Because science cannot say that it’s the work of an invisible pink unicorn, either.
It can only say what the evidence tells us and when that evidence cannot directly tell us anything it uses logical extrapolation to say what might be.
If logical extrapolation can explain the existence of an Inflationary Multiverse without having to invoke a creating and controlling mind (and it does, as I have already explained) then Occam’s Razor applies.
The simplest explanation - that the multiverse is the result of entirely natural mechanisms and forces - is more likely to be true than the more complex explanation of a creating and controlling mind.
I’ve already explained that a mind isn’t needed in any part of the process, Aluneth.
Inflationary cosmology does it all.
It doesn’t matter whether inflation is eternal or not, just run the numbers and zillions of life-friendly universes are generated.
Or, if you want, there are certain cyclic cosmological theories, with the universe endlessly renewing itself in various configurations. Again, run the numbers and you will inevitably get universes that exhibit life-friendly conditions. Time after time after time…
None of these possibilities can be ruled out at the moment because, as I explained earlier, we cannot observe whether our universe had a beginning or not. All we can do is to theorise using the data we have to hand.
A conscious mind isn’t a necessity, even if one isn’t an atheist. One could try to imagine some kind of non-conscious but intelligent force (think like a natural Cosmic Artificial Intelligence), for example. There are other “gray areas” in metaphysics (I don’t know if atheists see them as supernatural or not, because they can get “weird” at times) that could try to somehow fix the problem without invoking a single orchestrating mind or God.
Accepting the initial constants as a brute fact, we were “lucky” and “blessed.” It’s viable too, and it isn’t that ridiculous. It fits atheism well without invoking any “strange metaphysics.”
The term “miracle” is, per dictionary, something unexpected happening by divine intervention. Thus, using the term “miracle” implies literal divine or supernatural intervention. Your choice of words matter. Think it through before you post.
But as I’ve already explained Aluneth, there is no problem to be fixed here.
The current cosmological model incorporates Inflation and that explains all that we see and if we logically extrapolate it also explains the apparent Fine Tuning of our universe. The problem you talk about only seems to exist within you. So why do you have a need for there to be this disembodied mind as an explanation for everything?
Could it be that like the Christians and other types of theist, you have an deep-seated emotional need that only the presence of a directing and organising mind can satisfy? That perhaps you are deeply uncomfortable with the idea that there is no overarching plan, purpose or reason for existence?
This is not such a terrible thing to own up to, btw. Billions of people need purpose and meaning so strongly that they are prepared to believe in almost anything that will give this to them. The only difference between you and them being that you don’t assign a particular name or identity to this purpose/meaning giver.
Look deeply into your mind and your feelings for a moment, Aluneth.
Why do you need there to be this mind when there is no evidence for it? Why do you set up these thought experiments that begin with an act of imagination? Why can’t you just be content with a purely natural explanation of the cosmos that has no intelligence at work in it?
Asking yourself these questions and being honest with yourself should tell you if there really is a problem ‘out there’ to be solved or if the real problem lies within you.
I made no such assertion, nor implied it, and I am getting tired, of your endless straw man claims, and FYI they are fallacious, and demonstrate yet again the irrationality f your position.
No I am not assuming anything, you are lying again, and each time you post such a lie, you fail unsurprisingly to offer a single quote from anything I have posted to support your lie.
I am not going to waste my time quoting every tedious straw man, that you keep dishonestly assigning to me. You have however, yet again failed to honestly address anything I posted, and it is becoming abundantly clear that you are not here to debate honestly in good faith. Why bother replying to posts you then completely ignore in your response.
That was a begging the question fallacy, so the answer to your thread question is no your belief which you have failed to evidence at all, and supported with arguments that are relentlessly irrational - is clearly an irrational belief.
No it doesn’t or you’d have offered that here, and anyone can read this thread and see that you have failed to offer any coherent rational argument, or offer any supporting evidence at all.
No I did not, and ffs use the quote function that is what it’s for, so everyone can see what has and has not been said.
Your belief is demonstrably irrational, because, you have offered no evidence at all, only bare claims and subjective opinions, and your supporting arguments are relentlessly irrational.
Quote Walter claiming anything was “created” please?
Unevidenced assumptions in your question:
That anything was ever created.
That the universe requires creating / a creator.
That when an atheist disbelieves your claim they must have an alternative, this is also fallacious.
That universal constants required a sentient choice.
Rational arguments offered for those assumptions - none.
Evidence offered - none.
Just because you call something a fact, does not necessarily mean it is a fact, nor therefore that anyone has to accept it. FYI, you have ignored facts throughout this discourse, and still are, and that BTW is the proper context for the word fact, as opposed t your subjective unevidenced opinions.
That depends what one means by viable, nothing we can objectively evidence about reality evidences or requires a deity, they all are explained as entirely natural phenomena, you are the one violating Occam’s razor by adding a deity using inexplicable magic.
Except he does not have to accept any such thing, he can simply disbelieve theistic claims as they are unsupported by any evidence, and or rational argument.
The complete dearth of evidence, that’s what puts them in the same bucket! And FYI why the belief could be considered irrational.
Miracles defy natural explanation, by definition. This is also another of your entirely unevidenced claims.
Evidence please?
Exactly, he uses loaded wording all the time.
Atheism is not a claim, it is the lack or absence of belief in any deity or deities, until someone offers sufficiently compelling evidence then there is no rational reason to believe their claims, this is as true for deities as it is for anything else.
Let’s assume it does. Stopping at your “creator-mind” (CM) does not explain anything. Let us take a closer look at the CM and apply your own arguments.
How do you explain the presence of the CM? What makes a more coherent and likely account, according to your own arguments — that a “creator-creator-mind” (CCM) created it, or that a non-mind (NM) created it? If it was a NM, then fine, we can just apply the same NM thing to our own universe in the first place, and your CM is irrelevant.
However, according to your own arguments, a CCM makes more sense, so let’s follow that line of thought. How did the CCM come about? Again, according to your own logic, we’d need a CCCM (C3M). And a C4M, a C5M, a C6M, and so on up to infinity. In other words, you end up with an infinite regression here. And infinities was what you tried to avoid in the first place by not accepting that the universe could have “always” existed (no deities or CMs required). The CM, C2M, …,C∞ regression is perhaps an even more complex and logically worse situation than if you just accept that the universe has “always” existed, in the sense that by going far enough back in finite time, time-space and causality did not have the same meaning as it has now, due to the extreme energy densities that current physics indicates was there, and the complications of quantum gravity, which we don’t have a good understanding of, as of yet. And perhaps never will.
Another perfectly good conclusion is to just say “We don’t know. Perhaps we’ll never know”. Which is the scientifically most appropriate answer.
This has been explained to you before. And to countless other fans of magical creators. But somehow, practically all of them/you sidestep this, and avoid this conclusion. I wonder why(*).
You, me and Get_off_my_lawn are either singing from the same hymn sheet here… or at least singing from the same songbook.
We recognise that saying, “I don’t know” is an unacceptable thing for many people. For some, even unacceptable and terrifying. They would prefer any answer to that - even if the answer is wildly irrational.
I cannot possibly say why with any certainty but I can hazard a guess as to why.
Because saying “I don’t know” means they aren’t in control. That the mysteries of life, suffering and death aren’t neatly and comfortingly answered and controlled by a god. That prospect is too much for many people. They shrink from it and would prefer any answer, anything at all no matter how irrational, rather than not having the answers.
As I said, that’s a guess. But what do you guys think?
In @Aluneth’s case, he claimed that the origin of the universe is more coherently explained with a (unevidenced of course) sentient mind behind it, now if that were true, rather than a subjective personal preference (see bias), then this coherent explanation would have been offered, and would be rational, and of course be supported by evidence, and what he offered is neither, nor is it coherent, since it also lacks any explanatory powers.
It is clear from their posts, that most apologists have accepted the core belief a priori, and then afterwards facts are bent to the belief, rather than beliefs being bent to the facts.
Now I can’t say how conscious they are that they’re doing it, but if their hypothesis is tested against the arguments and evidence, and if those arguments are poor (see irrational) or the evidence insufficient ( or even non-existent) then in any rational approach the hypothesis should be discarded, but @Aluneth’s case he didn’t even acknowledge the rational objections, or requests for evidence, so at some level his selection bias is manifest.
It has been said, and warrants saying again then, nothing can be asserted to be an explanation unless it has explanatory powers, yet the claim god did it using inexplicable & unevidenced supernatural powers, has no explanatory powers at all, this is always the case when the supernatural and unfalsifiable are invoked.
A miracle, any miracle, cannot be an explanation for anything by definition, since it is nothing more than a (god of the gaps) appeal to mystery. We can’t explain X therefor god did it.
The problem as many posters point out, is that we could substitute anything for god, and the arguments lose nothing.
This assumption is not necessary for a rational assessment of the claim a deity exists, or it’s negation a deity does not exist.
No, but then we don’t assess the rationality of a belief on how it turns out, but on the evidence and arguments presented to support that belief, if any belief is based on demonstrably fallacious arguments and insufficient / no objective evidence, then yes that belief can be said to be irrational.
No, falsifiability is a bare minimum, in order to claim a belief is rational that would just be a starting point, a first hurdle.
Since this doesn’t offer rational argument, or objective evidence to support it, no. The emboldened part screams subjective bias, I have no idea what a web of philosophical reasoning is supposed to mean, but again if it isn’t supported by sufficient evidence, and rational argument, then no, it is not rational. William Lane Craig is a professional Philosopher with a PhD, and some of his arguments are nothing more than risible bias.
Subjective opinion, the belief either stands up to objective critical scrutiny or does not, if it did humans wouldn’t have imagined countless deities, and again argument and evidence are what determines rationality, not that someone’s personal perspective green lights it, if personal perspective were a reliable way to determine truth, why on earth did we bother creating methods like logic and science in the first place, that have largely superseded the philosophy that spawned those methods? Methods that are manifestly more successful at understanding reality.
Then we don’t need that assumption, a belief is rational if it is based on strong evidence, and rational arguments.
Forming beliefs based on strong evidence and rational argument. one’s beliefs must be consistent, and cannot contradict each other. So if personal experience is a valid reason to believe in a deity one would have to accept all such claims for all the countless deities such claims are made.
It can’t be objectively tested at all, this is true for all supernatural claims. If a belief is unfalsifiable and thus untestable, then it falls at the lowest evidentiary bar.
Believing an unfalsifiable claim is demonstrably not reasoning well? Take the claim a deity exists, with nothing more we have two claims:
A deity exists.
A deity does not exist.
These claims are negations of the other, and they are (here) unfalsifiable, so believing one over the other is bias, believing both an irrational contradiction, believing neither and admitting you don’t know, Schrödinger’s cat, is a rational open minded approach.
First off, define “non-mind.” What is that? Secondly, a good, solid read about evolution will demonstrate how lower simpler life forms can evolve into greater complexities. Third, if you’ve really read anything that Stenger said, you will know that the universe was in a total state of entropy or chaos in the beginning and that now we have both chaos and symmetry in the cosmos. He also stated that our universe may have come about through a “tunneling through” process from another universe and that matter self-assembles in the vacuum of space. So in that sense, the basic building blocks of the universe may have always been around without a “first cause.” You may need to deepen your knowledge about science to understand how theism is flawed. Just saying!
To be fair, theistic apologetics are flawed even without science, but your point is well made. Cherry picking archaic superstitions to weed out the bits that are directly contradicted by strong evidence is not rational, and especially if one is not fully au fait with the latest scientific facts.
I generally agree with all that you say here, Sheldon.
My personal experience of what you’ve described comes in two forms.
First, because I was raised within a Christian household I was inculcated with my beliefs without ever acquiring the critical skills to look at them on a dispassionately rational basis. This seems to agree with what you say about accepting a belief a priori.
Second, after leaving my faith, rejecting Jesus and educating myself I began to participate in the now defunct forum that was once part of this site. ExChristian.Net Over the years there I found exactly what you’ve described.
Christian apologists would visit and try their arguments, only to have the irrationality of them demonstrated to them. In deep discussion with them it slowly became clear that they had done just what you said. They believed first and then cast around for arguments to support that belief. Rather than scrupulously examining their belief to see if it was rational in the first place.
I suspect that there were two reasons why they didn’t do this. Because, like me (when I was a Christian), they had no critical thinking skills to question their beliefs with. And perhaps, deep down, they just didn’t want to question their belief. For fear of discovering something else?