The fine tuning argument

[solja247]

I can touch the rope. Your god is pure fantasy.

There are many things you cant touch in this world, yet you still believe they are real and not a 'fantasy'.

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If the only information we had on the rope was passed down from a book written by different people at different points in time, hundreds and thousands of years after the ropes son walked the earth all with different accounts of how the rope works and then the information on the rope was passed down between generations and different versions of the rope were fought and killed for , then your example would be valid, but it's not, so don't be silly.

Im talking about a Deist God, I accept the Bible because I believe Jesus rose from the dead.
There is no reason why one should not believe in a Deistic God...

[Minimalist]

yet you still believe they are real and not a 'fantasy'.

Don't tar me with the brush of superstition. I try very hard not to "believe" in anything with out some evidence of it.

You jesus freaks have none.

[Skipper]

There is no reason why one should not believe in a Deistic God...

Oh, ok then.

[The Omnissiunt One]

There is no reason why one should not believe in a Deistic God...

No reason to believe in one either. So I guess we're back where we started.

[LastPoet]

Solja just wants his god to be true so badly

[downbeatplumb]

God provides nothing.

Perhaps you are a blind person who is abseiling down a high cliff, they think they are holding themselves up, but it is the rope. They boast it is them who has the ability to climp up the cliff by themselves, yet, they cant see the rope or the neccesity of it either.

Let me get this right a blind person absieling down a cliff does not know of the need of a rope to help with this?
Is this your way of insinuating that blind people are stupid?
or is it just a very very poor analogy.

Isnt abseiling without a rope called falling?

[Captain Scarlet]

Why can't the universe be uncaused?

Everything has a cause, we can try and say it doesnt but untill we have something which doesnt need a cause (other than God) Everything does have a cause, its not a theory, its a fact.

This argument has long been put to bed. The universe cannot have been caused because causation requires time to exist and time only existed with the universe. In additional it is a compositional fallacy to draw a conclusion from events within the universe (ie cause and effect) to the universe as a whole. In the same way you cannot draw conclusions about the earth from just living in the USA. You might, for example, conclude that the earth was American.

[theVOID]

A naturalistic explanation would ultimately lead to something which doesn't require anymore explanation because that is the source of explanation for everything else.

I guess ultimately it would have to, though what that explanation could be I don't have a fucking clue.

That's why God doesn't have to be so complex.

The way God is defined makes him complex. Anything with a mind, a personality, morals and the ability to conceive of a design and then design it is an extremely complex entity.

If you wanted you could define God as being something simple, but we both know that's not the type of God you believe in - That god is one that represents the epitome of complexity.

God's omniscience alone requires his mind represent all knowledge, and a representation is at least as complex as the thing that it represents.

He could be so simple that it's beyond our grasp to understand His true nature.

Sure, but not the God you believe in. In fact, such a simple thing really couldn't be called "God" at all, not without redefining the word to mean something entirely different from what it means now, he couldn't be a personality, or a mind, or be omniscient, for example.

All of the aforementioned are things that are far more complex than an algorithm and a feedback loop, which is what nature essentially is.

The simplest thing could also be the greatest and the most mysterious thing you can ever imagine (or can't imagine).

The simplest thing would, by definition, be the thing with the least number of attributes. The more attributes you assign to this being the less simple it becomes.

This simple entity, should he exist at all, is clearly not the being described in your theology.

We can't understand the mind of God. Maybe it can exist all by itself without needing a brain like we do.

Firstly, this an appeal to mystery.

Secondly, Even if it didn't require constituents it doesn't make the contents of the mind any less complicated.

It's a combination of faith + reason + intuition - the evidence only.

Faith = bullshit
Intuition = inconclusive and unreliabke
Evidence = non existent.

If you think you have "evidence" that indicates the existence of a god I would love to see it. Unfortunately that's not what i'm going to get... All the 'evidence' you have presented so far has been 'look, here's a gap, i'm going to claim god did it'.

This sort of shit doesn't fly here.

Not just a mind, but God is a law itself for the entire universe, a law for all the other laws of nature.

And you just shot yourself in the foot.

According to you God is natural law and a mind. This makes him more complex than natural law alone by definition alone.

I don't know the answer to that, but it's possible that He gave the universe some kind of a self-organizational intelligence to ultimately sort out everything by itself to finally bring out the result which He had planned for. Yet again, maybe He could've done it the first time if He wanted to.

So in order to do this 99.999% of all galaxies are useless, the one galaxy that was useful contains 400,000,000,000 stars, all but one contain the planet he wanted, upon which 99.9% of all life forms had become extinct before his goal was met....

No, I believe in a perfectly efficient God.

That is in stark contradiction to the God who created hundreds of billions of times more things than was necessary to achieve his goal...

It's only that the universe if innefficient in certain ways.

Hang on... If I build a car, and my car is inefficient in many ways, I therefore am an inefficient designer, am I not?

An efficient designer would be one who takes an efficient amount of time and resources to make an efficient product.

I don't know why He made it like that. However, God reveals His perfection in the universe by bringing order out of chaos.

*sigh* Now you're just preaching.

Order from chaos is a pretty mundane phenomenon, patterns arise in nature all of the time via mechanism that are very well understood, none of which require a God to happen.

You'll notice that fine tuning has happened through different levels: First, the laws of physics were fine tuned, then the the laws of chemistry were fine tuned, and then the laws of biology were fine tuned to create life.

Actually, it would only have needed to be fine-tuned at one stage, considering all of the other phenomenon follow on from the first.

For example, Life is contingent upon biology, which is contingent upon chemistry, which is contingent upon physics. Therefore only physics needs to be fine-tuned.

That means in order to explain fine-tuning we need only to explain the reasons why the laws of physics are as they are.

Maybe the laws of physics were the most costly to fine-tune since there's a greater number of possible parameters to choose from than the laws of biology and chemistry.

Only for this particular biology and chemistry. A law with different physics would give rise to different biology and chemistry, if not some other completely different hierachy of complexity altogether. It seems reasonable to think that any system subject to entropy would create more variables from the initial system, which in turn leads to opportunities of complexity.

It would only have to be the most fundamental constituents of the universe, energy and a variation of natural law (however slight) that would lead to any possible system.

So the question is still "why this natural law" rather than "why this natural law for physics, and this one for chemistry etc"

Everything has a cause, we can try and say it doesnt but untill we have something which doesnt need a cause (other than God) Everything does have a cause, its not a theory, its a fact.

Why "other than god"?

Until you explain that this is both special pleading and a bare assertion.

[TheDarkestOfAngels]

Perhaps He isnt.
Something created God, something created God's creator, something created creator's creator, something created creator's creator, something created creator's creator, something created creator's creator, something created creator's creator...

You see how we dont get anywhere?

Either something created God and that God was created by another God and that God was created by another God OR there was an uncaused cause, which is God...

That doesn't make any sense. You an those who also ascribe to the fail train of the 'first cause' arguement all seem to be able to make the arguement that the universe CANNOT be eternal but MUST have a cause yet God by your own definition DOES NOT have a cause or, by your own admission, whose cause is IRRELEVANT or UNKNOWN to the arguement.
Which amuses me to no end, because you can apply all of these arguements to the current naturalistic theories of the universe with a far greater likelyhood of them being true - yet you and others like you use this as an arguement that there MUST be a creator when such a being is entirely unnecessary.

There are many things you cant touch in this world, yet you still believe they are real and not a 'fantasy'.

Humans also cannot touch neutrinos - a particle so ethereal that billions of them can pass through the entire planet without interacting with a single molecule. Yet, we have proven their existence with specialized 'neutrino detectors' thanks to the fact that a rare few sometimes do interact with normal matter. As such, I believe in neutrinos, even though I have never seen one, touched one, smelt one, tasted, heard one, or operated a neutrino detector personally.

There is no reason why one should not believe in a Deistic God...

Because there is no reason to believe in one.