If God is omnipotent, then why is the world such an awful place to live?
The miracle that would make me believe God exists if God would do what God is supposedly capable of. That is, instead of creating random people and sending the good ones to Heaven and the bad ones to Hell, just make everybody good. Everyone becomes benevolent and altruistic, they never lie, they don’t ever hurt anyone, no crime. No disease, no congenital malformations. No terrible experiences that are excused as “God is testing my faith.” No natural disasters. Basically Heaven on Earth.
I’m not quite sure how to respond to a flat-out rejection of the definition of logical negation.
Er, isn’t that a simple example of “Existence didn’t start at this point”? To the people in the sim universe, there is an outside context universe which contains its creator. Sure these would be interesting details for a person in the sim universe to learn about (the existential crises alone would be quite entertaining) but it doesn’t change the fundamental fact that while before they didn’t know where their universe came from, now they don’t know where the scientist/programer/gamer universe came from.
No, you most definitely didn’t. We are aware that there are infinite number of ways to subdivide the space between 1 and 2, and we can do math that tells us what trends are regarding infinities, but you definitely can’t sit down and literally count all the real numbers between 1 and 2. If anybody claims to have recited all the real numbers between 1 and 2, even if they never age and had all the time they wanted to do it, if somebody says “I started with one, and verbally counted all the real numbers between 1 and 2 in order, and I reached 2 and now I’m done”, then you can know with absolute certainty that they’re lying and that never happened. No matter how much time you take, you can’t actualize an infinity.
I’m mostly sticking to models that are possible.
Theoretically, a number line, including one being used to measure spans of time, extends infinitely into the negative. However, nothing can actually experience an infinite amount of time, counting the days from the start of the infinite span to the end of the infinite span. And it’s not just people who can’t sit there and count up an infinite number of birthdays; it’s the fabric of space itself. You don’t have to be sentient to be passing through time; you just have to be real. If the universe has existed infinitely long before now, it never got finished living through the “before” so it’s not here for the “now”.
There is also the claim that that we would ignore “direct proof of God”.
Well, no. If there were proof of God, then it would not be ignored. It would be studied scientifically, and Brian Cox would be on a BBC documentary explaining it.
But there is no proof of god. There are things that people call evidence that are either dubious reports, explainable by natural phenomena, or are outside of our current scientific understanding, but “I don’t know” is not equivalent to “God did it.”
One of the reasons that theists claim that those questioning the existence or nature of God would reject actual proof of God is because they know they will never be proven wrong on that claim, as they know they will never produce it.
Contrary to @SmartBulbInc’s claim, the argument of the atheist/agnostic/etc. really boils down to, “You are making extraordinary claims, and have presented no evidence for them.” and the claim of the theist always boils down to, “No evidence will be sufficient to convince you, so I don’t have to present any.”
But I would never use modal logic as the sole basis for an empirical claim. It’s too easy for us to include subtle assumptions in the framing / phrasing.
No it isn’t. I was speaking rhetorically meaning another option than the ones we’re aware of right now.
Bootstrapping of course has paradoxes of its own, on top of leaving the question why this reality, which is a key part of the problem.
Anyway, I guess we’ve gone too far from the OP anyway. I’ll just summarize my position as this: I don’t agree that the apparent intractable problem of existence itself constitutes a good argument for God.
Exactly. You say that there are only two possibilities. That just means you haven’t thought of any others, that doesn’t mean that they don’t exist.
Only if they are aware of that outside world. If they think that the world that they live in is real, as we do, then they would have no such context.
If I write a simulator, there is no reason that I have to use our laws of physics or even logic to do so. I can create any sort of arbitrary laws that the sims will be subject to, and that may have absolutely nothing to do with the universe that I, the owner of this video game, am in.
No one said that they would. You are getting hung up on the idea that an infinite has to be “actualized” in order to exist. Time doesn’t take time to happen, it just is.
If I have the function x=y, and I draw a line from 0,0 to 1,1, I have drawn a line through an infinite number of reals. I didn’t have to count them verbally, but they have all become defined by the line that I drew.
How long does it take for 1+1 to equal 2? Multiply that by infinity, and you will get how long it takes for an infinite past to exist as a coordinate system.
How do you judge which ones are possible? People that are smarter and more knowledgeable than either of us are proponents of such models, and there are people with the same qualifications that are dubious. Until we know how the universe came into being, and what came before if that means anything, then we can’t rule out anything that is mathematically consistent, and both cyclic cosmology and eternal inflation are. (And eternal inflation is actually a pretty popular model among those who delve deep into such things.)
For your perusal, here is one that goes from an infinite past to a big crunch to the big bang to what we see today, or to look at it another way, the arrow of time reverses at the singularity. Either way, it has no beginning, it just is and always is. And here is another that shows how the universe can create itself. Are they correct? Maybe, maybe not. But they are mathematically consistent, and what we know of the universe doesn’t rule them out as impossible.
The passage of time as something that needs to be experienced one second at a time is a quirk of our biology. We are at this second now, and then we’ll be at the next second, and that time has to pass in order for us to progress from one to the next. The universe doesn’t always conform to our intuitions, though, and an infinite past doesn’t take any time to exist, time would only be meaningful for objects experiencing time within it.
There are arguments made that the universe is also infinite in size. If that is the case, do I have to go through an infinite amount of space in order to get to where I am?
Heh, I second this. If we want to do a thread on the universe as science understands it, or at least tries to understand it, that could be fun, but I agree it’s gone a bit far afield.
Anyway, I agree entirely on the point, we don’t know, and we may never know how or why or what on the universe coming into existence, but that doesn’t mean that god did it.
By that logic, anything we don’t understand could just be said that “aliens did it” which is kind of a reverse God of the gaps argument.
The difference here is that radiation/atoms/whatever else are mere extensions of natural law and not violations of it. An omnipotent God could be capable of miracles that would be impossible even with advanced technology. Falling back on “its justified to believe something/not believe something because something might exist that might explain it,” is a flawed argument. That sort of argument, if taken as valid, could be used to dismiss anything out of hand. Example: “Well, just because we don’t have an explanation right now for why Santa exists doesn’t mean that one doesn’t exist, we just haven’t found an explanation yet.”
Right, which is why that logic doesn’t work for the god did it camp. Why are you positing that a god is more likely than aliens?
How sufficiently advanced are we talking here?
Sure, the first conclusion jumped to isn’t going to be god. There are going to be far more mundane and likely conclusions that should be tested out first. And yes, advanced aliens from Rigel 7 is a much more mundane and likely conclusion than god did it.
It’s more, “You haven’t provided any evidence that Santa exists, and the properties you claim that he has have no explanation given what we understand of the universe, that’s why I don’t think that Santa exists.”
That’s not the argument at all. The argument is, “Just because we don’t understand it doesn’t mean that we should believe that god did it.” We would investigate, scientifically, and see what we could learn. The flawed argument is that of the theologian that sees something that they can’t explain, and use that as a justification to believe something.
A very flawed argument is to say how someone else would react to a hypothetical scenario that will never happen, and then use that as a reason that that person would reject that evidence.
Sure, if that happens, then I could probably be persuaded that there is something pretty powerful out there, and if it wants to be called a god, then I should probably call it a god.
It still doesn’t say which god, or what rules we should operate under.
And, it still has the problem that this isn’t a hypothetical situation, this is real life.
Well, no, you are arguing that the premise of the OP was rejected out of hand, but you are not providing any sort of evidence of that, just claiming to have done so, because you think that you know how others would react to a hypothetical situation that will never and can never happen.
You are basically saying that if we don’t immediately kneel down and worship the Christian god at the first sight of something unexpected given our knowledge of the universe, that means that we would reject actual “irrefutable, unbiased, scientifically proven” evidence for God."
Sure, “God did it” and “Aliens did it” are, superficially at least, similar levels of explanation. Either way, I’m essentially admitting that I don’t know how it was actually done.
The difference comes down to probabilities, though. What is the probability that god exists with the attributes we’ve ascribed to it, vs. the probability that some super-advanced aliens exist and are messing with us?
Well, we know that life exists here, so it’s possible for life to exist in this universe. There are billions of stars in the galaxy, and billions of galaxies in the universe that we can see. Some of those stars and galaxies have been around for far longer than our own, and so it’s possible that life developed there billions of years ago. We know that humanity has gone from banging rocks together to the Moon in about 100,000 years, and we have no indication that our scientific progress has any reason to stop. So it’s possible that aliens that are maybe billions of years old exist somewhere, and have billions of years more development than we do, and so may have abilities that appear virtually miraculous to us.
Based on all that, I judge the probability of aliens to be significantly higher than the probability of god. Sufficiently higher than I consider the burden of showing it’s god instead of aliens to be on you.
You seem to think that “natural law” is some kind of objective standard that we can recognize, and say, “Oh, this violates natural law, while that’s just an extension of it…” Except that’s not how natural law works. “Natural law” has no meaning beyond “This is how we think the universe works”. “Natural law” was “atoms are indivisible” until it wasn’t. Natural law was “protons are indivisible” until it wasn’t. “Energy can be neither created nor destroyed” was natural law, right up until we realized that mass and energy are interchangeable.
Okay, if so, name one. So far, every example that has been suggested, I’ve been able to knock down just with technologies that we’ve speculated about. Give us another billions years and that’s just going to get worse.
And it wasn’t rejected “out of hand”. Almost everyone who has responded has had an explanation for why it was rejected, which is pretty much the exact opposite of doing it “out of hand”:
reject something out of hand
to reject an idea or suggestion without hesitating and without discussing it first
He has rejected out of hand any suggestion that there can be any compromise over the proposals.
That he doesn’t like the explanations doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
And “aliens did it” and “God did it” are both crappy answers if they’re applied to things where there’s no specific reason to think that aliens are the ones who did, or that god is the one who did it, respectively.
For me to be convinced that a miracle was caused by God, I have to have a reason to think it was caused by God. Is that so much to ask? I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect me to explain every unexplained event with “God did it”. There should be something about the event that convinces me it was God, specifically.
If a hypothetical God created irrefutable hypothetical miracles, I could hypothetically believe something strange is going on. If the hypothetical miracles are also irrefutably traceable back to the hypothetical God, my hypothetical belief in the hypothetical God would be a certainty, hypothetically speaking.
Given the odds, it would take a miracle for me in specific to win, but I did buy one ticket. I figure if I win, it’s all I needed, and if I lose, it’s all I can afford. Meantime, I get one hell of a daydream. There’s no praying involved, though.
Sure, you in specific, but if a hundred million people buy tickets and somebody wins, does that mean that God has been proven to exist to that someone? If it’s a good enough proof for him, shouldn’t it be a good enough proof for everyone who hears about it and knows that it objectively happened? “Some guy in Kansas won the lottery. It really happened, and he wasn’t cheating! I have proof! So, God exists!”
Also, I assume that if the odds were just a titch lower, it would still be convincingly miraculous. Or maybe even two titches lower, or three…I don’t see an obvious dividing line, so maybe lots of titches lower?
“Some guy in Kansas flipped a coin and it came up heads three times in a row!! It really happened, fair coin and everything! I have proof! So, God exists!”