Question about god and science?

[Legatus]

BTW, here is a little bit of The Screptape Letters that is appropriet to this about "argument" and "pursuasive essay". Basically, no one today cares much, or thinks much, about argument, or reason, or logic, or anything anymore. It used to be taught in school (or so they tell me), but is no more. Everyone is instead taught by TV and such, at the behest of advertizers who don't want people to think "do I really need that?" to only use emotions. Instead of a sucker born every minute, we can now train them to be suckers. This makes Satans job easier.


"I note what you say about guiding our patient's reading and taking care that he sees a good deal of his materialist friend. But are you not being a trifle naïf? It sounds as if you supposed that argument was the way to keep him out of the Enemy's clutches. That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier. At that time the humans still knew pretty well when a thing was proved and when it was not; and if it was proved they really believed it. They still connected thinking with doing and were prepared to alter their way of life as the result of a chain of reasoning. But what with the weekly press and other such weapons we have largely altered that. Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to have a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn't think of doctrines as primarily "true" of "false", but as "academic" or "practical", "outworn" or "contemporary", "conventional" or "ruthless". Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don't waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong, or stark, or courageous—that it is the philosophy of the future. That's the sort of thing he cares about.

The trouble about argument is that it moves the whole struggle onto the Enemy's own ground. He can argue too; whereas in really practical propaganda of the kind I am suggesting He has been shown for centuries to be greatly the inferior of Our Father Below. By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient's reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result? Even if a particular train of thought can be twisted so as to end in our favour, you will find that you have been strengthening in your patient the fatal habit of attending to universal issues and withdrawing his attention from the stream of immediate sense experiences. Your business is to fix his attention on the stream. Teach him to call it "real life" and don't let him ask what he means by "real"."

[Yrreg]

Byb is right on it. That is one of the mind blowing concepts. Infinite time would leave us the impossibility of ever getting to the present. Time is a product of the universe. God is timeless.

No matter how we want to answer all questions to make God perfectly understandable to human reason, there is a lot of things in God we can never understand.

Important thing is that we can prove to the contentment of the honest searcher that God exists as maker of everything that is not God Himself.


When a searcher is convinced that God exists as the maker of everything that is not God Himself Himself, then he can already rest in his heart and mind notwithstanding whatever conundrums atheists will bring up to beguile him that God cannot exist, because Christians have no acceptable explanation to them atheists with their conundrums.

If they atheists cannot gainsay the proof of God existing as the maker of everything that is not God, then that is the end of any challenges from them whatever and however smart they think their challenges are -- that is to their own empty self-smugness.


Yrreg

[SnowDrops]

Thanks for your responses, but i still have one question regarding my second question.

you guys say that god would simpler than his creation because he is a spirit, but wouldn't that be untrue because for a spirit to be able to have a mind to create all the small details in the universe, he must be pretty complex, not physically, but mentally.....and anyway, how would a spirit have a brain to think all of these things, if he isn't complex?

God never had a cause... He wasn't created, invented, etc. He just is. He exists outside of time. We can't possibly imagine that, but even in evolution, there has to be something that existed before time. Unless you want to imply that everything came from nothing; and nothing means also no laws of physics or dimensions. These things aren't a given, though it's really confusing at first. I'm not going to argue for or against complexity, since considering that God has and always will exist, it isn't really related to Him. Basically, this argument doesn't prove or disprove anything unless you're arguing for an eternal universe.

[SnowDrops]

Seraph - "in the trillions I think"

Are you kidding me ? Trillions is a horrible underestimate. Scientists have estimated some factors to be 1 in 10 to the power of billions. All of them together? Perhaps to the power of trillion(s). Sorry it's such an underestimate I couldn't help pointing it out.

[godseeker]

The GodandScience site mentions that the universe is so finely tuned that the chances of our universe being as suited for life as it is are as slim as if you stacked a pile of dimes up as high as the moon and as wide as North America, painted a random one red, and told someone to blindly pick it out of that pile. But the way I see it, the problem that the multiverse throws into this is that the person blinding picking the red dime no longer has to get it right the first try, but they are allowed to keep picking over and over for eternity. It may take quadrillions or a googolplex amount of years, but it will eventually happen.

I'm not sure anyone has mentioned this yet, but it needs to be said. The atheists like to try to suppose that our universe and life are almost guaranteed given an infinite number of universes. As Stephen Hawking says, all that you need are the laws of nature, and inevitably you’d have our universe and life.

The problem is that this is all rubbish. They suppose that the “laws of nature” are nothing. However, the laws of nature are precise mathematical formulas that are complex. In order for a multiverse with “infinite” diversity to be possible, there had to have been many (or at least one) complex formulas defining it. It is a blunder to consider laws to be nothing, for you cannot describe nothing. So, the atheists try to run away from the biblical God just to run into another lesser god: the impersonal, everlasting laws of nature. These laws of nature, however, just randomly (magically) were perfect for sentient life to form in one or some of the many universes. It could be shown that mathematically the probability is still astronomical for some random set of formulas (laws of nature) to produce any single universe containing the sort of complexity we see in our universe. So, even if you try to say that our universe isn’t finely tuned, you still cannot escape the conclusion that the laws of nature are finely tuned for a multiverse to exist containing complex life. The finely-tuned argument is inescapable, much to the disturbance of atheists.

For the atheists to have any chance of showing the likelihood of there being no God, they must show by evidence that our universe is relatively likely to have occurred by pure chance. They cannot do that. Even if they assume that the laws of nature somehow “evolved” from nothingness, they would never be able to prove that mathematically since there would be no mathematical laws underpinning that kind of evolution. (If there were laws, they’d be complex laws, which defeats the purpose.)

I do not know how complex God is, but for me that is irrelevant. The real “problem” is mere existence in the first place. We cannot wrap our puny, finite minds around the concept of eternal existence. We know that nothing comes from absolutely nothing, but we cannot fathom the alternative. That is because finite creatures cannot comprehend the infinite. But, as soon as we admit to our limitations, we see that an infinite Creator is possible. Not only that, but we can logically conclude that this Being has had the infinite power of self-existence—the ability to exist by pure choice of will. For me, that is the answer to everything. If God is outside of time, and has the infinite power of self-existence (the “I AM”), then His existence is perfectly reasonable and only requires that we acknowledge our finiteness. The universe, by itself, cannot possibly have this attribute of self-existence—unless we really want to take the pantheistic idea of the universe being self-aware and alive, a different kind of god.

So, the bottom line is, which is more likely: (1) a random, unaware universe/multiverse that just happened to be perfect for life and human beings who are self-aware; or (2) an infinite God who chose outside of time (from eternity past) to exist as a perfect being and to create a physical, finite world with self-aware beings made in His image? Combine this question with the evidence in support of the Bible, and atheists don’t stand a “chance” of being right.

[SnowDrops]

The GodandScience site mentions that the universe is so finely tuned that the chances of our universe being as suited for life as it is are as slim as if you stacked a pile of dimes up as high as the moon and as wide as North America, painted a random one red, and told someone to blindly pick it out of that pile. But the way I see it, the problem that the multiverse throws into this is that the person blinding picking the red dime no longer has to get it right the first try, but they are allowed to keep picking over and over for eternity. It may take quadrillions or a googolplex amount of years, but it will eventually happen.

I'm not sure anyone has mentioned this yet, but it needs to be said. The atheists like to try to suppose that our universe and life are almost guaranteed given an infinite number of universes. As Stephen Hawking says, all that you need are the laws of nature, and inevitably you’d have our universe and life.

The problem is that this is all rubbish. They suppose that the “laws of nature” are nothing. However, the laws of nature are precise mathematical formulas that are complex. In order for a multiverse with “infinite” diversity to be possible, there had to have been many (or at least one) complex formulas defining it. It is a blunder to consider laws to be nothing, for you cannot describe nothing. So, the atheists try to run away from the biblical God just to run into another lesser god: the impersonal, everlasting laws of nature. These laws of nature, however, just randomly (magically) were perfect for sentient life to form in one or some of the many universes. It could be shown that mathematically the probability is still astronomical for some random set of formulas (laws of nature) to produce any single universe containing the sort of complexity we see in our universe. So, even if you try to say that our universe isn’t finely tuned, you still cannot escape the conclusion that the laws of nature are finely tuned for a multiverse to exist containing complex life. The finely-tuned argument is inescapable, much to the disturbance of atheists.

For the atheists to have any chance of showing the likelihood of there being no God, they must show by evidence that our universe is relatively likely to have occurred by pure chance. They cannot do that. Even if they assume that the laws of nature somehow “evolved” from nothingness, they would never be able to prove that mathematically since there would be no mathematical laws underpinning that kind of evolution. (If there were laws, they’d be complex laws, which defeats the purpose.)

I do not know how complex God is, but for me that is irrelevant. The real “problem” is mere existence in the first place. We cannot wrap our puny, finite minds around the concept of eternal existence. We know that nothing comes from absolutely nothing, but we cannot fathom the alternative. That is because finite creatures cannot comprehend the infinite. But, as soon as we admit to our limitations, we see that an infinite Creator is possible. Not only that, but we can logically conclude that this Being has had the infinite power of self-existence—the ability to exist by pure choice of will. For me, that is the answer to everything. If God is outside of time, and has the infinite power of self-existence (the “I AM”), then His existence is perfectly reasonable and only requires that we acknowledge our finiteness. The universe, by itself, cannot possibly have this attribute of self-existence—unless we really want to take the pantheistic idea of the universe being self-aware and alive, a different kind of god.

So, the bottom line is, which is more likely: (1) a random, unaware universe/multiverse that just happened to be perfect for life and human beings who are self-aware; or (2) an infinite God who chose outside of time (from eternity past) to exist as a perfect being and to create a physical, finite world with self-aware beings made in His image? Combine this question with the evidence in support of the Bible, and atheists don’t stand a “chance” of being right.

Also, according to the anthropic principle for a universe to have life it must be expanding and therefore finite. Now the multiverse which supposedly created our universe did not have to, but there are other problems with this. Like Stephen Hawking says: "The laws of gravity say that the universe exists". But where did the laws of gravity come from?
Btw nice pun in the last sentence .

[The Protector]

If there are an infinite number of universes, then must there not be a universe in which the multiverse does not exist? Perhaps a universe that destroys the multiverse? Heck, if there are infinite universes, then doesn't that necessarily mean there is a universe wherein God exists? And if God exists in one universe, then God, by his very definition, must therefore exist in all universes-- otherwise He fails to meet the definition of God. So... Does an infinite multiverse necessarily imply that God exists?

EDIT: Indeed, if there are an infinite number of universes, doesn't that mean there exists a universe in which the multiverse does not exist, and God does? And since we are all here discussing it (or at least I am here discussing it, for all you Cartesians out there), doesn't that mean that this is that universe?

[Byblos]

If there are an infinite number of universes, then must there not be a universe in which the multiverse does not exist? Perhaps a universe that destroys the multiverse? Heck, if there are infinite universes, then doesn't that necessarily mean there is a universe wherein God exists? And if God exists in one universe, then God, by his very definition, must therefore exist in all universes-- otherwise He fails to meet the definition of God. So... Does an infinite multiverse necessarily imply that God exists?

EDIT: Indeed, if there are an infinite number of universes, doesn't that mean there exists a universe in which the multiverse does not exist, and God does? And since we are all here discussing it (or at least I am here discussing it, for all you Cartesians out there), doesn't that mean that this is that universe?

All valid points, which, at a minimum, proves the absurdity of infinite universes and the idea that anything is possible given an infinite amount of time (which in and of itself is absurd).

[SnowDrops]

If there are an infinite number of universes, then must there not be a universe in which the multiverse does not exist? Perhaps a universe that destroys the multiverse? Heck, if there are infinite universes, then doesn't that necessarily mean there is a universe wherein God exists? And if God exists in one universe, then God, by his very definition, must therefore exist in all universes-- otherwise He fails to meet the definition of God. So... Does an infinite multiverse necessarily imply that God exists?

EDIT: Indeed, if there are an infinite number of universes, doesn't that mean there exists a universe in which the multiverse does not exist, and God does? And since we are all here discussing it (or at least I am here discussing it, for all you Cartesians out there), doesn't that mean that this is that universe?

All valid points, which, at a minimum, proves the absurdity of infinite universes and the idea that anything is possible given an infinite amount of time (which in and of itself is absurd).

One thing, the multiverse doesn't (supposedly) exist inside a universe - as far as I know it's a separate infinite universe which can (again, supposedly and according to Stephen Hawking) randomly create anything at all. But yeah, in the end it all comes down to "scientific" wishful thinking . I suppose this is the "blind watchmaker" Richard Dawkins was talking about.

[Seraph]

If there are an infinite number of universes, then must there not be a universe in which the multiverse does not exist? Perhaps a universe that destroys the multiverse? Heck, if there are infinite universes, then doesn't that necessarily mean there is a universe wherein God exists? And if God exists in one universe, then God, by his very definition, must therefore exist in all universes-- otherwise He fails to meet the definition of God. So... Does an infinite multiverse necessarily imply that God exists?

EDIT: Indeed, if there are an infinite number of universes, doesn't that mean there exists a universe in which the multiverse does not exist, and God does? And since we are all here discussing it (or at least I am here discussing it, for all you Cartesians out there), doesn't that mean that this is that universe?

The multiverse is not a universe with physical laws of its own, it's a word to describe all of the parallel universes that exist throughout infinity. So the laws of the random universes cannot affect the multiverse as a whole.

Interesting point about God being created in at least one of the universes. Though if that was the case, I don't think it would necessarily fit God's definition perfectly. For instance, God is uncreated and eternal so that would have to be violated.

[Legatus]

One thing, the multiverse doesn't (supposedly) exist inside a universe - as far as I know it's a separate infinite universe which can (again, supposedly and according to Stephen Hawking) randomly create anything at all. But yeah, in the end it all comes down to "scientific" wishful thinking . I suppose this is the "blind watchmaker" Richard Dawkins was talking about.

Quote:
In the multiverse, anything can happen for no reason at all
in other words, a materialist is foced to believe in random miricles as an explainatory priniciple (to not believe in non random miricles).
In theistic universe, noting happens without a reason, miricles are intilliegently directed deviations from divinly maintained regularities and are epxpressions of rational porpose
thus scientific materilaism is self defeating and makes scientific rationality impossible.

[SnowDrops]

One thing, the multiverse doesn't (supposedly) exist inside a universe - as far as I know it's a separate infinite universe which can (again, supposedly and according to Stephen Hawking) randomly create anything at all. But yeah, in the end it all comes down to "scientific" wishful thinking . I suppose this is the "blind watchmaker" Richard Dawkins was talking about.

Quote:
In the multiverse, anything can happen for no reason at all
in other words, a materialist is foced to believe in random miricles as an explainatory priniciple (to not believe in non random miricles).
In theistic universe, noting happens without a reason, miricles are intilliegently directed deviations from divinly maintained regularities and are epxpressions of rational porpose
thus scientific materilaism is self defeating and makes scientific rationality impossible.

Yup, if materialism is true then nothing is true except that nothing is certainly true. Complete Chaos.

[Seraph]

Well...

There is a lot more science and quantum physics behind it than just believing that anything can happen for no reason at all in a multiverse. Observed quantum instability and fluctuations and whatnot.

[cubeus19]

Well...

There is a lot more science and quantum physics behind it than just believing that anything can happen for no reason at all in a multiverse. Observed quantum instability and fluctuations and whatnot.

Hey Seraph, if the multiverse has you worried have you looked into what RTB and Jeff Zweerink specifically has to say on the subject? From what I understand, that's one of the main areas that Zweerink specializes in. He's done quite a few articles and podcasts on the topic, many of which you can still find on reasons.org. Also, he's written a book "Who is afraid of a multiverse?" in which he makes the case that even if somehow the multiverse were proven true, it does not in any case, prove that God does not exist. Plus I think Zweerink is even on facebook, so if you add him you could ask him some specific questions if what I've just mentioned doesn't help. But anyway, I hope this helps. God bless.

[SnowDrops]

Well...

There is a lot more science and quantum physics behind it than just believing that anything can happen for no reason at all in a multiverse. Observed quantum instability and fluctuations and whatnot.

Yeah, but in the end the idea is that in the multiverse universes are constantly created, but everything in them and about them is random. Yes, applying it in physics is complex, but in the end it all comes down to "if you keep randomly doing things eventually you'll do the right thing". That's supposed to be the solution to the problem of design.