Religion Discussion Thread

shmenguin
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Postby shmenguin » Tue Feb 13, 2018 5:06 pm

Not if I was all powerful!
If you are given free will then yes they can choose wrong. I’m sure you as a parent won’t force your kid to do everything you want.
I guess this is a separate conversation, but I personally don't see how an all powerful, all knowing God and free will can co-exist.
god can gamble, right? he can close his eyes, spin around in a circle and point to a random thing. and then decide THAT'S the thing he'll go with. this is obviously absurd, but one could justify that he's all powerful if he chooses to be, but he also lets go of the wheel sometimes. not a strong justification, but I don't find any of them to be.

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Postby Freddy Rumsen » Tue Feb 13, 2018 5:09 pm


Here is a decent intro to the idea

https://youtu.be/gUxmi-BQVwA
I know I'm gonna come off as a *****, but I honestly have to ask ... is this is the sort of thing that justifies your belief?
No, a 2-minute video describing a singular concept in the Doctrine of God for young people is not the foundation of my understanding.

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Postby redwill » Tue Feb 13, 2018 5:43 pm


Here is a decent intro to the idea

https://youtu.be/gUxmi-BQVwA
I know I'm gonna come off as a *****, but I honestly have to ask ... is this is the sort of thing that justifies your belief?
No, a 2-minute video describing a singular concept in the Doctrine of God for young people is not the foundation of my understanding.
Well then pray do give me something better re: the Jain question.

columbia
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Postby columbia » Tue Feb 13, 2018 6:18 pm

Parents don’t have conditional love for their children.
Oh, really? Tell that to a child that was disowned because of their beliefs or sexual orientation...
I'm assuming that robbiestoupe 's love for his children is unconditional - and all of the other parents here too.
H E double hockey sticks no. I wish.
That seems odd. Even the mama cat in my house seems to have unconditional love for her kitten. :)

columbia
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Postby columbia » Tue Feb 13, 2018 6:22 pm

Why the catch of having to believe? Shouldn't said gift be unconditional?
God: Here, take this free ticket for entry into eternal bliss
columbia: you don't exist, therefore there is no ticket
columbia dies
God: Sorry, can't come in since you didn't take the free ticket
columbia: ???
i too have wondered why god created columbia in the first place
Do you mean Kicksave?

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Postby Willie Kool » Tue Feb 13, 2018 6:34 pm


i too have wondered why god created columbia in the first place
Do you mean Kicksave?
Wait, what? Are you saying Kicksave created you and/or that Kicksave is god?

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Postby Willie Kool » Tue Feb 13, 2018 6:50 pm


God: Here, take this free ticket for entry into eternal bliss
columbia: you don't exist, therefore there is no ticket
columbia dies
God: Sorry, can't come in since you didn't take the free ticket
columbia: ???
Free ticket?

:lol:

That ticket is not, by any definition of the word, free...

Kaiser
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Postby Kaiser » Tue Feb 13, 2018 7:52 pm

I believe in micro evolution, not macro evolution. I was just thinking about this the other day: take for instance a mother, whether it be an animal or a human. When the mother has a baby, its mammary glands produce milk. This is an essential part of animal life. Taking humans out of the equation, without mother's milk, the baby will not survive.

Macro evolution teaches me that over time, a species evolved to contain these glands, as well as produce a substance suitable for its species survival. Obviously the species didn't develop these glands overnight. It took thousands, maybe millions of years to develop. Where is this transition period, and how does the species survive during this transition? When did the species "decide" that milk would be its sustenance rather than (whatever the old method was)? I see a lack of proof of transitional development, let alone transitional species in archaeological findings. It's there, but not on a large enough scale to convince me macro evolution is a thing. I'm only talking about one thing here, not to mention the millions of other developments in macro evolution that must have happened in synchronicity to get us from point A (single cell organism) to point B (humans).


Your key miss is the word "decide". The animal didnt decide to produce milk, or have claws, or eyes, or to breathe through a hole and lungs instead of gills. Over time, reproduction introduces variation among genetics, the further away from a common family tree, the more variation is possible. Too far away, they are incompatible to breed. Those variations bring mutation through pure attrition, the more offspring, the more chances for a defect in the genetics. Those defects sometimes are crippling, sometimes beneficial.
The beneficial defects are not always noticable in the first generation, like a frog being more athletic than its predecessors, but because of them, that frog is more likely to survive than another. It survives, and passes the "defect" to its children, who are now more athletic than the average frog. They pass along the genes, until the less athletic frogs are simply not athletic enough to survive among their competitors, or are deemed unsuitable mates by their peers, and go extinct. This occurs over millions of years, over and over with each living species. There is no "transition period", because we are always in transition in some form or another.
Yes, "decide" was a poor choice of words. Of course species don't consciously decide to evolve. What I meant to portray was at one time, our human "ancestors", according to macro evolution, came from a single cell organism. This single cell organism obviously didn't need milk to survive. But over the course of many iterations along the line of human ancestry, the species developed the ability to produce milk. Before that, it had subsisted on whatever else kept it alive. There was a transition period where perhaps both were an option - the milk and the other means. If the other means of feeding the young was sufficient enough to keep the species going for the millions of years it took to develop mammary glands, why would the milk producers win out? Where are these special creatures that possessed both the ability to produce milk and to subsist on other means? That is what I mean by transition period.

Most of your examples above deal with micro evolution, of which I do not argue. What I don't believe is that humans were at one point a single cell organism, then evolved to live in the ocean, then grew legs and became a land animal, then eventually became human. No, humans were always humans. Our teeth may have evolved to eat more meats, or our feet may have evolved since we do not walk as much as we used to, but we didn't come from apes, and we won't evolve into a future species higher on the food chain than what we are now.
Mammary glands are a bi-product of species developing the ways to give birth to live young. The way before was to lay an egg, and from the time the egg is hatched, that creature is basically on its own. The milk producers survived or "won" because they had a better chance being raised with protection.
Humans were always humans? Well of course they were. Before they evolved into homo sapiens, their predecessor was something else. As far as humans coming from apes, i agree, and science agrees that we didnt. We share a common ancestor, from a few million years ago, that animal is extinct.
That's just the science side of it all. As shafnutz alluded to, the majesty and beauty of the universe holds no purpose, yet it exists. Why?

I also cannot fathom how a big bang could create a universe in such order, yet coincidentally in such chaos, without intelligent design. How many big bangs must there have been before THE Big Bang actually worked? Where there big bangs that were soooooo freaking close, but just didn't get it? Were there bb's that were perfect in constructing a universe full of planets and stars, but failed to make any life forms? Being that THE BIG BANG was a 1 in a ~quadrillion chance, there have to be other, observable, parallel universes where other big bangs existed. Otherwise, you're 1/1,000,000,000,000 chance is more like 1/10^10^10^10 and so on shot that the very first and very only big bang worked. If you're going to believe that, you might was well believe it was an intelligent designer behind the whole charade.
This is assuming things at a very focused, and small scale. For one, you seem to think that a universe without life is a failure. A universe is a universe, whether you exist or not. So any preceeding big bangs that did not produce habitable planets would still be as viable a place to study for these answers, if you could. And like i said above, the conditions we find ourselves in are not perfect for us to survive because we needed them, they are what we need because that is what we have. Besides, if there were already 100 quadrillion big bangs just using the matter in our universe (based on the above big crunch theory), it wouldnt make the slightest difference to us.

Time is relative, and not just because we have dialation around heavy gravitation. Time as we measure it is only useful around our own planet. Every other place with accumulated matter in the universe has its own time(its own measure of it relative to ours), because of the differences in gravitational fields of each and every object. 1 quadrillion universe lives would have a time value of Zero to us, because we werent there for it.
Well for one thing I never said a universe without life is a failure, I was just suggesting that we are living in the one instance where the universe "worked" for lack of a better term and there are theoretically eleventy-bagillion other non-life inhabitable universes out there. Where is this evidence (note: this is separate from verification of other life forms in our known universe. I'm talking about other big bangs)? Or do you subscribe to shmenguin's theory that the universe is eternally expanding and collapsing, and we are just living one iteration?

I understand your premise regarding the environment. Any other circumstances and we wouldn't be who we are, or simply wouldn't be. That's fair. It's a chicken vs. egg thing, and we both know what side we're on.
[/quote]
I dont subscribe to a cyclical universe because the Omega equation tells us that the universe is flat, not confined, and has an energy value of zero.

shafnutz05
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Postby shafnutz05 » Tue Feb 13, 2018 7:58 pm

FWIW, I endure a constant internal struggle with myself. I vacillate between feeling like I truly believe, and am a model believer, so to speak. And at other times, I start to doubt myself, and wonder if I *really* subscribe to Christianity because of Pascal's wager, and just not wanting to be wrong. I'm sure a lot of believers struggle with that, in terms of wanting to truly believe but having that nagging doubt that it's more of a fail safe.

I'm not really where I want to be in that respect, tbh.

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Postby Kaiser » Tue Feb 13, 2018 8:06 pm

Source of the post One thing is for sure, those looking for answers and those claiming to already know are on very different trajectories.
You're mixing science with religion here. Christians, at least most of the ones I know, don't claim to know everything about the universe and how it came to be. We're only given a small glimpse of what the beginning looked like, not all the fine details. But Christians do claim to know that there is a God, even if that "knowing" is from faith. In the same sense, the non-religious claim to know there isn't a God by putting their "faith" in the big bang or other theories, but also don't know everything scientifically. I propose that nobody ever will, since science in and of itself is a man-made creation. It's our own way of understanding something that is way beyond our scope of imagination. The human brain, even if all human brains were combined into one mega brain, is not capable of comprehending the universe we live in.
Militant atheists may claim to know there is no god, any rational person can see that they dont and cant know that, obvs. Saying that we cant understand or comprehend the universe is to give no credit to the progress we've made, and assumes that because we don't know what happens after our own death, that somehow means we won't figure out the non-ethereal fundamentals of our existence. We're on it, we've been at this for awhile, making progress; despite the religious in power doing all they can to keep us in the bronze age.
I think what you are trying to say above is that non-religious people tend to use science to explain life, while Christians don't. It doesn't mean all Christians are anti-science.

The best I can explain it is Christians have a decent idea of the boundaries created within this world. The Bible gives us an idea of what the world was and what the world will become, and from that we form our opinions. It's our worldview, and most things are seen through that lens. Granted, the Bible was not intended to be a historical document, but you would have to agree that at least part of its purpose was to give some historical content.

Non-religious people are trying to find those boundaries, and their worldview changes based on the new findings within the ever changing boundaries. 200 years from now, our ancestors may look back at all the big bang theorists and evolutionists and think of them in the same light as we do the Flat Earthers. To me, that doesn't make one iota of a difference in what I believe.
If you want to use the Bible in that way, go for it. If our decendants think of us as morons, it will mean we've made a great deal of hay in that time, so all the better. understand, though, a flat earther holds as much weight as a young earth christian to people who have abandoned those things. At this point, it doesnt matter what modern christians use science for, or what they think about the truths given to us by studying the cosmos.

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Postby Kaiser » Tue Feb 13, 2018 8:08 pm

FWIW, I endure a constant internal struggle with myself. I vacillate between feeling like I truly believe, and am a model believer, so to speak. And at other times, I start to doubt myself, and wonder if I *really* subscribe to Christianity because of Pascal's wager, and just not wanting to be wrong. I'm sure a lot of believers struggle with that, in terms of wanting to truly believe but having that nagging doubt that it's more of a fail safe.

I'm not really where I want to be in that respect, tbh.
Ive settled into not believing in god, or a paradise of an afterlife, but i hope its there.

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Postby columbia » Tue Feb 13, 2018 8:09 pm

If still like an answer to the lack of unconditional love by God. What is the point of that?

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Postby shafnutz05 » Tue Feb 13, 2018 8:12 pm

If still like an answer to the lack of unconditional love by God. What is the point of that?
The idea of God being wrathful is not really outrageous, but a lot of modern churches have moved away from that. The whole concept of Christianity is that Christ died on the cross to give humanity a chance for salvation, by basically being a buffer between the wrath of God and us.

This was a quote from JJ Packer:
“God’s wrath in the Bible is never the capricious, self-indulgent, irritable, morally ignoble thing that human anger so often is. It is, instead, a right and necessary reaction to objective moral evil”
Here's a nice brief synopsis as to *why* God is wrathful:

https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/fi ... ath-of-god

columbia
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Postby columbia » Tue Feb 13, 2018 8:17 pm

Not to be flippant, but that’s basically blackmail.
That’s a poor technique of persuasion, IMO.

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Postby shmenguin » Tue Feb 13, 2018 8:33 pm

If still like an answer to the lack of unconditional love by God. What is the point of that?
The idea of God being wrathful is not really outrageous, but a lot of modern churches have moved away from that. The whole concept of Christianity is that Christ died on the cross to give humanity a chance for salvation, by basically being a buffer between the wrath of God and us.

This was a quote from JJ Packer:
“God’s wrath in the Bible is never the capricious, self-indulgent, irritable, morally ignoble thing that human anger so often is. It is, instead, a right and necessary reaction to objective moral evil”
Here's a nice brief synopsis as to *why* God is wrathful:

https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/fi ... ath-of-god
Is something like widespread death by malaria, for instance, considered wrath?

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Postby shafnutz05 » Tue Feb 13, 2018 8:36 pm

Is something like widespread death by malaria, for instance, considered wrath?
Freddy might be the better guy to answer this. That is something I struggle with as well.

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Postby shmenguin » Tue Feb 13, 2018 8:47 pm

Is something like widespread death by malaria, for instance, considered wrath?
Freddy might be the better guy to answer this. That is something I struggle with as well.
Not much value in me being cute with this point. "His wrath is just" rubbed me the wrong way in that article. It's actually a really horrible assertion. Even if the scope is just supernatural bible-based repercussions.

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Postby count2infinity » Tue Feb 13, 2018 9:04 pm

I believe Freddy has described his POV before that god is like a potter. He created us, and he has the right to throw away anything he doesn't find fit (or something like that... I'm probably paraphrasing it incorrectly).

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Postby Kaiser » Tue Feb 13, 2018 10:03 pm

They definitely knew what the sun was.
I'd love to hear what they thought the sun was, and how you know this. I guess you were related to one of the apostles.
Also yes taking some science requires a certain leap of faith. And you are assuming that all Christians don’t believe in the science of the Big Bang or universe creation. I believe God works within the laws of nature to create. So he used evolution to create life and used the Big Bang to create the universe. I still believe in the science, but also believe a higher power is behind the laws that govern the universe.

Its this kind of paragraph that tells me faith is weak, and always has been. The solution to challenging substance has always been to say oh, god made it that way. Humans evolved? God made it that way. Universe expanding without the heretical notion that we're in the center of it all? just god bein' god, lmao. Religion (western anyway) cant insert itself into cosmological discoveries fast enough, even when the message they used to have directly contradicted them.

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Postby grunthy » Tue Feb 13, 2018 11:20 pm

They definitely knew what the sun was.
I'd love to hear what they thought the sun was, and how you know this. I guess you were related to one of the apostles.
Also yes taking some science requires a certain leap of faith. And you are assuming that all Christians don’t believe in the science of the Big Bang or universe creation. I believe God works within the laws of nature to create. So he used evolution to create life and used the Big Bang to create the universe. I still believe in the science, but also believe a higher power is behind the laws that govern the universe.

Its this kind of paragraph that tells me faith is weak, and always has been. The solution to challenging substance has always been to say oh, god made it that way. Humans evolved? God made it that way. Universe expanding without the heretical notion that we're in the center of it all? just god bein' god, lmao. Religion (western anyway) cant insert itself into cosmological discoveries fast enough, even when the message they used to have directly contradicted them.

The Greeks first came up with the idea of Stars. Anaxagoras was the guy in the 400 BC that thought it. And the fact that the Bible literally says Stars in it several times.

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Postby Kaiser » Tue Feb 13, 2018 11:31 pm

Anaxagoras believed (mistakenly) that the sun was a red-hot stone. Apparently generalizing from the instances of the sun and moon, he asserted that all the heavenly bodies were stone. His opinion that rock was the material of those bodies may have been inspired by the fall of a huge meteorite, said to have been as big as a wagon, near the Dardanelles when he was a young man.
That guy? Seems like quite the understanding hes got. Nevermind hat nobody listened to him, other that at his trial. Naming something "star" or whatever it was in Aramaic doesnt mean you know what the object is.

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Postby grunthy » Tue Feb 13, 2018 11:42 pm

Anaxagoras believed (mistakenly) that the sun was a red-hot stone. Apparently generalizing from the instances of the sun and moon, he asserted that all the heavenly bodies were stone. His opinion that rock was the material of those bodies may have been inspired by the fall of a huge meteorite, said to have been as big as a wagon, near the Dardanelles when he was a young man.
That guy? Seems like quite the understanding hes got. Nevermind hat nobody listened to him, other that at his trial. Naming something "star" or whatever it was in Aramaic doesnt mean you know what the object is.

The point being that the idea of stars, being of some other construction, was beginning. Science changes all the time as new discoveries are made by scientists today, it doesn’t make the scientists before them idiots.

I shouldn’t have said definitely, but disqualifying a group of people because their level of understanding science isn’t to the same detail as as ours is just lazy.

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Postby Kaiser » Wed Feb 14, 2018 12:03 am

So is interpreting the words of those idiots in a way that fits today's knowledge. Since as we've just seen, they didnt know **** when they were writing your instruction manual.

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Postby grunthy » Wed Feb 14, 2018 12:18 am

Well it was a civilized conversation.

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Postby Kraftster » Wed Feb 14, 2018 12:38 am

I believe in micro evolution, not macro evolution. I was just thinking about this the other day: take for instance a mother, whether it be an animal or a human. When the mother has a baby, its mammary glands produce milk. This is an essential part of animal life. Taking humans out of the equation, without mother's milk, the baby will not survive.

Macro evolution teaches me that over time, a species evolved to contain these glands, as well as produce a substance suitable for its species survival. Obviously the species didn't develop these glands overnight. It took thousands, maybe millions of years to develop. Where is this transition period, and how does the species survive during this transition? When did the species "decide" that milk would be its sustenance rather than (whatever the old method was)? I see a lack of proof of transitional development, let alone transitional species in archaeological findings. It's there, but not on a large enough scale to convince me macro evolution is a thing. I'm only talking about one thing here, not to mention the millions of other developments in macro evolution that must have happened in synchronicity to get us from point A (single cell organism) to point B (humans).
Your key miss is the word "decide". The animal didnt decide to produce milk, or have claws, or eyes, or to breathe through a hole and lungs instead of gills. Over time, reproduction introduces variation among genetics, the further away from a common family tree, the more variation is possible. Too far away, they are incompatible to breed. Those variations bring mutation through pure attrition, the more offspring, the more chances for a defect in the genetics. Those defects sometimes are crippling, sometimes beneficial.
The beneficial defects are not always noticable in the first generation, like a frog being more athletic than its predecessors, but because of them, that frog is more likely to survive than another. It survives, and passes the "defect" to its children, who are now more athletic than the average frog. They pass along the genes, until the less athletic frogs are simply not athletic enough to survive among their competitors, or are deemed unsuitable mates by their peers, and go extinct. This occurs over millions of years, over and over with each living species. There is no "transition period", because we are always in transition in some form or another.
That's just the science side of it all. As shafnutz alluded to, the majesty and beauty of the universe holds no purpose, yet it exists. Why?

I also cannot fathom how a big bang could create a universe in such order, yet coincidentally in such chaos, without intelligent design. How many big bangs must there have been before THE Big Bang actually worked? Where there big bangs that were soooooo freaking close, but just didn't get it? Were there bb's that were perfect in constructing a universe full of planets and stars, but failed to make any life forms? Being that THE BIG BANG was a 1 in a ~quadrillion chance, there have to be other, observable, parallel universes where other big bangs existed. Otherwise, you're 1/1,000,000,000,000 chance is more like 1/10^10^10^10 and so on shot that the very first and very only big bang worked. If you're going to believe that, you might was well believe it was an intelligent designer behind the whole charade.
This is assuming things at a very focused, and small scale. For one, you seem to think that a universe without life is a failure. A universe is a universe, whether you exist or not. So any preceeding big bangs that did not produce habitable planets would still be as viable a place to study for these answers, if you could. And like i said above, the conditions we find ourselves in are not perfect for us to survive because we needed them, they are what we need because that is what we have. Besides, if there were already 100 quadrillion big bangs just using the matter in our universe (based on the above big crunch theory), it wouldnt make the slightest difference to us.

Time is relative, and not just because we have dialation around heavy gravitation. Time as we measure it is only useful around our own planet. Every other place with accumulated matter in the universe has its own time(its own measure of it relative to ours), because of the differences in gravitational fields of each and every object. 1 quadrillion universe lives would have a time value of Zero to us, because we werent there for it.
:thumb: This post articulated many of my thoughts.

That we exist within our universe suggests nothing otherworldly. It is more likely that the particles that constitute us would not be so assembled and instead would be off in cold, empty space somewhere out there. So, it's cool that I exist vs. the far greater likelihood of me not existing at all. But in the end, it's just numbers. Given the physics of this universe and the time that has passed since the big bang, there is going to be intelligent life. What little intelligent life there is (in comparison with other use of particles in the universe) will inevitably be positioned to be awed by being the "lucky" x% of the universe. But if one could step back outside the universe and observe our intelligent existence in the vastness of space, the more appropriate response would be, "oh, cool, so that's where things have assembled to form intelligent life." It would be no more remarkable than any other equally unlikely configuration of the universe somewhere else.

Just as our existence within our universe is not remarkable, our universe within the history of all likely prior big bangs looks the same. That zoom out within the universe I tried to highlight above can be done with respect to the various "unsuccessful" big bangs/universes, etc.
Otherwise, you're 1/1,000,000,000,000 chance is more like 1/10^10^10^10 and so on shot that the very first and very only big bang worked. If you're going to believe that, you might was well believe it was an intelligent designer behind the whole charade.
I don't understand this move in the argument? Why? Even if we reject multiple big bangs and accept we're a part of one "successful" one, there is obviously an actual chance that the one single big bang would play out this way? If we weren't here to observe it, no one would be remarking that the big bang happened to hit on something that was a 1/100 chance. This feels like saying something equivalent to, if you win the powerball, you might as well believe it was because a unicorn wished on a dandelion.

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