God and Reality (The nature of a \'Creator\')

by dhw, Wednesday, June 26, 2013, 13:18 (4167 days ago) @ David Turell

Dhw: You and atheists can both assume an eternal first cause, conscious or unconscious (I don't buy the something from nothing argument either), and extrapolate the existence of an infinite number of past universes from the historical fact of this one. It is therefore illogical to dismiss an atheistic infinite number of universes as a poppycock dodge to avoid design, when you yourself believe there have been an infinite number of universes! If you can have an infinite number of universes, so can an atheist, and that slashes the odds against one of them happening to be suitable for life.-May I take it that you have now withdrawn the argument that an atheist belief in an infinite number of universes, which you also believe in, is a poppycock dodge to avoid design? (See below)-dhw: You cannot conjure up intelligence and consciousness out of "first cause" just by stating that it is so. Sorry, but it's still one "huge mystery" in place of another!-DAVID: Not a huge mystery to me. God exists as a first cause. What I said was I don't know where or how He came to exist or if He had a cause, because I cannot know that. I must make the asumption that God has always existed, and cannot give it a reason other than to look at the results of his activity.-I don't know where or how intelligence came to exist, because I cannot know that. All I know is that it does exist (here on Earth) and must have had a cause. The claim that the cause was an intelligence concerning which we do not know where or how it came to exist, or if it had a cause, still puts one huge mystery in place of another. If it is reasonable for you to live with one insoluble mystery because of your faith in God, it must be equally reasonable for an atheist to live with another insoluble mystery because of his faith in chance. Neither of you should therefore be dismissing the other's theories as poppycock. As in the discussions on an infinite number of universes and on my panpsychist hypothesis, theists and atheists attack one another's arguments for precisely the same reasons. You are pots and kettles. But you need to climb up onto my comfortably padded fence to get the full view!