Searching for GOD...

[Maeght]

But we are not talking about a single improbable event.
Bringing life into this universe involved literally billions of very specific but highly improbable events to have occurred in sequence.  The true odds are incalculable.

Look at the trees.

[bluehillside Retd.]

AB,

But we are not talking about a single improbable event.
Bringing life into this universe involved literally billions of very specific but highly improbable events to have occurred in sequence.  The true odds are incalculable.

And entirely irrelevant. See my last reply (48099) to see why.

[Alan Burns]

AB,

Just to add to Torri’s reply, your mistake when looking at fantastically long odds against an event occurring and assuming therefore guidance when it does occur is that your premise and your conclusion are the same thing – ie “god”.

In the deck of cards example (which has fallen on deaf ears when I’ve explained it to you before) no-one is surprised at the dealing of any particular sequence of 52 cards because that sequence wasn’t assumed to be the intended outcome before the deck was dealt. You on the other hand assume that you were the intended outcome a priori because god wanted it that way, and then marvel at the unlikelihood of god’s plan happening by chance – therefore god!

Can you see where you go wrong here? Your “proof” for god requires an intending god ab initio, whereas your existence in a universe indifferent to its outcomes would be no more surprising than a particular sequence of 52 cards appearing from a dealt deck of cards.

To put it another way, imagine that any species of alien possessed of sentience but also of a poor grasp of logic also marvelled at the unlikelihood of its existence and then claimed “therefore alien god” too. Would he be right, or just reasoning incompetently?     

This is such a simple and unanswerable argument (that I’ve explained to you several time before now) that I’m at a loss to know why you ignore it and then make the same mistake once again (“It offers undeniable evidence for the hand of God being intimately involved throughout time to create and sustain life as we know it”).

Do you get it now?

So as you state, we have a  universe indifferent to life.
But we can show that there is only one particular sequence of specific events which will result in life as we know it
The possible alternatives which would all have resulted a lifeless universe amount to many magnitudes more than the estimated number of atomic particles in the known universe.
And you still continue to believe that we came into existence by chance events?

[Dicky Underpants]

......
To explain further:
If I won the national lottery, it would be regarded as a chance event.
If I won it twice in succession, it may be regarded as perhaps a freak occurrence, but still just attributed to random unintended events.
If I won it every week for the rest of my life no one could possibly attribute it entirely to random unintended events.
The succession of apparently random unintended, but essential events needed to bring us into existence far exceeds the improbable odds of me winning the national lottery every week.  It offers undeniable evidence for the hand of God being intimately involved throughout time to create and sustain life as we know it.  We are all living proof of God's miraculous work.See above

The trouble is, evolution clearly shows that 'God' has made mistakes again and again over the millions of years since life began, as if 'he' had no direct control, but was at best working it out as he went along, with many an 'oops' along the way. And sometimes those oopses were of such an order of magnitude that all life on earth came close to being wiped out, and things nearly had to start again from scratch. This, at best, shows a very fallible 'god' who certainly can't control the fall of the dice or the winning of any lottery. And of course, if he could, why didn't he bring all life into existence in an instant, instead of this incredibly tedious, wasteful and pain-filled method of evolution?
Of course, the godless explanation of evolution raises none of these problems, and indeed transforms one's whole perspective to one of seeing life's inherent grandeur as it has struggled through vast aeons of geological time.

[bluehillside Retd.]

AB,

So as you state, we have a  universe indifferent to life.

Asbent any sound reasoning to the contrary, yes.

But we can show that there is only one particular sequence of specific events which will result in life as we know it

Actually “life as we know it” exists in multiple forms each with its own “particular sequence of specific events” but ok…

The possible alternatives which would all have resulted a lifeless universe amount to many magnitudes more than the estimated number of atomic particles in the known universe.

You don’t know that. For all you know the universe is teeming with multiple types of life, but ok…

And you still continue to believe that we came into existence by chance events?

Yes, for the reasons I’ve explained to you and you’ve ignored again. What’s the point of explaining things to you only for you to ignore the explanations?

However unlikely your existence your fundamental mistake is still one of circular reasoning, namely:

1. God intended me to exist

2. The chances of me existing without god’s intervention are so unlikely that there must have been been god’s intervention

3. Therefore God

4. God intended etc... (now repeat endlessly)

Even if there were no other species of life but Homo sapiens either here or anywhere else in the universe, and even if the "particular sequence of specific events" necessary for your existence was a bajillion times more unlikely than it already is you’d still be stuck with the same basic error of circular reasoning.   

Once again: the degree of unlikelihood of you existence at all cannot be a proof for god when your argument for god also requires god ab initio.

Try writing that down 1,000 times or until it sinks in – whichever happens the sooner.

[Walt Zingmatilder]

Well, Vlad, I was replying to a post of Alan's in which he specifically mentioned 'God' - but had he said 'Jove' instead I'd say my reply would be more or less the same.

That may be so but you know and I know that you exercise some method and process of judging whether you accept something or not.
It seems to me you are confusing or conflating or both Alan’s burden of proof, your supposed “default position and your means of judging what constitutes evidence or proof. Alan isn’t asking you to prove yours he is asking for your criteria and you are evasive in this matter.

[Outrider]

But we are not talking about a single improbable event.

We are talking about events where, currently, we can't accurately quantify how probably or improbable they are, that's an assumption on your part.

Bringing life into this universe involved literally billions of very specific but highly improbable events to have occurred in sequence.  The true odds are incalculable.

Maybe, certainly more than one event, yes. And there are billions of galaxies, containing billions of stars, around which uncountable trillions of planets have been orbiting for billions of years; there have been an unfathomable number of chances for those mere billion or so (by your estimate) of incidents to occur. Frankly, if it only takes a billion unlikely events I'm surprised we're not swarming with alien life by now.

O.

[Alan Burns]

We are talking about events where, currently, we can't accurately quantify how probably or improbable they are, that's an assumption on your part.

Maybe, certainly more than one event, yes. And there are billions of galaxies, containing billions of stars, around which uncountable trillions of planets have been orbiting for billions of years; there have been an unfathomable number of chances for those mere billion or so (by your estimate) of incidents to occur. Frankly, if it only takes a billion unlikely events I'm surprised we're not swarming with alien life by now.

O.

I am not at all surprised that we are not swarming with alien life.
Life in this universe could not possibly exist unless God wanted it to exist.

[Walt Zingmatilder]

Not really. You can't be accused of 'god-dodging' in the absence of some sort of claim that there is a god. We don't have accusations of 'blig-dodging'.

Yet theophobia is an observed and recorded phenomenon. Your statement isn’t documented. It is nothing to do with claims or any exercise of rationality so asserting it has is plainly wrong. As we know avoidance is a feature of phobia and theophobia is no exception.

Theists are frequently accused here of dodging the truth and it may be that some religious people are dodging the truth that they really do not believe.Not to be aware of or deny this possibility in an atheist who is dodging God by acting as though there isn’t is mere immaturity and a special plead at that.

 Not all criticisms or arguments against are Goddodging, God dodging or God avoidance is a behaviour
A psychology and an attitude after all but suggestions involving circular hierarchies of contingencies, poppings out of nothing, necessity free contingency and other absurdities are suspect.

[Outrider]

I am not at all surprised that we are not swarming with alien life. Life in this universe could not possibly exist unless God wanted it to exist.

The criteria a moment ago was probability. Now that's been shown to not necessarily be the impediment you thought the goalposts have shifted. You aren't interested in the argument, because you don't care about the points other people are making. You haven't got a reasoned position, you've got a position and you're attempted to rationalise it after the fact.

O.

[Outrider]

Yet theophobia is an observed and recorded phenomenon.

Theophobics, though, would be theists - they're afraid of god. Fear of religion would be religiophobia - and, of course, it would have to be the irrational fear of religion, not the justifiable fear of its effects.

Your statement isn’t documented. It is nothing to do with claims or any exercise of rationality so asserting it has is plainly wrong.

That you assert 'god' doesn't make it any more valid a claim than 'blig' - in the absence of that, it holds exactly as little merit as your accusations of 'god dodging'.

As we know avoidance is a feature of phobia and theophobia is no exception.

Avoidance is a feature of many responses - repugnance, ignorance, boredom, poor personal hygiene... You'd need a little more than 'avoidance' and an unsubstantiated claim to carry the day.

Theists are frequently accused here of dodging the truth and it may be that some religious people are dodging the truth that they really do not believe.

Given that there is an entire organisation dedicated to aiding people who no longer believe separate from their religious institutions, I'd suggest it's a somewhat more certain than there 'may be' some'.

Not to be aware of or deny this possibility in an atheist who is dodging God by acting as though there isn’t is mere immaturity and a special plead at that.

The category error here is that those people who no longer believe are atheists, they are no longer theists. For an atheist to 'god dodge' would be to suggest that they are secretly theists, to suggest that deep down they actually believe but are somehow pretending not to. Which is nonsense.

Not all criticisms or arguments against are Goddodging, God dodging or God avoidance is a behaviour.

Given that your migratory goalpost seems to be the determining factor, I'd suggest that god-dodging at the moment is an unsubstantiated accusation of a behaviour at best, and an attempt to shift the burden of proof at worst.

A psychology and an attitude after all but suggestions involving circular hierarchies of contingencies,

An accusation that can be levelled at most theologies.

poppings out of nothing,

An accusation that can be levelled at most theologies.

necessity free contingency

An accusation that can be levelled at most theologies.

and other absurdities are suspect.

An accusation that can be levelled at most theologies, with a healthy does of authoritarianism, misogyny, homophobia and tribalism thrown in for good measure.

O.

[torridon]

But we are not talking about a single improbable event.
Bringing life into this universe involved literally billions of very specific but highly improbable events to have occurred in sequence.  The true odds are incalculable.

Any event, however improbable. will happen given a large enough probability space.  And spacetime is pretty darn big, just go ask an astronomer if you want to be bowled over by inconceivably vast numbers.  And if the universe is infinite, then anything that can happen, will happen, over and over again.

Having said that, the emergence of life is likely not some highly improbable event anyway.  Complexity builds quite naturally over time in organic chemistry.  Life on early Earth emerged over the course of around a billion years; we may never know the exact pathways of how that happened, and there may be innumerable pathways by which it could happen.

[torridon]

I am not at all surprised that we are not swarming with alien life.
Life in this universe could not possibly exist unless God wanted it to exist.

Perhaps you ought to write to Nasa and other space agencies to tell them then, think how much money we could save on sending rovers out to look for life on other planetary bodies if it is impossible.  And why anyone would think God would want to make life impossible anyway is beyond me.  What sort of God would create a universe to host life by making life impossible ?  Perhaps the sort of God that would design a car with square wheels.

[bluehillside Retd.]

AB,

I am not at all surprised that we are not swarming with alien life.

You have no idea whether or not the universe is "swarming" with alien life.

Life in this universe could not possibly exist unless God wanted it to exist.

Blind faith claim.

Anyway, do you now understand why marvelling at the unlikeliness of your existence and concluding that god must therefore have intervened to deliver god's plan cannot be a proof for god?   

[Alan Burns]

Anyway, do you now understand why marvelling at the unlikeliness of your existence and concluding that god must therefore have intervened to deliver god's plan cannot be a proof for god?

I have never claimed absolute proof.

Just the impossibly remote chance that we could have been brought into existence by the unguided, purposeless, hostile forces observed in our material universe.

[Outrider]

Just the impossibly remote chance that we could have been brought into existence by the unguided, purposeless, hostile forces observed in our material universe.

Except that you (and the rest of us) have no capacity to quantify how unlikely any of those individual events are, and even then you are failing to understand how many chances each of those possibilities has to happen.

All of which is put up against your claim which is, essentially, "uh... magic!". I know which one of those i think is less likely.

O.

[bluehillside Retd.]

AB,

I have never claimed absolute proof.

And yet in Reply 48094 you said:

“It offers undeniable evidence for the hand of God being intimately involved throughout time to create and sustain life as we know it.”

It offers no such thing.

Just the impossibly remote chance that we could have been brought into existence by the unguided, purposeless, hostile forces observed in our material universe.

Whoosh!

First, it’s not “impossibly” anything as you do in fact exist.

Second, you’ve no idea how remote the chance is because you have no frame of reference for the number of opportunities for it to happen. Given 52! trials for example, the probability of a given sequence of 52 cards being dealt is 1.     

Third though (and most damning of all for your claim of evidence) the unlikelihood of god’s plan being delivered without also god’s intervention cannot be evidence for god.

As you’re still struggling to grasp this basic problem of circular reasoning let me put it another way. Imagine that the probability of the “particular sequence of specific events” necessary for your existence was calculated, and that it was expressed as “one in x”, with “x” being a suitably huge number.

Now imagine also a lottery, but a really big one with only one winner possible, the tickets limited to one per player and the number of players also being “x”.

So come Friday night the draw is held and someone wins the jackpot. Thus the odds against specifically her winning were the same as those against specifically you being born.

Would the lottery winner be right to think that the lottery company had wanted her to win all along and so must have therefore have intervened to cause her win would you say?

Now can you see why you’ve fallen into the lottery winner’s fallacy? The universe no more needs to know or care whether or what type of life emerges than the lottery company needs to know or care who wins its next draw. Your existence is a much dumb luck for you as the lottery jackpot is dumb luck for the winner, and trying to retro-fit a narrative about you being an intended outcome ab initio as your evidence for a god's necessary existence to make it happen is wrongheaded thinking.

And what that tells you is that “my existence is so unlikely that god must have intervened to deliver god’s plan, therefore god” cannot be evidence (let alone a proof) for god.

Do you get it now?       

[Alan Burns]

Now imagine also a lottery, but a really big one with only one winner possible, the tickets limited to one per player and the number of players also being “x”.

So come Friday night the draw is held and someone wins the jackpot. Thus the odds against specifically her winning were the same as those against specifically you being born.

Would the lottery winner be right to think that the lottery company had wanted her to win all along and so must have therefore have intervened to cause her win would you say?

Now can you see why you’ve fallen into the lottery winner’s fallacy? The universe no more needs to know or care whether or what type of life emerges than the lottery company needs to know or care who wins its next draw. Your existence is a much dumb luck for you as the lottery jackpot is dumb luck for the winner, and trying to retro-fit a narrative about you being an intended outcome ab initio as your evidence for a god's necessary existence to make it happen is wrongheaded thinking.

And what that tells you is that “my existence is so unlikely that god must have intervened to deliver god’s plan, therefore god” cannot be evidence (let alone a proof) for god.

Do you get it now?     

Bad analogy.
You are making a comparison of a specific series of events with the remote possibility of a single event - a single lottery draw.

Just go back to the original comparison I made with lottery winners.

I compared the unguided process of bringing life into existence in a hostile universe with the likelihood of me winning the lottery every week for the rest of my life - a specific sequence of highly unlikely events.  We both know it could never happen.

[bluehillside Retd.]

AB,

Bad analogy.
You are making a comparison of a specific series of events with the remote possibility of a single event - a single lottery draw.

Sorry, my bad. I’d forgotten that you can't grasp what analogies actually entail. The point here was that the probability “x” of the lottery win is the same as the probability “x” of your existence, and whether the contributory events were a one-off or were sequential makes no difference to that probability.   

Just go back to the original comparison I made with lottery winners.

I compared the unguided process of bringing life into existence in a hostile universe with the likelihood of me winning the lottery every week for the rest of my life - a specific sequence of highly unlikely events.  We both know it could never happen.

Oh dear.

1. When the probability of each outcome is the same then the probability of each outcome is the same. The probability of throwing two dice and getting two ones for example is 1:36. The probability of doing that three times in row is 1:46,656 (1:36 x 1:36 x 1:36). The probability of winning a lottery with 46,656 tickets is also though 1:46,656.

One involves a sequence of events, the other involves just one event. The probabilities though are the same.

Do you get it now?

2. The maths though are irrelevant in any case to the basic mistake in logic you’re making and avoiding addressing – ie, circular reasoning. No matter what the odds (and nor how many events it takes to obtain them) you cannot use god as your evidence for god.

Your claim here is that the probability of your existence is so fantastically unlikely that a god must be necessary to implement the plan that god had already decided on, therefore god. Try to understand why this is very bad reasoning, and then to try at least to address the problem it gives you.   

[Gordon]

The utterly bizarre thing that strikes me about Alan's approach is that he gets hung up on probabilities (with a few added pejoratives for good measure) and yet his 'alternative' is a superatural agent for which probability is out of scope.

It's laughable.

[bluehillside Retd.]

Hi Gordon,

The utterly bizarre thing that strikes me about Alan's approach is that he gets hung up on probabilities (with a few added pejoratives for good measure) and yet his 'alternative' is a superatural agent for which probability is out of scope.

It's laughable.

Yes. It’s a secondary argument I think, but essentially he’s saying “god is less improbable than happenstance, therefore god”. How on earth he’s calculated the probability of “god” for comparison purposes is anyone’s guess, but he seems to be less incredulous about one than the other nonetheless.

More to the point though, the improbability of his/our existence cannot in any way be evidence for “god” as he claims because what he’s actually arguing for is the improbability of god’s plan coming to fruition without god to guide it. He’s trying to use god as evidence for god in other words, which is a non-starter no matter the odds.             

[Alan Burns]

AB,

Sorry, my bad. I’d forgotten that you have no idea what analogies actually entail. The point here was that if the probability “x” of the lottery win is the same as the probability “x” of your existence, and whether the contributory events were a one-off or were sequential makes no difference to that probability.   

Oh dear.

1. When the probability of each outcome is the same then the probability of each outcome is the same. The probability of throwing two dice and getting two ones for example is 1:36. The probability of doing that three times in row is 1:46,656 (1:36 x 1:36 x 1:36). The probability of winning a lottery with 46,656 tickets is also though 1:46,656.

One involves a sequence of events, the other involves just one event. The probabilities though are the same.

Do you get it now?

2. The maths though are irrelevant in any case to the basic mistake in logic you’re making and avoiding addressing. – ie, circular reasoning. No matter what the odds (and nor how many events it takes to obtain them) you cannot use god as your evidence for god.

Your claim here is that the probability of your existence is so fantastically unlikely that a god must be necessary to implement the plan that god had already decided on. Try to understand why this is very bad reasoning, and then to try at least to address the problem it gives you.

You seem to be implying that no degree of improbability could ever convince you that you could never be the outcome of the random, unguided, purposeless forces of a material universe.  The phrase "Head in the Sand" comes to mind. 

[Alan Burns]

The utterly bizarre thing that strikes me about Alan's approach is that he gets hung up on probabilities (with a few added pejoratives for good measure) and yet his 'alternative' is a superatural agent for which probability is out of scope.

It's laughable.

I have not discovered God through probabilities.
Having come to experience God and His love through various other means, it is a natural progression to realise that our gift of freedom which enables us to consciously manipulate the forces and elements of this world to facilitate human creativity is a reflection of God's own creativity which brought us into existence.

[Maeght]

I have not discovered God through probabilities.
Having come to experience God and His love through various other means, it is a natural progression to realise that our gift of freedom which enables us to consciously manipulate the forces and elements of this world to facilitate human creativity is a reflection of God's own creativity which brought us into existence.

Confirmation bias.

[Sebastian Toe]

I have not discovered God through probabilities.
Having come to experience God and His love through various other means, it is a natural progression to realise that our gift of freedom which enables us to consciously manipulate the forces and elements of this world to facilitate human creativity is a reflection of God's own creativity which brought us into existence.

Or you are easily brainwashed.
Or you have been hypnotised.

Can you prove otherwise?