I don’t see why it would. I mean there are many things that once never existed and now does. The fact that they now exist doesn’t mean they had to be present at the putative origin of the universe(supposing it even had one).
I am an atheist because, ultimately, Carl Sagan’s friends garage dragon. The whole thing stinks like ever more silly rationalizations.
As best I can tell human religions and their associated concepts, like the idea of a single all-powerful conscious mind existing outside of time and space, are human inventions. Partly shaped by the psychological need of religious people to engage in apologetics when pressured by skeptics (all people will try to defend their views, some times against all reason and evidence).
The sort of idea of God we hear today is so nebulous and vague we’re literally told it could have hypothetically inscrutable motives and face untestable obstacles that require it’s presence to be hidden. For our benefit of course.
The world has evils but God is supposedly omnipotent(another blatant invention, what possible reason could anyone have for the belief that there is such a thing as omnipotence?). And they square that by inventing another idea: There is some sort of good we can’t presently access, in another world that comes only after we die(so it can’t be tested, how convenient) that requires, is only possible, through the currently existing evils having to occur. Triple self-serving invention defended with more invention and rationalization. None of it based in anything verifiable.
All the good magic happened long ago.
All the purported rewards and any shred of proof will only happen after everyone’s gone.
And people get mad when you say it like that because their ape-instincts value stubbornnes, defiance, and tribalistic loyalty. We instinctively dislike people who don’t defend themselves. We instinctively want to be loyal to our friends and in-group. So we make stuff up when pushed and believe it ever more strongly. That’s how we got an invisible omni-everything God that works in mysterious ways that especially rewards belief by “those who have not seen” in a magical realm you only get to enter after you die. And the people we don’t like? Oh man, you should see their faces when they realize what’s coming.
I would first note that this is a philosophical argument.
I would also question whether “intricate design” should be considered a fact without being very clear on the meaning of the term. That is not to say that I definitely reject it - depending on the meaning I might or might not. Human created designs may be intricate, of course, but I don’t consider that to have direct implications for the origin of our universe.
Aside from that I would say that it very obviously does not follow.
Unless you wish to invoke an infinite regress there must be some origin of these properties that does not require that they already exist. But then you would need additional argumentation to say why it follows with regard to our universe - especially when these things appear to have arisen locally in our universe long after the origin.
@Audrey this may call for some disambiguation. The lay persons’ definition of nothing is not the same as what physicists consider it to be. A physicist might say there is a field and energy, LOTS of energy. Physicist Lawrence Krauss’ interpretation of how the universe can arise from nothing is very different from the Biblical concept of Creation. Most Christians are comfortable with both ideas.
Now, since I’m not a physicist, I’m about to get roasted by every physicist present. Enjoy the show!
In order to make a valid Bayesian argument for God from the existence of life, you would need to demonstrate that P(Life|God) >> P(Life|~God). P(Life|God) is the probability that life exists given that God exists, and P(Life|~God) is the probability that life exists given that God does not exist.
Unfortunately, neither of these probabilities are calculable. Without a plausible Theory of Everything, we can have no way of knowing what the probability is that a ‘fine-tuned’ universe would arise naturalistically. We could also never know what the probability is for God to create life, unless we know all of God’s motives for creating or not creating life, which we can’t. (Romans 11:33-34)
For that reason, all teleological arguments are always going to be fatally flawed.
With regard to the probability of life arising naturalistically being statistically impossible, we just don’t know enough about the underlying mechanisms of the universe to tell whether or not physical constants are fine-tuned to any significant degree.
That is a perfectly understandable and also sufficient answer. But Sean Carroll (an astrophysicist and popularizer of science) had a rebuttal of sorts, and it was basically this: Granted, science provides explanations about events in the physical world, and science cannot explore the non-physical or supernatural realm (whatever that is). But whenever someone makes claims about there being a supernatural anything, they always claim that this supernatural “thing” has an influence on the physical world. And we science types can then pounce on that and test for unexplainable events in the physical world. So far, we’ve arguably never found it.
I would go further, and say that every single observation we make of our world, without exception, indicates that things of any complexity whatsoever arise from simpler components under the influence of natural laws. It would be contrary to our every single empirical observation for intelligence to just sort of exist, on its own, before anything else did.
I think that the “absence of God” is not a very well-defined proposition. There are a lot of gods, and what might constitute evidence of the presence or absence of one might not be very helpful on the presence or absence of another.
So, generically, no. There’s nothing that would constitute evidence against any and all of the gods existing. One has to evaluate each god as its own hypothesis. Is it eight hundred feet tall, highly visible, and standing right next to me? If so, I have excellent evidence against its existence, which might easily be elevated to the status of “scientific evidence” by a few well corroborated measurements.
But the pattern of discourse on this sort of thing is so very sad and regrettable: the atheist says, well, I have good reason to think that the god of, say, the Flurpidurpan Bible does not exist, because His Holy Scrolls turn out to be ordinary rolls of Bounty extra-absorbent paper towels. The Flurpidurpan believer does not regard that as very helpful, however, and so withdraws the existence of His Holy Scrolls from the question: either those rolls of Bounty really are the scrolls, but not in a way perceptible to us, or the existence of His Holy Scrolls isn’t really the point of Flurpidurpianism, or something. Then the deeds of the Flurpidurpan god are scrutinized, and the Flurpidurpan believer says, ah, you have a naive view of the nature of Flurpidurpan scripture, and so ya ain’t laid a glove on me. And then when the very spot where the Flurpidurpan god is said to stand is examined, and found surprisingly godless, the Flurpidurpan god suddenly acquires new characteristics which are useful for nothing but the evasion of scrutiny: he is inscrutable, and ineffable, and so the unbeliever is scrut and effed in all his attempts to evaluate the truth of these claims.
And so the question really belongs the other way round. What is it that the Flurpidurpan believer thinks (and, importantly, that any reasonable interlocutor would have to agree) is the unambiguous, objective, measurable manifestation of the reality of the Flurpidurpan god? Once that is known – and given in genuine, testable terms devoid of reference to convenient get-out-of-scrutiny-free cards like inscrutability – then it will become immediately evident what is evidence for, and what is evidence against, that particular god.
It would seem more parsimonious to attribute this to the fact that rationality, intelligence, and cooperative behavior may have evolutionary advantages.
It is a fact that there are Volkswagens, COVID-19 variants and Yorkies[1]. Does it follow from that, that the origin of the universe contained Volkswagens, wet markets and the ability to have and create Yorkies?
Same argument, different objects. If my version is flawed, yours is too.
I suggest we make a distinction between “What are the arguments”, “How good are the arguments”, and actually having an argument.
We’ve got a great discussion going here representing different points of view. Let’s not argue over who killed who right or wrong, we get enough of that in other threads.
It is definitely the latter. Here is a snippet of an article by researchers who are NOT from the Discovery institute:
"The evolution of tubulin and microtubules is puzzling. Why would tubulin, a single protein, evolve as a cog in a machine, one brick in a skyscraper yet to be realized? According to conventional evolutionary theory, the feedback fitness function for tubulin would depend on higher order microtubule activities not yet present.
Proponents of intelligent design cite microtubules and their composites cilia and centrioles as structures which are difficult to explain through natural selection. They may have a valid objection, but lack a scientific alternative. How did tubulin and microtubules (or their prokaryotic and archaebacteria counterpart proteins) evolve? Consider a possible scenario in the primordial soup. " [emphasis added]
For more on what scenario they are proposing, read the source above.
Oh yeah, they are being taking seriously by legit scientists right now:
"However, in Penrose OR the choices (and quality of subjective experience) are influenced by resonate with what Penrose called noncomputable Platonic values embedded in the fine scale structure of spacetime geometry. These Platonic values, patterns, or vibrations in the makeup of the universe, may encode qualia, and pertain to mathematics, geometry, ethics, and aesthetics, and the 20 or so dimensionless constants governing the universe.
These include the fine structure constant, the mass ratios for all fundamental particles, the gravitational constant and many more, all precise to many decimal points. If these numbers were slightly different, life and consciousness -at least as we know them- would be impossible.
…Penrose OR avoids the need for MWI and supports strong AP, suggesting that over aeons, dimensionless constants defining the universe evolved and self-organized to optimize life, qualia, and consciousness. "
If this quote is too technical for you, here is a quote from a secondary source that briefly describes their theory for the laymen:
“Penrose has employed his beginner’s mind methodology to controversially challenge the prevailing theories of mind and consciousness. In his “orchestrated objective reduction” theory (a.k.a. Orch-OR), Penrose posits that consciousness derives from quantum vibrations in microtubules throughout neurons in the brain. In this view, individual consciousness is connected to a universal proto-consciousness . This theory may resonate with the classical Buddhist view, that consciousness is the “ground” or primordial nature of the universe. The Beginner’s Mind of Scientist Sir Roger Penrose - Lions Roar
Well, God has an explanation. He exists by necessity of his own nature while our universe or multiverse depends on God’s existence. If God did not exist, then we would not be able to ask the question " Does God have an explanation?" in the first place.
This is the wrong question to ask them these days because most of them actually claim that there is no evidence that God exists instead . For this reason, the real question that should be asked is… Do you believe there is scientific evidence that points to the absence of evidence for God?
Either way, it is a faith-based position on their part.
You are forgetting that God, technically, did not create from absolutely nothing but from no matter and energy according to John chapter 1:
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. “…The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. We have seen His glory, the glory of the one and only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.”
The Greek meaning for “the Word” mentioned in John 1:1-3 is “something said; by implication, a topic, also reasoning or motive; by extension, a COMPUTATION; specially, the Divine Expression.” [emphasis added]
Here is another source on the Orch OR theory of consciousness that you should be able to understand and enjoy:
Li T, Tang H, Zhu J, Zhang JH. The finer scale of consciousness: quantum theory. Annals of Translational Medicine 2019;7(20):585. doi: 10.21037/atm.2019.09.09.
Here are some other sources you might like as well:
This rather nicely demonstrates the pitfalls of allowing one religious Apologist, with no expertise in Biology whatsoever (West), to recount from another religious Apologist, who likewise has no expertise in Biology whatsoever (CS Lewis), the latter’s argument about biology.
In this case, you end up with a strawman argument in that “universal evolutionism” is not what Evolutionary Biology teaches. While it may seem to amateur outsiders that evolution is an inevitable march from less complex to more complex creatures, what Evolutionary Biology actually teaches is that Natural Selection is selecting for greater fitness, not greater complexity – if greater fitness results from greater complexity, fine, but Natural Selection is equally perfectly happy (if I may be forgiven for anthropomorphising for a moment) if the improved fitness results from greater simplicity.
This is yet another reason why you should not take the word of Apologists over that of the Scientific Community.
Hello @John_Harshman. Thanks for responding. You mentioned current physical theory: does that hold that the big bang could have arises from nothing, or from some sort of pre-existing energy?
