God and Big Bang

[Brian37]

Certainly if there is some sort of prime mover god... it's not the god of the Bible.

That's my whole issue with the deist god... where do people get the idea that god started everything? Because we are quite certain that if there is some sort of prime mover god, it's not the Yahweh we know from the bible. So where does the idea then come from? Out of their asses?

It is a  gap argument. One could plop in a giant invisible pink unicorn and claim it farted us into existence and it would have the same amount of evidence. 

I really cannot stress this enough. While it is good to bitch slap ALL gap arguments, we really DO have an evolutionary explanation as to why humans make up these claims. 

There is no such thing as a god, never was. That really is nothing more than humans projecting their own qualities on non human things. This gap filling is the same misfire that will cause a dog to bark at it's own reflection in the mirror. 

A single atom cannot act as an adult in tact brain. The universe is also not a giant consciousness. It is also not the same structure as a human brain. If it makes no sense to place Thor as the cause of lightening, and it makes no sense to place the ocean god Poseidon as the cause of hurricanes, why would the universe need a thinking cognition to start it? 

It would still as a gap answer suffer from the problem of infinite regress. If an infinitely complex cognition started all this, and everything has a cause, then that infinitely complex cognition has an even more infinitely complex prime mover, and so on and so on and so on.

It makes much more sense to say humans like what they believe and buy into a comforting lie because the thought of being finite frightens most. Ocham's razor states that the solution to a problem is going most likely be the one with the least complex baggage. 

Humans make up gods. If you postulate the other, a god existing, you end up with endless regress that keeps begging the question with superfluous garbage.

If a God can exist with no cause, certainly the universe can as well.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

The universe isn't "fine tuned". What we have is a result of what the universe is.

[Brian37]

The universe isn't "fine tuned". What we have is a result of what the universe is.

Yep, just like a hurricane is the result of CONDITIONS not a god. Life is nothing more than temporary outcome as a result of building conditions and countless factors over long periods of time. No magic sky wizard need to fill in the blanks anymore than Poseidon is needed to explain a hurricane.

[Alex K]

If one of the quark masses were not much larger, protons would decay and there would only be hydrogen gas. You can't tell me that would be an equally valid but different backdrop for some form of intelligence.

[Fake Messiah]

If one of the quark masses were not much larger, protons would decay and there would only be hydrogen gas. You can't tell me that would be an equally valid but different backdrop for some form of intelligence.

Well give it 14 billion years and anything is possible. The bottom line is, I think, that you can't argue if life, as we know it, depends sensitively on the parameters of our universe. But it certainly doesn't stop William Lane Craig and many other theist authors to argue that this is indeed like that and it is therefore evidence for god.
Biology of life are still big misery to science. Sure we know a lot about life on Earth and how it developed but all life on Earth is essentially the same; chemically we're identical to bacteria or begonias. It's as though you said to a physicist: "You're going to study gravity now, but you can't go out of this room, and you can't look at anything that has a gravitational influence except what's within this room. Here are two big lead spheres. Measure how much they attract each other and try to devise a general theory." Well, that's very difficult.

Certainly Isaac Newton did it not make his fundamental discoveries by being in a laboratory, but by looking at the motion of Moon and the moons of Jupiter and so on, and things on the earth as well. By making those connections he was able to make a general law of gravitation. Well, the biologists have mighty few general laws, and that's because they have mighty few cases - like one.

[Alex K]

If one of the quark masses were not much larger, protons would decay and there would only be hydrogen gas. You can't tell me that would be an equally valid but different backdrop for some form of intelligence.

Well give it 14 billion years and anything is possible.

In an expanding universe filled with nothing but dilute hydrogen gas?

The bottom line is, I think, that you can't argue if life, as we know it, depends sensitively on the parameters of our universe.

I don't agree entirely... I don't think that by far every set of conditions enables something deserving of that name, and varying the parameters of our universe as we understand them today only slightly can yield some very structureless universes in which there are neither stars, nor chemistry..

But it certainly doesn't stop William Lane Craig and many other theist authors to argue that this is indeed like that and it is therefore evidence for god.

Of course... William Lane Craig is a lying sack of shit, nothing stops him from selling his crap...

Biology of life are still big misery to science.

I wouldn't go so far...

Sure we know a lot about life on Earth and how it developed but all life on Earth is essentially the same; chemically we're identical to bacteria or begonias. It's as though you said to a physicist: "You're going to study gravity now, but you can't go out of this room, and you can't look at anything that has a gravitational influence except what's within this room. Here are two big lead spheres. Measure how much they attract each other and try to devise a general theory." Well, that's very difficult.

If you give the physicist a super great Mössbauer crystal and a laser on top of that, getting general relativity is actually feasible because she can discover gravitational time dilation and from that conclude curvature of spacetime. Ok, if she's really really smart

Certainly Isaac Newton did it not make his fundamental discoveries by being in a laboratory, but by looking at the motion of Moon and the moons of Jupiter and so on, and things on the earth as well. By making those connections he was able to make a general law of gravitation. Well, the biologists have mighty few general laws, and that's because they have mighty few cases - like one.

I think Evolution by Natural selection alone is such an immensely general law that it kind of compensates for that. What you are getting at though is Abiogenesis, and that one is a tough one to decide how exactly it went to for sure.

[Minimalist]

Of course... William Lane Craig is a lying sack of shit, nothing stops him from selling his crap...

Worse, nothing stops shitheads from buying it.

[Fake Messiah]

I don't agree entirely... I don't think that by far every set of conditions enables something deserving of that name, and varying the parameters of our universe as we understand them today only slightly can yield some very structureless universes in which there are neither stars, nor chemistry..

But didn't our own universe start in a state of perfect symmetry, in particular, gravity and electromagnetism were of equal strength? That symmetry, however, was unstable and, as the universe cooled, a spontaneous symmetry breaking resulted in the forces separating into the four basic kinds we experience at much lower energies today, and their strengths evolved to their current values. They were not fine-tuned. Stellar formation and, thus, life had to simply wait for the forces to separate sufficiently. That wait was actually a tiny fraction of a second.

And when you say stuff like "If one of the quark masses were not much larger, protons would decay and there would only be hydrogen gas. You can't tell me that would be an equally valid but different backdrop for some form of intelligence." I think you are jumping to conclusion because you vary a single parameter while assuming all the others remain fixed. Then you further proceed to calculate meaningless probabilities based on the erroneous assumption that all the parameters are independent. Is it not pretty reasonable to expect that changing one or more other parameters can often compensate for the one that is changed?

For instance back in 2001 physicist Anthony Aguirre examined the universes that result when six cosmological parameters are simultaneously varied by orders of magnitude, and found he could construct cosmologies in which stars, planets, and intelligent life can plausibly arise.
http://cds.cern.ch/record/503848/files/0106143.pdf

[The Valkyrie]

According to the TV show "Lucifer", the universe came into being after two celestial beings known as "god" and "mom", met and had sex.

Hence "Big Bang" is quite appropriate.

And since "mom" is played by Tricia Helfer, it's quite understandable, too...

[surreptitious57]

The four fundamental forces are supposed to have been bound together at the point the universe began to expand. Although the Big Bang cannot be observed all the
way back to its very beginning as the universe is too opaque to light pre CMB. And also what happened nearly 14 billion years ago was not the very beginning as such
but merely local cosmic expansion. It does not mean t = 0 as time could have existed before then. It would just mean the singularity would not have experienced time