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The precision of the Big Bang is one of many evidences that, when taken as a whole, make a case for the involvement of a creator God,
“Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’...
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Is your strawman example of Sasquatch in any way comparable to matter and information disappearing into a black hole, transported to another dimension of reality?? That’s an absurd analogy for you to put forward.
It is not a straw man, ToTN did not say Sasquatch was a supernatural event, he was comparing supernatural events to Sasquatch. ToTN also did not compare Sasquatch to information disappearing into a black hole.
Ironically you are straw manning the argument.
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Originally Posted by Iwasmadenew
It’s evident that you have exhausted your arguments and are just repeating your same unreasonable assertions.
Irony.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Iwasmadenew
Why not let Harry try to kick the can down the road for a while?
Why, you have been refuted, and all you had were pathetic excuses?
If you do a simple web search you would find many quotes stating something very similar to the Lanza quote I used. I could have used a similar quote from any number of people. Do you trust Stephen Hawking's opinion? Here's one of his quotes stating the same point...
If the rate of expansion one second after the Big Bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, it would have recollapsed before it reached its present size. On the other hand, if it had been greater by a part in a million, the universe would have expanded too rapidly for stars and planets to form.
- Stephen Hawking
Also, I never said the incredible precision of the Big Bang was "proof" that God did it. No one can "prove" to another person that God does or does not exist. The precision of the Big Bang is one of many evidences that, when taken as a whole, make a case for the involvement of a creator God, IMO.
No, it is evidence against a god.
Because the probability of the universe just having the correct properties is equally as unlikely as a god just knowing those precise properties. And complex, specified entities existing by chance are very unlikely (as your protein video showed), which makes an all knowing god just existing extremely unlikely indeed.
So an improbable god who also just knows the precise properties for the universe must be less likely than the universe just having those properties. Whereas the multiverse theory means a stable universe must eventually arise.
If someone doesn't agree with my reasoning, that fine with me (I already stated I didn't expect to change any minds), but unless a more compelling case can be put forward to suggest a creator God does not exist, and all this (universe, conscious human life, etc.) just happened on it's own, then it's just unsubstantiated opinion. So far I have seen no compelling case put forward to suggest a creator God was not involved.
Point 6, where I showed that you argued your god is not probable.
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Originally Posted by Iwasmadenew
What I keep seeing as a response it that someday in the future scientists will discover a "natural" explanation. That's not good reasoning and it's not making a credible case. That's just kicking the can down the road.
No, it is based on priors. But I forgot, you do not understand big numbers or probability.
I have heard also a creationist claim some time ago that the universe is based on a particular numerical constant.
6 constants. Which makes the universe even less likely by chance.
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Originally Posted by TRANSPONDER
And there is the 'Goldilocks zone'. If the the earth was not where it is, Life could not have formed.
Yes, a Goldilock zone is unlikely, although recent research says it may not be too unlikely for simple life.
I know you understand the problem with words like unlikely, but I will explain it for IWas.
If you were to pick five cards from a shuffled pack, the probability you would pick a royal flush is an unlikely 649,740:1. So if you were to have just one go, it is unlikely you would pick a royal flush. But if you were to try this 1,000,000 times, there is a good chance you will pick a royal flush at least once. Or if 1,000,000 people picked five cards. And if 1,000,000 people picked 5 cards 1,000,000 times, it is very probable someone would pick a royal flush sometime.
So the more chances you have, the more probable an event becomes. So while it is unlikely one specific star has a Goldilock zone, it is probable some star in our large, old galaxy has one.
It is the same for a universe. The chance one specific universe has the correct parameters is extremely unlikely. But if universes are often created, then eventually one must exist that is stable.
And IWas can not argue this is just conjecture, because 1) this does not get IWas out of the problem of believing in a most improbable god, and 2) this is not conjecture as we have an example of one universe, ours. So unless IWas can provide a solid reason why only one universe can exist, IWas has nothing but the same old arguments refuted by mathematics.
Which is why atheism has the evidence Christianity does not.
Yes, a Goldilock zone is unlikely, although recent research says it may not be too unlikely for simple life.
Considering how orbiting planets go into resonance and planets like Jupiter and Venus would have formed much closer in and actually swapped positions - and in fact cannot grow so large unless they do move from an inner position to an outer position, it would seem likely that an earthlike planet would naturally find itself in the goldilocks zone of its star quite frequently. In our solar system, the goldilocks zone stretches from Venus right out to Mars. Or so astronomers tell us.
Quote:
No, it is evidence against a god.
Because the probability of the universe just having the correct properties is equally as unlikely as a god just knowing those precise properties. And complex, specified entities existing by chance are very unlikely (as your protein video showed), which makes an all knowing god just existing extremely unlikely indeed
Even if a god just coincidentally did happen to exist and did know the precise parameters with which to build a working universe, what would this god have created it from? We would still be left with the same problem of something from nothing.
But there is a mechanism for matter and energy to form from nothing. It's to do with the four dimensions of space-time and the fact that spacetime can be distorted. This means that energy can come from nothing as long as the sum total of that energy is zero. Which it can be if it is out of phase.
Of course, one could argue that a god came into existence by the same mechanism and could then manipulate spacetime to create energy. Conversely one could argue that a god was formed during the process of the big bang but either way, it defeats the argument that a god was the prime mover.
6 constants. Which makes the universe even less likely by chance.
True. I was thinking of one argument based on this:
"But if you put these constants together, you get a dimensionless number! At the energies currently present in our Universe, this number comes out to ≈ 1/137.036, although the strength of this interaction increases as the energy of the interacting particles rise."
The argument implied that 'Someone' had to decide on this number. But we have seen that anything that is So and we can't always explain why or how, "God" is popped in there.
Which of course doesn't terll us Which god. But the believers know which one it is, of course.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Harry Diogenes
I presume a joke I am missing?
As well as (german) alcoholic drink;
bier
/bɪə/
Learn to pronounce
noun
a movable frame on which a coffin or a corpse is placed before burial or cremation or on which they are carried to the grave.
Last edited by TRANSPONDER; 09-10-2019 at 03:06 AM..
Of course, one could argue that a god came into existence by the same mechanism and could then manipulate spacetime to create energy. Conversely one could argue that a god was formed during the process of the big bang but either way, it defeats the argument that a god was the prime mover.
Exactly. My argument was not refuting all gods, prime mover gods.
bier
/bɪə/
Learn to pronounce
noun
a movable frame on which a coffin or a corpse is placed before burial or cremation or on which they are carried to the grave.
OK, eine Totenbahre. I will try and not think about this when I next have a drink.
Q: Don't you agree that you accept as true some things that are considered supernatural (big bang, black holes, quantum entanglement, etc)?
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This is one part of the discussion I could not sit out of. Nothing in science is considered supernatural. There are concepts that are well understood, understood somewhat, and not understood at all. And even the well understood concepts in physics still are not completely understood. We are always learning more and more about the way the universe is.
The Big Bang, Black holes, and quantum entanglement all easily fit into the understood somewhat.
Just from memory:
The Big Bang is somewhat of a misnomer. It's not an explosion as is often portrayed but it is the best theory for how our universe came into being. All the evidence we have leads to a universe that began roughly 13.7ish billion years ago. We know this from many different sources of info. All the galaxies moving away from one another. The cosmic background radiation that was predicted far before evidence of it was found using the theory. Also people forget that in high energy particle accelerators, we can achieve the energies and temperatures of just after the big bang and the results coincide with the theory. We actually understand things very well up to 10e-34 seconds after the big bang. That's a 0.00 34 zeros 001 seconds after the big bang. What happened before that is much like our understanding of general relativity and black holes. Our theories break down and we require further study. The inflationary period around 10e-36 seconds is our best current model, but we don't yet have much experimental confirmation. Before that... Is our best guess. But we aren't talking milliseconds, we aren't talking microseconds or tera or picoseconds. It is such a small period of time from the big bang that we understand that it is hard for the human brain to even comprehend it. It is somewhat likely we will never understand much closer to the beginning than now... but that does not in any way mean we need to create a being...that has no other evidence to do it. That is like how primitive man didn't know how the sun crossed the sky so invented god's that pulled it or storm gods that brought rain. Doesn't know = continue to investigate not make up a cause.
We know how black holes form, we know how they grow... and how they shrink and evaporate. We know how they affect matter, orbits, time, light and lensing, gravity, etc. We still have a lot more to understand about them as we can't yet reconcile quantum gravity and relativity... two concepts we actually do understand fairly well. So while we have a great understanding we have a lot still to discover.
We actually also have a pretty decent understanding of quantum entanglement. It is the basis of our next generation of quantum computers that are very fast at solving certain types of problems. Quantum entanglement doesn't violate any of our previous laws (such as the speed of information traveling faster than the speed of light). It simply is the way the world is. Quantum mechanics has a number of weird things that happen at the sub atomic level that seem strange to us because we don't observe them in our macro view of the world. But quantum simply is the way the world is no different than our understanding of gravity, thermodynamics, etc. The really strange aspects are when you look at the double slit experiment but with an observer over one of the paths or the even stranger quantum eraser double slit experiment. It doesn't seem at all possible, but it is the way the world is. Nothing supernatural... simply more understanding needed.
So for an Atheist Physicist answer: 3 Big Questions:
1. How did the universe originate (time, space, matter)?
The Big Bang is our best model. We understand it up to 10-34 seconds from the big bang origin. Before that. We do not fully understand it yet.
2. How did life originate on Earth from non-life?
There are many hypothesis, but all fall much further in our understanding than the Big Bang. We have been able to create self replicating molecules and there has been a little progress in understanding of the different steps in abiogenisis (the prevailing hypothesis). However, there is still a lot of "I don't know." However, even though we are much further away from a theory of how life began than we are even to say the theory of the big bang. In no way shape or form does a scientist give up and say that a being outside of time and space did it. Even further, why would we attribute human qualities to such a being (or race of beings) if we did. That's ridiculous. Furthermore, through the fossil record, we can 100% discount the biblical (and other religions claims) as to how life was created and the timeline.
3. Does objective truth and/or objective morality exist?
Objective truth absolutely exists. Finding it and agreeing on it is a different matter.
Objective morality - absolutely not. Our morality is something that we as humans slowly changes over time. It's easy to prove that Christians do not 100% believe in objective morality or that all of their morality comes from god. Slavery is well documented in the bible and was one time accepted. There are passages in the bible as how to treat your slaves and how the owner should be punished if he hits a slave too hard (if he dies in one day... you should be punished... but if he lives until the next... it wasn't that bad and after all he is your property). Now if any Christian still believes that, then I'll at least believe they thing morality is objective, but if they don't believe their child should be sold to someone, be subject to a master's every whim, willed to the master's children when he dies, etc. Then I can't believe even Christians truely believe in objective morality.
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