The point is that it is in violation of how physics normally works. So if God can make Jesus walk on water, in violation of gravity, God should also be able to make an organism stay alive even while the normal laws of the universe imply they should be dead. Isn’t that, in effect, what he did when he also resurrected Jesus?
Much ink has been spent by apologists assuring us that Jesus died on the cross due to his treatment by the romans. The story is that Jesus was tortured, crucified, and stabbed with a spear to check if he was really dead, so he probably died to some combination of blood loss, dehydration, and sheer physical exhaustion.
That’s what the laws of physics normally does to a person who is crucified under those circumstances. The body gives in, it stops working. But then Jesus came back alive, apparently still with those wounds in his body (such as holes in his hands and feet). And yet he lived, through some act of God, right? So apparently God can sustain a person alive, even while the laws of physics says they normally should not be able to live.
Okay I think I understand what you meant by the term then. There is just a greater range of values over which we’d produce a universe such as the one we see. Just a semantics point here then, which is it’s not really that it’s “less fine tuned”, since the values still have to be something, it’s just that the relationship between the magnitude of the change in value, and the magnitude of the effect of that change in value
No. Atheism being true makes no claims about how reality came to be the way it is, short of implying it wasn’t created by any god(s). That’s it.
No. Even if the values obtained by chance(which atheism still does not say they do), that would not make fine-tuning any more a problem on atheism than on theism. I have already explained why in this post. To reiterate, you just push the question back to God: What is the probability that, of all the ways a God could be, it happens to be a God that wants our exact kind of physical life in this exact type of physical universe?
No, you are confusing what atheism actually refers to, with a much larger set of beliefs that atheists of course hold.
Nobody is “just” an atheist, I totally agree with that. We all obviously have other beliefs, in addition to being an atheist. But those beliefs do not follow intrinsically from their atheism. They may follow from other philosophical beliefs or assumptions an atheist might make, but with respect to the subject of fine-tuning of the physical laws of the universe, atheism itself makes no claims about how the universe came to exist and be the way it is.
Some atheists are materialists, some are not. Some atheists are metaphysical naturalists, some are not. Some atheists believe in determinism, some do not. Some atheists believe in panpsychism, some do not. Some atheists belive in one of several types of compatibilist free will, some atheists believe in libertarian free will, some atheists are indeterminists but don’t believe in free will, and some atheists are determinists and don’t believe in free will.
For the record I am actually agnostic(understood to mean that I don’t claim to know with any appreciable degree of certainty) on the question of determinism. I simply don’t know whether the world is ultimately fully deterministic or not. I am also agnostic on the question of the origin of the universe, and it’s attributes. That is to say, I simply don’t know that either.
With respect to free will, it depends on how you define it. I think libertarian free will is logically incoherent, and the people who advocate for it appear not to understand what it even is, in my experience. They think it gives them moral responsibility for their actions, but when analyzed in greater detail it actually doesn’t. I’d be happy to explore that question further if you want. Just know that I don’t think me being an atheist has any implications for whether I have free will or not. Since I find the concept íncoherent, I don’t think positing God’s existence would make free will a workable concept anyway.
Yes it’s clear you’re very misinformed on these questions.
I’m not going to waste my time defending positions I myself am not even remotely sure on. I don’t even know what you mean by free will or agency, and I have little reason to think you’d be able to provide definitions of those terms that would stand up to any scrutiny.
I would have to agree with that, including definitions of free will and agency coming from Christians.
Even if that is true, that does not imply philosophical materialism follows from atheism. It obviously doesn’t. One may be a philosophical materialist and an atheist, just like one may be a citizen of Italy and be a Catholic. But there is no logically necessary connection between the two. It may be that most people in Italy are catholics, but obviously one does not follow from the other.
I have no idea what you mean by “pure” atheists, but if you mean to imply an atheist who has no other beliefs than their atheism, obviously not.
If merely the latter, that there’s an atheist who isn’t a philosophical materialist, then yes. You’re talking to one.
Can exist? As in it is logically possible that a ghost can exist? Yes. I think it’s logically possible. I don’t think there ARE any ghosts, because there doesn’t seem to be any good evidence for ghosts.
I don’t believe that humans act in a way that is not in accordance with the laws of physics. But I also don’t think libertarian free will is a logically coherent concept, even if I became convinced that God exists I still think the idea is incoherent.