I don't investigate them, but I am open to them when they talk about it. To me it's part of being accepting of others, knowing that I don't know everything there is to know.
Multiverse - Higgs boson - String - Anthropic Principle
- Thread starter Dr. Jones
- Start date
I don't investigate them, but I am open to them when they talk about it. To me it's part of being accepting of others, knowing that I don't know everything there is to know.
If being open to an idea is as easy as saying you are while you dismiss it, then you're right. And just like you're open to Hinduism or Sikhism, I am open to your faith. I don't think there's a single chance in hell it's in any way true (just as you don't doubt the falsehood of Greek paganism), but I'm perfectly fine with you talking about them! How wonderfully easy it is to be open.
Not at all... I do believe in my heart that there is a spiritual being, the creator if you will, who have revealed himself to each of us in a different way. When I say I'm open to Hinduism, I'm not just merely "tolerating" what they are saying. On the contrary, I am open to the possibility that the heart of their story is intrinsically the same as my story, told in a different way.
What is it you want from me? I presented my worldview that the universe is knowable through rational inquiry. I responded to your disagreements. I answered your challenges. I'm not interested in convincing you, only in explaining myself and my perspective. You keep talking about how open you are (despite your insulting opinion about wanting their faith to be really about yours), but you seem offended by the fact I see things differently. You don't bother giving me reasons to take your beliefs seriously. You even maintain that they're something you just feel to be true.
So I ask again, what do you expect of me? How can I be open to your religion? Should I change my opinion to something you like better? Should I just shut up so that you don't have to see anyone who doesn't acknowledge faith as a path to knowledge? Admit that all opinions are equally possible for the virtue of their existence? How much should I change to satisfy your open mind?
Uhh... I never said that.
If you recall, I said I don't know everything there is to know and that I'm open to the possibility that, at the heart of it, their stories and mine are intrinsically the same. When did I say "their faith is really all about mine"? If my opinion is somehow "insulting to you", then please accept my sincere apologies.
All I wanted to do is to have an open conversation where we can somehow discuss things without being insulting/angry with each other. To have an open mind about things and ideas, to be open to other people's beliefs or experiences.
Yeah, I have been incredibly insulting and angry. You have been going around answering questions relevant to the thread, while I continued to harass you about being close minded and not accepting the relevance of my experience to pre-big bang events. Sorry for being such a dick. All you're trying to do is find our common story.
Hmm.. that wasn't directed at you, not sure how you got that from what I said.
Again, please accept my sincere apologies.
You know what puzzles me about believers? It is the fact that their gods must remain within the restraints of the believer's mind.
Even when I was a Muslim, I never once tried to distort this scientific theory or that, in order to shape it into my mold of god. The Quran proclaims that the pursuit of science is among the most noble of causes, because even if humanity was to spend eternity unraveling the works of Allah, they would only be able to extract a single grain of sand out of the mountain that is all knowledge.
But when I became an atheist, I was surprised to see that I was in the minority, even as a believer. People's gods can only create things whole. It cannot create life through biological evolution. Or maybe it set up the natural mechanisms that allow evolution, but they did not set the up any natural processes for abiogensis. And when people's god's are grand enough to have done that, surely they only used natural processes up to the point of the big bang.
How can anyone be contended in a god that only created most things through mechanistic know-how, but a few things through unknowable magic. Why can't god be truly grand? Why couldn't he have created the universe in an infinite multiverse. Why can't that multiverse be but a sliver of something even more magnificent. Why bother putting chains on your gods at all?
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Deleted member 848
Guest
Intwesting points, particularly the bolded part.
Wow.. OK I didn't know you had a Muslim background/upbringing. That's good to know, appreciate you telling us that.
I don't think I've ever said we're contend with God being constrained in any way. Nobody here is dismissing the multiverse as being impossible - simply because nobody knows how "God" created it all. I'm simply saying - be cautious in how you use what we know of this Universe, to make inferences/predictions about what was here before matter, space & time began.
I also agree with what you said about Allah in the highlighted part above.
Anything that I have every answer for is a small field indeed.
I don't know that the universe is fine-tuned. For all I know, the various dimensionless physical constants of our universe (fine structure constant, coupling constant, etc.) are the only possible, mutually consistent values for these constants. So, before you can demand an explanation for fine-tuning, you must first prove fine-tuning is an actual phenomenon, as opposed to a hypothesis.
Please provide evidence that either variation is a physical possibility.
This is hardly true of all believers. I do not pretend to know how or why God does things. "Believers" is a huge group of people and as I am sure you can imagine their opinions and thoughts on a higher power, and anything else, range from on extreme to another and cover everything in between.
Only to the degree that such perceptions and measurements are independently repeatable, and that such principles provide results that can be tested. However, I completely agree that a decision to to limit reality to such phenomena is a philosophical position. It's not a position of faith, though, but one of the absence of faith. Every person takes a philosophical position on what types of knowledge can be trusted. Not all of those positions accept faith as a source.
I see an athiests stance that there is not a higher power as a sign of faith. Faith that there isn't. Why you ask? Because they cannot prove there is not a higher power anymore than I can prove there is.
Ultimately, science is a process of learning more about nature/our universe.
Some of the key philosophical position of science include homogeneity (the universe operates the same way everywhere) and isometry (measurements work the same everywhere). So, science speculates about the conditions before our universe by speculating that, in that previous existence, things worked basically as they do now. It's widely recognized as speculation, to my understanding.
The Black Swordsman
Well-Known Member
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oO0QRUX4HGE
See video were Dawkins is exposed for his irrationality and irrational worldview.
The universe is fine tuned.
Steven Weinberg Nobel Prize in Physics even though an atheist admits this.
"Universe being fine tuned is clearly true"
There are atheists who assert the notion of God is inherently contradictory/impossible, but they are a minority of atheists. I don't claim to have no evidence of the non-existence of God. I only say that, lacking evidence for God, I don't believe in God. No faith needed.
Nowhere in the video did it mention evidence that these universal constants can be different than they are. Being unable to prove they can't be different is not evidence they can be different. Where is your evidence they can be different?