Do you believe in God?

Post Reply New Topic

I believe god exists but not in the form we traditionally think of her as. I also think god isn't male but female and has many old names like Hecate and Persephone and Jehovah to name a few of her names. She exists on a plane that we are unable to fully comprehend and this life is the test so to say. These however are my personal beliefs only.

As a Pantheist, God's existence is something obvious to me. Its material existence is. As for Its spiritual existence, I don't know. How could I ? There's no evidence of either possibility. Maybe God is a sentient being. But a personal God with human-like sentience and morals, I really don't think so. It's impossible to be sure of it but I'm quite skeptical when it comes to that. We're so incredibly anthropocentric that we believe that God should think, feel and have morals like a human being. It's pretty sad.

I have a counter to the fine tuning argument. Resident theists claim that the universe is fine-tuned for life. So why isn't life fine-tuned for the universe? Go take a tour of any hospital, talk to any doctor, bodies are full of ill adapted organs and structures that seem designed to fail in a million different ways, long before the average life span of the organism. Why aren't we fine-tuned, if we are the goal and object of creation?

To help answer the question, are these "resident theists" you refer to Christian?

You would have to ask them.

This is hardly a counter argument, at least on a cosmic scale.

For instance, a change in the dark matter/dark energy mix/ordinary matter mix by Roger Penrose's 1/(10^10^123) would prevent the formation of carbon, the essential element of life.

Moreover, there have been detection of billion other exoplanets with similar properties of the earth. All of them have the potential to host carbon based lifeforms.

The counter argument, is not plausible, at least by my logic.

Last edited by Deltaville on 20 Mar 2016, 6:31 am, edited 1 time in total.

The final odds of our fine tuned universe (with the gravitational constant (G), added by the cosmological constant (lambda), added by the dark energy, dark matter, and ordinary matter mix) which is responsible for star and carbon formation is:

1/(10^60+10^120+10^10^123)

To grasp that number, remember that 10^20 is the amount of seconds that have ticked off since time began.

So, what you are saying is that the outcome of life on a planet like Earth's was carefully considered. In light of that, how do you explain the extreme fragility of our corporeal selves?

AspE, we aren't getting anywhere in this thread. To sum things up, the fact that time began 13.8 billion years ago, and the fact that our universe is fine tuned on the narrowest edge, are merely arguments for the existence of God in the realm of cosmology. They do not prove that God exist, but they are simply scientific facts that one can logically postulate the existence of God.

Even Christopher Hitchens said that these two facts are indeed the best arguments from the 'other side!'

They will not change the fact that God exists or does not, but they should be viewed as merely facts that one can reasonably hypothesize that a higher power of some sort exists.

The equivalence principle (a fact originally conceived by Albert Einstein) means that laws and constants throughout the universe are static.

In fact the fine tuning of the universe is considered by many atheist physicists as a 'severe problem' that they attempt to explain away by their own brand of metaphysics (such as the multiverse theory!). Some such as Sean Carrol want to even CHANGE the definition of the scientific method of falsification in order to accommodate the notion of a multiverse!

Paul Davies, the well known theoretical physicist, made it clear that invocation of the multiverse is merely nothing more than an attempt to explain away the fine tune argument, as well as the cosmological argument.

Being static has no bearing on their origin. They could be interdependent. And my counter argument, that life isn't fine-tuned for the universe, still stands. If life were perfectly adapted to the environment, it's existence wouldn't be so rare and tenuous.

The fact that astrobiological studies indicate the fact that over 100 billion life-bearing exoplanets exist in our galaxy makes your argument meaningless.

A vast majority of cosmologists concur that indeed our universe is undeniably well fined tuned for life.

Again AspE, the fact that our universe is so fine tuned resulted in many atheistic physicist like Hawkings to the multiverse in order to explain away the notion of God (ironically the multiverse is its own form of metaphysics) nothing that you say can disprove the airtight validity of the anthropic principle.

Luke Barnes, an agnostic, has explained this notion clearly: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1112.4647v2.pdf

Now what I am about to say is my own opinion, and it cannot be proved or disproved. As a Christian of Jewish origin, I believe in the Strong Anthropic Principle. The fact that our universe was in essence, preparing for our arrival. But that is after all, only my philosophical perspective. Freeman Dyson also holds the same view.

You are just restating the fine tuning argument from your side. What about the biological angle? From that standpoint it is not fine-tuned.

It IS biologically fine tuned as only the said combination of the four fundamental forces have been extraordinarily fine tuned for carbon. The essential element for biological existence.