The odds for God (Introduction)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Friday, May 20, 2011, 22:41 (4915 days ago) @ David Turell

Contrary to Matt's approach, it is appropriate to figure odds for God from what we know about our physical reality and about the biology of life. Read this summary of an Oxford professor's book, "God's Undertaker--Has Science buried God?", by Prof. John Lennox. Note in this review numbers in the thousands are really ten to a power. The author apparently didn't know how to type them. Lennox is a mathematician/philosopher who doesn't follow Matt's reasoning at all. I feel vindicated, since I am not a math person!
> 
> http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/has_science_buried_god/-Don't. He makes the same mistake as everyone else; that it's feasible to compute odds in the presence of asymmetric information. It's worse than a weather calculation. That entire article is practically a copy/paste of the same arguments we've discussed here, only this time from a mathematician. His analysis--and yours rests on the assumption that statistics can yield a proper result in the presence of asymmetric data. It can, but only in instances where the statistical model can be falsified. -The entire ID argument is fluff built around the fact that we don't know how abiogenesis happened. (Again I use abiogenesis to mean the event that sparked life from nonlife, however this occurred.) -A different tact: Actuarial analysis (I'm a programmer at an insurance company, mind you!) is in the business of computing the odds of some pretty far-out events; but these statistics are only computed upon actual data. You can't predict the odds of say, abiogenesis--when we don't posses the knowledge to replicate it. You can't compute odds without full knowledge of the system. Seriously. I'm not making this up. You take Lennox's argument to an actuary and he'll laugh you out of the room! -You can give it your best guess--Lennox's "weather prediction"--but the correctness of your prediction can only be determined by actually conducting the experiment. -As a side note, I recently saw a stab that discusses the "fine-tuning" for life in the universe. Looking at identical data, when you consider that life as we know it only exists on a fraction of the 4% of "normal" matter in the universe, you get a sudden picture that the universe is actually inherently hostile to life. NOT fine-tuned for life. -If you can draw two disparate conclusions from the same data, in math we call that an unsolved problem.

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\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"