Well, there’s the laws of physics and the general consistent nature of the universe. But that’s certainly not proof of any god; there’s no evidence that a god is necessary for those to exist, or that a universe could exist that didn’t have those things. It seems much more likely that the universe is logically consistent because it can be no other way. As for if physics didn’t exist; even if that’s possible, there wouldn’t be anything around to comment on the matter.
Try to form this as a syllogism, because, frankly, while this might be merely a terrible leap of logic, it looks very much like a flight of fancy.
Given a universe that is governed by physical laws, it is pretty certain that the more activity that occurs, the more order will be introduced to the system by those physical laws acting upon the “random” matter. Eventually, those laws result in self-organizing substances, (we already know of self-organizing chemicals). Forms that arise from such substances will also be, potentially, self-organizing. By the time one has moved through life, from proto-life viruses to fully coherent mammals, self-organization will be inherent in every creature. If intelligence develops among one or more species, it, necessarily, must be organized or it would not be intelligence.
I will not even get into what appears to be a misunderstanding of the word “random” as employed in the first paragraph, but there is no reason to believe that an origin sprung from chaos would not resolve itself into order, so the starting point of the OP is without basis.
I already took your argument into consideration, but inductively it is highly unlikely.
If the Intelligent Being (God or process) wasn’t intelligent, would it be possible for It to create a being that was more intelligent?
Yes.
Next question.
Certainly. That happens every time a human or animal has offspring; utterly mindless biochemical processes producing sentient creatures, or full fledged sapient beings in the case of humans. Not only is it possible, it’s not even unusual.
Ah but I previously entertained your rebuttal and septo-gnostically it is unwilling to pastern even the first gate.
Is it possible to have a child that is smarter than you?
Also, remember that if it existed, God created a universe. That universe was only unthinking hydrogen and a set of laws. Then some hydrogen clumped into stars, blew up and seeded heavy elements into the cosmos. Then some of the heavy elements became our system. Then the system was sterile for a billion years. Then the first primitive life started. Then over the next 3.6 billion years additional forms of life evolved.
A sequence that goes on now but currently has us being here today. God, if He existed, didn’t create us. He would have created some hydrogen.
If you have a concept of “God” in mind, why speak of him as some nebulous, hypothetical “intelligent being” that could easily bear no resemblance at all to your God? Just say “God” and don’t bother with the doublespeak. It’s not entirely honest.
As a little kid, my intuition told me the Earth was flat, but I had to accept that it was wrong. Human intuition is wrong so often that I’m surprised you would put so much faith (ouch) in it.
Pchaos, what’s your view on the origins of human beings? Do you accept that they evolved from other earlier life or do you believe the Intelligent Being created human beings directly?
Hear, hear!
That’s what pisses me off about Creationism; “Intelligent Being” is just a sneaky euphemism for “The Lord God Jehovah, Father of Jesus Christ.” It’s an underhanded way to preach their specific religion to the malleable minds of children, who are supposed to be protected from such craziness by Separation of Church and State. (Thank you, Thomas Jefferson!)
Bullshit. Where’s the proof?
It was also tried as a way to sneak God into the schools through the back door of the Constitution. Lying for Jesus is just all right in some Christian circles.
None of this answers (or ever really addresses) the question of “What came before?” - either God, or the Big Bang, or the brane collision, or… whatever. Something cannot come from nothing - it is counter-intuitive at best, and insanity-inducing at worst.
Seriously, at the coarsest of levels, somebody has to explain What Came Before, and even more mind-warpingly, Where Did That Come From. Even the hardest of hard-core athiests can’t hand-wave that question. Neither can the most devout of Believers. In fact, trying to explain that conundrum seems to be the Singularity where science and faith collide - it requires a huge degree of “It Just Was”-ness to make any sense in terms of human understanding. Not even Morgan Freeman seems to know.
Simply put - ‘we don’t know’ anything about before the ‘event’ - saying that means there must be a ‘GOD’ is being intelectually lazy - searching for answers, and being willing to say ‘we don’t know’ is the sign of a rational and reasonable mind.
Well don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a problem with the intellectual persuit of “The Beginning”, nor do I have a problem with the faith-based pursuit of it - I just can’t imagine that either one will ever be able to reduce it to a sensible “This is the beginning and nothing was before it” answer that would make some kind of sense.
Reductio ad absurdum and such.
The search for answers is what drives us - the desire to know ‘why’ - and this is one of he chief reasons that I abhor ‘religion’ - it wants to squash this desire with a handwave of “GOD” and pretend that is the answer. We may never have an answer to what started it all - and that is better than making one up.
Reductio ad absurdum indeed.
Here’s the thing.
If your intelligent being always existed, and is eternal and uncreated, then you believe things can exist without being created.
If God can exist without being created, why can’t other things? Like, say, the universe?
Here’s the other thing. We don’t know what caused the universe. Actually, we don’t even know if they universe was caused, maybe it always existed, or maybe it came into existence but didn’t have a cause. Just because everything we see in the universe has a cause doesn’t mean the universe itself had to have a cause, the universe as a whole could have different properties than objects within the universe.
Now, you can call the unknown reason for the universe existing “God” if you like. Lots of people, even physicists would accept that. The trouble comes when you try to reason from the supposition that the universe must have had a cause, to the properties of that cause. Like that the cause was intelligent. Or that it was loving. Or that it has a long white beard and wears a robe. Or that it raped a random woman 2000 years ago and caused her to give birth to a hybrid half-human/half-uncaused-first-cause baby.
Labeling this hypothetical, unknown and unknowable origin of the universe “God” has a certain poetry to it, but it also causes you to sneak in all sorts of assumptions about the origin of the universe that might or might not be true, but whether they are true or untrue your assumptions are not well founded because you have no way of knowing whether they are true or untrue.
Most physicists would say that our common sense notions of how the universe works break down in areas that ordinary humans never encounter. So our common sense notions of how atoms and subatomic particles should work are all completely wrong, because human beings never interact with individual subatomic particles. Our common sense notions about vast distances of interstellar space are completely wrong because human beings never travel between the stars. Our common sense notions of the origin of the universe are likewise completely wrong, because common sense applies to things that human beings encounter commonly, not things that occurred billions of years before humans ever existed.
Our common sense doesn’t work at extremely small scales, it doesn’t work at extremely large scales, it doesn’t work at extremely high speeds, it doesn’t work at extremely high temperatures, it doesn’t work at extremely low temperatures, our notions of how the universe works don’t apply when the universe didn’t exist.
Human beings may never know the origin of the universe. Maybe it’s because the origin of the universe is inherently unknowable. Maybe it’s because the last human being will die before any scientist figures it out. Or maybe we will.
But deciding we already know the answer by giving it a name doesn’t actually tell us anything. We can name it “God” or “A hypothetical uncaused first cause”, but naming it doesn’t help us understand it. And slapping a name on it confuses the issue because it leads us to believe we’re at least asking the right questions. But we don’t know that we’re even in the right ballpark, we may be asking questions that are nonsensical.
“It makes no sense to me” isn’t an argument for something being impossible.
Of course we can. “We don’t know” being an obvious answer. Nor is that an argument for religion; science being unable to answer something doesn’t make religion a valid source of knowledge. Given how religion has historically been relentlessly wrong on the claims it has made by the world, why should it be believed to have gotten it right on this subject? Going by history, you’d be better guessing at random that trusting religion to be right about anything.
Faith is just a pretty word for lies and self delusion. Faith and science only collide when faith tries to impose its falsehoods on science, or when science shows faith for the false thing it is. Faith is intellectually sterile; it has nothing meaningful to say about the beginning of the universe or anything else whatsoever.
“We don’t know” isn’t an answer any more that “God did it” is. I’m not talking about our current state of knowledge, I’m saying can we EVER know what started all of this… and even deeper, what caused that?
Who knows, at some far point in the Ian Banks future we might actually have the ability to say “Yup, this is the exact moment when it all began” and I’d be beyond overjoyed to have that final answer. It would solve a lot of problems.
But then some smartass like me will pop up and say “Yeah, but what happened before that?” and derail the whole thing again.
EVEN if you believe in God (which I’m not sure I do, agnostic, remember?), then you always have to solve for “before”.
If nothing else, this will keep a lot of priests and physicsts in business.
It’s much more of one; “God did it” is at best a fantasy. “We don’t know” at least allows for the possibility of learning the truth; “God did it” is the end of thought and inquiry.
To learn the truth about something, one must first reject “God did it” and admit that you don’t know.
Of course “We don’t know” is an answer. And the reason it’s a good answer is that we don’t know. As to whether the answer is knowable or unknowable, the answer to that is “We don’t know”.
To give a more concrete example, what was Charlemagne’s birthplace? The answer to that is “we don’t know”. No conclusive evidence for Charlemagne’s birthplace has ever been found. So is his birthplace unknowable? It may be the evidence exists, we just haven’t found it yet. Like, there’s some forgotten manuscript in the basement of some monastery that would settle the question, and it will be found on January 17th, 2053. Or maybe that manuscript doesn’t exist, and no other such manuscript exists in the world, and therefore no record of Charlemagne’s birthplace survives, and so we will never know. Or maybe the manuscript exists, but it will be destroyed in 2038 in a tragic fire, and we’ll never know that Charlemagne’s birthplace was knowable, but we never knew that it was knowable, and now that the evidence is gone we don’t know that it’s unknowable.
The point being, the very early history of the universe might have destroyed the physical evidence we’d need to deduce the even earlier history of the universe. Or maybe not. Maybe one day we’ll know whether it is knowable or unknowable in principle, even though we won’t actually know the actual answer, we’ll just know that it might be possible to know the answer. Or maybe we’ll know the answer.
Or maybe we’ll continue on as we are now, we won’t know the answer, and won’t know if we can or cannot know the answer. I don’t see how you can reject the ultimate answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything as inherently incomplete when the poor bastards haven’t even got around to formulating it yet. It seems a little premature to declare with confidence that no matter what those “scientists” come up with, it won’t be good enough for you. I mean, I’m morally certain that you and I will be dead long before any such answer from any hypothetical future scientist is possible. But you’re sure–sure–that that future scientist of the future is gonna be dead wrong?
We could all be just someone’s science-fair project.