Chastity cages and Christianity

What created nothing and brought something out of it?

 

No it doesn’t! Because from what perspective, in such a universe, would this god be defined as wicked?
This issue is exhaustively dealt with in the book of Job.

 

Btw we do seem to have strayed wildly off topic

 

Regardless. Still a stupid thing to say.

 

Do you realize how unlikely it is that we just happened by chance. Even mathamaticians admit how unlikely that is.
You can see that things in the world tend to go from order to disorder. Yet you think that for no apparent reason life just came together. That order came from disorder. Do you realize how unlikely that is?

 

Hmmm…. I myself am a Christian and believe in the biblical account of creation (tho not obsessively hung up on which aspects of that account are “literal” and which are figurative).
However, as I understand it the secular hypothesis about the origin of life is that the general law of entropy operating across the whole universe as an energy system may still permit movement from simplicity to complexity within local subsystems, and that the universe is so vast that statistically improbable events are nevertheless likely to occur somewhere - and “somewhere” is here. And although I don’t hold this position myself I don’t think it’s daft.

 

You have obviously had some kind of trauma at the hands of some deviant clergy member. That is sad and certainly not your fault. You are mixing up religion with God. Religion is created by man and thus is imperfect. There are plenty of religions that do prey on those in need. There are also deviant people that take advantage of their positions and use it to do harm to others. You can't blame everyone for the sins of a few.
Did you know that almost every leader of the democracies in the world believes in a God? Are they all mentally ill?

 

But do those events that are statistically unlikely to occur but can occur continue to occur over and over again. Wouldn't it eventually reach the point of impossibility? It takes more than one improbable event for life to occur and to evolve into something complex.

 

Im not a scientist but from what I know, that’s not how it is. Certain happenings initiate a cascade of further events that are negentropic but nevertheless natural consequences of their precursors. In the case of the emergence of primitive life the key event was the appearance in the primeval ocean of chain molecules that coalesced into membranes separating the outer water from an inner, captured volume. And these membranes, being semipermeable, allowed electrochemical processes to occur that led to growth and division. Once these “blobs” came into being, further evolution of complex systems became far more likely to occur.

 

That’s a very sketchy account but it’s what I recall from my study of the molecular biology of cells. And over time, those complex systems that were able to persist did so, whilst those that couldn’t, didn’t. So what we have now is (as a matter of logic) what survived against a background of chaotic mutation which in almost all cases led nowhere.
Hope that makes some kind of sense!

 

Incidentally I’m happy to play devil’s advocate here because I don’t really like the argument from design as an attempt to prove the existence of God. I put all my eggs in the basket of convincement through an experience of relationship with Jesus Christ as a living, resurrected, personal Friend and Master. Once you’ve got that you can work backwards to belief in Divine creation ex nihilo on the basis that the truth revealed in the Gospels and brought to completion at Pentecost can be trusted.

 

I’m just grateful I’ve been able to post all this when the two Jays are presumably asleep in their beds and unable to jump on me with their mischievous pisstaking!

 

The anthropic principle. Look it up. It is a far better explanation. And you're misunderstanding thermodynamics.

 

If God created the universe then who created God, and who created them etc etc etc forever. The most parsimonious explanation for the origin of everything, is that it came from nothing. It doesn't create infinite regress, as I think God does. Over time things get more complex, how can something less complex (afvanced) create something more complex (advanced).

 

Except it’s not an explanation, it’s the terminal point of explanation. And that’s ok, explanation must stop somewhere. But the theistic explanation can likewise just meet its terminus with a simple “God just is” (which in Scripture is stated by the Name of God being “I AM THAT I AM”).
So really, in terms of parsimony, I see the theist heuristic as trumping atheism because it understands the universe as always already the product of conscious intention, so no ontological problem with regard to our consciousness and freedom - whereas science still has no fleshed out account of how a certain type of upright monkey can be a person.

 

We have pretty strong evidence that the universe has not existed eternally into the past, but had a beginning a finite time ago. In 2003, the mathematician Arvind Borde, and physicists Alan Guth and Alexander Vilenkin were able to prove that any universe which has, on average, been expanding throughout its history cannot be infinite in the past, but must have a past spacetime boundary (i.e., a beginning).

The Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem implies that the quantum vacuum state which may have characterized the early universe cannot have existed eternally into the past, but must itself have had a beginning. Even if our universe is just a tiny part of a so-called ‘multiverse’, composed of many universes, their theorem requires that the multiverse itself must have had a beginning.
Vilenkin concluded, “All the evidence we have says that the universe had a beginning.”

But then the inevitable question arises: Why did the universe come into being? What brought the universe into existence? There must have been a transcendent cause which brought the universe into being – a cause outside the universe itself.

We can summarize this argument thus far as follows:

1. The universe began to exist.

2. If the universe began to exist, then the universe has a transcendent cause.

3. Therefore, the universe has a transcendent cause.

By the very nature of the case, that cause of the physical universe must be an immaterial (i.e., non-physical) being. Now there are only two types of things that could possibly fit that description: either an abstract object like a number, or an unembodied mind/consciousness. But abstract objects don’t stand in causal relations to physical things. The number 7, for example, has no effect on anything. Therefore the cause of the universe is an unembodied mind. Thus again we are brought, not merely to a transcendent cause of the universe, but to its Personal Creator.

Quoted from.

 

There’s a hard limit to our capacity for thinking about these questions. We are in and of this universe, and the language we use takes the phenomena of this world, situated in time and space, as its referent. When we think about these ultimate questions we are using our language figuratively. An example being: people talk about “the first few seconds of the universe” but a “second” is a measurement of duration based on its being a sixtieth part of a sixtieth part of a twenty fourth of a three hundred and sixty fifth (approx) fraction of the journey of a planet around a star, both of which are moving within an expanding space. And no aspect of the physics of this is in any way “parsimonious”. Generations of brilliant scientists have struggled to get to grips with it; in so doing they have had to invent whole new mathematical languages that are incomprehensible to the vast majority of people and can therefore only be explained by analogy. Plus they remain theories.
If you’re looking for parsimony, how about chapter one of Genesis? It does a pretty good job as an origin story of the world we inhabit, just as Newtonian physics holds up as a model of the world of medium sized things (to borrow from Strawson).

 

I still hold to my original assertion that it is highly unlikely. Your argument supports that assertion.

 

At least these long winded explanations on the origins of the universe have run off all of the trolls. There is that.

 

I don’t really believe in trolls

 

The Kalam argument is well refuted in my view.

 

I agree, which is why most people say they don't know how the universe started rather than stammer out something that is likely wrong.

How do you know your god created you with good intent? Surely you don't suppose to know the mind of a god?

 

No, but you have clearly worked out the probability so please share your workings out.

That's a nice fallacious argument you have there. Because a math teacher thinks it's unlikely is not a good foundation for an argument.

You aren't qualified to know what I think.

Again, show your workings out for the probability.

 

This proves that praying works, so therefore gods exist.

 

Since they are all greedy, power mad psychopaths who seem hellbent on destroying the world for profit...I dunno, you decide.

Also, these democracies...are they the ones that attacked Iraq, Syria, Libya, Vietnam, Korea, and more, based on lies and to get kickbacks from the military industrial complex? Because if so then I think they are evil men and women that will happily watch 100s of thousands of children die and think it's worth it.

Yes, anyone that believes in a sky daddy is mentally ill. They are suffering from delusions, they need help.