Cosmology: how the universe evolved (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, June 04, 2018, 13:27 (2363 days ago) @ John Kalber

REBLAK: The only unquestionable certainty is that the Universe exists. As there is neither evidence nor reason to imagine the existence of a God (or other such superpower) the simple fact is that the Universe is an eternal state of being. Eternity has no beginning and no end.

Everything known (without exception) is generated by the natural forces and material substance inherent to the Universe. Whether we can or cannot yet simulate all its actions is immaterial and has no bearing whatever on its capacity to achieve.

To claim the existence of God is mere superstition. To endow this phantom with overarching power that can create something from nothing is to be party to Wizardry. If you cannot believe in the capacity of Nature (known to exist), yet acknowledge as real something that is, most decidedly, not known to exist and simply claim it has supernatural powers, well ...

To believe that you can deduce that your God chose to build the Universe a bit at a time and that you can rationally divine that choice, beggars belief!

Welcome back! We need a good dose of atheism to re-establish the balance of this website, but I wish you had addressed your post to David and not to me, as he is the theist. I am the one who stands in the middle and rejects both his certainty and yours. My scepticism in relation to your version of events is based partly on the fact that living organisms (I include single cells) are so complex that one needs faith to believe they could assemble themselves spontaneously without any form of consciousness to guide them. (A single cell is so complex that it not only lives, but can also reproduce itself, adapt itself, and in due course evolve into multiple forms of life.) If you think that Nature is conscious, you are on the road to pantheism, which can be taken as a form of theism (i.e. God is Nature). The mystery of consciousness itself compounds the problem, and I do not exclude psychic experiences from the list of mysteries I cannot solve by way of materialism. The belief that materialistic science will eventually solve them is itself a faith. But this scepticism is balanced by the argument that we do not solve a mystery by creating another mystery. “God did it” is no more acceptable to me than it is to you, and in discussion with you, I needn’t dwell on the problems associated with such a concept. David will no doubt present his case for theism, but I will happily chip in to say why my belief is beggared both by your faith in the creative powers of chance and unthinking materials and by his faith in a sourceless and seemingly limitless conscious mind he calls God. (But I know I am wrong one way or the other.)