(October 23, 2016 at 1:58 pm)Soldat Du Christ Wrote: Example...
Beleiver: How can you explain the impossible odds required for our universe to not only begin to exist, but sustain itself?
This would be the argument from improbability, where probabilities for events are stacked one upon the next until it provides a 'statistical probability' that is so large that the specific event would seem impossible. Lawrence Krauss once explained --in a letter to the Wall Street Journal-- that a case could be made that it would be impossible for anyone to ever write a letter to the WSJ by calculating the odds in a similar fashion. The farther back we go and more detailed we become (what are the odds that his great-great-grandfather would meet his great-great-grandmother, etc) the more astronomically huge the odds become.
So the fact that we are here does indicate that we beat the odds, either because they weren't long to begin with, or because there was enough of something (time, circumstances, variables, etc) to mitigate the unlikelihood. After all, what are the odds that there's a supernatural dimension inhabited by a single being of near-infinite power who is timeless and eternal and decided --at some point in the eternal timeline-- to create a massive universe around a tiny speck of a planet and seed it with life which failed his simple test of obedience and forced him to reduce himself to their level in order to save them? Could that be the irrelevant thesis?
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould