The question has two possible outcomes so we should initially assign a 50% probability to each outcome. — Devans99

I'm terribly opposed to this method of going about things. I fail to see how it makes sense to investigate the origin of all that is, and the origin of intelligibility as such, by giving a modal binary like 'contingency vs. necessity', then exclaiming: 'Aha! That exhausts logical space, so we have our starting point and can move on...'

Obviously, with the countless logical proofs of the existence of God, I'm in the heavy minority here, but what makes you think that the origin of all of existence can be meaningfully understood by such a method?

I fail to appreciate your objections. We can have absolute knowledge of abstract concepts only (eg logic and maths); we can never have absolute knowledge of the physical world.

So we can discuss the physical world as much as we like but we will never reach any conclusions without employing probability.

I fail to appreciate your objections. We can have absolute knowledge of abstract concepts only (eg logic and maths); we can never have absolute knowledge of the physical world.

So we can discuss the physical world as much as we like but we will never reach any conclusions without employing probability. — Devans99

I'm not posing an objection as much as a skeptical worry that you're a flesh and blood animal employing concepts which you acquired in the course of participating in an earth-bound human form of life and it seems bad philosophical practice to investigate the nature and origin of both all that is and the existence of entities as such without first giving some consideration as to why you feel entitled to hold that these abstract concepts are capable of doing that sort of work. This needs some initial justification before you get going with probabilities and all that.

I should add that I am putting this concern out there only as a good faith effort to suggest additional philosophical problems you might want to consider as part of your reflections. :smile:

I need an answer to this question so I use the only tools at my disposal. I know these tools are not entirely satisfactory: science gives provisional answers, probability even more so but the pure logic tool failed to give an answer for 1000s of years and there are no other tools to use.

I need an answer to this question so I use the only tools at my disposal. I know these tools are not entirely satisfactory: science gives provisional answers, probability even more so but the pure logic tool failed to give an answer for 1000s of years and there are no other tools to use. — Devans99

Well, I wish you the best of luck. :smile: I hope you might consider the alternative of embracing the idea that it is not a question which admits of an answer; that the question itself is the first step in a movement towards faith in God's pervasive love (Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky) and/or the joyful immanence of discovery and creation in a world one can share with friends, family, and community (Nietzsche). That is, the question is embraced and answered in how you live a life rather than a solution you give in words.

In either case, I suggest you consider engaging a bit with this wonderful thread.

The question has two possible outcomes so we should initially assign a 50% probability to each outcome. — Devans99

The interesting question in my eyes is if this proposition is very clever of very dumb. Could be both. The naive dumbness assigns 50% just because there are two options - either you win in the lottery or not. Or - the clever alternative: You exactly know that there is no necessity that would speak for either alternative and hence people's answers could correctly be interpreted as coin-flips...

We can have absolute knowledge of abstract concepts only (eg logic and maths); we can never have absolute knowledge of the physical world. — Devans99

Deciding that logic trumps reality is one of the ways we go astray.

But in any case, supposing that the universe was made on purpose by some agent is entirely compatible with the Big Bang: God made it happen, and then everything follows from there. I don't believe God caused the Big Bang, but it is certainly possible to believe such a thing, just as it is possible to believe that a god created the world in 6 days about 6,000 years ago.

You can believe whatever you want. If you run into obstinate resistance from reality, that's your problem. (Humans are always running into obstinate resistance from reality, no matter what they believe.)

I don't believe God caused the Big Bang, but it is certainly possible to believe such a thing, just as it is possible to believe that a god created the world in 6 days about 6,000 years ago. — Bitter Crank

While it is certainly possible to believe both, they are not equivalent beliefs. The former is not in conflict with fact or reason, the later is.

While it is certainly possible to believe both, they are not equivalent beliefs. The former is not in conflict with fact or reason, the later is. — Rank Amateur

God created the earth in 6 days 6000 years ago and in doing so constructed it in such a way as to appear much older to our limited technology. What's in conflict with fact or reason in that account?

While it is certainly possible to believe both, they are not equivalent beliefs. The former is not in conflict with fact or reason, the later is. — Rank Amateur

They are not equivalent beliefs, true enough. But many people are prepared to believe at least six impossible things before breakfast.

God created the earth in 6 days 6000 years ago and in doing so constructed it in such a way as to appear much older to our limited technology. What's in conflict with fact or reason in that account? — Pseudonym

These sort of questions are basically Solipsistic. While Solipsism is logically self-consistent, it is also an exponentially more complicated theory than Realism. "Why is the fossil record the way it is?" becomes the same question raised to the power of, "Why fake it?", "Why fake it that way?", "What's in it for the faker?", ...

We reject Solipsism and it's related theories because, if you take them seriously they reveal themselves not to be simplified world-views, but rather indefensible over-elaborations of Realism.

A god capable of creating the universe in 6 days could certainly manage --on this one small celestial ball--to make complex layers of folded rock, scatter the odd creatures' bones hither and thither amongst the folded rock, put petroleum under salt domes for our future destruction, stick a bunch of coal in sort of convenient places, make it look like there were ice ages, get everything moving on top of a plastic mantel surrounding hell itself, and do other things on the moon and the other planets.

God, after all, is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. He knew exactly how smart and how stupid we would be, about what, and for how long.

We can rest, assured, that global warming is part of The Plan -- the End Game where we fizzle out.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

So we can discuss the physical world as much as we like but we will never reach any conclusions without employing probability. — Devans99

I'm not sure that probability is of any use to you. It cannot be applied to explanatory theories (i.e. scientific theories), and it even doesn't work for your two non-explanatory theories.

E.g. you claim that p=0.9375 for there being a creator, which means chance has p=0.0625, even if there is a mature explanatory theory of the origins of the universe that involves something like quantum tunneling. We end up with a fully developed explanatory theory compared with nothing more than "God did it". Are "Chance" and "God" even mutually exclusive theories?

Start by examining the universes origins. The Big Bang. — Devans99

Next examine the universe itself. It’s incredibly unlikely for a randomly selected universe to be life supporting so we live in a fine tuned universe. — Devans99

If you accept cosmological science as a believable starting point, then already a heavy constraint has been laid on your theological Bayesianism. The "logical alternatives" are not as you are outlining them.

To accept the Big Bang as the creation event is already to accept a scientific tale of existence in which a deity is materially absent AND where chance and purpose are accounted for as complementary aspects of that materiality.

The Big Bang is a story with both necessary and contingent features. It must have unfolded due to global laws or conservation symmetries. We "know" the rules in play all the way back to the effective "first moment". We also "know" what seem to be the contingencies or accidents.

It may not be a final theory yet - we know that too. But it is a strong constraint on any Bayesian reasoning. We have established that the rules of quantum physics would have had to have been in play. And that those rules say something about the material fluctuations that would have been de novo possible.

Then likewise the fine-tuning issue. This is more speculative in terms of cosmology. But the strongly divided form of the choice is either that our own creation event is part of a multiverse of creation events, or that there are structural necessities in play that made our particular universe the only creation event that could actually happen.

Again, quantum physics - with its path integral formalism and employment of the (telic) least action principle - says it is certainly possible, if not even highly probable, that we exist in the one universe that has the configuration optimal for material existence.

But either way - whichever cosmological option you feel inclined towards - neither answer on fine-tuning gives any credence to a fine-tuning creator. Fine-tuning is either just an actual random accident - and so the multiverse applies. Or fine-tuning is our illusion in not yet having a better grasp of the physics. We haven't yet got to the mathematical reasons why different flavours of particles have their varied coupling constants, for instance.

So to the degree you accept existing physics as a constraint on assessing the probabilities, fine-tuning is divided on the degree of mathematical necessity involved in our own form of universe. But a creator of fine-tuning is already ruled out as a 0% option.

Or at least, now you have to start arguing that God had the freedom to invent a different maths of symmetry and symmetry-breaking. Good luck on that.

The reference to 'creation' stacks the deck already, as 'creation' already implies 'creator'. Furthermore no matter the ingenuity of the argument, people will typically respond to it on the basis of what they're inclined to believe. So the religious are naturally inclined to believe in a Creator, for which many arguments can then be adduced, whilst the non-religious will be naturally inclined to argue the contrary. And such arguments are notoriously intractable.

However, I can take issue with this:

To accept the Big Bang as the creation event is already to accept a scientific tale of existence — apokrisis

Certainly the discovery of the 'big bang' is based on empirical observations, but it is nevertheless it is an intrinsically mysterious or mystical model - the idea that the Universe springs into existence from an infinitesmally small point sounds suspiciously like 'creation ex nihilo'*. Indeed, when it was first floated in the 1930's many scientists were extremely hostile to it on exactly those grounds.

]By 1951, Pope Pius XII declared that Lemaître's theory [of the 'primeval atom'] provided a scientific validation for Catholicism. However, Lemaître resented the Pope's proclamation, stating that the theory was neutral and there was neither a connection nor a contradiction between his religion and his theory. When Lemaître and Daniel O'Connell, the Pope's science advisor, tried to persuade the Pope not to mention Creationism publicly anymore, the Pope agreed. He persuaded the Pope to stop making proclamations about cosmology. While a devout Roman Catholic, he was against mixing science with religion, though he also was of the opinion that these two fields of human experience were not in conflict. — Wikipedia

Without even going down that route, however, one can always ask, how is it that what emerged from total disorder was order? You can't peer back in time past the 'singularity', nor can you see anything beyond the horizon of this universe.

So, believers are able to believe, sceptics will continue to challenge them. The dogs bark, the caravan moves on.

-------------------------
*There used to be a bumper sticker about this very thing: God said 'bang', or something like that.

How about explaining how your arithmetic works. Shouldn't be too difficult if you've got the rest of the universe covered.

While a devout Roman Catholic — Wikipedia

Just FYI, Lemaître was a priest

So the religious are naturally inclined to believe in a Creator, for which many arguments can then be adduced, whilst the non-religious will be naturally inclined to argue the contrary. — Wayfarer

But the non-religious might have the advantage of having an argument that hinges on the test of evidence?

One might scientifically keep an open mind on the possibility of eventually encountering this Creator face to face at some point. And yet we are also able to say - as cosmologists - we've gone all the way back to the first 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000001th of a second, and He ain't showed up in any essential way thus far. And everything we understood by that scientific route reduces any telic role He might have played to plucking a few constants out of the air for no obvious good reason.

Did God care so much about the mass of a quark or electron that he "fine-tuned" the number? Rum sort of Creator, if so.

the idea that the Universe springs into existence from an infinitesmally small point sounds suspiciously like 'creation ex nihilo'* — Wayfarer

Yeah. Which is why I always promote the systems-thinking alternative of creation as an emergent structure of constraint on unbridled material freedoms.

Something from nothing is the problem for notions of causality that already presume causality is about material/efficient cause. Rather than wheeling in a creator god to make that nonsense idea work, it is better to just say it doesn't work and get on with an Aristotelian four causes/immanent/systems approach that sees creation as the constraint on a plenum of chaotic potential.

however, one can always ask, how is it that what emerged from total disorder was order? — Wayfarer

And modern science has the answer. It has mathematical models of order out of chaos. Those models are being applied in cosmology.

You can't peer back in time past the 'singularity', nor can you see anything beyond the horizon of this universe. — Wayfarer

Again, these are points that count against a "creating god" notion of causality, and for a self-organising systems approach to cosmic causality.

So your shotgun is pointed squarely at your own foot here.

If you can't go back earlier in time to reach this mythical singularity - the place where this God of the Blue Touchpaper must reside in prime mover fashion - then maybe time itself is thermally emergent. What we are talking about is the first moment when time starts as already a symmetry-breaking.

Likewise the fact that we are bounded by cosmic event horizons. Everywhere we look around us now, we see that broken symmetry. The self-organising nature of cosmic structure is the scientific fact staring our metaphysical musings in the face.

But I don't see you factoring that in to your own line of thought. You seem to be suggesting some behind the scenes prime mover can rescue the standard materialist conception of causation for you.

Give it up. Move on. A creating god is the kind of last ditch myth you would invent if you can't in fact let go of a materialist understanding of creation events.

You want it to be true that existence has a first cause. The principle of sufficient reason appears to demand it. And yet you agree cosmological science finds no evidence of that right back to the first measurable instant. Why not just let go of this materialist conception of how the metaphysical answer ought to look?

While it is certainly possible to believe both, they are not equivalent beliefs. The former is not in conflict with fact or reason, the later is. — Rank Amateur

The latter may not have been in conflict with "fact and reason" six thousand years ago. The same may be said of our present beliefs in 6000 years (if humanity manages the energy, resources, population, pollution and global warming crises sufficiently well to survive that long).

The latter may not have been in conflict with "fact and reason" six thousand years ago. The same may be said of our present beliefs in 6000 years (if humanity manages the energy, resources, population, pollution and global warming crises sufficiently well to survive that long). — Janus

Absolutely possible. In the end it is either God, or a big black hole.

One might scientifically keep an open mind on the possibility of eventually encountering this Creator face to face at some point. And yet we are also able to say - as cosmologists - we've gone all the way back to the first 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000001th of a second, and He ain't showed up in any essential way thus far. — apokrisis

Sure - if you think about 'God' as on the same level of existence as the kinds of things that science investigates, then I would certainly agree that there is no such thing.

everything we understood by that scientific route reduces any telic role He might have played to plucking a few constants out of the air for no obvious good reason. — apokrisis

Other than the fact that, without them, nothing.

It depends on what you mean by "God" and "big black hole".

Other than the fact that, without them, nothing. — Wayfarer

We have no way of knowing that. Without them, then no us and the nature we are familiar with, but perhaps something else.

Something I have noticed is the tendency for those skeptical of theism to reduce God to a "thing" or "being" which is swiftly "dealt with" as a mafia crime boss might deal with a target. There is swagger, there is bravado, there is a sense of triumphant victory over the invisible illusion as if it were a curse.

If you are skeptical of theism and this describes your disposition, then I sincerely encourage you to reconsider what, precisely, you believe theism to entail. It is a historical fact that "atheism" did not appear on the European continent as an explicit denial of all divinity until this same divinity had been transformed into what we now call "personalism" - i.e. a God that is a thing-among-things, distinguishable only by quantitative properties.

It is interesting, I think, that those who parade science as overcoming theology seem to be unaware of the relatively recent advancements in the social sciences, particularly anthropology, ethnology, and sociology. This austere naturalism seems more fit in the days of Feuerbach, Marx, Freud, Frazer and Tyler and not in the more contemporary scene, where empirical facts are more valued than armchair speculation and modern mentalities are not artificially transposed onto ancient minds.

There are many models of theism, to be sure, but there are just a few prominent and historically lasting classical notions of God, and the Abrahamic traditions have, arguably from their beginnings, upheld the idea of a personal God, who created the Universe and who cares what happens.

Sure - if you think about 'God' as on the same level of existence as the kinds of things that science investigates, then I would certainly agree that there is no such thing. — Wayfarer

Again, I pointed out to you two things.

Expecting our metaphysical speculations to be constrained by actual evidence seems to have emerged as the best way to go about reasoned inquiry. You don't seem to disagree.

So if a theory can't be cashed out in acts of measurement, it is classed as an idea that is "not even wrong". You seem to think this is a good argument against string theory for instance. So let's apply the same principle to all metaphysical speculation, including theism.

Then I also pointed out that your principal complaint is that materialism doesn't work as a causal story, and yet you are still talking like a materialist to the degree you accept there is some kind of necessity for a creating God.

Of course you can take refuge in ambiguity here. You can say you don't buy the concrete notion of a big daddy in the sky who actually decides to construct a Cosmos by knocking up some set of laws and constants - a God who is a substantial agent acting with material effect. But how else are we to understand the idea of "a creator"?

A systems view of the divine would see "god" as the name given to some kind of generalised finality and even Platonic form. That could be the immanent cause of being in delivering a telic drive towards order out of chaos. The cosmos would self-organise due to a purpose.

But now this is a radically different notion of a divine hand behind creation. There is no kind of specific creator making His choices about purpose or structure. Being itself is the coming-into-being that expresses some structure-producing tendency which cannot be denied.

At which point, we have an image of God so ambiguous you might as well give up the divine influence tag as we now have a well developed physicalism of that kind of self-organising systemhood. Mentioning anything supernatural feels rather redundant. The story of creation no longer needs an answer to the materialist riddle of who moved something first. Instead, we now have a more interesting story of what could have stopped a Cosmic tendency towards definite order in the first place.

How could creation have been resisted given the mathematical-strength necessities we now understand pretty well?

The whole God issue can be neatly turned on its head in that fashion. The scientific question now - or at least it will be the telling question once we get to a Theory of Everything - is what prevented the Cosmos becoming as we observe it?

That is an interesting issue. I have ambivalent feelings about the Abrahamic God. I suspect the philosophical God of Aristotle and Plato was wrongly abducted by the apologists in order to paint the desert war god yahweh in a gentler tone.

Yahweh ... Yahweh ... what a funny-sounding name. No wonder it's so popular as a mockery.

We have no way of knowing that. Without them, then no us and the nature we are familiar with, but perhaps something else. — Janus

This point, which Apokrisis and I also discussed in another thread, is related to the cosmological argument. It is the fact that there is a causal chain that appears to terminate at the very point of the singularity. Put it like this: we have a good understanding [and I fully accept] the naturalist account of how stellar explosions gave rise to heavy matter, how solar systems and then planets formed, and the fact that life evolved on Earth after this period. When all of this was first discovered, it was commonplace to say that this showed or proved that the origin of life itself could be understood as a chance event - when the right materials come together in the right way, whether it’s a thermal vent or Darwin’s ‘warm little pond’, then the first living organisms form as a kind of chain reaction.

But now it seems the case that in order for that to occur, there already had to have been the aforementioned stellar explosions. It was the investigation of those, that led Fred Hoyle to discover something called ‘carbon resonance’, which he said seems to rely on a very specific property of the atoms of stars. [There used to be a very good Paul Davies magazine essay online about this, but it seems to have vanished.] But the thrust of the idea is that every step in the sequence leading to the formation of life, has antecedents, and ultimately those antecedents appear to go back to the formation of the Universe out of the so-called ‘big bang’. That lead to the intuition, expressed also by at least some scientists [Freeman Dyson being one], that ‘the universe knew we were coming’. So it undermines the idea of chance or randomness or of life just occurring as the consequence of the shuffling of the deck.

So what I’m saying is that natural theologians will always be able to say that this was ‘all part of the plan’. And of course, scientific naturalism, which eschews such an understanding, will always reject such an attitude.

But another point is this. The ‘sky-father-god’ which Apokrisis mentions above, in some ways skews the debate. That’s because for Apokrisis [and many people], the whole ‘conception of the divine’ is inextricably bound up with that understanding. Whereas for others - well, for myself - that’s not what it means. My approach is something more like ‘religious naturalism’ - which is that religious traditions and symbols are representations or archetypes. So my way of interpreting religious mythology is that it symbolises something real about the human condition. However the mainstream religion in current culture has become radically out of sync with the outlook of current culture. That’s where interpretation is required - analysis of the symbolic meaning of the ideas.

Some people get along just fine without any kind of spiritual sense. For better or worse, I’m not one of them. So that is what causes me to keep reading and debating and thinking about these questions. My belief is, there is a reality which is signified by the name of God, although I remain agnostic about the nature of this reality. But as scientific naturalism has generally developed specifically to exclude such ideas, then naturally I am not inclined to agree with it. That is laying my cards on the table to the best of my ability.

I don't have time for much of a response right now, but I am curious: do you believe in a creator God that existed prior to the Universe, and who cares what happens? You seem to be saying you are agnostic on this issue, but if you are, then what exactly is the 'reality' you are believing in? If the Universe was believed to be created "for a purpose" then that would suggest the Abrahamic model.

The alternative would seem to be to think that the Universe was not created for a purpose. Where does that leave us? Isn't that just what the advocates of science are saying? What sense could we make of any kind of dialetheic third "possibility" such as that the Universe was neither created for a purpose, nor was it not created for a purpose.

The ‘sky-father-god’ which Apokrisis mentions above, in some ways skews the debate. That’s because for Apokrisis [and many people], the whole ‘conception of the divine’ is inextricably bound up with that understanding. — Wayfarer

Well given that was the kind of god the OP refers to, it seems fair enough to be focusing on that.

And I was pointing out how you were defending the same conception to the degree you thought there is some "physical singularity" whose structural form is in need of a materialistic "cause-and-effect" explanation.