I can't remember what we've covered before, and I get the feeling I've said some of this before, so bear with me if I've had a senior moment...
The argument is that we know what conditions are needed for the life we have and see on Earth to exist. As I said you have to work with what you have, otherwise we may as well throw our hands up in the air and all be agnostics claiming it's impossible to know. It's not impossible. We are here. We live. We know what we need to live. We know the makeup of other planets in our system and we know the makeup of entire regions of the universe.
We know that life
can live in Earth-like conditions, sure, but that doesn't mean we can say that life
must live in Earth-life conditions. Looking at Earth-like planets is a good way to find alien life, since we already know that Earth-like planets can harbour life. But that doesn't mean other planets can't. We just don't know if a 200°C, methane/sulphur atmosphere could ever harbour life, so we can't speculate either way.
So, given that we don't know just how versatile life is, we can't say speculate on how probable it is to form naturally.
So, we can't say that life is so unlikely to occur naturally that it must have been created by an intelligence.
If I find a computer program and run it, and it outputs '5', what can I say about the total range of outputs for that program? I can only say that '5' is a possible output. That could be the only output, or it could output any integer, or any real number, or any random sequence of ASCII characters, or what have you. It's fallacious to say that '5' is the
only output; rather, it's the only
known output. Likewise, that Earth is the only know inhabited planet doesn't mean Earth is the only planet that
can be inhabited; for all we know, life could arise naturally on every rocky and gaseous body in the universe.
We also have some pretty crazy equations as to the construction probability of the universe with these conditions, [snip]
I disagree with those kinds of models. First, it's not known if the foundations of those equations are even changeable. Second, we don't know enough about them to know just how the variables interact. Third, and most importantly, they're fundamentally futile:
we exist. The sheer size and variety of the universe guarantees that almost every combination of salinity, pH, gravity, atmosphere, temperature, etc, exists somewhere. So, even if life requires very specific circumstances to occur, we shouldn't be surprised that if
does occur
somewhere, since there's almost certainly going to be somewhere that just so happens to meet those criteria (by sheer chance, not intelligence). Further, nor should we be surprised that we live in a fragile balance of physical properties: we can only exist in one of those very rare places with the right properties.
If I deal out a shuffled deck of cards, the odds that I deal out those 52 cards in that specific order is mind-bogglingly small (specifically, 8x10[sup]67[/sup]), so small that I will bet everything I own that that specific order will never be dealt again. But, nonetheless, that order
was dealt. So simply being an improbable occurrence isn't good enough, which is basically where teleology falls down.
However, there are trademarks of design all over the place, and as such it makes sense to believe that it was created by a designer 'somehow'.
Well, I think that's pretty much the crux of our disagreement: you say the 'trademarks of design' are evident, I say they aren't.
I honestly think that foreknowledge is restraining people from honestly and openly considering things.
Well, all I can say is, as an atheist, I genuinely don't consider the ramifications of belief in deities when I consider believing in deities. All that matters to me is whether or not such a belief is justified. The whole rigmarole of Christianity is, firstly, unnecessary (I don't need to become ordained within the Catholic Church to believe in the Christian God, nor indeed do any other rite or ritual - belief, so I've been told, is enough), and, secondly, irrelevant (if I had to become a priest, so be it).
Oh! Right. So, God is only responsible for the bad things in our universe, not for any of the wonders of our universe, or our planet, of life, the human body, of our minds, personalities and character, the elements, atmosphere, environment and such.
If he exists, he is indeed responsible for the bad things in the universe. That a man makes a pretty painting doesn't excuse him from child abuse.
I have to say, that this is your atheistic world-view lying to you. Mankind does bad things, as well as the good - God only does good. It's easy to sit on the outside and think, well, that earthquake killed 50k people but I would simply ask why do people keep going and rebuilding homes over giant fault-lines? What about the tsunami's? Well we have warning devices, we could put more money into them, but we don't because we want to spend it on giant hotels in Dubai and massive New Year's Eve fireworks shows.
... I want to believe you're joking, I really do.
Are you really saying that the suffering caused by in Port-au-Prince is
our fault for
not investing? That the mass death at Pompeii is humanity's fault for being technologically primitive? That the all-powerful being in the sky who could literally do anything at any moment with zero cost to anyone, that this being
isn't morally culpable for sitting back and watching these things happen?
You say man does good and bad things, sure, I accept that. But you say God doesn't do anything bad! If he exists, he is guilty of negligence - he lets us suffer. We would condemn a man who wilfully and knowingly lets his child burn to death, and we should likewise condemn an all-powerful being who wilfully and knowingly lets us suffer.
I don't think it's even remotely easy to make a case for God being evil unless you switch off your brain-organ and I think you are a lot better than that. This is all completely discounting the fact that there may be morally sufficient grounds for these things to happen - do you know that the parts of the world that are experiencing the most disaster and most hardship? India, Africa and China are where the most disasters are occurring and where the strongest Christian growth is. Why is that? Well, Christian missionaries are there, because they are compelled by their faith and God to help those in need. They rebuild, teach and educate and give those people in those nations hope and a strong foundation to continue on.
Which is all well and good, and I commend the efforts of those people, but that hardly bolsters the veracity of Christian beliefs. Besides, what does this have to do with 'morally sufficient grounds' for these disasters? Are you saying that God allows such tragedies to occur, just so Christians can do charity work?
Atheism is a minority demography that doesn't have a unified, tax-exempt church to fund its relief efforts. The Catholic Church can pay for missionaries and charity trips - atheists are disparate and organised. But I'm not going to sit here and wheedle out excuses for each and every atheist who dared be anything less than a paragon of humanity.
Atheism isn't there. Atheism is a world-view for the strong only, for those in power, luxury and who are content, it doesn't give the weak anything. An atheist approached me once and started telling me about his world-view, I asked him quite bluntly what he is offering and he summed it up as freedom, the ability to think and act as I please and live in peace. I said, "What you are offering me is a brick, and I already own a mansion. Sorry." and that was that.
Well, lovely. I'm quite surprised an atheist would just walk up to you and start waxing philosophic, but there you go.
Criminal negligence is a fairly solid grounds for imprisonment. If I do not provide food for my child, and he dies of starvation, my inaction caused the child's death. Are you saying that I wouldn't be help responsible for my actions? If I walked past a burning house and saw people screaming for help inside, would you still consider me perfectly innocent if I did nothing but watched them die?
No but that is an absurd analogy. We don't punish people when their inaction causes evil. I see people walk past homeless persons every day, hundreds of them, they aren't punished at all.
There are three things to note here. First, the logistics alone make such a law unenforceable. Second, there is considerable disagreement as to how we should treat the homeless; there's no consensus that not giving money to the poor is inherently evil. Third, in a welfare state, one could argue that we already
are giving them money, by paying for shelters and things with our taxes.
Well at least we are making headway here and you are agreeing it's a simplified view.[snip]
I think you've quite spectacularly missed what I was trying to say. I wrote quite a bit on each separate bit, but I'm just going to cut-and-paste the main bits. Ahem:
So a distinction must be made between what we're calling a metaphor: the modern Christian's interpretation of the verse, and the original author's intent. I believe Genesis was meant to be taken metaphorically, while I believe the leprosy cure was to be taken literally - they really believed that it would cure leprosy. However, since this is demonstrably false - it doesn't, in fact, cure leprosy - a modern Christian should therefore consider the verses to be metaphorical (perhaps God was simply emphasising cleanliness), or simply false (not everything in the Bible needs to be dripping in meaning, literal or metaphorical; some mundane stuff may have slipping in during transcription).
Basically, I was referring to how modern theists treat a piece of religious text, not how the authors intended the text to be treated. I think this is an important distinction, as the leprosy-cure thing shows: I believe the authors of Leviticus genuinely thought it worked, and they wrote it as a literal guide. Obviously, the cure
doesn't work, so the authors were wrong. But the theist ascribes mystical significance to the text, so they have to decide just what God meant by that particular passage - which, again, depends a great deal on how they view God's influence on the text of the Bible. Did God author it all? Did humans copy it verbatim? Was it the compilation of an oral tradition, with inevitable 'additions'?
We can discuss the author's intent till the cows come home, but I'm not really interested in that - I think we're discussing enough already
. What's of more interest is how the theist tackles this: she, after all, believes the text to have more significance than other pieces of the text. For instance, the Christian places great importance on the Bible, but not on the Qu'ran.
I'm starting to feel like I'm wading through a train-wreck here.
Look, my question was "Why assign arbitrary interpretations to text?" not "Why interpret verses?". The difference being that you are just not applying any credible method to deducing the truth, about what they say. Given that you yourself claimed to be after the ultimate truth, this is just sloppy, why is there a double-standard or an element of complacency here about this? The onus is on you to pursue it wherever it may lead, not stop when you reach an arbitrary conclusion. Secondly the language in this quote is telling to me, you don't really know what divinely inspired means, and unless I don't understand you, you don't feel it important to apply a credible method of understanding to it. I mean, should we just stop this conversation here then, as that's tantamount to saying, "I don't really care." in my eyes. You can of course apply the same methods to the Qu'ran, and I think it will reveal the flaws in it.
My point is that I see no reason to consider the Bible to be any more significant than the Qu'ran, or the Vedic texts, or the Kitab-i-Aqdal. I see no reason to plough through every single text that was ever written in the hopes of gleaning some higher knowledge, if only because there's a lot of religious books in the world, and very little reason to suppose
any of them are of interest.
To me, the books detail the religion and philosophy of that particular culture, and usually their history, rites and rituals, laws and taboos, myths and legends, etc. In that, they are interesting. But theists of various camps ascribe some 'special' meaning to them - for instance, some Christians claim the Bible (KJV only, of course) to be 100% literally true and free of error. Such a claim goes beyond my rather secular and (if I may say so) guarded belief.
Again, this isn't the point. The point is that science, which appears to be your god, went right ahead and posited something with no evidence of it whatsoever, in order to complete a cosmological view that was basically broken. This is the criticism leveled at Christians the entire time, in regards to when faith is (incorrectly) interpreted as believing without evidence.
Hardly. As I said, dark matter
isn't that mysterious. There
is evidence for its existence, which is precisely why it was posited to exist in the first place. It's exactly the same process that lead scientists to posit the existence of Neptune - though not directly observed, there was substantial evidence that a planet existed beyond Uranus.
Really? Let's say no one found any evidence of dark matter for 5000 years, but it actually existed the entire time. Then what? This is the problem you face.
I don't understand the question. If no one found any evidence for dark matter... that's a statement, not a dilemma.