Porphyry wrote:
My understanding of the fine tuning argument goes something like this: There are physical constants whose values are, so far as we can tell, arbitrary. For example the relative strength of the fundamental forces (gravity, strong nuclear, weak nuclear, electromagnetism): The constants that define the strength of these forces seems to be arbitrary; There is no reason, so far as we can tell, that they must have the values they have, no mathematical problems arise if we pretend they have other values and run the numbers. We can’t derive them mathematically; we can only measure them. But if they were different, even only slightly different, the universe would be a very very different place. For example, even slight changes to any of them would prevent the formation of atoms. So the problem for naturalism is that it just seems insanely lucky that these arbitrary values that are built into the very fabric of the physical world just happen to be the very precise values that are necessary for any sort of life we can conceive of to develop. This isn’t just a Christian apologetic point, it is a problem that bothers philosophical naturalists; I mean, the fine tuning argument takes its foundation from the fine tuning problem, which had previously been articulated by physicists. I (obviously) don’t think it is a conclusive argument–and as a theist, I thought it was quite weak–but it is the sort of thing that just bugs me. How did we get so insanely lucky?
I don’t dispute your description of the issue of Fine Tuning or the problems raised by it. I would just point out that I’m not sure we can say that the universe is fine tuned for “life”. The building blocks for life perhaps. All we can say is that we are here and that we observe certain conditions that exist and did exist.
As I said my argument was against using Fine Tuning as a reason to believe in the Christian God. The omni-God. Omnipotent, Omnipresent, Omniscient, etc… Against Divine Omnipotence, whence constraints? If you say that God can only do something logically possible I reply that God created logic itself, right? if you say God can’t make a square circle, I reply that God made the rules and foundations of grammar, and their relations to reality, right? If the answer to these questions is no, then we’re not talking about the Christian God. Why would an all powerful God create constraints He must obey? All this leads me to question the internal coherence of the Christian God concept itself.
As far as “A network of ranges and thresholds seems indicative of a naturalistic universe”, I observe what we find in nature. Not absolute states but points on a continuum. The parameters fall within ranges at spots from which deviation limits effectiveness. There are spots (at least one) from which life can originate and spread. There are spots where life cannot originate but to where it can spread. There are spots where life can neither originate nor spread. We obviously live in a universe where life was possible, but was it inevitable?
Statistically improbable things happen all the time. Maybe we were in fact just insanely lucky!
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“That said I will not allow you to fill up this thread with book posts about books you’ve never read and are unwilling to discuss as you have others.”
What are 2 books I’ve allegedly been “unwilling to discuss”?
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“I believe in the power of the active imagination in the Blakean sense.
(Blake used to tell people that he regularly had dinner with the Prophet Elijah.
Do you believe this?)”
5 March 1922 Sadhu Sundar Sing
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–>
…….Jean 14 : 21
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then machine translation into English:
I would like to repeat here how I converted, how I became a Christian.
Many of you do not know that I was an enemy of Jesus Christ.
I tore up the Gospel and threw it into the fire; I thought:
“This is a false religion; our Hinduism is the only true religion.”
When, while still very young, I was no longer satisfied with my religion, I nevertheless did not want to believe in Jesus Christ and I thought about committing suicide.
One morning I got up very early, took a cold bath and began to pray, asking that, if God exists, He would come and show me the way to salvation.
At five o’clock in the morning, a train was to pass and he had decided to commit suicide by putting me on the tracks, if I had not found peace beforehand.
I therefore prayed that God would reveal himself to me, otherwise I would commit suicide, in order to meet him in the other world.
After an hour and a half of prayer, I saw something wonderful that I didn’t understand at first.
There, in my room, the glorious Christ appeared to me and said to me in a voice full of sweetness:
“How long will you persecute me?
I died for you; I am the Savior of the world.”
I never would have expected it.
It was December 18, 1904, and three days before I had burned the Bible!
Then the power of the living Christ penetrated me and I found my Savior, my everything.
When I got up, He had disappeared, but the wonderful peace that filled my heart did not leave me.
It was still dark when I went to wake up my father, who was sleeping in another room, and told him what had happened to me.
I said to him: “Now I am a Christian.”
He couldn’t believe it: “How! The day before yesterday you were burning the Bible and today you would be a Christian! It’s impossible!”
I replied: “It’s true! I knew Jesus Christ from books, but now I know Him, the living Christ, because I have seen Him and I know that He is God. I hated him as long as I believed he was just a man, but now He has revealed Himself to me, I want to serve Him.”
If I had not seen the living Christ, I would not proclaim the Gospel that I burned a few years ago.
However, I am not here to preach, but to bear witness to what Jesus Christ can do.
If He can reveal Himself so magnificently to an enemy, how much more can He reveal Himself to you, who have known Him since your childhood?
It is not enough to have heard about Jesus Christ; you have to know him himself, personally.
I am certain that, through prayer, he will also reveal himself to you; then you will know Him as He is, and not only will He reveal Himself to you, but He Himself will come to give you the power, the joy, the peace, to overcome temptations.
This is my own experience.
“How could we explain how the human mind came about if we don’t actually understand the human mind itself?”
I dunno– how?
Has anyone explained in detail how a bacterial flagellum could have arisen via totally-mindless-at-every-level processes?
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However, the flagellar research community has scarcely begun to consider how these systems have evolved.
This neglect probably stems from a reluctance to engage in the ‘armchair speculation’ inherent in building evolutionary models, and from a desire to determine how a system works before wondering how it got to be that way.
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Motility is achieved in most bacterial species by a complex machine called the flagellar apparatus.
…
Systematic analysis of hundreds of completely sequenced bacterial genomes has predicted many additional motility genes.
Most of these predicted motility genes lie in known flagellar operons or gene clusters, although often their actual roles in motility remain unknown.
James A. Shapiro, “In the Details… What?” _National Review_ (16 Sept 1996), 62-65, on 64, far-left column
PDF
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Surely, then, contemporary Darwinists have answers to rebut critics like Professor Behe.
In fact, there are no detailed Darwinian accounts for the evolution of any fundamental biochemical or cellular system, only a variety of wishful speculations.
It is remarkable that Darwinism is accepted as a satisfactory explanation for such a vast subject– evolution– with so little rigorous examination of how well its basic theses work in illuminating specific instances of biological adaptation or diversity.
Professor Behe’s third goal is…
“How could we explain how the human mind came about if we don’t actually understand the human mind itself?
We don’t know the goal so of course we can’t specify how to get to it.”
Are you saying there _was_ a goal involved in the origination of the human mind?
Simpson, George Gaylord. 1949. _The Meaning of
Evolution: A Study of the History of Life and of Its
Significance for Man_ (New Haven: Yale University Press),
364pp., from the chapter “Epilogue and Summary,” on 344
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Man is the result of a purposeless materialistic process that did not have him in mind.
He was not planned.
He is a state of matter, a form of life, a sort of animal, and a species of the Order Primates, akin nearly or remotely to all of life and indeed to all that is material.
On 343:
Although many details remain to be worked out, it is already evident that all the objective phenomena of the history of life can be explained by purely materialistic factors.
Do we know how _any_ of the numerous innovations evident in biology could have originated via totally-mindless processes?
Andreas Wagner, _Arrival of the Fittest: How Nature Innovates_ (2015), 291pp., on 14, 21-22
… natural selection is not a creative force.
It does not innovate, but merely selects what is already there.
Darwin realized that natural selection allows innovations to spread, but he did not know where they came from in the first place.
…
The culprit is once again the enormous phenotypic complexity of living organisms.
Even today, we struggle to fully understand the phenotype of even the simplest organisms, and hundreds of thousands of biologists laboring over many decades have still not fully understood how genes help shape this phenotype.^35
Steefen,
Is God an infrared object? No, that is a tool. The wrench that turns itself.
God is now a thought, that the sins of the world have been forgiven.
The tools are that which keeps life alive and conscious,
God is that which formed everything on Earth so that non-life could become alive and conscious. However long that all took is not interesting to me.
I believe it is far more likely that a pile of scrap in a junkyard would by natural processes, within a lifetime, become a running car again,
than it is for life to exist without God in 13.5 billion years of evolution.
You don’t believe in a god-of-the-gaps, unless it’s you?
Well humility prevents me from claiming actual divine status although I have been led to believe I do have some special relationship with the universe that precludes obligation to the fixed laws of time and space.
Do we know how _any_ of the numerous innovations evident in biology could have originated via totally-mindless processes?
David, David, David, you’ve simply got to stop giving me these straight lines. Eventually I won’t be able to resist.
The wrench that turns itself.
Interesting image. We have trouble conceptualizing processes that seem self-organizing and self-sustaining. We want “A” to do something to “B” to cause “C”. I’ve always found the Buddhist idea of Mutual Arising to be interesting. Everything causes everything. And then there is the Hindu Net of Indra where the cosmos is conceived as a vast web of interlaced strands with pearls at each intersection. Each pearl reflects every other. Was it Freud who said that every time he achieved some psychological insight that he found a poet had already been there first?
“simply got to stop giving me these straight lines. Eventually I won’t be able to resist”
In Nagel’s remarks below, what is he overlooking/ unaware of?
Thomas Nagel, _Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False_ (2012), 130pp., on 49
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And to complete the link with physics, the explanation has to suppose that there is a nonnegligible probability that some sequence of steps, starting from nonliving matter and depending on purely physical mechanisms, could eventually have resulted in a replicating molecule capable of all this, embodying a precise code billions of characters long, together with the ribosomes that translate that code into proteins.^10
It is not enough to say, “Something had to happen, so why not this?”
I find the confidence among the scientific establishment that the whole scenario will yield to a purely chemical explanation hard to understand, except as a manifestation of an axiomatic commitment to reductive materialism.^11
But to explain consciousness, as well as biological complexity, as a consequence of the natural order adds a whole new dimension of difficulty.
Do you disagree with any of this?:
Thomas Nagel, _Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False_ (2012), 130pp., on 49
amazon .com/Mind-Cosmos-Materialist-Neo-Darwinian-Conception/dp/0199919755/
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Page 35
Consciousness is the most conspicuous obstacle to a comprehensive naturalism that relies only on the resources of physical science.
The existence of consciousness seems to imply that the physical description of the universe, in spite of its richness and explanatory power, is only part of the truth, and that the natural order is far less austere than it would be if physics and chemistry accounted for everything.
If we take this problem seriously, and follow out its implications, it threatens to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture.
Page 42
So far I have argued that the physical sciences will not enable us to understand the irreducibly subjective centers of consciousness that are such a conspicuous part of the world.
Nagel’s footnote 11 quotes some of the Lewontin below.
Lewontin, Richard. 9 January 1997. “Billions and Billions of Demons”
_NY Times Book Reviews_. At
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A paragraph:
Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are
against common sense is the key to an understanding of
the real struggle between science and the supernatural.
We take the side of science _in spite_ of the patent
absurdity of some of its constructs, _in spite_ of its
failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of
health and life, _in spite_ of the tolerance of the
scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories,
because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to
materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions
of science somehow compel us to accept a material
explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the
contrary, that we are forced by our _a priori_ adherence
to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation
and a set of concepts that produce material explanations,
no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how
mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that
materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine
Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck
used to say that anyone who could believe in God could
believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is
to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature
may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.
David
“I think Jesus failed on this one, also”
Details?– could that be elaborated upon?
Steefen
I will gradually stop replying to you asking questions where the answer is SO right in front of you.
Jesus died for the sins of the world.
In the gospels, Jesus was forgiving sins without his death.
For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son (to Death and Resurrection)
that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life.
So, believe in Jesus and your spirit will not perish in the afterlife.
Believe in the teachings of Jesus and your life can be better before death.
Moreso, Jesus died for our sins and we’re supposed to pray forgive our sins which we intend not to repeat and the world will be a better place.
Jesus failed here because the wages of sin is imprisonment, punishment (crime and punishment), dysfunction, corruption, BUT, sin is a business and sin is in the operation of super powers and is a way of doing war. The wages of sin can be earthly riches and prestige.
David, if you’re asking me to critique Thomas Nagel, his claim is a very sophisticated version of an Argument from Incredulity.
“I can’t conceive how this could possibly happen therefore it couldn’t possibly happen.”
Am I being uncharitable? Well David I guess you’ll have to actually read the book yourself and figure it out.
“…Thomas Nagel, his claim is a very sophisticated version of an Argument from Incredulity.
‘I can’t conceive how this could possibly happen therefore it couldn’t possibly happen.'”
Is it possible that a super-intelligent not-material entity created the 1st biological lifeform?
“…Jesus died for our sins and we’re supposed to pray forgive our sins which we intend not to repeat and the world will be a better place”
Unforgiveness has led to a lot of violence over the centuries, making the world a worse place.
Someone’s holding unforgiveness injures his/her own self.
Ceasing from doing unloving acts
makes the world a better place than
continuing to do unloving acts.
Matthew 6 (NKJV)
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9 In this manner, therefore, pray:
Our Father in heaven,
Hallowed be Your name.
10 Your kingdom come.
Your will be done
On earth as it is in heaven.
11 Give us this day our daily bread.
12 And forgive us our debts,
As we forgive our debtors.
13 And do not lead us into temptation,
But deliver us from the evil one.
For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.
14 “For if you forgive men their trespasses,
your heavenly Father will also forgive you.
15 But if you do not forgive men their trespasses,
neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.
“Jesus failed here because the wages of sin is imprisonment, punishment (crime and punishment), dysfunction, corruption, BUT, sin is a business and sin is in the operation of super powers and is a way of doing war”
Some people do unloving actions while seeming to escape imprisonment or punishment.
“The wages of sin can be earthly riches and prestige”
Luke 9:25 (ESV)
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For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses or forfeits himself?
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert
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