You know, back in the day, it was the same for ancient men. They would look at lightning, and thunder, and volcanoes, and earthquakes, and diseases, and famine, and death and say... "Gee, I don't understand all this.
I don't use the wellknown God of the gaps argument. I base my arguments on what we DO know. Namely, to make it brief :
1. The universe had most probably a beginning.
This is supported through scientific, and philosophical reasons. Therefore it had a cause. Since beyond our universe, there was no time, no space, and no matter, that cause must be timeless, beginningless, eternal, spaceless, transcendent, invisible, personal, and incredibly powerful. Why does it need to have these characteristics ? This cause cannot exist in the time/space/material universe because then it would exist within the very universe it created. That is impossible.
Whatever caused the universe, existed beyond the universe. Since the universe had a beginning in time, and since matter and energy do not spontaneously change and arrange themselves into something new, then the best explanation for the cause of the universe is an action that was a decision.The cause must be personal because an impersonal force would be deterministic and mechanistic, not possessing free will. A mechanistic being only operates according to the programming it received from something else. But if the cause of the universe received programming from something else, then we have again not provided the answer to the cause of the universe. We have just found a middle-man. The cause had to make a choice to create and only beings who are personal can make choices.That description fits best to the God of the bible.
2. The universe is finely tuned to permit life on our planet.
Over 120 fine tune constants are know up to know, and as more time pasts, more are discovered. This might be due to chance, to physical need, or to design. Chance is a very bad explanation. Some advocate a Multiverse. But to have just one life permitting universe, you need 1 to 10^500 attempts to get it done. Thats a 1 with 500 zeros. If we put it in comparison, that in our universe, there exist around 10^80 atoms, this shows how improbable it is, that a Multiverse could explain finetuning. Beside this, the Multiverse argument does not explain away God. A mechanism needs to be in place to trigger these multiverses. It could not be by physical need, since if so, why are there many planets, which are not life permitting, but our is ? So its best explained by design. Our earth/solar/moon system is a very strong evidence. Our solar system is embedded at the right position in our galaxy, neither too close, nor too far from the center of the galaxy. Its also the only location, which alouds us to explore the universe, In a other location, and we would not see more than stellar clouds. The earth has the right distance from the sun, and so has the moon from the earth. The size of the moon, and the earth, is the right one. Our planet has the needed minerals, and water. It has the right atmosphere, and a ozon protecting mantle. Jupiter attracts all asteroids , avoiding these to fall to the earth, and make life impossible. The earths magnetic field protects us from the deadly rays of the sun. The velocity of rotation of the earth is just right. And so is the axial tilt of the earth. Beside this, volcano activities, earth quakes, the size of the crust of the earth, and more over 70 different paramenters must be just right. To believe, all these are just right by chance, needs a big leap of faith. This is indeed maibe the strongest argument for theism.
3. Life. Abiogenesis has not been able to explain the existence of life on earth.
Science cannot explain it. There are strong reasons to believe, a natural origin is not probable, and a bad explanation. First of all, why whould dead rocks need to evolve, to create life ? Secondly, just one living cell is more complex than the most complex machine created by man. A living eukaryotic cell contains many hundreds of thousands of different complex parts, including various motor proteins. These parts must be assembled correctly to produce a living cell, the most complex ‘machine’ in the universe—far more complex than a Cray supercomputer.DNA molecules carry information . Information is always created by a mind. There i no natural mechanism known to man, to create information. Information is by essence spiritual, and not physical. There is no bridge to cross the gulf from material to spiritual. Even through millions of years of evolution. Its not possible.
http://www.icr.org/article/einsteins...tion-cross-it/On the one side, we find the real world of objects, events, and tensional spacetime relations. On the other side, we find fully abstract representations that contain information about the material world. That articulate information is abstracted first by our senses, secondarily by our bodily actions, and tertiarily by our ability to use one or more particular languages . Between the two realms we find what appears to be an uncrossable gulf.
A small part of the evolutionists' problem is that hard objects are never observed spontaneously to transform themselves (on their own recognizance) into abstract ideas.
4. The moral argument, and value of life.
Life has no value. Everthing is permissible. There is no such thing as right and wrong because there is no all knowing and all powerful Creator to define what is good and what is bad. It becomes society who tries to define it. What does that matter though if the people making laws define right from wrong. They are just as human as any other person in the world. The only thing that truly exists is personal preference. What Hitler, Stalin, or any other mass murderer did was not wrong at all. They simply had a different personal preference than you do. The point is, you shouldn't tell anyone that they are wrong or even right because they aren't either of those things. You can believe that its wrong, but you have no place to ground it. People can do anything they want to do without getting punished for their actions if the world lived consistently with the belief that God doesn't exist. How do you explain where guilt comes from? How do you explain why all people in the world have this feeling called a conscience that seems to tell them that something is wrong, such as murder. How come people feel a heavy weight on their emotions called guilt when they do something wrong, such as lie and steal, and the best thing to do to take the weight off themselves is to tell the truth and/or ask for forgiveness. If God doesn't exist, then how could you rationally explain all that?
5. Without God, life has no reason to be, there is no ultimate goal
There is no purpose to life. Life has no ultimate goal. There is no reason for living. Sacrifice for someone else's life would be stupid. This argument shows that an atheist lives inconsistently with their own belief. If a murderer who believed murder to be ok, came into your house to brutally murder you and your family, would you think that HE is wrong to do that? If you said no, that he isn't doing any thing wrong, then you would be living consistantly with your beliefs. But if you said yes, then you would live as if there were objective morals. But if there is no god to define objective morality then there is only subjective morality. So by saying it is wrong makes it only your opinion, but not the murderers opinion. You would be "pushing your<br style="position: static !important; ">morality on him" which is the opposite of what you believe. You probably believe that "it is wrong to push your morality on another person." Even that statement right there is another objective moral statement. In other words you express your opinions, but don't always live by them.
6. Religious experiences and miracles
What ever culture you go into, people are incurably religious. In every culture you see three things. 1) Everyone, except the atheist, worships a being higher than themselves. 2) Everyone has a morality they cannot keep. 3) Everyone is psychologically unsatisfied. People feel an emptiness in themselves that they want to fill. If the material world was the only thing that existed and if all your material needs were met, you should be satesfied right? But how come people who have the most wealth are usually the most unhappy. They constantly want more and more. And how can you explain the millions of people in the world who say they have felt the closeness of God in their lives? I personally am included with them. I have felt God's presence in my life on a consistent basis. Now how can you rationally explain that without God's existence? There are many people in the world who report seeing miracles. In other words there are people who say that they saw a situation occur where there is no naturalistic explanation for it. I personally know people who have had miraculous situations occur, such as immediate healings. You might argue that science will someday explain those things, but right now you can't explain them. The best explaination is God, because if God created the world then it wouldn't be hard to believe that he can intervene supernaturally in this world.
It must be the act of a supernatural being". We know how all of those work now. And we know more about the universe than we ever have in the history of civilization. And we continue to learn more. What that has done is pushed any notion of the necessity of God as an explanatory force into oblivion.
How so ?
We are smarter now. God was a theory that helped the human race in its infancy. We grew up. Maybe you need to grow up too. If all you are going to stick to is the start of the universe (an event for which NO current causative evidence is available)
The very only fact that the universe most probably had a beginning, makes it reasonable to ask : What caused it into being ?
God is the EASIEST possibility, but it is certainly NOT the one that makes the most sense.
Which one does ?
In fact, the God theory creates more questions than it answers. If you didn't like believing in God so much, you might be able to see it. Your bias hurts your ability to objectively look at the evidence.
You have not shown your interpretation of the evidence, so far. Please present it.
13.7 billion years ago, 2 larger, circular shaped universes collided together in a giant explosion.
Where these universes eternal, or had they also a beginning ? If they had a beginning, you shifted the question about the cause backwards. If you assert two universes which were there before eternally, you are getting in serious philosophical problems. Beside this, if time were created at the Big BAng, no physical event could have happened before, since there was no before.
In that explosion, that we call the Big Bang, very small particles of matter flew off in all directions. At that time, each particle of matter had mass, and the natural property of mass holds that there is a small gravitational force associated with it.That force causes the small particles to coalesce together and form small atoms. Hydrogen forms first and is significantly larger than the original particles. The larger hydrogen atoms have a larger gravitational pull associated with them, and they start to pull toward each other. Over thousands and thousands of years, enough hydrogen clusters together that the sheer size of the ball of hydrogen reaches a critical stage and begins to heat up. After that, nuclear fusion begins. For a time, the star burns hydrogen and turns it into helium. But then it runs out of hydrogen, it starts to burn the helium. Once it does that, the star gets bigger, and then when it runs out of helium, it starts making larger atoms, such as carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and so on, until it reaches lead, at which time it blows up, scattering all the elements of our planet into the universe, where the natural force of gravity acts again to bring them together to form Earth. Somewhere in the universe (whether it be on our planet, or another, or a star, or something we do not know yet), long chains of carbon based (organic) molecules began to form together. Once on earth, those molecules began to thrive in a process (called evolution) which led to all the different varieties of life... all the way to us.
this mass had to be extremely fine tuned, and so the gravitational force , and the relation of the gravitational force, to the strong, weak, and electro magnetic force of the atoms. How was it possible, that these had just the right properties ?
http://www.reasons.org/fine-tuning-life-universestrong nuclear force constant
if larger: no hydrogen; nuclei essential for life would be unstable
if smaller: no elements other than hydrogen
weak nuclear force constant
if larger: too much hydrogen converted to helium in big bang, hence too much heavy element material made by star burning; no expulsion of heavy elements from stars
if smaller: too little helium produced from big bang, hence too little heavy element material made by star burning; no expulsion of heavy elements from stars
gravitational force constant
if larger: stars would be too hot and would burn up quickly and unevenly|
if smaller: stars would be so cool that nuclear fusion would not ignite, thus no heavy element production
electromagnetic force constant
if larger: insufficient chemical bonding; elements more massive than boron would be unstable to fission
if smaller: insufficient chemical bonding
ratio of electromagnetic force constant to gravitational force constant
if larger: no stars less than 1.4 solar masses, hence short and uneven stellar burning
if smaller: no stars more than 0.8 solar masses, hence no heavy element production
ratio of electron to proton mass
if larger: insufficient chemical bonding
if smaller: insufficient chemical bonding
ratio of number of protons to number of electrons
if larger: electromagnetism dominates gravity preventing galaxy, star, and planet formation
if smaller: electromagnetism dominates gravity preventing galaxy, star, and planet formation
Now, I know that your "Magic sky man snapped his fingers and everything appeared" is an EASIER hypothesis
no, its definitively a more rational hypothesis. YOurs runs in serious problems. 1. there were no events before the big bang, because there was no time. 2. do you imagine the odds of finely tune the constants to have the right expansion rate of the big bang, and the atomic forces, and magnetic forces ? what do you suggest to explain such a incredible fine tuning. Chance ?
Why do you think it is any better than any other creation myth out there?
because it correlates with scientific findings. While others, don't.
The archeological evidence of what? Of places? Harry Potter takes place in London, does that make any of the books real? And the same goes for people.
We all know Harry Potter is fictional. Pilatus, Agrippa, the apostle paul, Jesus, were not. They were real people, which influenced the world as anybody else in world history, and so the life of millions of people. And it was to the better.
You ask me if I want to know the truth, and the answer is a resounding YES. But the only way I know of to arrive at the truth is to use my reasoning and logic to assess your claims in the exact same way I use it to assess other claims.
so explain then please, how the incredible fine tuning of the universe can be explained rationally ?
