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]

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.

Please show evidence of the following. Everything needs a cause. Please show evidence of the following 'Nothing comes from nothing'. Please show that there ever was 'nothing'.

In QM, there appears to be a number of things that do not appear to have a cause. That causes premise number 1 to fail. One of these things is the creation of virtual particles from nothing. This causes premise number 2 to fail.


You then declare God to be the one thing that 'always' existed, thereby giving
God an attribute that is not given to anything else. Because you say evertying was 'caused' to exist but god, you are using the logical fallacy of "Special Pleading".

From http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacie ... ading.html

Special Pleading is a fallacy in which a person applies standards, principles, rules, etc. to others while taking herself (or those she has a special interest in) to be exempt, without providing adequate justification for the exemption. This sort of "reasoning" has the following form:

You are giving the special attribute to God of 'not being caused', and evertying else to 'have a cause'. There is no reason to do that, except to try to 'define' god into place.

[achilles12604]

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.

What caused God to exist?
Or are you going to invent a special plea for GOD.

I get this defense a lot but really it is in incorrect. I am creating a thread just for this subject. Please respond there.

[Goat]

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.

What caused God to exist?
Or are you going to invent a special plea for GOD.

I get this defense a lot but really it is in incorrect. I am creating a thread just for this subject. Please respond there.

I most certainly will. I find the refusal to see the special pleading in that arguement very frustrating. THe blindess is annoying.

[FinalEnigma]

Sorry about my lack of response achilies, but i rather lost track of this thread.

I think this would be a little more productive than talking about the cause of humans. What is the cause of the matter that makes up the humam? Prove any instance where matter itself has a cause that is not energy(because they can cycle into one another) or a cause of energy that is not matter.

Personally i believe it most likely that all matter/energy in the universe has always existed and i go for the multiple big bangs theory. Everything has gravity, and that the effect of that gravity never dimishes to 0 with distance. Therefore the universe must eventually implode(or rather all the mass must converge on a single point)...and cause another big bang.(most of my knowledge of physics comes from the endless questions i've asked my father, who was a physics major in college. admittedly he hasnt kept up on it and his information may be out of date somewhat[science does advance quickly!], but i imagine the basic premises' of it are still valid.)

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?

Sure.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_degree

Oh, and i owe you an apology.

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'

That was condescending. I didn't realize it at the time. Sorry.

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?

Nuh-uh. that someone outside of Ford knows how to make a car doesnt mean Ford doesnt exist. It means Ford doesnt neccesarily exist. If nobody had never seen a Ford commercial, and 'Ford' wasnt written all over their cars, it would be a logical conclusion that Ford probably doesn't exist. They might. But they are unnecessary.

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.

In case you didnt notice i didnt capitalize the 'g' on that 'god'. Also, you know i didnt mean that in the sense of 'you are the christian god'
I meant it quite in the philosophical sense, that god is a human construct, but has actual power.

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.

Admittedly, that's a good point, and possibly theoretically possible. You admitted that you cant prove it's true. But perhaps you could prove that its possible?

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.

Actually, i didnt mean anything to do with first cause, i meant more in the "the bible is based off of this" vein. As in "some aliens decided to pretend to be gods and caused all the things in the bible to happen to convince us that they were God"
Perhaps some kind of social experiment about the propogation of religion.

[achilles12604]

What caused God to exist?
Or are you going to invent a special plea for GOD.

Cogi has asked an important question one which Christians do create special pleas for.

For a page and a half, this thread became terribly concerned with what causes a person. Let's look at that in terms of the god hypothesis.

"The first human beings who lived in caves & used stone tools evolved this degree of sophistication with the assistance of digital computers."

We dismiss this hypothesis because it implies something very complicated existed at a time before such complicated things had come into existence. Furthermore, we do not need to know how humans came into existence to know this hypothesis is fatally flawed.

Whatever god is, he demands an explanation. Not the tremendous cop out that apologists present. God is a very "complex" thing and we know that complex things don't just happen.

This is why the god hypothesis is bunk.

God is a very "complex" thing and we know that complex things don't just happen.

Since your entire argument revolves around this sentence I figured I would simply point out that if God always existed, then he didn't ever "happen". So in a manner of speaking you are correct. But if God didn't begin to exist, then this sentence has no bearing on your next one.

[achilles12604]

Sorry about my lack of response achilies, but i rather lost track of this thread.

I think this would be a little more productive than talking about the cause of humans. What is the cause of the matter that makes up the humam? Prove any instance where matter itself has a cause that is not energy(because they can cycle into one another) or a cause of energy that is not matter.

Well one simple argument is the second law of thermodynamics. This law is frequently applied incorrectly, however when discussing energy and organization of that energy, it is very important.

Organization of energy requires energy to accomplish. This energy is expended as heat. Heat is the ultimate state of disorder for energy. It is chaotic energy without order.

Here is the second law of thermodynamics.

Second law

Main article: Second law of thermodynamics

" There is no process that, operating in a cycle, produces no other effect than the subtraction of a positive amount of heat from a reservoir and the production of an equal amount of work. "

This version is the so-called Kelvin-Planck Statement. In a simple manner, the Second Law states that energy systems have a tendency to increase their entropy (heat transformation content) rather than decrease it.

In simple terms, it is an expression of the fact that over time, differences in temperature, pressure, and density tend to even out in a physical system which is isolated from the outside world. Entropy is a measure of how far along this evening-out process has progressed.

The entropy of a thermally isolated macroscopic system never decreases (see Maxwell's demon), however a microscopic system may exhibit fluctuations of entropy opposite to that dictated by the Second Law (see Fluctuation Theorem). In fact, the mathematical proof of the Fluctuation Theorem from time-reversible dynamics and the Axiom of Causality, constitutes a proof of the Second Law. In a logical sense the Second Law thus ceases to be a "Law" of Physics and instead becomes a theorem which is valid for large systems or long times.

Stephen Hawking described this using time as an entropy base. For example, when time moves in a forward direction and one, say, breaks a cup of coffee on the floor, no matter what happens, in our universe, one will never see the cup reform. Cups are breaking all the time, but never reforming. Since the Big Bang, the entropy of the universe has been on the rise, and so the Second Law states that this process will continue to increase.

If the universe was eternal then the entropy of the universe should have become even infinate time ago. Since we still have areas of order of energy, the entropy of the universe is not final. Thus the universe we are in had a beginning. This beginning organized matter and energy (for an estimation of the odds of this occuring by accident see here
). Now you were asking for proof that energy was created in the big bang and didn't exist prior to this. Honestly I don't believe your request can ever be filled as to test any hypothesis on this subject would require the ability to be in an area without any energy or matter. I know of no such place within the universe.

However, I can just as easily say that even if energy did exist before the creation of the universe (which I acknowledge is a possibility), the sudden and complete alteration in that energy and its current patterns would have necessitated a cause. Energy unaffected will remain constant in it current form.

Read the Zeroth law of thermodynamics
Zeroth law

Main article: Zeroth law of thermodynamics

" If two thermodynamic systems are in thermal equilibrium with a third, they are also in thermal equilibrium with each other. "

When two systems are put in contact with each other, there will be a net exchange of energy between them unless or until they are in thermal equilibrium. While this is a fundamental concept of thermodynamics, the need to state it explicitly as a law was not perceived until the first third of the 20th century, long after the first three laws were already widely in use, hence the zero numbering. The Zeroth Law asserts that thermal equilibrium, viewed as a binary relation, is an equivalence relation.

If all the energy was in contact with all the other energy and none of it was organized into the universe, then for this energy to suddenly change into matter would require a cause. The zeroth law shows that once again if everything is in equilibrium, then only another system will alter their equilibrium.

Personally i believe it most likely that all matter/energy in the universe has always existed and i go for the multiple big bangs theory. Everything has gravity, and that the effect of that gravity never diminishes to 0 with distance. Therefore the universe must eventually implode(or rather all the mass must converge on a single point)...and cause another big bang.(most of my knowledge of physics comes from the endless questions i've asked my father, who was a physics major in college. admittedly he hasnt kept up on it and his information may be out of date somewhat[science does advance quickly!], but i imagine the basic premises' of it are still valid.)

I for one do not agree with this theory. It has many physically impossible aspects to it in my opinion.

1) Gravity is always in existence. Granted. The expansion of the universe can be slowing down. Granted. However if the universe were to come all back together again, why would it explode outwards again? What in this universe, either energy or matter, would cause such an explosion? (oops I used the word cause again didn't I )

2) There are other reasons why gravity may not be enough to cause the implosion of the universe (I don't buy this personally. But it is still a theory out there)

http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_a ... 0902a.html
It has been said that because our universe creates its own "space and time" it is expanding into pure nothing. Is there a possibility that this "nothings"' main attribute is that of a perfect vacuum pulling the universe apart like a balloon inside a bell jar when the air is removed?

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?

Sure.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_degree

Oh, and i owe you an apology.

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'

That was condescending. I didn't realize it at the time. Sorry.

No problem.


Ok I have heard of this however you really threw me off.

The argument from degree has nothing to do with temperatures. It has to do with variations of perception. From your source.

"We notice that things in the world differ. There are degrees of, say, goodness or perfection. But we judge these degrees only by comparison with a maximum. Humans can be both good and bad, so the maximum goodness cannot rest in us. Therefore there must be some other maximum to set the standard for perfection, and we call that maximum God.

Boy was I confused there. I thought you were talking about an argument from temperatures.

This was written in the OP

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:

And for the record, I don't really think this is a very good argument either although I'm sure in philosophy it is great.

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 appendix 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 extremely 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?

Nuh-uh. that someone outside of Ford knows how to make a car doesnt mean Ford doesnt exist. It means Ford doesnt neccesarily exist. If nobody had never seen a Ford commercial, and 'Ford' wasnt written all over their cars, it would be a logical conclusion that Ford probably doesn't exist. They might. But they are unnecessary.

I think I follow but I still disagree. This line of thinking leads me dangerously close to "god of gaps" so I want to make a distinction here.

Scientifically you may be right, the idea of God is unnecessary. However from this point I could take two approaches.

One is the God of Gaps. - Science hasn't been able to determine the cause of the universe so it must have been god-

The other is the one I actually follow and believe and that is simply even if science figures out exactly how and when the universe started it will not NEGATE the possibility of God because I can always tack on "God made that be like that". As I have said time and time again, God can not be tested by science.

My entire line of reasoning with the first cause is philosophical. It was first thought of by Plato and Aristotle. it is not scientific. I just wanted to make that distinction clear.

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.

In case you didnt notice i didnt capitalize the 'g' on that 'god'. Also, you know i didnt mean that in the sense of 'you are the christian god'
I meant it quite in the philosophical sense, that god is a human construct, but has actual power.

I know. I was giving you a hard time. Sorry.

I'm such a bad person sometimes. I understand the premise put forth about human ability and strength. I agree with some of it even.

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.

Admittedly, that's a good point, and possibly theoretically possible. You admitted that you cant prove it's true. But perhaps you could prove that its possible?

Well I put forth my reasoning earlier. I don't have much to add.

If God exists as the Christian God, then he would be outside of time. He would therefore not be constrained by time.

Any "proof" I could offer would be speculative at best. I simply wanted to put forth that my line of reasoning was not impossible. Just getting my ideas to be included during the evaluation of evidence is really hard with most non-theists. The tendency is to throw away any option including anything supernatural and THEN and only then test the remaining ideas. This of course causes my options to not even be considered, whether they are valid, correct, or junk.

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.

Actually, i didnt mean anything to do with first cause, i meant more in the "the bible is based off of this" vein. As in "some aliens decided to pretend to be gods and caused all the things in the bible to happen to convince us that they were God"
Perhaps some kind of social experiment about the propogation of religion.

[/quote]

Oh. Totally different line of thinking.

Ok so your thesis is that aliens wrote the bible, and caused everything in this universe to occur just as it did as a sort of high school experiment.

Got it. And no I can't disprove it. I also can not disprove that I am even real in the ultimate sense of the word. I could easily be part of someone's dream in another realm and I only think I am real up to the point that the individual wakes up, and then I simply no longer exist. I can not disprove this theory either. Some things I just take on faith. Not much, but some.

[QED]

achilles12604 -- As far as hypothesis go, in the absence of any other evidence, an eternal, uncaused God is fully interchangeable with an eternal, uncaused multiverse. This statement is made on the basis that both suspend the need for first cause while filling the need for our providence. If you disagree, then let's focus on your reason.

I see them both as candidate explanations. So how do we set about disambiguating the two notions without straying too far into the realms of imagination? Do we know of any complex entities (intelligences) that don't earn their prowess through some kind of evolution (take this as gradual change from lower to higher complexities)? I don't think so. Do we know of the existence of any "unseen universe"? Yes: One more light-year of our own universe comes into view every orbit round our star. In addition to this particular fact we have many pointers to our universe being other than unique coming out of physics. I'll grant you that we could do right now with the results from a number of more detailed investigations already planned, but I think you'll find very few cosmologists today (with perhaps the notable exception of Paul Davies) that don't accept the very high probability of our horizon cutting us off from some considerably larger state-space for physics.

I think there's a great deal of suspicion among theists who view the Big-Bang as defining the full extent of existence, towards talk of multiverses (hence re-introducing infinities and the absence of beginnings) but there really is no hard data concerning even the extent of our own universe. It may well have infinite extent despite being finitely old -- and nothing more would be required to set up the right Anthropic conditions for our otherwise unlikely existence. There's clearly a "process" at work when we consider the Big-Bang but it has absolutely nothing recognisable to science to label it as an act of God. It could be; equally it could be the work of highly advanced alien civilization -- or the product of some timeless re-genesis within a nexus of universal generation. When it comes to putting probabilities on all these ideas (and that is all they really are at the moment) I think we have to admit they all deserve some non-zero share. That's why Dawkin's resorts to "weasel words" like "almost certainly no God". He knows along with most other critical thinkers that we are in no position to rule in or out any of the hypotheses currently on the table.

But what token of respect does the theist pay to this situation? None, I'm afraid to say, by the very definition of theism.

[achilles12604]

achilles12604 -- As far as hypothesis go, in the absence of any other evidence, an eternal, uncaused God is fully interchangeable with an eternal, uncaused multiverse. This statement is made on the basis that both suspend the need for first cause while filling the need for our providence. If you disagree, then let's focus on your reason.

I agree wholeheartedly.

I see them both as candidate explanations. So how do we set about disambiguating the two notions without straying too far into the realms of imagination? Do we know of any complex entities (intelligences) that don't earn their prowess through some kind of evolution (take this as gradual change from lower to higher complexities)? I don't think so.

True. However all entities available fur us to examine also were created by and through this universe. So we are unable to even test the possibility of complex entities outside of this universe.

Do we know of the existence of any "unseen universe"? Yes: One more light-year of our own universe comes into view every orbit round our star.

Perhaps you could explain how this is a separate universe from the one we are currently in? I do not see how the examination of our own universe (or in this case our examination of the new areas of our universe) is equivocal to seeing a new universe. Seeing more of an expanding balloon does not equate to two balloons.

In addition to this particular fact we have many pointers to our universe being other than unique coming out of physics. I'll grant you that we could do right now with the results from a number of more detailed investigations already planned, but I think you'll find very few cosmologists today (with perhaps the notable exception of Paul Davies) that don't accept the very high probability of our horizon cutting us off from some considerably larger state-space for physics.

Right. However while this is entirely possible, it still falls in line with your original premise that God and multiverses are currently just as possible and un-testable.

1) I would add that as I have said before, even if a multiverse does exist, this does not negate God's existence.

2) Nor does it eliminate first cause unless and until it is established that totally different laws of physics exist within those universes which allow something from nothing and spontaneous events.

3) And to top it off, everyone of those universes has to exist. By this I mean that the possibility of a universe existing within out own set of physics laws is very minimal. One result of Hawking's calculations was to show us the margin of error for the creation of our own universe. Every one of those other universes would have to occur within some sort of margin of error as well.

I think there's a great deal of suspicion among theists who view the Big-Bang as defining the full extent of existence, towards talk of multiverses (hence re-introducing infinities and the absence of beginnings) but there really is no hard data concerning even the extent of our own universe. It may well have infinite extent despite being finitely old -- and nothing more would be required to set up the right Anthropic conditions for our otherwise unlikely existence.

Actually this very thought was introduced to me tonight by re-reading (for the millionth time) the laws of thermodynamics and thinking about what I know of energy. I now can say that I admit the possibility of just what you wrote here. An infinite universe containing a finite existence. Before existence nothing but disorganized energy. Boggles the mind huh? I love this stuff.

I would add that as for my first cause, an infinite universe doesn't destroy my argument since as I wrote to FinalEnigma, if all the energy was in equilibrium and static, and suddenly the energy formed the universe, there must still be a causing factor for this occurrence, be it aliens from another universe, God or the great FSM.

There's clearly a "process" at work when we consider the Big-Bang but it has absolutely nothing recognisable to science to label it as an act of God. It could be; equally it could be the work of highly advanced alien civilization -- or the product of some timeless re-genesis within a nexus of universal generation. When it comes to putting probabilities on all these ideas (and that is all they really are at the moment) I think we have to admit they all deserve some non-zero share.

This I agree to. The first cause does nothing at all to prove "god" was the unique creator of this universe. HOWEVER, it does prove that something happened and it also outlines necessities for this cause.

Again as I wrote to final enigma, I can never absolutely prove God's existence. I also can not prove that I exist in any fashion more than a dream. I can not prove that there isn't a pink unicorn flying overhead that only I can see.

However, I can take a fair analysis of the facts and investigate its plausibility with regard to theology and I feel this is exactly what I have done. I have taken plausible theories, (the universe did begin, the universe is expanding into nothingness, every action has a cause) and shown how they COULD point to the same God described in the bible.

I never said they must. Must is a science question and as I have said many times, science doesn't test God.

That's why Dawkin's resorts to "weasel words" like "almost certainly no God". He knows along with most other critical thinkers that we are in no position to rule in or out any of the hypotheses currently on the table.

But what token of respect does the theist pay to this situation? None, I'm afraid to say, by the very definition of theism.

In fact this is exactly what I am trying to do. However I am at the unfortunate disadvantage of having my theories thrown out as impossible BEFORE they are ever examined to see if they are plausible.

Because science has no ability to test the supernatural, science impartially decreed that the supernatural must not exist and therefore any arguments stemming from the supernatural must be invalid.

So you see, I am simply trying to get my argument to be acknowledged as POSSIBLE. I am in no way trying to prove its correctness, nor can I through science, philosophy, theology or anything else at this time.

[The Duke of Vandals]

Most of the silliness you've posited in the above post has already been dispelled by Dawkins and we have another thread where your special pleading is being torn to shreds.

There really wasn't anything to reply to. The god hypothesis is still untenable because it implies something very complex at a time of simplicity without giving the slightest explanation of how that complex thing could have come into being.

You are still trying to justify the magical appearance of a Boeing 747 before 1903 as an explanation for the Wright Brother's designs.

[achilles12604]

Most of the silliness you've posited in the above post has already been dispelled by Dawkins and we have another thread where your special pleading is being torn to shreds.

There really wasn't anything to reply to. The god hypothesis is still untenable because it implies something very complex at a time of simplicity without giving the slightest explanation of how that complex thing could have come into being.

You are still trying to justify the magical appearance of a Boeing 747 before 1903 as an explanation for the Wright Brother's designs.

You are continuing to get my argument out of sequence.

I first went through using nothing but scientific observations to create the hypothesis that the universe needed a cause.

THIS is where you should be attacking.

Because all you are attacking is my inability to prove God. But God is not a pre-requisit for my argument. He is merely an observation after the fact.


There are other possibilities which fill in the same place as God would. However each of these is just a likely or unlikely as God for the time being.


To use your analogy all I am doing is saying that the charactistics of the machine the wright brothers used are the same as the 747 I already believe in.