Harbal wrote: ↑Mon Jan 08, 2024 6:08 pm
I don't think it makes any difference whether God exists or not.
Then you're the only person who thinks so.
It's pretty clear it's the consideration that makes the most difference in the world possible.
To explain God, we need science. Starting out with the assumption of God, and what God is, will lead us nowhere.
How ironic. Historically, it's actually the opposite: if we had had no conception of God, we would never have had any science either.
It's science that's the derivative, and Theism that's the source, actually.
Want proof? Ask yourself this: there are billions of very smart people in places like India, China, Subsaharan Africa, aboriginal North America...and so on. Why, then, did science appear in the West, and nowhere else?
Answer: a certain conception of God has to exist in a society before one can even conceive of natural laws, or of a systematic and rational method to predict them. One has to believe in a lawgiving kind of God, a rational God, a God of order and sequence...and then one has to have motive to discover His doings through the examination of creation. That's why the discoverer of the scientific method itself was a devout Christian, Francis Bacon. Check it out.
This, by the way, is not my own insight. It's known as "Whitehead's Thesis," invented by the philosopher of science, Alfred North Whitehead,"
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/whitehead/. He was also a clergyman.
IC wrote:Harbal wrote:No, I don't get it...
Look at the above statement. Kind of obvious, wouldn't you think? A ruby in a pile of rocks is still a ruby. And the rocks are still rocks.
But your assumption that we are a ruby, and the rest of the stuff in the universe is just rocks, is what I think is called begging the question.
I'm simply pointing out the illogic in your own argument. You said that the abundance of the "stuff" means we should be skeptical that we have any value; I pointed out that that's not logical. I didn't try to argue we were a "ruby," just that you can't know we AREN'T one by trying to deduce it from the size of the universe.
So no, I didn't beg any question. I didn't, in fact, make any argument of the kind. I just pointed out that
yours didn't work.
We know we are a miniscule spec in the universe, that is not a matter of dispute, but we by no means know if there is anything special about us that sets us apart from the infinitely massive quantity of other stuff that we just seem to be part of.
This was your argument...plus one more step...that you seem to think that repeatedly speaking about the amount of 'stuff' that apparently
doesn't count should also
count against any possiblilty of our specialness.
And it doesn't. That's the only point worth making from that.