The "something can't come from nothing" argument

[Thief]

As usual the truth probably lies in between both camps. Evolution has occurred but God also had a role in genetic reality.

I might agree.

Evolution...Day Six.....Man as a species.
No names, no law, no garden,.....

Chapter Two is a story of manipulation.
An alteration is made.
That's not evolution.

Adam is a chosen son of God.
The garden event is a petri dish.
Eve is a clone. She had no navel.
Adam was given his twin sister for a bride.

 

[1robin]

I have to say I have always hated that particular flavour of tripe. Especially when it comes to the Evolution vs Creationism debate.

I have little interest in what you hate. The issue here is what is true. I find that above the opposite group non-theist have a amazing capacity to hate truth. There are substantial secular scholarly reasons to draw the conclusions I have whether they are to my or your liking or not.

 

[1robin]

I might agree.

Evolution...Day Six.....Man as a species.
No names, no law, no garden,.....

Chapter Two is a story of manipulation.
An alteration is made.
That's not evolution.

Adam is a chosen son of God.
The garden event is a petri dish.
Eve is a clone. She had no navel.
Adam was given his twin sister for a bride.

Your "middle ground" is far too radical and to unknowable for me. I meant only that the stories could be allegorical or representative instead of literal. There is a great book called "The science of God" written by a superb scholar in math and physics and he equates and harmonizes the Genesis creation story in amazing detail. I recommend at least the first chapter of his book. I regard what you posted as mostly speculation and inaccessible.

 

[Thief]

Your "middle ground" is far too radical and to unknowable for me. I meant only that the stories could be allegorical or representative instead of literal. There is a great book called "The science of God" written by a superb scholar in math and physics and he equates and harmonizes the Genesis creation story in amazing detail. I recommend at least the first chapter of his book. I regard what you posted as mostly speculation and inaccessible.

If you prefer the Genesis account as literal, my viewpoint cannot be set aside.
If you prefer the account as metaphor.....then faith is only reasoning.

Reducing Chapter Two, to a discussion of metaphor sets aside any belief that God had something to do with Man as we are now.

If evolution is all there may be.....then God can be discounted as an influence.
Even if we had a beginning by His Hand....we are no longer His.

 

[1robin]

If you prefer the Genesis account as literal, my viewpoint cannot be set aside.
If you prefer the account as metaphor.....then faith is only reasoning.

Reducing Chapter Two, to a discussion of metaphor sets aside any belief that God had something to do with Man as we are now.

If evolution is all there may be.....then God can be discounted as an influence.
Even if we had a beginning by His Hand....we are no longer His.

I regard Genesis as part literal and part allegory. Literal needs no explanation but by allegory I mean a story that reflects the truth of reality by representation. If God laid out step by step physical descriptions of creation, quantum mechanics, and metaphysical actualization no one until a few hundred years ago would have had any idea what he was saying, and even today we would only understand a small fraction of it, and science is not the subject of the bible. This is way too large a subject to explain in a post. If you read (it's available online" just the chapter of that book I recommended by Schroeder you would have a good idea what I believe and why. Either way you would be much more informed by the few minutes reading it would require.


BTW I do not believe evolution is the only genetic force there is. I believe God does guide genetics but evolution is part of that process and plan. Evolution it's self is so finely tuned as to be miraculous in it's own right.

 

[viole]

BTW I do not believe evolution is the only genetic force there is. I believe God does guide genetics but evolution is part of that process and plan. Evolution it's self is so finely tuned as to be miraculous in it's own right.

Can you imagine a not "fine tuned" evolution (by natural selection)?

If god guides evolution (for us, allegedly) that entails that God fine tunes the momentum and angle of huge meteorites so that they wipe out our competition at the right time after millions of years when said competition ruled the world. The same with other calamities that have nothing to do with genetics.

Do you really believe that?

Ciao

- viole

 

[Ouroboros]

If evolution is all there may be.....then God can be discounted as an influence.

Not really.

Perhaps evolution is a part of God's nature of being, just like you digest food is part of your body's nature of being. Perhaps the evolutionary algorithm is a truth so fundamental in life and existence that it represents God him/her/itself?

So, really, it's a matter of perspective of what "God" is, not if God can be discounted or not. God has been redefined according to our increasing knowledge in the past, and will continue to do so in the future. Reality won't change according to our faith, but we can change our faith according to reality.

Even if we had a beginning by His Hand....we are no longer His.

We're part of God. Always.

Life overcomes. Life persists. If God is Life, then Life is God.

 

[1robin]

Can you imagine a not "fine tuned" evolution (by natural selection)?

I can imagine all kinds of realities different from this one. The point is that fine tuning implies a tuner. By probability we should expect any kind of universe except this one, if no God exists. In fact we should expect to find nothing (even ourselves) in existence if no God existed.

If god guides evolution (for us, allegedly) that entails that God fine tunes the momentum and angle of huge meteorites so that they wipe out our competition at the right time after millions of years when said competition ruled the world. The same with other calamities that have nothing to do with genetics.

You underestimate the issue. I have no firm position as there is not enough data to form one but others hold that God so finely tuned nature (and enough data exists to know it is tuned) that it would lead to what he ultimately desired. The route is irrelevant. He was not limited by time or anything else. I believe that God set all initial conditions and occasionally tweaks things (based on prayer, etc...), but things are left generally to be worked out by natural law. God simply knew what initial conditions to set that would eventually produce what he desired. It has been compared to the work of a painter instead of the work of a production line manager.

Do you really believe that?

Ciao

- viole

I had never really thought on that particular specific historical occurrence before nor have I heard any theological scholarship on the specific matter, so my answer was intentionally broad. I will think more on this.

I thought of something I needed too add here. It was not any theist who I got the idea of the razors edge fine tuning that evolution is dependent on. It was three non-theists Sagan, Gould, and I can't remember the third.
So lets compare evolutions improbability to winning the lottery's improbability. If several random people win several random lottery's then it's safe to say that no agent was determining the results. However if the same person won every lottery ever held in his lifetime no rational human who ever lived would doubt that a rational agent in the form of a mind was manipulating events. I can know that without having to know a single way in which the mind actualized the manipulation, to what extent, or by what means. Evolution keeps winning lotteries by the millions so I suspect there is a mind behind it.

 

[ImmortalFlame]

I can imagine all kinds of realities different from this one. The point is that fine tuning implies a tuner.

Except being "fine tuned" is the result of evolutionary adaptation.

By probability we should expect any kind of universe except this one, if no God exists.

How did you work that one out? If the Universe were only slightly different, why would that be any indication that no God exists?

In fact we should expect to find nothing (even ourselves) in existence if no God existed.

And I would really like to know how you can prove that.

I thought of something I needed too add here. It was not any theist who I got the idea of the razors edge fine tuning that evolution is dependent on. It was three non-theists Sagan, Gould, and I can't remember the third.
So lets compare evolutions improbability to winning the lottery's improbability. If several random people win several random lottery's then it's safe to say that no agent was determining the results. However if the same person won every lottery ever held in his lifetime no rational human who ever lived would doubt that a rational agent in the form of a mind was manipulating events. I can know that without having to know a single way in which the mind actualized the manipulation, to what extent, or by what means. Evolution keeps winning lotteries by the millions so I suspect there is a mind behind it.

How is evolution "winning lotteries by the millions", exactly?

 

[kashmir]

Who cares?

We still suck as animals, seriously?
Fk off

 

[Thief]

Not really.

Perhaps evolution is a part of God's nature of being, just like you digest food is part of your body's nature of being. Perhaps the evolutionary algorithm is a truth so fundamental in life and existence that it represents God him/her/itself?

So, really, it's a matter of perspective of what "God" is, not if God can be discounted or not. God has been redefined according to our increasing knowledge in the past, and will continue to do so in the future. Reality won't change according to our faith, but we can change our faith according to reality.


We're part of God. Always.

Life overcomes. Life persists. If God is Life, then Life is God.

If you were to use the term....change.....it might work better.
Evolution is a change....but that term leans to biology and the form of life.
Change is a much larger scope and applied to God it gets even bigger.

 

[idav]

How is evolution "winning lotteries by the millions", exactly?

If I may interject with a question in case anyone has any idea. How many sperms does it take to create one individual?:cover:

If its vulgar I'm sorry I'm genuinely interested how many billions.

 

[Ouroboros]

If you were to use the term....change.....it might work better.
Evolution is a change....but that term leans to biology and the form of life.
Change is a much larger scope and applied to God it gets even bigger.

In the large perspective, the term evolution means change. It really means "to turn" or something like that and has been used for similar uses before it was chosen to represent biological/physical evolution. We all change. We all go trials and modify our behavior, so in a sense we all evolve through our life in actions, knowledge, behavior, personality, etc. Like a metaphysical evolution. When (and if) God created the universe, the universe had to spawn from God's existence... God changed, God evolved. It's all about change. That's the power of God. That what and who God is. That's the innate nature of God. It's how chaos becomes order. Evolution of all things.

 

[1robin]

Except being "fine tuned" is the result of evolutionary adaptation.

Gould, Sagan, etc... were not talking about the fine tuned results but fine tuned initiation conditions and necessary factors that allow anything to evolve successfully.

How did you work that one out? If the Universe were only slightly different, why would that be any indication that no God exists?

Imagine the possible range of universes. It can't be done but let's use an analogy to at least get some picture. Lets say we built a machine that actually produced random numbers in 100 digit strings. (there actually is no machine hat lacks any bias but lets pretend there was. That machine represents whatever natural mechanism produced this universe. Now if me and you only had one result from that truly random digit generator 100 numerals long and that we got only one result or could only view one of an infinite number of results, and that results was 99999999999999............... to 100 places. Any rational human who ever lived would think either that the machine was broken or that some mind had rigged it to produce that astronomically absurd probability on purpose. Now multiply those odds by trillions or infinity and that is what we are dealing with. According to cosmologists a structured universe (one that even had the potentiality for life) is among that tiny band of possible universes.

And I would really like to know how you can prove that.

Well since cosmology posits a finite universe before which nothing existed. By nothing I mean non-being. No time, no space, no quantum fluctuations, no energy, no matter, no potential to do anything. Which is why the famous scholar Leibniz said:

The German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz made a similar argument with his principle of sufficient reason in 1714. "There can be found no fact that is true or existent, or any true proposition," he wrote, "without there being a sufficient reason for its being so and not otherwise, although we cannot know these reasons in most cases." He formulated the cosmological argument succinctly: "Why is there something rather than nothing? The sufficient reason [...] is found in a substance which [...] is a necessary being bearing the reason for its existence within itself."[13]
Cosmological argument - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Science is only able to ask that question, not answer it. In fact attempts at answering it have been embarrassing and clumsy. Since the modern infancy of atheist driven science simply rejects God as a possible cause they have to substitute the wildest fantasy because that is all hat is available to them.

How is evolution "winning lotteries by the millions", exactly?

Obviously I cannot list millions of reasons but I will give a few.

To begin with it needs to get a universe out of nothing. That chance is exactly zero.

Next we need a very specific kind of universe fine tuned to even allow structure and matter to exist. That requires among thousands of things:

1. ratio of the strengths of gravity to that of electromagnetism;
2. strength of the force binding nucleons into nuclei;
3. relative importance of gravity and expansion energy in the Universe, or Density parameter;
4. cosmological constant;
5. ratio of the gravitational energy required to pull a large galaxy apart to the energy equivalent of its mass;
6. number of spatial dimensions in space-time.

Some of these things are fine tuned to trillions of decimal places even according to Hawking, etc.......

I will just give a random smattering of other lottery's it had to win.

"[The entire biological] evolutionary process depends upon the unusual chemistry of carbon, which allows it to bond to itself, as well as other elements, creating highly complex molecules that are stable over prevailing terrestrial temperatures, and are capable of conveying genetic information (especially DNA). […] Whereas it might be argued that nature creates its own fine-tuning, this can only be done if the primordial constituents of the universe are such that an evolutionary process can be initiated. The unique chemistry of carbon is the ultimate foundation of the capacity of nature to tune itself." 8

"A commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question."


"The more I examine the universe, and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the Universe in some sense must have known we were coming." — Freeman Dyson1

"A bottom-up approach to cosmology either requires one to postulate an initial state of the Universe that is carefully fine-tuned — as if prescribed by an outside agency — or it requires one to invoke the notion of eternal inflation, a mighty speculative notion to the generation of many different Universes, which prevents one from predicting what a typical observer would see." — Stephen Hawking and Thomas Hertog2

A few examples of this fine-tuning are listed below:

1. If the initial explosion of the big bang had differed in strength by as little as 1 part in 1060, the universe would have either quickly collapsed back on itself, or expanded too rapidly for stars to form. In either case, life would be impossible. [See Davies, 1982, pp. 90-91. (As John Jefferson Davis points out (p. 140), an accuracy of one part in 10^60 can be compared to firing a bullet at a one-inch target on the other side of the observable universe, twenty billion light years away, and hitting the target.)

2. Calculations indicate that if the strong nuclear force, the force that binds protons and neutrons together in an atom, had been stronger or weaker by as little as 5%, life would be impossible. (Leslie, 1989, pp. 4, 35; Barrow and Tipler, p. 322.)

3. Calculations by Brandon Carter show that if gravity had been stronger or weaker by 1 part in 10 to the 40th power, then life-sustaining stars like the sun could not exist. This would most likely make life impossible. (Davies, 1984, p. 242.)

4. If the neutron were not about 1.001 times the mass of the proton, all protons would have decayed into neutrons or all neutrons would have decayed into protons, and thus life would not be possible. (Leslie, 1989, pp. 39-40 )

5. If the electromagnetic force were slightly stronger or weaker, life would be impossible, for a variety of different reasons. (Leslie, 1988, p. 299.)
CSC - The Fine-Tuning Design Argument:


Also notice that most of this fine tuning is required just to permit a universe that will contain structure, or mass, or life of any kind. Not just humans or carbon based life.

 

[1robin]

Who cares?

We still suck as animals, seriously?
Fk off

What the heck was this supposed to be?

 

[Willamena]

If I may interject with a question in case anyone has any idea. How many sperms does it take to create one individual?:cover:

If its vulgar I'm sorry I'm genuinely interested how many billions.

One sperm, if I remember correctly.

 

[viole]

I can imagine all kinds of realities different from this one.

Pick one and consider the odds of its existence. Everything requires "fine tuning". Or, more likely, nothing.

The point is that fine tuning implies a tuner.

Yes, and alien abductions imply the existence of aliens. Using "fine tuning" without evidence of intentionality in creating the universe is question begging, like all theleological arguments.

By probability we should expect any kind of universe except this one,

Our human intution fails when we consider the concept of probability. A posteriori, everything that happened seems highly improbable. If I throw a coin 100 times, no matter what the outcome is, it was highly improbable, yet it happened.

My own existence is an amazing sequence of improbabilities. Another spermatozoon and I would be one of my potential siblings. The same for my parents, their parents, and so on. Yet, I am here. Do I need to appeal to God, because of this amazingly improbable chain of events? If yes, it is not clear why He wanted me and not someone else.

if no God exists. In fact we should expect to find nothing (even ourselves) in existence if no God existed.

I wonder why. You seem to assume that something is less natural than nothing, without a God. In other words, you seem to assume that something always requires a creator, which is also question begging. For if the creator is something then he should require a creator as well, unless we use special pleading.

You underestimate the issue. I have no firm position as there is not enough data to form one but others hold that God so finely tuned nature (and enough data exists to know it is tuned) that it would lead to what he ultimately desired.

The data tell us that our universe can host things like complex life, neutron stars and the Ebola virus. Period. To single out complex life as something more special requiring explanation is also question begging, I am afraid.

The route is irrelevant. He was not limited by time or anything else. I believe that God set all initial conditions and occasionally tweaks things (based on prayer, etc...), but things are left generally to be worked out by natural law. God simply knew what initial conditions to set that would eventually produce what he desired. It has been compared to the work of a painter instead of the work of a production line manager.

If you follow the logic to its consequences, you should be a deist. Can you imagine an omniscient and omnipotent being thinking: oops, I did not expect this prayer that needs to break my laws in order to be fulfilled.

I had never really thought on that particular specific historical occurrence before nor have I heard any theological scholarship on the specific matter, so my answer was intentionally broad. I will think more on this.

Theological scholarship dealing with the trajectory of meteorites orbiting between Mars and Jupiter as agents of bringing man on the stage?

Wouldn't have been more parsimonious to let dinos evolving moral agency, instead of causing mass extinctions of such proportions? I wonder what is so special about apes in God's eyes. They look definetely better than velociraptors, but as they say in italy: every coackroach is beautiful to its mother.

Don't you think you are complicating issues beyond necessity?

I thought of something I needed too add here. It was not any theist who I got the idea of the razors edge fine tuning that evolution is dependent on. It was three non-theists Sagan, Gould, and I can't remember the third.
So lets compare evolutions improbability to winning the lottery's improbability. If several random people win several random lottery's then it's safe to say that no agent was determining the results. However if the same person won every lottery ever held in his lifetime no rational human who ever lived would doubt that a rational agent in the form of a mind was manipulating events. I can know that without having to know a single way in which the mind actualized the manipulation, to what extent, or by what means. Evolution keeps winning lotteries by the millions so I suspect there is a mind behind it.

Nope. Evolution is more like winning small lotteries that give you more money to buy more tickets than the competition. So, if someone wins a small lottery and can pass this extra richness to their descendants so that they can buy more tickets, we should not be surprised to see very reach people if you wait long enough (and meteorites behave).

Ciao

- viole

 

[Willamena]

I thought of something I needed too add here. It was not any theist who I got the idea of the razors edge fine tuning that evolution is dependent on. It was three non-theists Sagan, Gould, and I can't remember the third.

Was it William Murray?

So lets compare evolutions improbability to winning the lottery's improbability. If several random people win several random lottery's then it's safe to say that no agent was determining the results. However if the same person won every lottery ever held in his lifetime no rational human who ever lived would doubt that a rational agent in the form of a mind was manipulating events. I can know that without having to know a single way in which the mind actualized the manipulation, to what extent, or by what means. Evolution keeps winning lotteries by the millions so I suspect there is a mind behind it.

With the lottery, it's beneficial to hold the winning ticket. With evolution, though, the ticket is drawn successfully because it's beneficial. Different game.

 

[viole]

One sperm, if I remember correctly.

I confirm.

I also remember to have been only one sperm before being born

Ciao

- viole

 

[idav]

One sperm, if I remember correctly.

I understand that part, after how many countless attempts is what I'm alluding to. :angel2: