Re: All the physical evidence we have points away from there being a god

Fordtunate Son

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Mar 3, 2024, 5:14 PM [ in reply to Re: All the physical evidence we have points away from there being a god ]

>I would counter and say the evidence we have points towards slow evolution from simple to complex forms.

I don't disagree with that at all, but I also don't know if evolution is necessarily directly tied to God. I mean it could be, in a creator sense, where he designed a system and then moved on to something else. Intelligent design stuff. And that's a very common belief. The fact that there is order, at all, in anything, as opposed to pure chaos.

Why do planets move in orbits rather than just fly around in any direction, etc? But the fact is that the distribution of matter in the observable universe is largely chaotic. It's driven by forces like gravity, etc., but the distribution of the matter itself is as if you dropped a deck of playing cards on the floor...clumps here, spread out there...both random and ordered.

We "see" the universe as a sphere because of the way light works, but there's nothing to say that it is a sphere, that's just a limitation of our particular perspective. Without going too far off on a tangent, my larger point is that there likely just as much chaos in the universe as order if not more. In fact, they are two sides of the same coin. That which isn't "chaos" is order. And that which isn't "order," is chaos. What else would they be - they are definitional complements of each other.

Some just focus on the order and see that as some justification for their being a God. When the reverse could be equally true. If I use chaos as my foundation for there being no God, there's plenty of evidence for that too.

Think of a single atom. I can say "Well, that atom is completely designed and structured. It has a well-defined nucleus of protons and neutrons. It has electrons neatly arranged in S, P, D and F shells. It's a fine watch made by a creator.

But that's just a description, designed by US, to simplify a reality we can hardly grasp. The "reality" is that there are no hard particles. No point electrons. Everything is a smear of probabilities at the atomic level. Clouds of unpredictable movements layered on clouds of unpredictable movements. That miraculously(?), lead to a predictable result - an atom that can bond with others.

So there is an order of sorts, that is itself composed of chaotic elements. That's crazy.

I'm sure you have heard the analogy that hard matter is mostly empty space, because each and every atom matter is composed of is mostly empty space. I had a professor describe it to me once as "It's like building a brick house by stacking handfuls of clouds together. If you stack enough handfuls of clouds together, you eventually end up with a brick house. Electrons barely have mass at all. They are the cloud. It's their random 'movement' smeared around the nucleus, that creates "matter," so, even the hardest brick is composed of nebulous whiffs of almost nothing once you delve into its composition.

What I'm getting at is that to use order as evidence for God is to deny the chaos. And to use chaos as evidence for there not being a God is to deny the order. See the conundrum? That's why I'm not sure the "order" argument holds any more water than any other argument for, or against, the existence of God. Order, like life, may not be anything special. It just "is." And if it just 'is', and is nothing special, then how is that particularly compelling evidence for a God that can be discerned by finding "specialness" in the universe, somehow?

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I'm with you on a lot of that, but with a few reservations, perhaps.

>So that right there tells me personal testimony won’t get you to the truth.

Sure, another person's experience may not be your path to understanding, or truth, or whatever term one wants to use. If there even is a singular truth. But, their experience may open some understanding for you. I try to think of what others tell me as clues, not necessarily solutions, for myself. Maybe it's helpful, maybe it's not - it all depends, you know.

>What I have never seen one iota of is substantiated testimony of anything supernatural.

This is a bit tougher because supernatural phenomenon may be right in front of our eyes, we just don't recognize them, or describe them as such. Or, familiarity makes us overlook them. We see them all the time, so they are no longer "mysterious" to us. What I'm getting as is, "what's in a name?"

And it can be the seemingly most familiar, or simple, things. For instance, and I've used this example before, a seed and water. Now, I can take a seed, which is decidedly unliving, and might sit unliving for 30,000 years in a prehistoric cave. And I can add just a few drops of equally unliving water, and I can create something I can't explain.

Now how in the hell does that happen? Dead + Dead=Live? Call it natural or call it supernatural, but I'm not sure we can explain it. We can describe it. We can go right down to the molecular level and discuss electrons in their various shells bonding with other electrons. But at what point, and how, does all that subatomic swapping create life?

I can't drop H2 and O on a seed, it must be H20. And it can't be H2O2, or any other combination that we know of, on this world. That just blows me away. And I need photons of light. Dead photons of light, to create life. So the equation is really Dead Seed + Dead Water + Dead Light = Living Plant.

And that's just one example of something right in front of our eyes, that we see all the time. But because it's everywhere, and so prevalent, we overlook the "miracle" quality of it.

>Big bang theory, evolution

These I see as slightly different cases. Evolution, yes, we have physical, fossil evidence, and even living cases, like the moths in London, to support the theory. The Big Bang is more observational, and thus more theoretical, since there's nothing we can physically touch, of course. Not that it's any less accurate, based on what we know. It's just the difference of dealing with the tangible vs. the intangible

I happen to believe in both given the evidence we currently do have. But, that always comes with the caveat that if the evidence changes, the theory may as well; a bedrock of science.

It's kind of ironic to me that the Big Bang theory was first proposed by a Catholic priest of all people, and later strengthened by Hubble's observations, both in the 1920s. Science is no longer typically associated with religion, though it was for centuries, and there's no reason it can't be again, really. The Vatican operates an observatory over in Arizona, if you can believe that.

I'm scalp a quote from the Godfather 2 for my own purposes. "If history has taught us anything, it's that our understanding of the universe will change."

And a better one from John Haldane: "Not only is the universe stranger than you imagine, it's stranger than you CAN imagine."

All the physical evidence we have points away from there being a god

It can't be proven either way.

Re: It can't be proven either way.

It's not a "rule", it's a fact.

Re: It's not a "rule", it's a fact.