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Intelligent Design

PartSkeptic said:
No. Entertainment need not meet an atheists level of expectation of perfection. How boring would that be.

The Cosmic Intelligence is getting a lot of entertainment out of debates about the meaning of perfection.
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Tell me: where did you get insight into the cosmic intelligence's intents and feelings?

Stop pulling things out of your ass.
 
The Great Zaganza said:
I believe the misunderstanding is whether the universe necessarily had to turn out the way it did.
And the answer is, of course - no. Tiny perturbations in the chaotic system that is the cosmos can lead to vastly different outcomes.
No one is saying that Homo Sapiens was a pre-determined outcome of the Big Bang

All we can say with 100% certainty is that, in hindsight, things must have happened in such a way that allows for us to communicate this way, here and now.
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Actually we can't say no. It could be that the universe is the only way it could be. We simply have no way of knowing.
 
acbytesla said:
Well you confused the debate as I don't understand your point. If you wanted to say that earth at this moment in time is fine tuned for life, I agree, but the universe doesn't seem to be or at least the rest of our solar system isn't. But this is not evidence of a creator.

But one cannot honestly calculate odds post hoc. Because it is more accurate to say that the odds of the earth producing intelligent life is not some astronomical number. It is 100 percent because it did.
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I would disagree, given the entire volume it really doesn't seem to be fine tuned for life. Life only seems to be able to exist in such a small volume its almost just statistical noise! When you then apply the same to the entire universe it would seem that you could hardly produce a universe that would be less designed for life to exist. If the universe is designed for something it sure doesn't seem to be for life!
 
The point I was trying to get to has been made

That AFTER an event has happened, calculating the probability what actually did happen for an event is meaningless.

So what about the BEFORE?
 
PartSkeptic said:
In trying to research this issue some more, I found this site:

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/Nave-html/Faithpathh/Leslie.html

Oddly it is about a firing squad. Not relevant and not a derail. Just a coincidence.
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Or instead we could actually ask questions. For example, we could ask why giving some of a firing squad blanks leads to better accuracy. Well it turns out that outside of life and death situations most people (even soldiers) don't like killing people so varying numbers will not fire at all or aim to miss. So we have a number of individual events (the choice to aim to kill or not) across a number of actors and we get results.
So we have a choice of assuming a single actor ("God" for suitable values thereof) or we can actually try to find out what happened across a more complex set of events. It turns out the latter is what got us where we are.
 
I will jump ahead a bit. Here is a site that discusses probabilities in detail.


https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fine-tuning/#InveGambFallChar

Proponents of the argument from fine-tuning for design argue that, in view of the required fine-tuning, life-friendly conditions are highly improbable if there is no divine designer. Thus, the conditional probability P(R∣¬D) should be set close to zero. In contrast, it is highly likely according to them that the constants are right for life if there is indeed a designer. Thus the conditional probability P(R∣¬D) should be given a value not far from 1. If a sufficiently powerful divine being exists—the idea goes—it is only to be expected that she/he will be interested in creating, or at least enabling, intelligent life, which means that we can expect the constants to be right for life on that assumption. This motivates the likelihood inequality...
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Wudang said:
Or instead we could actually ask questions. For example, we could ask why giving some of a firing squad blanks leads to better accuracy. Well it turns out that outside of life and death situations most people (even soldiers) don't like killing people so varying numbers will not fire at all or aim to miss. So we have a number of individual events (the choice to aim to kill or not) across a number of actors and we get results.
So we have a choice of assuming a single actor ("God" for suitable values thereof) or we can actually try to find out what happened across a more complex set of events. It turns out the latter is what got us where we are.
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People selected for a firing squad would be volunteers. Many people are more than happy to kill someone. In those US States that used firing squads, how many missed?

You are assuming that they all thought they might have a blank. How does that contrast with those who decide to miss, are going to miss because they assume they have a live round?

At the close range of a firing squad it would take a miracle for all to miss. Has it ever happened?

My father told me of a group of Italian soldiers lined up to be executed by a machine gun. The guy next to him in the field hospital survived the killings despite having 26 bullets in his chest and neck.
 
No it discusses arguments from probability in detail. Did you read past the bit you quote? The very next paragraphs:
We could not possibly have existed in conditions that are incompatible with the existence of observers. The famous weak anthropic principle (WAP) (Carter 1974) suggests that this apparently trivial point may have important consequences:

[W]e must be prepared to take account of the fact that our location in the universe is necessarily privileged to the extent of being compatible with our existence as observers. (Carter 1974: 293, emphasis due to Carter)

Our methods of empirical observation are unavoidably biased towards detecting conditions which are compatible with the existence of observers. For example, even if life-hostile places vastly outnumber life-friendly places in our universe, we should not be surprised to find ourselves in one of the relatively few places that are life-friendly and seek an explanation for this finding, simply because—in virtue of being living organisms—we could not possibly have found ourselves in a life-hostile place.
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acbytesla said:
Well you confused the debate as I don't understand your point. If you wanted to say that earth at this moment in time is fine tuned for life, I agree, but the universe doesn't seem to be or at least the rest of our solar system isn't. But this is not evidence of a creator.

But one cannot honestly calculate odds post hoc. Because it is more accurate to say that the odds of the earth producing intelligent life is not some astronomical number. It is 100 percent because it did.
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Darat said:
I would disagree, given the entire volume it really doesn't seem to be fine tuned for life. Life only seems to be able to exist in such a small volume its almost just statistical noise! When you then apply the same to the entire universe it would seem that you could hardly produce a universe that would be less designed for life to exist. If the universe is designed for something it sure doesn't seem to be for life!
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You would be wrong then. Post hoc analysis of calculating odds is always flawed. The odds of a specific event occurring that did happen is ALWAYS 100 percent. If you calculate the odds against life occurring in some random unknown spot in the universe to be very high you would be right. But the earth is not a random spot. It is the winning lottery ticket and just like in the lottery the odds of life and that the winning ticket is the winning ticket is ALWAYS 100 percent.
 
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PartSkeptic said:
I will jump ahead a bit. Here is a site that discusses probabilities in detail.
Quote:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/f...veGambFallChar

Proponents of the argument from fine-tuning for design argue that, in view of the required fine-tuning, life-friendly conditions are highly improbable if there is no divine designer. Thus, the conditional probability P(R∣¬D) should be set close to zero. In contrast, it is highly likely according to them that the constants are right for life if there is indeed a designer. Thus the conditional probability P(R∣¬D) should be given a value not far from 1. If a sufficiently powerful divine being exists—the idea goes—it is only to be expected that she/he will be interested in creating, or at least enabling, intelligent life, which means that we can expect the constants to be right for life on that assumption. This motivates the likelihood inequality...
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Great. The high likelihood of "constants [that] are right for life" is evidence for a designer if you assume the designer that the constants are evidence for.
 
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Wudang said:
No it discusses arguments from probability in detail. Did you read past the bit you quote? The very next paragraphs:
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Yes I did read them. Typically "sit-on-fence" stuff. The point is that science discusses probabilities of these constants coming into existence. They do not use the "they exist, therefore the probability that they exist is unity". The unity probability is the definition of an absolute truth.

The discussion opposing fine tuning so far is that "We exist - therefore the probability that the constants would be what they are is unity".

There are two problems with this statement.

Do we exist purely as physical beings, or do we exist purely in the mind of a Cosmic Intelligence?

If there is doubt, then the probability cannot be unity.

The second problem is that in science everything has a cause. When the constants came into being, why did they have "just the right values". Not just one constant but many?

Take the cosmological constant for example. This has to be precise to a very very large number. I seem to read that if it deviates by one part in 10 raised to the power 120 then the universe would either collapse or over-expand. The question to be asked is why that precise number and not a slight deviation.

Keep in mind two problems. Firstly, dark energy and dark matter, what are they apart from scientific fantasy? The unicorns of science.

Secondly, atheist science is so worried about the fine tuning that it has invented another fantasy, namely gazillions of universes so that the law of large numbers can be used in argument.

So how fanciful is my Cosmic Intelligence compared to the fantasies mentioned? At least I have some personal evidence. Atheists only have desperate musings.

As for the fall-back retort of "No-one can Know therefore you cannot Know" is another meaningless fall-back defense. We are talking about probability of one hypothesis versus another for the Ultimate Reality. You say I have NO evidence. Rubbish, I have evidence, but not the evidence atheists are prepared to accept.
 
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