Junk DNA: goodbye!: Review article (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, March 18, 2015, 21:11 (3538 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

TONY: Actually I wrote “If the parameters of physics were not as they are, the universe could not exist. Period.” Not that it could not exist in it's current state, it simply could not exist.”-Aw shucks! On Sunday 15 March at 20.20 (at the end of your analysis of the cosmos) you wrote: “It isn't just that the universe is fine tuned for life, it is fine tuned for the universe as we know it to even exist!” On Monday 16 March at 21.22, I said I regarded this argument as a dead end, and on Tuesday 17 March at 06.50 (what were you doing up so early?) you rejected the “current state” - or “as we know it” - argument you yourself had put forward, and replaced it with the quote above about physics. Frankly, it doesn't make much difference. I agree that it's pure speculation to argue that “If the parameters of physics were not as they are, they would be different, and so we might have a different universe”, but I am not championing the multiverse theory. I am not championing any theory. We only know (a little of)what we have, and it's also pure speculation to assume that what we have is all there is, or that we know all the possibilities of what we have, or that what we have is specially designed by an unknown designer to be the way it is, or that what we have has to be as it is because that's how it is and so there's no need for a designer.-Dhw: A person of reason will agree that there is no evidence that chance can create life. A person of reason will agree that there is no evidence of a vast, eternal, sourceless, superintelligent mind/power/being that somehow knew from nothing how to create a universe and life. A person of reason can then decide to leap towards chance, or leap towards God, and fill the gaps in his/her knowledge with all kinds of unprovable theories. Or a person of reason can decide not to leap at all.-Tony: If "A person of reason will agree that there is no evidence that chance can create life" then there is only one other possibility.-Why do you ignore the rest of my post? If a person of reason agrees that there is no evidence of Big Daddy in the sky (Our Father who art in Heaven), then there is only one other possibility. That is why so many scientists are atheists. Then they and you try to fill the gaps with your nebulous theories.
 
DAVID: I hate to gang up, but that has been my constant refrain. Dhw keeps looking for a third way, but there is none. His day dream of the interaction of matter and energy somehow conjuring up the design of this universe when they are both two aspects of the same thing, makes no sense at all. [...] Reasoning to the simplest solution which can explain all is a reasonable approach. It doesn't explain the mind of God...-Ganging up is perfectly natural. Theists and atheists do it all the time, and theists even gang up against each other, because it's so difficult to read a mind that might not exist. You personally like to distance yourself from such conflicts by refusing to give any attributes to the designer. I must say that for me a God without attributes might just as well not be there, so I wonder why you don't just say “SOMETHING” caused life but we don't know what it is. Wouldn't that be "the simplest solution"?