Intelligent first cause: why it must exist

Originally posted by HarryTZ
Ignorance, stupidity, disbelief... there could be a thousand different reasons.

Ah, and here we have the crux of it.

You see yourself as 'better' because you have figured it all out when others can't see it.

You have -zero- empirical evidence and prop yourself up with superstition because -you- are too ignorant or stupid (to use your words), as evidenced by your unwillingness to even entertain M theory, to wrap your head around the same complex calculations that come from God.

Originally posted by MichaelPMaccabee

Originally posted by HarryTZ
reply to post by MichaelPMaccabee

 

Do you want some specific observable phenomena? I would tell you to take a look at literally anything in the universe, but I assume that that wouldn't be enough for you either.

Yes. Specific observable phenomena would be the very FIRST place to start. Let me look at the glass of whisky sitting next to me on my desk.

How does it's existence point to your Intelligent First Cause?

Why such an easy one, Maccy? Clearly the glass of whiskey exists solely for you to drown not only your sorrows but your painfully transparent feelings of inadequacy you have with yourself. Now, once upon a time you criticized someone for bringing no useful information to the table……please enlighten as us we have been waiting patiently for some time now through your smug and pitiful posts to provide some semblance of constructive information. Ah, as you'd say, "you got nothing". Back to bed, kiddo. Life will only continue to get more difficult for you.

Originally posted by Wertdagf
reply to post by HarryTZ

 

Argument from ignorance....Argument from complexity.... blah blah blah blah...

You should do a bit of research on why you shouldn't use such poor arguments. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Ordinary and extraordinary are subjective terms. For the Sng'oi of Malaysia, it's ordinary to have a conversation with the jungle. But to you it's extraordinary. Who is right? Who is wrong? Please don't point to "Science" and use that as your authoritative arbiter of right and wrong. Therefore the terms 'extraordinary' and 'ordinary' are unfit to use in debate. Carl never seemed to get that. I don't even believe in the supernatural, but my definition of natural encompasses a lot that other people consider to be supernatural.

A lot of this argument could be done away with if we would just trouble ourselves to define the terms of discussion. You know, the first step in a good debate?

Originally posted by HarryTZ
There was a gentleman (I assume he was male) that retorted, in a reply to the first section of the OP:

Not if this universe is one of the longer-lasting failures in an infinite series of failures.[...]

"success" and "failure" are only relevant to the intent. Since it's impossible to Know the intent of a posited Creator, it is useless and distracting to bother with "success" and "failure" in this context.

Originally posted by seamus

"success" and "failure" are only relevant to the intent. Since it's impossible to Know the intent of a posited Creator, it is useless and distracting to bother with "success" and "failure" in this context.

I honestly think the multiverse theory is just a bunch of scientific mumbo-jumbo, something they just assume 'could' be the case without an actual basis for the assumption.

Originally posted by S3rvoV3ritas

Originally posted by HarryTZ
I am a bit familiar with superstring theory, however I have no desire to look too deeply into a thing that cannot truly be comprehended.

Says the guy who is arguing for the existence of "God".

Sorry buddy I have no desire to look any further into this post than page one simply from this one claim alone. You have no desire to educate yourself because you admit you cannot fully comprehend the subject, yet here you are trying to prove the existence of "God". If God did exist (I am atheist btw) then you would not be able to comprehend him because he is such a "perfect" being.

You just shot yourself in the foot.
Actually you shot yourself in the foot, fell down then shot your other foot.

Originally posted by HarryTZ
reply to post by Liquesence

 

I am not trying to understand god, I am simply pointing to god's existence. There is a difference.

Originally posted by MichaelPMaccabee

Originally posted by HarryTZ
Ignorance, stupidity, disbelief... there could be a thousand different reasons.

Ah, and here we have the crux of it.

You see yourself as 'better' because you have figured it all out when others can't see it.

You have -zero- empirical evidence and prop yourself up with superstition because -you- are too ignorant or stupid (to use your words), as evidenced by your unwillingness to even entertain M theory, to wrap your head around the same complex calculations that come from God.

Okay.

reply to post by HarryTZ

Thank you for your reply, Harry.

The creator is infinite in an infinitude of infinitely diverse aspects. It is, literally, the unmanifest potential of infinite intelligence.

This does not address my principal question: why do you assume the universe must have a Creator?

The universe is not more complex than the creator (the Absolute), it is simply the manifestation of the infinite complexity.

Then God is more complex than the universe? Very well. Now you must devise an answer to Wertdagf's question: how, when and why did this complexity arise? Where did God come from? And how do you know?

So 'before' the Big Bang, there was just the beingness of timeless infinite consciousness... Do not try to comprehend this... You may, however, experience it. This we call Nirvana.

So we've abandoned logic for direct experience? Experience of a mystical or 'spiritual' kind? That's fine by me; as I said earlier, these are matters for faith, not reason. If this is the line you're going to take, then we no longer have an argument – but by the same token, you no longer have a thread. It's all Harken unto Prophet Harry now. Which kind of thing we've heard as often as boys cry wolf.

Astyanax:
We see no effects in the universe that would lead us to suppose they were caused by a god.

HarryTZ
Except the fact that something as complex as 'dark matter' even exists. You are asking for proof and I tell you, look at the universe! Look at its splendor and its beauty! But that is not and cannot be satisfactory to you...

Please. I am overwhelmed by the splendour and beauty of the universe – just as I am by its cruelty and ultimate hostility to human concepts of beauty and meaning. But none of this is to the point. Your point appears to be that complex things require a creator to bring them into existence. Prove this.

Even the smallest of subatomic particles must be defined with infinite specificality for it to exist in the midst of a void.

No. It merely has to be the most probable thing that can exist under the particular conditions prevailing. You are still assuming both the need for definition and the existence of a Definer.

If a certain combination of elements is able to generate a certain effect, it is because the entire system of mathematical relations and proportions that modeled and determined this possibility preceded from eternity its manifestation.

From Paley's watchmaker argument to the theological version of the anthropic principle, this is well-trodden ground. Yes, the universe we live in appears to be fine-tuned for life. But that follows automatically from the fact that life lives in it. There could well be other 'universes' (string theory allows for about 10^500 of them) where the 'mathematical relations and proportions' are inhospitable to life, but nobody would ever know about them, would they? None of this demands the existence of a God to make it so.

I'm sorry, Harry. Your reply isn't any good. The whole epistle can be summed up in a single sentence:

Originally posted by HarryTZ
While it cannot be proved, it is, which now should be obvious, the only logical explanation.

No, Harry. If something cannot be proved – and yes, that is now quite obvious – it is by definition beyond the reach of logic. That's what logic does, you know; it proves things. Things that can be proven.

reply to post by MichaelPMaccabee

Had the fundamental mathematics been different, something ELSE would be in my glass, not whisky.

Not necessarily.

It is a curious fact, and one to which no one knows quite how much importance to attach, that something like 85% of all known worlds in the Galaxy, be they primitive or highly advanced, have invented a drink called jynnan tonnyx, or gee-N'N-T'N-ix, or jinond-o-nicks, or any one of a thousand or more variations on the same phonetic theme. The drinks themselves are not the same, and vary between the Sivolvian 'chinanto/mnigs' which is ordinary water served at slightly above room temperature, and the Gagrakackan 'tzjin-anthony-ks' which kill cows at a hundred paces; and in fact the one common factor between all of them, beyond the fact that the names sound the same, is that they were all invented and named before the worlds concerned made contact with any other worlds.

What can be made of this fact? It exists in total isolation. As far as any theory of structural linguistics is concerned it is right off the graph, and yet it persists. Old structural linguists get very angry when young structural linguists go on about it. Young structural linguists get deeply excited about it and stay up late at night convinced that they are very close to something of profound importance, and end up becoming old structural linguists before their time, getting very angry with the young ones. Structural linguistics is a bitterly divided and unhappy discipline, and a large number of its practitioners spend too many nights drowning their problems in Ouisghian Zodahs.

– Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Cheap shot. Never mind.

Originally posted by winofiend
If the complexity of everything is beyond our comprehension, yet we willing then bring in god as the answer for it all, leaving it at that and enjoying our ability to ignore facts if it's too hard to bother, then it still falls over at a crucial point of the entire thing.

Who made god.

"Universe, big bang? Impossible, Too complex. God did it."
"Who made god? "
"Oh don't ask such silly questions, it's rude and god won't like it."

So we either have gods creating gods creating gods creating everything. Or we have that thing we cannot know.

It's funny that god has only existed as long as humans have. And even less so in the form that he is accepted generally now, by the major religions.

He must have been really bored for the billions of years after he flicked a switch and said "Let there be ignorance."

I think you're spot on - science has expanded our understanding and removed some of the "God did it" thinking that existed prior to knowledge, but here we are with someone saying "okay well science has a theory about how the universe began, but I can't understand, therefore.... God did it".

Trying to talk about science and bringing God into the equation is a contradiction in terms.

Originally posted by Power_Semi
Trying to talk about science and bringing God into the equation is a contradiction in terms.

So god can't have anything to do with science? That simply does not make sense, for obvious reasons.

Originally posted by HarryTZ

Originally posted by Power_Semi
Trying to talk about science and bringing God into the equation is a contradiction in terms.

So god can't have anything to do with science? That simply does not make sense, for obvious reasons.

You're failing to understand my point.

You can't understand the big bang theory, therefore you say there must be a God (God is written with a capital G).

This is the Human response to things it cannot understand - it must be some unseen force whether it's God, ghosts, demons, or aliens - the attempt to rationalise the unknown with a superior being.

The universe, how it works, the maths, everything - none of it infers or requires a God, it is false logic to say there must be a God because you can't understand the universe.

Originally posted by Power_Semi

This is the Human response to things it cannot understand - it must be some unseen force whether it's God, ghosts, demons, or aliens - the attempt to rationalise the unknown with a superior being.

Is there something faulty with this rationale? Obviously the universe didn't just magically appear out of nothing. Even if you argue that the universe could just be one random 'success' in a multiverse with near infinite 'failures', that still doesn't explain where the multiverse came from, where any sort of 'random' laws, principles, or properties came from, or why and how said properties even have ground to exist (by the way, this so-called 'multiverse' theory is just an idealistic assumption, based more on faith than actual logic).

The universe, how it works, the maths, everything - none of it infers or requires a God

So baseless, infinitely complex math can 'just exist' for 'no reason' other than it being there? If that's not utterly irrational, I don't know what is...

Originally posted by HarryTZ

The universe, how it works, the maths, everything - none of it infers or requires a God

So baseless, infinitely complex math can 'just exist' for 'no reason' other than it being there? If that's not utterly irrational, I don't know what is...

edit on 26-5-2013 by HarryTZ because: (no reason given)

Again, just because you can't understand it or think it's unlikely means nothing and is not proof for their to be a "God".

Also mathematics is simply the way of expressing relationships within the universe, mathematics exists because the universe exists, it isn't a separate framework where a God sat down and wrote the rules of Algebra in a maths book.

And no maths can be "infinitely complex".

You're making irrational, baseless, quite silly statements that are factually incorrect to try and give basis for your beliefs.

It is faulty logic through and through.

cause and effect

God won't exist until science can prove it?

By that time, it could be too late to try and implement any of his teachings?

I like your thinking. But it puts me off when you insist that it proves the existence of God. It proves we can think and achieve some level of understanding. Understanding that is generally thrown into question as we process new and apparently changing aspects of our reality. Proof is, well, debatable.

Not to say that I know enough about this stuff to debate it. But it seems to me that if there is truly only one cause, then all that is, including you and I, are but a manifestation of that cause's consciousness. Are the forces that you mention truly contraptions or are they misadventures in understanding by that rascally wisp of a notion in the creators consciousness that we like to refer to as mankind?

Also if God or the cause, is all that has always been, existing before even time and space, then God is in a state of change, evolving, expanding with the addition of such goodies as time, space, matter, vibration, life, and all that have come to be, in the bubble of awareness that is the creators claim to being. This expansion and change in this consciousness suggests a development or progression and in my mind casts some doubt on the idea of being infinite.

Originally posted by squiz

Originally posted by NorEaster

Quantum physics isn't just some other guy's research. Seriously. Max Planck and Albert Einstein debunked infinity. I didn't.

"As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter."

Max Planck - The Nature of Matter speech 1944

This quote sounds similar to what Einstein had said ( wikipedia as a source, I know, it's bad)
"I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind."

reply to post by seamus


Science is a reliable and proven tool for finding out what is true.

Do you have a better method? How do you tell fantasy from reality?

reply to post by loveguy


Why would god give people a mind for advanced reasoning and then be upset when they use it to the best of their ability and find no evidence supporting his existence?

Your god must be a real moron.