Do you believe in God?

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Philosophy precedes science most of the time. One must first *think about something in order to identify a problem, formulate a hypothesis--->design an experiment to test the hypothesis. Again... that series that I perpetually and incessantly keep recommending covers this entire issue in depth. The video series is highly interdisciplinary.... one will get an education in computer science, communications/information theory, theology, logic, engineering, philosophy of science, history, biology, and genetics. Its 31 parts long, but each video is fairly brief.. the whole thing is around 2 hours long.

Last edited by NoahYates on 09 Mar 2016, 10:22 am, edited 1 time in total.

By the way, in case anyone is interested, the atheists that I feel give the best presentation of the atheist world view in debates with William lane Craig or John Lennox are Peter Atkins and Stephen Law. Their debates with Craig and Lennox respectively are some of my favorites, precisely because they are able to get past the superficial rhetoric. Also, Stephen Law had a heady dialogue via radio interview with Alvin Plantinga concerning Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism.

Last edited by NoahYates on 09 Mar 2016, 10:29 am, edited 1 time in total.

Edit: I'm quoting P.Z. Meyers

"My conversation with Perry Marshall about “evolution 2.0” is now online on the radio show Unbelievable.

Marshall is sales and marketing guy who has written a book titled Evolution 2.0: Breaking the Deadlock Between Darwin and Design, in which he claims to have worked out a reconciliation between science and religion based on arguments he had with his missionary/theologian brother, that hints at the quality of the science you’ll find in it. He has a superficial view of a few biological processes, like DNA error repair and transposition, and has shoehorned them into his religious belief that these are the tools used by some kind of engineering force that makes them purposeful."


http://cfvod.kaltura.com/pd/p/618072/sp ... name/a.mp3

"Just to help you picture this: he’s an electrical engineer and SEO guy with only the most superficial, and often wrong, knowledge of biology, and he has written a book in which he explains how all those biologists have got everything wrong. I was most entertained by the parts where he explains how there is all this amazing stuff in biology that we never tell anybody about, and one of his examples was something I lectured my cell biology class about last week, and a couple of the examples were things I talked about in my freshman biology course this morning.

In other words, his stunning revelations that will revolutionize evolutionary biology were all known mechanisms that are so well established that we teach them in basic college courses, and often simply take for granted. And he gets them wrong. Wrong wrong wrongity wrong.

But he’s frenetically glib about it all, which is apparently a useful attribute if you’re trying to sell car stereo speakers. It’s not at all impressive when you’re pushing pseudoscience."

http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/ ... -my-plate/

Last edited by AspE on 09 Mar 2016, 10:44 am, edited 1 time in total.

I think the man is a genius. That is awesome you have had discussions with him! I think in the end it must come down to the difference in the way everyone "sees" concepts. I find that he and I share a lot of "intuition" about the nature of reality. That is truly amazing though... its a small world after-all.


Also... I just re-read your comment and it struck me that you are ignoring that he admits that he comes at this with a layman's understanding. He also completely admits that he could be totally wrong. This is all theoretical. When you try to tie all disciplines together in the short time we humans have to work with, it becomes difficult to study to a scholarly level on every subject... but if you can gain a deep enough* understanding drawing from a wider bandwidth of sources, you can come up with novel connections... for the same reason that an aspie mind can come up with creative and novel solutions/interpretations, etc. Its all about density of connection.

edit: now I see that you were quoting someone

Last edited by NoahYates on 09 Mar 2016, 10:48 am, edited 1 time in total.

Even if I assume you are correct, how does that mean the universe was designed for humans? You can't assume life couldn't arise if the universe had different properties.

I quote physicist Victor Stenger:

"I have made a modest attempt to obtain some feeling for what a universe with different constants would be like... ...I find that long-lived stars that could make life more likely will occur over a wide range of these parameters. For example, if we take the electron and proton masses to be equal to their values in our universe, an electromagnetic force strength having any value greater than it's value in our universe will give a stellar lifetime of more than 680 million years. The strong interaction strength does not enter into this calculation. If we had an electron mass 100,000 times lower, the proton mass could be as much as 1,000 times lower to achieve the same minimum stellar lifetime. This is hardly fine-tuning.
... I have analyzed 100 universes in which the values of the four parameters were generated randomly from a range five orders of magnitude above to five orders of magnitude below their values in our universe, this is, over a total range of ten orders of magnitude... I have examined the distribution of stellar lifetimes for these same 100 universes. While few are low, most are probably high enough to allow enough time for stellar evolution and heavy element nucleosynthesis. Over half the universes have stars that live at least a billion years...

http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/vste ... neTune.pdf

Of course he's totally wrong, he's an ignoramus with no knowledge of biology trying to reconcile science with his faith.

Also, I was quoting P.Z. Meyers, that wasn't me.

Yes, I see that now... In any case, I have a great deal of knowledge about biology. Yet, I encounter people with equal knowledge... looking at the same information... and we come up with different interpretations of the data. One's underlying philosophy will influence the "angle" at which you approach everything in life. Most atheists and people who adopt "scientism" are metaphysical naturalists.... so this skews their approach to judgement of all incoming ideologies and concepts. In the same way, the super-naturalist or theist will "see" all incoming perceptions and concepts in a certain "light." Some try to maintain a constant state of non-belief and are therefore skeptics. My point is, just because you say that he is wrong on fundamental concepts of biology does not necessarily mean that I, or other like-minded people, would judge him to be wrong... perhaps you are missing something.... or are rejecting an assumption that we grant.

Even if one achieved the same ratio for critical variant electron and proton mass, the fine tune constants would still be astronomically high. Moreover the author fails to nullify the crucial importance of the fine tuned cosmological constant and the gravitation constant with extremely narrow bounds. I calculate that even then, the odds would still be ≈10^100 if one was to negate the proton and neutron ratio. Again, this discharges your argument.

I have not, but it sounds interesting.

Hehe, very funny guys. XD I don't think of it to such an extreme degree, but there has been some heated discussion and reproving going on.

My view point would actually include Misery on Side 1.

Also, I kind of view Edenthiel more just adding to discussion. She has been rather civil and not argumentative and not being condescending like some other little cuties on here. ^,^

Skeptics don't "try to maintain a constant state of non-belief". The evidence is the evidence, wherever it leads. And belief is not a choice anyway. But you are using a normal practice in science, interpretation of data, to excuse wilful ignorance and outright lies. Note, that I do not adopt scientism, and few atheists or scientists do.

The odds of what?

Perhaps these so-called constants are linked by a hitherto unknown symmetry, and they couldn't be otherwise. I'm not knowledgeable enough in this field to say. But the basic flaws in your argument still stand. We evolved to fit this universe, like the water to the pond in which it finds itself, not the other way around. And you can't discount that it could be arbitrary. All life sentient enough to comment on it's natural environment would necessarily find that environment suitable for the development of life. It's not evidence of a God.

Please stop, I was a Buddhist before you were a zygote.

... how old are you?