The way atheists think about God is alarming: this is the worst of hard after 13 years of posting

CARM (where else?)post no 20 by Hunble thinker

the original issue was that God's moral judgment is in a better position than ours to know right and wrong. Right and wrong are based upon God's very nature. The atheist argues that is special pleading. That seemed wired and they didn't explain it. after pressing I find it's because they are claiming that to assert that God is not subject to the same limitations of humanity is special pleading. This is not really Germaine because special pleading innovates violation of a rule of logic or some rule of man made origin not merely the recognition that some aspect of reality is more improtant, smarter, more enduring, more powerful, or more "right" than another.

Originally Posted by Metacrock View Post
that's utterly silly. to say that believing that God is more powerful than a man and more intelligent than make is special pleading is is idiotic. that's like saying belief that white dwarfs are hotter than red giants is special pleading.

HT:

Not it's not. Stars classified as white dwarfs have been evidenced to be hotter than red giants. No such thing can be claimed about God

Meta:
That doesn't mean there aren't other ways to understand that God is more popwerful than humans. That's a foundatoinal assumption in the concept of God. That's the whole point of belief; being "more powerful" is not the issue but being the basis of reality is. So if we can't say that the basis of reality is more infinite, smarter, more enduring, more power, better equipt to understand things, then we can't say anything. It's as though they have never heard of the idea of God before. They are so skeptical of everything they even challenge the most foundational assumptions like up and down.

Of course my example of stars was meant to be sarcastic. That stars are the objects of empirical observation and God is not does not defeat the analogy because it's still an example of some known being ignored. If we can't know that God is in a better position to know morality than we are then we can't know anything.

I had already posted documentation form logicians to show that special pleading invovles violation of a rule. Special pleading is about violating a rule that one expects to apply in all other cases and then pleading that "but my thing is a special case."

The Nizkor Project:
"The Fallacy of Special Pleading"

Special Pleading is a fallacy in which a person applies standards, principles, rules, etc. to others while taking herself (or those she has a special interest in) to be exempt, without providing adequate justification for the exemption. This sort of "reasoning" has the following form:

1. Person A accepts standard(s) S and applies them to others in circumtance(s) C.
2. Person A is in circumstance(s) C.
3. Therefore A is exempt from S.

The person committing Special Pleading is claiming that he is exempt from certain principles or standards yet he provides no good reason for his exemption. That this sort of reasoning is fallacious is shown by the following extreme example:

1. Barbara accepts that all murderers should be punished for their crimes.
2. Although she murdered Bill, Barbara claims she is an exception because she really would not like going to prison.
3. Therefore, the standard of punishing murderers should not be applied to her.

This is obviously a blatant case of special pleading. Since no one likes going to prison, this cannot justify the claim that Barbara alone should be exempt from punishment.

From a philosophic standpoint, the fallacy of Special Pleading is violating a well accepted principle, namely the Principle of Relevant Difference. According to this principle, two people can be treated differently if and only if there is a relevant difference between them. This principle is a reasonable one. After all, it would not be particularly rational to treat two people differently when there is no relevant difference between them. As an extreme case, it would be very odd for a parent to insist on making one child wear size 5 shoes and the other wear size 7 shoes when the children are both size 5.

It should be noted that the Principle of Relevant Difference does allow people to be treated differently. For example, if one employee was a slacker and the other was a very prodictive worker the boss would be justified in giving only the productive worker a raise. This is because the productive of each is a relevant difference between them. Since it can be reasonable to treat people differently, there will be cases in which some people will be exempt from the usual standards. For example, if it is Bill's turn to cook dinner and Bill is very ill, it would not be a case of Special Pleading if Bill asked to be excused from making dinner (this, of course, assumes that Bill does not accept a standard that requires people to cook dinner regardless of the circumstances). In this case Bill is offering a good reason as to why he should be exempt and, most importantly, it would be a good reason for anyone who was ill and not just Bill.

These atheists think belief in God is special pleading becasue God doesn't obey the rules. that' why I used the example of stars. Stars fit the descriptions of the laws of physics and yet some are different than others. The real point is that physical objects don't conform to man made rules such as ethical norms. Thus God's understanding of ethical norms would have to be transcendent of man and his extra human abilities are not violations of any rule.

HT:

There's no rule that says He isn't. (on a par with humans)

Meta:

Yes, there is. It's the rule of what the term God means.

HT:

People claim that without warrant to conveniently support their argument. One could just as easily claim that He is simply treated as a super man, but a man nonetheless, but you obviously would not accept that. This is the "upshot" you are talking about. Why don't you understand that?

Meta:
Essentially he's saying that I made up the idea that God is better than humans in order to avoid the encouragements of atheist argument. This is what is so increeduably stupid, and diabolical because it completely obscures the origin of religious belief the reason for understanding a concept of God in the first place. Its' also excessively ignorant because the concept of God goes back to a point sometime bewteen the stone age and the bronze age. So sometime before 3000BC people started talking about "God." That's just what we know from writing. For all we really know Neanderthal may have been talking about "the great spirit." Does he really imagine that people in 3000bc had to worry about athiest arguments of special pleading? It's a pretty safe assumption they did not. This sort of obfuscation and ignorance is just priceless. not to know this is so alarming.

we could debate the reasons why people came up with the idea of God, whatever the reason, to explain nature or the sense of he numinous, is sure as hell was not because they thought they could do more than God. It sure as hell was not to answer some atheist argument.

whatever else it had to do with it basically had to do with feeling the presence of something grater than themselves. obviously. People come to believe in God because they come to believe that there is something greater than themselves. It's foundational to the whole concept. Just th notion that God is eternal and created the universe has to put him ahead of man. Can this "humble thinker" create a universe? If we put it in the crass terms. Never mind all that foundation of reality jazz, can you create a universe? are you eternal? Not just creating but from scratch no less.

This is such an affront to reason and a transgression against the foundational concepts of Western thought one might just think of it as "satanic."

Atheists continue to embarrase themseleves with Fine Tuning

The argument on Fine tuning thread on CARM, here, they went on to totally embarrass themselves with three other threads.

A point about fine tuning

The fallacy about Fine tuning

there was another I can't find.

They never did actually argue with the issues of the argument. They did get some people who tired to make more substantive arguments. Mat Hunter kept putting up links to his pages where he posts may scientific paper supposedly disproving it. He Also admitted it doesn't disprove it it's just a start. Yet he continues to not say how.

Spacemonkey continued to refer to some mysterious he thought he won but would never say what. Fireproof Ashes continued to try make me redefine my argument over and over again never quite satisfied with it due to some arcane nuance.

The real attempts were made by HRG and Troxel. Troxel being the slanderer from the ridiculous attempt to show that I don't understand Amaro article, and his BS on the fine tuning broke down into another go at the Amaro thing. His performence was the most ridiculous. The other's picked it up and began gonig wih it. Before I get to that I must deal with HRG.


HRG made the most sophisticated seeming arguments. I say "seeming" becuase like most of what he does I suspect is meaningless and just a smoke screen but he has the mathematical training to make it seem that it's really saying something. These are just his standard tricks. He quotes Victor Stenger fisrt. Stengetr a real physicist but he's a gung ho apologist and he's not exactly them most objective person.

Before he got on to red marbles he was arguing that the distribution curve of probability is small in the sense of the physical space of the universe, but small physically doesn't equal improbable. just becuase there are few places in the universe life might develop then that doesn't mean that it's super unlikely that they would. I argued that the argument doesn't say that. The argument is about hurtles one after another. That's what the evidence says. Some of those hurtles involve the whole universe, such as it's flatness or the plank density, so it's not about where in the universe life can develop, many of them are universal.

Then he pulls out his major strategy argument from analogy. He cliams his analogies are only illustrating his ideas. This red marble analogy is supposed to be illustrating the filed distribution thing he did above. Yet not only do the other atheists begin to treat it like a proof but HRG does as well. They totally misconstrue the point about the analogy, what it's for, why it has to reflect the argument.

HRG:post 1

Let's assume that we have just pulled a red marble out of an infinite bag full of marbles (we know nothing about the distribution of marble colors in the bag). What does this observation indicate in your opinion - that red marbles are rare in the bag, or that they are frequent ?

Once you have answered the above question, please consider that we have pulled a life-friendly (well, somewhat life-friendly) universe out of the bag of all universes. What does this indicate: that such universes are rare, or that they are frequent ?

(When answering this question, please do not confuse small size with small probability).

Originally Posted by Metacrock

bad analogy. here's a better one

you have several hundred bags. Each bag has thousands of marbles, only one red one to a bag. you have to get a red from each bag and you only get one try per bag!

HRG

A bad analogy, since you don't know that there is only one red marble to a bag. You confuse small size with low probability.

This answer demonstrates a complete misunderstanding of the argument. My analogy reflect perfectly what the argument is and his does not. HRG is assuming that we don't know any of the variables, we don't know the probability. We can have many chances to make life. He's not dealing with the fine tuning argument. The argument says there are several series of things that have to stack up exactly right, we do know many of them. We can estimate them. This opened a rash of argument where HRG demanded "we don't know the exact numbers on probability then the argument is no good." That's clealry foolish because who cares if the chances of life forming in a given instance are 1 in 1,0000, 000, ooo, vs 1 in 1000,000,000,0000,000,000? Either way it's totally improbable. They want to make as though if we can't prove conclusviely that it's the latter set of zeroes than life is just as good 50/50. Taht's foolish, it's not that hard to tell that vastly improbable.

These are things that are touted by real physicists, major physicists they have data to back them up and so on. They are not ID guys, although it may be an ID guy connecting the info and making the website. I also quote Andre Linde from the Scientific American article.





Ray Collins,Fine tuning Design Argument
Center for Science and Culture.

The Center is an ID source, while I'm not in favor of ID I use this explanation to clarify what is meant by fine tuning. All the different mechanisms to attend to life in that example are like the target levels in fine tuning.

Collins give concrete examples:

A few examples of this fine-tuning are listed below:

1. If the initial explosion of the big bang had differed in strength by as little as 1 part in 1060, the universe would have either quickly collapsed back on itself, or expanded too rapidly for stars to form. In either case, life would be impossible. [See Davies, 1982, pp. 90-91. (As John Jefferson Davis points out (p. 140), an accuracy of one part in 10^60 can be compared to firing a bullet at a one-inch target on the other side of the observable universe, twenty billion light years away, and hitting the target.)

2. Calculations indicate that if the strong nuclear force, the force that binds protons and neutrons together in an atom, had been stronger or weaker by as little as 5%, life would be impossible. (Leslie, 1989, pp. 4, 35; Barrow and Tipler, p. 322.)

3. Calculations by Brandon Carter show that if gravity had been stronger or weaker by 1 part in 10 to the 40th power, then life-sustaining stars like the sun could not exist. This would most likely make life impossible. (Davies, 1984, p. 242.)

4. If the neutron were not about 1.001 times the mass of the proton, all protons would have decayed into neutrons or all neutrons would have decayed into protons, and thus life would not be possible. (Leslie, 1989, pp. 39-40 )

5. If the electromagnetic force were slightly stronger or weaker, life would be impossible, for a variety of different reasons. (Leslie, 1988, p. 299.)

Imaginatively, one could think of each instance of fine-tuning as a radio dial: unless all the dials are set exactly right, life would be impossible. Or, one could think of the initial conditions of the universe and the fundamental parameters of physics as a dart board that fills the whole galaxy, and the conditions necessary for life to exist as a small one-foot wide target: unless the dart hits the target, life would be impossible. The fact that the dials are perfectly set, or the dart has hit the target, strongly suggests that someone set the dials or aimed the dart, for it seems enormously improbable that such a coincidence could have happened by chance.

Note that the examples are coming from major physicists such as Paul Davies and Barrow and Tippler who are not creationists.

An example from an article interview with Andre Linde
Tim Folger, Discover, "Science's Alternative to an Intelligent Creator:
Multiverse Theory."

Consider just two possible changes. Atoms consist of protons, neutrons, and electrons. If those protons were just 0.2 percent more massive than they actually are, they would be unstable and would decay into simpler particles. Atoms wouldn’t exist; neither would we. If gravity were slightly more powerful, the consequences would be nearly as grave. A beefed-up gravitational force would compress stars more tightly, making them smaller, hotter, and denser. Rather than surviving for billions of years, stars would burn through their fuel in a few million years, sputtering out long before life had a chance to evolve. There are many such examples of the universe’s life-friendly properties—so many, in fact, that physicists can’t dismiss them all as mere accidents.

The article seems to imply that fine tuning is beaten by the multiverse theory but that will be dealt with on the next page. In setting that up they do demonstrate the problem.

Andre Linde invented inflationary theory. He is to a theist and he is not an apologist for anything. He takes FT seroiusly but he's seeking to answer it not to support it. Years ago he did an article Scientific American.

Adrei Linde,Scientific American. Oct 97

a) something from nothing

b) Flatness of Universe

"A second trouble spot is the flatness of space. General relativity suggests that space may be very curved, with a typical radius on the order of the Planck length, or 10^-33 centimeter. We see however, that our universe is just about flat on a scale of 10^28 centimeters, the radius of the observable part of the universe. This result of our observation differs from theoretical expectations by more than 60 orders of magnitude."

c) Size of Universe--Plank Density

"A similar discrepancy between theory and observations concerns the size of the universe. Cosmological examinations show that our part of the universe contains at least IO^88 elementary particles. But why is the universe so big? If one takes a universe of a typical initial size given by the Planck length and a typical initial density equal to the Planck density, then, using the standard big bang theory, one can calculate how many elementary particles such a universe might encompass. The answer is rather unexpected: the entire universe should only be large enough to accommodate just one elementary particle or at most 10 of them. it would be unable to house even a single reader of Scientiftc American, who consists of about 10^29 elementary particles. Obviously something is wrong with this theory."

d) Timing of expansion

"The fourth problem deals with the timing of the expansion. In its standard form, the big bang theory assumes that all parts of the universe began expanding simultaneously. But how could all the different parts of the universe synchromize the beginning of their expansion? Who gave the command?

e)Distribution of matter in the universe

"Fifth, there is the question about the distribution of matter in the universe. on the very large scale, matter has spread out with remarkable uniformity. Across more than 10 billion light-years, its distribution departs from perfect homogeneity by less than one part in 10,000..... One of the cornerstones of the standard cosmology was the 'cosmological principle," which asserts that the universe must be homogeneous. This assumption. however, does not help much, because the universe incorporates important deviations from homogeneity, namely. stars, galaxies and other agglomerations of matter. Tence, we must explain why the universe is so uniform on large scales and at the same time suggest some mechanism that produces galaxies."

f) The "Uniqueness Problem"

"Finally, there is what I call the uniqueness problem. AIbert Einstein captured its essence when he said: "What really interests ine is whether God had any choice in the creation of the world." Indeed, slight changes in the physical constants of nature could have made the universe unfold in a completeIy, different manner. ..... In some theories, compactilication can occur in billions of different ways. A few years ago it would have seemed rather meaningless to ask why space-time has four dimensions, why the gravitational constant is so small or why the proton is almost 2,000 times heavier than the electron. New developments in elementary particle physics make answering these questions crucial to understanding the construction of our world."

Now Linde is confident that the new inflationary theires will explain all of this, and indeed states that their purpose is to revolve the ambiguity with which cosmologists are forced to cope. The Scalar field is suppossed to explain all of this; but these inflationary models are still on the drawing board. Moreover, he never says where scalar fields come from, what makes them, and indeed never illustrates how they solve the initial problem of where it all came form in the first palce. Finally, it seems that scalar fields would be a design feature that should troulbe Linde as much as the initial problems, since he compares them the circuit breaker of a house which keeps the uiverse from heating up too fast before it can expand. Moreover, they might be argitrary necessiteis (see argument I).


So what we see here in these facts there are real scientists with real data who are willing to say we do know some of the probabilities. Moreover, if you look at the data presented above it does form a kind of gauntlet where you have to get my each guy with a tomahawk one at a time before you can get through the tunnel and survive. Its' not a matter of places in the universe but the whole universe is also at steak for life bearing properties. Obviously you only get one chance. For example if the plank density was off but a little bit then the universe might be 12 feet wide and no life is possible. That one factor would kill the chances of life in the entire universe. There are many such factors. For that reason we should construct an analogy whereby you get one red marble per bad because that represents the one chance for that universe.

Then HRG argues that we don't know how many marbles are in the rest of the bag. That's right but it's going to be more than six. We have billions of stars each star is a chance for al ife bearing plaent (of couse you can elmiatne a bunch of them because they are not the right kind fo stars but each one could be the right kind at the outset and so each one is a chance). We have as many marble per bag as we have stars in the universe. We may not know the number but we know it's big. They want to use not knowing to turn it around and say "o that mean sit could just be 50/50 and life is really a toss up. Its' never going to be that likely. It will never be 50/50. That would mean there are only two chances for life in a universe.

The thing is the more chances for life the less likely it is to obtain. Why? Becasue most of chances are not gonig to pan out. The more chances the greater the odds against it. Sl if you have two marbles one white and one red (red = life) you have a 50/50 chance. It's one in 2. So that's pretty good. Life at that stage is probable. You get 10 marbles, one red (becuase there's only one chance to get past the life killing conditions in plank density or whatever) then ife is one in ten. less likely. You have 300 marbles it's one in 300.

There are going to be a lot more than 300 marbles. As I said every star is a chance for life, becasue it could become the kind of star we have and develop an earth like planet, or some other kind of life. Since the odds are against any particular chance it's not going to be that all those chances are good. With several of the make or brake examples as above that's a reason to limit the red marbles to one per bag (one per universe). It's not that the red mrables are life per se but the successful attribution of life.

The atheist contained to insist that the analogy with unlimited red marbles and unlimited other colored marbles was more apporiptate and that getting the red ones increased the chances for life (as though there could be more than one chance with some of those make or break deals). The contined to assert that I didn't understand the analogy and this told me they can't follow an argument. If can't see how we do know the odds on a lot of the examples because they are produced by scientific data, and we can't assign more than one chance per bab because with the make or break issues if you break then you have to start a new universe, the life chances of that one are gone.

They just see what they want to see. They just contract the analogy to suit their argument then insist that i don't get it. They all profess to believe that analogies don't prove things but hen they fight for their analogy tooth and nail as though it is itself the proof. I continued to say the function of analogy is to illustrate a point. the analogy si thought up by the person making the argument, not to prove the argument, but to clarify what it means. Actually this means Algonquians are hard, and dangerous it's better not to use them. They should be used sparingly and carefully. Its' an old familiar trick of HRG's to argue form analogy as though they are proof. They can be very persuasive if the person is too lazy to follow the argument and the analogy gives him an image he latch on to.

The image of the limitless bounty of the life-sustaining grab bag of the universe, is exactly the way they want to believe the universe is. things are just popping up out of nothing, no God need apply, it's just a cornucopia of life coming about by random chance. For people who are too lazy to clink on a link and read a chapter that seems like real proof.