RE: Atheists, tell me, a Roman Catholic: why should I become an atheist?
December 18, 2016 at 8:32 pm
(December 18, 2016 at 6:55 pm)Balaco Wrote: Objectively speaking, unlikely events, such as our existence, don't necessarily point to God. Even though some parts of the universe are precise...even if a small percent difference would've stopped us from existing, it's not impossible these things could've happened on their own.
Human existence didn't have to happen, but it did. It ended up being the event that happened out of the many events that could have been possible.
A simple analogy I've found involves the roll of a die 1000 times over. Every last combination of the numbers produced by the die is equally as likely; equally as unlikely. The order being something like "2, 4, 6, 4, 3, 4, 1, 1 etc." or just "2" over and over is extremely unlikely, but just as extremely unlikely as any other outcome. It just so happened that, out of all the possible outcomes, that one occurred.
I've also seen the lottery or disorders being used as analogies. There are billions of people in the world, each as unlikely to win the lottery or be born with a rare disorder, but it happens.
Of course, human existence is (probably) much more complex than rolling a die or winning the lottery in a sense. Though if we look at it without immediately assuming that we had to or have to exist, the analogies remain relevant. For all we know, that small percent change in the elements would've led to the existence of radically different beings, rather than us humans.
Some other users also claimed that it could also be possible that the odds of us existing were 100% (without God existing)...but our knowledge is currently too limited to comprehend this. There could be a branch of physics/science that explains this, but we haven't learned it yet.....or our incomplete human minds are overthinking things. These last points here aren't exactly provable so I'm not necessarily defending them past their possibility.
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What kind of surprised me was that no theists really tried to refute it. One person admitted that the teleological argument isn't "absolute" proof of God and conceded that these points show that.
Actually this person feels that it proves God is highly likely to exist, and that "atheists are putting a great deal of faith in the tiny sliver of a chance that God doesn't exist." I don't really see how this argument necessarily proves either of these two; I laid out how it's scientifically possible that humanity didn't have to exist...though I suppose the theist mind in this case likely doesn't focus on how we didn't necessarily have to exist, as God's existence would answer that. I suppose other arguments for God's existence may reinforce the confidence in theists, which strengthens the validity of the teleological argument for them. I'll probably ask this guy for some clarification and then see if I can refute him.
Another simply mentioned that (as I said) Aquinas' teleological argument is much stronger than this one.
The only other person who responded claims that the teleological argument, among every other single thing in the world, points to God, and supplemented that with an analogy on how there's many ways we don't believe in God. Wasn't really relevant to the discussion. I guess this might be another case of jumping to God for an answer rather than attempting to find a logical answer, though to be fair I don't know anything about this person's knowledge.
My bolded.
I just don't see any advantage in attributing our existence to a god instead of chance. To say a god created us gives us no understanding into how that was done, it merely hands the explanation to a black box we call "god". I just can't see how that makes anyone feel as if they've gotten a satisfactory answer. I prefer to just admit I don't know and wait for more evidence or insight. But assigning the answer to a black box does not count as any kind of explanation in my book.