pack_bryan is going to blow this thread up with tons of irrefutable evidence that there is a god.

We'll wait patiently for it.

12/14/2011 4:48:38 PM

12/14/2011 4:50:00 PM

Exactly.

[crickets]

12/14/2011 4:51:23 PM

There's a joke about a burning forum post in here somewhere.

12/14/2011 6:45:30 PM

http://www.realitysandwich.com/node/93685

we will know more when 2012 finally gets here

12/14/2011 6:59:37 PM

god

or

God?

12/14/2011 7:10:07 PM

Still waiting on some evidence.

12/14/2011 7:24:36 PM

I'd like to pre-emptively take all evidence he presents and use it to bolster my case that there is an invisible unicorn living at the heart of Jupiter who controls the universe through psychokinesis

12/15/2011 10:36:10 AM

[crickets]

12/21/2011 3:32:55 PM

YOU MEAN NO ONE HAS PROVIDED SATISFACTORY PROOF YET?

YOU DON'T FUCKING SAY!

12/21/2011 3:38:13 PM

Quote :

"I'd like to pre-emptively take all evidence he presents and use it to bolster my case that there is an invisible unicorn living at the heart of Jupiter who controls the universe through psychokinesis"

It's no use man. They won't believe until they're pierced by his psychic horn.

12/21/2011 3:39:10 PM

I am atheist, but the sheer fact that we exist points to some sort of creative (read: initiatory) force.

Is it conscious and were we created in its image? Very unlikely.

Are there forces in this universe that we have yet to explain or discover? Absolutely.

[Edited on December 21, 2011 at 3:51 PM. Reason : ;]

[Edited on December 21, 2011 at 4:13 PM. Reason : moar words]

12/21/2011 3:51:00 PM

^this

12/21/2011 3:59:19 PM

Quote :

"I am atheist, but the sheer fact that we exist points to some sort of creative force."

Why? If there is a creative force, what created that creative force?

The problem is our understanding of time and space is limited to how our human brain perceives as time and space. The concept of infinity eludes us.

Quote :

"Are there forces in this universe that we have yet to explain or discover? Absolutely."

[Edited on December 21, 2011 at 4:03 PM. Reason : .]

12/21/2011 4:02:28 PM

Quote :

"I am atheist, but the sheer fact that we exist points to some sort of creative force. Is it conscious and were we created in its image? Very unlikely."

Ugh. There's so much baggage with a word like creative and such language leads to a lot of nonsensical thinking.

Nuclear fusion is a creative force. But nuclear fusion doesn't write poetry or paint landscapes.

12/21/2011 4:06:22 PM

^^^^ huh?

Describing a force as "creative" pretty much implies that the force is either conscious or supernatural.

12/21/2011 4:06:28 PM

I meant creative as in everything that exists came from somewhere, not in the artistic sense.

i.e. The force that initiated the big bang was creative in that it began all this. Not that it is artistic, conscious or discriminating.

[Edited on December 21, 2011 at 4:13 PM. Reason : ;]

12/21/2011 4:12:56 PM

Quote :

"Why? If there is a creative force, what created that creative force?"

The fact that "our" god has its own god would not invalidate the observation that we have a god.

Plus, the other approach you can tread, that there was nothing before the big bang (putting aside the likely need to a revised definition of "before" and "time") will be fruitless. The meaningful complexity and suitability of this universe for life clearly leads to anthropic arguments, if nothing else. Generally though, the proposition that there was nothing before the big bang, or that there are not other great truths beyond what we know now is as absurd as the idea of the common religious idea of God.

12/21/2011 5:08:34 PM

Quote :

"The fact that "our" god has its own god would not invalidate the observation that we have a god."

No, but it makes the statement MatJMM2 made even more fruitless, and further illustrates my point that we can not comprehend infinity.

[Edited on December 21, 2011 at 5:25 PM. Reason : .]

12/21/2011 5:24:36 PM

it's turtles all the way down

12/21/2011 5:28:34 PM

Quote :

"The meaningful complexity and suitability of this universe for life clearly leads to anthropic arguments, if nothing else."

This is absolutely ridiculous. 99.9999999999999% of the known universe is utterly unsuitable for any form of life.

12/21/2011 6:10:09 PM

Quote :

"No, but it makes the statement MatJMM2 made even more fruitless, and further illustrates my point that we can not comprehend infinity."

I think you may be misinterpreting me.

I agree and I'm basically making the same point that universe is unfathomable.

With that in mind, the sheer fact of our existence and the unfathomably of the scale the universe allows us to glimpse at forces/dimensions that we may never completely understand or become aware of.

I contend that there are forces around us that we do not even know exist. Our brains only have a certain capacity to be aware of different types of "data" or senses.

Is this evidence of a deity? Absolutely not. But it does make you wonder in awe of our vast ignorance of the universe.

12/21/2011 9:11:54 PM

Quote :

"This is absolutely ridiculous. 99.9999999999999% of the known universe is utterly unsuitable for any form of life."

The the majority of random combinations of physical laws are 100% unsuitable for life, much more unsuitable for abiogensis. Humans, for one, probably haven't ever described a single formal (mathematical) system suitable for life.

Plus, you're wrong anyway. Any given random point inside or outside our solar system is inhospitable to terrestrial life as we know it but completely suitable for an advanced space-faring race.

Quote :

"No, but it makes the statement MatJMM2 made even more fruitless, and further illustrates my point that we can not comprehend infinity."

MatJMM2:

Quote :

"I am atheist, but the sheer fact that we exist points to some sort of creative (read: initiatory) force."

Ok.

Still, he used the word "force", which is about as undefined as you can get. Although, I suppose I should point out that the entire thread is pointless because we only have slightly less vague notions of what "god" is.

12/21/2011 10:07:14 PM

My point was that an "initiatory" force may not be necessary. It's just the only thing that makes sense to us.

12/21/2011 10:19:01 PM

Quote :

"The the majority of random combinations of physical laws are 100% unsuitable for life, much more unsuitable for abiogensis."

People say this all the time, but I don't see any reason to believe it's necessarily true. We have a very narrow concept of what constitutes life and somehow we know exactly what the universe looks like with different physical laws and exactly how suitable it is for life?

Quote :

"Plus, you're wrong anyway. Any given random point inside or outside our solar system is inhospitable to terrestrial life as we know it but completely suitable for an advanced space-faring race."

That's kind of a silly and pedantic point. Of course when you replace a cold, barren, hostile environment with your own environment that has been precision engineered to support life.... surprise!, it supports life.

12/21/2011 10:29:46 PM

Stuff is really complex and I don't fully understand it, therefore God.

Really?

12/22/2011 9:10:25 AM

God must be really complex and hard to understand to, thus...?

12/22/2011 9:54:07 AM

Quote :

"My point was that an "initiatory" force may not be necessary. It's just the only thing that makes sense to us."

So many words with no clear meaning!

Quote :

"People say this all the time, but I don't see any reason to believe it's necessarily true. We have a very narrow concept of what constitutes life and somehow we know exactly what the universe looks like with different physical laws and exactly how suitable it is for life?"

Atoms are pretty fucking awesome, I have to say.

Quote :

"People say this all the time, but I don't see any reason to believe it's necessarily true. We have a very narrow concept of what constitutes life and somehow we know exactly what the universe looks like with different physical laws and exactly how suitable it is for life?"

Again, such an advanced, engineered civilization will still be made up with atoms. Sci-fi writers often like to speculate that we will use some new kind of material not made up of a lattice of atoms, and they're wrong.

The properties of fermions, electrons in particular, do most of the work to create "normal" matter, but you have to have the small, nucleus that is interacting mostly only through the electric force with atoms. A small tweak will destroy this. We will only have Hydrogen, for instance. But it's pretty much a sure thing that even a proton evolving was non-trivial.

Now, I think your line of thought does lead to something, eventually. I think that diversity in the building blocks of nature is a good way to get to life through a random walk. It's quite possible that you can make a universe that is more diverse than ours, although it would take great effort to fine tune it all correctly. For instance, why stop at 92 elements? The universe doesn't have to. But if you accept the proposition that our universe evolved through the anthropic principle and that we are here due to an abiogensis, then the set of properties for our universe is likely only on the boundary of the set of life-friendly universes. Why? Because if the universe was any more hospitable to life, we would be surrounded by life by now, instead of being an apparent anomaly.

Of course this begs many other questions and doesn't resolve the Fermi Paradox. But maybe it will never be resolved.

12/22/2011 10:58:35 AM

Quote :

""I am atheist, but the sheer fact that we exist points to some sort of creative (read: initiatory) force.""

This answers nothing.

If something exists, there must be a creative force.

Then, since that creative force exists, there must also be a creative force of that creative force.

And it recurses infinitely after that.

This is what confuses me most about religious folks. They can't fathom that something like a universe or multiverse or whatever is timeless, infinite and creatorless and all-permeating...but effortlessly assign all those qualities to God without a second thought. They're entirely able to believe in something fitting those qualities, but only if that something has a beard and sits on a cloud and talks to us. He really is just a repository for all our doubts and questions about the universe and a respite from all the loneliness and alienation that uncertainty otherwise gives us.

[Edited on December 22, 2011 at 11:24 AM. Reason : .]

12/22/2011 11:23:16 AM

I'm not entirely certain I agree with the "if something exists then it must have been created" premise.

It poorly defines "exists." Take myself, for instance. None of the atoms in me were "created" when I was conceived, they are just reconfigurations of existing atoms. In fact, all regular matter and energy are not created by any process really.

The notion of a "something" implies a framework of creation itself but it fails to address the fact that what that "something" is made out of was already around. The rock that makes up a mountain for instance is just part of the Earth's crust that previously wasn't above sea level. Was that mountain "created" by tectonic shifting in the sense that we are suggesting that the Universe must have been "created"? I don't think so.

I think the premise is flawed.

12/22/2011 1:46:13 PM

2nd Law of Thermodynamics

System becomes less and less organized over time

Therefore there's a 100% chance primordial soup mixes, energized by lightning, to form 10^130 combinations of amino acids needed to form proteins, which is only the beginning of the ingredients needed to start thinking about organizing life by pure chemical 'chance'

Although I'd love to see it reproduced in a lab one day. Biogenesis that is.



BTW this thread was a troll thread with the underpinning logic that I was some Trinity Baptist church attending Christian like Barack Obama or something. LOL

12/22/2011 2:11:42 PM

Quote :

"System becomes less and less organized over time Therefore there's a 100% chance primordial soup mixes, energized by lightning, to form 10^130 combinations of amino acids needed to form proteins, which is only the beginning of the ingredients needed to start thinking about organizing life by pure chemical 'chance'"

Thermodynamics applied to chemical kinetics says that the universe minimizes the Gibbs free energy. This does not imply the things you suggest it does.

12/22/2011 2:35:49 PM

I'm not certain that pack_bryan was seriously invoking the 2nd law of Thermodynamics or just trying to be ironic since it's ordinarily invoked to disprove the possibility of abiogenesis.

Either way it's stupid because it doesn't apply to the conditions on Earth or the Universe in general. It's a law of heat transfer in closed systems and has absolutely nothing to do with abiogenesis. It neither confirms or helps to disprove abiogenesis.

Quote :

"BTW this thread was a troll thread with the underpinning logic that I was some Trinity Baptist church attending Christian like Barack Obama or something. LOL"

It's still an interesting conversation, in my opinion. And one that theists should have more regularly.

[Edited on December 22, 2011 at 3:15 PM. Reason : .]

12/22/2011 3:13:36 PM

^but they won't have it more regularly because it is hard to justify a god by using reason or logic. The acceptance of a deity requires faith which is a rejection of fact.

12/22/2011 3:24:08 PM

That's the point.

12/22/2011 4:03:56 PM

Quote :

"The acceptance of a deity"

Again, until you better define what you mean by such statements this is all just intellectual masturbation.

12/22/2011 4:06:40 PM

Since he said it requires faith I read it as "acceptance of a potentially powerful being that has a discernible effect on reality but is not supported by evidence and may in fact be contradicted by evidence."

Specific enough? If you're talking about Spinoza's god or some "unmoved mover" fine, but clearly pdrankin was referring to theistic rather than deistic belief.

[Edited on December 22, 2011 at 4:22 PM. Reason : clarification]

12/22/2011 4:21:32 PM

Quote :

"acceptance of a potentially powerful being that has a discernible effect on reality but is not supported by evidence and may in fact be contradicted by evidence"

Provided the effect on reality is selective, then it can't ever be falsified, right? That's one of those "not even wrong" propositions.

Say someone is professing belief in a deity that causes absurd and supernatural things to happen in our world, like turning water into wine. There are several levels:

1. They presume that God interferes but don't know when/where specifically
2. They accept authority and correctness of claims of such intervention in the past
3. They believe they are eyewitness to direct intervention from God in our reality

In many ways, #1 is indistinguishable from store-brand agnosticism. Catholics and Christians are mostly #2. Born again Christians are basically #3, as are any new age spiritual people. Nonetheless, you can go any one of these routes and be unfalsifiable.

[Edited on December 22, 2011 at 5:03 PM. Reason : ]

12/22/2011 5:01:38 PM