Atheism V's Theism.

... is exactly the same probability as any other sequence of 200 results. Whatever result you get, it was 'impossible' under your definition. Therefore, impossible things happen every nanosecond of every day.

 

No, my point is not nonsensical. Forget other planets. Strike that. Go ahead and appeal to ignorance if you want to. Sure, somewhere out there, on a planet we don't know about, it may be easy for life to form from non living material. But here on Earth, where we do know something about it, it's not easy. We can't even reproduce the process when we try. You seem to have missed the entire point of the post you responded to, though, which is to be expected, I guess, when you jump in on the ass end of a conversation. The point was: Given that we exist, we should find that our existence is likely, yet we don't.

 

Are you not arguing that because we haven't figured out how to generate life from inorganic material then it most likely didn't happen without some sort of divine intervention here and elsewhere? Sure seems like an argument from ignorance to me.

 

How is the assumption that life is the purpose of existence a problem with the logic?
One of the most likely forms the Universe could have taken is one that expands to quickly for matter to form. What kind of life could form without matter?
Or one in which only hydrogen forms. What kind of life could form in a hydrogen only environment?
Or one that only makes black holes, or collapses back before it can get going. What kind of life forms in a singularity?

 

What's immoral? Is being a potential threat to the state immoral? Is the use of religion to pacify or control populations so they don't get all uppity and defy the ruling class immoral? What about killing 20,000,000 people because they don't believe the right things, is that immoral? 38,000,000? 500,000? That's how the state keeps people in line. Is it even civilized behavior?

 

No. What part of anything I wrote did you get that from?
I'll say it one more time. Given that we exist, we should find that our existence is likely, yet we don't. The more we learn, the less likely we find our existence to have been.

 

Given that a specific 18 people won the lottery, we should find that the chances of those specific 18 people winning the lottery is high, yet we don't.

 

Well you also said...

"Sure, somewhere out there, on a planet we don't know about, it may be easy for life to form from non living material. But here on Earth, where we do know something about it, it's not easy. We can't even reproduce the process when we try."

That's where I got it and from it my earlier question to you still stands!

 

The way I understand it is that, in any application where imaginary numbers are used, they are always converted back into real numbers in order to get a meaningful result. What Hawking did, in his No Boundary model, is just fail to convert back to real numbers. The result is a concave shape at the beginning of the Universe, instead of a singularity. If you convert his equations back into real numbers the singularity reappears.

In The Grand Design, he uses a lot of ink defending an extreme anti-realist view of science. He even compares the young earth (6,000 year old) model with the standard big bang model, and says that one cannot be said to be more real than the other. The book and that model are obviously meant to appeal to popular culture, not to the scientific community.

 

THe difference is that we can prove that there are millions of people buying lottery tickets. We cannot prove that there are millions of alternate universes, or even attempts to make universes. We are, once again, commiting the guilt by association fallcy, assuming that the evidence for lottery is the same as the creation of the galaxy - I think that is an extreme stretch.

The line of logic is no different than making up the FSM and declaring it and the evidence for God to be the same. It isn't.

 

Millions of people buy tickets. If you can show how matter is trying to arrange itself in a way that brings about life, I'll take your lottery analogy seriously.

 

It is a different flea on the same dog.

 

You are researching it, or attempting to find an excuse for it? There is a difference Maytag.

And remember, you tell me you are searching for truth, but here you are belatedly 'researching' Hawkins, avoiding all rebuttals of Hawkins ALREADY DISCREDITED works, attempting to butress them and declaring all other sources (save a few) as 'Creationist'.

No, this is not 'research'. This is teh phenomeana known as atheist baseball, wherein you demand evidence - get it, in this case the extreme unlikeliness that the universe is an accident, and instead of taking the evidnece, you will go and find a reason to ignore it. It doesn't matter how flimsy it is, I mean in less than a night, you are suddenly a master of physics equal to Stephen Hawkins and all his peers, and have thrown your weight not onto the sientific consenus (which rejects the multiverse and similiar antics) but with Stephen Hawkings - without really being abkle to find anything on the subject.

What is botably absent from any of this, is the admission that perhaps your adversaries, people of faith, are not as crazy as you make them out to be.

 

No. He's saying that if our intelligence doesn't appear close to pulling it off, it is even more difficult to conclude that it took place by accident when we see it elsewhere.

 

The probability arguments do not prove god. Because any creator must be even more complex or have less entropy (and thus by this train of thought even less probability to just appear without another intelligent creator) than the universe he created. So if the universe needs a creator because it is complex (has low entropy), then his even more complex creator must also have been created by the same logic, by an even more complex intelligent creator and so on ad infinitum. Claiming that very complex god did not need to be created, while denying this possibility for the (less complex) universe itself is a special pleading fallacy, not to mention incompatible with the principle of parsimony, because there is no evidence for gods existence (while we know universe exists).

Even worse are the arguments from the existence of life. In addition to being a god of the gaps fallacy (we dont know yet how exactly life appeared from non-life, therefore god), they are often mutually contradictory with the above arguments:
Life is improbable in the universe, therefore god did it / universe is finetuned to life, therefore god did it. Which is it? Is life in this universe improbable, or is this universe finetuned for life? You cannot have it both ways at the same time.

 

Tortured logic. Every other result doesn't conclude in our existence - which is the whole point of expressing the validity of belief in a Creator based upon probability.

 

Exactly! But that sure sounds like argument from ignorance to me. The likelyhood of x is linked to the intelligence of humans. Because we can't figure it out it's therefore less likely that it could occur naturally.

 

Well it's still posted up there, but it doesn't stand in the sense that it's meaningful or relevant. The first sentence in the quote you posted is an affirmation of the contentions made in the post I was responding to. The next two are statements about what we DO know. Let's assume, for a moment that we live in a universe where life forms by happenstance. In such a universe, should we expect to find it easy to reproduce conditions under which life forms from non-living material, or should we expect to find it difficult? The correct answer is that we should expect to find it easy. We know a good deal about life, now. one of the things we know is that, in addition to the correct chemical arrangement, we would need to write a long, complicated, and specific, genetic program in order for the life to operate. Reproducing the conditions under which life can emerge spontaneously from non-living material is, in fact, not easy. It's not even difficult. At this point (as opposed to the points in our history when we were more ignorant), it seems to be impossible.

 

Since you're moving on to a different point, does that mean you accept that the odds as presented do not in fact represent an impossibility?

 

It is not intended to prove God. It is intended to validate believing in God.

By definition, God has no probability of having another Creator. We're discussing two levels of our own Creation: an Intelligent Designer, which could certainly be trumped by God, and God himself. To fit the definition of God, He would not have been created.

There is no need to employ this tortured logic, as there is no need to believe that the entity which created Time had a beginning, as the concept of 'beginning' requires Time to consider it.

Invalid argument. You're attempting to extend the Laws of Nature - the foundation of your argument through use of what we know of Entropy - past the point of the origin of Nature. If entropic decay didn't exist prior to "The Big Bang", then your argument crumbles.

Illegitimacies like this, however, gird your belief - and they are invalid.

Your last paragraph is utterly baffling. There is no conflict of consistency in claiming that the Universe is fine-tuned to produce life exactly where it has been found (which is ON EARTH) - or anywhere else, for that matter - while simultaneously claiming that it was statistically impossible for it to have taken place by accident. The former fact isn't in conflict with the latter. That the former is fact simply validates the conclusion that many draw that it wasn't an accident.

They don't need those facts to be proof of God; they simply need the argument that the near impossibility of life supports a valid reason to believe that our existence is intentional.

We'll let God prove Himself to you. Meanwhile, we'll simply defend the validity of our belief using your rules.

 

How does my comment mean that I'm moving on to a different point?

And no: the odds are statistically impossible. That's what 'impossible' means, in fact.

 

In order for it to be an argument from ignorance, you cannot use the descriptor "more difficult".

 

Hm, I'm not sure how many other ways I can explain why it's not impossible. The assumptions are that there are a number of possibilities (10^123, but thats actually beside the point), the probability of each outcome is evenly distributed, and that one outcome must result from the process. Whichever one you end up with will have exactly the same probability as any other. You are guaranteed to have a result that will beat whatever odds you give, by definition.

By the way, you do know that 'statistically impossible' doesn't mean it's actually impossible?

 

I wouldn't attribute the rules of inference to any atheist. There perfectly good for everyone, and were refined by theists.

 

Sure, but some outcomes are life permitting and some are life prohibiting. The possible life prohibiting universes vastly outnumber the possible life permitting ones. Also, the initial entropy condition is not the only variable initial condition or constant. When something is statistically impossible, it seems reasonable to go ahead and reject it as a possibility.