Where in the world do you get the nonsensical idea that I am claiming that "random" = "defies nature"? I have never claimed that. My position is that something is random if it can not be predicted. If I get a bunch of little balls and paint numbers on them, then put them in a barrel that has a mechanism to mix them up and then pick one, is that able to be predicted? No, of course not.
The definition of randomness defies nature, what are you talking about is pseudorandomness, something that cannot be predicted isn't random, it just lucks information. True randomness is when something defies nature, laws, anything, you throw a ball and it transforms into a dragon and vanishes, that's randomness.
Of course you will be able to predict them if you look inside the barell and take the ball with the number you want to choose. What you describing is not randomness, its i want to make it random by not looking at it. lol
It is predicting that the result will be random, as it said quite clearly in what you cut and pasted.
Please, do try to actually read what you are posting, mkay?
Luck of information doesn't provide randomness, this event was determined by the event, something truly random isn't determined by anything, not even quantum vaccuum.
You obviously don't understand how an analogy is meant to work...
No you obsviously don't know what a random event is. Something that is determined by something else is not randomness.
So your solution is to muddy the waters so as to make things so complicated that whenever you get caught out you can just turn around and say, "I can see why you;d think that, because it's really complicated, but the truth is actually this other thing." In short, you are hiding behind technobabble.
I never said that God created each planet sepperately, each cloud seperatly, my view on the Creation is that God set the conditions and the Universe unfolded with the values it has now to create intelligent life. The proof of that is the Fine Tuning of the Universe.
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1112/1112.4647v1.pdf
Show me where I said that I am a cosmic mistake without purpose and I'll answer the question.
Until then, I'll thank you not to try to put words in my mouth. That's a good way to get your fingers bitten.
Something that wasn't intented to be made it is by definition a random mistake without goal. If you imply that your creation was due to Determinism then you imply a goal that couldn't be eternally past.
And you were posting your view on something, and I doubt you are qualified to pass judgement on it (unless you have studied string theory?). Perhaps you can cite the original paper which supports your claim that: "the most promising candidate for a Theory of Everything (T.O.E.) to date, super-string theory or M-Theory, allows a cosmic landscape of around 10500 different universes governed by the present laws of nature" (from post 682).
Cosmologists Andrei Linde and Vitaly Vanchurin at Stanford University in California calculate that the number dwarfs the 10500 universes postulated in string theory, and raise the provocative notion that the answer may depend on the human
brain.
Sign in to read: Is string theory in trouble? - opinion - 17 December 2005 - New Scientist
Way to shift the burden of proof. You are making the claim that there must have been fine tuning, it falls on you to support your own claim.
Here are the facts on the fine-tuning:
Life has certain minimal requirements;
long-term stable source of energy, a large number of different chemical elements, an element that can serve as a hub for joining together other elements into compounds, etc.
In order to meet these minimal requirements, the physical constants, (such as the gravitational constant), and the ratios between physical constants, need to be withing a narrow range of values in order to support the minimal requirements for life of any kind.
Slight changes to any of the physical constants, or to the rations between the constants, will result in a universe inhospitable to life.
The range of possible ranges over 70 orders of magnitude.
The constants are selected by whoever creates the universe. They are not determined by physical laws. And the extreme probabilities involved required put the fine-tuning beyond the reach of chance.
Although each individual selection of constants and ratios is as unlikely as any other selection, the vast majority of these possibilities do not support the minimal requirements of life of any kind. (In the same way as any hand of 5 cards that is dealt is as likely as any other, but you are overwhelmingly likely NOT to get a royal flush. In our case, a royal flush is a life-permitting universe).
Examples of finely-tuned constants
Here are a couple of examples of the fine-tuning. Craig only gave one example in the debate and didnt explain how changes to the constant would affect the minimal requirements for life. But Bradley does explain it, and he is a professional research scientist, so he is speaking about things he worked in his polymer research lab. (He was the director)
a) The strong force: (the force that binds nucleons (= protons and neutrons) together in nucleus, by means of meson exchange)
if the strong force constant were 2% stronger, there would be no stable hydrogen, no long-lived stars, no hydrogen containing compounds. This is because the single proton in hydrogen would want to stick to something else so badly that there would be no hydrogen left!
if the strong force constant were 5% weaker, there would be no stable stars, few (if any) elements besides hydrogen. This is because you would be able to build up the nuclei of the heavier elements, which contain more than 1 proton.
So, whether you adjust the strong force up or down, you lose stars than can serve as long-term sources of stable energy, or you lose chemical diversity, which is necessary to make beings that can perform the minimal requirements of living beings. (see below)
b) The conversion of beryllium to carbon, and carbon to oxygen
Life requires carbon in order to serve as the hub for complex molecules, but it also requires oxygen in order to create water.
Carbon is like the hub wheel in a tinker toy set: you can bind other elements together to more complicated molecules (e.g. carbon-based life), but the bonds are not so tight that they cant be broken down again later to make something else.
The carbon resonance level is determined by two constants: the strong force and electromagnetic force.
If you mess with these forces even slightly, you either lose the carbon or the oxygen.
Either way, youve got no life of any conceivable kind.
Is the fine-tuning real?
Yes, its real and it is conceded by the top-rank of atheist physicists. Let me give you a citation from the best one of all, Martin Rees. Martin Rees is an atheist and a qualified astronomer. He wrote a book called Just Six Numbers:
The Deep Forces That Shape The Universe, (Basic Books: 2001). In it, he discusses 6 numbers that need to be fine-tuned in order to have a life-permitting universe.
Rees writes here:
These six numbers constitute a recipe for a universe. Moreover, the outcome is sensitive to their values: if any one of them were to be untuned, there would be no stars and no life. Is this tuning just a brute fact, a coincidence?
Or is it the providence of a benign Creator?
There are some atheists who deny the fine-tuning, but these atheists are in firm opposition to the progress of science. The more science has progressed, the more constants, ratios and quantities we have discovered that need to be fine-tuned. Science is going in a theistic direction. Next, lets see how atheists try to account for the fine-tuning, on atheism.
Atheistic responses to the fine-tuning argument
There are two common responses among atheists to this argument.
The first is to speculate that there are actually an infinite number of other universes that are not fine-tuned, (i.e. the gamblers fallacy). All these other universes dont support life. We just happen to be in the one universe is fine-tuned for life. The problem is that there is no way of directly observing these other universes and no independent evidence that they exist.
Here is an excerpt from an article in Discover magazine, (which is hostile to theism and Christianity).
Science's Alternative to an Intelligent Creator: the Multiverse Theory | DiscoverMagazine.com
The second response by atheists is that the human observers that exist today, 14 billion years after the universe was created out of nothing, actually caused the fine-tuning. This solution would mean that although humans did not exist at the time the of the big bang, they are going to be able to reach back in time at some point in the future and manually fine-tune the universe.
Here is an excerpt from and article in the New Scientist, (which is hostile to theism and Christianity).
Sign in to read: Why it's not as simple as God vs the multiverse - opinion - 04 December 2008 - New Scientist
So, there are two choices for atheists. Either an infinite number of unobservable universes that are not fine-tuned, or humans go back in time at some future point and fine-tune the beginning of the universe, billions of years in the past.
Atheists that accept the Fine Tuning of the Universe
Wilczek: life appears to depend upon delicate coincidences that we have not been able to explain. The broad outlines of that situation have been apparent for many decades. When less was known, it seemed reasonable to hope that better understanding of symmetry and dynamics would clear things up. Now that hope seems much less reasonable. The happy coincidences between lifes requirements and natures choices of parameter values might be just a series of flukes, but one could be forgiven for beginning to suspect that something deeper is at work.
Hawking: Most of the fundamental constants in our theories appear fine-tuned in the sense that if they were altered by only modest amounts, the universe would be qualitatively different, and in many cases unsuitable for the development of life.
The emergence of the complex structures capable of supporting intelligent observers seems to be very fragile. The laws of nature form a system that is extremely fine-tuned, and very little in physical law can be altered without destroying the possibility of the development of life as we know it.
Rees: Any universe hospitable to life what we might call a biophilic universe has to be adjusted in a particular way. The prerequisites for any life of the kind we know about long-lived stable stars, stable atoms such as carbon, oxygen and silicon, able to combine into complex molecules, etc are sensitive to the physical laws and to the size, expansion rate and contents of the universe. Indeed, even for the most open-minded science fiction writer, life or intelligence requires the emergence of some generic complex structures: it cant exist in a homogeneous universe, not in a universe containing only a few dozen particles. Many recipes would lead to stillborn universes with no atoms, no chemistry, and no planets; or to universes too short-lived or too empty to allow anything to evolve beyond sterile uniformity.
Linde: the existence of an amazingly strong correlation between our own properties and the values of many parameters of our world, such as the masses and charges of electron and proton, the value of the gravitational constant, the amplitude of spontaneous symmetry breaking in the electroweak theory, the value of the vacuum energy, and the dimensionality of our world, is an experimental fact requiring an explanation.
Susskind: The Laws of Physics
are almost always deadly. In a sense the laws of nature are like East Coast weather: tremendously variable, almost always awful, but on rare occasions, perfectly lovely.
[O]ur own universe is an extraordinary place that appears to be fantastically well designed for our own existence. This specialness is not something that we can attribute to lucky accidents, which is far too unlikely. The apparent coincidences cry out for an explanation.
Guth: in the multiverse, life will evolve only in very rare regions where the local laws of physics just happen to have the properties needed for life, giving a simple explanation for why the observed universe appears to have just the right properties for the evolution of life. The incredibly small value of the cosmological constant is a telling example of a feature that seems to be needed for life, but for which an explanation from fundamental physics is painfully lacking.
Smolin: Our universe is much more complex than most universes with the same laws but different values of the parameters of those laws. In particular, it has a complex astrophysics, including galaxies and long lived stars, and a complex chemistry, including carbon chemistry. These necessary conditions for life are present in our universe as a consequence of the complexity which is made possible by the special values of the parameters.
Victor Stenger: The most commonly cited examples of apparent fine-tuning can be readily explained by the application of a little well-established physics and cosmology. . . .
ome form of life would have occurred in most universes that could be described by the same physical models as ours, with parameters whose ranges varied over ranges consistent with those models.
. My case against fine-tuning will not rely on speculations beyond well-established physics nor on the existence of multiple universes.
According to quantum theory (and verified by experiment) there is no way to predict which direction a photon will take through a beam splitter. This situation is "irreducibly random".
By properly adjusting the path lengths you can make it so that all of the photons go to a single detector. You can't predict which path the photon takes, but you can perfectly predict the end result.
When waves are combined they don't simply add, they interfere. The sum of two waves can be larger (constructive interference) or smaller (destructive interference) depending on how they line up.
