"God did not create Universe!", says Hawking.

[Gadritan]

Yeah well, I created that too. And for those of you that are curious, yes, Favre is the second coming.

[Mizango]

Google images > right-click > copy > paste, didn't catch the site, lol. Just typed "Thor" and grabbed a pic.

lol Max QQ

I like the explanation that some triforce (weak, strong, electro-magnetism) held together by gravitational force fell apart and exploded to create the universe. Gives it a more Zelda feel.

I like the idea of this.

[Ashmada]

You see, the religious people -- most of them -- really think this planet is an experiment. That's what their beliefs come down to. Some god or other is always fixing and poking, messing around with tradesmen's wives, giving tablets on mountains, commanding you to mutilate your children, telling people what words they can say and what words they can't say, making people feel guilty about enjoying themselves, and like that. Why can't the gods leave well enough alone?

All this intervention speaks of incompetence. If God didn't want Lot's wife to look back, why didn't he make her obedient, so she'd do what her husband told her? Or if he hadn't made Lot such a shithead, maybe she would've listened to him more. If God is omnipotent and omniscient, why didn't he start the universe out in the first place so it would come out the way he wants? Why's he constantly repairing and complaining? No, there's one thing the Bible makes clear: The biblical God is a sloppy manufacturer. He's not good at design, he's not good at execution. He'd be out of business if there was any competition. -Carl Sagan

That's one of the contradictions I was hinting at earlier, and the religious answer to this is "free will".
It's not an adequate answer, but that's all you'll get.

[Mizango]

Basically.

[Max™]

If the Universe is a process (it isn't) and deterministic (it may not be, can't be according to current physics) and determinism is incompatible with free will (it may not be) and what we call free will itself isn't just an illusion (still up in the air) then you still can't have an omniscient observer, to observe something in the Universe you need to interact with it. These interactions would be noticeable by the natives.

If you observed all things at all moments you would lock the state of everything, destroying the very balance which allows quantum mechanics to function, or throw everything into such a chaotic state that there would be no use in observation at all.

The ideas of god made up by humans are flawed, horribly, except for Thor, but I digress.

The infinite all everything versions contradict their own existence, they're logically impossible, so there is no use in even positing their existence. Variations of those ideas all hold their own issues regarding disproving themselves, and that isn't even touching upon the worst part, which Sagan was getting at.


If your god is effectively some kind of micro-managing RTS geek, they aren't very good at it, and it isn't a very good model for an all-whatever skyparent. Can you imagine the cheeto's stains they'd leave everywhere?

What does it say about your deity that it isn't smarter than you are?

[Mizango]

Yeah well, I created that too. And for those of you that are curious, yes, Favre is the second coming.

I was sooo tempted to log into my Orton account to reply to this, I smelled ban and decided against it.

[Maxwell]

That's one of the contradictions I was hinting at earlier, and the religious answer to this is "free will".
It's not an adequate answer, but that's all you'll get.

I didn't pose a question in my assessment of human curiosity, it was merely a statement. Free will is an idea based on the perception of not having control. It is ironic however that theists use free will as their decisive reason for god, when the existence of god would preclude said free will.

[Ashmada]

I wasn't answering to that .
I didn't quote your dissertation on curiosity, but Mizango's Carl Sagan quote about god's inefficiency.

I was saying the religious answer as to why an omniscient god couldn't make everything perfect from the start is that said god couldn't do that without removing free will from us.

[Byrthnoth]

Yes, we had to read up on Aquinas' works when I was in school.

Son of a bitch, I wrote an answer to this and my goddamned browser ate it. Anyway...

Aquinas was an empiricist trying to harmonize Aristotle's scientific proofs with the Church's dogma and believe system. It's pretty reasonable to assume that he knew all the math and physics that anyone knew in the 13th century. This proof is awesome for that very reason.

"The fifth way is taken from the governance of the world. We see that things which lack knowledge, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain the best result. Hence it is plain that they achieve their end, not fortuitously, but designedly. Now whatever lacks knowledge cannot move towards an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence; as the arrow is directed by the archer. Therefore, some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God." - Aquinas

The primary assumption that Aquinas makes in this proof is that of a meaningful universe.

If you have faith that things exist are moving with some ultimate purpose, then you have to accept that inanimate objects (like planets) that move in an orderly fashion must be doing so because that's their purpose. If something inanimate is moving with a purpose, then something sentient must have moved it. AKA God.

In a way, this proof is kind of like 1 = 1. If you assume a meaningful universe, you're already half way to assuming God in my opinion. However, at the time that he wrote it that was what made the proof so awesome. He was attempting to harmonize science and religion. This proof starts with the assumption that things move with a purpose, which no religious figure would deny, and claims empiricism (that things always or almost always happen in exactly the same way) as evidence, then follows solid logic to prove the existence of God.

Still, even if we somehow realize some day that everything is deterministic and we have the equations to prove it, the very physical laws that provide order to our universe will still leave open the possibility of God by this proof.

I, personally, don't care if there's a God, and don't really consider the possibility except when threads like this come up. If there is a God, he's probably not like the religious fairy tales we have. If there isn't a God, then we obviously never needed one. In my opinion, we've reached a point in science where we can exclude the possibility that God plays an active role in our lives.

Edit: Holy crap, work must have been busy today. There have been like 100 posts since I started writing that.
Anyway, main point is that Aquinas' argument was a lot different from the Paley's watchmaker argument or the argument from ignorance. If anything, Aquinas made an argument from knowledge. He didn't really even need to include the meaningfulness of the universe assumption imop. "We know that things behave in an ordered manner. Something must be responsible for this order. SHAZZAAM, GOD!" would have been fine as far as I'm concerned.

[Max™]

Order tends to decrease, the Universe when viewed along the downstream direction of time is not something which anyone would call purposeful, unless that purpose is to unmake itself, as that is what it will ultimately do.

The only reason Aquinas argues that the universe has a purpose is because he didn't appreciate that his perception of time is limited to only include information from the past.

When you look upstream in time, you see an increase of order, naturally.



The Universe exists because it is logically self consistent, it does not contradict itself, you don't need to go deeper into "why" questions, it is possible for a Universe like this to exist, it may be possible for many types to exist even, even things which are nothing like Universes but possess existence themselves, as many argue about mathematics.

Though you get the whole "people created math" shit, to which I point out that Ants count. If you ever wondered why ants always form those chains from that spilled bit of soda on the driveway to their nest, there are two reasons, they leave a scent trail to say which way it is, and they count steps to know how long to follow the trail in that direction.

If you glue extensions on to the legs of an ant which was following a trail back and forth, it will overshoot by exactly the distance that your extensions lengthened it's steps, if you shorten the legs, it will come up short the same way.

Ants count.

Cicadas aren't 13 and 17 year for no reason, the only predators which know to look for cicadas emerging from underground are ones that have seen this happen before. If the life span of predators overlaps with your emergence period, you will sooner or later get noticed. The only way a predator could be looking for cicadas is if it was around 13 or 17 years earlier, other generations of that predator will exist in a world without them. 13 and 17 are prime numbers, you can't divide them except by 1 and themselves.

Cicadas make use of prime numbers via natural selection. The ones that had 10 year, 15 year, 8 year, etc emergence cycles... they got eaten more, the 13 and 17 year ones just pop up and only opportunistic predation affects them generally.

If we argue that math is something that is invented, then we're pretty damn slow, bugs got around to it millions of years before we did.


So if math is something more fundamental, you can ask which is more fundamental: the universe, or math?

Can math only be described by the universe and it's framework, or can the universe only be described by math and it's framework?

It appears that mathematics should actually be more fundamental, if you found a way to hop to another universe, it is almost certain that any sentient beings there would understand the mathematics we know.

If god is not logically consistent, it is not a part of mathematics, but the universe might be (a la Tegmark, for example), so that's a good reason to continue honing our scientific theories to approach ever more closely a purely axiomatic mathematical form.

[Pirian]

Others may knock these kinds of threads, but I fucking love them, lol. Although, it is kind of neat seeing the opinions of some people who seem like they have tried to think it out, but didn't use any external source or counter-points to their own opinion when examining it.

[Kuya]

Maybe science will one day turn me into a god so that i may create other human civilizations and observe them from where they cannot detect me, thus we come full circle.

[Byrthnoth]

Actually, Aquinas' argument has absolutely nothing to do with and isn't affected by entropy. Try reading it, I posted the entirety of the text there between the quotation marks.

[Sagacious Sundi]

Just curious, has anyone here ever watched a Christian program? The ones that talk about the existence of God and philosophy and stuff, not the self-help ones or the ones with obvious political agendas.

Anyway, my point is that, from what I have seen, they tend to take and misconstrue random quotes from Einstein and Hawking to sort of show that "See? Smart people can believe in a god, and these guys are the quintessential 'genius' poster boys and probably half the scientists you have ever heard of so take their word for it." (However, I have seen Hawking lumped into the same category as hardcore, obviously hellbound heathens like Dawkins, which is odd.) ANYWAY, my point is that this made me think that anyone using Hawking as support for the existence of God should lose credibility, even if he is only stating that you don't need a deity for the Big Band to occur.

[Blarg]

I think Hawking is just angry at god because when he rolls along the beach he doesn't see another set of wheelchair tracks beside him.

[Yuri-G]

the only christian programs I've seen are veggie tales, the rapping preacher, the farting preacher, and kirk cameron playing with his banana. but I'm not surprised that Christians would do that.

[Rhyis.]

He's changed his stance quite a bit. He used to say he believed in a being that created the universe.

[Zoolander]

I like this stance on God, this shit really resonated with me. Most of you will probably find it an entertaining read: http://www.thrivenotes.com/lets-help...ate-this-seed/

I met god the other day. I know what you’re thinking. How the hell did you know it was god? Well, I’ll explain as we go along, but basically he convinced me by having all, and I do mean ALL, the answers. Every question I flung at him he batted back with a plausible and satisfactory answer. In the end, it was easier to accept that he was god than otherwise. Which is odd, because I’m still an atheist and we even agree on that!

[Gadritan]

Just curious, has anyone here ever watched a Christian program? The ones that talk about the existence of God and philosophy and stuff, not the self-help ones or the ones with obvious political agendas.

Actually, yeah. I watch em' sometimes out of boredom, plus I firmly believe in the whole "know your enemy," thing. It's important to know as much as you possibly can about something if you're going to disagree with it. Otherwise you're just as much of a hypocrite as they are.

It can be incredibly entertaining as well. It's one of those things that just totally blows your mind. Not that just one person thinks this or that, but that they have hordes of people who agree and have actually gone through the steps to produce and publish these programs. One of the most entertaining classics is when they break out the time lines to demonstrate that the earth really is only 5,000 years old. Seen a few variations of this.

[Max™]

Actually, Aquinas' argument has absolutely nothing to do with and isn't affected by entropy. Try reading it, I posted the entirety of the text there between the quotation marks.

"The fifth way is taken from the governance of the world. We see that things which lack knowledge, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain the best result.

For what end, what is the best result?

Hence it is plain that they achieve their end, not fortuitously, but designedly.

It is?

Now whatever lacks knowledge cannot move towards an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence; as the arrow is directed by the archer.

What reason is there to assume things move with some purpose, seeking some goal, this end of which he speaks is not a valid assumption. I've never seen a rock make it's mind up to leap from the ground and do something, though I have seen rocks moving about in space according to the laws of gravity. Things don't need a reason to behave as they do, they would need a reason to not behave in the manner dictated by simple physical laws of motion, electrochromodynamics, and whatnot.

He is assuming not only that there must be a cause, but that there must be a goal as well.

The purpose is not the action itself, it is a only as a consequence of some action that things appear to gain a purpose, the mystery of which he is vaguely eluding is why the Universe was so ordered at the singularity we define as the origin of time.

I must point out though, that you can define the heat death singularity as the origin, and wonder why entropy was so high before it started decreasing into the past.

Therefore, some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God." - Aquinas

Sorry Tommy, I need to see this purpose to which things proceed enunciated as something other than an axiomatic statement, because it is not a sound axiom on which to base a system of statements.