Apolotetics misusing philosophy?

[Nuda900]

That is a great video, thank you!

This confirms yet further what a slimy, dishonest weasel WLC is. He knows full well what he's doing, and he hides the fallacies and equivocations behind walls of text and plays both sides seamlessly.

As I predicted, logical fallacies, and philosophy without evidence. That's all apologetics is, and it's why it achieves fuck all except reassuring those who already believe. Oh, and makes him rich. Con artist. He may believe his conclusion, but he knows his methodology is flawed.

Theoretical Bullshit is kind of a fun channel. Strangely enough the guy is a soap opera star in the Bold an the beautiful (It made me laugh). Elegantly challenging my own 100% unfounded stereotype of the soap opera actor. Without breaking a sweat he destroys the kalam argument that has been defended by a dr in philosophy an theologie.....it still makes me smile.

I would love to see other "arguments" being dismantled by someone smatter than me, or atleast better bespoken than me. Like the fine tuning argument for gods existence. I like what sean carrol had to say about that:

"First, I am by no means convinced that there is a fine-tuning problem and, again, Dr. Craig offered no evidence for it. It is certainly true that if you change the parameters of nature our local conditions that we observe around us would change by a lot. I grant that quickly. I do not grant therefore life could not exist. I will start granting that once someone tells me the conditions under which life can exist. What is the definition of life, for example? If it’s just information processing, thinking or something like that, there’s a huge panoply of possibilities. They sound very “science fiction-y” but then again you’re the one who is changing the parameters of the universe. The results are going to sound like they come from a science fiction novel. Sadly, we just don’t know whether life could exist if the conditions of our universe were very different because we only see the universe that we see.


Secondly, God doesn’t need to fine-tune anything. We talk about the parameters of physics and cosmology: the mass of the election, the strength of gravity. And we say if they weren’t the numbers that they were then life itself could not exist. That really underestimates God by a lot, which is surprising from theists, I think. In theism, life is not purely physical. It’s not purely a collection of atoms doing things like it is in naturalism. I would think that no matter what the atoms were doing God could still create life. God doesn’t care what the mass of the electron is. He can do what he wants. The only framework in which you can honestly say that the physical parameters of the universe must take on certain values in order for life to exist is naturalism.

The third point is that the fine-tunings you think are there might go away once you understand the universe better. They might only be apparent. There’s a famous example theists like to give, or even cosmologists who haven’t thought about it enough, that the expansion rate of the early universe is tuned to within 1 part in 1060. That’s the naïve estimate, back of the envelope, pencil and paper you would do. But in this case you can do better. You can go into the equations of general relativity and there is a correct rigorous derivation of the probability. If you ask the same question using the correct equations you find that the probability is 1. All set of measure zeroof early universe cosmologies have the right expansion rate to live for a long time and allow life to exist. I can’t say that all parameters fit into that paradigm but until we know the answer we can’t claim that they’re definitely finely-tuned."

[robvalue]

If God set things up initially so that he had to then fine tune these arbitrary parameters he made...

And then the best he could then do is a universe which is barely inhabitable by the very beings it was designed for, I'd say he was the worst designer ever. He sabotaged his own design possibilities before even getting to the fine tune section.

Or did someone else set up the first stage?

Also, unlikely clearly doesn't equal impossible, nor does it point to any other explanation explicitly. If things were different, they would be different. No shit, Sherlock.

[The Grand Nudger]

We could start at the top and work our way down, with "fine tuning".  The simplest and most demonstrative form of this notion, that the parameters for supporting life are so specific and narrowly defined that they could not have arisen by "mere chance", revolves around the "goldilocks zone"...the CHZ.  Which, for a star like ours, is somewhere between .5 and 3 AUs.  AUs.....93 million miles, 8 light minutes.  Try to conceptualize the volume of a sphere with that radius, and the difference in volume between .5 and 3AUr spheres.

Apparently, we're good to go all the way out to Ceres, or not......narrow and specific my ass. There's no need to bicker about the chance portion...because we can safely ignore what might have been if things were different....just taking things as they are. If things were different, if we insist on going that route, the volume of that sphere might be orders of magnitude greater...and it could be much, much smaller without ever approaching narrow, or specific.

Lay all of that aside, though, forget the math and the failure of the proposition on it's own terms. Should it surprise any creature to find that the universe it lives in, or the planet it lives on...supports it's life? I can't imagine why...if it didn't..they wouldn't be there to ask the question in the first place. Weak anthropic principle. Yet somehow, a certain subset of us feels that this is a great profundity which needs be accounted for, and further......that god, specifically, is the only sufficient explanation.

[Nuda900]

If God set things up initially so that he had to then fine tune these arbitrary parameters he made...

And then the best he could then do is a universe which is barely inhabitable by the very beings it was designed for, I'd say he was the worst designer ever. He sabotaged his own design possibilities before even getting to the fine tune section.

Or did someone else set up the first stage?

Also, unlikely clearly doesn't equal impossible, nor does it point to any other explanation explicitly. If things were different, they would be different. No shit, Sherlock.

For one....it is not really a surprise that we would find ourselves in a universe that we can live in. I would guess the argument is about the fact that very small changes would results in a universe that does not support our kind of life. If that is true....indeed....kind of a bad design. It's like building a skyscraper and use the point of a pencil as the foundation.

And from the theist point of view: the fine tuning does not exist, you would expect us to exist not matter what the universe looks like. Or you would have to how god is somehow bound by physical law.

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Yet somehow, a certain subset of us feels that this is a great profundity which needs be accounted for, and further......that god, specifically, is the only sufficient explanation.

Well, this is the strange stuff for me: on theism one does not need to account for it.  Only on naturalism one requires the universe to be as it is in order for us to exist. I can't understand that I have not been able to explain this to any theist.

They tend to explain it through with the lottery example. How likely is it to win the lottery if your change is this small (kind of strange since we clearly did win something it that lottery)? The best response I had so far is: on theism the lottery does not exist, it makes not sense to talk about the chance of winning it.

[The Grand Nudger]

I'd be more convinced in a creator god if I found myself, as is, inexplicably living on the surface of the sun. -That- would take some serious accounting. That I live on earth, which itself exists in an unimaginably wide band of suitable space, a total non-starter, for me.

[robvalue]

What's the odds that the lottery winner had the winning ticket? Like, one in several million or something? What a coincidence!

They get it all so backwards. And being amazed at stuff isn't an argument.

I notice it's always, "Look how God dealt with this problem, and that problem, and got around that restriction and narrowly avoided..."

Hold up, who put all these problems and restrictions there? They come out of nowhere to explain why God did things in such a cackhanded way. They just can't keep their story straight, even if I allow them to make it all up as they go along.

[Nuda900]

What's the odds that the lottery winner had the winning ticket? Like, one in several million or something? What a coincidence!

They get it all so backwards. And being amazed at stuff isn't an argument.

I notice it's always, "Look how God dealt with this problem, and that problem, and got around that restriction and narrowly avoided..."

Hold up, who put all these problems and restrictions there? They come out of nowhere to explain why God did things in such a cackhanded way. They just can't keep their story straight, even if I allow them to make it all up as they go along.

I agree. So boring.

I don't understand how they can say: god is all powerfull (excluding the logically impossible but not the physical impossible), and thus implying that god can create us regardless of what the universe looks like. And jet the fail to understand, that because of that, there is no universe in which you can point and say: the universe is fine tuned for our existence.

They always seem to borrow on the stuff that science doesn't know yet (or may not ever know) and also say that it is not god of the gaps reasoning. 

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I'd be more convinced in a creator god if I found myself, as is, inexplicably living on the surface of the sun.  -That- would take some serious accounting.  That I live on earth, which itself exists in an unimaginably wide band of suitable space, a total non-starter, for me.

Hehe....of all the universes that god could design, he happend to design one of the few universes that could support life as we know it under naturalism.  Tiny change...