Note that Barnes does not state, at least here, that fine tuning is scientific evidence for God. An explanation can be rationally consistent without being scientific.
I am a theist, and I am intrigued by the fine tuning discussion. But it is very sloppy to construe that as scientific evidence for God.
I do not think so.
Spacetime is more fundamental that matter, energy and radiation because it is possible for spacetime to exist without matter, energy or radiation. It is not possible for those to exist without spacetime.
No. I did not. I āwonder[ed]ā as to āwhat level of familiarityā you have āwith the underlying scienceā, and commented about āapologists, often with little or no scientific expertise, making grandiose claims about what the āscientific evidenceā leads to.ā
Nobody, be they plumbers or neurosurgeons, need āpersonal qualificationsā in order to merely discuss science.
But you werenāt ādiscussingā science, your OP dumped a veritable Gish Gallop of unsubstantiated and often controversial claims about science on our laps.
You were talking at us, not talking with us.
You mean like the claim that BGV āproves that any universe expanding on averageālike oursāmust have a beginningā? See my first post.
I can see a number of potential reasons for that:
Leading with the AI aspect probably put people off. People tend to be disinclined to spend time replying to a post generated by an LLM.
Your OP was a wide-roving Gish Gallop, lacking any substantiation, let alone citations. This would tend to evoke skeptical standoffishness rather than detailed engagement.
Your claims overlap considerably with WLCās KCA ā which has already been debated repeatedly on this forum (most recently here), reducing the appetite for a rehash.
This forum tends to have more biologists than theoretical physicists, reducing the level of engagement on the latter topic.
And Iāve seen enough bad science in apologetics over the years to be completely unmoved by this.
And āI considerā you to be mistaken in this view. You exhibit little concern about the wider āfoundations, methods, and implications of scienceā, but rather on the narrow focus of finding what science can be cherry-picked to get to the only answer that apologists are ever seem interested in: that āGoddiditā. If it is not purported āScientific Evidence for a Creatorā, you would appear to have no interest in it. The fact that the only scientific topic, other than Cosmology, that you bring up is Abiogenesis would appear to support this interpretation.
This would not disabuse us of the suspicion that your understanding of the science may be superficial, and your conclusions the product of motivated reasoning.
Summarised: you posted on an apologetics blog, and were asked to do a video based upon it on an apologetics Youtube channel.
None of that adds to your credibility ā the internet is chock full of blogs, and Youtube is chock full of channels ā many (most?) of which are terrible.
If somebody had genuinely āfalsifie[d] the RNA World hypothesisā, I rather suspect that somebody on this forum would have noticed, and commented on the fact.
Given your use of the perjorative āEvolutionistā, I would suspect that your understanding of biology is as tainted by motivated reasoning as your understanding of cosmology.
On what topic do you intend to write? Nothing of your output that Iāve seen to date would appear to be within that field.
That paper presents āthe existence of a Creatorā as a pure hypothetical (āIF there was actually a messageā), not as a scientific inference. One more point where you are ādemonstrating that [you] had misunderstood something important about the science.ā
This paper does assert the existence of a ācreatorā ā but appears to do so by way of mystical gibberish, rather than āscientific inferenceā:
Fortunately, it can imagine light and alter its perception of rates of
time to stretch the light to give its space depth and otherwise manipulate the
light to create worlds that it can incarnate itself into, ālosingā itself to escape
its eternal loneliness and pass its eternity. All life forms are just different
points of view, different perspectives for that single awareness. Hence, we
are all one in it and we are all its children and, hence, in faith we have divine
power.Because we are all one in it, it harmonizes our universes. This
explains non-locality. Alice and Bob have harmonized experiences,
regardless of the apparent distance between them, because they are one-and-
the-same in the Creator that is harmonizing their points of view.The universe evolves forward beneficially for us when we believe it
will. We are all brought forth as infants who must be carefully succored and
this initiates us into faith. We are born into a totally loving, caring,
supportive world. A guilty conscience initiates doubt, which is the opposite
of faith, and it can manifest devastating effects.
Can anybody make head or tails of this?
I could not find that quote on that page, nor anywhere else in that article nor any cognate of theism/theistic.
Hereās a quote from Barnes:
"Consider the following tidy explanations:
* This universe is one of a large number of variegated universes, produced by physical processes that randomly scan through (a subset of) the set of possible physics. Eventually (or somewhere), a life-permitting universe will be created. Only such universes can be observed, since only such universes contain observers.
This is absolutely proof positive that Barnes has published in a peer reviewed journal the consideration of a Creator hypothesis. I do not understand how anyone can argue that this is not true. A personal Creator is a scientific hypothesis.
The paper by Forrington has been removed. I initially thought āThe Journal of Modern Cosmologyā was peer reviewed but as I have skimmed over the paper more closely, I see that it not.
It seems that the quote from Barnes is not from this paper. I will remove that also from my comment.
Yes, in skimming Barnes I saw that passage. But:
That is not the quote that you originally misattributed to him.
The passage in no way indicates that Barnes is advocating these positions, let alone offering them as āscientific inferencesā, merely as examples of ātidy explanationsā of the type that Leslie (1989) had noted as:
[a] chief reason for thinking that something stands in special need of explanation is that we actually glimpse some tidy way in which it might be explained
Howās the saying goāthe devil is in the details? Of course I get ācaught upā on displays of sophistry, especially those where Christian apologists skip premises in reaching conclusions.The āreal pointā is not whether a creator exists, the point is the characteristics attributed to that creator which are unjustified. My sympathies lie with deism and pantheism, thus I donāt outright deny the existence of some type of creator in principle. In fact a creator can be easily inferred if there was a true, unequivocal beginning to the universe. But there is not.
However, thatās not my point. My point is that you have cited no empirical or logical support for a personal God. Christianity stands or falls on the existence of a personal God, a God that inter-meddles in the world. You have simply imported that attribute into your ontology by sleight of handā¦
This thread reveals little strength to your argument, but quite a bit of weaknesses to Grok.
A question:
Why would an āeternal, atemporal Creatorā create a universe at a specific arbitrary point in time?
If the creator were indeed eternal and atemporal, wouldnāt it make sense that the universe they created would also be eternal? If creating a universe is a good idea, it always would have been a good idea ā so there is no point in waiting to create it. So the creation would have been as eternal as the creator.
On one hand we have an apologetic argument for the existence of God, and the claim is (essentially) we need a scientific argument to disprove the apologetic. I call non-sequitur.
This is the same question philosophers have been arguing for thousands of years now. If there were any clear resolution, it would have been found centuries ago, no AI needed. There is nothing new here except that itās an AI rehashing these old arguments in place of a human apologist.
I have to apologize for my tone here because itās going to be harsh, but fair, and true. Your post is idiotic. Iām sorry, itās idiotic. Youāre citing what is little more than a chat-bot as if to support a scientific or philosophical question? Thatās idiotic.
You can literally make it say anything you want with the right prompt. Tell me why X is good at Y/tell me why X is bad at Y almost always works. Youāve wasted everyoneās time.
Itās capacity to evaluate logic is also next to worthless, as it is trivial to get it to make basic errors in logical reasoning. Even in relatively basic geometry Iāve been able to describe problems, aided by literal figures, that the bot had trouble comprehending, and where I had to take it through itās errors in baby-steps.
Finally, yveryone of your points are disputed in both cosmology and philosophy, and there are innumerable good responses to these claims about everything from infinite regresses, the BVG theorem, multiverses, and the like. All you have are untestable assumptions about what must be true or possible about time, space, causation, physics etc. The fact is we donāt know the ultimate nature of time, or causation, and anyone who claims we do to such an extend we can reasonably conclude anything about these matters is working with an agenda in mind.
And yet when I look for your argument in the links in this thread I only find conversations with chatbots. Since much of the argument seems to be missing itās rather hard to discuss it.
Given that the argument hasnāt had any real scrutiny that is jumping to conclusions.
This objection makes no sense. Grokās ādefault positionā really doesnāt tell us how it will react to input. The training data is far more relevant and it seems entirely plausible that the training data includes more apologetics of the sort you offer and positive responses to them than it does serious critiques.
The intended point was to show that the argument was nonsense - by linking directly to it. The proponent was not very forthcoming even refusing to supply the prompts. But here is a Grok conversation , The claimed ChatGPT output was similarly sycophantic.
I disagree. The universe had an ultimate beginning. There are no viable past eternal cosmological models. The only mathematical models, such as the Aguirre-Gratton model, require a reversal of the arrow of time. In other words, it requires a miracle. This is true of every mathematical model that is able to evade BGV theorem. There are no reasonal or plausible models that can evade the theorem. None.
Hello Everyone!
This has been an interesting experience for me. I posted a thoughtful argument about the existence of God based on scientific evidence that was vetted by Grok, a leading AI. What was the response? Did anyone want to discuss the science in a peaceful or non-emotional way?
No.
I was attacked. Grok was attacked. AI as a whole was attacked. People who were attacking were not even aware of the important role AI has assumed in scientific research. In past years, several peer reviewed papers were published with AI listed as a co-author. That practice is no longer followed as AI cannot respond to correspondence and cannot be held responsible. Journals have now established policies so that authors can report their use of AI in the research and literature searches.
The attacks on me personally are not a big deal. I donāt mind the attack itself really. What I do mind is that it distracts from our time discussing the science. No one here is actually discussing the science, which was my goal in posting in the first place. The closest to a discussion I got was a few people commented regarding Sean Carrollās false claims about BGV theorem from 2014. I have already written on Sean Carrollās dishonesty. And so his claims are easily refuted. See Sean Carrollās Dishonesty: The Debate of 2014 | Free Thinking Ministries
Where are the scientists who are willling to discuss the actual science?
You did? Where is it? I havenāt seen it.
Hereās a curious phenomenon I have noticed: When people become religious apologists, they often become convinced that they have expert knowledge of subjects, particularly scientific ones, about which they are actually abjectly ignorant. They then expect to engage with people who actually have expert knowledge on an equal basis and debate them, rather than simply listening and learning with a humble attitude.
Why is this?
You have zero qualifications in the relevant fields so the point is moot.
Well, shucks, this is how I find out that writing a book and over 440 posts on science & faith, plus my small contributions to the field of public health in my role at a public health software company, not to mention my sporadic posts in this very forum which have received literal ones of likes, donāt qualify me as a public intellectual. Are they insufficiently public or insufficiently intellectual, I wonder. 
Respecting privacy is a good instinct, but in this case, I suspect I have already achieved whatever level of notoriety I am capable of in this context.
Indeed, this is why I suggested to a group of apologists that they might benefit from a journal club, in order to improve their skills at reading the literature and engaging with the actual methods and evidence, rather than just quoting from introductions and discussions.
Primarily @sygarte and @Paul.B.Rimmer, who are not strangers to this forum either.
For what it is worth, my sense from our conversations with Carter is that he is comfortable with this language. The paper in question is a mathematical model exploring the difficulties in a lower-fidelity protein-based* translation system displacing a higher-fidelity RNA-based translation system. From their results, Wills & Carter conclude that translation always involved proteins (or perhaps polypeptides). The extent to which this actually falsifies the RNA World hypothesis of course depends on how well the math represents the breadth of possible scenarios, and how one formulates the RNA World hypothesis.
*Carter has done a lot of work on aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases (aaRS), and it is that function which is the primary focus of the model. Iām sure Wills & Carter are aware that the ribosome peptidyl transferase is a ribozyme, as is frequently discussed here.
Iāll note that we also discussed Carterās experimental work on the evolution of aaRS and the hypothesis that their common ancestor is a single bidirectional gene, work which has produced evidence consistent with the idea that the genetic code has origins which can be understood as a series of steps involving physical mechanisms even if they are not all purely RNA-based.
Iāll reiterate the point that the current cohort of regular posters skew strongly towards expertise in biology rather than physics. You might get more traction if you want to discuss protein evolution or the evolution of sexual reproduction rather than cosmology.
Perhaps as an abstract coordinate system, like integers are abstractions, but as a physical reality that may or may not be true.
There have been many peer reviewed papers around the beginning of the universe which glance on or involve discussion of divine creation. That does not mean that the authors regard that as within the boundaries of scientific investigation. Nor, for that matter, is it universally accepted that the multiverse is a scientific hypothesis. Those who regard the idea as scientific tend to argue that there are observations which could determine the question, and those who view the idea as not scientific tend to view the idea as not testable in principle. Just because an idea is materialistic does not necessarily make it scientific, and the proposal of a Creator is of course not material and forever outside the scope of science.
By Ethan Siegel: Is The Multiverse A Scientific Theory?
Iām on the skeptical front: the Multiverse may be interesting and a seemingly inevitable theoretical consequence of physics. But until we can test it scientifically ā and it may be that we never can ā it is not quite good enough to be science. Itās a theoretical conjecture, one that makes sense, but it isnāt a scientific theory, and thanks to the limitations of the Universe, it may never be.
George F. R. Ellis writes in Scientific American Does the Multiverse Really Exist?
Parallel universes may or may not exist; the case is unproved. We are going to have to live with that uncertainty. Nothing is wrong with scientifically based philosophical speculation, which is what multiverse proposals are. But we should name it for what it is.
So budding philosopher of science, you cannot ever scientifically reason along the lines of we do not know, therefore my conclusion. Ignorance as to if or how the universe started is never scientific evidence for anything. You are, of course, free to speculate philosophically.
I expect the reception is much warmer when you are preaching to the choir.
Most everyone here is very, very, aware of the role AI plays in research, and fully understand the development, operation, utility, and misuse of the technology.
As others have stated, you have presented little in the way of actual science to discuss, and seem very eager to just jump straight from preferred assumed positions to apologetics.