Does he know something I don't?

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I was arguing with someone on the fine-tuning of creation. It goes as follows.

Me: You implied hat you believe in the Big Bang. I believe that during and after the Big Bang, God orchestrated everything coming together to support life. I just find it hard to believe that people can so easily disregard God, and believe that the absolute smallest of chances brought the universe together. Now, this is both organic and inorganic matter that I’m talking about.

His response: The reason why people disregard god is because they have a good understanding of science. Once you have this it becomes impossible for one to place a deity into the mix. Adding a deity only complicates the issue. Now you have to say who created this entity. Nothing in nature demands the need for one and more importantly nor is there any evidence of one. It’s just making up s#@$ to provide an answer. That doesn’t cut it.

Who said it was a small chance. You sound like you have been listening to preachers providing misinformation. The creation of elements has been discovered. Very quick and dirty summary. Started off with hydrogen and other trace elements. Suns formed. When they went supernova it created heaver elements. We are made from the death of a stars.

Please give special regard to the second paragraph. He’s talking about the creation of elements, not how the universe was so finely tuned. Did
I miss something, or is his answer a cop-out?
 
His response: The reason why people disregard god is because they have a good understanding of science. Once you have this it becomes impossible for one to place a deity into the mix. Adding a deity only complicates the issue. Now you have to say who created this entity. Nothing in nature demands the need for one and more importantly nor is there any evidence of one. It’s just making up s#@$ to provide an answer. That doesn’t cut it.

Did I miss something, or is his answer a cop-out?
Either that or arrogance and/or stupidity. “Adding a deity only complicates the issue”? Quite the opposite.
 
Considering that the “finetuning of Creation” argument starts out with things like “the universe had every chance to go out of existence as fast as it came in” and “why did the Big Bang happen in the first place?” – why, yes, passing on to the creation of the elements is quite a large jump. Stars didn’t come into existence for gazillions of years. Elements beside hydrogen and helium didn’t come into existence for even more gazillions of years before that.

Immediate aftermath of the Big Bang first. Orderly modernish events like stars, much later. Humans as star stuff, etc, comes along quite late in the day.
 
You don’t have to explain who created an almighty deity. If an almighty being created all the laws of physics, then he is not bound by their laws and can exist without a cause of his own.
 
‘Fine tuning’ usually IIRC refers to the values of the physical constants (laws of physics) etc. - for example, if gravity were weaker than it was the matter all would have flown apart and thus not formed galaxies & nebulae, thus not planets & stars, thus not life; if gravity were stronger the universe would have collapsed in on itself early on, no time for much of anything to develop, thus again no life.

I think similar stuff applies for other physical constants, but I’m a bio major, not physics/astrophysics.

Also why the universe turned out (nearly) all matter rather than equal components of matter/antimatter which would then mutually annihilate to energy (which clearly didn’t happen, since matter still exists) - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baryon_asymmetry

Remember that ‘the universe’ is everything - not just matter & energy. So if someone is talking about how the laws of physics allow the universe to appear from nothing w/ no need for a Creator – the problem is that the laws of physics are PART OF ‘the universe’.
A contingent (=could have been otherwise, not ‘self-explanatory’) universe still needs an external origin, i.e. a Creator.

B.T.W. when people say God isn’t needed to ‘explain’ the universe… there’s IMO somewhat of a philosophical problem there caused by treating the proposition ‘God exists’ like a scientific hypothesis, which it isn’t.

When a scientist says a hypothesis has ‘explanatory power’ that means (more or less) it lets you derive/deduce stuff about the universe, and then you can go observe the universe and see if the observations match the deductions – if they do the hypothesis ‘explains’ those observations. “Einstein’s theory of relativity predicts that gravity bends light, we can look at a solar eclipse and observe that the sun’s gravity bends light, so the theory ‘explains’ this observation, & is confirmed.” A theory that “explains” a lot of (previously) seemingly disparate phenomena is a very strong one.

But God’s existence isn’t like that… it’s a different sort of ‘explanation’. The simple knowledge that God exists doesn’t let you deduce/derive the properties of the physical universe. But when we talk about God in this context it’s a more causal sense of ‘explaining’. God’s existence is a philosophical necessity/certainty but not a scientific hypothesis.
 
I used to think about this kind of thing a lot. And one day, I realized that the problem is ambiguous definition: what I mean by ‘the world’ and what the materialist means by ‘the world’ are two different things. So, we are trying to explain different things. The materialist (or physicalist, or whatever they call themselves nowadays) see ‘the world’ (all of existence) as reducible to the universe/cosmos, and if the Christian argues on that ground, he will be at a disadvantage. As usual, Chesterton illustrates it well (emphasis mine):
Take first the more obvious case of materialism. As an explanation of the world, materialism has a sort of insane simplicity. It has just the quality of the madman’s argument; we have at once the sense of it covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out. Contemplate some able and sincere materialist, as, for instance, Mr. McCabe, and you will have exactly this unique sensation. He understands everything, and everything does not seem worth understanding. His cosmos may be complete in every rivet and cog-wheel, but still his cosmos is smaller than our world. Somehow his scheme, like the lucid scheme of the madman, seems unconscious of the alien energies and the large indifference of the earth; it is not thinking of the real things of the earth, of fighting peoples or proud mothers, or first love or fear upon the sea. The earth is so very large, and the cosmos is so very small. The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in.
- G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
There is also a passage by Pope Benedict in his Introduction to Christianity along these lines. I can’t locate it, but essentially he says that one has to decide at some point what is more ‘real’ and fundamental: the essence, the idea, e.g. love, beauty, truth; or ‘stuff’, i.e. the physical universe. Long before I read this, and after years of reflection, I had voted for the former, so the materialist argument simply had no currency with me.

Of course, that will not necessarily make my position any more persuasive to the materialist! But that’s okay; if people spent more time defining terms and stating first principles (which hardly anyone bothers to do), less time would be wasting arguing in circles. There can only be argument where there is agreement: we can only meaningfully argue on the basis of the first principles that we have in common. Anything else is a waste of time.
 
A Catholic Priest (can not think of his name off hand) came up with the ‘big bang’;Fred Hoyle was the one named it the ‘big bang’ :rolleyes: ;Albert Enstain said that the Priest’s math was good but his physics was bad! :D:nerd::tiphat:
 
I was arguing with someone on the fine-tuning of creation. It goes as follows.

Me: You implied hat you believe in the Big Bang. I believe that during and after the Big Bang, God orchestrated everything coming together to support life. I just find it hard to believe that people can so easily disregard God, and believe that the absolute smallest of chances brought the universe together. Now, this is both organic and inorganic matter that I’m talking about.

His response: The reason why people disregard god is because they have a good understanding of science. Once you have this it becomes impossible for one to place a deity into the mix. Adding a deity only complicates the issue. Now you have to say who created this entity. Nothing in nature demands the need for one and more importantly nor is there any evidence of one. It’s just making up s#@$ to provide an answer. That doesn’t cut it.

Who said it was a small chance. You sound like you have been listening to preachers providing misinformation. The creation of elements has been discovered. Very quick and dirty summary. Started off with hydrogen and other trace elements. Suns formed. When they went supernova it created heaver elements. We are made from the death of a stars.

Please give special regard to the second paragraph. He’s talking about the creation of elements, not how the universe was so finely tuned. Did
I miss something, or is his answer a cop-out?
He makes 2 mistakes:

First: He thinks God is just a cause among others. People like Aquinas and many others NEVER said ‘The universe has a beginning - so God exists’ as God is some accidental cause of the Universe.

I recomend this series of posts by Dr. Ed Feser:
edwardfeser.blogspot.it/2012/07/cosmological-argument-roundup.html

Claiming:
The reason why people disregard god is because they have a good understanding of science. Once you have this it becomes impossible for one to place a deity into the mix

is nonsense. There have been and are many modern physicists who are believers.

The point is that God is not a ‘god of the gaps’ meant to explain some natural phenomena (that might be true for ancient pagan gods maybe…)

I think poor understanding of science (or very bad philosophical misconceptions) leads rather to hard atheism.
Who said it was a small chance. You sound like you have been listening to preachers providing misinformation. The creation of elements has been discovered. Very quick and dirty summary. Started off with hydrogen and other trace elements. Suns formed. When they went supernova it created heaver elements. We are made from the death of a stars.
Please give special regard to the second paragraph. He’s talking about the creation of elements, not how the universe was so finely tuned.
Second mistake:

Well it’s true that elements are formed in stars… and the ‘we are made of dead stars’ is a jab from some atheist who said: ‘forget Jesus, stars died so we could be born’.

It’s the usual lame new atheist nonsense. A red herring that tries NOT to answer the questions asked.

In any case I am NOT a fan of the ‘fine-tuning’ argument… sounds a bit too much like Intelligence Design.
 
I was arguing with someone on the fine-tuning of creation. It goes as follows.

Me: You implied hat you believe in the Big Bang. I believe that during and after the Big Bang, God orchestrated everything coming together to support life. I just find it hard to believe that people can so easily disregard God, and believe that the absolute smallest of chances brought the universe together. Now, this is both organic and inorganic matter that I’m talking about.

His response: The reason why people disregard god is because they have a good understanding of science. Once you have this it becomes impossible for one to place a deity into the mix. Adding a deity only complicates the issue. Now you have to say who created this entity. Nothing in nature demands the need for one and more importantly nor is there any evidence of one. It’s just making up s#@$ to provide an answer. That doesn’t cut it.

Who said it was a small chance. You sound like you have been listening to preachers providing misinformation. The creation of elements has been discovered. Very quick and dirty summary. Started off with hydrogen and other trace elements. Suns formed. When they went supernova it created heaver elements. We are made from the death of a stars.

Please give special regard to the second paragraph. He’s talking about the creation of elements, not how the universe was so finely tuned. Did
I miss something, or is his answer a cop-out?
I suspect he doesn’t even understand the issue of fine tuning, not that’s he’s copping out. Just like he doesn’t even understand the issue of the uncaused Cause (“who created this entity?”). He is talking down to you from a position of ignorance. That’s a bad combination. :rolleyes:

I’d give him a quick lesson on fine tuning, pointing out that the math is the math whether God exists or does not exist, and go from there. Then when he attempts to save his position by bringing in the multiverse, you get to ask him “who created this multiverse?” 🙂
 
His quick and dirty summary is wrong. We started out with quarks first, then came protons, electrons, & neutrons. Then came the hydrogen (long after the big bang). Nucelosynthesis in the stellar interiors is how we get to helium, carbon, oxygen etc. It is nucleosynthesis in the supernova ejecta that create the elements greater than iron.

My suggestion is to simply ask him where the quarks came from. He will either concede that nothing caused them to exist or that a creator caused it, the latter being the only rational choice.
 
Tell him that there have been stories and explanations of how everything started with more deities involved that you could poke a stick at ever since man thought on these matters. Tell him there’s no way they can all be wrong.

Oh, hang on…
 
Tell him that there have been stories and explanations of how everything started with more deities involved that you could poke a stick at ever since man thought on these matters. Tell him there’s no way they can all be wrong.

Oh, hang on…
And all the atheists making dumb-witted comments can’t also all be wrong… oh wait!

Besides we understand creation in the Bible as something symbolical, not literal. Christianity or at least Catholics do not turn to the bible for natural science.

And before you start quoting ‘Galileo’, let me reming you that Augustine and Aquinas and many others thought it was worthy to investigate the natural world through ‘natural philosphy’ (which is the precursor to science) and claimed that many truths can be found also apart from revelation itself.
 
Just a heads-up, this thread died back in August. I appreciate the answers, but I’ve gotten it sorted out. Feel free to keep posting if you wish.
 
Just a heads-up, this thread died back in August. I appreciate the answers, but I’ve gotten it sorted out. Feel free to keep posting if you wish.
Good 🙂 My fault for resurrecting it really 😛
 
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