That's arguing in a circle. The universe doesn't HAVE to exist at all, much less be hospitable. It is not trivial that both of these are true, no more than it would be trivial for me to find myself alive, having somehow dodged every bullet from a firing squad.
And also you've missed my point: these fine tuning arguments aren't talking about possibility of life forming somewhere. They're talking about the fine tuning required for life to form anywhere. For example, the universe has not collapsed on itself, atoms can form, as can stars - all of these would be prerequisites for any kind of life to form anywhere, and require incredible fine tuning, but these are not explained by the Atheist account.
If this is true of Christians it's certainly true of Atheists.
I often ask Atheists how they explain the remarkable fine tuning that the universe displays in the absence of a creator God. Very few have ever thought seriously about the question, and most are more than content to ignore the issue, or maintain a blind faith in some system of parallel universes for which there is no evidence whatsoever. Do you see the lazy doubt at work here?
To say that all Christians, such as myself, are lazy doubters is as unrealistic as to say that Atheists have a monopoly on intelligent thought.
I understand this forum has a strong anti-Christian bias, so please think twice before modding me troll.
Yes I thought that to. It's not really a surprise - after all it only came about because Richard Dawkins made it up just so he could tell Christians that they had a virus in their mind.
So look around you to spot the glass before you start chucking any stones!
The problem is that this isn't some little application. There are 750 MILLION users of IE. Each user will have paid somewhere between $20 and $200 for the privalege of using their bundled browser - and Microsoft is rich! beyond the dreams of avarice.
Is it wrong for us to expect a little quality in IE? Especially considering the number of users, it's importance as an app, and the amount of cash MS has?
I was listening to BBC Radio 1, and they had a news item about it this morning. But I think GP is right - I can't imagine it will make many users switch. However, as more and more people within the technical community become jaded with the consistent poor quality in Microsoft's offerings, MS will inevitably loose mind-share, and hence their strangle hold on the industry will loosen.
It's this sort of thing that made me switch over to Linux a year ago. I haven't looked back.
Microsoft already tried this with sort of thing with Office 2000-2003. Remember infrequently used menu and toolbar items being hidden away? I do, and shudder. It made teaching people how to use it a total nightmare. Even using it as an expert user always felt clumsy.
Good UI is not about making a UI that learns the user - a computer will never be able to do a good job of that. Good UI is about making the app easily learnable. This is much easier than it sounds: simple tidyness and consistency get you 80% of the way toward good UI. But when you start making dynamic UI, consistency is the first thing to go out the window.
Office 2007 does this quite well (though it is themed differently to all other apps), and so it's much easier to work with than any previous versions of office.
If the universe were eternal, why wouldn't it be possible for the universe and God to be co-eternal but distinct? The numbers "1" and "2" are both timeless abstract objects (eternal) but yet distinct.
As others have mentioned, this is an age old idea. Here are some questions that I've yet to hear sensible answers to:
So your idea is that the universe is actually part of a multiverse. Fine. But then why does that exist, as opposed to nothing? and how did this multiverse come to be a place so fineley tuned as to be an environment conducive to the spawning of hospitable universes? Do you see that while you've expanded the idea, you havn't come to a more fundamental answer? And what is it that makes the universe "work"? Say the multiverse is goverened by string theory, what is it that breathes life into all these mathematical equations, rather than them being simply lifeless abstract formulae?
And where's the payoff in believing in a multiverse? Doesn't your Occam's Razor alarm bell begin ringing like crazy? To accept it, I'd have to put faith in an unseen (perhaps even permanently undetectible) world of parallel universes for which we have not even a single shred of hard evidence (and possibly never will), and for which the theory behind it is so embryonic that it's equations have not even been completely written down, much less solved; a theory which is so tenuous that many physicists regard it's status as "Not even wrong" (Peter Woit). What possible good reason could there be to find this a more appealing "explanation" for the origin of the universe? Not only is there no substantial evidence whatsoever, but also it fails to deal with the design/creator problem. As an explanation it does nothing but expand our idea of the scope of everything-that-exists by a step. So it seems to me that it would take much more faith to believe in this over the idea of a creator God.
Sometimes it seems people are so eager to believe in anything - any idea at all - just so long as it doesn't have God in it.
It feels strange to me the way Atheists always want to claim the Scientific high ground over Christians. It's strange that the headline of this article sets Science and belief in a creator God up as opposed to each other, which they're clearly not. I grow weary of Atheists pointing to this theory or that experiment as a way of proving that God cannot exist. The reason I grow weary is that Science (aka the Natural/Physical Sciences) is the ordered study of the natural/physcial world, but God must by definition be in some ways metaphysical. So discussion regarding God has to be grounded in Philosophy and Metaphysics rather than Physics of the Natural Sciences.
Re:you can't stop the doomsayers
on
LHC Success!
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· Score: 2, Funny
Honestly, even if you come up with good reasons, it automatically becomes a cover up to those people, thus excusing even wilder claims.
In memory of September 11th tomorrow, I've been together a montage video of the 9/11 the disaster, but reading comments on 9/11 videos is shocking! Almost everyone who's commented seems happy to believe that the twin towers were destroyed by a conspiracy; an inside job involving hundreds if not thousands of Americans to murder fellow Americans allegedly to give America an excuse to invade Iraq... for oil... or something. I cannot understand what makes these people latch on to the least likely explanation, one which isn't supported by a single shred of evidence!
But didn't Apple spend a whole ton of money to write and maintain Mac OS X?
Yes they did, so if I wanted to buy a copy, I'd pay them for it. We're not talking about warez here, we're talking about the freedom to run software that I've paid for on whatever system I damn well like.
...is what I say. It's nice to see the little guy stand up against big buisiness muscle. Apple is beginning to look more and more Microsoft-esque by the week.
A couple of things off the top of my head. First there is a latest-limit set by the Rylands P52 fragment - though that doesn't set the limit earlier than AD100. John does seem to be the latest of the Gospels, certainly.
On the subject of persecution the book of James makes a central theme of it. And in Acts, which gives the account of the events which took place after Jesus, believers face fierce persecution from beginning to end. Interestingly the story of Acts comes to an abrupt halt in Acts 27 when Paul is under house arrest awaiting trial before Caeser in Rome. That halt occurs seemingly before the temple destruction, as well before other cataclysmic historical events such as the martyrdoms of James, Paul and Peter (62, 64 & 65AD) - because they're not present in the record, and so it's reasonable to conclude that Acts was written before the 60-70AD period.
There are also subtle historical details which suggest that Luke was an eye-witness in the 1st c.
This means that the book of Luke must have been written earlier - it's the prequel. It's likely that Mark and Matthew were written in a similar time-frame because Matthew, Mark and Luke share similar source material.
There's more to say but you can see that we can use these techniques to put credible specific dates to the texts of the new testament.
They date Daniel using the same logic. Daniel couldn't have prophesied those emipres in 360 B.C., so it must have been written in 200 B.C.
The book of Daniel's very interesting, as you say, because it's chok-full of prophesies which bear a striking similarity to the events as they played out in the New Testament.
Not very many decades ago these things seemed like great reasons to put a date on Daniel after the 1st c. AD. But now we know that that's impossible, both from the dead sea scroll (from the 1st c. BC), and because of the archaeological record - which is part of my tour in the British Museum. The book of Daniel knows all sorts of subtle historical details that a later writer simply could not have known.
This presents a problem for skeptics, and so, as far as I know all of the late-Daniel theories have collapsed in recent years. I'll be very interested to see if anyone can mount any kind of a response, and I'm particularly interested to know how sceptics would respond to this.
I'm a Christian, and I constantly hear these grand conspriricy theories from all kinds of people, but then a cover-up always makes more exciting discussion than the truth.
I run a tour of the British Museum and Library sometimes, and I show people the primary sources of this kind of information which on display for everyone to look at.
1. It was perverted from the start.
There's a lack of evidence to support that claim. There's no good reason to believe than any of the New Testament books were written after the destruction of Jerusalem in AD70. And we can see the full gospel message - resurrection for our sins all over the NT e.g. in books as early as 1 Corinthians written between AD 53 and 57 - less than 30 years after Jesus death. You want to say that both the NT and the OT have been changed by New Testament believers. The former is unlikely - there's an abundance of ancient NT manuscripts (20,000 by some counts) which are identical by and large, no evidence for this process of accretions and deletions. The latter is impossible, because we have access to books of the OT from before the time of Jesus out of the dead sea scrolls.
The eternal virginity of mary is not something that I'm concerned about. Clearly Jesus did have brothers - we hear about them in the NT. This is a late Roman Catholic thing.
I'd like to hear more about Ebionites. Perhaps you can give me some credible references. It surprises that they're so small on the academic radar.
2. That wouldn't even be the end of massaging it into a different shape.
Fortunately because the sources for Christians today are so very good e.g. the Syniaticus, modern Christians can go back to the text and work out what the truth of the matter is. So we can make conclusions about things which are true for ourselves, and detect the things we've missunderstood. The good news as well is that new fragments are turning up all the time which take us back earlier toward the events, all giving greater support to the later codices that we have.
3. Which brings me to the point, they had no problem dealing with the Ebionites or with the Syriac churches which were a lot closer to where it all happened. They just proclaimed them heretics.
I'm guessing it will be the same today. People will just proclaim this manuscript as some gnostic heresy, and continue as if nothing happened.
People claim things are gnostic heresies when there's *evidence* to suggest that they're heresies. e.g Muslims sometimes claim the 16th c. Gospel of Barnabus is in fact a true gospel account that the church has surpressed. But we know that this can't be true for all sorts of reasons. e.g. some soldiers are recorded rolling out barrels to be refilled with wine. But we know this impossible because there were no barrels until much later in the near east. This is an example of the application straight-forward tools that historians use every day.
Slashdot Mirror
That's arguing in a circle. The universe doesn't HAVE to exist at all, much less be hospitable. It is not trivial that both of these are true, no more than it would be trivial for me to find myself alive, having somehow dodged every bullet from a firing squad.
And also you've missed my point: these fine tuning arguments aren't talking about possibility of life forming somewhere. They're talking about the fine tuning required for life to form anywhere. For example, the universe has not collapsed on itself, atoms can form, as can stars - all of these would be prerequisites for any kind of life to form anywhere, and require incredible fine tuning, but these are not explained by the Atheist account.
If this is true of Christians it's certainly true of Atheists.
I often ask Atheists how they explain the remarkable fine tuning that the universe displays in the absence of a creator God. Very few have ever thought seriously about the question, and most are more than content to ignore the issue, or maintain a blind faith in some system of parallel universes for which there is no evidence whatsoever. Do you see the lazy doubt at work here?
To say that all Christians, such as myself, are lazy doubters is as unrealistic as to say that Atheists have a monopoly on intelligent thought.
I understand this forum has a strong anti-Christian bias, so please think twice before modding me troll.
I didn't have to do any of that when I installed it the other week - all I need was to switch riched20 into builtin, and it works straight off the CD.
Those will come soon, and if you're not doing print or broadcast work, that isn't such a big deal.
...and already someones pulled it to bits
Yes I thought that to. It's not really a surprise - after all it only came about because Richard Dawkins made it up just so he could tell Christians that they had a virus in their mind.
So look around you to spot the glass before you start chucking any stones!
The problem is that this isn't some little application. There are 750 MILLION users of IE. Each user will have paid somewhere between $20 and $200 for the privalege of using their bundled browser - and Microsoft is rich! beyond the dreams of avarice.
Is it wrong for us to expect a little quality in IE? Especially considering the number of users, it's importance as an app, and the amount of cash MS has?
I was listening to BBC Radio 1, and they had a news item about it this morning. But I think GP is right - I can't imagine it will make many users switch. However, as more and more people within the technical community become jaded with the consistent poor quality in Microsoft's offerings, MS will inevitably loose mind-share, and hence their strangle hold on the industry will loosen.
It's this sort of thing that made me switch over to Linux a year ago. I haven't looked back.
Microsoft already tried this with sort of thing with Office 2000-2003. Remember infrequently used menu and toolbar items being hidden away? I do, and shudder. It made teaching people how to use it a total nightmare. Even using it as an expert user always felt clumsy.
Good UI is not about making a UI that learns the user - a computer will never be able to do a good job of that. Good UI is about making the app easily learnable. This is much easier than it sounds: simple tidyness and consistency get you 80% of the way toward good UI. But when you start making dynamic UI, consistency is the first thing to go out the window.
Office 2007 does this quite well (though it is themed differently to all other apps), and so it's much easier to work with than any previous versions of office.
If the universe were eternal, why wouldn't it be possible for the universe and God to be co-eternal but distinct? The numbers "1" and "2" are both timeless abstract objects (eternal) but yet distinct.
As others have mentioned, this is an age old idea. Here are some questions that I've yet to hear sensible answers to:
So your idea is that the universe is actually part of a multiverse. Fine. But then why does that exist, as opposed to nothing? and how did this multiverse come to be a place so fineley tuned as to be an environment conducive to the spawning of hospitable universes? Do you see that while you've expanded the idea, you havn't come to a more fundamental answer? And what is it that makes the universe "work"? Say the multiverse is goverened by string theory, what is it that breathes life into all these mathematical equations, rather than them being simply lifeless abstract formulae?
And where's the payoff in believing in a multiverse? Doesn't your Occam's Razor alarm bell begin ringing like crazy? To accept it, I'd have to put faith in an unseen (perhaps even permanently undetectible) world of parallel universes for which we have not even a single shred of hard evidence (and possibly never will), and for which the theory behind it is so embryonic that it's equations have not even been completely written down, much less solved; a theory which is so tenuous that many physicists regard it's status as "Not even wrong" (Peter Woit). What possible good reason could there be to find this a more appealing "explanation" for the origin of the universe? Not only is there no substantial evidence whatsoever, but also it fails to deal with the design/creator problem. As an explanation it does nothing but expand our idea of the scope of everything-that-exists by a step. So it seems to me that it would take much more faith to believe in this over the idea of a creator God.
Sometimes it seems people are so eager to believe in anything - any idea at all - just so long as it doesn't have God in it.
It feels strange to me the way Atheists always want to claim the Scientific high ground over Christians. It's strange that the headline of this article sets Science and belief in a creator God up as opposed to each other, which they're clearly not. I grow weary of Atheists pointing to this theory or that experiment as a way of proving that God cannot exist. The reason I grow weary is that Science (aka the Natural/Physical Sciences) is the ordered study of the natural/physcial world, but God must by definition be in some ways metaphysical. So discussion regarding God has to be grounded in Philosophy and Metaphysics rather than Physics of the Natural Sciences.
Honestly, even if you come up with good reasons, it automatically becomes a cover up to those people, thus excusing even wilder claims.
In memory of September 11th tomorrow, I've been together a montage video of the 9/11 the disaster, but reading comments on 9/11 videos is shocking! Almost everyone who's commented seems happy to believe that the twin towers were destroyed by a conspiracy; an inside job involving hundreds if not thousands of Americans to murder fellow Americans allegedly to give America an excuse to invade Iraq... for oil... or something. I cannot understand what makes these people latch on to the least likely explanation, one which isn't supported by a single shred of evidence!
what do non-creationists consider neanderthals?
There... fixed it for you.
Many religious believers would agree with atheists on the subject of neanderthals including many evangelical Christians such as myself.
So glad I don't live in your stupid country. :)
But didn't Apple spend a whole ton of money to write and maintain Mac OS X?
Yes they did, so if I wanted to buy a copy, I'd pay them for it. We're not talking about warez here, we're talking about the freedom to run software that I've paid for on whatever system I damn well like.
...is what I say. It's nice to see the little guy stand up against big buisiness muscle. Apple is beginning to look more and more Microsoft-esque by the week.
In the minds of most programmers I know, there's no glory or bragging rights in building a unified user experience.
Fortunately, there are a few of us around who believe in getting the little things just right.
A couple of things off the top of my head. First there is a latest-limit set by the Rylands P52 fragment - though that doesn't set the limit earlier than AD100. John does seem to be the latest of the Gospels, certainly.
On the subject of persecution the book of James makes a central theme of it. And in Acts, which gives the account of the events which took place after Jesus, believers face fierce persecution from beginning to end. Interestingly the story of Acts comes to an abrupt halt in Acts 27 when Paul is under house arrest awaiting trial before Caeser in Rome. That halt occurs seemingly before the temple destruction, as well before other cataclysmic historical events such as the martyrdoms of James, Paul and Peter (62, 64 & 65AD) - because they're not present in the record, and so it's reasonable to conclude that Acts was written before the 60-70AD period.
There are also subtle historical details which suggest that Luke was an eye-witness in the 1st c.
This means that the book of Luke must have been written earlier - it's the prequel. It's likely that Mark and Matthew were written in a similar time-frame because Matthew, Mark and Luke share similar source material.
There's more to say but you can see that we can use these techniques to put credible specific dates to the texts of the new testament.
It's great stuff!
I have met Muslims who claim it as authentic on more than one occasion.
The book of Daniel's very interesting, as you say, because it's chok-full of prophesies which bear a striking similarity to the events as they played out in the New Testament.
Not very many decades ago these things seemed like great reasons to put a date on Daniel after the 1st c. AD. But now we know that that's impossible, both from the dead sea scroll (from the 1st c. BC), and because of the archaeological record - which is part of my tour in the British Museum. The book of Daniel knows all sorts of subtle historical details that a later writer simply could not have known.
This presents a problem for skeptics, and so, as far as I know all of the late-Daniel theories have collapsed in recent years. I'll be very interested to see if anyone can mount any kind of a response, and I'm particularly interested to know how sceptics would respond to this.
1. It was perverted from the start.
There's a lack of evidence to support that claim. There's no good reason to believe than any of the New Testament books were written after the destruction of Jerusalem in AD70. And we can see the full gospel message - resurrection for our sins all over the NT e.g. in books as early as 1 Corinthians written between AD 53 and 57 - less than 30 years after Jesus death. You want to say that both the NT and the OT have been changed by New Testament believers. The former is unlikely - there's an abundance of ancient NT manuscripts (20,000 by some counts) which are identical by and large, no evidence for this process of accretions and deletions. The latter is impossible, because we have access to books of the OT from before the time of Jesus out of the dead sea scrolls. The eternal virginity of mary is not something that I'm concerned about. Clearly Jesus did have brothers - we hear about them in the NT. This is a late Roman Catholic thing. I'd like to hear more about Ebionites. Perhaps you can give me some credible references. It surprises that they're so small on the academic radar.
2. That wouldn't even be the end of massaging it into a different shape.
Fortunately because the sources for Christians today are so very good e.g. the Syniaticus, modern Christians can go back to the text and work out what the truth of the matter is. So we can make conclusions about things which are true for ourselves, and detect the things we've missunderstood. The good news as well is that new fragments are turning up all the time which take us back earlier toward the events, all giving greater support to the later codices that we have.
3. Which brings me to the point, they had no problem dealing with the Ebionites or with the Syriac churches which were a lot closer to where it all happened. They just proclaimed them heretics. I'm guessing it will be the same today. People will just proclaim this manuscript as some gnostic heresy, and continue as if nothing happened.
People claim things are gnostic heresies when there's *evidence* to suggest that they're heresies. e.g Muslims sometimes claim the 16th c. Gospel of Barnabus is in fact a true gospel account that the church has surpressed. But we know that this can't be true for all sorts of reasons. e.g. some soldiers are recorded rolling out barrels to be refilled with wine. But we know this impossible because there were no barrels until much later in the near east. This is an example of the application straight-forward tools that historians use every day.
Hope that helps. Joel