Negative atheism? (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, December 24, 2014, 13:01 (3412 days ago) @ David Turell
edited by dhw, Wednesday, December 24, 2014, 13:33

Dhw: We are dealing only in hypotheses here.... I have pointed out that the odds against chance would not be so astronomical if our universe had been preceded by countless billions of others.
DAVID: You are using the same illogical cop-out as the multiverse-hawking, poorly-thinking cosmologists. Just conjure up infinities and you can have any result you want.-How can it be illogical when you yourself concede that an eternal God is unlikely to have twiddled his divine thumbs, doing nothing for ever and ever until approx. 14 billion years ago?-dhw: You have agreed that your God might have done it before - and since he has eternities, there is no limit to the number of universes he might have created.-DAVID: ANY suggestion is possible. We are in 'la-la' land in this area of discussion. Can you tell me what fraction of eternity does the life of a universe occupy, so we can decide how many God might have made? It is thought this universe might have 100 billion years before the 'big rip' of continual expansion. 100 billon years, times x =s eternity? You solve the equation. I certainly can't. -There IS no equation. Eternity allows for an infinite number. An atheist would certainly describe the concept of an eternally conscious, infinite mind as “La-la” land. Such sneering does no credit to either side.-dhw: You cannot escape the problem of what preceded the BB, and none of us can do anything except hypothesise. Of course you are free to favour one hypothesis over the other, but since your whole hypothesis depends on what preceded the BB, you can hardly dismiss other hypotheses on the grounds that we don't know what preceded the BB.
DAVID: It is YOUR hypothesis that depends on before the BB. All I can know, as I have stated over and over, is that our universe looks like a creation by someone (GOD) or some process (UNKNOWN), and I can go no further than that in following the logic I use. -Ah, this is a much better answer. We are dealing with an unknown process. That is why we hypothesize. You hypothesize that because it looks like a creation, it IS a creation, and there is a single, eternally conscious mind that has created it. I am prepared to consider other hypotheses, but unlike you, I do not believe in any of them, following the logic I use, and so I keep an open mind.-DAVID: That single observation didn't get me to God. There are, as you know, lots of other facts and observations in my books that made me reach my conclusion. It is a 'preponderance of evidence' to reach a conclusion 'beyond a reasonable doubt'. -I have indeed followed all the other facts and observations, have enormous respect for your learning and your arguments, and neither reject nor accept your conclusions. All of this constitutes the whole substance of our forum, and every single fact and observation that you use to come to your conclusions has at one time or another been the subject of our discussions. Long may these continue.