The evolution of an atheist.

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The naturalistic explanation for the scientifically determined fine tuning of the universe seems to be the anthropic principle. There seem to be various ways of dealing with this including a multi-verse theory. These are all theories and may or may not at some point be proven. However, if you want to follow Occam's razor it seems to me that this simplest explanation is that God did it. It would simply answer all the questions instead of theorizing the idea of many, if not infinite parallel universes exist, and we just happen to be in the right one. (That is my understanding so if I have it wrong I have a hunch you'll feel free to correct me. )

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Not really. God is an infinite entity. Introduction of any infinity to a solution is at least as complex and normally more complex than any possible alternative and rarely actually addresses the issue. In the case of fine-tuning there are many hypothesis which are much less complex in terms of introducing additional entities and which are therefore favoured by the good old occy's razor. Examples would include:
a. the Evolutionary universe hypothesis from Lee Smolin - which is a theory with much beauty and symmetryb. variations of the anthropic principle.
b1. Even the straight (weak) anthropic principle - the universe must be as it is because we are here to observe it - introduces less assumptions/entities than the introduction of an infinite deity, but there are alternatives:
b2. Had the physical constants been different and a universe resulted with different physical laws then that simply means it may have evolved different life. The assumption that this universe is fine-tuned for life is not necessarily the case, and our existence is basically explained by the golf analogy*
b3. The assumption of fine-tuning is actually not valid - the assumption that this universe is friendly to life is clearly untrue - it is just the opposite, very unfriendly. The FT argument rests on the assertion that significant differences in the constants would not lead to a stable universe, but this is supposing that the variables are free to vary in such ways, which is unevidenced, and that there would be no synergy between the changes resulting in an unforseen result (ie normally we change one constant and show that this results in the electron smashing into the nucleus and that is that. What we should do is model several changes and look for mutual interactivity which might support a stable universe with new physics - I don't think this has been done, or at least done in any systematic and comprehensive manner.*The golf analogy:
a pro golfer typically drives a ball 300 yards plus or minus 20 yards. Within the 40 yeard margin of error there are 13,000,000 blades of grass. The pro hits the ball and the ball lands. Wow, he says, the chances of me landing that ball on this blade of grass are 13 million to 1.PS - we could argue about whether the universal ethic is derived from the golden rule - it isn't IMHO. Do unto others is a different rule if you think about it - the universal ethic is more specific and rules out many poor outcomes of the do unto others Golden rule (eg a masochist might do things unto others that they would not enjoy at all..)
The universal ethic is entirely derived from secular principles. I could give you a long explanation but instead I'll just give a link:
http://www.foldvary.net/works/ue1.htmlEdited by Bikerman, : No reason given.

You will have to explain that to me.Normally, "affirming the consequent" refers to an error in deductive logic. But what you quoted does not look like deductive logic. Rather, it looks like the description of an experimental method, including a claim that the method was repeated many times giving highly consistent results.I have no idea what was the context of that quote, so I am not clear on what was being measured. It is my understanding that Einstein thought the eclipse was very weak supporting evidence. It the theory correctly predicted the orbit of Mercury, that would have been considered stronger evidence.In any case, scientific theories are never proved. They are adopted, or rejected on pragmatic grounds. It's a mistake to treat them as if they were propositions that had a truth value. Most physical scientists are skeptical of a lot of psychology, not just Freud's work. I assume that crashfrog is among the skeptics.Sure, I readily admit that many psychologists actually do read the philosophy literature, and actually do try to practice science as described by philosophy of science. That's perhaps part of why psychology often seems such a weak science. I hate that kind of argument.The word "philosophy" is used in several ways. In a narrow sense, it refers to the kind of work done by professional philosophers, and what they publish in their books and research journals. But there is also a broader sense of the word, in which all humans can be said to engage in philosophy. It is pretty obvious that crashfrog was criticizing philosophy in the first narrower sense. So now you try to move the goalposts to the second and broader sense.

Well, I'm sorry that you've been taken in by philosophical nonsense, but that's what it is. Sure, which can't be supported logically.Why do you think that's a problem with empiricism and not with logic? Maybe it's the notion of axiomatic derivation that has the fundamental flaw, not the notion of empiric gathering of knowledge. Much valid science predates Popper. We even continue to use Mendel's genetics from over 100 years from before "The Logic of Scientific Discovery." Bayes has done far more to prevent fundamental errors in the practice of science than anything Popper has done.Every scientist I've ever met has heard of Bayes; I can think of only one who had heard of Karl Popper before I brought it up. (Largely their response to my description of his philosophy is something akin to "...and what's the punchline?") If there's a way to resolve these questions, they'll be resolved by scientists doing science, not philosophers doing philosophy. In the meantime philosophers will borrow the language of biology and physics to produce stuff indistinguishable from Sokal's classic hoax. And yet I can't find any philosophers in any science labs. I can't find Kant next to the lab manuals in any science course. My wife's new Nanodrop spectrophotometer didn't come with a manual on the philosophical implications of Beer's law. I can't find a single scientist who turns to Popper when he has a question about experimental design. But I can find legions of philosophers like Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini who evince less than a freshman understanding of the science of evolution, yet pen a ridiculous strawman attack against it:

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The authors bring to the bar two articles (one published in 1981, the other in 1993) discussing this phenomenon, but they seem completely unaware that the classic studies of Achillea these articles cite were actually conducted more than half a century ago by researchers who fully embraced natural selection and the emerging neo-Darwinian synthesis (Jens Clausen, David D. Keck and William M. Hiesey, Experimental Studies on the Nature of Species: III. Environmental Responses of Climatic Races of Achillea [Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1948]). This is a typical example of the authors’ misunderstanding of the history of evolutionary biology.

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A more egregious case occurs when they favorably quote Ernst Mayr as protesting against what he has referred to as beanbag geneticsthe view that genes singly determine phenotypic traits. Mayr, one of the architects of neo-Darwinism, is thus called on to oppose neo-Darwinism. Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini quote at length from a 1999 study by Geoffrey B. West, James H. Brown and Brian J. Enquist (Science, 284:1677—1679) concerning invariant scaling laws, which constrain phenotypic expression quite independently of natural selection; they apparently do not realize that Julian Huxley was a pioneer of this kind of allometric study in his Problems of Relative Growth (1932) and that he then integrated these very concepts of allometric constraint into his Evolution: the Modern Synthesis (1944), a classic work of neo-Darwinism.

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So, no. I can't find any support at all for your notion that philosophy of science makes science possible. I certainly have no objections to philosophers of science attempting to observe the process of science, but I can't find any evidence at all that, from the perspective of the scientists who do science, the philosophers are doing much to inform it.

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That is, that God doesn't know what I am going to have for lunch tomorrow. I guess the best metaphor would be our own raising of kids. We know about them now and in the past but we don't know what their future holds. We relate to them in the now. Polkinghorne has convinced me that this is also true for God's relationship with us. Gerald Schroeder also views it this way as near as I can understand but from a Jewish perspective.

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So he rejects an omniscient God? This creates problems as well as solving some of the obvious ones (problem of human free will being the most obvious, and I suspect this position is actually largely because of the free-will problem - which seems to me to be intractable for any omniscient being).OK so God is just really smart:1) He must have been smart enough to know the outcome, 13.7 billion years in advance, of a virtually infinite number of interactions possible after BB t=0, and KNOW the outcome of probabilistic events (otherwise he could not have known we would evolve). This implies a knowledge of all possible physical law, at least as it relates to non-biological systems. It also implies a knowledge of biology, evolutionary mechanisms, animal psychology (we could go on...basically he has to know that once abiogenesis occurs that the result will be us). So he knows all of possible physics and all of the rest of the goey biological stuff. The only thing that leaves is knowing what we will do. That sounds like a case of special pleading to me. He knows what the apes will do (he would have to, otherwise he couldn't possibly foresee humans appearing), and what every other animal will do, just not us. Again, that really does sound like very special pleading to me.If God did not have this knowledge then the fine tuning argument is multiplied many times and fired right back at God - how could he know we would evolve and without that knowledge why make the universe in the first place. On the other hand to possess all that knowledge and not be able to make the tiny weeny leap to knowing out future along with the rest of the universe over the last 13.7 billion years....that is one hell of a stretch.2) Comparing God to a human parent is a bad analogy unless you also grant that the human parent forsaw the birth of their child from the time they themselves were born (or from at least a time when they were mature) and further that the human parent had the power to influence everything around them from the time they entered the scene.Nonetheless...let us now attack this with some rigour, starting with infinities and the paradoxes therein:i1) We don't know if this new version of God is omnipotent or just very powerful. If the latter then the immediate question I would ask is 'why the hell call him God? He is just ET writ large'.i2) One thing we do know is that he must exist outside this spacetime (having created it). Now. given that he is not omniscient and possibly not omnipotent are we to believe he is eternal (or at least infinite into the past if not the future) ? If the answer is no then the obvious question follows - who made/created him? If the answer is yes then many paradoxes follow. eg
Any being infinite in historical extent must have knowledge of prior events which itself is therefore infinite - therefore God has infinite knowledge but doesn't know about the future of men...paradox. We can illustrate this as follows: Any being infinite in historical extent can be analogised by an infinite library - a library with an infinite number of books. Such a library must, by definition, contain a book with my entire life story written in it, and indeed the life story of every human who ever lived and who ever will live.

I am perfectly happy to continue my attempted defence, but I am aware that we are now well into material that is properly, I think, the subject of a thread unto itself. Can I suggest, that in the interests of leaving the extant discussion to continue, we move this to a separate thread with the help and consent of the moderator? It is quite demanding defending against a two or three party attack - whilst also being quite stimulating - but I'm running the risk of confusing myself, let alone others, with this thread running through the other one I'm trying to have...
Is this agreeable to you both and to the mod?

What's to defend? You were not being attacked.If you can accept that many scientists are not as enamored of philosophy as you are, then we can just leave the issue at that, and get back to discussing other things.Honestly, this is your thread. And if you found ideas from philosophy to be important to you, that's fine. It's just that some of us don't see the same importance in them.

This is not necessarily the case. Consider the set of all integer squares 0, 1, 4, 9, 25, etc. This is of course infinite, but does not include every number.Or your imaginary infinite library could consist of the infinite set of books which begin with the words: "This is the story of Englebert Humperdinck".

Nono you misunderstand me. I meant defend in an entirely non-aggressive manner and I wasn't trying to imply you were doing anything nasty or even unusual. Normally I just use the words attack/defend to refer to someone defending a proposition and someone else trying to defeat it. I can see how that might suggest I'm complaining or crying foul, but really, that it not the case...

True...I was lazy in defining the problem and made an invalid assumption - schoolboy error in fact. (especially since I was discussing Cantor's hierarchy of infinities not that long ago on the science forums :-) )Obviously the last part of that argument (last para above) falls.Edited by Bikerman, : No reason given.

However, I cannot even think of what proposition that might be.

I understood your meaning, at least, and didn't think your words were mischosen - I'm certainly attacking philosophy and you're certainly defending it. No harm in describing it that way.But you're right that we're quite off-topic. Feel free to open a new topic if it's something you want to keep talking about, though I'm not sure what else I have to bring to the table. I think you know pretty well what I think, now.

OK first I absolutely accept that many scientists are far from enamoured with philosophy. In fact at first I thought you might be one of the science forums regulars because this debate is very reminiscent of many similar ones we have had.

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Why do you think that's a problem with empiricism and not with logic? Maybe it's the notion of axiomatic derivation that has the fundamental flaw, not the notion of empiric gathering of knowledge.

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It certainly isn't a problem with empiricism, simply a suggested change of focus. Better to try to gather the one piece of data that disproves the hypothesis than gather a million supporting examples...therefore design the tests to falsify the hypothesis not simply to confirm it (choose boundary cases or make bold predictions at the limit of the hypothesis).

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Much valid science predates Popper. We even continue to use Mendel's genetics from over 100 years from before "The Logic of Scientific Discovery." Bayes has done far more to prevent fundamental errors in the practice of science than anything Popper has done.

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I agree that much valid science predates Popper but there has been an paradigm shift because of his work.
Falsifiability is now generally understood as a key element in scientific demarcation and scientific method. The notion that an hypothesis should be testable and potentially falsified to be considered scientific is pretty universal now. Also the notion that the power of an hypothesis is a function of how easy it is to refute flows directly from this. Until Popper science was infested with pseudo-science like Freudianism simply because there was no agreed way of saying what was and was not science. There were vague notions of empiricism, but no clear line in the sand. Popper provides that and in doing so frees science from many of parasites that used to cling to its coat-tails with impugnity.

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Every scientist I've ever met has heard of Bayes; I can think of only one who had heard of Karl Popper before I brought it up. (Largely their response to my description of his philosophy is something akin to "...and what's the punchline?")

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That surprises me. I would have thought that most undergrad science courses would have had at least a module on scientific method and demarcation/philosophy. I suspect that the 'what is the punchline' comment means 'it is obvious' - but it wasn't. Yes, it should be obvious to anyone studying science now because it has been absorbed so that it is no longer even notable. Go back to pre 1930 and there is no clear scientific demarcation, and a scientific method which Aristotle would have recognised and which was unclear and over-reliant on inductive method. Popper et al clarify, simplify and set the basis for modern scientific method, peer-review and demarcation. You don't need telling that one reading/observation can refute a hypothesis and require it to be modified or ditched. Scientists of the 18th and 19th century DID need telling so because they generally did not look to falsify but to confirm. That is a much weaker method and leaves too much chaff surviving. Attack the theory head on, and determined to falsify it (just as most juries on the professional journals do) and you quickly cut through the bull.

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If there's a way to resolve these questions, they'll be resolved by scientists doing science, not philosophers doing philosophy. In the meantime philosophers will borrow the language of biology and physics to produce stuff indistinguishable from Sokal's classic hoax.

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No, scientists will do what they get grants to do. Meanwhile their grant awarding bodies will be influenced by philosophy, economics and a range of other considerations. Yes, I agree that philosophy can be a refuge for pedants, sophists and those with nothing to say but an overwhelming urge to say it. I don't think it is either fair or accurate to characterise the whole discipline, or even the majority, in that way.

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And yet I can't find any philosophers in any science labs. I can't find Kant next to the lab manuals in any science course. My wife's new Nanodrop spectrophotometer didn't come with a manual on the philosophical implications of Beer's law. I can't find a single scientist who turns to Popper when he has a question about experimental design.

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Again I am surprised. Do the designers not seek to push the boundaries and go for cases where the hypothesis should be stretched, rather than the safe middle ground? Actually I know they do because I speak regularly to physicists, biologists and chemists in the science forums. If they don't then they are not designing their experiments as well as they could or should.

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But I can find legions of philosophers like Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini who evince less than a freshman understanding of the science of evolution, yet pen a ridiculous strawman attack against it:

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Yes but come on - I can find large numbers of computer 'scientists' and engineers who are avid creationists (I don't know what it is about computer science or engineering, but it is certainly the case). It means nothing. We don't damn engineering because a proportion of engineers have loony-tunes views, nor should we do so for philosophy.

I was thinking this would be a good OP for an altogether new topic. We don't want to derail your atheism discussion.

You replied to me, but mostly quoted crashfrog.I'll hold off responding for a while, in case you decide to start a new thread with it.If you do start a new thread, I think it could actually be a fairly non-contentious discussion over different views of the relation between science and philosophy.

It does answer the free will question but it is also consistent with scripture. There are many instances in the OT where God's actions are dependent on His created beings. The whole story of Noah is one obvious example. Not necessarily. The universe and this world was created over time according to both science and scripture. Living things came later also according to both. I agree that the deistic position is possible in that God created and allowed it to evolve on its own but personally I favour the idea that God intervened in the evolutionary process. I guess it's like building a car. You know what it is going to finish up like but you still put it together one piece at a time. He knew we would evolve because it was His on-going project. At some point along the way He got us to the point that we became sentient beings with a knowledge of good and evil, with the freedom to choose. I agree that it is far from a perfect metaphor. My point was that essentially we give our kids guidelines to work with but we don't know how they will turn out. I guess a God that is wise enough to create all that we can perceive and give me life is worth calling God. How can we even measure the intelligence required to do that and from our perspective it likely is close enough to infinite that we might as well call it that. My answer would be yes. We did touch on this earlier in this thread. Time is the way we experience change and with our five senses we only know of one way of perceiving change and that is by what we call time. We know that this planet had a beginning and we know it will have an end. God was there at the beginning and he'll be there at the end whenever that it is. The alpha and the omega. Maybe however in another dimension of time, with maybe more and/or different senses change, may be perceived in an entirely different manner and infinity will be the norm. Who knows. We aren't capable of answering all the questions. I do know that when I get to the next life I am definitely going to all the lectures. I do want to reiterate. This is just my opinion on things and my opinions are evolving, and will no doubt continue to evolve.