All I can say is “urk”. I think the equation is nonsensical. It appears to assume a particular model of life’s origin in which you randomly dump stuff into a test tube and see if it turns into an organism.
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That’s not the Drake equation.
You always skip the cruicial step when comparing probabilities. You calculate the probability of the laws and constants taking the values they do instead of some other arbitrarily picked values, and arrive at some insanely small number. Then you say, look how small that number is, so it must have been God.
Sorry, what is the probability that God would create a life-giving universe, and that he would choose this one? I need to be able to compare probabilities of competing hypotheses if I am to make a decision, but people advancing the fine-tuning argument always skip the probability of God deciding to create a universe like ours. This is apparently taken for granted to be 1. You are smuggling claims about God into the equation here and I’m not buying it. What is the probability that God is the kind of being that wants to create a life-giving universe, and, what is the probability he’d decide on this exact set of constants, values, and initial conditions?
It’s impossible for me to make a decision between two options based on their probabilities if I don’t have have some way knowing the probability of one of the options. It could be even lower.
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I guess my only question is whether you think an eternal and sovereign God would go to the trouble of creating a universe which contained no possibilty to delight Him.
I realize that’s an assumption, but it seems reasonable.
Would you rather “curate a museum” that contained only inorganics, or would you want advanced biological life making free decisions?
Excuse me if I’ve inadvertently offended the rock collector in each of us… : )
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How do you know what delights God? How many Gods do you know, and how do you establish what, if anything, brings them joy? If God is all-knowing, in what way would creating a universe with life in it be able to bring him more joy than a universe with just a vacuum or lots of sand? Nothing that happens can in any way be a surprise to God. I’m sure you can invent some reason why God could would find joy in predictability.
Ironically you seem to be anthropomorphizing God a lot. You know what they say, men created Gods in their own image.
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Or, God created us in His image, and such instincts can serve us well in understanding Him better. There is only one God to know; the rest are just pale imitations, at best.
I’m hanging my hat by what the Bible says, not the pundits.
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A Bayesian prior assumption that completely determines the posterior distribution.
IOW: Assuming the conclusion. 
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@Guy_Coe I think you have a misunderstanding of the atheist basis for lacking in God. It’s a misrepresentation even to say there is a single basis, but they generally find religious arguments for origins (or anything else) not to be compelling.
I think you are trying to impose a requirement for atheism that there must be some other answer to the origin of life (and many other things). No, it’s not like that. The only requirement for atheism is a lack of belief in god(s).
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Then Darwinism doesn’t, in fact, make it possible to be an intellectually satisfied atheist, because there is still too much to account for.
Protest all you’d like; it IS like that.
For those whose atheism hasn’t displaced the wonder of it all entirely, there’s still hope.
If that sounds like an insult, welcome to my oft-perceived sentiments in the converse, because I mean only to continue to offer hope.
I am an intellectually satisfied atheist whose atheism hasn’t displaced the wonder of living with purpose and meaning. I continue to hope that it will be you who will enjoy your remaining years without searching for meaning, purpose, and happiness in ratty old ancient dibble dapple. Best wishes for a happy and healthy new year.
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The problem with this is that you can freely vacillate between “God is like us” and “God is incomprehensible” with no way to tell, at any given moment, which of these notions would help us understand him. You seem to choose either when it fits your purposes.
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When have I ever said that God is “incomprehensible?”
I’ve only said that He is not predictable; He remains morally consistent, but not always easy to understand, since His “perspective” is so much more vast than ours.
Thanks for the well-wishes in return, @Patrick, and I can assure you that I do not continue to “search for purpose and meaning,” since that’s been clarified, for me, by the gospel of Jesus the Messiah.
What I do hope to do well, in return, is to use the time I’ve been given on earth faithfully and strategically to spread and celebrate that gospel, by the Holy Spirit’s leading and guiding, in giving due praise, worship, and candor to my friend and Lord Jesus, and clarity and hope to others about their own prospects for the same.
He has come among us, indeed!
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Here’s how Paul gave testimony to the same to a pagan culture; hear his passion and hopes for them:
—So Paul stood in the midst of the Areopagus and said, “Men of Athens, I observe that you are very religious in all respects. For while I was passing through and examining the objects of your worship, I also found an altar with this inscription, ‘TO AN UNKNOWN GOD.’ Therefore what you worship in ignorance, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and all things in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands; nor is He served by human hands, as though He needed anything, since He Himself gives to all people life and breath and all things; and He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their habitation, that they would seek God, if perhaps they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us; for in Him we live and move and exist, as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we also are His children.’ Being then the children of God, we ought not to think that the Divine Nature is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and thought of man. Therefore having overlooked the times of ignorance, God is now declaring to men that all people everywhere should repent, because He has fixed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness through a Man whom He has appointed, having furnished proof to all men by raising Him from the dead.” - Acts 17:22-31 NASB
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It amounts to the same thing in the end: you draw lessons about God’s nature when they fit what you want, and when they don’t you just say “we don’t understand that”.
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And you don’t, with, say, the thesis of purely naturalistic abiogenesis? We may be more alike than you think.
Hope your holidays are going well!
Correct.
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So, are you claiming that you do, in fact, understand the means by which abiogenetic origins took place, or have we stumbled across an area of amicable agreement, without conceding the larger arguments?
I can’t tell which of those is the case from your reply.
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If by “intellectually satisfied” you mean “have a platitude answer for everything”, then sure I agree with that. There are many things we don’t know, and many questions for which the only intellectually justifiable answer is “we don’t know”. And “god did it” is not an intellectually justifiable answer, it’s a platitude.
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What makes you think atheism entails a lack of wonder? In a way I take that statement to be strangely revealing of your psychology. Atheism could be true, and you’d be inclined to deny it because you find it emotionally impoverished? I just have to keep being surprised that there are people in the world who thinks that how things feel to them, or what consequences it would have to humanity if it was true, is some sort of guide to what is true.
If atheism is true, there’d be no wonder to life and no purpose to existence, we are told. And I could sit here as an atheist and in principle agree with it (I don’t, though), and it would not have done any work to show that atheism is false or that theism is true.
There are the way things are, what is true, what is actually the case, and then there are the things we like, the things we want, and the things we hope for, and those frequently don’t align. This should go without saying, but it’s like every theist I have a discussion with make statements that essentially are appeal to consequences fallacies.
All this talk about purpose, morality, and intellectual fulfillment is irrelevant. Our emotions don’t dictate reality. Who here who isn’t a young child haven’t at some point experienced the death of a loved one, or friend of a loved one or something similar, and thought to themselves that it would be nice to some day get to meet them again and reminisce about all that has happened since they “left”? Part of growing up is realizing that’s just a comforting fantasy, and we have to make the most of the fleeting moment we get.
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