Whereas this stuff, I still don’t buy as being at all common.
Really? Despite living in a society dominated by a religion that has always cheerfully used threats to attempt to coerce people into lying about how they supported the True Faith? Or consider how many people were perfectly willing to accept that confessions of terrorist affiliations extracted by torture should be considered as true.
OK. Let’s call it “fact” instead. Previous experience, observation or measurement tells me that something has always happened before and will always happen in the future. That’s fact. It can be proven and demonstrated. It’s a fact that if I miss the nail and bash my thumb with the hammer, it will hurt. It’s a fact that has been proven too many times in the past. I can predict it will hurt just as bad next time. Science 
Let’s say this: I have not found any evidence that comes even close to satisfying me. I’ve also found that the single bit of evidence that believers tend to take the most seriously is their personal “revelations” or emotions, which are always subjective and non-instructive (i.e. don’t seem to lead to any new knowledge that could be tested) so they should, at most, work only for the person experiencing them.
Pretty much all the rest of the evidence is superstition & “urban legends” that happen to, sort of, match the believers “main” religious themes (although they’re usually just “evidence” for ‘some supernatural something somewhere’). If I could I would kick the people who made “What the #@&*(# do we know?!” until they told me they were sorry for spreading a whole boat load of ridiculous lies and misinformation that I’ve heard people use as “evidence” for pretty much any belief on the planet.
Well, it could be God. But I addressed that above.
Fact is, we just don’t know how the fine-tuning works, or if there even is one. What we do know is that a multiverse theory would probably address a lot of the problem, and is consistent with what we do know about the universe. But as begbert2 mentioned, even without a multiverse, it could still be blind chance.
I’m going to take out this old chestnut: why don’t people get “miraculously healed” from something that is literally uncureable? Like loss of a leg? Why are all the cases I hear of either internal problems with little outward evidence or simply diseases that could easily have healed on their own, or even better: miraculously involved a lot of miraculous medical attention?
Difference is: I don’t need any.
Go through your books and present the single best piece of evidence you’ve got.
My shot, from this thread:
That’s not evidence-that’s a belief system.
Although I stated my claim from the other thread as a belief, each claim I made is backed with reason and evidence.
What’s the best piece of evidence you’ve got, then?
I refuse to believe the sky is blue. If my assumption is correct then it must be a different color than blue, and if it is a different color than blue than it can’t also be blue at the same time. Ergo the sky isn’t blue. QED.
So your religious beliefs consist of thinking that there was some prime mover entity that started the universe, the nature of whom we know nothing about. No holy book or claims of miracles or having him intervene in our history, right? After all, this vague notion of “something started the universe” would be pretty hard to translate into an organized religion with history and dogma.
I’ve explained it.
Are you asking what is the evidence that you can’t have an infinite amount of finite things? (Abstract concepts, like numbers, not included).
I’m basically a deist, I don’t purport belief in any religion.
And a prime mover / uncaused cause / “creator” doesn’t have to be an entity (and I’m doubtful that an entity can exist outside of time at all), doesn’t have to have intelligence and doesn’t need to to have intent. All that this argument attempts to prove is that there “was” something outside of time. It doesn’t even attempt to prove the thing that started the universe is “still there”, if you even can say that of something that’s out of time.
For instance, if we’re going to assume stuff, the big bang/universe could just be the “inside” of a black hole in another universe. That would satisfy all the parameters but would hardly qualify as a god.
I think “entity” is a pretty reasonable term to ascribe to something that isn’t a nothing, and isn’t a universe.
Also doesn’t need not have it. The question being posited in this thread is show some evidence, not conclusive proofs.
No it wouldn’t, it just means this other universe was actually the “first” universe, that universe would still be bound by time, hence, need a beginning.
Fair enough.
But if it doesn’t need intent, or intelligence, why would you assume it has?
It’s not necessarily bound by our time, though. Hell, time in that other universe might be circular. It’s no more crazy than positing something that exists without any time at all. At least we know that black holes and spacetime exist here.
Well, if you look at what was “caused” to come in to existence, namely a whole bunch of components with a a high degree of elegance and functionality, the inference is, I believe, design. We don’t ever see high amounts of elegance and functionality on things we know aren’t designed.
If the hypothetical other universe is undergoing change, it’s experiencing time.
Or… please show evidence that the other universe you are positing existed. There isn’t any? Then no reason to believe in it.
Well… I don’t agree 
But that’s a different point.
All I’m trying to point out is that there’s no particular reason to infer that “out of (or, before) time” means anything more than “out of OUR time”, since for all we know, our universe’s time is part of our universe, and also that intent is a separate assumption that can’t be made purely on a “first cause” argument.
Except for eveything in the universe you mean? Obviously if you start from the premise that everything elegant is designed, there won’t be anything left that is elegant and not-designed.
That’s not a proof, it’s a failure of logic.
KellyCriterion, if I follow your reasoning, it goes like this:
The number of things is bounded by the universe (and is not infinite). Therefore, there is a god.
I don’t follow that. Are there underpants gnomes involved somewhere in this chain of constructs?