Hitch is dead

Which is all the usual rationalisations that don't in anyway answer the problem. What he's saying is that the universe is the way it is because that's the way it needs to be to for it to create us - and everything else. A circular argument.It's an error ridden argument on many levels.First it's an argument for a deistic, non-interventionist, fire-and-forget god which is not what you or he believes.Second, despite his protestations it shows a limited god, a lessor god that is unable to create the end product that he desires without making and remaking imperfect versions of it for billions of years.Third, it creates an hugely immoral god that builds an enormous experiment which tortures and kills every living thing for billions of years before this perfection can arrive - and knows the suffering that it creates but does it anyway.Fourth, he's really dumb. I mean seriously stupid. Depending on which version of Christianity you have chosen to believe, none of this vile experimentation is necessary. God is capable of creating places where none of this suffering happens or is necessary - the Garden of Eden and Heaven. And the GoE is redundant; heaven is seemingly fine and his end goal - none of this experimentation is actually necessary is it?

'It is the way it is' has no explanatory value. All Polkinghorne is saying is that if god wanted us to be this way, then the way we got to be this way is necessary. That's circular, explains nothing and does not even need to be true.For almost all of the time Christians had held beliefs, they believed that our existence was puffed into being all at once as we see it now. That, at least has explanatory value and requires a god. Now that we know that both the universe and all living things evolved over billions of years, the god is no longer required except - in a deist's view - at the inception. Hence the need for rationalisations. That's just poetic pulpit waffle. That's the understatement of the year. It also removes god's omnipotence. Oops, there goes a cornerstone of monotheism. Yes, every living thing that there has ever been and will ever be suffers and dies. You are not an exception. Maybe you'll get lucky and get hit by a bus rather than die slowly in pain like my brother-in-law, but you will die. So far, you've had the best life available to modern humans - being born in a wealthy Western country with access to education, work, justice and health systems. You tell us that you spend a lot of time you helping the suffering, making life better for those not so lucky. Please don't pretend that suffering doesn't exist. I keep reminding you, is not about you or me. And you know that how?Of course both are imaginary. I'm simply playing back believer's beliefs. Both are biblical. You guys just pick and choose and rationalise. Your interpretation of the biblical view is simply one of several. It's another belief. But you all admit to an afterlife. Are you telling me that the afterlife will contain suffering and death? Which does not require all the artefacts of religious practice and paraphernalia.

No I don't say that. I say that if your god is a loving all powerful god, then he wouldn't have created anything like the universe that exists. And point out the contradictions between your belief and his values. A creature that ran such an obnoxious experiment as this is not the benevolent god that you worship, nor the god of the new testament. If you practiced even a tiny part of those 'character development' activities on your own child you'd be imprisoned for life - if you survived the public wrath. As have you, save one.

And I'm providing you with reasons why the belief is an error.But you skipped answering whether there is suffering and death in the afterlife?

It's not a new argument Phat, it's been made here dozens of times. Your god can not be both all powerful and all loving if he creates/allows suffering.GDR has surrendered the all powerful bit to get round it. A massive weakening of theology. So now, like GDR, you're throwing away half of the bible. Your god is shrinking in size and shape with every sentence. Surely you know that already - it's a small book, not the Encyclopaedia Brittanica. You guys are supposed to be reading it all day everyday...Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

Woah there boy! You take a far more irrational position than that!The deist position is at least semi-rational and can't be dismissed on evidence; yet. A god that kicks off a chain of events that ultimately arrives at us and takes no interest thereafter is *not* what you believe.Your problem is that we can now show that the processes of cosmic and biological evolution are natural ones, requiring no external intervention.Eventually we will show how the whole thing can start by itself, but possibly not in my lifetime and it will certainly be something I wouldn't understand. But there are already physicists that believe they can show this.And, I should point out before you complain, that at the point of creation, your god also requires the same explanation - what caused him? Just saying that he's the causeless cause is not an explanation.This is a quote from someone attempting to explain Hawking's position on the universe creating itself.

quote:

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The whole universe can be created from nothing.

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One of the presumptions of The Grand Design is that the universe creates itself.

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In order to contemplate the universe creating itself from nothing, you must first accept the proposition that something can be created from nothing . That is tenable only in the quantum realm, so applying it to the universe presumes a quantum scale for the universe. If we track the big bang backward to a stage when it was less than an atomic diameter, then the whole universe must be treated by quantum mechanical methods. At a scale far below the size of a nucleus, if we envision the universe as proceeding from a singularity, you would have a sizzling sea of quarks, with particles and antiparticles continually being created and annihilatiing one another.

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Hawking's position as I understand it is that with the nature of gravity and the fact that gravititational potential energy is negative. As the universe expands the gravity energy becomes less negative and in the case of our nearly "flat" universe will approach zero. So if I understand it correctly, no additional energy compared to the vacuum would be needed and the universe could create itself.

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One of the real problems here is that you are in the realm of quantum gravity, which no one, not even Hawking, claims to understand. To me, it also seems to be a problem to invoke gravitational potential energy back in the early stages where mass may not have been a characteristic of the particles if the Higgs mechanism acting later was responsibile for particles having mass.

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Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

Nope. I say that the deistic position can't as yet be disproven. Quite different. A god that doesn't intervene in our physical world and is totally invisible to us can not be shown not to exist. Can't be shown to be anything in fact. But is totally superfluous.But there's no requirement to do so as we have natural processes that show us that things happen naturally. Uh? Of course they're different processes - when has anyone said anything else? There are million, billions, trillions of processes necessary to get us from the big bang to people banging drums.For our convenience we study the processes of life in a different discipline than the processes of the cosmos but that's arbitrary. They may in the end merge because in the end we're all built from stardust but for the moment science separates them. I'm not asking you to take my word for it; that's the science of it. Ask Polkinghorne he is at least in his own field there. Uh?? Why??? We're made of the same stuff as the cosmic universe, science assumes that life is an emergent property. We even have a name for it - abiogenesis. It does nothing of the kind, that's purely a religious notion with no evidence to support it. Again, no. All of that is pure invention. Inserting an unexplained cause as the cause is not an explanation. It's what religion has been doing for millennia and it's always been wrong.Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

Science can examine anything that occurs in our physical universe. So far nothing has been found that requires a supernatural explanation. Science has continually explained the natural causes behind the supernatural claims made by religious believers. There is no reason why that process will not continue. Though we may be limited by the bounds of our own intelligence - we don't know that yet. There's no obvious reason why we should think ourselves able to understand everything. Maybe our machines will ultimately take it all the way? Certainly you and I will never know. That is only (partially) true at the very beginning of all the processes - the big bang - and then only because we don't understand it. Yet.Given that everything we've ever examined is a result of natural causes, science's working hypothesis is that it all is. But the idea that a god is the original cause and intervenes no further is deism, which is not your belief. You believe that god somehow intervenes in undefined ways routinely in our universe - pulling the strings on unimaginable volumes of processes. A totally unnecessary fiction as we can see that the processes happen naturally. You're still not getting this because you're thinking like a believer, not a scientist. Abiogenesis is not a black and white moment - no life, then life. It's a gradient, a messy development spectrum. It will be impossible to establish a single point because at that level of organic development we're talking more about chemistry than biology. But we know from studying life now that it goes from relatively simple replicating chemicals to complex organisms.The processes that create all these life forms are natural. Two single cells from a man and a woman combine to eventually form an adult human being. Literally trillions of processes, each process kicking off the next - naturally. When one of these processes goes wrong because of an error in a gene or physical damage, development also goes wrong and we get malformations and even death.The processes we see working today, are the same ones that have been working for billions of years. They develop both complex organisms from 'simple' ones - people from single cells - and all life from 'simple' chemicals. We know this as fact and understand many of the processes. They're all natural.

But according to your book he is! He creates heaven where all is apparently perfect, why does he need this messy stuff? That'll be because we're sick of waiting for some supernatural being to tidy up the mess he made here.

If you like. It just means it's at the edge of our current knowledge. You've assumed an agency. Science doesn't assume agency; it concerns itself with evidence. 'Mostly'. What does that mean? As for the rest, it's just fanciful religious invention. It's not a bloody belief! Stop doing that! It's just factual, observational science. There are processes all the way down. None require external interference.There is no point in any of the processes that require external intervention, they all follow naturally one to the next. Can you show us anything that requires it? Marvel away. But please point to any part of the process from conception to birth that requires supernatural intervention. All those zillions of processes - where is the intervention?

Is there free will in heaven? What is the purpose of our existence? Who was it that gave us human logic and justice? Would who ever did it expect us not to use it?

You keep dodging. In the example I gave of conception to birth there are literally billions of processes that occur naturally. In embryology we can see each developmental stage. You can't point to a single one that requires anything supernatural.If you want to say that god created the the circumstances where those processes developed naturally, we say that is simply a god of the gaps argument. But in that case it's a deist belief, not a theistic one anyway. Unless you can find a place for intervention, you do not have an interventionist god.

Right, we can't go any further than that without solving the something from nothing problem. Just be aware that that gap in our knowledge may also be filled, possibly within our lifetimes. Sadly though neither of us will understand it. I'm afraid it is. You filled the gap in our knowledge about how the universe came into existence by inserting an uncaused cause. That's not an explanation it's a linguistic trick. Which is merely mythology. Which we know is a naturally developed brain function.

Given that science says that its a gap in it's knowledge and science doesn't as yet have have it figured out, it's fair to say it's gap in science's knowledge. Nobody in science is saying that it can't be explained naturally and is therefore a supernatural concern. It's an explanation of the state of the art. You're speaking for yourself, there are physicists and mathematicians that are currently thinking in 10, 11 and 26 dimensions.String theory - Wikipedia Science says that this is not necessarily so. Or it might not exist or have existed but no longer does. You've just chosen the option you'd prefer to believe.But if it does exist, it can't explain itself. The uncaused cause is just a linguistic trick; it explains nothing.

Then god doesn't need this entire human experiment does he? It's pointless - because we could all go directly there - and cruel. That's too silly to require comment. You argue that suffering is required because we have free will - the right to do harm if we choose. I say that if god can create heaven where there is no suffering and everything is perfect without free will why do we need it here?Alternatively, if there is free will in heaven, then why do we need to be here and why is there no suffering and mortality heaven because of it?(Not withstanding that the whole concept of free will is total bunkum anyway.