I really enjoyed the lecture. a lot of good points were brought up. I have to admit that it was put on by the
Discovery institute. Many
atheist hate the institute and think that they are willing to practice bad science inorder to believe in the god of the Bible. I have a different viewpoint. I ask anyone who disagrees that there is evidence found in Physics pointing to
God would listen to these lectures and point out why they are wrong in detail. Yes, in case you are wondering, I am calling you out.
What Contemporary Physics and Philosophy Tell Us About Nature and God
OK, so this gets you no further than barebones deism as a mere possibility amongst many other possibilities… Seems you want to infer more than that.
ReplyDeleteAs for anthropic coincidence, 99.99999% of the universe is in no way tuned for life. For those who claim the improbability of life as evidence of divine creation, they are forgetting a very simple principle of statistics, that is the odds of something being exactly like it is right now are 1:1 because, well, it is like it is right now. To simplify, think of the present state of the universe as being represented by a trillion dice rolls. You take note of all trillion values rolled, then you roll the dice a trillion more times. The odds of you getting the same results as the first trillion rolls is indeed astronomically small, but that doesn’t mean the first set of rolls didn’t happen.
Or, the odds of YOU winning the lottery are astronomically small. The odds of SOMEONE winning are not.
He covered that argument in the lecture. How do you know how many dice rolls there are?
ReplyDeleteYou don't, "billion" was a generalization.
ReplyDeletefor all you know...it could have been one
ReplyDeletefor all you know, it could have been fifteen.
ReplyDeleteNot sure what your point is.
He covered that argument in the lecture.
ReplyDeleteOK, so to be honest, I lost interest after 40 minutes, so I assumed your comment referred to something I missed after I stopped listening. I went back and listened to the rest of it. Yeah, he didn’t cover anything remotely related to my objection about the way ID proponents erroneously look at probability.
An important question that these guys are missing (avoiding?) is that is it even possible for the constants to be different then they are? Sure, move the gravitation constant .0000000000000001 and we wouldn't exist to observe the universe. But is there actually any indiction that it could be anything other than it actually is? I think no. The problem is that when we reduce things to numbers (such as these foundational constants), there is a temptation to think that those numbers are 1) mutable (even if the number is a contant!) and 2) real actual things independent of the thing being observed.
How do you know it could not have been anything? What fixed them and made it necessary for those numbers to be constant? If you are arguing that it was tried again and again until the right configuration stuck, are you arguing an oscillatory universe that continually born and dies?
ReplyDeleteOK, so now you are erroneously looking at probability. It's not the "right configuration" it's the configuration. If it was different, we wouldn't be here to know it was different.
ReplyDeleteUm what answering my questions. The configuration is the right configuration for life (as we know it) to exist. Either it's the most probable configuration or it's not. (We know it's not). So how do you account for that? You dislike this interpretation and this hypothesis and that is fine. Do you have a better one that answers the questions?
ReplyDeleteThe constants are mutable because they would have to always come out that way in every possible universe and we have no way to say that they would. They aren't just numbers they are independent characteristics of the universe that with respect to what you or I think they should be. If you or I measured the gravitational constant (a fun exercise by they way) right now, we would get the same answer.