Do you believe in God?

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I quite like William Lane Craig (even though I'm not a Christian).

He didn't add anything to the argument except to increase the odds (billions and billions of possibilities). And he doesn't seem to be aware of the contributions of several physicists who calculate that certain constants can vary by orders of magnitude and it would still result in stars that produce carbon.

I thought part of his point, albeit merely tacitly implied, was that this is not like a lottery where someone winning is a given. OTOH, we have to be in a life-permitting universe to be able to have any view of it.

Does the existence of a winner in his scenario imply to a greater degree that the game was rigged? If there is an eternity to pick balls, and an infinite population, it will still hit upon a winner eventually.

Hm, yes, but do we know that there is an infinte number of possibilities for universes to come into existence or are we assuming that is the case because we live in one that just happens to be so improbable that eternity is needed to explain it?

We don't know whether big bangs happen often or whether this one is really so improbable. We don't even have a complete physics model of all the particles. But as long as there are gaps, someone will try to justify a God with them.

Well I don't believe in a 'god of the gaps' in that sense. The life-permittance of the universe is not among the reasons I have for faith. Physics is physics. The divine has to do with other things, though I'm hesitant to bring that up as it is essentially a different story (I mean, this was never about my faith).

AspE do you understand Godel's incompleteness theorem?

Turns out that 'Stenger's' experiment on stability and star formation of other universes turned out be a ridiculous program called MonkeyGod which completely ignores important parameters such as the cosmological constant, initial entropy, gravitational constant etc.... And instead considers trivialities like length of a day. Check part 'B' of the publication. And no, there are no multiple 'physicists,' only Stenger who carried out this simulation. Like the author maintains, Stenger's experiment is akin to asking who will win the presidential election at a Republican convention center.

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1112.4647v2.pdf

Such statements indicate ignorance of cosmological behavior. First and foremost, in order for any the results to play out in a differing manner, the universe must collapse again and explode in another big bang. This will cause entropy to skyrocket and cause and subsequent expansions and contractions to converge to a singularity over a single point.

Which God???

God... the necessarily existent being... the prime mover of contingent things, the transcendent ground of all being. Thought to be Minded, Personal, unimaginably powerful, maximally good, the greatest conceivable being in all possible worlds--which necessarily exists in all possible worlds. The creative force that animates the universe. The Other and the True Self. The Tao. And incidentally, the Tao that can be told is not the Eternal Tao (Godel's Incompleteness theorem stated by ancient Chinese mystics.)

Here is another excellent series from William Lane Craig... it is 5 parts, but I am only posting the link to the first video.

I've been trying not to say this but I gotta.

Dear B.Hons Math and Theoretical Physics, Law -

I like you and admire you. I respect your accomplishments. I remember how it is to be young and sure of anything. But just you wait till your long-deceased mother shows up to get you through a crisis. I'm sure there are scientific explanations for that, too, but they won't hold up.

There! I finally got that off my chest. I apologize if I've offended you, I don't mean to. I don't even mean to offend science. It's not either/or. What bothers me is the idea that science trumps everything.

You know, I was wondering when you'd show up.

Last edited by Deltaville on 13 Mar 2016, 9:39 pm, edited 1 time in total.