Do you believe in God?

Post Reply New Topic

"And he who defines his conduct by ethics imprisons his song-bird in a cage.
The freest song comes not through bars and wires."

And that's what religion is, that's what god concepts are. I have a counter verse:

Verse 29. Jesus said, "If the flesh came into being because of spirit,
it is a wonder. But if spirit came into being because of the
body, it is a wonder of wonders. Indeed, I am amazed at how this
great wealth has made its home in this poverty."
The Gospel of Thomas

So your viewpoints on life and reality are essentially static? Now you are using biblical text in support of a null hypothesis??? What is wrong with you?

"Deltaville"...For the last time, THESE are facts. The universe had a beginning, and as I have emphasized, by way of Luke Barnes and Roger Penrose among others, the universe is fine tuned for life. Period.

I honestly am starting to think you are just trolling us at this point./quote


So facts are determined by the opinions of smart sounding people? That's not how science works. No one recognizes these things as facts. There is no evidence of fine tuning or that the universe had a beginning. All we know is that at one point it was very condensed. Not the same thing.

"Deltaville"So your viewpoints on life and reality are essentially static? Now you are using biblical text in support of a null hypothesis??? What is wrong with you?/quote

My viewpoint changes as new evidence comes to light. I'm using (non-canonical) gnostic texts to show that the wonder of the universe is not lessened by recognizing that all is material. Even forces are transmitted by particles. And another thing. Even if the universe had a beginning, that wouldn't prove a god. You still have all your work ahead of you to show that. Even if this universe has an extremely unlikely set of parameters, (which is by no means certain) it still doesn't prove it was intended that way for life.

Last edited by AspE on 23 Mar 2016, 2:49 pm, edited 1 time in total.

"Deltaville"

Materialism is complete..../quote
...........................
I admire these men for their work in the field of science. All their other speculations have just as much validity as my own. Seriously, argument from authority? Is that all you got? Why must we assume it's a mind? He doesn't say. Use the word space-time instead, at least it's a defensible concept.

Quantum mechanics has already nullified the notion of materialism. Trust me, I have studied that form of physics for over five years in university. Never heard of Max Planck had you? Well, by the same notion your act of posting Vic Stenger's opinions means that you are anchoring upon the idea that an authority is always correct. The same kind of treason you are accusing me of.

But what colour of right do I have? Since you assume I am stupid, you are bound to disregard any of the facts that I convey to you; their merits, notwithstanding.

I think here you are appealing to authority. Neither of them is qualified to say our universe is fine turned for life as a fact.

As far as we know there is only one universe and it has life in it. To say it is fine tuned for life is meaningless because there are no other universes to compare ours too. For example, if there was one billion different universes we could observe, and ours happened to be the only one that had life in it. Then you could say ours appears to have been fine tuned, however, even then, we could just be very lucky.

Just to be alive right now is the equivalent of winning the lottery, as we all once upon a time, were one of millions of sperm that won the race to the ovary.

quote="Deltaville"

Quantum mechanics has already nullified the notion of materialism. Trust me, I have studied that form of physics for over five years in university. Never heard of Max Planck had you? Well, by the same notion your act of posting Vic Stenger's opinions means that you are anchoring upon the idea that an authority is always correct. The same kind of treason you are accusing me of.

But what colour of right do I have? Since you assume I am stupid, you are bound to disregard any of the facts that I convey to you; their merits, notwithstanding./quote


--------------------


I have no particular faith that Victor Stenger is correct, but as long as there is any even slightly plausible alternative materialistic explanation, it beats the supernatural one every time. Quantum Physics isn't opposed to materialism either, that's a misunderstanding. I have heard of Max Planck. I'm not saying you're stupid, only incorrect, and your level of education doesn't make you any more correct. I recommend a book called "Quantum Gods" by Victor Stenger.

http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/vstenger/dice.html

The odds of our universe coming into being with the exact parameters it has is exactly 1. There is a strict mathematical calculation for this, I'm not just making it up.

I wrote that message quickly on my cellular phone, so I quickly added that. The fine tuning argument is extraordinary strong because the fundamental forces of physics have been so well tailored that if they were changed by only a hairs breath, none of us would be here. It has been calculated that if the dark energy/dark matter/ordinary matter mix has been changed by only 1 in 10^10^123, no stars or galaxies would exist. Let alone us, of course.

On Death
Kahlil Gibran

"You would know the secret of death.
But how shall you find it unless you seek it in the heart of life?
The owl whose night-bound eyes are blind unto the day cannot unveil the mystery of light.
If you would indeed behold the spirit of death, open your heart wide unto the body of life.
For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one.


In the depth of your hopes and desires lies your silent knowledge of the beyond;
And like seeds dreaming beneath the snow your heart dreams of spring.
Trust the dreams, for in them is hidden the gate to eternity.
Your fear of death is but the trembling of the shepherd when he stands before the king whose hand is to be laid upon him in honour.
Is the shepherd not joyful beneath his trembling, that he shall wear the mark of the king?
Yet is he not more mindful of his trembling?


For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?
And what is it to cease breathing, but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?


Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.
And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb.
And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance."

Well of course the odds of a universe like our would appear is exactly close to one if you ignore the cosmological constant, the gravitational constant, and two of the fundamental forces, while giving value only to worthless parameters like length of day or year! Did you read the source code of MonkeyGod that conveniently excludes these crucial parameters! Appeal to authority right there!

If musicians and actors attribute their talent to God or spirits, that means they are unaware of how the mind works or they are already religious answering according to what they believe...

"Intelligent Design advocates have not overlooked the cosmological constant problem (Ross 1998). Once again they claim to see the hand of God in fine-tuning the cosmological constant to ensure that human life, as we know it, can exist. However, recent theoretical work has offered a non-divine solution to the cosmological constant problem.

Theoretical physicists have proposed models in which the dark energy is not identified with the energy of curved space-time but rather a dynamical, material energy field called quintessence. In these models, the cosmological constant is exactly 0, as suggested by a symmetry principle called supersymmetry. Since 0 multiplied by 10120 is still 0, we have no cosmological constant problem in this case. The energy density of quintessence is not constant but evolves along with the other matter/energy fields of the universe. Unlike the cosmological constant, quintessence energy density need not be fine-tuned.

While quintessence may not turn out to provide the correct explanation for the cosmological constant problem, it demonstrates, if nothing else, that science is always hard at work trying to solve its puzzles within a materialistic framework. The assertion that God can be seen by virtue of his acts of cosmological fine-tuning, like intelligent design and earlier versions of the argument from design, is nothing more than another variation on the disreputable God-of-the-gaps argument. These rely only on the faint hope that scientists will never be able to find a natural explanation for one or more of the puzzles and therefore will have to insert God as the explanation. As long as science can provide plausible scenarios for a fully material universe, even if those scenarios cannot be currently tested they are sufficient to refute the God of the gaps."
Victor Stenger

I would really, really love it if there were a God- a personal one who cared deeply about every individual.

However, I don't believe that there is. When I see all the suffering people are forced to go through- refugees, cancer patients, people who don't recover from mental illness- it seems more comforting to believe in a ruthless universe where nothing has any greater meaning. I don't want to believe that there is any higher purpose to sickness or evil or suffering- I think it is healthier to just accept these things as being awful. If there is a God who oversees all of this and does nothing about it ("then why call it God?" etc.) then I don't want to believe in it.

That said, I don't think there should necessarily be any connection between the existence of a God and the necessity of acknowledging its existence.

*yawn* Wait, what is this? Oh, another long refuted Vic Stenger proposition that fails to account for the DE/OM mix balance as well as the initial entropy value. Stenger is indeed the go to guy for dealing with me, when you cannot account for the weight of the parameters he is trying to downplay, isn't he? Appeal to authority again.

You presume a fatal flaw. If we live in a multiverse as many physicists believe, we simply exist in one where the constants are tuned to allow our form of life to exist. It would be impossible to live in any other. That said, the constant problem becomes meaningless...

Not true, more than half of my physics faculty know that the multiverse theorem is a load of CRAP. The only ones who have any real faith in the multiverse are string theory nutjobs and scifi fanboys.