> dhw: Fine up to now. But then he goes and spoils it all with this:
> 
> "It is something or Someone, that must be revealed and, in fact, has been: "In the beginning, was the Logos.""
> 
> dhw:Just like all the others, this is a presupposition, or "fiat" (strange use of the word, but certainly more applicable to religion than to science). The usual atheist pots and theist kettles.-Just because he used "Logos" you slip away from the point. The laws, principal requirements of life, the mechanics of the universe all follow rules and laws we can define with our minds. There has to be a source of such an underlying organization of information. Only a thoughtful mind could create such a structure of laws and rules.


> dhw: Yet more attributes! Rest assured, I don't keep worrying about God and evil, but I'm willing to discuss different concepts. .....I wrote earlier: "The muddled theist and atheist cling to their own woolly hypotheses and dismiss the others as woolly hypotheses, while the clear-thinking agnostic sees that they are all woolly hypotheses, and so remains neutral." That applies as much to muddled theists' woolly concepts of God as it does to woolly explanations of life and consciousness. BBella's ALL THAT IS expresses what we know, and avoids all attributes. Agnosticism par excellence!-Your agnosticism is just as muddled. You don't accept a chance development of All That Is. You do accept evolution but you are sure Darwin got it wrong by relying too much on ramdon mutation and natural selection and you have embraced epigenetics. Is Lamarck OK? You accept a first cause, but are afraid to imagine what it might be. You admit to not being able to conceptualize a first cause with consciousness. Since you continue to seek 'truth' about how our reality started can you just let a little imaginative supposition sneak in? With all this confusion whirling about, I really view your picket fence as completely non-padded.

dhw: An extraordinary non sequitur. You see yourself as a panentheist who does not endow God with any attributes, and yet in fact your God is the God of the OT! I offer you the ALL THAT IS without attributes, and you think I'm being muddled by the OT! -I feel the OT training of your childhood muddles your thinking. I make up my God as as I go along. My God does not include any trinitarian extensions, which is why He is OT only. You keep worrying about God and evil. God gave us free will and life. He doesn't worry much about evil, for what He did allows it. He arranged for a guided evolution and that implies red of tooth and claw. I do not believe He is the sweetness and light of the OT on one hand and killing off sets of people on the other. The OT makes him a complex mixture. I try to avoid all that.


> dhw:That's because you're in a designer box. But both boxes can be eternal, and if eternal energy can produce one universe, it can produce an infinite series of who knows what kind of universes, leading to who knows what kinds of life and non-life? Their nature is irrelevant to my point that an infinite series of "single file universes" gives us an infinite number of potential lucky breaks for OUR universe. The argument for one lucky break is therefore plausible even if you and I don't believe it.-Again you are at apples and oranges. I described a series of designer universes, each one fit for life. no lucky break. All we can know from science and history is First Cause (All That IS, God) is capable of starting a universe that allows life with consciousness to appear. We cannot drag any imagined reality beyond that observation.-> dhw: The first attribute you give your God is "a designer intelligence", i.e. it is conscious, and it plans (because no designer ever works without a plan), and it could hardly plan without having any purpose, and so your God ... according to the religion of David ... had the purpose of creating humans, but why did he want to create humans? Because he wanted to test their faith, to teach them the lessons of tough love (ah, God loves us). Are these attributes any different from OT Judaism?-You are correct. Not really different. But interestingly, arrived at by studying science. 
> 
> dhw; A God without attributes may as well not exist. Why not emulate BBella, and call it the All That Is? It is there, and it produced the universe and life. No name. No attributes. The perfect agnostic solution. -I don't see the agnosticism at all. See my response above. You are so bound to the God of the OT that you met in childhood you let that image muddle your thinking. Forget that God. Start on the same path I used. Just don't conjure up wooly ideas such as unorganized energy can evolve to invent consciousness.


> Yes, atheists need it and you don't. Instead you "need" your eternal, hidden, tough love God to explain your own view of the universe, which atheists would dismiss as an invention "from thin air" because you need "the hope and the hype". The fact that people need an explanation does not make it poppycock. So please let us have a straight answer, regardless of your belief system: is the theory of infinite universes PLAUSIBLE or not?-No, not at the same time as in multiverses. I supposed for my anwser to you the possibility of an infinite series of single universes, mimicking what we know about this universe. You are arguing apples and oranges. I don't need the series in my imagination to support my theism. And single file universes is no multiverse, the way the atheists exclude a designer universe. I think each was a designer universe, one at a time!-> 
> You say I'm unwilling to think outside my box, but you always revert to design. ......... From your viewpoint design is the winner. So who's in a box?-You are. This universe is designed for life or from your viewpoint appears that way. Why not accept the idea, because it makes the most sense, even without jumping the chasm of faith. All I can ever get to for sure in my thinking is a designer intelligence, always existing. I do not try to give that entity the religions' atributes of the God they describe. They do not try to describe the conclusion I've reached. I have my own religion of David.


> http://townhall.com/columnists/dennisprager/2013/06/18/why-some-scientists-embrace-the-... 
> dhw: When I asked whether your God might not have created universes prior to this one, you answered: "we can suppose an infinite number of universes in past eternity." An infinite number of universes in the present and an infinite number of universes in the past makes little mathematical difference! The point which "you persist in missing" is that if you can suppose an infinite number of universes, it is illogical for you then to dismiss the very same concept as poppycock just because atheists need it for their own theory. If it is plausible for you, it has to be plausible for them.-Your question to me was what was God doing in the past before this universe? So I conjured up a supposition that he probably made other universes, since that is what we know He does. That supposition is not part of my belief system or vital to it. You are trying to make it seem as if it is. On the other hand, the atheists (other than that fool Vic Stenger, who has a book on why it does not look designed) are threatened by the designer universe concept. They need the hope, and hype, of multiverses to defend their position. They only know of one universe, just as I do, but have to invent from thin air and squirrely math a ray of hope from infinite universes. 
> 
> DAVID: I know the quote well. Loved to read about Holmes as a child. Are all three options equally improbable in your mind?
> 
> dhw: That is a very difficult question, which has forced me into a lengthy session of introspection! The short answer is yes. But it's a complicated yes. If I could focus solely on your unanswerable design argument, I would have to acknowledge that a designer is the least improbable. If I could focus solely on eternity, infinity, the impersonality and randomness of the universe as I see it, atheistic chance would win. If I could focus solely on the meeting of individual minds through discussion, literature, music, on individual psychic experiences, and on the vast range of individual intelligences throughout the human, animal and plant kingdoms, my relatively new (to me) atheistic panpsychist hypothesis would seem the least improbable. However, each hypothesis impinges on the others, and they are always in conflict. I simply do not have the wherewithal to grasp the whole and make sense of it. No-one has. That is why you need faith to jump into your box!-A very honest analysis. As I parse your words, the weakest consideration of yours is chance. The universe is not random, but follows rules and laws that make perfect sense to us. We have decoded much of the workings of this universe, granting as we have that its basis in the quantum realm is unyieldingly obscure. That leaves the design/designer option and the evolution of intelligence proposal. But panpsychism takes its cue from the recognition that intelligence and consciousness seem to pervade the universe. From my viewpoint the balance of improbability has design the winner.


> Dhw:I asked the question because you dismissed the atheist idea of other universes as a poppycock device to avoid design. If the theory of other universes is plausible for you as a theist, because something must have preceded the Big Bang, you should grant that it is plausible for an atheist because something must have preceded the Big Bang. The fact that you don't need this plausible theory because you believe in God anyway is hardly a reason for dismissing the same plausible theory just because atheists need it!-You persist in missing my point. I don't need to imagine any other universes to support my theism. I only know this universe and what it shows me. Atheists have conjured up multiverses (with absolutely no way of proving them) to support their atheism theory.-> 
> dhw: It is not disbelief, and you have still not understood the distinction between disbelief and not believing. Theists and atheists disbelieve: you reject chance, and they reject God. I accept the possibility of chance, and I accept the possibility of God, and I accept the possibility of consciousness evolving. -I fully understand your position. It is an unwillingness to think outside your box. Reminds me of Schroedinger's cat.-> dhw: In The Sign of Four, Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes sums it up beautifully: "How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?" You and atheists are satisfied that you have distinguished between the impossible and the improbable, and you have come to diametrically opposite conclusions. I have not been able to make the distinction. For me, all three options remain improbable but not impossible.-I know the quote well. Loved to read about Holmes as a child. Are all three options equally improbable in your mind?

dhw: On 21 June you wrote: "I think we can suppose an infinite number of universes in past eternity if we presume first cause is eternal" [which you do]. Atheists "know" that non-conscious eternal energy produced this one, therefore that may be what eternal energy does, one after another. Why is it plausible for a theist to "suppose" an infinite number of universes, but poppycock for an atheist?-I 'supposed' it to answer your question of what God did all those eons before the Big Bang. I don't know what He did, and it doesn't matter to my personal theology. I only know this universe and don't need a multiverse, as the atheists do to support their position.-> 
> dhw: From my padded fence I do not believe in chance, in God, or in my panpsychist hypothesis (whether theistic or atheistic). But I realize that one of them must be closer to the truth than the others, and so I do not disbelieve or "reject" any of them. Not believing is not the same as rejecting ... a distinction many theists and atheists seem to have difficulty understanding. -Your disbelief is rational for you. I believe that two of your proposals require chance: chance itself and panpsychism as you describe it evolves on its own by chance. That leaves God and you find it rational to not accept that third choice.


> dhw: 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? -When I discussed the possibility that God might have created other universes in the past, it was a response to your question about God's past time. We theists know He created this one, therefore that may be what He does, one after another. It is not a theory, it is not a point of faith, it is a plausable answer to your question.
> 
> dhw: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. -But even you reject chance from your padded fence. How can you defend the atheists as possibly correct in their views? The evidence is skewed my way.