Nothing (General)

by David Turell , Monday, November 30, 2009, 17:23 (5470 days ago) @ George Jelliss
edited by unknown, Monday, November 30, 2009, 17:29

dhw says that Stenger's claim: "Not only does the universe show no evidence for God, it looks exactly as it would be expected to look if there is no God." is silly.-I agree 
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> There is nothing silly about this at all. In the preface to "God: The Failed Hypothesis" he writes: "The process I will follow is the scientific method of hypothesis testing. The existence of a God will be taken as a scientific hypothesis and the consequences of that hypothesis searched for in objective observations of the world around us. Various models will be assumed in which God has specific attribiutes that can be tested empirically. -Who does the assuming? Or who is to define the concept on God? Certainly not religions. They are working on faith, and have no emperical answer. Stenger? He is extremely biased, and his philosophy is certainly muddled.The next comment of yours describes and solves the issue.-
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> This seems eminently reasonable. The only problem is that religionists often postulate a God who works in mysterious ways that are supposedly beyond our comprehension. Such a God by definition cannot be tested for.-Exactly. A God composed of theories from religion cannot be tested for. Faith is not emperical. ->
> As a simple example. If there is a benevolent God howcome all the nastiness in the world? One would "expect" something very different from this hypothesis. Nothing new in this argument of course, but it is still strong.-That is because you are attacking a God invented by religion. That is why Frank's approach and mine are more reasonable.
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> I don't see why dhw is bothered by Stenger's arguments anyway. He's an agnostic and doesn't know if there is a God of any sort or what such a God's properties might be if it did exist, and therefore he cannot provide any testable predictions. -Exactly my point. You are arguing for my viewpoint, a common atheist mistake. That is why the idea of design is appealing. In years to come if the full complexities of life are elucidated, it may be able to show mathmatically that a chance process could not have accomplished it. Sort of a proof by negativity.-> 
> DT raises the related idea: "Beyond our expanding space is what I conceive of as absolute void. Nothing, into which this universe is expanding."
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> The human mind, and indeed I should imagine any alien mind, has difficulty thinking about the universe (which is everything there is) without envisioning it as being within something else, a larger universe, even if that larger universe consists of "nothing". But the whole point of the expansion theory is that the universe isn't "expanding into" anything, it is just expanding in the sense that the distances between the galaxies are increasing. Distance, i.e. space, only exists within the universe. -I agree with your point.
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> If we allow the concept of a "nothing" that exists outside the universe, it would not have the properties of space, i.e. it would not be possible to measure distances within it, since it would then be a real space of some sort and not a "nothing". But this type of philosophically absolute nothing is not really a useful concept, it just leads to paradox.-No, conceive of it as 'no' space. it doesn't feel paradoxical to me. Just image a raisin bread baking in an oven, the old way cosmologists explained everything. "No space" is the interior of the oven, without the heat.