Why "God does not exist" is a positive claim

[mikkel_the_dane]

And my point is that without the math the rest is irrelevant.

Yeah, but when look at what is claimed, it is also relevent if it is a theory or a hypothessis. That is my point.

 

[ratiocinator]

Odd thing is, I don't really know why he didn't at least give a reference. It's from Roger Penrose's 1989 book The Emperor's New Mind. You can read the extract >here<. It is obviously riddled with assumptions and is only offered as a guesstimate.

Note that he uses the word 'Creator' metaphorically, he is not arguing that a creator is actually required, in fact the constraint he thinks applies is simply that the Weyl tensor was zero (the Weyl curvature hypothesis), for which he later suggested conformal cyclic cosmology as an explanation.

Actually, much of this is in the paper cited before (Before the Big Bang: An Outrageous New Perspective and Its Implications for Particle Physics). Should have checked.

 

[RestlessSoul]

The point about context is that if we shuffle (say) 10⁵⁰⁰ decks of cards, then the numerical ordering into suits, in at least one case, would become very probable.

It's also worth noting that the initial low entropy state (which is what makes the initial state of the universe so special) was, according to the Weyl curvature hypothesis, simply due to one tensor being zero.

The converse problem, that you are still studiously avoiding, is consideration of the improbability of a 'Creator' that wants to make this exact sort of universe, and the basic mathematical conjunction problem.

The probability of the observable Universe being the manifestation of the will of a Creator isn't difficult to calculate. It's equal to either unity or zero; therefore there is no conjunction problem. Either God is everything, or He is nothing, and the answer is in the eye of the beholder.

Attempts to assign a value to the extreme specialness of the low entropy conditions of the early universe, illustrate that statistically, our existence is so improbable as to be miraculous. The empirical data remains the same whether this miracle is the work of divine purpose, or random accident; it requires nothing more nor less than a gestalt shift on our part, to switch perceptions.

 

[PureX]

The question is not really about how many decks of cards there are or how many times they get reshuffled. The question has more to do with source of the scenario. How did the cards become possible? How did the shuffling become possible? How did the order of the card's arrangement become possible?

 

[RestlessSoul]

The question is not really about how many decks of cards there are or how many times they get reshuffled. The question has more to do with source of the scenario. How did the cards become possible? How did the shuffling become possible? How did the order of the card's arrangement become possible?

Or put another way, Why is there order in the Universe? and, Why is there something rather than nothing?

In cosmology the first question is particularly interesting, given that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics tells us the universe is tending towards disorder (entropy). Indeed, all the restless activity of the universe seems to be a product of this move from high to low entropy, without which there would be no flow of time.

 

[McBell]

Yeah, but when look at what is claimed, it is also relevent if it is a theory or a hypothessis. That is my point.

How?

Being a hypothesis or theory or even a proven fact does not alter showing the math of a math claim.

 

[McBell]

The probability of the observable Universe being the manifestation of the will of a Creator isn't difficult to calculate.

Thus far it appears to be impossible to calculate.

Otherwise the math could be shown.

It's equal to either unity or zero; therefore there is no conjunction problem. Either God is everything, or He is nothing, and the answer is in the eye of the beholder.

Attempts to assign a value to the extreme specialness of the low entropy conditions of the early universe, illustrate that statistically, our existence is so improbable as to be miraculous. The empirical data remains the same whether this miracle is the work of divine purpose, or random accident; it requires nothing more nor less than a gestalt shift on our part, to switch perceptions.

I can not do the math, therefore the math is impossible?

 

[RestlessSoul]

Thus far it appears to be impossible to calculate.

Otherwise the math could be shown.


I can not do the math, therefore the math is impossible?

Just playing around with ideas mate. If you have an idea of your own let's hear it, and by all means show the maths.

 

[McBell]

Just playing around with ideas mate. If you have an idea of your own let's hear it, and by all means show the maths.

I am not one using faulty reasoning to justify my beliefs.

 

[RestlessSoul]

I am not one using faulty reasoning to justify my beliefs.

Of course not. That would require you to express a belief of your own in the first place. And then submit it to reasoned objection or scrutiny.

 

[McBell]

Of course not. That would require you to express a belief of your own in the first place. And then submit it to reasoned objection or scrutiny.

Oooh.
You reeally burned me there with that one.
How ever will I recover?

Ouch ow the pain.
The PAIIIIN...

And no, I have not forgotten that you made a math claim and epically failed to support it.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

How?

Being a hypothesis or theory or even a proven fact does not alter showing the math of a math claim.

Well, you do know that are no proven facts other than in the abstract sense for logic/math as such.
For the empirical world there are facts as per natural science and its theories. But for a hypothesis/theoretical physics are no facts, as they are go further as proposed explanations for which there are no corresponding facts as per emperical observation.
So there is the math as math, but there is also what the math is about, for abstract, combined with emperical or proposed explanations.

 

[RestlessSoul]

Oooh.
You reeally burned me there with that one.
How ever will I recover?

Ouch ow the pain.
The PAIIIIN...

And no, I have not forgotten that you made a math claim and epically failed to support it.

I made no claim. I provided a link to a paper, by one of the greatest mathematicians of his generation, which was relevant to a point you raised.

My own maths is pretty atrocious. I have never pretended otherwise.

Not sure what your problem is tbh

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

...

I can not do the math, therefore the math is impossible?

No, that math can't show any difference for in effect the fields of epistemology, metaphysics and ontology, because none of the variations have any mathematical values as such to assign. If you assign any value they would be random as such.
So the math is not impossible, it is just in effect meaningless as random.

 

[McBell]

I made no claim.

Yes you did:

Okay, you’ve referenced the anthropic principle, a tautological argument often cited to refute the ‘fine-tuning problem’.

That doesn’t alter the fact that, in a universe increasingly shown to be probabilistic rather than deterministic in nature, our existence here is a statistical miracle.

Are you going to be the first one in the history of RF to show the math?

Obviously not. But better minds than mine have had a shot at it.


https://accelconf.web.cern.ch/e06/papers/thespa01.pdf

That is a rather interesting article.

However, it does not show the math in support of the claim "our existence here is a statistical miracle"

The bolded is mine to point out your claim that you did not make....

I provided a link to a paper, by one of the greatest mathematicians of his generation, which was relevant to a point you raised.

That did not show the math...

My own maths is pretty atrocious. I have never pretended otherwise.

I honestly do not expect any member of RF to be able to do the maths themselves.
I know I couldn't.
However, since it is such a popular claim made by theists, one would think that someone somewhere at some time actually did do the math.
Problem is that no one has been able to show the math.
Not even the ones who claim to have done it.

 

[McBell]

So the math is not impossible, it is just in effect meaningless as random.

which is no excuse for not showing the math when making a math claim.

Though it does make a person wonder why even make the claim if they know such a claim is is meaningless.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

which is no excuse for not showing the math when making a math claim.

Though it does make a person wonder why even make the claim if they know such a claim is is meaningless.

Yeah, I stay out of the actual claim as such.

 

[ratiocinator]

The probability of the observable Universe being the manifestation of the will of a Creator isn't difficult to calculate. It's equal to either unity or zero; therefore there is no conjunction problem. Either God is everything, or He is nothing, and the answer is in the eye of the beholder.

You really don't know anything about probability, do you?

The existence of a 'Creator' is an unknown, so the correct approach is to treat it like any other unknown and look at the 'space' of possibilities compared to the option we are considering.

The space of possibilities for some generic 'Creator' must be greater than the space of possibilities for universes like ours, for all the reasons I have set out in previous posts.

In this instance, the conjunction problem arises simply because we don't know why the universe appears to be improbable. If you add an unevidenced 'answer' (natural or 'supernatural'), then you are adding an extra constraint over the simple 'we don't know' position, since the 'we don't know' position includes whatever 'answer' you proposed.

Maybe this will help: Meet Mary. After you've looked at that, read up here: Conjunction fallacy.

Penrose's own answers have the same problem, only slightly mitigated by the fact that he is extrapolating from known and tested theories, rather than a blind guess of a 'Creator', with zero reason as to why it just happens to exist.

Attempts to assign a value to the extreme specialness of the low entropy conditions of the early universe, illustrate that statistically, our existence is so improbable as to be miraculous. The empirical data remains the same whether this miracle is the work of divine purpose, or random accident; it requires nothing more nor less than a gestalt shift on our part, to switch perceptions.

Your lack of understanding of probability is still showing. How improbably it is depends on the constraints (which we don't know) and the number of opportunities (which we also don't know). If inflation is correct, then the part of the universe we can see is absolutely insignificant compared to the whole, and it might well be that the whole is literally infinite. The very 'start' may have been much more complex, with us occupying a tiny region which is amenable to life. Then we have multiverse possibilities. All of which suggest the number of opportunities may be vastly larger than the improbability of the part of reality we observe, making our existence a near, or actual (in the case of infinite possibilities), certainty.

Additionally, in this case, the simple constraint that Weyl curvature tensor was zero near the big bang is all that's needed. We don't know why that might be, or if it was possible for it not to be. Penrose has offered possibilities, but when you formulate it in terms of some physical property of space-time being zero, it really doesn't seem at all unreasonable that there is some physical reason why that was the case.

 

[RestlessSoul]

You really don't know anything about probability, do you?

The existence of a 'Creator' is an unknown, so the correct approach is to treat it like any other unknown and look at the 'space' of possibilities compared to the option we are considering.

The space of possibilities for some generic 'Creator' must be greater than the space of possibilities for universes like ours, for all the reasons I have set out in previous posts.

In this instance, the conjunction problem arises simply because we don't know why the universe appears to be improbable. If you add an unevidenced 'answer' (natural or 'supernatural'), then you are adding an extra constraint over the simple 'we don't know' position, since the 'we don't know' position includes whatever 'answer' you proposed.

Maybe this will help: Meet Mary. After you've looked at that, read up here: Conjunction fallacy.

Penrose's own answers would have the same problem, only slightly mitigated by the fact that he is extrapolating from known and tested theories, rather than a blind guess of a 'Creator', with zero reason as to why it just happens to exist.


Your lack of understanding of probability is still showing. How improbably it is depends on the constraints (which we don't know) and the number of opportunities (which we also don't know). If inflation is correct, then the part of the universe we can see is absolutely insignificant compared to the whole, and it might well be that the whole is literally infinite. The very 'start' may have been much more complex, with us occupying a tiny region which is amenable to life. Then we have multiverse possibilities. All of which suggest the number of opportunities may be vastly larger than the improbability of the part of reality we observe, making our existence a near, or actual (in the case of infinite possibilities), certainty.

Additionally, in this case, the simple constraint that Weyl curvature tensor was zero near the big bang is all that's needed. We don't know why that might be, or if it was possible for it not to be. Penrose has offered possibilities, but when you formulate it in terms of some physical property of space-time being zero, it really doesn't seem at all unreasonable that there is some physical reason why that was the case.

You're conflating two distinct points, and massively over complicating both. Which might explain your invoking the conjunction problem where none exists.

However you calculate it, the probability of the initial conditions of the universe occurring randomly appears utterly insignificant. Of course there can be no agreed method for doing this accurately, but there's no need for accuracy when what we are seeking to illustrate is not the precise probability, but the sheer astronomical scale of the odds. We might, for example, estimate the number of atoms in the universe, then calculate the Poincare time cycle for those atoms to reconfigure randomly in their initial state; this would almost certainly amount to a lot longer than the 13.8 billion years that the universe is believed to have been around for. Whichever way you do it, you're going to be dealing with more noughts than you can enter into an excel spreadsheet. The problem does go away in the context of infinity, where insignificant probability becomes inevitability. But for the sake of our argument, infinity, like the Weyl curvature hypothesis, is a red herring not worth pursuing here.

Having established (okay, not to everyone's satisfaction) that our existence is long odds against, ergo a statistical miracle (the phrase which seems to have you and @McBell fizzing for no apparent reason) we're done with probability at this point. There is no conjunction problem, because there is no need to account for the probability of divine agency or random chance having initiated the Big Bang; these are not outcomes, the likelihood of which we may reasonably attempt to put a numerical value on. They are potential explanations, equally supported by the empirical evidence which informs the Standard Model of Cosmology. We are each free to decide which explanation we consider most likely, or even to remain open minded (unfamiliar territory as that last may be).

 

[ratiocinator]

I made no claim.

You claimed a "statistical miracle".

I provided a link to a paper, by one of the greatest mathematicians of his generation, which was relevant to a point you raised.

Who doesn't agree with the conclusions you have drawn from his work.

You're conflating two distinct points, and massively over complicating both. Which might explain your invoking the conjunction problem where none exists.

However you calculate it, the probability of the initial conditions of the universe occurring randomly appears utterly insignificant. Of course there can be no agreed method for doing this accurately, but there's no need for accuracy when what we are seeking to illustrate is not the precise probability, but the sheer astronomical scale of the odds. We might, for example, estimate the number of atoms in the universe, then calculate the Poincare time cycle for those atoms to reconfigure randomly in their initial state; this would almost certainly amount to a lot longer than the 13.8 billion years that the universe is believed to have been around for. Whichever way you do it, you're going to be dealing with more noughts than you can enter into an excel spreadsheet. The problem does go away in the context of infinity, where insignificant probability becomes inevitability. But for the sake of our argument, infinity, like the Weyl curvature hypothesis, is a red herring not worth pursuing here.

Having established (okay, not to everyone's satisfaction) that our existence is long odds against, ergo a statistical miracle (the phrase which seems to have you and @McBell fizzing for no apparent reason) we're done with probability at this point. There is no conjunction problem, because there is no need to account for the probability of divine agency or random chance having initiated the Big Bang; these are not outcomes, the likelihood of which we may reasonably attempt to put a numerical value on. They are potential explanations, equally supported by the empirical evidence which informs the Standard Model of Cosmology. We are each free to decide which explanation we consider most likely, or even to remain open minded (unfamiliar territory as that last may be).

Incredible.

You've simply ignored what I've said and doubled-down on your own misunderstanding, which appears to be due to complete ignorance of the mathematics of probability. You are trying to replace genuine probability, with some kind of subjective intuition.

The reason people object to "statistical miracle" is that you cannot draw that conclusion from the improbability of one event without knowing the context.

Look, the probability of flipping a coin ten times and getting heads every time is approximately 0.1%. But if I know that it was tried 10 000 times, then it becomes a near certainty (approximately 99.99%) that it would have succeeded at least once.

Did you even read the links on conjunction? Because you still seem unable to grasp that it must mathematically apply.

Options:

1. The universe exists. No proposed reason: 'we don't know why'.
2. The universe exists and it was due to a Creator.
3. The universe exists and it was due to X, where X is some specific scientific conjecture (like those offered by Penrose).

Clearly, option 1 is a (near) certainty, and the others are, necessarily, less probable. You can look at the universe and speculate (which is actually all we have) that it's statistically unlikely that it was a one-off random chance, which is fine. If the assumptions are correct, then I agree, it's very unlikely that it was a one-off random chance, but we simply don't know enough to say that it's a one-off nor do we know enough to test the assumptions.

I'd be happy to say that we can pretty much rule out the option:

• The universe exists, and the assumptions that lead to the improbability are right, and it was a one-off statistical chance.

But I know of nobody who is proposing that. You're trying to use assumptions to produce an improbability to justify a specific speculation (a 'Creator'). It's no more than a guessing game based on unknowns.

A bind guess is always improbable.