If not God, then what?

[Howedar]

I personally subscribe to the "God the clockmaker" theory. God set the universe into motion with rules of science to govern it, then sat back and watched, occasionally intervening on a small scale.

[Queeb Salaron]

Why God "Stopped" performing miracles? I think the phrase you're looking for is "why there are no miracles".

I was trying to give Christians the benefit of the doubt...

Even if there were a huge volume of information not presently explainable by science and logic, there would be no reason to leap to the conclusion that some sentient being is responsible for it.

You have to remember that Christianity is unlike many religions in that it wasn't created to explain why things are the way they are, but rather to establish some kind of order for the afterlife, and a moral code for the present life. The stories about the saints hold SOME truth to them (in that St. Patrick was a real person, but probably did not drive all the snakes from Ireland), and even THAT gives Christian Cult a bit more real-world validity than, say, Hinduism. But that's a little off-topic, isn't it?

We saw the Greeks and Romans try to explain natural phenomena by way of the gods. They used the gods as a sort of machina ex deus (pardon the pun) for the things they can't explain. Christianity, however, never touches these things, at least not often. They do not claim that all lightning is the fury of God manifest, but rather that in isolated incedents, God lashed out and blew up things and people that He deemed immoral. There really wasn't (near as I can tell) any referene to God making all natural things happen. They just do that on their own. So I don't think Christians really DO claim that there is a sentient being responsible for science. At least not the non-fundies.

[Crayz9000]

There really wasn't (near as I can tell) any referene to God making all natural things happen. They just do that on their own. So I don't think Christians really DO claim that there is a sentient being responsible for science. At least not the non-fundies.

Speaking of that viewpoint, the Orthodox Christian churches' position on science is typically a wait and see approach. Many Eastern Christians see no reason for the Church to be in conflict with science, although there are exceptions. But the important thing is that the church itself only really takes sides on morally related matters, such as cloning.

Not to say that the Orthodox Church is perfect. You can't take a church with traditions that dates back to ancient Isreal, dump it into modern times, and expect everything to mesh.

[Grand Moff Yenchin]

I believe in Tao, or, 'The Path'. It teaches about some universal law behind everything in the universe (something like the Force). People studying Tao don't worship anything, the so-called 'Gods' in Taoism are seen as people who have more knowledge of Tao than mortals. Tao doesn't care if you worship/study it or not, it just goes on.

[Frank Hipper]

I believe in Tao, or, 'The Path'. It teaches about some universal law behind everything in the universe (something like the Force). People studying Tao don't worship anything, the so-called 'Gods' in Taoism are seen as people who have more knowledge of Tao than mortals. Tao doesn't care if you worship/study it or not, it just goes on.

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao....

[Grand Moff Yenchin]

I believe in Tao, or, 'The Path'. It teaches about some universal law behind everything in the universe (something like the Force). People studying Tao don't worship anything, the so-called 'Gods' in Taoism are seen as people who have more knowledge of Tao than mortals. Tao doesn't care if you worship/study it or not, it just goes on.

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao....

My whole post is an AFAIK + some observations...

Edit: The -> My

[Peregrin Toker]

I believe that life somehow evolved over the aeons, and that no deities interfered in the evolution - mainly because they don't exist.

I neither believe that evolution was manipulated by extraterrestrial visitors -that would probably have left some quite significant marks on life today.

[Zoink]

It might be that the universe is not contingent, i.e. it's literally 'incapable' of not existing.

This is what I usually end up concluding when thinking about the subject.

WARNING RANDOM BABBLINGS:

If you consider the universe without considering "time" (because time is a part of the universe), then you can only really consider existence vs non-existence (ignore creation, destruction, these or only 'points' on an object that either exists or doesn't exist).

A complete lack of existence is contrary to what we observe, therefore "nothing" doesn't exist, so is the very concept of "nothing" simply an error in logic (ie. is as bizzare as considering everything exists?)?

Further, for there to be nothing, it would seem you need a rule or definition to say that nothing exists, a contradiction.

I then usually take this further, considering whether other universes "simply exist", and whether from our perspective if their existence has any implications for us (ie. is there a physical link), and if not, does this mean they actually exist (from our perspective).

About his time Occam usually phones up and tells me to stop thinking.

[Durandal]

No one knows. But saying that it must have come from a supreme being only prompts the question of where that being came from. It's just passing the buck onto an untestable proposition, which is hardly useful.

It might be that the universe is not contingent, i.e. it's literally 'incapable' of not existing. When I voiced this possibility, I've had some people tell me that they can easily imagine there not being a universe, though that's absurd--thinking or imagining a true 'nothing' is a contradiciton in terms.

I'm a big proponent of "thing are the way they are because that's the only way anything would work." Lots of intelligent design morons like to point out that the universe would be royally fucked up if the gravitational constant was different. Well of course it would be! That's why it is what it is! It wouldn't work otherwise!

[Kuroneko]

I'm a big proponent of "thing are the way they are because that's the only way anything would work." Lots of intelligent design morons like to point out that the universe would be royally fucked up if the gravitational constant was different. Well of course it would be! That's why it is what it is! It wouldn't work otherwise!

On the question "why is there something rather than nothing?", this is reasonable. In science it is unreasonable to go by anything we can't observe or falsify by observation, but this case is even stronger: the alternative, total non-existance, is unthinkable in the most literal sense of the word. Not because we wouldn't be here (no need for hubris), but because thinking of a true nothing is simply not thinking at all, a contradiction.

However, on the question "why is gravity the way it is?", it is much less clear. Certainly, a small change in the way it works, none of the familiar structures of the universe (including ourselves) would be here. What is unclear, however, is if it is truly the only way it could work, even if the universe the change produces is utter chaos. In the case of electromagnetism, one perhaps could make a case that the way it works is the only possible way it could work, because we actually know the underlying mechanism of electromagnetism (photon exchange) from Mr. Feynman's work. But in the case of gravitation, both Newton's and Einsten's theories are purely descriptive: "if you have mass, this happens". They tell us nothing on how it happens; it just does. Until this is understood (and it may be well understood in the future), I don't think there could be a reasonable argument on whether the gravitation we have as the only possible way it could work.

But whether or not physical laws "could" be different than they are now, it is actually not important to dealing with the "Argument from Design". The most reasonable of them that I've seen can be summarized like this: the probability of the universe being the way it is, some state U (just the fact that it exists, or complexity, or the presense of life--depends on the flavor of the argument; it doesn't really matter) is higher if there is a God than without. That is, Pr(U|God) > Pr(U|no God). The conclusion is that if God wasn't there, the Universe being the way it is would be very unlikely, so given U, the existence God is likely, i.e., Pr(God|U) > Pr(no God|U).

Anyone who has ever heard of conditional probabilities will immediately note that the conclusion follows only if Pr(God) ≥ Pr(no God), i.e. the independent probability of God is at least as much as that of no God, without applying the supposed evidence of the state of the universe. There is no reasonable justification for this hidden assumption; in fact, given numerous "possible" ways of the universe could have come into being, one could argue that the opposite is true.

[Darth Wong]

I'm a big proponent of "thing are the way they are because that's the only way anything would work." Lots of intelligent design morons like to point out that the universe would be royally fucked up if the gravitational constant was different. Well of course it would be! That's why it is what it is! It wouldn't work otherwise!

I prefer to use the "cart before the horse" rebuttal. Were our noses designed for holding eyeglases? No, the eyeglasses were designed to suit human noses. Similarly, the gravitational constant was not designed to permit life to exist in human form, but rather, life naturally formed around the laws of physics as they are.

[Grand Moff Yenchin]

I was wondering: creationist fundies like to argue about watches being made, is that some sort of misinterpretation from Franklin's theory?

[Darth Wong]

I was wondering: creationist fundies like to argue about watches being made, is that some sort of misinterpretation from Franklin's theory?

The watchmaker's argument is the notion that you can't throw a pile of gears together and get a working watch, so you can't throw a pile of amino acids together and get a working protein, much less a self-replicating protein chain (the theoretical precursor to RNA/DNA).

The problem with the analogy, of course, is that gears do not spontaneously react with one another. Amino acids do.

[Spyder]

There only needs to be enough chaos to get the life cycle started. Once it's off, evolution and the will to survive does the rest. You could say that we have inadvertadly designed ourselves.

[neoolong]

There only needs to be enough chaos to get the life cycle started. Once it's off, evolution and the will to survive does the rest. You could say that we have inadvertadly designed ourselves.

Just wait until we get Nietzscheans.

[Spyder]

Just wait until we get Nietzscheans.

Personally I consider consciously taking control of our development is merely part of the natural continuation of our species.

[Kuroneko]

I prefer to use the "cart before the horse" rebuttal. Were our noses designed for holding eyeglases? No, the eyeglasses were designed to suit human noses. Similarly, the gravitational constant was not designed to permit life to exist in human form, but rather, life naturally formed around the laws of physics as they are.

I like it. It's so straightforward and commonsensical, it's practically genius.

[Zoink]

On this topic, there's the anthropic principle:

Another example of reasoning that invokes observation selection effects is the attempt to provide a possible (not necessarily the only) explanation of why the universe appears fine-tuned for intelligent life in the sense that if any of various physical constants or initial conditions had been even very slightly different from what they are then life as we know it would not have existed. The idea behind this possible anthropic explanation is that the totality of spacetime might be very huge and may contain regions in which the values of fundamental constants and other parameters differ in many ways, perhaps according to some broad random distribution. If this is the case, then we should not be amazed to find that in our own region physical conditions appear “fine-tuned”. Owing to an obvious observation selection effect, only such fine-tuned regions are observed. Observing a fine-tuned region is precisely what we should expect if this theory is true, and so it can potentially account for available data in a neat and simple way, without having to assume that conditions just happened to turn out “right” through some immensely lucky—and arguably a priori extremely improbable—cosmic coincidence. (Some skeptics doubt that an explanation for the apparent fine-tuning of our universe is needed or is even meaningful. We examine the skeptical arguments in chapter 2 and consider the counterarguments offered by proponents of the anthropic explanation.)

http://www.anthropic-principle.com/primer.html

[Durandal]

Another example of reasoning that invokes observation selection effects is the attempt to provide a possible (not necessarily the only) explanation of why the universe appears fine-tuned for intelligent life in the sense that if any of various physical constants or initial conditions had been even very slightly different from what they are then life as we know it would not have existed. The idea behind this possible anthropic explanation is that the totality of spacetime might be very huge and may contain regions in which the values of fundamental constants and other parameters differ in many ways, perhaps according to some broad random distribution. If this is the case, then we should not be amazed to find that in our own region physical conditions appear ?fine-tuned?. Owing to an obvious observation selection effect, only such fine-tuned regions are observed. Observing a fine-tuned region is precisely what we should expect if this theory is true, and so it can potentially account for available data in a neat and simple way, without having to assume that conditions just happened to turn out ?right? through some immensely lucky?and arguably a priori extremely improbable?cosmic coincidence. (Some skeptics doubt that an explanation for the apparent fine-tuning of our universe is needed or is even meaningful. We examine the skeptical arguments in chapter 2 and consider the counterarguments offered by proponents of the anthropic explanation.)

Violation of Occam's Razor.

[salm]

<shrugs> [HomerSimpson]idonknow[/HomerSimpson]


Anymore, I'm not really sure I care. I don't buy into any of the established religions anymore for lots of reasons. I'm here, the Earth's here. I don't know why and don't see any likely hood that I'm going to find out why anytime soon. Without any other evidence otherwise I'm going with what I have available from the scientific community.

same here.