using evolution to make themselves simpler. And did you know that whales are evolved from early ungulate species, showing a clear reversal as land based animals that went back into the sea, losing their more complex limbs in the process?

Hell, you have little toes, don't you? Those things are shrinking; in the past they were larger, more complicated, and used to bear weight. So there goes that theory.

The universe was structured in such as way to develop structures (solar systems/planets) suitable for life. The whole thing had to be engineered a certain way for this to be accomplished. There wasn't a margin for error for any of this. You're not going to form something like this by blind chance coincidence. Look at this son of a bitch right here.

And, again, I'm saying that you're overlaying your human ability to recognize patterns on a universe that sometimes has recurring numbers or patterns in it without an inbuilt design. You're saying that this is god at work. How do we prove one or the other?

You have so far provided no evidence beyond pointing to everything and saying that all this is so complex, it must have been designed, without giving any reason for one to think that natural things can't also be complex. In essence, your entire position is the classic argument from ignorance: "This seems complicated to me, I can't think of a better way for all this to have developed, and therefore it must have been designed."

And even taking that premise as true, you haven't advanced one step toward showing that this designer is your god.

I find this business somewhat interesting as well. I think life much as the universe in general must be set on some kind of intricate mathematical framework and there is some general kind of direction or flow behind it. This way we can still be creations of God even if the process is a little less direct than that described in Genesis.

It doesn't matter what you think, it matters what you can demonstrate, and pointing at things in the universe and going "See?! See?!" doesn't count as a demonstration.

I would strongly suggest that there is some kind of design and we can actually see it with our own eyes. This isn't really one of those "if you wish hard enough it just might be true" kind of things here.

You haven't given any evidence to support your suggestion, and so at the moment it absolutely is an issue of you really wanting it to be true.

Even Charles Darwin believed life was made a Creator.

I don't care. Darwin can be wrong too. He's not an atheist prophet, you know; he's just a guy who had a good idea once. Yeah, he was smart, but arguments from authority won't touch me, here.

Natural selection is a real enough but all it does is sieve through the genetic material presented to it. It has no capacity to introduce new genetic material. And neither really does random point mutation which essentially deletes genetic information from the organism.

Wrong-o.

Though of course Darwin himself knew nothing about DNA or mutation. Chances are he would have disagreed with what his theory has been developed into given the evidence we have.

Seriously doesn't matter.

All the evidence you want to use is evidence I'd use to claim that there is a design/purpose therefore a designer and purpose giver. This will be God.

Then I would invite you to show me how the evidence I posted necessarily leads exclusively to the christian god. Because evidence cannot be accurately used to support two different positions, so one of us is wrong, here, and I'd like to know who it is.

Oh also, I should mention, the big bang and god aren't mutually exclusive propositions either. You just got my dander up by talking as though there was no evidence for the big bang but there was evidence for god, without presenting any.

Do you believe your consciousness is a byproduct of chemical reactions in your brain or don't you? If you don't believe in God or the supernatural (insert whatever you want to call it) then you can't be anything else. Everything you think, feel and do would be a result of chemical reactions reacting to environmental stimulus like some kind of a machine. If you don't believe this then you're not really an atheist/naturalist as you would believe there is something more to it. We can call it God.

I do believe it, because every time we've encountered consciousness ever, it has been the product of a brain. We've never seen anything different, and without evidence I simply have no reason to believe there's anything more.

It doesn't seem to me like it would have any kind of survival advantage at all. Given the amount of time and energy humanity has invested into this business. Seems to me like there would be something interesting laying behind it.

Humanity has also invested a lot of time in war, and masturbation, and the production of cigarettes. Sociological phenomenon don't require evolutionary purposes, because the mind causing them to occur isn't bound to evolution, nor is it entirely rational. It's made up of a patchwork of heuristics and instinctual concepts that don't mesh perfectly well together.

The phenomenon was right there at the very beginning as far as we can tell. It certainly predates civilization by tens of thousands of years and covering the entire planet. So there's going have to be some other explanation for it beyond sociology. This won't be a purely culture thing even if culture does appear to be a factor in shaping someones religious beliefs and practice. Certainly something that has been around for this length of time must have something going for it.

Which gets us to "people appeal to higher powers instinctively," which does have an evolutionary benefit: kids need to believe what their parents- their higher power- says without necessarily understanding the motives behind it, in order to survive. Appeals to authorities larger than us is built in as a survival mechanism.