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5th April 2018, 06:41 PM | #81 |
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I'm still stuck at basically seeing everything that has ever happened as "way too improbable to even calculate the odds of" to ever "absolutely need" something like a god or multiverse to explain anything just because it's unlikely.
I almost get the sense that the astronomers haven't had the theists down their throats with an agenda since Copernicus and Galileo, so they haven't HAD to see the problems with seeing gods in gaps like the evolutionary biologists had to when anti-evolution ID was being pushed, so they're not as intimately familiar with "Blind Watchmaker" type thinking when it comes to these sorts of things. |
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5th April 2018, 07:00 PM | #82 |
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The universe is no more fine tuned for life than a pothole is fine tuned for the water that fills it when it rains. In fact, the universe is 99.99999999999999999999999999999999999 hostile to life (as we know it)
There isn't a "fine tuning" problem, there is a just a "point of view" situation. There might appear to be a problem if you are outside the universe looking in, but when you are inside the universe looking within, what you see is what you have. It is what it is! |
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5th April 2018, 10:23 PM | #83 |
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6th April 2018, 12:38 AM | #84 |
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I think there's three possibilities, one of which that astronomer has neglected to mention, and one of which is different to what she stated it as:
1) This universe is one of many, each with different laws. 2) This universe is all there is and all there ever has been. 3) This universe was engineered to have precisely the qualities it has. 1) is basically what she said about the multiverse, although it also allows for the possibility that this is one of a series of universes that has existed, each with different properties. This is analogous to Adams' puddle, given how many holes there are in the world, each of which can form its own unique puddle. This theory has the advantage of making the existence of a universe with these exact properties expected and mundane, no matter how extraordinary it may seem from the outside - the idea that although it seems extraordinary to the person who actually wins the jackpot on the lottery, someone winning the lottery is so commonplace as to occur almost every time the lottery is drawn. 2) is the one that she omitted. Presumably she believes that it's too improbable to be true, but that's actually the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. You don't get to decide what the win conditions are after you know what the results are. In other words, if you rolled a billion-sided die, you don't get to see that you rolled a 375,974,385 and declare it extraordinary because the chances of getting that number were a billion to one. Or, to put it another way, she's assuming that there's something special about this universe and the fact that we exist in it which makes this result significant, when it's actually only significant to us because we exist and have egos. 3) is slightly different to what she said. She's assuming that any consciousness who made the universe as it is would be God, but firstly that implies the Christian god, and I see no reason to assume that if a deity were to exist that it would be Jehovah or, indeed, any particular one. And secondly, it implies that there can't be other consciousnesses responsible. It assumes, for example, that billions of years in the future, after the singularity, a giant supercomputer the size of a galaxy works out that it's impossible for the universe to have formed like this by accident - there's a secret code buried within the spin of quarks, say - and so has to invent a time machine in order to send a probe back to the Big Bang and tweak conditions to ensure that the universe ends up like this. It's an ontological paradox, sure, but the existence of God is paradoxical, too, and at least my example hypothesis relies mostly on logical extrapolations of current knowledge. I suppose that there's also a possibility of a 4 - that there's some as-yet unknown drive towards stability (like a sort of multidimensional entropy). So there have been other universes, but only a few, with each being born from the others. With each the universe becomes a little more stable, a little more like ours, and that the drive towards things like the charge on each electron being as it is is a law of nature that we don't yet understand. Oh, I suppose there's a 5) which is subtly different from 2), too - that these things couldn't have been different. We don't yet understand all these things and how they came about. It's possible, therefore, that rather than (for example) the weak force being what it is and gravity being what it is, the weak force is what it is because gravity is what it is. I believe it's been theorised that all the forces were originally one force which split into different forces soon after the Big Bang. So, if our stable universe can be represented by the number 10, then if gravity is 7 then the weak force must be 3, but if gravity were 6, then the weak force would be 4 and the universe would still be as stable. In other words, it doesn't matter what the specific numbers of each of the factors are because if one were different, then all the others would be different in a way which also created a stable universe. We don't yet know enough to know. |
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6th April 2018, 06:38 AM | #85 |
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I take your point about apatheism. There are many blessed folks who simply don’t give a damn. Good for them, not having to waste valuable life-energy on ultimately worthless thoughts. But leaving apatheists aside, I’m not so sure about what you say. That thread you mention (“theism fail or science win”). Now I realize the title itself doesn’t necessarily cover the actual point of an OP, and besides, the entire thread itself can cover many different aspects not necessarily envisaged even in the OP. Perhaps what I’m thinking now may well have been covered in that thread itself. But what I was speaking of is more general. I’d say, myself, that “science” is a specific application of a general rational outlook. In this case what is important is that general rational outlook (in a word, skepticism), rather than science specifically. Either “theism fail” and/or “science win” can, at the individual level, lead to loss of faith in religion only in as much as one’s reason guides one to reject religion basis this evidence, right? Even a very spectacular “theism fail” and a very emphatic “science win” can, in the absence of the all-important reasoning process, can lead to continued faith in all kinds of religious nonsense. Happens all that time! I really don’t see how anyone can move to an atheist position without actually reasoning this out to their own individual satisfaction! Faith can be accessed without reason, but not the absence of faith. At least not if your starting point had been faith. (Of course, I’m ignoring one specific item here : a religion that specifically posits that there is no god. An adherent of such a religion can, I suppose, be thought of as an atheist. And, like other theists, this theist’s religious worldview may well have been shaped primarily by means of faith, as opposed to reason. So yes, I see two instances where de facto atheism can be arrived at without recourse to reason : the first one is apatheism, like you suggest ; and the second is via some atheistic religion. But these apart, atheism must necessarily be arrived at via reason, it seems to me. And, like I was saying in my earlier post : While this is an intensely personal process, nevertheless some of the reasons and arguments may well happen to be framed by others as well, why not?) |
6th April 2018, 09:27 AM | #86 |
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It's not, and I'll give you an analogy why. It's the same one I gave in another thread:
Suppose I'm to be executed, but my executioners, for some reason, have given me a small chance of survival. A random number generator will spit out a number between 1 and 100 quadrillion right before the poison hits my veins. If a 2 pops up, I get to live. I close my eyes, wait for my imminent death...and it doesn't happen. A 2 popped up. Now, are you claiming I'm not going to question why I'm still alive? Of course I am. I'm going to naturally conclude the random number generator wasn't so random after all, and it was rigged in my favor. If you do the Bayesian calculus, the hypothesis that someone rigged things in my favor is far more likely than the "I just got lucky" one. If you don't agree, I can just tweak the RNG so that the range of values becomes so large that believing in the coincidence explanation for my survival becomes absurd. That's the epistemological position we're in regarding the fine-tuning problem. I don't know anyone working in the field (i.e., not Victor Stenger) who still believes in the coincidence explanation. One of the reasons inflation theory is so popular is it solves these kinds of fine-tuning problems, like the flatness problem. |
6th April 2018, 09:51 AM | #87 |
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Well, firstly, what you're describing is the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy. Secondly, your analogy assumes that the existence of God is as likely as the existence of someone who could tamper with or otherwise rig a random number generator, which is unsustainable.
A better analogy would be to the probability of you being born - taking into account all the things like one specific sperm fertilising one particular egg, your parents meeting (each with their own particular sperm and eggs), and so on and so forth, right back to the first single-celled lifeforms. If you define the "win" condition as being your existence and work your way backwards, that seems spectacularly improbable. But is it more probable that an unimaginably advanced being micromanaged the behaviour and biology of creatures for billions of years in order to eventually produce you? Bearing in mind that God doesn't actually answer any questions, it just moves them back a notch, so you just have to answer the same questions about God. |
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6th April 2018, 09:54 AM | #88 |
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No, it's not. In my scenario, you would question why you are still alive and conclude it was because someone rigged things on your behalf. You would come to that conclusion rationally, not because of some fallacy. I can show you a simple Bayesian analysis of why that's so.
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6th April 2018, 10:12 AM | #89 |
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You're formulating your hypothesis after the data has been gathered. That's the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy.
And you have ignored the bulk of my post in which I outlined a more apt analogy than yours - one which doesn't draw a false equivalence between the existence of a human and the existence of an all-powerful deity. |
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6th April 2018, 10:28 AM | #90 |
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6th April 2018, 10:55 AM | #91 |
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_...hooter_fallacy
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And is there any particular reason why you keep ignoring the parts of my post which are relevant to the discussion in order to focus on a minor side-issue? |
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6th April 2018, 11:00 AM | #92 |
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6th April 2018, 11:01 AM | #93 |
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6th April 2018, 11:02 AM | #94 |
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When I said "I'm still stuck at basically seeing everything that has ever happened as "way too improbable to even calculate the odds of" to ever "absolutely need" something like a god or multiverse to explain anything just because it's unlikely." --- I think I must have been thinking of the Texas sharpshooter fallacy.
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6th April 2018, 11:04 AM | #95 |
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6th April 2018, 11:05 AM | #96 |
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Leaving a strict religion has less to do with the reason and more to do with personal freedom
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6th April 2018, 11:07 AM | #97 |
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What, the incredible odds of you being born? It's not similar. If it hadn't been you, it would have been someone else wondering about it. That's why multiverse defeats the fine-tuning problem: there are a lot of other universes, and we happen to be one of the few where life is possible.
To make your analogy fit, there would have to be an improbable string of coincidences leading to your existence, and you are the only person in existence. THEN you would conclude it was not just coincidence. It's like a lottery: if there are enough players, it's not surprising if someone wins. But if you design a lottery, and the odds of winning are a bazillion-to-one, and only one person plays, and they win the first time, then the lottery was rigged. |
6th April 2018, 11:09 AM | #98 |
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6th April 2018, 11:13 AM | #99 |
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6th April 2018, 11:14 AM | #100 |
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And if the universe hadn't had the exact values for these factors that it had, then it would have had different ones.
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6th April 2018, 11:16 AM | #101 |
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And there would be no life. That's not the situation we're in.
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6th April 2018, 11:19 AM | #102 |
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If ANY number between one and bazillion is pulled in said lottery, each one was as unlikely as the other regardless of which number comes up. Our universe can be the only number pulled out of all potential universes, and we're only here finding it amazing because it was, and it doesn't imply anything was rigged. Would you find it metaphysically meaningful if some plague wiped out every other human on earth besides you, and you were the last person left on earth? |
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6th April 2018, 11:23 AM | #103 |
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6th April 2018, 11:25 AM | #104 |
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6th April 2018, 11:27 AM | #105 |
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The point of the thread was to reason theists out of religion. Pretend I'm the theist. I've just quoted an atheist expert who said it's either God or the multiverse, and that the evidence for both is zilch, so both are equally possible.
What do you do to counter my argument? |
6th April 2018, 11:35 AM | #106 |
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A lottery made for a person? I'd consider it likely.
But the universe wasn't designed for us, as far as I can tell, any more than our parents were made to make us, and their parents before them, back to the primordial soup and the big bang before that. Almost everything that has ever happened is too improbable to calculate. You can say the result of a coin flip was 50/50, but what were the chances of the coin even being flipped at that exact moment in time, or the person who flipped the coin ever having been born? |
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6th April 2018, 11:41 AM | #107 |
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First I'd note that a theory of everything might greatly reduce even the appearance of fine tuning, if the fundamental forces are calibrated to one another. If you randomly add or subtract large amounts of just flour from a cake recipe, you'll get something inedible, but if you exactly double it all or cut it in half, etc it's basically the same.
Secondly, I'd advise the theist to see if that atheist expert is presenting the scientific consensus on the topic, or if it's a minority opinion. |
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6th April 2018, 11:52 AM | #108 |
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And I would respond that it might or it might not, but the consensus now is that a TOE is not going to solve the fine-tuning problem. The consensus is the parameters of the physical constants could have differed. Cosmic inflation resulting in a large-enough multiverse does solve the fine-tuning problem, which is one of the reasons it's so popular at the moment (see flatness fine-tuning problem).
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The fact that the theist can cite any valid non-theist experts that say things like "it's either god or a multiverse" puts the theist on pretty solid footing. Even if you prove it's not the consensus position, it is at least a rational position, backed up by experts. The theist would be like a physicist who believes in the MWI interpretation of QM. It's not the consensus view, but physicists who believe in the MWI aren't considered nuts either. |
6th April 2018, 12:26 PM | #109 |
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6th April 2018, 12:28 PM | #110 |
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If there's zilch evidence for both then both are equally improbable with no credible reason to conclude either are possible. Atheist experts can be as wrong as theist experts.
I believe theists misrepresent Faber's words, as they eagerly do with Einsteins "God doesn't play dice with The Universe" quote. Seems "fine-tuning" has become the new "quantum" for theists to argue that science proves a god. |
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6th April 2018, 12:30 PM | #111 |
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Pretty much anything is possible until it's essentially proven impossible or too unlikely to worry about. |
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6th April 2018, 12:43 PM | #112 |
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If you want to believe that all dreams and fantasies are actually possible then that's your choice. But you don't have the right to impose that choice on others as if you have their agreement.
"We don't know everything that is possible" isn't the same as "Everything is possible" ETA - What determines what is "to unlikely to worry about" other than the complete lack of some evidence that determines it's likely enough to worry about? If it's possible to prove anything is impossible then "anything is possible" is redundant. "Pretty much anything is possible" is a contradiction. "Anything is possible" means nothing can ever be impossible. It's like an omnipotent god destroying it's own omnipotence by creating an immovable mountain it can't move. |
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6th April 2018, 01:10 PM | #113 |
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All of this is utter bollocks. In my lifetime, my country has gone from a total ban on any contraception of any sort (which gave rise to an interesting smuggling operation) to being the first country in the world to ratify SSM by popular vote. That just shows how irrelevant religion has become.
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6th April 2018, 01:16 PM | #114 |
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6th April 2018, 01:25 PM | #115 |
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Err...
Lets pretend it's 1600 and we're trying to figure out what makes people sick. So far, people have proposed: hypothesis 1, hypothesis 2, and hypothesis 3. Do we encourage people so inclined to discover whatever evidence they can, or just sit around going "so far there's zilch evidence for any then, so they're all equally improbable with no credible reason to conclude any are possible"? |
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6th April 2018, 01:32 PM | #116 |
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The popularity of inflation theory partly as a solution to the fine-tuning problem. Inflation theory is dominant, at the moment, and part of the reason is because it solves issues like the Flatness problem and the hugely inaccurate predictions regarding the Cosmological Constant and Higgs Boson. I've provided a link to the flatness problem. You can look up the others.
String theory is probably the best known TOE candidate, but it's not popular anymore. The lack of results from the LHC have been devastating to it. Inflation theory leading to a large multiverse IS the leading "theory of everything". It doesn't unify QM and gravity, but if true, it explains a lot of things that have bothered cosmologists over the years.
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6th April 2018, 01:35 PM | #117 |
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Suppose I'm to be executed, but my executioners, for some reason, have given me a small chance of survival. If a supernova appears in the sky in the next five minutes, I get to live.
I close my eyes, wait for my imminent death...and it doesn't happen. A supernova appeared in the sky. Still think it was rigged? |
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6th April 2018, 01:38 PM | #118 |
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6th April 2018, 01:58 PM | #119 |
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6th April 2018, 01:58 PM | #120 |
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