Scientific Evidence for The Existence of God

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Dardedar
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Scientific Evidence for The Existence of God

Post by Dardedar »

Just found out about this. We will be going to this. Fayetteville Freethinkers spring into action!

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Scientific Evidence for The Existence of God

10/26/2011 Start Time: 7:00 PM

Event Description

A public lecture by Dr Mike Strauss...

Location Information:
Main Campus - RCED - Donald W. Reynolds Center
Room: RCED 120 - Auditorium

Here he is giving this lecture on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FetjUAvXFk8

https://calendars.uark.edu/EventList.as ... pe&rss=rss
"I'm not a skeptic because I want to believe, I'm a skeptic because I want to know." --Michael Shermer
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Re: Scientific Evidence for The Existence of God

Post by Savonarola »

Darrel wrote:Here he is giving this lecture on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FetjUAvXFk8
What an intellectually dishonest hack. Some quick comments (and if any of them are mistaken, I hope that Bill and/or Felix will correct me):

The posited inflation beginning one Planck time (10^-43 seconds) after singularity is not posited in order to "cover up" the beginning of the universe in order to produce an excuse to deny the existence of God. That length of time is the period required for a quantum event to occur; we CANNOT know about any event -- past, present, or future -- within a smaller window of time.
Frankly, one could equally (dumbly) argue that the uncertainty regarding the singularity is posited in order to open the door to accepting the existence of God.

Strauss explains that time does not exist without the universe but repeatedly refers to "before time." "Before" is a temporal reference and has no meaning without the context of time as an existing dimension. Saying "before time" is like saying, "me, as myself, without my existing (or before my existence)."
Strauss argues this in terms of God being transcendent, but any change requires the existence of time; if God exists outside of time, he can effect no changes and is therefore an entirely impotent being.

He uses a fancy-ass name and expression for what is usually just called the fine-structure constant. Why not just call it the fine-structure constant?
I think this ties in with his intro that had the purpose of conveying, "I'm a physicist who knows the history of cosmology, so I'm a reliable source." Be less than forthright about what you're doing and try to impress people instead of making reasonable arguments.

I thought it amusing that he came up with some ghastly probability like 10^-131 for earth existing, yet here we are... If that doesn't show that such probabilities mean precisely nothing, then I don't know what else we can do for this poor, stupid bastard.

I know of no biologists who deny that natural selection and random mutation are real effects. I also know of no biologists who accept that RM+NS is the sole mechanism. It must take either severe incompetence or a complete lack of cognitive dissonance to state that evolutionary theory lacks a mechanism -- or else he's just a lying sack of shit.

I found it interesting that he insisted on ignoring scientific ideas that he considered speculative right before he turned around and suggested that maybe perhaps possibly it's plausible that a single moon and a Jupiter-like planet are required for life, so he'll include that in the math.

Of course, the whole anthropic principle thing pisses me off. No educated person can accept such an argument. We exist "as we know it" because we evolved in a universe that is exactly like ours. If the universe were not exactly like ours, any beings living there would exist as *they* know it and would make the very same claims. That we could not live in a different universe doesn't mean that nothing could live in that different universe. (In fact, any universe with life could find that life making the same argument; if the universe could not support life, there would be no beings asking why not.)
I've always liked using the water in a puddle/pothole analogy to counter this, but he made this even easier and better when he argued that oxygen couldn't exist if not for fine tuning of the universe. No oxygen means no water, no water means no puddle: irrefutable evidence that God created the universe for water to fit in potholes.

I would love to be there to hear him appeal to the 10^-43 seconds as a cop out for naturalists who refuse to accept God because they'd rather be more important (as he did in the Q&A). Remember that he pointed out in his intro (and again in the Q&A) that science has shown that man is but an insignificant speck in a vast universe; Strauss, however, is humble, and insists that this entire universe -- the majority of which he will never experience in any way -- was created just for him. I would rip him a new one for this.

Any reference to how the Bible reflects modern science better than does early science just opens the door to all sorts of damning Biblical absurdities.

And there's always the Neil DeGrasse Tyson argument: When one argues that the universe is fine tuned for life, just point out that 99.999999% of the universe is absolutely inhospitable to life.
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