These are not analogous situations. You assume quite a bit in making that analogy and the followed assumption. Looking at the universe around you yields high complication and order only if you assume that we are actually, "ordered" and not "random". Now, there is no truly random in the universe-- as we are slowly learning, all interactions are governed by certain laws and forces which lead to predictable outcomes. The world around you is only as complex and ordered as our frame of reference. Understanding that our own universe is so big that trillions of trillions of trillions of possibilities exist within it, and that those trillions of trillions of trillions of planets and stars and worlds which are created based upon these fundamental laws have a certain number of "options" based upon these fundamental laws as paths they can go down, and once certain events lead them down those paths there are only certain paths to go down, etc etc.

The universe is so tremendous that many of the possible worlds to construct are in fact constructed somewhere. In fact, many estimates predict that life exists and has spontaneously (for all intents and purposes) developed in as many as millions of worlds.

We are only so unique and so special that our outcome can be considered one that requires design if we are actually that unique and special. Everything that science and philosophy has taken into account in the modern age suggests that this is anything but the truth.

One must remember that order on a small scale happens in small scenarios. However, order on a tremendous scale such as the universe can happen on equally tremendous scales and NOT be unlikely, or even special enough to enter the point of, "needing" a designer.

There is no reason to look out amongst ourselves and suggest we need design other than a lack of understanding of the universe, probability, and how to scale probability to universal proportions, or just plain human exceptionalism without any real motivation for that. We're not anywhere near the "special case" that you're making us out to be.

As for the other philosophical argument in this thread, I'll be more prepared ot make it in a few days when I can go back and do my reading on some of these issues. Unfortunately, the other person I'm arguing with seems not to have investigated much of the last 200 years of philosophy pertaining to God (Kant, Hume, etc) and I'm going to have to make a better argument to convince him, if I can convince him.

If you were referring to me, everything you have quoted (which has been very little - you usually just state that it has been disproved without any evidence) has been about design which is irrelevant to causality.

And I'm sure that your statement that science and philosophy has come to the conclusion that there are millions of other places with life in the universe is quite wrong. The percentage of the universe that is habitable is very small, the the area of that which could have intelligent life is even smaller.

How do we really know that that, as far as we know the planets in our solar system are uninhabitable. We don't very much about any of the other galaxies. Until we create some way to travel to other solar systems or galaxies we really don't know.

Check out the Drake Equation, and don't forget to move beyond Wikipedia which is noted as being edited biasly. Specifically, Drake's own recent comments which suggest he thinks the numbers should be rather largely increased.

This estimates just within our galaxy how many civilizations have the ability to contact us, not just life. Multiply that by almost 100 for life in the galaxy, and by hundreds of millions for life in the universe.

I still don't understand how the "cosmological" argument leads to any reasonable conclusion involving God. Even if this argument is correct, which I don't believe it is, what leads that cause to be God? Why an entity at all? Could such a cause have any affect on the "effect" (our Universe)? If the Cosmological argument is the best for God, it seems to disprove an intervening God, which I imagine is your personal, eventual conclusion, and is one of my objections to this argument...

It may not be the best example, but they are analogous to an extent. If the big bang caused the universe, gas spread out rapidly and like gasses massed together to form our universe--our ordered universe. In my example, the dice were scattered and formed the "universe"--with order. Like I said, not the best example, but to an extent.

So you deny that the universe is complex? Even the simplest of cells carries our extremely complex functions. Our bodies, containing trillions of cells like this, all of them working together. Is that not complex? Or do you believe we're just masses of cells who's behavior can be simplified? Even if you know how it works, that does not change the complexity of it. You only need to browse around NASA's site in order to see how complex and amazing space is.

Using this argument, one could come to the conclusion that a trillion dice thrown at once, stacking up, balancing on their corners, all showing the same number, and spinning at a constant speed for millions of years, is just as likely as five dice landing within a circle. It is on a tremendous scale, and has tremendous order. But is it likely? Would you say that this tower of a trillion dice has no designer? Or that is has no cause?

Sorry for not clarifying. I meant that they all fell within a circle.

I fail to see how. So causing the universe means he doesn't intervene?

Well, what I mean is this. Religion's "purpose" (i.e., the reason why it was created by man) is a means by which to answer some fundamental philosophical questions (why are we here? who "made" us, etc...). When religion fails to report answers to these questions, it simply reverts to doctrines which deny us the use of reason, the main "tool" we use to solve these problems or questions. Thus, its main purpose is discarded and the dogmatic rules by which it's governed (a natural consequence of any irrational belief) moves on to occupy the spotlight. Dogmatic beliefs which ignore the questions they set out to answer are not, and I hope you will agree with me on this, the central pillars of this belief in god.

Just in case, I'm referring to this:

It clearly states that, once religion fails to provide us with decent solutions, we should limit our lives to glorifying god and not ask questions, creating more questions that it even set out to answer: why did god create us?, how did god start existing?, where is god?, etc... Questions which would not exist if we were to eliminate god from the subject.

Voluntary change does indeed require a desire to improve. In which case does it not? Before you state extreme and irrelevant situations like masochism, I'll only say that they are characteristic of psychologically deficient people... I hope you're not saying that the god in which you believe in is mentally unstable and / or possibly insane.


Why would this omnipotent being find the need to even suspend these descriptive laws? Again, creating more irrelevant questions.

Highly complicated compared to exactly what? We say that a watch is highly complicated compared to a sand clock. So, the Universe is highly complicated compared to what exactly (we obviously have to compare it to similar things)? And, why can't the Universe be even more organized and complicated than it currently is? What if we're living in an extremely simple Universe out of all the trillions and trillions of possibilities?

Your "highly-complicated" argument is useless since we can't currently compare the Universe to any other things of similar characteristics or dimensions.

And you're saying this based on... what? Our extensive knowledge of the Universe?

That was going to be my response.

In additionm I'd like to point out that what I was saying was basically that we look at the level of order achieved by matter and say that it is complex. Assume that these "decisions" that are made by a universe not governed by a designer, these probabilities that are eventually chosen all had to be made. If a choice was made between probabilities it means that there were several outcomes and one of them was chosen, and which one was based on these probabilities (or improbabilities, in some cases, to play a bit with wording). We assume that after 15billion years of these decisions that the outcome is "complex" and "improbable". This is true-- we are improbable as we are simply one possibility of one possibility of one possibility, etc. However, we have no sense that had any of these situations changed the "decision" that the outcome would be any more probable than our current situation. 15 billion years of time, many orders of magnitude higher amounts of energy and matter that are practical infinite in the universe, only so many ways that matter can interact, some of that matter forms galaxy which consists of stars, of which some have planets from left over material, of which some are contained in a zone which provides a reasonable amount of energy for chemical reactions to occur, on which some of these planets the materials are there for reactions to occur, on which some of these planets these reactions involved carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen, on which some of those something "organic" was created, on which some of those life formed, on which some of those life could be sustained...

If that all seems all that improbable to you in our vast universe-- well you're simply wrong. Because the chance of that happening in a universe is exactly 1. It did happen, we do exist, as do the planets, sun, other stars, other solar systems with planets, in galaxies, in clusters, in a universe. The chances of this happening again somewhere I think are quite high even for the skeptic if you understand htat with each step made towards life you're more and more likely to have conditions for life develop. As soon as a star was born, containing the vast amounts of energy into a "small" area leaving some places to cool off in between it was more likely there would be life. When some of these stars had material left over from their formation that did not get pulled in and was circling these stars as proto-planetary discs, there was a greater chance for life. When planets aggregated from this matter circling stars, there was a greater chance for life. When these planets were bombarded with an incredible array of different elements produced from stars that had exploded, life was more likely, etc etc.

And these events, we now have proof, happened in multiple places throughout the galaxy, not just the universe. Practically everywhere we look we are finding extra solar planets...

The sense of exceptionalism people have is amazing when you DO look at how big and vast and complex the universe is-- to realize that these decisions that led to life were made billions of times over billions of years. This outcome was bound to come up somewhere, at some point. And, just the fact that it did leads me to believe that it is just as likely that it would come up somewhere else. We're not that unique if you're willing to pull your head out of religion which teaches that we alone are God's people.

There is a whole universe out there, all of which is God's. It's not our fault that when the writers of scripture were around they did not understand just how big, how beautiful, how complex, and how marvelous creation is that they felt hte need to make themselves exceptional and the Earth exceptional. That was all they knew and all they could understand. We're not needed to make hte universe exceptional and the glory of creation marvelous-- there is a whole universe that attests to that far better than we can.

When people can conclude this, they're in a much better place, IMO, to praise God.

Only someone who has not indeed enjoyed the infinite good would call it a "limit". Indeed I cannot think of a better purpose for mankind in general. Science cannot provide any answers to our purpose. "Why are we here?" is not a question that science can solve. I do not understand why you say that religion has failed to answer this question. The closest thing science can come up with as an answer is "to reproduce." If you think that is a better answer, I feel sorry for you.

I agree with you in the sense that we always choose to do the best thing we understand possible at the time. We always choose an apparent good. So I will probably agree that with mankind, voluntary change makes an apperant improvement - though there are probably some choices that don't make any improvement but remain neutral. But in the case of God, who is already perfection and cannot change, there cannot be any improvement. Therefore, if what you are saying is true, then God necessarily cannot create. But this seems ridiculous. God can create angels, or a universe and remain metaphysically unchanged. Nothing changes in God when he creates, therefore no improvement is made.


It tends to grab our attention when he does.

A book I read that compared the characteristics necessary for intelligent life with that of the known properties of locations in the universe.

See, the thing is, I don't ask the question "what's the meaning of life?" or "why are we here?" in the first place. Those questions imply the existence of a superior being which, in my opinion, is extremely improbable. Rational thought obviously can't answer your question simply because it does not make sense, in the same way it can't answer a great ammount of others, like how many sides does a circle have?

Ah, so are you saying that the concept of god is intrinsically contradictory, or a paradox? Because that's what I would conclude from your post...

Like I said before: religion creates more questions than it even set out to answer, because "It tends to grab our attention when he does." is clearly an opinion, not an objective fact.

Just because you do not ask the question doesn't mean that there isn't an answer. If there is no God then you're existence is pointless, purposeless, and futile. And if that is the case, then then only the question that truly matters is "Why not kill myself?". I'd rather not accept your a priori assumption of antisupernaturalism and follow the evidence.


No, I was showing how your statement doesn't apply to God and probably isn't true anyways. I may have been unclear in that.

Nope, you're right. If most people saw miracles they would just keep walking and not care. They will just shrug them off and not care.... Nope.

Anyways, this thread has gotten way off track and I am going out of the state for a couple months soon. So this will probably be my last post here. Thanks for the great discussion.

Seems that you are confusing "improbable" with "impossible."

If there is a chance a complicated event occurs without design, then it isn't impossible. If it isn't impossible, then its having occurred doesn't suggest anything at all.

Besides, it's a little weird to amaze oneself with the a priori probability of something that is already known to have happened! SOMETHING was bound to happen, and any one possibility BY ITSELF would have been a priori unlikely. But something happened, maybe something random. Call it X. Then we look back and say, WOW, X was unlikely to have happened!

But that's silly to say...every other possibility would have been equally unlikely!

Maybe this is not coming across nicely. Let me give an example. Suppose we ask a computer to provide a random 100-digit binary number. Guessing the right number before the computer spits it out would be impressive. But what we're doing with the universe is looking at the binary number after it's been spit out, and then remarking that it could only have occurred with probability 1/2^100. We then (apparently) find this startling, and we conclude that the smallness of the probability suggests that the number wasn't random, after all!

But it was random. All the strings are equally unlikely, and one of them was going to occur no matter what. The unlikeliness of the one that *did* occur suggests only that we started with a lot of possibilities, which we knew already!

Nicely explained. Most people don't see the difference between comparing the probability of one outcome compared to the probability of any other outcome, and the probability of one outcome compared to the sum of the probabilities of all other outcomes.