tamara
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Post by tamara on Jan 4, 2004 15:00:31 GMT -5
So I promised that I would come up with some evidence for God’s existence. When I speak of God in this thread, I simply mean the Creative Force behind it all, the Cosmic Mother of us all, and one that remains involved with her creation. These are the things have made sense to me.
1) I think it is highly unlikely that the universe as we know it came to being and evolved as a result of blind chance. The hypothesis that God is behind it all, I realize, is unlikely too, but it makes a bit more sense.
2) I think the odds of having a planet like ours, supporting life, and having evolved intelligent life, self-aware life, are very long indeed. Unless it can be argued that this was meant to happen, that a Force out there had a direction.
3) I have examined the so called near death experiences, and became convinced enough that there is something going on there. It is not direct evidence of God, but if our consciousness can survive brain death, then the universe is a very different place than science has claimed for it, and strongly suggests that the role we play is far greater than just reproduction of our genes for a cosmic minute. I think too that science is beginning to point in the direction of consciousness being independent of the meat being that we also are.
4) You may find this one strange, but what really got me started on this path was the realization that plants can behave very strangely, responsive, some say, to us in unexpected ways. Findhorn comes to mind, and biodynamic gardening… And if there are unseen forces that mediate this connection, then the jump to God is not unreasonable.
5) I think that scientists have been amazed by the quantum physics discoveries, and tho again, this may be some day explained otherwise, it certainly has revealed a world very different from our sober imaginings, and one that perhaps has the face of God finally peeking at us thru the “life” of the tiniest parts of the universe.
6) I have been experimenting with calling for, and receiving guidance from the unseen forces I assume are out there, and so far, I must say that I have profitted immensely by it. It has made a huge difference in my life.
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Post by Maverick on Jan 4, 2004 15:21:35 GMT -5
tamara, what you posted above isn't evidence. You merely speculated on what you believe to likely. To address your specific points: 1 & 2) In these two points, you simply state the fact that you believe the existence of our universe/intelligent life is unlikely. You don't go further and demonstrate why you think these things are unlikely. How the God hypothesis makes more sense? You didn't explain your reasoning behind that argument either. 3) I am not convinced of anything involving near death experiences (NDEs), though I admit I haven't researched the issue. Even if we assume that NDEs are valid and do occur: How did you make a connection between NDEs and our "role" in the universe? 4) I think you're making the "god of the gaps" mistake here. Let's assume that plants do behave in strange ways (though you've given us no evidence to verify that this is true). If the behavior of these plants are unexplained, that is one thing. But using God as an explanation because no other explanation seems available at the moment is unreasonable. 5) What about quantum physics points to the existence of a God? 6) In the word of Jake (from the AN): "A subjective experience is not valid towards the claim of existence." This point cannot be verified by others on this board. Therefore, we cannot consider it evidence of a God's existence. I also have a problem with your definition of God, which I will respond to in the What is god? thread.
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tamara
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Post by tamara on Jan 4, 2004 15:36:36 GMT -5
Well, I disagree. Subjective experience certainly is evidence, and can be tested by others. For example, I try a food and claim it's bitter. Nobody can tell me I am wrong or that am lying, since it is my personal experience. My claim is not falsifiable. However, another person can try it for themselves. They may find it elicits another flavor, or they may find that it tastes bitter to them too. But if they don't try it, then they'll never know.
Those that want to know if they will be given guidance must be willing to ask for it in a heartfelt, honest way. (Spoofs or parlor tricks do not count.) If they do, and they don't find it, then they can argue against this. But if they are unwilling to try, then they'll never know, and neither will they have an effective counter-argument.
Please understand: my arguments are all connected to my experience. I don't think objectivity in the old sense exists. We have either inter-subjectivity, or subjectivity. My last piece of evidence is subjective, but is accessible to others.
Another example: some people cannot tell certain colors clearly. We call them color blind. Well, we could equally say that they are fucking with our minds, just to mess with us. Because we will never know what really it is like to be color blind. I am not sure if of late there are some physiological differences that have been uncovered, but for hundreds of years, the evidence of their experience was enough. Why not count the experience of the many religious people that they have received guidance, as well?
I will post more on the other stuff later.
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Post by Supremor on Jan 4, 2004 15:47:34 GMT -5
Hello Tamara,
I think I would expand on what Maverick is saying, by asking that you use SPECIFIC facts and situations to support your points. If you can't tell us exactly what happens in each case then we can't give any guidance.
Secondly, when you use 'subjectly', can you eplain exactly what you mean. Do you mean that things only have a certain meaning to that which sees the meaning. I find it very difficult to communicate with subjective people because in the end they can refuse point blank an observation, on the pretext that my observation is subjective to myself, but not others.
I think that if we are not at least a bit objective, with a clear aim in sight and a clear method to achieve it with, then it is almost impossible to actually have a debate.
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Post by droskey on Jan 4, 2004 15:57:03 GMT -5
Points 1 and 2: Certainly, the universe is mind boggling. However, you are using terms of probability and "odds" without enough information to actually calculate said odds. How likely is it that the universe as we know it came into being and evolved by random chance? I don't know. We don't have enough information to answer this, and we probably never will. It might have been highly unlikely or it might have been inevitable. The question simply cannot be answered (or posed properly) at this point. What are the odds that Earth developed the way that it did by chance? Well, depending on how big the universe really is, it may have been inevitable that a planet like earth come into existance. In fact, if the universe is large enough, there may be another copy of earth somewhere.
Point 3: I don't dispute that NDE's occur and that they are very profound to those who experience them. However, I assign such stories to the realm of anecdote. They may be valuable in saying that something occurs at death, but they aren't very good at illuminating exactly what is going on. And they are certainly not hard evidence for God or an afterlife.
I have heard accounts of NDEs. I have also heard of people taking halucinogenic drugs, people experiencing psychological events and studies on brain function that have produced results that are just as strange an astounding as those described by NDEs. I don't think that it is necessary to invoke the supernatural to explain NDEs.
I don't know anything about point 4.
Point 5: What quantum discoveries? I'll assume here, based on one of your previous posts, that you are talking about Bell's inequality and the role of measurment in quantum theory. Quantum theory deals with laying out a framework in which to describe how experiments will turn out. It is true that the current theory holds that "measurment" causes quantum states to collapse into the state corresponding to the result of the measurment and that it makes no sense to talk about what state the system was in "before" the measurment. However, the idea of measurement is a very abstract one and doesn't require a conscious being. To my knowledge, there is no importance placed on consciousness in the current theory in this context.
Point 6: I agree with Maverick, this doesn't really constitute hard evidence. It is personal experience that can't be repeated by others (or yourself for that matter). However, I will offer my experience as a counter example. I was a Christian for about 20 years. For much of that time I was pretty devout, studying my Bible and praying/meditating regularly. At times, prayer helped me (pshchologically). Sometimes it did nothing. For most of the times when I felt like it helped I could get a similar result by talking to myself (i.e. verbally working through my difficulty) rather than to God. My conclusion was that prayer didn't do anything that slowing down and thinking on my own wouldn't do. This was a helpful realization for me.
The point here, is that my experience suggests to me that prayer doesn't do much (at least the kind of praying that I was doing). However, my experience is of very little use in convincing others that prayer is useless. The main reasons for this is because I am the only one that interprets my experience. Another is that I could be lying and you would have no way of verifying that. You have to take my word on it.
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Post by dragonfly on Jan 4, 2004 16:09:58 GMT -5
The interesting about human beings generally is their ability to seize evidence for their mystical beliefs...to find instances to support their particular belief or in some cases to convert to one.
One of my favourite examples is of my own grandmother who's family was poor and in deep suffering having had no food for weeks(and 13 mouths to feed).
At the tender age of 10 she was extremely devout (Catholic) and took matters in her own hands by stepping out to pray publically in the street for food inviting other members of her village to do so. Touched by the childs simple faith she was joined by a crowd.Within 10 minutes of prayer a flock of ducks had plunged to their deaths entangled in some over-head wiring and the entire village was fed.
Now we can speculate on coincidence all we like but the fact remains that years after my grandmothers death this tale is still used by members of that village to as absolute proof of God and the power of prayer.It confimed their faith and no outsider conjecture regarding fluke and likelihood could shake it.
Amazing things happen all the time.Some explainable ...some not.For certain is that for every prayer that is seemingly answered a billion seemingly go unanswered and for every blessed miracle there is equal evil....proof of what? An Evil God and Good GOD at war? ...A God that intervenes occasionally as the whim strikes?.....Other unknown entities with their own criteria?......or a billion probabilities that would occur or not in any case as the result of random interactions of humans with their environment?.
The only thing I can say for certain is "I don't know"
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Post by Maverick on Jan 4, 2004 16:36:58 GMT -5
I will use your two examples for a moment: food and color. Your analogy to these two items is slightly misguided. Yes, the subjective experience of different people can lead them to different conclusions about how food tastes or what colors they are seeing. But the question here doesn't involve the perception of a given item but the existence of the item to begin with.
If we want to relate your analogy properly, an atheist not believing in the existence of a God would be just like someone not believing that food or color exists. The only difference is that we can verify that foods and color exist. Have we yet verified that a God exists?
tamara
How can I verify that you have received guidance from unseen forces? If your last peice of evidence is accessible to others, as you stated, I should be able to somehow verify that you've received guidance from your God. How can I do that tamara?
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tamara
Broken-in Plebe
Posts: 96
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Post by tamara on Jan 4, 2004 19:55:29 GMT -5
I think maybe I should have kept 1 & 2 as one point? Anyway, here is an argument against blind chance and odds. "The Sun’s interior temperature is estimated to be over 20 million degrees Celsius (Lawton, 1981, 89[1]:102). The Earth, however, is located at exactly the correct distance from the Sun to receive the proper amount of heat and radiation to sustain life as we know it. If the Earth were moved just 10% closer to the Sun (about 10 million miles), far too much heat and radiation would be absorbed. If the Earth were moved just 10% further from the Sun, too little heat would be absorbed. Either scenario would spell doom for life on the Earth. The Earth is rotating on its axis at 1,000 miles per hour at the equator, and moving around the Sun at 70,000 miles per hour (approximately 19 miles per second), while the Sun and its solar system are moving through space at 600,000 miles per hour in an orbit so large it would take over 220 million years just to complete a single orbit. Interestingly, however, as the Earth moves in its orbit around the Sun, it departs from a straight line by only one-ninth of an inch every eighteen miles. If it departed by one-eighth of an inch, we would come so close to the Sun that we would be incinerated; if it departed by one-tenth of an inch, we would find ourselves so far from the Sun that we would all freeze to death (Science Digest, 1981, 89[1]:124). The Earth is poised some 240,000 miles from the Moon, whose gravitational pull produces ocean tides. If the Moon were moved closer to the Earth by just a fifth, the tides would be so enormous that twice a day they would reach 35-50 feet high over most of the Earth’s surface. What would happen if the rotation rate of the Earth were halved, or doubled? If it were halved, the seasons would be doubled in their length, which would cause such harsh heat and cold over much of the Earth that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to grow enough food to feed the Earth’s population. If the rotation rate were doubled, the length of each season would be halved, and it would be difficult or impossible to grow enough food to feed the Earth’s population. The Earth is tilted on its axis at exactly 23.5 degrees. Were that tilt to be reduced to zero, much of the Earth’s water would accumulate around the two poles, leaving vast deserts in its place. If the atmosphere surrounding the Earth were much thinner, meteorites could strike our planet with greater force and frequency, causing worldwide devastation. The oceans provide a huge reservoir of moisture that constantly is evaporating and condensing, thus falling upon the land as refreshing rain. It is a well-known fact that water heats and cools at a much slower rate than a solid land mass, which explains why desert regions can be blistering hot in the daytime and freezing cold at night. Water, however, holds its temperature longer, and provides a sort of natural heating/air-conditioning system for the land areas of the Earth. Temperature extremes would be much more erratic than they are, were it not for the fact that approximately four-fifths of the Earth is covered with water. In addition, humans and animals inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. On the other hand, plants take in carbon dioxide and give off oxygen. We depend upon the world of botany for our oxygen supply, but often fail to realize that approximately 90% of our oxygen comes from microscopic plants in the seas (see Asimov, 1975, 2:116). If our oceans were appreciably smaller, we soon would be out of air to breathe. Can a person reasonably be expected to believe that these exacting requirements for life as we know it have been met “just by accident”? The Earth is exactly the right distance from the Sun; it is exactly the right distance from the Moon; it has exactly the right diameter; it has exactly the right atmospheric pressure; it has exactly the right tilt; it has exactly the right amount of oceanic water; it has exactly the right weight and mass; and so on. Were this many requirements to be met in any other essential area of life, the idea that they had been provided “just by accident” would be dismissed immediately as ludicrous. Yet atheists and agnostics suggest that the Universe, the Earth, and life on the Earth are all here as a result of fortuitous accidents. Physicist John Gribbin (1983), writing on the numerous specific requirements necessary for life on our planet, emphasized in great detail both the nature and essentiality of those requirements, yet curiously chose to title his article, “Earth’s Lucky Break”—as if all of the precision, orderliness, and intricate design in the Universe could be explained by postulating that the Earth simply received, in a roll of the cosmic dice, a “lucky break.” For more than a decade and a half, British evolutionist Sir Fred Hoyle has stressed the insurmountable problems with such thinking, and has addressed specifically the many problems faced by those who defend the idea of a naturalistic origin of life on Earth. In fact, Dr. Hoyle described the atheistic concept that disorder gives rise to order in a rather picturesque manner when he observed that “the chance that higher forms have emerged in this way is comparable with the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein” (1981b, p. 105). Dr. Hoyle, even went so far as to draw the following conclusion: Once we see, however, that the probability of life originating at random is so utterly miniscule as to make the random concept absurd, it becomes sensible to think that the favourable properties of physics on which life depends, are in every respect deliberate.... It is therefore almost inevitable that our own measure of intelligence must reflect in a valid way the higher intelligences...even to the extreme idealized limit of God (Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, 1981, pp. 141,144, emp. in orig.). Atheist Richard Dawkins was forced to admit: “The more statistically improbable a thing is, the less we can believe that it just happened by blind chance. Superficially, the obvious alternative to chance is an intelligent Designer” (1982, p. 130, emp. added). That is the very conclusion theists have drawn from the available evidence—in keeping with the law of rationality. The statistical improbability of the Universe “just happening by blind chance” is staggering. " Quote from: www.apologeticspress.org/rr/rr1995/r&r9505a.htm
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tamara
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Post by tamara on Jan 4, 2004 20:02:14 GMT -5
Maverick, if there was direct evidence, we would not be arguing. But indirect evidence counts too. Plenty of stuff we accept in science has never been seen, only inferred.
You cannot verify that I taste food x as bitter. What makes you think you can verify anything else I experience?
But if you are truly curious about faith and God, you can try it yourself and see what happens. In that sense, you can do it. Anytime you wish.
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tamara
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Post by tamara on Jan 4, 2004 20:39:55 GMT -5
Supremor, when I say certain things are subjective, then I mean there is no way to refute them -- they are experienced by the other person, and we have no access to their experience. We can, however, try for ourselves whatever it was they were doing, and see how our experience matches or differs. We do that all the time...
Since the God experience is subjective, it must be experienced anew by each person. But since many people thru history report that experience, it makes sense to many of us to try it for ourselves.
Jacopo, I don't buy that argument. I think many of these notions like this one have been pulled out of a scientist's hat when in the heat of anti-religious sentiment, and tell us nothing. It's like that thing about a monkey writing a Shakespeare play if given enough time. Balloney.
I am not presenting hard evidence here. I am sharing with you what convinces me well enough, at this time. My main argument for becoming a theist lies elsewhere.
I agree that the NDEs might someday be explained otherwise, but at this time, my best bet is on survival after death.
As for quantum stuff, I'll try to come up with something summing up my impression. But I want to say this: no, you are right about consciousness claims. In fact, people come out and say outright that consciousness plays no role here, and that in fact no information can be conveyed even tho 2 particles gazillion light years away react instantaneously to each other. Hogwash. It is amazing how much said in science is really efforts to shore up past notions.
Sorry to hear you found prayer useless. I find quite otherwise. I also find that asking for particular things to happen is useless (and I don't think God works that way). I find asking for guidance works.
Dragonfly, what a lovely story! Thanks for sharing it. I bet it was an incredibly powerful experience for those folks... but as you say, there is always the problem, if the birds came from God's help, why others are left to starve in the same situation...
While I do not discount that focusing one's energies like that may bring about some helpful event, I don't think God works that way.
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Post by droskey on Jan 4, 2004 23:13:46 GMT -5
tamaraDuly noted. I am not saying that you should not be convinced by your own arguments. I am only outlining why I find said arguments unconvincing in regards to the existance of a diety. tamaraI don't think that it is unreasonable to expect such conditions to occur in a very large universe. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if such conditions have occured quite a few times in the universe. It would be quite strange if the earth was the only planet and the sun were the only star. But that isn't the case. Also, many of the special conditions that you mentioned (specifically about the earth's tilt) are conditions for our life currently on earth. I don't see any reason to believe that they are necessary for any and all forms of life that could occur in the universe. tamaraI'm not clear what you are trying to say here. What is hogwash? jacopo7531tamaraWell, I'll confess that I was begging the question without realizing it. However, if we are talking about purely natural processes (as opposed to supernatural in which a consciousness is directing creation) then there is nothing to render the duplicate earth scenario impossible. If we arise from an initial configuration that is randomly determined, then if the sample set is large enough initial conditions for similar end scenarios will almost certainly occur more than once. Such situations require numbers that are larger than astronomical, though. But the concept is not balloney and it isn't pulled out of anybody's hat. It simply depends on randomness, degrees of freedom and sample size. The problem with probablility arguments is that everyone wants to compare the situation with what they deal with every day. This is ok if we are talking about probability of dice roles, coin tosses, the number of ways people can arrange themselves in a room, etc. But we quickly lose touch when we try to "visualize" the universe. The universe, being everything, requires us to think alot bigger. Going to your Shakespearean monkey argument. What would happen if you had 10 12 monkeys (or 10 50 or 10 200)? That's a lot of monkeys (and flying feces)! In this sort of discussion, I do think that allowances can be made for subjective experience (such as that with prayer). Unfortunately, such arguments often don't go far, because we get different people with very different experiences (even contradictory experience). This is seen in our respective experiences with prayer. Cheers.
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Post by Yaw on Jan 5, 2004 13:40:48 GMT -5
A couple points.
First of all, I don't think NDEs properly belong in this conversation. My reasoning for this is that Buddhists have studied NDEs and other such phenomena extensively, and used them as backing for their doctrine of reincarnation. Mahayana Buddhists specifically are atheistic (in that they don't believe in a deity), hence it can be seen that the mere existence of NDEs does not necessarily point towards the existence of a deity. Of course, whether or not NDEs are legitimate, and whether or not consciousness is separate from the physical body could be very interesting topics. They just don't seem to fit very well in this thread.
As for the large quoted post, could you please provide a reference for that, tamara? Part of my reason for asking is just proper format (whoever wrote that did put effort into it, and deserves acknowledgement). The other aspect is that I am convinced the Dawkins quote specifically is taken entirely out of context by the author.
This is the paragraph in question. The embedded reference isn't enough to really track down the quote -- I assume there's a real reference in the article itself. But look at what Dawkins is saying here. He isn't saying that there is an intelligent Designer. He is saying that an intelligent Designer is a superficial alternative to what he thinks is really occurring. You'll note the author of the article isn't saying that Dawkins is ceasing to be atheistic, which would be the logical conclusion of an argument that admits to a deity. I would be quite willing to wager that the author has deliberately ignored the paragraphs following this one in Dawkins' work, in which Dawkins is probably explaining why an intelligent Designer is not a reasonable alternative. Without having access to the references, there's no way to delve into this argument.
One final note about probability. Take an ordinary deck of cards, shuffle them, and then deal them all out in order. The probability of getting that particular arrangement that you see is 1/52!, or 1.24 X 10-68. That is extremely unlikely. Yet, you just did it, and your method was completely random. You can't conclude from the experiment that the mere improbability of the event you just created was the result of deliberately planning out the specific placement of every card. Sometimes improbable stuff just happens. Whether or not there is a God/gods has to be based on more than probability calculations.
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Post by dragonfly on Jan 5, 2004 23:56:05 GMT -5
[quote author=jacopo7531 "I don't think that it is unreasonable to expect such conditions to occur in a very large universe. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if such conditions have occured quite a few times in the universe. It would be quite strange if the earth was the only planet and the sun were the only star. But that isn't the case. Also, many of the special conditions that you mentioned (specifically about the earth's tilt) are conditions for our life currently on earth. I don't see any reason to believe that they are necessary for any and all forms of life that could occur in the universe. If we arise from an initial configuration that is randomly determined, then if the sample set is large enough initial conditions for similar end scenarios will almost certainly occur more than once. Such situations require numbers that are larger than astronomical, though." I have to say I agree with the above statements made by Jacopo 7531 most emphatically. They neither prove nor disprove the existance of a possible intelligent creating force/god/deity however .I do believe though that the information is essential to understanding our position in the universe regardless of the religious viewpoint....theist or atheist.
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tamara
Broken-in Plebe
Posts: 96
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Post by tamara on Jan 11, 2004 12:46:53 GMT -5
Thank you for the thoughtful responses. I have added the link to my quote several posts above. (I repeat it here too: www.apologeticspress.org/rr/rr1995/r&r9505a.htmIt used to be said by scientists that it was highly likely to find other conditions for life in other solar systems. But last I heard, other solar systems so far identified show no potential for life, and in fact quite confound the expectations. It certainly seems to look at the moment as if the conditions for other life are not likely tho certainly not non-existent. I just came across more information about the unlikelyhood for life-favorable conditions: our moon, and its specifics. This is from Nigel Calder’s Magic Universe (Oxford Guide to Modern Science, very recent vinatage, pp217-219). It talks about how our moon probably got created by an impact of a huge object the size of Mars hitting the Earth and splitting off a piece that later formed the moon. This unlikely moon acts to stabilize conditions for life! “It’s importance in that role became clear in the early 1990s, when scientists got to grips with the effects of chaos in the Solar System. In this context, chaos means erratic and unpredictable alterations in the orbits of planets due to complicated interactions between them, via gravity. Not only can the shape of an orbit be affected by chaos, but also the tilt of a planet’s axis of rotation, in relation to its orbit. This orientation governs the timing and intensity of the seasons. Thus the Earth’s North Pole is at present tilted by 23.4 degrees toward the Sun in the northern summer, and away in winter.” (It goes to say that these tilts out of control basically ruin any chance for stable seasons.) “In the absence of the Moon, the orientation of the Earth would have been very unstable, which without doubt would have frustrated the evolution of life.” ----- In Why Religion Matters by Huston Smith, he has this to add (p176): “More and more, scientists are finding that if the mathematical ratios in nature had been the slightest bit different, life could not have evolved. Were the force of gravity the tiniest bit stronger, all stars would be blue giants, while if it were slightly weaker, all would be red dwarfs, neither of which come close to being habitable. Or again, had the Earth spun in an orbit 5 percent closer to the sun, it would have experienced a runnaway greenhouse effect, creating unbearable surface temperatures and evaporating the oceans; etc. Physicists of the stature of John Polkinghorn [who is this guy?] find it impossible to believe that such fine tuning (and the apparent frequency with which it occurs) could have resulted from chance. They toss around improbability figures of one in 10 followed by 40 zeros. …. For them, improbablilities of this order all but require us to think that the universe was designed to make human life possible…. They do not laugh when a fellow scientist, Dale Kohler, writes: We have been scraping away at physical reality all these centuries, and the layer of the remaining little that we don’t understand is so thin that God’s face is staring right out at us.” Yaw, I think the writer is not trying to misrepresent Dawkins, he is just saying that even a hard liner evolutionist such as he admits that on the surface, it looks like design. And I agree that the probability arguments are not conclusive, and certainly improbable stuff just happens. But it is a far cry now in science from the days when life on other planets was basically assumed, and all over the place. It sure looks like those predictions have not panned out, and life is much rarer than the used to think. As for the monkeys... nah. If universe had a begining, and so the time available is not unlimited, I think this is more like "garbage in, garbage out", IMO. As for Mahayana Buddhists, how does a religion without God work?
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Post by droskey on Jan 11, 2004 15:15:08 GMT -5
tamaratamaraThis falls in the category of "necessary conditions for earth life today" but not necessarily life in general. If you give any weight to evolution, life would adapt to the conditions that are presented to it. This isn't to say that several conditions aren't necessary for life that is like our own to exist. However, I think that the parameter space is much bigger than you are implying in these statements. tamaraAnthropomorphic arguments for the existance of God aren't very satisfying. For one, the discussion about what woud happen if the fundamental constants were different is pure speculation. In fact we simply don't know whether something that could be called life could exist in such a universe. Now, I will grant, that if the constants were so different that matter could not form, then you could have no life. However, this brings up an interesting point. Some people argue for the existance of a soul appart from the physical body. Something that makes life "special". When one argues for the existance of God based on these statements about ratios of fundamental constants, I would pose one is implicitly arguing against this concept of a soul. The thing that makes life "special" is inseparable from matter. Second, we don't know how different the universe could acutally be. How do we know that the fundamental constants could be anything other than what they are? Third, granting that there are other possible universes and that they are numerous and devoid of life, unlikely things do happen. tamaraI'm not an astronomer, but the problem here is one of technology. There are only certain types of solar systems that we can detect here on earth right now. We simply cannot detect earthlike planets orbiting sun-like stars at this point in time (at least, that is my understanding). The systems that we can detect are the extreme systems. These are stars with very large planets (larger than Jupiter) orbiting very close to the star. Knowing this, it is clear why all of the systems that we have detected don't look like they could support earth-like life. In all probability, they couldn't. tamaraYou wouldn't need an unlimited amount of time, just a long time. 15 billion years is pretty long! Or alternatively, you could use a large number of monkeys (and typewriters). For instantce 10 50 or 10 200 as I said before. My point is not to say that life isn't unlikely. It's probably very unlikely. Especially "intelligent" life. However, I don't think we have good reason to believe that it is unique in the universe. That is, taking the whole universe, it is not inconceivable that the conditions for earth-like life have been satisfied in many places at many different times. Cheers.
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