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Metsfanmax wrote:It is only absurd to believe that a sky daddy could create the universe from nothing insofar as we have no evidence for it. That being said, it is at least a claim consistent with what we know. You've posed a thought experiment that is completely illogical and based on nonsense premises. Your thought experiment needs to make sense if it's going to disprove anything. And it doesn't, because it suggests that somehow causality comes from acausality (whereas causality is always inherently present in the creation story).
Metsfanmax wrote:This definition of causality discusses how causality plays out in a universe with space and time. It is an example of a more general understanding of causality (that "causes" precede "effects" -- this is a simple logical description that is independent of physical descriptions). You can't semantically argue your way out of this, because it avoids the real question.
Metsfanmax wrote:Your argument is sound at first glance, but it doesn't stand up in reality. You're essentially saying that if I lift an object up, I do work against the gravitational force, leaving me with a net change in energy, since the kinetic energy is zero at both the beginning and the end. But energy is always conserved, so something must have happened when you lifted that book. In particular, you pushed the Earth downward. Obviously the effect is so minuscule that the Earth doesn't care. But be assured, lifting that book was a zero sum process, if you take into account the entire system, which is what you are required to do when considering energy conservation.
Metsfanmax wrote:No, but all of the physics is in place so that a designer can come in and write a program on it; they don't need to invent the laws that make up transistors from scratch.
Metsfanmax wrote:jonesthecurl wrote:And saying there are invisible badgers.
How do you know there aren't invisible badgers?
Atheists are all consistently wrong, and it's always for exactly the same reason. Absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.
Ray Rider wrote:...every object has a phenomenal cause if you insist on the infinity of the series -- but the series of phenomenal causes is an insufficient explanation of the series. Therefore, the series has not a phenomenal cause but a transcendent cause... the series of events is either caused or it's not caused. If it is caused, there must obviously be a cause outside the series. If it's not caused then it's sufficient to itself, and if it's sufficient to itself, it is what I call necessary. But it can't be necessary since each member is contingent, and we've agreed that the total has no reality apart from the members, therefore, it can't be necessary. And I should like to observe in passing that the statement "the world is simply there and is inexplicable" can't be got out of logical analysis.
...What we call the world is intrinsically unintelligible, apart from the existence of God. You see, I don't believe that the infinity of the series of events -- I mean a horizontal series, so to speak -- if such an infinity could be proved, would be in the slightest degree relevant to the situation. If you add up chocolates you get chocolates after all and not a sheep. If you add up chocolates to infinity, you presumably get an infinite number of chocolates. So if you add up contingent beings to infinity, you still get contingent beings, not a Necessary Being. An infinite series of contingent beings will be, to my way of thinking, as unable to cause itself as one contingent being.
- Frederick C. Copleston in a debate with Bertrand Russell
jonesthecurl wrote:Well, you're the one talking about things that happen "before time".
And that god could create the universe, but not cause it.
And suggesting that my arguments are merely semantic tautolologies while seeking yourself to redefine just about every word in the dictionary.
And saying there are invisible badgers.
Oh, wait, that last one was me. My bad.
Anyhow, I'm off to bed now. If I can define bed.
G'night.
crispybits wrote:Absence of evidence can be taken as reasonable evidence of the likelihood of absence, especially when the definition of what is unevident is omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent and omnipresent.
Metsfanmax wrote:jonesthecurl wrote:And saying there are invisible badgers.
How do you know there aren't invisible badgers?
Atheists are all consistently wrong, and it's always for exactly the same reason. Absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.
2dimes wrote:Metsfanmax wrote:jonesthecurl wrote:And saying there are invisible badgers.
How do you know there aren't invisible badgers?
Atheists are all consistently wrong, and it's always for exactly the same reason. Absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.
Check and... Mate!
Now I have to go chase invisible badgers out of my hen house.
Metsfanmax wrote:To sum up my position briefly: we have no definitive evidence one way or the other (yet) on why our universe was "created." So feel free to make up your own explanation if you feel the need to have an answer to the question, and don't be concerned if your hypothesis is different from that of someone else. They're all equally fanciful, and you shouldn't be trying to convince people to abandon their hypothesis for yours when yours has exactly as much evidence as theirs.
But my recommendation is just to accept the reality of not having an answer, and move on with your life. It's ok to not know.
jonesthecurl wrote:2dimes wrote:Metsfanmax wrote:jonesthecurl wrote:And saying there are invisible badgers.
How do you know there aren't invisible badgers?
Atheists are all consistently wrong, and it's always for exactly the same reason. Absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.
Check and... Mate!
Now I have to go chase invisible badgers out of my hen house.
How will you know when they're gone?
Gillipig wrote:Metsfanmax wrote:To sum up my position briefly: we have no definitive evidence one way or the other (yet) on why our universe was "created." So feel free to make up your own explanation if you feel the need to have an answer to the question, and don't be concerned if your hypothesis is different from that of someone else. They're all equally fanciful, and you shouldn't be trying to convince people to abandon their hypothesis for yours when yours has exactly as much evidence as theirs.
But my recommendation is just to accept the reality of not having an answer, and move on with your life. It's ok to not know.
There's no reason to believe there is a "why" altogether. So unless someone can prove that there is (this is not something you can do by just talking, you'd need science for that.) the logical thing to do is to assume there was no intention behind the "creation" of the universe.
jonesthecurl wrote:"We scientists", when speculating about invisible, atemporal, acausal, non-detectible all-powerful beings (or invisible badgers) are simply being anal-vocal. That's not "science".
You can't claim the mantle of science while spouting groundless verbiage.
Metsfanmax wrote:crispybits wrote:Absence of evidence can be taken as reasonable evidence of the likelihood of absence, especially when the definition of what is unevident is omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent and omnipresent.
Absence of evidence can be taken as a reasonable justification for not wasting one's time going to church or praying (this is my position). It should not ever be taken to comment on the likelihood of absence of a higher power, because by construction this higher power is unknowable to us. If we aren't supposed to be able to perceive God, and we haven't, you can't claim anything about the likelihood of God's existence simply because you haven't found him yet. This is similar to the invisible badger argument. If the badgers are invisible, then by construction we can't possibly ever see them. So how could we know whether they exist or not? How could we possibly say whether it is likely that they exist if, by definition, we cannot ever gather information on them?
Metsfanmax wrote:Now, if humans were themselves all-knowing, I would consider this a stronger argument. But, for example, if the three spatial dimensions of the universe are a subset of some larger set of dimensions that humans cannot perceive (for example), then anything existing in those higher dimensions could very well be totally real but definitely unknowable to us. To insist that it doesn't exist, or even is likely not to exist, because some moderately intelligent species descended from the apes has not yet been able to come up with an answer one way or the other, is ludicrous.
Humans should rightfully be humbled by both the scale of the universe relative to us, and what we have learned in spite of that. It should not fill us with the arrogance to suggest that we can know more than that about which we observe.
Metsfanmax wrote:To sum up my position briefly: we have no definitive evidence one way or the other (yet) on why our universe was "created." So feel free to make up your own explanation if you feel the need to have an answer to the question, and don't be concerned if your hypothesis is different from that of someone else. They're all equally fanciful, and you shouldn't be trying to convince people to abandon their hypothesis for yours when yours has exactly as much evidence as theirs.
But my recommendation is just to accept the reality of not having an answer, and move on with your life. It's ok to not know.
Metsfanmax wrote:But, sometimes it's intellectually enjoyable to find holes in atheist/religious arguments, and this was one of those times.
saxitoxin wrote:Your position is more complex than the federal tax code. As soon as I think I understand it, I find another index of cross-references, exceptions and amendments I have to apply.
Timminz wrote:Yo mama is so classless, she could be a Marxist utopia.
Metsfanmax wrote:Gillipig wrote:Metsfanmax wrote:To sum up my position briefly: we have no definitive evidence one way or the other (yet) on why our universe was "created." So feel free to make up your own explanation if you feel the need to have an answer to the question, and don't be concerned if your hypothesis is different from that of someone else. They're all equally fanciful, and you shouldn't be trying to convince people to abandon their hypothesis for yours when yours has exactly as much evidence as theirs.
But my recommendation is just to accept the reality of not having an answer, and move on with your life. It's ok to not know.
There's no reason to believe there is a "why" altogether. So unless someone can prove that there is (this is not something you can do by just talking, you'd need science for that.) the logical thing to do is to assume there was no intention behind the "creation" of the universe.
In principle, we can't prove that causality actually exists at all; it just certainly seems like it does. In principle, there's no reason to believe there's a "why" for anything we observe. But faith that there is a logical reason has worked out well for us, so it makes sense to try to extend it as far back as we can and see if we can explain what happened; this is what cosmologists are doing. I would say that many (if not most) physicists hope that we could eventually explain the cause of the Big Bang some day, and in that sense describe the "cause" of the creation of the universe. I am in this camp; I believe it is at least possible in principle to do this, and some physicists have already produced falsifiable models describing such causes.
Simply put, humans have a drive to understand why, and so we're certainly going to try! Centuries of scientific progress have shown that we scientists are a bit more likely to shed light on this question than the armchair philosophers.
MeDeFe wrote:Metsfanmax wrote:But, sometimes it's intellectually enjoyable to find holes in atheist/religious arguments, and this was one of those times.
You never managed to say what the holes were, though.
jdw35 wrote:AndyDufresne wrote:Quick, so we've made 100 pages and nearly 1500 posts. Have we solved everything yet?
--Andy
that was very immature, i am a 16 year old preachers son tryin to be real with you guys and then you come in and pull a smart ass move like that. If you dont truely have a comment to say on this topic, then get out, we dont appreciate you being childish
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