Objection! Now you are claiming to understand God’s motives. 
Good and evil mean nothing by themselves unless they are compared to some standard. Each one of us sets our own standards, consciously and unconsiously, based on who and what we are, on our surroundings, on our experiences, on our interests and so on. That is why there are so many different value systems around the world, even when some of them are widely shared between people. In the end I can only judge against my own standards, not against anyone else’s. I guess that makes such concepts subjective, or when widely shared, inter-subjective.
Anyway, what has this to do with my observation that ‘love’ is an abstraction, a label that humans assign to a set of feelings and behaviours? Do you dispute that?
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8 posts were merged into an existing topic: The Argument Clinic
Fine-tuning does mean ‘as much life as possible’ the way it is used in the fine-tuning argument I was (implicitly) addressing. Obviously the universe could be finely tuned to ‘some’ goal, but that’s both irrelevant and uninteresting. And if the thing God wants is indistinguishable from the expectations of natural causation, then we can’t use observations to distinguish between the two, now can we?
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Please take personal disagreements private or to a new thread, and report back on any resolution. Thank you
/fnord
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Who is that comment directed to? what does fnord mean?
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And I am arguing that this evidence is insufficient to demonstrate that God exists. Morevover, you seem to be confirming that you have never heard a theist claim the contrary.
I guess we have different understandings of what @Audrey meant by her initial comment.
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Hey @Tim thanks for your reply. I am curious though how there can be an intelligent process such as natural selection that will “work to develop them” if there is no fundamental force of intelligence that is the source of the universe?
@Puck_Mendelssohn I do realize that you cannot find “God” or “the absence of God” with the tools of science. But the reason I started this thread, though, is that I wanted some intelligent opinions on what the scientific evidence is for a world that, by implication, either does or does not seem to have an intelligent Being as its source. I have gotten some really great food for thought here by asking this question.
@Faizal_Ali Did you check out the PDF I posted by Dr. Jeffrey Long? For a near death experience to qualify as a subject for research, it has to meet a minimum score on the NDE scale. He defines the medically inexplicable aspect of them this way (pasted from his PDF):
“Near-death experiences, by their very definition, occur at a time of
unconsciousness and even clinical death with an absent heartbeat. Speaking both
medically and logically, having a highly lucid experience while unconscious or clinically
dead should be impossible. However, thousands of NDEs describe lucid conscious
perceptions even while comatose.
Near-death experiences often occur in association with a cardiac arrest, which
means the heart stops beating.21 This condition is popularly known by the phrase “heart
attack”. To understand how remarkable it is to have an NDE at a time of clinical death, it
is essential to know what happens when the heart stops beating. After the heart stops,
blood immediately ceases flowing to the brain. About ten to twenty seconds later, the
electroencephalogram (EEG), a measurement of brain electrical activity, is flat.22 At this
time there is no significant measurable electrical activity in the cortex, which is the outer
part of the brain. Multiple studies show that patients are usually amnesic or confused
about events that took place before or after the cardiac arrest.23,24,25
Consequently, almost immediately after cardiac arrest, it should be impossible to
have a lucid, organized, and conscious experience. But when a near-death experience
occurs, a lucid experience happens even while physical brain function is shut down. The
NDERF website has hundreds of examples of NDEs that happened during a cardiac
arrest.26 The typical high lucidity in NDEs following cardiac arrest defies any possible
medical explanation. Here are two examples of NDEs that occurred at the time of a
cardiac arrest: …”
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Oh, right! I agree with you completely. I should have clarified that, when someone refuses to infer God from the natural world, religious texts such as the Bible will say this is a heart issue - like a hardened heart or a willful blindness.
Hello @Dan_Eastwood this is my first thread. I believe I have been staying on topic, but if I have not, let me know. I am unsure who your post is referring to. Thanks.
You are just fine. I’m looking to clear out some of the less on-topic comments. 
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If evidence cannot bear on the truth of falsity of a proposition, it also cannot imply much, except in the fully-subjective sense of “imply,” which is useless to anyone interested in the truth.
And that is what a merchant of religion, like the authors of Bible texts, would be expected to say, from a purely self-interested perspective, so that’s not surprising. Is it true, though? Is it the case that whether an inference is valid is a matter of personal taste or preference? I think it is not a matter for the “heart.” And there are many of us who have no dog in the hunt, who would just like to know which, if any, of the gods do really exist, and what, if anything, they have been or are up to. The “heart” has little to do with that, and if you’ve ever examined one, you know it’s a bloody mess.
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Again: An absent heartbeat does not mean absent brain activity. Why is this so complicated for some people to understand?
Here’s an interesting article that I recently encountered. What is significant about it is that the author of the study, Sam Parnia, is someone who is often cited by those who believe in NDE’s as evidence for dualism. Yet look what he found:
Led by researchers at NYU Grossman School of Medicine and elsewhere, the study involved 567 men and women whose hearts stopped beating while hospitalized and who received CPR between May 2017 and March 2020 in the United States and United Kingdom. Despite immediate treatment, fewer than 10 percent recovered sufficiently to be discharged from the hospital.
Survivors reported having unique lucid experiences, including a perception of separation from the body, observing events without pain or distress, and a meaningful evaluation of life, including of their actions, intentions, and thoughts toward others. The researchers found these experiences of death to be different from hallucinations, delusions, illusions, dreams, or CPR-induced consciousness.
The work also included tests for hidden brain activity. A key finding was the discovery of spikes of brain activity, including so-called gamma, delta, theta, alpha, and beta waves up to an hour into CPR. Some of these brain waves normally occur when people are conscious and performing higher mental functions, including thinking, memory retrieval, and conscious perception.
“These recalled experiences and brain wave changes may be the first signs of the so-called near-death experience, and we have captured them for the first time in a large study,” says Sam Parnia, MD, PhD, the lead study investigator and an intensive care physician, who is also an associate professor in the Department of Medicine at NYU Langone Health, as well as the organization’s director of critical care and resuscitation research. “Our results offer evidence that while on the brink of death and in a coma, people undergo a unique inner conscious experience, including awareness without distress.”
Identifying measureable electrical signs of lucid and heightened brain activity, together with similar stories of recalled death experiences, suggests that the human sense of self and consciousness, much like other biological body functions, may not stop completely around the time of death, adds Dr. Parnia.
The study has not yet been published, but if it passes peer review it should put an end to the misconception that NDE’s occur in the absence of brain activity.
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Natural Selection isn’t “an intelligent process” (except perhaps metaphorically) – it is a mindless brute force process of trial and error.
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2 posts were merged into an existing topic: The Argument Clinic
Welcome, Audrey! It’s great to see here a younger person (an inference based on your picture), a woman (of whom we don’t have nearly enough posting here), and an Eastern Orthodox Christian (of whom we don’t have many posting here, perhaps none at all). I’m respectful of the Orthodox tradition (which has much overlap with my own Anglican tradition), and who knows, I may end up there some day.
I like your generic definition of God, which keeps the discussion at a level that is not likely to degenerate into quarreling about Noah’s Flood and so on – as all too often has happened on sites where science and religion are discussed.
I have not read the book by Luke Barnes mentioned above, but there are other books which make fine-tuning arguments, including Nature’s Destiny by Michael Denton (and six other shorter books by Denton published by the Discovery Institute). So you can add those to your long-term reading list.
I agree with some of the others about the need to distinguish between philosophical and scientific arguments. It might be the case, for example, that there are no valid scientific arguments to God, but that there are valid philosophical arguments to God – arguments which start from accurate descriptions of the world as given by current science. For the traditional Christian, “scientific” arguments for God in the modern sense (using the meaning of “science” currently operating among most scientists) are not all that important, since there were already arguments for the existence of God coming from theologians and philosophers long before modern science arose. So even if there is no way directly from scientific facts to God, it doesn’t mean there is no way of reasoning to God. You can find such reasoning in the Church Fathers and in Aquinas and probably (though I have not consulted the texts) in the medieval Orthodox tradition.
On the other hand, it might be argued that the particular discoveries of modern science, including those that suggest a finely tuned universe and those that indicate the astounding complexity (far beyond anything William Paley ever dreamed of) of living systems, though not sufficient to prove the existence of God, should incline a dispassionate observer to at least suspect some overriding design proceeding from some sort of intelligence.
I look forward to hearing more from you here. And if you know others from the Orthodox tradition who have religion/science questions, or have already done some study in this area from an Orthodox point of view, by all means send them here.
I’ll now reply to a comment by one of the others who responded to you:
As stated, this sentence implies that intelligent design is incompatible with the existence of “evolution.” But that depends on the meaning of “evolution.” Intelligent design is not incompatible with “evolution” in the sense of “descent with modification” (which is what Darwin talked about), and it’s not even incompatible with “universal common descent” (as ID proponents such as Michael Behe and William Dembski have made clear). It’s incompatible only with utterly unguided and unplanned evolutionary change.
Matthew seems to realize that “design” and “evolution” aren’t necessarily incompatible, however, because in his next sentence, he suggests that an intelligent designer “chose to design by means of evolution.” However, without an unpacking of what Matthew means by “evolution”, it’s hard to say what that involves. Certainly there are people, such as Michael Denton (apparently a Deist) and Francis Collins (an evangelical Christian) who would say that God creates through evolution. But it appears that Denton and Collins conceive of the workings of evolution in at least partly different ways.
Sorting out all the different proposed ways of combining a doctrine of creation with notions of evolution is a large task, and one I’ve spent about 15 years on, so if you’re interested in that combination, be prepared to do lots of reading!
Once again, Audrey, glad to see you posting here!
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I’m pleased to see this attempt to avoid dogmatic generalizations.
The video below provides an example of what ought to be considered an explanation for how the trick is done:
Now, kindly provide a similarly detailed and specific explanation of how a god has done any specific thing. Create a universe, raise a guy from the dead, build a bacterial flagellum, anything at all. Your choice.
Mind you, I am not asking for an argument intended to convince someone that a god did this thing. I am asking for an explanation of how it was done.
Thanks in advance.
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