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.

[Brakeman]

Intercessory prayer is a request to God or Jesus to change his mind about the already established plan for the universe and make it go another way.

Oooh now that's a freewill killer right there. No our lives aren't mapped out because we have right here some degree of independence from God. I think it's somewhat vital that we have freewill and there is no way atheism or naturalism would allow us to have it (chemical reaction, neurons, instincts, programming etc). Neither would deterministic theism. The central theme of the Bible as a whole is that we are independent beings with our own independent will but with a morality grounded in God. As for Gods relationship with time I'd recommend reading Lane Craigs book Time and Eternity, God essentially exists in relationship to time as we do while the universe exists. Though can still exist without the universe and exist beyond time. So there is no preset plan for our lives individually and if there were then any change he would make would have been part of the plan anyway.

1. Explain how a creator god cannot have a complete plan.

2. Explain how the creator of time and matter could change his plan, and it not actually be his original unchanged plan.

That's two questions I'd love to hear the answers to.

[Sword of Christ]

Because it didn't. Things ended up this way, and not some other way.

You would be an easy person to set-up in some kind of a gambling card game if you can believe in coincidences of this sheer magnitude. You would even think to ask how you lost 100 times in a row to the same set of cards from a shuffled pack. You would just think it's a chance coincidence and "Happened that 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.

God or an intelligent creator would be the relatively mundane explanation when you're faced with something on this scale. Either it was purpose made this way for a reason or it was some kind of chance byproduct. Scientifically speaking a view of the universe that was purpose made with an eventual outcome in mind makes perfect logical sense. This would be the nature of the universe we can see and understand. It could have just been some kind of nonsensical chaos we eventually emerged from. Rather than a finely structured order and a sequence of a chain of events. Again this isn't one of those "if you believe in it hard enough it just might be true" things it's based on what you can actually see and understand. Your scientific evidence for the existence of God is there and it's as good as it could possibly be.

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.

If anything in the laws of physics that lead up to the cosmological formation of the universe and life in the sequence was 0.0000000001% out of it's perfect balance something would still happen but stars, planets, galaxies and life would be the end the result. We can run computer simulations of this now. The level of fine tuning we're talking about here is obscene, if this was put together by coincidence without a purpose in mind this would actually be far more miraculous than God. Do you have any idea how incredible that would be?

The best we can say is "we don't know yet."

You can speak for yourself, we have known for thousands of years. If you're planning on proving God through science, this is how you prove God with science. You point out all the details of what we know and you draw the only real conclusion it would be rational to make when faced with such overwhelming odds.

But you're making a knowledge claim about what did happen

Well yes, unless you have a better explanation of how a universe purpose made for life can be, well purpose made for life? You need an intelligence to do this not a blind random force. People understood this thousands of years ago and we ought to understand it all the more. The evidence merely heaped itself up.

and you need to prove that.

That's what I think I'm doing, how much proof would you need? There is vast vast amounts of evidence to suggest a purposeful origin of the universe. At this stage we ought to be debating God nature not his existence.

Science not having an answer yet doesn't make god the correct answer

Science points toward God, that's the answer science is giving you.

nor even the most likely one. Evidence will do that, one way or the other.

The evidence is right there in plain sight, I've been pointing it out to you, it's right there.

You can't say that, because you don't know the full range of other possible universes,

This may be the only universe that exists for all we know. If there are other universes they could all be made by God and all be perfectly balanced for life if that's what they're intended to do.

nor the full range of possible life.

This is the only universe in which the formation of intelligent organic (or silicon based possibly) can exist. Unless you want to argue the existence of a fundamentally different kind of reality beyond this universe? If you want to be an atheist you may want to avoid claiming that there is anything like that, because that would be a supernatural realm. Do you know the kind of possibilities a supernatural realm would give you?

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.

So you're saying in other dimensions of reality there can be beings such as say angels? Something entirely different to what we know in this universe? But if you want a universe for complex biological life it has to be this one there isn't an alternative.

Unless you're claiming absolute knowledge on this point?

99.9~% certainty of Gods existence in general. It does drop a little when you get into the specifics of what we know about this God as some of that is taken on faith rather than what can be figured out by observation and deduction. No doubt I'm going to be wrong about a few things, but not as wrong as you're going to be.

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.

You would have to believe this if you're basing your view of the universe purely on naturalism and physical laws. It isn't something that would be optional as a belief it would be a fact given what you assume to be true. Unless you want to say God exists?

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

I didn't.

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.

But look at the way it did actually form, look at everything that was involved, look at the sheer intricacy of the entire thing. That's not blind coincidence, you're having a laugh.

You can't make a claim on probabilities here, because you can't possibly have enough data.

B-b-b-but *is aghast* there is masses masses of data my God, just, argh! Look at the formation of all this.



[img]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0f/Earth's_Location_in_the_Universe_SMALLER_(JPEG).jpg[/img]

All this lead to the ultras complexity of organic life. Even a single cell is vastly complex piece of micro-engineering. Yes it was formed by various natural processes, most of which we still have no understanding of at all. We have some idea of how life developed once it was here through natural selection. How the initial genetic changes come about we don't know. If the universe is purpose made for life then evolution has a direction within it toward an eventual goal. On Earth this goal was humanity, therefore God is our creator. He just needed to create the whole thing. If he didn't create the whole thing then suggest what the reasonable alternative is. The burden of proof is if anything on you.

For one, you don't have any other universes to compare it to.

What other universes? Provide evidence that other universe even exist. You may as well say God exists if you're going to make hypothetical claims that are not based on evidence.

For two, even you don't know the process by which the universe began, you just believe in one strongly.

God isn't a process he began the process of the Big Bang that eventually formed and structured our universe. If you have a better idea that makes more sense of this I haven't seen it. If you want to claim God doesn't exist or there no good reason to believe God exists then it falls on you to explain why you think this, and evidence you have to support your claim. The scientific evidence is stacking against your position.

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

You're doing this if you claim that God is fictitious or some kind of superstition. Actually no there is strong support from science and the observable universe, coupled with deductive reasoning itself to support the claim that God exists. Far more to this claim than to support your counter claim which is what you're doing.

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.

You shot yourself in the foot by claiming anything can go "backward" or revert to a lesser "advanced" form. Though I don't think there are any clear examples of this. Complex structures once formed will remain unless like eyes of a fish a dark cave they atrophy. The direction is general over the planet as a whole. Unless you to say the Carboniferous period was equally in advanced state to the world as it is today? Well no there was a clear level of progress along a trajectory. You can link this in to the formation of the universe as a whole and see the intentional design behind it.

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?

A dolphin is far more physically advanced and intelligent an animal in the sea than it ever was on the land so not a great example. Yes it adapted to a new way of life but it didn't become a more primitive form of life. I did mention atrophy but that's not so much a regression as the loss of dead weight. We wouldn't become less advanced if we lost our appendix. Apes when they lost their tails didn't become less advanced they just didn't need tails anymore.

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.

Well no not really. Not that this relevant to the universe being purpose made by God to create advanced life on planets such as Earth. This is fully compatible with the Biblical God, at least if you read it figuratively.

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?

No when we see mathematical patterns and structure in the universe we are understanding something that is actually there we're not reading something into it. This isn't like the face on Mars.

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."

Your argument is an argument from "not wanting something to be true" as you haven't explained what the alternative is. This is just a belief or do you have a rational/scientific reason for this belief that God isn't the likely or reasonable answer?

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

There are other arguments in favor of Christianity such as the resurrection, the empty tomb, the advancement we have seen in our moral standards through Christianity. But first we need to establish that God exists and made the universe specifically for life and civilization. This is what the Bible claims is true and this is what science and deductive reason appears to support. You begin with the basics and build upward. You don't start with the Bible then try to fit the universe around it as Young Earthers would do. You don't necessarily start with a naturalist/materialist purposeless assumption either. You start with an open mind and go to where the evidence itself will take you.

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.

The ball is in your court to explain why the universe exists at all and why it is as complexly structured as it is without being intentionally this way. If it was intentional then it would have to have been created by God or some other supreme intelligence, who would essentially be still be God.

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.

Scientific evidence (masses of it) + deductive reasoning + an open mind= God

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.

So who was it who had the better idea since Darwin that would rule out Gods involvement/purposeful design?

Seriously doesn't matter.

It does if you want to state that evolution demonstrates that our creation was not an intentional outcome. Who's to say it wasn't? There was clearly some kind of progress series of advancements on a global scale over time. Not just individual organisms but across whole ecosystems. All of this could have been intentional from the moment of the BB. This was the way God created us, and it makes perfectly good sense. More sense than the alternative you're (not) suggesting.

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.

It doesn't have to be the Christian God, there are other very good arguments for that. If you want to believe in the Muslim God you can, but Mohammed had a 9 year old wife and flew to heaven on a horse with wings. Not really my cup of tea but if you like that.

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. [quote]

What would be "evidence for God" you have to define what kind of evidence you're looking for to begin with. People can give you a ton of evidence for God but it isn't necessarily the evidence you want. But this would be the scientific evidence for God we're looking at here.


[quote] 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.

How do you know its a product of the brain? Do you have evidence for this claim or are you just asserting it as fact?

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.

All of these are easily explainable/practical behaviors. If a race of atheist aliens who never had contact with religion visited Earth what would they make of us? How would they explain what we're doing?

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.

So we recognize that there is a chain of command/order of being and at the very top of the ladder there is the ultimate form of being that conceivably could exist and that being is God? And it is to this power that our future survival into eternity will depend?

[Esquilax]

You would be an easy person to set-up in some kind of a gambling card game if you can believe in coincidences of this sheer magnitude. You would even think to ask how you lost 100 times in a row to the same set of cards from a shuffled pack. You would just think it's a chance coincidence and "Happened that way and not some other way".

That's a flawed analogy: cards games demonstrably require a conscious designer to run, there needs to be a dealer to scam me or there wouldn't be a scam at all. Nobody has been able to provide any evidence that the universe requires the same.

A more apt analogy would be a landslide; the chances of each individual piece of rubble landing in their eventual resting point in space exactly as they did is very, very small, considering the rest of the available space in the universe, but there's no designer involved. Very small probabilities do not automatically require designers.

God or an intelligent creator would be the relatively mundane explanation when you're faced with something on this scale.

Again, god isn't an explanation at all. It's just a bigger mystery. And I can say that safely on two counts; one is that saying a god created things doesn't tell us how that creation occurred, and to what end, meaning nothing has actually been explained. When I ask you want you want for dinner, "food" is not a helpful answer. When I ask you how the universe came to be, "god" is similar.

The second thing I'd do is ask you what created god. Obviously a designer of such complexity must have a creator, right? Omnipotent universe creators don't just happen by chance!

Do you understand why I'm not convinced, yet?

Either it was purpose made this way for a reason or it was some kind of chance byproduct. Scientifically speaking a view of the universe that was purpose made with an eventual outcome in mind makes perfect logical sense.

Something can be logical and still be wrong. Your premises just need to be faulty. My submission is that "complex things require a creator," is a faulty premise, and it's one you yourself don't even subscribe to, unless you think your god has a creator.

This would be the nature of the universe we can see and understand. It could have just been some kind of nonsensical chaos we eventually emerged from. Rather than a finely structured order and a sequence of a chain of events.

Have you seen how much of space is on radioactive fire before you say that? Our universe is random chaos, from top to bottom. How many worlds have been devoured by black holes, or incinerated by dying stars, or pummelled by meteors?

You might see order, from your cozy little controlled world, but even the most cursory glance at the world outside shows you otherwise. Stop pretending.

Again this isn't one of those "if you believe in it hard enough it just might be true" things it's based on what you can actually see and understand. Your scientific evidence for the existence of God is there and it's as good as it could possibly be.

Are you ever going to show any of this evidence, or just assert that all things everywhere are evidence? Because I think you should have figured out by now that that's not going to fly here.

If anything in the laws of physics that lead up to the cosmological formation of the universe and life in the sequence was 0.0000000001% out of it's perfect balance something would still happen but stars, planets, galaxies and life would be the end the result. We can run computer simulations of this now.

Then it should be relatively easy for you to pull up and link to a citation. I don't know why you didn't already.

The level of fine tuning we're talking about here is obscene, if this was put together by coincidence without a purpose in mind this would actually be far more miraculous than God. Do you have any idea how incredible that would be?

The universe doesn't care, and you haven't yet given a single shred of credible evidence to demonstrate that something out there does. Is the landslide miraculous because it crushes this specific house just so? The chances of it happening exactly as it did are infinitesimally low, after all...

You can speak for yourself, we have known for thousands of years. If you're planning on proving God through science, this is how you prove God with science. You point out all the details of what we know and you draw the only real conclusion it would be rational to make when faced with such overwhelming odds.

Do I need to explain again how this is an argument from ignorance? Not to mention leading the evidence. Here, let me show you:

You're absolutely right! I'm now a follower of Nikmi, the one and true designer of the universe! Not that god chap!

What evidence can you provide that discounts Nikmi, and demonstrates God? What if I were to go on further, describe Nikmi in such a way that he's not a conscious being at all, and his act of design was purely accidental? Could you exclude those possibilities, from the evidence at your command? What if I just kept manufacturing made up gods for you to try and discredit? Can you point me to a reason that it's your god at the helm, and not all of them?

If you can't, how can you possibly make a knowledge claim based on the evidence?

Well yes, unless you have a better explanation of how a universe purpose made for life can be, well purpose made for life?

Okay, so first of all, another argument from ignorance. My lack of not having an explanation does not mean yours is correct.

Second, you're wrong anyway. Nothing here is purpose made for life; have you noticed that if you were to step into most of the universe- space, that is- you'll die almost immediately without a protective suit? Or burn? Or freeze? And even if you're on a planet, most of them won't... you know, support life? And all those hostile deserts on this one planet we know does support life? Water, when we drown, covering most of its surface? Natural disasters? The eventual destruction of our planet due to the sun dying? The constant barrage of space radiation?

It takes a very selective mind to claim that the universe is purpose made for life.

You need an intelligence to do this not a blind random force. People understood this thousands of years ago and we ought to understand it all the more. The evidence merely heaped itself up.

Funny how you never seem to give any, then.

That's what I think I'm doing, how much proof would you need? There is vast vast amounts of evidence to suggest a purposeful origin of the universe. At this stage we ought to be debating God nature not his existence.

What you've been doing is pointing at things that exist, saying they're complicated, and then telling me what I already know: that you can't think of any other way they might have come about. This is not an argument, though. It's an admission that you don't know everything yet, and then a desperate plea that we accept the answer you really want to be true, sight unseen of any demonstrably real answer.

And I can say this because, even if I were to just blindly accept your premises as you've given them, nothing you've said so far gets us to the christian god you worship, or even any such god that our world has yet dreamed up. I could say it was the cosmic ham sandwich that designed the universe, and be equally as correct, based on the arguments you've made thus far.

Science points toward God, that's the answer science is giving you.

Right, that's why I can go look in a science journal or two and see plenty of peer reviewed, mainstream accepted papers about god and how he exists. Yep. That's also why the majority of scientists are christians in your specific sect.

Oh wait no all of those are wrong because that's fucking stupid.

The evidence is right there in plain sight, I've been pointing it out to you, it's right there.

Alright, let me play the same game from my side, see if it convinces you:



Does that look designed to you? See? See?! No designer!

Are you convinced yet? Because I can find plenty of ugly looking shit to point to all day. It's basically what you're doing: why don't you find it convincing when it's done to you?

This may be the only universe that exists for all we know. If there are other universes they could all be made by God and all be perfectly balanced for life if that's what they're intended to do.

Just so long as you don't have a presupposition tainting everything you say.

This is the only universe in which the formation of intelligent organic (or silicon based possibly) can exist.

And there's your knowledge claim. Alright: how do you intend to demonstrate this? Please tell us about the infinite other, minutely different universes that you created and oversaw, so you are sure of this? We'd certainly love to know about this groundbreaking research that you've definitely done, because you wouldn't be arrogant enough to make a certain knowledge claim based upon absolutely nothing, right?

Unless you want to argue the existence of a fundamentally different kind of reality beyond this universe?

Not really, but then again, I'm not making broad, blanket claims about what can and can't exist based on my own ignorance, now am I? I'm keeping an open mind, something your last sentence demonstrates you clearly have no interest in.

If you want to be an atheist you may want to avoid claiming that there is anything like that, because that would be a supernatural realm. Do you know the kind of possibilities a supernatural realm would give you?

Or we could be inhabiting a multiverse. Perhaps there's an anteroom universe before this one, spitting out new ones every so often. Maybe there's just two, like Futurama once showed. How would we know? We can't even say for sure how this one got started, and yet you're sitting there saying it's the only one that could ever exist with life in it. I'm saying don't because history tends to prove people who make claims based on ignorance wrong, and I'd hate for you to be wronger than you already are.

So you're saying in other dimensions of reality there can be beings such as say angels? Something entirely different to what we know in this universe? But if you want a universe for complex biological life it has to be this one there isn't an alternative.

How do you know?

99.9~% certainty of Gods existence in general. It does drop a little when you get into the specifics of what we know about this God as some of that is taken on faith rather than what can be figured out by observation and deduction. No doubt I'm going to be wrong about a few things, but not as wrong as you're going to be.

How do you know?

You would have to believe this if you're basing your view of the universe purely on naturalism and physical laws. It isn't something that would be optional as a belief it would be a fact given what you assume to be true. Unless you want to say God exists?

Atheism isn't a statement on creators. It's a statement about gods: there could very well be a creator, and it might even be yours, too. All I'm saying is that I- quite justifiably- do not believe you based on the arguments you're making, nor do I believe in any other god definition that has been put forward. That doesn't mean there wasn't a creator or a designer; I'm keeping an open mind on that score, as are most of my atheist peeps here. So your false dichotomy kind of falls flat at the first hurdle.

It's called agnostic atheism, before you tell me I should call myself an agnostic. It's a different thing to pure agnosticism.

But look at the way it did actually form, look at everything that was involved, look at the sheer intricacy of the entire thing. That's not blind coincidence, you're having a laugh.

Please demonstrate that it's more than a coincidence. Don't just point to the fact that it's currently very complex. Demonstrate.

B-b-b-but *is aghast* there is masses masses of data my God, just, argh! Look at the formation of all this.

Yeah, we already know: you see something big and pretty that you don't understand, and based on your ignorance you claim it was the work of a magic man. This is not how evidence works.

If the universe is purpose made for life then evolution has a direction within it toward an eventual goal. On Earth this goal was humanity, therefore God is our creator.

How do you know?

He just needed to create the whole thing. If he didn't create the whole thing then suggest what the reasonable alternative is. The burden of proof is if anything on you.

Again, the argument from ignorance. Jeez, just go and marry the damn thing already, you're already so far up its colon its practically a mascot suit.

What other universes? Provide evidence that other universe even exist. You may as well say God exists if you're going to make hypothetical claims that are not based on evidence.

That was my point, you can't say that this universe is the only one suited for complex life, because you have no other universes with which to make a comparison. You're sitting in the only one you know that we've got.

This argument is like if I showed you my dog, who has black fur, and then you claimed with absolute certainty that I only have dogs with black fur. After all, I just showed you a dog with black fur!

And then I proceed to show you my wife's brown furred dog.

God isn't a process he began the process of the Big Bang that eventually formed and structured our universe. If you have a better idea that makes more sense of this I haven't seen it. If you want to claim God doesn't exist or there no good reason to believe God exists then it falls on you to explain why you think this, and evidence you have to support your claim. The scientific evidence is stacking against your position.

I'm just... I'm just going to link you to a few places. Please read what's there, before you post again. Maybe they'll help.

You're doing this if you claim that God is fictitious or some kind of superstition. Actually no there is strong support from science and the observable universe, coupled with deductive reasoning itself to support the claim that God exists. Far more to this claim than to support your counter claim which is what you're doing.

My claim is that I don't believe you because I think your evidence is insanely fallacious. The only evidence I need to bring to bear on that front is my own mind; I know what I'm thinking, and therefore I know that I don't believe you.

You shot yourself in the foot by claiming anything can go "backward" or revert to a lesser "advanced" form. Though I don't think there are any clear examples of this. Complex structures once formed will remain unless like eyes of a fish a dark cave they atrophy.

Summary: unless complex structures disappear, they remain. Awesome.

The direction is general over the planet as a whole. Unless you to say the Carboniferous period was equally in advanced state to the world as it is today? Well no there was a clear level of progress along a trajectory. You can link this in to the formation of the universe as a whole and see the intentional design behind it.

Please demonstrate, using examples, how this is so. Don't merely assert it. What's that? You want examples of the reverse? Okay. Pretty clear, no? This isn't hard.

A dolphin is far more physically advanced and intelligent an animal in the sea than it ever was on the land so not a great example. Yes it adapted to a new way of life but it didn't become a more primitive form of life. I did mention atrophy but that's not so much a regression as the loss of dead weight. We wouldn't become less advanced if we lost our appendix. Apes when they lost their tails didn't become less advanced they just didn't need tails anymore.

So essentially you've set up a dishonest system where you can never be wrong on this point because you've not defined the parameters well enough, and you'll keep moving the goalposts back time and again no matter what evidence is presented to you. Outstanding.

Well no not really. Not that this relevant to the universe being purpose made by God to create advanced life on planets such as Earth. This is fully compatible with the Biblical God, at least if you read it figuratively.

Read: at least if you read it with a mind that it's already true no matter what.

No when we see mathematical patterns and structure in the universe we are understanding something that is actually there we're not reading something into it. This isn't like the face on Mars.

If you're just going to keep making unevidenced assertions I'm not going to want to play anymore.

Your argument is an argument from "not wanting something to be true" as you haven't explained what the alternative is. This is just a belief or do you have a rational/scientific reason for this belief that God isn't the likely or reasonable answer?

I have a simple logical argument: the time to believe that something exists is where there is sufficient evidence to do so, and so far all you've provided is fallacious arguments from top to bottom.

If you want to believe things without sufficient evidence, then you'll be in the position of having to believe every claim anyone has ever made. And as to why I don't find your arguments sufficient, I want you to go back and read your own posts, replacing the word "god" with the word "Thor." Would you accept that same argument then? If not, why not? The only thing that's changed is the name, after all.

There are other arguments in favor of Christianity such as the resurrection, the empty tomb, the advancement we have seen in our moral standards through Christianity. But first we need to establish that God exists and made the universe specifically for life and civilization. This is what the Bible claims is true and this is what science and deductive reason appears to support. You begin with the basics and build upward. You don't start with the Bible then try to fit the universe around it as Young Earthers would do. You don't necessarily start with a naturalist/materialist purposeless assumption either. You start with an open mind and go to where the evidence itself will take you.

You've already been told, by myself and others, why those arguments are wrong. You just reply with yet more assertions. And I don't believe for a second you came into this with an open mind.

I
The ball is in your court to explain why the universe exists at all and why it is as complexly structured as it is without being intentionally this way. If it was intentional then it would have to have been created by God or some other supreme intelligence, who would essentially be still be God.

Argument from ignorance again. Getting bored of this one.

Scientific evidence (masses of it) + deductive reasoning + an open mind= God

Wow, you've convinced me. Yep. I'm a christian now. Congrats.

So who was it who had the better idea since Darwin that would rule out Gods involvement/purposeful design?

You don't need an alternative to an idea that has no rational basis in itself.

It does if you want to state that evolution demonstrates that our creation was not an intentional outcome. Who's to say it wasn't? There was clearly some kind of progress series of advancements on a global scale over time. Not just individual organisms but across whole ecosystems. All of this could have been intentional from the moment of the BB. This was the way God created us, and it makes perfectly good sense. More sense than the alternative you're (not) suggesting.

Argument from ignorance and argument from incredulity, with a side order of shifting the burden of proof. Please, no more! I'm already full of fallacies, I could not eat another bite!

It doesn't have to be the Christian God, there are other very good arguments for that. If you want to believe in the Muslim God you can, but Mohammed had a 9 year old wife and flew to heaven on a horse with wings. Not really my cup of tea but if you like that.

So, in the end your beliefs aren't really about what conforms to reality, but what you want to be true? You're a christian because it feels less icky that worshiping Mohammed? Okay, cool. I'm glad you admitted that.

What would be "evidence for God" you have to define what kind of evidence you're looking for to begin with. People can give you a ton of evidence for God but it isn't necessarily the evidence you want. But this would be the scientific evidence for God we're looking at here.

It's actually really easy: imagine you wanted to prove your girlfriend existed to me. The same things you would do there would do as evidence for god. If you can't provide any of those and would like to rely on arguments instead- as you have been doing- then they'll have to be pretty special to surmount the extraordinary claims you're making. Nothing you've given so far is doing that.

How do you know its a product of the brain? Do you have evidence for this claim or are you just asserting it as fact?

When your brain gets damaged, so too does your consciousness. Here, check this out: this guy studies split brain patients, and in this video he discusses a man with a severed corpus callosum, whose consciousness is one half theist and one half atheist, after having his brain split:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFJPtVRlI64

Pretty cool, right? Now show me a mind that exists without a brain.

All of these are easily explainable/practical behaviors. If a race of atheist aliens who never had contact with religion visited Earth what would they make of us? How would they explain what we're doing?

Gee, thanks for just brushing off my argument with a non sequitur.

So we recognize that there is a chain of command/order of being and at the very top of the ladder there is the ultimate form of being that conceivably could exist and that being is God? And it is to this power that our future survival into eternity will depend?

That is absolutely not what I'm saying. Gee, it's almost like you have an agenda to push that doesn't require a corresponding truth value!

[Tonus]

If anything in the laws of physics that lead up to the cosmological formation of the universe and life in the sequence was 0.0000000001% out of it's perfect balance something would still happen but stars, planets, galaxies and life would be the end the result. We can run computer simulations of this now. The level of fine tuning we're talking about here is obscene, if this was put together by coincidence without a purpose in mind this would actually be far more miraculous than God. Do you have any idea how incredible that would be?

If life is only possible under an extremely limited set of factors, then god would be unable to produce life under any other settings. Which implies that someone else designed the universe that god works in. It's possible that the universal constants are just that; they cannot be anything else. It's possible that the constants that govern our universe are one combination of many that would have produced life; perhaps we'll never know, since we lack any pocket universes of our own to experiment with. It's possible that god exists and is constrained by the laws of physics in the very universe that he created, but that seems utterly absurd. It's possible that god exists and could have used any set of constants to build a working universe, but that undermines the fine-tuning argument.

There doesn't seem to be a circumstance under which the fine-tuning argument is viable, to me. At least as a way of implying that a creator exists.

[StuW]

We wouldn't become less advanced if we lost our appendix. Apes when they lost their tails didn't become less advanced they just didn't need tails anymore.

More Complex != More Advanced

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.

We Homo sapiens are NOT the most complex things on earth by a LOOOOONG way, and as it turns out that's a GOOD thing.

http://www.skeptical-science.com/science...mplex-dna/

[Bad Writer]

How do you know life is an uncommon phenomenon? We can't say either way for certain, for we can only view about 10% of the known universe, if even that.