The God Hypothesis

[The Duke of Vandals]

The following is from Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion:

http://edge.org/3rd_culture/dawkins06/d ... index.html

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Stephen Jay Gould's 'NOMA' 'non-overlapping magisteria'. Gould claimed that science and true religion never come into conflict because they exist in completely separate dimensions of discourse:

To say it for all my colleagues and for the umpteenth millionth time (from college bull sessions to learned treatises): science simply cannot (by its legitimate methods) adjudicate the issue of God's possible superintendence of nature. We neither affirm nor deny it; we simply can't comment on it as scientists.

This sounds terrific, right up until you give it a moment's thought. You then realize that the presence of a creative deity in the universe is clearly a scientific hypothesis. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a more momentous hypothesis in all of science. A universe with a god would be a completely different kind of universe from one without, and it would be a scientific difference. God could clinch the matter in his favour at any moment by staging a spectacular demonstration of his powers, one that would satisfy the exacting standards of science. Even the infamous Templeton Foundation recognized that God is a scientific hypothesis by funding double-blind trials to test whether remote prayer would speed the recovery of heart patients. It didn't, of course, although a control group who knew they had been prayed for tended to get worse (how about a class action suit against the Templeton Foundation?) Despite such well-financed efforts, no evidence for God's existence has yet appeared.

To see the disingenuous hypocrisy of religious people who embrace NOMA, imagine that forensic archeologists, by some unlikely set of circumstances, discovered DNA evidence demonstrating that Jesus was born of a virgin mother and had no father. If NOMA enthusiasts were sincere, they should dismiss the archeologists' DNA out of hand: "Irrelevant. Scientific evidence has no bearing on theological questions. Wrong magisterium." Does anyone seriously imagine that they would say anything remotely like that? You can bet your boots that not just the fundamentalists but every professor of theology and every bishop in the land would trumpet the archeological evidence to the skies.

Either Jesus had a father or he didn't. The question is a scientific one, and scientific evidence, if any were available, would be used to settle it. The same is true of any miracle and the deliberate and intentional creation of the universe would have to have been the mother and father of all miracles. Either it happened or it didn't. It is a fact, one way or the other, and in our state of uncertainty we can put a probability on it an estimate that may change as more information comes in. Humanity's best estimate of the probability of divine creation dropped steeply in 1859 when The Origin of Species was published, and it has declined steadily during the subsequent decades, as evolution consolidated itself from plausible theory in the nineteenth century to established fact today.

....

Accepting, then, that the God Hypothesis is a proper scientific hypothesis whose truth or falsehood is hidden from us only by lack of evidence, what should be our best estimate of the probability that God exists, given the evidence now available? Pretty low I think, and here's why.

First, most of the traditional arguments for God's existence, from Aquinas on, are easily demolished. Several of them, such as the First Cause argument, work by setting up an infinite regress which God is wheeled out to terminate. But we are never told why God is magically able to terminate regresses while needing no explanation himself. To be sure, we do need some kind of explanation for the origin of all things. Physicists and cosmologists are hard at work on the problem. But whatever the answer a random quantum fluctuation or a Hawking/Penrose singularity or whatever we end up calling it it will be simple. Complex, statistically improbable things, by definition, don't just happen; they demand an explanation in their own right. They are impotent to terminate regresses, in a way that simple things are not. The first cause cannot have been an intelligence let alone an intelligence that answers prayers and enjoys being worshipped. Intelligent, creative, complex, statistically improbable things come late into the universe, as the product of evolution or some other process of gradual escalation from simple beginnings. They come late into the universe and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it.

Another of Aquinas' efforts, the Argument from Degree, is worth spelling out, for it epitomises the characteristic flabbiness of theological reasoning. We notice degrees of, say, goodness or temperature, and we measure them, Aquinas said, by reference to a maximum:

Now the maximum in any genus is the cause of all in that genus, as fire, which is the maximum of heat, is the cause of all hot things . . . Therefore, there must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection; and this we call God.

That's an argument? You might as well say that people vary in smelliness but we can make the judgment only by reference to a perfect maximum of conceivable smelliness. Therefore there must exist a pre-eminently peerless stinker, and we call him God. Or substitute any dimension of comparison you like, and derive an equivalently fatuous conclusion. That's theology.

The only one of the traditional arguments for God that is widely used today is the teleological argument, sometimes called the Argument from Design although since the name begs the question of its validity it should better be called the Argument for Design. It is the familiar 'watchmaker' argument, which is surely one of the most superficially plausible bad arguments ever discovered and it is rediscovered by just about everybody until they are taught the logical fallacy and Darwin's brilliant alternative.

In the familiar world of human artifacts, complicated things that look designed are designed. To nave observers, it seems to follow that similarly complicated things in the natural world that look designed things like eyes and hearts are designed too. It isn't just an argument by analogy. There is a semblance of statistical reasoning here too fallacious, but carrying an illusion of plausibility. If you randomly scramble the fragments of an eye or a leg or a heart a million times, you'd be lucky to hit even one combination that could see, walk or pump. This demonstrates that such devices could not have been put together by chance. And of course, no sensible scientist ever said they could. Lamentably, the scientific education of most British and American students omits all mention of Darwinism, and therefore the only alternative to chance that most people can imagine is design.

Even before Darwin's time, the illogicality was glaring: how could it ever have been a good idea to postulate, in explanation for the existence of improbable things, a designer who would have to be even more improbable? The entire argument is a logical non-starter, as David Hume realized before Darwin was born. What Hume didn't know was the supremely elegant alternative to both chance and design that Darwin was to give us. Natural selection is so stunningly powerful and elegant, it not only explains the whole of life, it raises our consciousness and boosts our confidence in science's future ability to explain everything else.

Natural selection is not just an alternative to chance. It is the only ultimate alternative ever suggested. Design is a workable explanation for organized complexity only in the short term. It is not an ultimate explanation, because designers themselves demand an explanation. If, as Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel once playfully speculated, life on this planet was deliberately seeded by a payload of bacteria in the nose cone of a rocket, we still need an explanation for the intelligent aliens who dispatched the rocket. Ultimately they must have evolved by gradual degrees from simpler beginnings. Only evolution, or some kind of gradualistic 'crane' (to use Daniel Dennett's neat term), is capable of terminating the regress. Natural selection is an anti-chance process, which gradually builds up complexity, step by tiny step. The end product of this ratcheting process is an eye, or a heart, or a brain a device whose improbable complexity is utterly baffling until you spot the gentle ramp that leads up to it.

Whether my conjecture is right that evolution is the only explanation for life in the universe, there is no doubt that it is the explanation for life on this planet. Evolution is a fact, and it is among the more secure facts known to science. But it had to get started somehow. Natural selection cannot work its wonders until certain minimal conditions are in place, of which the most important is an accurate system of replication DNA, or something that works like DNA.

The origin of life on this planet which means the origin of the first self-replicating molecule is hard to study, because it (probably) only happened once, 4 billion years ago and under very different conditions from those with which we are familiar. We may never know how it happened. Unlike the ordinary evolutionary events that followed, it must have been a genuinely very improbable in the sense of unpredictable event: too improbable, perhaps, for chemists to reproduce it in the laboratory or even devise a plausible theory for what happened. This weirdly paradoxical conclusion that a chemical account of the origin of life, in order to be plausible, has to be implausible would follow if it were the case that life is extremely rare in the universe. And indeed we have never encountered any hint of extraterrestrial life, not even by radio the circumstance that prompted Enrico Fermi's cry: "Where is everybody?"

Suppose life's origin on a planet took place through a hugely improbable stroke of luck, so improbable that it happens on only one in a billion planets. The National Science Foundation would laugh at any chemist whose proposed research had only a one in a hundred chance of succeeding, let alone one in a billion. Yet, given that there are at least a billion billion planets in the universe, even such absurdly low odds as these will yield life on a billion planets. And this is where the famous anthropic principle comes in Earth has to be one of them, because here we are.

If you set out in a spaceship to find the one planet in the galaxy that has life, the odds against your finding it would be so great that the task would be indistinguishable, in practice, from impossible. But if you are alive (as you manifestly are if you are about to step into a spaceship) you needn't bother to go looking for that one planet because, by definition, you are already standing on it. The anthropic principle really is rather elegant. By the way, I don't actually think the origin of life was as improbable as all that. I think the galaxy has plenty of islands of life dotted about, even if the islands are too spaced out for any one to hope for a meeting with any other. My point is only that, given the number of planets in the universe, the origin of life could in theory be as lucky as a blindfolded golfer scoring a hole in one. The beauty of the anthropic principle is that, even in the teeth of such stupefying odds against, it still gives us a perfectly satisfying explanation for life's presence on our own planet.

The anthropic principle is usually applied not to planets but to universes. Physicists have suggested that the laws and constants of physics are too good as if the universe were set up to favour our eventual evolution. It is as though there were, say, half a dozen dials representing the major constants of physics. Each of the dials could in principle be tuned to any of a wide range of values. Almost all of these knob-twiddlings would yield a universe in which life would be impossible. Some universes would fizzle out within the first picosecond. Others would contain no elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. In yet others, matter would never condense into stars (and you need stars in order to forge the elements of chemistry and hence life). You can estimate the very low odds against the six knobs all just happening to be correctly tuned, and conclude that a divine knob-twiddler must have been at work. But, as we have already seen, that explanation is vacuous because it begs the biggest question of all. The divine knob twiddler would himself have to have been at least as improbable as the settings of his knobs.

Again, the anthropic principle delivers its devastatingly neat solution. Physicists already have reason to suspect that our universe everything we can see is only one universe among perhaps billions. Some theorists postulate a multiverse of foam, where the universe we know is just one bubble. Each bubble has its own laws and constants. Our familiar laws of physics are parochial bylaws. Of all the universes in the foam, only a minority has what it takes to generate life. And, with anthropic hindsight, we obviously have to be sitting in a member of that minority, because, well, here we are, aren't we? As physicists have said, it is no accident that we see stars in our sky, for a universe without stars would also lack the chemical elements necessary for life. There may be universes whose skies have no stars: but they also have no inhabitants to notice the lack. Similarly, it is no accident that we see a rich diversity of living species: for an evolutionary process that is capable of yielding a species that can see things and reflect on them cannot help producing lots of other species at the same time. The reflective species must be surrounded by an ecosystem, as it must be surrounded by stars.

The anthropic principle entitles us to postulate a massive dose of luck in accounting for the existence of life on our planet. But there are limits. We are allowed one stroke of luck for the origin of evolution, and perhaps for a couple of other unique events like the origin of the eukaryotic cell and the origin of consciousness. But that's the end of our entitlement to large-scale luck. We emphatically cannot invoke major strokes of luck to account for the illusion of design that glows from each of the billion species of living creature that have ever lived on Earth. The evolution of life is a general and continuing process, producing essentially the same result in all species, however different the details.

Contrary to what is sometimes alleged, evolution is a predictive science. If you pick any hitherto unstudied species and subject it to minute scrutiny, any evolutionist will confidently predict that each individual will be observed to do everything in its power, in the particular way of the species plant, herbivore, carnivore, nectivore or whatever it is to survive and propagate the DNA that rides inside it. We won't be around long enough to test the prediction but we can say, with great confidence, that if a comet strikes Earth and wipes out the mammals, a new fauna will rise to fill their shoes, just as the mammals filled those of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. And the range of parts played by the new cast of life's drama will be similar in broad outline, though not in detail, to the roles played by the mammals, and the dinosaurs before them, and the mammal-like reptiles before the dinosaurs. The same rules are predictably being followed, in millions of species all over the globe, and for hundreds of millions of years. Such a general observation requires an entirely different explanatory principle from the anthropic principle that explains one-off events like the origin of life, or the origin of the universe, by luck. That entirely different principle is natural selection.

We explain our existence by a combination of the anthropic principle and Darwin's principle of natural selection. That combination provides a complete and deeply satisfying explanation for everything that we see and know. Not only is the god hypothesis unnecessary. It is spectacularly unparsimonious. Not only do we need no God to explain the universe and life. God stands out in the universe as the most glaring of all superfluous sore thumbs. We cannot, of course, disprove God, just as we can't disprove Thor, fairies, leprechauns and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. But, like those other fantasies that we can't disprove, we can say that God is very very improbable.[/indent]

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Do you agree that the question of god'e existence is a scientific one? If not, how do you justify this? Do you support Dawkins' stance?

Discuss.

[Goat]

For some Christians you are absolutly correct. I am about to marry a woman who went to a high school which taught YEC. Many of these individuals would lose their faith if their traditional creation was proven false (in their opinions). In fact while snooping in the outer darkness I read cephus reason for de-conversion. It revolved around this very thing.

However, my central post for Christianity is the man of Jesus. This is my foundation. His life, ministry, death and resurrection are my foundation. So I don't really care how God decided to create things. He could have been as direct as to place every detail with his "finger" or as removed as the watchmaker idea. It doesn't matter because this belief isn't going to save or condemn me.

You have identified one of the weakest links in the "fundamentalist" Christian beliefs. And that is the rather rigid teaching that everything in the Bible is literal. This rigid thinking is very binary. Right/wrong, true/false. One thing I noticed
about many atheists that are ex-Christians of this variety is that although they
are intelligent enough to question, they still have this binary thinking built into them. They can't see the wonderful world of color that is between 'black and white', nor can many of them even see the shades of grey.


Because the literalists are using 'facts' that are demonstratably false, this can lead to crisis in faith if they are intelligent enough to realise what they have been taught is wrong. Although some can make the leap and keep their faith, many lose their faith all togather.

To these people, a proper education is a threat to their faith. I find that to be a shame.

[achilles12604]

For some Christians you are absolutly correct. I am about to marry a woman who went to a high school which taught YEC. Many of these individuals would lose their faith if their traditional creation was proven false (in their opinions). In fact while snooping in the outer darkness I read cephus reason for de-conversion. It revolved around this very thing.

However, my central post for Christianity is the man of Jesus. This is my foundation. His life, ministry, death and resurrection are my foundation. So I don't really care how God decided to create things. He could have been as direct as to place every detail with his "finger" or as removed as the watchmaker idea. It doesn't matter because this belief isn't going to save or condemn me.

You have identified one of the weakest links in the "fundamentalist" Christian beliefs. And that is the rather rigid teaching that everything in the Bible is literal. This rigid thinking is very binary. Right/wrong, true/false. One thing I noticed
about many atheists that are ex-Christians of this variety is that although they
are intelligent enough to question, they still have this binary thinking built into them. They can't see the wonderful world of color that is between 'black and white', nor can many of them even see the shades of grey.


Because the literalists are using 'facts' that are demonstratably false, this can lead to crisis in faith if they are intelligent enough to realise what they have been taught is wrong. Although some can make the leap and keep their faith, many lose their faith all togather.

To these people, a proper education is a threat to their faith. I find that to be a shame.

For once we agree 100%.

[Cogitoergosum]

You have identified one of the weakest links in the "fundamentalist" Christian beliefs. And that is the rather rigid teaching that everything in the Bible is literal. This rigid thinking is very binary. Right/wrong, true/false. One thing I noticed
about many atheists that are ex-Christians of this variety is that although they
are intelligent enough to question, they still have this binary thinking built into them. They can't see the wonderful world of color that is between 'black and white', nor can many of them even see the shades of grey.


Because the literalists are using 'facts' that are demonstratably false, this can lead to crisis in faith if they are intelligent enough to realise what they have been taught is wrong. Although some can make the leap and keep their faith, many lose their faith all togather.

To these people, a proper education is a threat to their faith. I find that to be a shame.

I'll tell you one thing, i was a christian, who did not take the old testament literally at all, i took it all as a myth, still believed in christianity until i noticed that the new testament was as flawed and unsupported as the old testament, so my faith in jesus was kaput at that time. I was wondering then, is there really a GOD?
Where did i get the notion of GOD? i got it from the old testament and the new testament. Without these i would have not heard of Yahweh or whomever. Now these two books are not supported by any credible and strong evidence, so why should i still believe in Yahweh. Why should i shake everything and keep this belief? If i write a mathematical formula that proves that the earth is flat, and then a mathematician comes and sees 600 flaws in my formula, should i disregard the formula and maintain that the earth is flat? No that conclusion goes with the formula to the trash can. If the bible is unsupported than Yahweh is unsupported like zeus, baal... it is a myth to me. Unless God manifests himself in some way, there is no reason to assume he exists.

[FinalEnigma]

Are you familiar with how I argued the first cause?

Read through posts 6, and 11 (especially 11).

I used simple logic to show that a first cause can be expected. If I failed, show me where.

Let me take a shot.

Since he doesn't really do it justice, allow me to express it how I understand.

Everything that begins to exist needs a cause. Nothing comes from nothing. Without a cause, nothing happens.

The universe began to exist. Therefore the universe needs a cause.


Now Dawkins goes on to write:

But we are never told why God is magically able to terminate regresses while needing no explanation himself.

The answer to this is extreamly simple. Read the logical premise carefully. Whatever BEGINS to exist must have a cause.

You're going to fight his argument on semantics?

First of all, the premis that god never began to exist is no less rediculous than that the universe never began to exist.

Another of Aquinas' efforts, the Argument from Degree, is worth spelling out, for it epitomises the characteristic flabbiness of theological reasoning. We notice degrees of, say, goodness or temperature, and we measure them, Aquinas said, by reference to a maximum:

Now the maximum in any genus is the cause of all in that genus, as fire, which is the maximum of heat, is the cause of all hot things . . . Therefore, there must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection; and this we call God.

This I have no knowledge of so it must not be very widely used.

Not very widely used? You have no knowledge of it? Didn't you take philosophy 101? thats where i learned about it.
Now, ill assume you know who Saint Thomas Aquinas is and not get in to that, but he based alot of his work on his 'arguments from'

Here we finally get to Dawkins area of expertise. Natural selection. I agree with Dawkins as far as the science expert goes. However, when Dawkis states :

The origin of life on this planet which means the origin of the first self-replicating molecule is hard to study, because it (probably) only happened once, 4 billion years ago and under very different conditions from those with which we are familiar. We may never know how it happened. Unlike the ordinary evolutionary events that followed, it must have been a genuinely very improbable in the sense of unpredictable event: too improbable, perhaps, for chemists to reproduce it in the laboratory or even devise a plausible theory for what happened.

like the first creator, no matter what science discovers, God can always be the author of life. This is why creation and life are not scientific questions for the theologian. We simply tack on one extra step which scientists deem "unnecessary".

It is unneccesary. And untill it is proven to be neccesary the logical conlusion is that it probably didnt happen.

We explain our existence by a combination of the anthropic principle and Darwin's principle of natural selection. That combination provides a complete and deeply satisfying explanation for everything that we see and know. Not only is the god hypothesis unnecessary. It is spectacularly unparsimonious. Not only do we need no God to explain the universe and life. God stands out in the universe as the most glaring of all superfluous sore thumbs.

Ultimately THIS is what it boils down to. Who is our God going to be? For the non-theists (at least the truely honest ones), the answer is themselves. For the Theist, it is God.

Have you ever read 'stranger in a strange land'? It's a great book. It may have been fiction, but i think he was on to something.
Thou art god.

Scientists and physicists are looking for that one simple combining factor of everything. I wonder what they will do when they find it?

Celebrate, I imagine. And one of them will become the most famous scientist to ever live.

But I ask you, how does he intend on testing this theory? Can it be scientifically tested? Can it be scientifically proven?

Wait, you want him to test and prove his theory that some other theory is wrong? Before said other theory is tested and proven?

and...on to what you actually challenged me to do...

If the universe did begin, it must have had a cause. Nothing comes from nothing. If nothing happened or existed, then nothing would be the result. Obviously something happened because we are here. So something changed. Changes require causes.

1) It must have been spaceless or at the very least outside of the confines of this universe.

2) It must have been timeless. Time it is shown by Einstein and others after him directly interacts with matter and space inside this universe. It is a factor which exists inside this universe. If there was no universe then there would be nothing to interact with. Hence the cause of the universe must be timeless.

Nothing comes from nothing...God doesnt either. You are suggesting that god always existed. And outside of space and time at that. ok, Where is God's timeline?
Time had to exist for God, seperately from the universe, otherwise he couldnt actually do anything. And anything he did do would be done instantly, from the moment of his existence. Which leads you to a completely rediculous train of thought. How does god act when there is no such thing as time? When did he come to a decision to make the universe? Either he has his very own personal timeline, outside of the timeline of any and all universes(which makes absolutely no sense), or you've got a problem here.

Now we have determined using that whatever caused the universe to occur, it did so with exactly the correct specifications to foster life inside this universe.

you know better than that. same thing as the life on earth question. Life tailors itself to the universe in which it resides, not the other way around. Also, presuming multiple universes. The anthrophic prinicple.

I would submit that history would indicate a all encompassing being encountering this universe in a variety of ways.

I would submit that technologically advanced aliens make more sense than an omnipotent/omniscient god. Prove this theory false.
I would also submit that when there are multiple theories explaining a single thing you cant just go pick the one you like. Technologically advanced aliens is even a simpler theory than God.
It seems far more likely that Jesus was an alien(or a man who was a tool of aliens) than God.

[achilles12604]

Are you familiar with how I argued the first cause?

Read through posts 6, and 11 (especially 11).

I used simple logic to show that a first cause can be expected. If I failed, show me where.

Let me take a shot.

Since he doesn't really do it justice, allow me to express it how I understand.

Everything that begins to exist needs a cause. Nothing comes from nothing. Without a cause, nothing happens.

The universe began to exist. Therefore the universe needs a cause.


Now Dawkins goes on to write:

But we are never told why God is magically able to terminate regresses while needing no explanation himself.

The answer to this is extreamly simple. Read the logical premise carefully. Whatever BEGINS to exist must have a cause.

You're going to fight his argument on semantics?

First of all, the premis that god never began to exist is no less rediculous than that the universe never began to exist.

Why? I clearly explain why the cause of the universe must be timeless. Instead of simply saying my ideas are rediclous, please feel free to explain or show me WHY they are rediculous. I did so with my case.

Another of Aquinas' efforts, the Argument from Degree, is worth spelling out, for it epitomises the characteristic flabbiness of theological reasoning. We notice degrees of, say, goodness or temperature, and we measure them, Aquinas said, by reference to a maximum:

Now the maximum in any genus is the cause of all in that genus, as fire, which is the maximum of heat, is the cause of all hot things . . . Therefore, there must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection; and this we call God.

This I have no knowledge of so it must not be very widely used.

Not very widely used? You have no knowledge of it? Didn't you take philosophy 101? thats where i learned about it.
Now, ill assume you know who Saint Thomas Aquinas is and not get in to that, but he based alot of his work on his 'arguments from'

Can you give me a source with this argument?

Here we finally get to Dawkins area of expertise. Natural selection. I agree with Dawkins as far as the science expert goes. However, when Dawkis states :

The origin of life on this planet which means the origin of the first self-replicating molecule is hard to study, because it (probably) only happened once, 4 billion years ago and under very different conditions from those with which we are familiar. We may never know how it happened. Unlike the ordinary evolutionary events that followed, it must have been a genuinely very improbable in the sense of unpredictable event: too improbable, perhaps, for chemists to reproduce it in the laboratory or even devise a plausible theory for what happened.

like the first creator, no matter what science discovers, God can always be the author of life. This is why creation and life are not scientific questions for the theologian. We simply tack on one extra step which scientists deem "unnecessary".

It is unneccesary. And untill it is proven to be neccesary the logical conlusion is that it probably didnt happen.

Is my apendix necessary? Does it exist?

Just because you deem it to be un-necessary right now doesn't mean that on one time, it wasn't extreamly necessary.

How about out tail bone? Is it necessary today? How about a few million years ago?

You are implying that since we understand the HOW, there wasn't a WHY. Certainly you can see this is a logical fallacy. I know how a car is made. I know how to put in the pieces. I can even build one myself.

Does this mean that Ford doesn't actually exist?

We explain our existence by a combination of the anthropic principle and Darwin's principle of natural selection. That combination provides a complete and deeply satisfying explanation for everything that we see and know. Not only is the god hypothesis unnecessary. It is spectacularly unparsimonious. Not only do we need no God to explain the universe and life. God stands out in the universe as the most glaring of all superfluous sore thumbs.

Ultimately THIS is what it boils down to. Who is our God going to be? For the non-theists (at least the truely honest ones), the answer is themselves. For the Theist, it is God.

Have you ever read 'stranger in a strange land'? It's a great book. It may have been fiction, but i think he was on to something.
Thou art god.

I'm god? COOL!!

Then the first thing I will do is to create for myself a universe and fill it with little purple people eaters.

Hmmm . . .

You know what? nothing happened.

But I ask you, how does he intend on testing this theory? Can it be scientifically tested? Can it be scientifically proven?

Wait, you want him to test and prove his theory that some other theory is wrong? Before said other theory is tested and proven?

and...on to what you actually challenged me to do...

I believe I was talking about the multiverse theory here.

If the universe did begin, it must have had a cause. Nothing comes from nothing. If nothing happened or existed, then nothing would be the result. Obviously something happened because we are here. So something changed. Changes require causes.

1) It must have been spaceless or at the very least outside of the confines of this universe.

2) It must have been timeless. Time it is shown by Einstein and others after him directly interacts with matter and space inside this universe. It is a factor which exists inside this universe. If there was no universe then there would be nothing to interact with. Hence the cause of the universe must be timeless.

Nothing comes from nothing...God doesnt either. You are suggesting that god always existed. And outside of space and time at that. ok, Where is God's timeline?

How would you define "timeless"? I define it as without the aspect of time. So God doesn't have a timeline. He is timeless.

Time had to exist for God, seperately from the universe, otherwise he couldnt actually do anything.

Why? Do you have special knowledge of the supernatural and its characteristics and laws?

Easier question. Do you even have knowledge that other universes as proposed by others here have the same laws of physics as this one? If not, then how can you claim to have knowledge of areas outside of any universe?

And anything he did do would be done instantly, from the moment of his existence. Which leads you to a completely rediculous train of thought. How does god act when there is no such thing as time? When did he come to a decision to make the universe? Either he has his very own personal timeline, outside of the timeline of any and all universes(which makes absolutely no sense), or you've got a problem here.

Are you familiar with the multiple dementions known to us? Then you certainly know that a 2D object would not be able to interact in a 3D environment correct?

But can a 3D object interact on a 2D level? Can I look at a sheet of paper and see its 8 x 11 side facing me?

What if God were outside of even our 4th dimension. What if God viewed time as we view a street mall? he could walk up and down our timeline and peer into and interact with any window of time at any "time" he wanted.

He would be outside our time, yet able to interact with our time just as we can pass by windows and choose which one to enter.

I would submit that history would indicate a all encompassing being encountering this universe in a variety of ways.

I would submit that technologically advanced aliens make more sense than an omnipotent/omniscient god. Prove this theory false.
I would also submit that when there are multiple theories explaining a single thing you cant just go pick the one you like. Technologically advanced aliens is even a simpler theory than God.
It seems far more likely that Jesus was an alien(or a man who was a tool of aliens) than God.

Ok lets go with your alien idea.

What caused the aliens to exist? What caused their universe to be created so they could create ours?

You must ultimately begin with a cause that is outside of ALL universes and ALL times.

So even if this universe was proven to have been caused by aliens, God's existence is still plausible based on the first cause argument.

[Cathar1950]

If you going to make an exception for God then there is no reason to not make an exception for the universe.
If there is a first cause it need not be God.

How would you define "timeless"? I define it as without the aspect of time. So God doesn't have a timeline. He is timeless

Easier question. Do you even have knowledge that other universes as proposed by others here have the same laws of physics as this one? If not, then how can you claim to have knowledge of areas outside of any universe?

Have you been outside of time and space?
How do you know anything or claim to have knowledge of areas outside the universe including God?

[achilles12604]

If you going to make an exception for God then there is no reason to not make an exception for the universe.
If there is a first cause it need not be God.

Well lets apply my line of reasoning to the universe.

First I said that the universe began. With one notable exception, there have not been any objections to this accepted fact.

I also put forth that every action requires a cause. anything that begins to exist, must have a cause. There are no known exceptions for this within the laws of this universe. Since this universe is within this universe, I can safely say that this line of reasoning applies to our current universe.

Now if the universe began to exist and thus needed a cause, this cause had to meet certain criteria.

I said it must be space less. If you want to discuss multiverses that is fine but then you only push the problem back one step, so for simplicities sake I will stick with this universe only. Space exists within this universe. Outside of the universe, no matter has been formed by the universe and thus, there is nothing or it is space less.

Since the cause of the universe can not be dependent on the universe's existence, it must be space less.



How am I doing so far?

Ok lets see if the universe itself can be its own cause. The universe is a bordered (or boundless it doesn't matter) area which contains stuff. Because the universe is made of stuff, it must have space in which to place said stuff, thus the universe is dependent on space. But space is dependent on the existence of the universe. So the universe as its own cause can not be because it is not space less.


I argued that the cause of the universe had to be timeless because time directly relates to space. without "things", time has no meaning. there would be nothing to define time. Therefore, time is also dependent on the universe's existence.

so if the first cause was both timeless and space less, it could not be the universe. Hence, I do not have to make an exception for the universe simply because God fit's the criteria which was necessary for the first cause of the universe.

God and the universe have different, and unique attributes. We learn about the attributes of the universe through science. We learn about the attributes of God through theology and philosophy.

So there is no reason to assume that because the universe required a cause, God must therefore also require a cause.

How would you define "timeless"? I define it as without the aspect of time. So God doesn't have a timeline. He is timeless

Easier question. Do you even have knowledge that other universes as proposed by others here have the same laws of physics as this one? If not, then how can you claim to have knowledge of areas outside of any universe?

Have you been outside of time and space?
How do you know anything or claim to have knowledge of areas outside the universe including God?

I do not claim to have scientific knowledge outside this universe. I simply am using what scientists have found thus far and logical arguments.

However, while God is outside of space and time, he can also interact with space and time and if he did so for the purpose of explaining himself to his creation, then we could gain knowledge of him.

Since nothingness is unable to communicate with out universe and us specifically, we would not expect for us to be able to understand that with which we have had no contact at all.

[WelshBoy]

I'd like to challenge your premise that everything that begins to exist must have a cause. Can you give me an example where this is true? At best I think you will only be able to give me examples of things changing from one state to another. Energy for example cannot be created or destroyed, it simply changes its form.

[achilles12604]

I'd like to challenge your premise that everything that begins to exist must have a cause. Can you give me an example where this is true? At best I think you will only be able to give me examples of things changing from one state to another. Energy for example cannot be created or destroyed, it simply changes its form.

I think we have two different things to talk about here.

I'd like to challenge your premise that everything that begins to exist must have a cause. Can you give me an example where this is true?

Honestly I am resting this on the fact that there is no example I can think of where this is not true.

The only example I was given once was nuclear decay and how random it is. However we know WHY radioactive materials decay. So not only is there a cause, but we even know what that cause is.

http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/p ... y00774.htm
http://misterguch.brinkster.net/nucleardecay.html

I am unaware of ANYTHING which violates the rule that nothing happens (or specifically begins) without a cause of some sort.

If you can provide me with ANY example I promise to quit using this argument forever.

As for energy not being created or destroyed, this is a fact we can generally accept within the confines of our universe. I could use the apologetical answer of before there was space physical laws didn't exist or apply and this could be valid but I don't even need to do this because the big bang theory offers another explanation.

There was a highly dense material or cloud of energy before the big bang. Then like nuclear decay, something changed and boom, the universe began. The energy was there but not organized like we see it now.

Of course all of this is theory. But creation or destruction of energy doesn't negate the beginning of the universe. So these two points, though valid individually, don't necessarily correlate directly with one another.

[WelshBoy]

Well, think about person beginning to exist.

A baby is born. That baby was at one time a single cell. That single cell was once two gametes, an egg and a sperm. Those were generated in the parent's gonads. The nutrients required to generate those cells were ingested by the parents. The food containing those nutrients was grown or farmed. The plants grew because of the energy of the sun........I can go on and on and on, but the person doesn't have a 'first cause'.

Why must the existence of the universe have a cause? I'm not particularly well versed on universe theory, but I am aware that there is a line of thought whereby this universe is one in a long line of universes that expand, collapse, expand, collapse. Do they need a cause?