Christianity

[uwot]

The reason that I didn't really bother to read the entire book *the Moon one - was that prior to purchase, I read a summary - relating to all the anomalies of this moon - the largest moon in the Solar System btw.

Relative to its planet. Ganymede, Callisto and Io, which orbit Jupiter, and Titan that swings around Saturn are all bigger than our moon, but they are all dwarfed by their hosts.

[attofishpi]

The reason that I didn't really bother to read the entire book *the Moon one - was that prior to purchase, I read a summary - relating to all the anomalies of this moon - the largest moon in the Solar System btw.

Relative to its planet. Ganymede, Callisto and Io, which orbit Jupiter, and Titan that swings around Saturn are all bigger than our moon, but they are all dwarfed by their hosts.

Thanks Will, I have to admit I was really surprised a few weeks ago when it was stated that it is the largest moon in the Solar System, without the relative to the host planet part, and to he honest I think it was on Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman narrating - maybe a Hells Angel on a Harley flew by house at the crucial commentary - f'ing hate that! So many morons on the planet that like to disturb the peace!

[Belinda]

No society was ever primitive.

You've been conditioned by the liberal set to believe that. But you should travel more. You'd change your mind.

Live for a week in a village in the hills of Central America or the out in the wilds of Canada (I have, by the way). And tell me afterward that nothing is "primitive." You'll see.

Yes. Primitive by certain standards. The word 'primitive' is evaluative and explains nothing except your bias .
However if you were to be explicit and as objective as possible about the village or the wild and voice an opinion as to how you'd improve the situation you would not need to condemn anything as 'primitive'.

[seeds]

I don't agree that the universe exhibits features of design. I don't see design, and presume there was no designer.

That's good news to me, because it demonstrates that my design work is accomplishing precisely what it was designed to do. And that's to make you believe that your world wasn't designed.

- signed, "you know who" (still in character from your "role playing" thread).
_______

[Immanuel Can]

Well, B. and others have been arguing that they do, but they think there's still no designer. And oddly enough, even as Atheistic a person as Dawkins thinks the universe at least *looks* designed. He insists we have to believe it isn't that, but he admits that it looks that way.

I assumed we were specifically talking about consciously intentioned design, rather than things like natural selection, as in the case of living organisms.

Natural selection would be part of the problem, of course, but far from the totality of it. The big question is why an "harmonious" or "law-like" regularities, the kinds of things science absolutely depends upon finding, exist in a system that is presumed by secularists to have happened by way of sheer accident.

That shouldn't happen. Yet it has. That fact needs some explanation.

Science depends on patterns, regularities, harmonies, laws, consistencies and so forth. Absent them, science itself would simply be impossible. So science actually begins with the belief that we can expect and analyze such regularities.

I didn't say there were no laws, patterns and regularities in nature, of course there are.

Yes.

But HOW are there any such? As I say, we should not at all expect that. And this is what people mean when they point to "the fine tuning of the universe." They mean that if things like the gravitational forces, the strong force in the atom, or the weak force, or any of the other such physical laws failed to hit within an extremely tiny range of possibility, then not just no Earth would exist, but no planets, no solar systems, and no universe at all. So if somebody says "That happened by chance," it's immeasurably less plausible than if a person were to walk into a casino to play roulette and hit on "6" ten times in a row. The normal explanation would be, "The wheel has been manipulated by somebody." The weird explanation would be, "That just happened by chance."

Yes, you are quite right, there are many small, simple, all-in-one-piece items that it would be almost impossible to identify the purpose of, unless you had some specialist knowledge to start with. Such items are quite often just components of more complicated things. I was thinking of the more complicated things, like cars, or pianos,or universes.

Right. But if you can detect the presence of design in something that is made of only four or five pieces, is it more or less easy to detect it in a more complex one? I would think you'd find it possible, maybe, to suppose that a whip finisher could have happened by accident...but a wristwatch? A car? A universe? The immeasurably greater complexity of the latter, if it shows the same features of specification, irreducible complexity, role functions, and so on, would surely lead us to be more convinced of its designed nature...not less so.

You'd have to ask God about that. It's above my pay grade to know such things. But Genesis says God spoke the universe into existence. The details, you'll have to ask Him for.

I'm a little surprised that you refer to Genesis. The first few pages of Genesis are the only bit of the Bible I have actually read for myself, and if I were trying to make an argument that God created the world, I would certainly not draw attention to what it says in Genesis. I would also hope that whoever I was trying to convince didn't mention it, either.

On the other hand, I'm not even slightly abashed. One has to think beyond the immediate; but when one does, some surprising truths emerge.

The fundamental feature of the design of the universe is information. DNA, for example, is an extremely complex information-code, specifying the entire design of your body. Or the whole field of physics, that mathematics can describe every sort of motion and action in the universe (at least, we believe so, in principle) is most remarkable, and depends on this information-stability in the universe. Now, when the book of Genesis says that God "spoke" things into existence, it is really pointing to this fundamental fact...the orderliness, the deliberateness, the purposefulness of the design of things. God's "logos," or "logic," or "rationality" if you like, in creating the sort of place in which we live.

That's hardly a claim of which one should be ashamed. It's most remarkable that the Bible notes it. It took us, mere humans, millennia to make the discovery that God was right about that all along, and that we could do a thing called "science" on the universe He created. That's a great achievement for us...but we're late to the game, compared to Genesis.

[Immanuel Can]

No society was ever primitive.

You've been conditioned by the liberal set to believe that. But you should travel more. You'd change your mind.

Live for a week in a village in the hills of Central America or the out in the wilds of Canada (I have, by the way). And tell me afterward that nothing is "primitive." You'll see.

Yes. Primitive by certain standards.

No, really absolutely so. And by that, I mean that if you compare their, say, water or sanitation systems to modern ones, you won't have a single doubt which is "primitive" and which is "modern."

However if you were to be explicit and as objective as possible about the village or the wild and voice an opinion as to how you'd improve the situation you would not need to condemn anything as 'primitive'.

I didn't give them my opinion. Instead, we helped them improve their water system. But it was only because I could see how horribly "primitive" and awful it is for villagers to be drinking out of a ditch full of frogs that we could see help was needed.

[FlashDangerpants]

I don't agree that the universe exhibits features of design. I don't see design, and presume there was no designer.

That's good news to me, because it demonstrates that my design work is accomplishing precisely what it was designed to do. And that's to make you believe that your world wasn't designed.

- signed, "you know who" (still in character from your "role playing" thread).
_______

Fair piont. However if the infallible God dude put so much effort into making his handiwork indistinguishable from the output of an impersonal and undirected force such as evolution, then it must be an act both of extreme vanity and indeed sacrilege, to attempt to outwit that God and prove it was him that did it not evolution. Thus Harbal gets sainthood, while IC gets fried in the vile depths of heck.

[Harbal]

Natural selection would be part of the problem, of course, but far from the totality of it. The big question is why an "harmonious" or "law-like" regularities, the kinds of things science absolutely depends upon finding, exist in a system that is presumed by secularists to have happened by way of sheer accident.

That shouldn't happen. Yet it has. That fact needs some explanation.

Okay, give me a few examples of things that shouldn't happen, and I'll have a go at explaining them.

But HOW are there any such? As I say, we should not at all expect that. And this is what people mean when they point to "the fine tuning of the universe." They mean that if things like the gravitational forces, the strong force in the atom, or the weak force, or any of the other such physical laws failed to hit within an extremely tiny range of possibility, then not just no Earth would exist, but no planets, no solar systems, and no universe at all.

If all the forces you mention were slightly different, or even very different, something different would have happened. It is ridiculous to say that it had to be exactly as it is, or nothing could have been possible. Besides, a God that can just think things into existence and make them function as he wishes wouldn't need to bother with things like the laws of physics.

Right. But if you can detect the presence of design in something that is made of only four or five pieces, is it more or less easy to detect it in a more complex one? I would think you'd find it possible, maybe, to suppose that a whip finisher could have happened by accident...but a wristwatch? A car? A universe? The immeasurably greater complexity of the latter, if it shows the same features of specification, irreducible complexity, role functions, and so on, would surely lead us to be more convinced of its designed nature...not less so.

Perhaps if you could say what the role, or function, of the universe is, it might be easier to think it was designed.

The fundamental feature of the design of the universe is information. DNA, for example, is an extremely complex information-code, specifying the entire design of your body. Or the whole field of physics, that mathematics can describe every sort of motion and action in the universe (at least, we believe so, in principle) is most remarkable, and depends on this information-stability in the universe. Now, when the book of Genesis says that God "spoke" things into existence, it is really pointing to this fundamental fact...the orderliness, the deliberateness, the purposefulness of the design of things. God's "logos," or "logic," or "rationality" if you like, in creating the sort of place in which we live.

But God didn't bother with DNA, or mathematics; he just used his will to create stuff. He didn't develop Adam by creating DNA and just letting it get on with its job. In fact, everything came ready made; the Sun, the Earth; absolutely everything. Science doesn't agree with that. Science describes how the objects that populate the universe came to be formed. You can't have it both ways. You can't admit science when it seems to support your view, but dismiss it, or misrepresent it, when it doesn't.

That's hardly a claim of which one should be ashamed. It's most remarkable that the Bible notes it. It took us, mere humans, millennia to make the discovery that God was right about that all along, and that we could do a thing called "science" on the universe He created. That's a great achievement for us...but we're late to the game, compared to Genesis.

Genesis is total mythology, and contains absolutely nothing that deserves to be taken seriously.

Actually, I am denying the idea of design a bit more vigorously than I should be. The suggestion that some sort of intelligence put the mechanisms in place to enable the universe to come into existence, and for life to develop, is not something I would dismiss out of hand, although it is certainly not an idea I lean towards, but it is very clear that none of it started out fully formed, and there is certainly nothing in the Bible that relates to it. Science doesn't have the full picture yet, but we know the basics of how primitive life emerged out of a chemical cocktail billions of years ago, and very slowly developed into life as we see it today. We also know how stars, including our Sun, are formed, and it definitely isn't by someone saying, "let there be light".

Honestly, IC, you would be able to put forward a far better argument for God if you were to ditch the Bible; it just undermines you at every turn.

[seeds]

I don't agree that the universe exhibits features of design. I don't see design, and presume there was no designer.

That's good news to me, because it demonstrates that my design work is accomplishing precisely what it was designed to do. And that's to make you believe that your world wasn't designed.

- signed, "you know who" (still in character from your "role playing" thread).
_______

Fair piont. However if the infallible God dude put so much effort into making his handiwork indistinguishable from the output of an impersonal and undirected force such as evolution, then it must be an act both of extreme vanity and indeed sacrilege, to attempt to outwit that God and prove it was him that did it not evolution. Thus Harbal gets sainthood, while IC gets fried in the vile depths of heck.

Nah, as an integral part of the design, tension (and balance) between the two beliefs must be maintained.

Furthermore, they both get the booby prize for not realizing that they are the equivalent of two amoebas in a petri dish, haggling over how they (and the dish) came into existence.
_______

[Harbal]

Furthermore, they both get the booby prize for not realizing that they are the equivalent of two amoebas in a petri dish, haggling over how they (and the dish) came into existence.

I'm not disputing the booby prize, but I was actually haggling over how it didn't come into existence. In truth, I don't know how we, the universe, and the amoeba came to be here; just like IC doesn't know, and you don't know.

[seeds]

Furthermore, they both get the booby prize for not realizing that they are the equivalent of two amoebas in a petri dish, haggling over how they (and the dish) came into existence.

I'm not disputing the booby prize, but I was actually haggling over how it didn't come into existence. In truth, I don't know how we, the universe, and the amoeba came to be here; just like IC doesn't know, and you don't know.

Well, from what I can tell, all of our haggling seems to be over whether or not the phenomenal features of the universe are the result of "chance," (or) purposeful "design."

Furthermore, what do you mean by saying that you are actually haggling over...

"...how it didn't come into existence..."

...
_______

[Immanuel Can]

Natural selection would be part of the problem, of course, but far from the totality of it. The big question is why an "harmonious" or "law-like" regularities, the kinds of things science absolutely depends upon finding, exist in a system that is presumed by secularists to have happened by way of sheer accident.

That shouldn't happen. Yet it has. That fact needs some explanation.

Okay, give me a few examples of things that shouldn't happen, and I'll have a go at explaining them.

You misunderstand. What should not happen is the whole system being governed by "laws" or "regularities." Accidents only produce disorder, not order.

And you can perform all the experiments you like in order to show it. For example, throw a bunch of papers up in the air until they spell out the first sentence of the Magna Carta. See how long it takes for chaos to produce order.

But HOW are there any such? As I say, we should not at all expect that. And this is what people mean when they point to "the fine tuning of the universe." They mean that if things like the gravitational forces, the strong force in the atom, or the weak force, or any of the other such physical laws failed to hit within an extremely tiny range of possibility, then not just no Earth would exist, but no planets, no solar systems, and no universe at all.

If all the forces you mention were slightly different, or even very different, something different would have happened.[/quote]
Yes: there would be no universe at all, in all cases. You can't trade off things like the atomic forces, and still even have matter existing.

This will make the argument here clear: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EE76nwimuT0 (It's only 6 minutes.)

Right. But if you can detect the presence of design in something that is made of only four or five pieces, is it more or less easy to detect it in a more complex one? I would think you'd find it possible, maybe, to suppose that a whip finisher could have happened by accident...but a wristwatch? A car? A universe? The immeasurably greater complexity of the latter, if it shows the same features of specification, irreducible complexity, role functions, and so on, would surely lead us to be more convinced of its designed nature...not less so.

Perhaps if you could say what the role, or function, of the universe is, it might be easier to think it was designed.

No doubt that would be an additional strong reason. But even if we didn't know that (and, of course, Christians think we DO know that) the other features of design would still be enough. Remember the whip finisher?

But God didn't bother with DNA, or mathematics;

That's not what Genesis says. It says He used "the logos," the Word, from which we get our words for "logic" and "intentional speech" and "reasons."

Science doesn't agree with that.

Evolutionism doesn't. And with regard to most of the universe, it doesn't really matter. If God used instant creation or creation by way of gradualism, the Bible doesn't tell us, and it makes no difference at all either way.

But with regard to man, in specific, it does: that was a separate, deliberate creation. On that much, Genesis is definitive. Gradualism, if proved in the case of mankind, would be a serious theological problem. However, since the death of the ridiculous and demonstrably dishonest monkey-to-man theory, there's been no reason to hold to gradualism in the case of human beings.

Genesis is total mythology, and contains absolutely nothing that deserves to be taken seriously.

You'll find the case is otherwise. It's not for nothing that this book that you dismiss so quickly has occupied some of the world's greatest minds for millennia. Even today, you can watch somebody like Dr. Jordan Peterson taking very seriously this same narrative you've decided simply to dismiss...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdrLQ7DpiWs

But you're right...you're denying rather quickly, and maybe "more vigorously" than you might, had you some time to process Genesis. So I receive the former as intended more as a rhetorical gesture than as a deliberated claim. It sure would be convenient if the Biblical narrative could be disregarded so easily, but it cannot.

Actually, I am denying the idea of design a bit more vigorously than I should be. The suggestion that some sort of intelligence put the mechanisms in place to enable the universe to come into existence, and for life to develop, is not something I would dismiss out of hand, although it is certainly not an idea I lean towards, but it is very clear that none of it started out fully formed,

How? How is it "clear" that mankind was not created "fully formed"? Have you discovered a new theory of anthropogenesis? I have to say, I remain skeptical. But I'll hear it, if you offer it.

[Harbal]

Furthermore, what do you mean by saying that you are actually haggling over...

"...how it didn't come into existence..."

I don't really mean anything by "haggling". You introduced that word, and I just picked it up, it's not a word I would have chosen myself. I was expressing my opinion that there is nothing about the universe that justifies arriving at the conclusion that it was consciously, or intentionally, designed, and also that whether it was or wasn't designed, there is nothing in the Bible that is able to shed any light on the matter.

Now then, do I get another booby prize for that?

[Harbal]

How? How is it "clear" that mankind was not created "fully formed"? Have you discovered a new theory of anthropogenesis? I have to say, I remain skeptical. But I'll hear it, if you offer it.

Come on, I bet the majority of Christians don't take all of the Bible literally, and certainly not Genesis. It's too ridiculous to even enter into a converstation about it.

[uwot]

...in the irony void between Mr Can's ears:

...The big question is why an "harmonious" or "law-like" regularities, the kinds of things science absolutely depends upon finding, exist in a system that is presumed by secularists to have happened by way of sheer accident.

That shouldn't happen. Yet it has. That fact needs some explanation.

Here's the thing: Mr Can is arguing that nature can only be predictable because his god made it so. He also claims that nature is so regular that only an act of god can produce a miracle that violates that regularity. Mr Can's game is heads I win, tails you lose.