Comments

  • Does systemic racism exist in the US?
    There seems to be little evidence to suggest any racial disparity in police violence.

    Aside from the many studies finding precisely that, you mean? So, aside from e.g. Kramer and Remster 2018 ("Findings show that Black and White civilians experience fundamentally different interactions with police. Black civilians are particularly more likely to experience potential lethal force"), Edwards et al 2018 ("Police kill, on average, 2.8 men per day... Black men’s mortality risk is between 1.9 and 2.4 deaths per 100 000 per year, Latino risk is between 0.8 and 1.2, and White risk is between 0.6 and 0.7... Black and Latino men are at higher risk for death than are White men, and these disparities vary markedly across place."), Fryer 2016 ("blacks and Hispanics are more than fifty percent more likely to experience some form of force in interactions with police") and so on?
  • God Almost Certainly Exists
    Its also probably worth noting here, just for the record, that multiverse models are not in general posited merely to circumvent theistic fine-tuning arguments- this is a caricature at best. At least some of them, like the cosmological multiverse, follow fairly straightforwardly from entirely observational and scientific concerns: the cosmological multiverse for instance follows from the fact that (as far as we can tell) the geometry of the universe is flat and therefore is spatially infinite + the fact that the speed of light is finite- if the universe is flat and thus spatially infinite, and the speed of light (and thus causation) is finite, then there are an infinite number of causally-disconnected regions (i.e. past our particle/cosmic event horizons) from our own observable section of the universe. And it is possible/plausible that fundamental physical quantities vary over time and/or space- there is even some limited/initial observational evidence for this thesis. Nothing about refuting theistic fine-tuning arguments for the existence of God here- just the same old push to explain and provide a theoretical framework for the observations we make and data we find.

    And from what little I know about string theory and quantum mechanics, the multiverse or parallel universes in these domains are also motivated at least in part by purely scientific concerns as well- the role of theological boogeyman in these proposals is, at least so far as I can tell, quite exaggerated.
  • God Almost Certainly Exists


    Its textbook whataboutism: even if it were true that the notion that multiverses address the "problem" of fine-tuning is rhetorical and fabricated, that would not refute my suggestion that this is the case wrt theistic/creationist interpretations of the BBT- they could BOTH be true. Which is of course why whataboutism is fallacious just in general: the accusation that someone or something did something bad cannot be rebutted by the accusation that someone or something else did something bad too, since its completely possible that they both did something bad.

    And its telling that the people who claim that the BBT meaningfully converges on or corroborates a theistic creation story are almost invariably... theologians and theists rather than physicists. That alone should tell you that their take on the relevant science may be suspect, and that this conclusion is motivated rather by religion and theology than science. And indeed that's precisely what it turns out to be: the part of the BBT that is suggested to corroborate theistic creation, isn't actually an accepted part of the BBT at all. Moreover, is something we are fairly certain is an artifact of a broken/incomplete theory (GR) rather than a description of anything physical (i.e. spacetime or gravitational singularities, like the one at the hypothetical "t=0" of the BB model, or at the center of stellar black holes, which indeed disappear in e.g. loop quantum gravity).
  • God Almost Certainly Exists
    Whataboutism on a philosophy board, I'm genuinely disappointed. And of course once again this is an inaccurate characterization of the relevant science anyways.
  • God Almost Certainly Exists
    because, after all, it does state that the entire vast universe burst into existence from a single, infinitesimally small point in a single instant.
    Not a very accurate characterization of the BBT, but no doubt if that was what it actually described then there may well have been something to all of this. But the BBT describes the evolution of the universe from a hot, dense early state some ~13.8 billion years ago into the cooling and expanding (at an accelerating rate) universe we presently observe. Not only is any absolute beginning or "popping into existence" not a generally accepted part of any cosmological model (including the BBT), we essentially know that GR ceases to be a good description of physical reality once we reach the point where the gravitational field dominates on the quantum scale and so our lack of a theory of quantum gravity means we can't make reliable predictions (and that the predictions we do make- like the hypothetical "t=0" spacetime singularity- are almost certainly wrong, and mere artifacts of a broken theory... or, at least, one pushed well beyond its domain of applicability).

    So the supposed convergence or corroboration of the BBT with creationism or theistic cosmologies seems mostly rhetorical and fabricated, and is the same sort of round peg/square hole, old wine -> new skins scenario theology always seems to find itself in wrt specific scientific results (which is, to repeat my original comment, why it is inadvisable to tether your religious views to specific factual claims which may turn out other than you assume).
  • God Almost Certainly Exists


    Or even the most basic deductive logic, apparently, if they honestly think that they have executed a successful reductio and derived a genuine contradiction from an infinite past or infinite causal sequence.

    Or, on the other hand, if they seriously believe "X is weird -> X is therefore impossible" is a compelling or valid argument then they clearly have not been following physics for the last century or so and would be quite shocked to learn about GR or QM (which are nothing if not weird and counter-intuitive, and apparently quite true despite that).
  • God Almost Certainly Exists
    We do know that time has a start - how could the past possibly be longer than any finite number of days?
    No, we know no such thing. The fact that past-eternal and cyclical cosmological models remain viable is of course due precisely to the fact that we know no such thing. And the past could possibly be infinite, apparently, because there is nothing logically contradictory about an infinite past or infinite causal sequence- at least, not so far as you or Craig or anyone else has hitherto been able to rigorously demonstrate. Nor is there any compelling body of empirical scientific evidence establishing a finite past (and again, thus the viability of past-eternal models).

    So this premise is an article of faith no less than the existence of God itself, rendering this entire exercise pointless (since presumably the point of an argument or proof of God's existence is to establish that conclusion on firmer epistemic footing than mere faith).
  • God Almost Certainly Exists
    (and if the arguments that purport to establish God's existence require faith every bit as much as belief in the existence of God itself- which is certainly the case for the proposition that the universe is past-finite or "began to exist"- then what exactly is the point?)
  • God Almost Certainly Exists
    What facts do I claim to know? I'm merely pointing out that the scientific/factual question of whether the universe is past-eternal or not remains open, and so arguments whose premises take a strong position on this (such as the causal/cosmological arguments for the existence of God) are not very good arguments. If you don't know whether the premises of your argument are actually true or not, its not a particularly useful argument. Which is exactly the problem here.
  • God Almost Certainly Exists
    Indeed- the god of the gaps is always destined to disappear. So its just not a very good theological strategy- firmer ground is advisable, if one must posit gods.

    And its not that either Hawking's or any past-eternal model is clearly correct, the point is of course that the question remains unsettled and all these various alternatives remain viable, and so the theists stubborn preference for the one cosmological model consistent with and conducive to their religious views seems to always be explained by ideology and a priori commitment (come what may) rather than evidence or any defensible line of reasoning (which is no doubt why the arguments rarely hold up to the slightest critical scrutiny- they were ad hoc to begin with).
  • God Almost Certainly Exists
    Zeno Strikes Back; the Revenge of the Eleatics!

    (And your remix of the classic Witt line is perfectly apt!)

    In all seriousness, you would think theists and apologists would learn from their history: tethering the truth of your religious/theological views to an unresolved factual/scientific question is a bad idea, because despite your faith and a priori assumption, you don't actually know what the answer to that scientific question will be. And so it is here. We don't know whether the universe is past-eternal or not: the science on the matter is decidedly NOT settled, and for all their admirable efforts theistic apologists (like Craig) have still yet to derive a logical contradiction from a past-infinite sequence of cases, or a past-eternal universe; the best they've been able to do is deduce counter-intuitive results, not genuine contradictions. But then, that's probably what one would expect even if infinite causal sequences are real- when your experience is exclusively of finite sequences, then infinite ones will inevitably run counter to your intuitions. So all they have on this crucial question is all they ever have: faith, and simply assuming or stipulating what they want to be true (and thus arguments whose conclusions are more or less indistinguishable from their founding assumption).

    So as far as both logic and empirical scientific evidence is concerned, past-infinite causal sequences and cyclical and past-eternal universes remain very much on the table, even in light of the accelerating expansion of space/dark energy: you have eternal inflation, Penrose's conformal cyclical cosmology, the bouncing universe of loop quantum gravity/loop quantum cosmology, and so on. All viable models. You even have viable models that exclude a past-eternal universe, but remain unamenable to theistic interpretation, like Hawking/Hartle's "no boundary" proposal where the universe is in some sense past-finite but nevertheless lacking a beginning or start (and therefore lacking any causal role for a creator, at least in any horizontal or sequential sense). And this is all in addition the fact that our efforts to model the earliest stages of the universe are likely futile because gravity would be significant enough to dominate on the quantum scale, and so our lack of a quantum theory of gravity likely makes most of our efforts moot (indeed it would be sort of a miracle if we managed to stumble on a correct description of the early universe, despite lacking any viable theoretical framework for this period).

    So despite Devans and others religious conviction on this matter, there is nothing even "almost" certain about any of this... other than the fact that their arguments are patently unsound and even somewhat arbitrary.

Enai De A Lukal

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