If you really need it, it will come to you. (But hopefully somewhere else.)

I think we can agree that God is not the only potential explanation for the universe, and that it’s fine to explore other options. We certainly don’t know everything.

There’s some fascinating reading out there, though. Alan Guth’s inflationary hypothesis holds some potential for some indirect, inferential, circumstantial support for multiple universes. On the other hand, it also contains within it a pretty strong counter to your hope that other initial constants could have produced a universe conducive to complexity.

(Note that the issue is complexity. “Life as we know it” could be fairly parochial, but fine-tuning implies that no chemical/physical complexity of any kind could exist if our physical laws, constants, and–by the way–initial boundary conditions also, were not just what they were.)

The alternate stable universe you suggest, if it is to be conducive, is not possible without fine-tuning, in other words. If there were adjustments of some parameters to make an alternate universe, there would have to be incredibly fine-tuned adjustments in many other parameters in order for that universe to be stable and conducive to complexity. Based on the current science, you can’t escape it.

Serial universes get into a serious problem of infinite regress and the impossibility of a beginningless cosmos, or a beginningless series of them.

I want you to understand that theism doesn’t arise out of nowhere, and that we haven’t gone without thinking about these issues. Christianity in particular arises out of God’s interaction with His people through time and history (see links from here; I need to find a way to summarize that in shorter form). But it’s also supported by the fact that it’s a really elegant, economical answer to questions like where did we come from? Why are we here? What is our purpose? Why does life and the universe appear to be designed?

I think it was Charlie who referred to God as (among other things) the “best explanation” for these things. It’s not that other explanations can’t be put forth, and it’s not that God was concocted just for this handy purpose. It’s that where explanations are called for, the theistic answer is a very satisfyingly complete one, and in my mind, has far fewer philosophical and evidential problems than, say, multiple universes.

I’ll check out the Alvin P link.

Regarding your last point about how multiple universes also leads to an infinite regress: again, I’m not saying that I believe in the multiverse idea. I just put it forward to show that there are other ways of getting around the apparent low odds of this universe being here and supporting life as we know it. I have no idea about the origin of the universe. Another thing I didnt mention earlier regarding fine-tuning was this: while an off-setting of some of the constants by a fairly meager amount may have made this universe collapse upon itself, perhaps had their been different initial constants an alternative stable universe would have formed (and perhaps in this universe there would be eventually be analogous forms of intelligence that would talk about how unlikely their universe’s emergence was). Or perhaps no other stable universe would have been born. Or perhaps many unstable universes would have come about and collapsed, and some more stable universes may have come about and lasted longer (perhaps in parallel with each other). Now, who knows how much sense what I just said makes in terms of the objective universe. I just implied time *in between* serially-related universes. Time may not even exist outside of universes. Again, I just don’t know. But I throw out more and more possibilities among which God ideas should be considered, so as to show that God theories are only one type of possible answer.

But yes, I will look at your link.

Thank you for hanging in here! I understand the time issue, and the preference to do this kind of thing on your own blog. So I appreciate your being here, and as Charlie said, I appreciate your respectful responses even where you disagree.

If you still have time to continue…

The big thing is that the atheists who would strongly doubt the rationality of the believer are the ones who are of the opinion that believers are believing in something that has not been rationally justified….

…to be more clear about my position: I think that any position other than agnostic atheism is based on irrationality and/or ignorance (willful or not). Personal experience, in my opinion, should become far less compelling when one finds out that there have been billions of people who have had what they have deemed to be compelling personal experiences with regard to irreconcilably different beliefs.

Amazingly enough, people who talk about “rationally justified” rarely understand how hard that phrase is even to define. You would probably say something like “based on sufficient evidence,” but believers in Christ do consider their evidence to be sufficient, and can marshal strong arguments in favor of that. Charlie is right: all the positions are somewhat underdetermined by the evidence, but that doesn’t mean Christianity is unjustified.

This has been covered in quite a fascinating way in Alvin Plantinga’s Warranted Christian Belief, in which he even makes a good case for the rationality of relying on personal experience for evidence.

But I agree, personal experience sans objective verification is worth little. My personal experience of God might just as well be a misfiring in the brain or the result of too much pizza. But there is objective verification in history and in numerous other forms. I’ll refer to Alvin Plantinga again for a couple dozen or so such arguments–not to try to link-dump on you, but just to show that there are several intellectually respectable lines of evidence in favor of Christian belief.

As for the appearance of design. To invoke a designer is to immediately shoot yourself in the foot. Have you explained anything? No. You’ve just started off an infinite regress. And what’s the antidote to the regress? To simply declare that God exists outside of space and time. This is a baseless cop-out.

Is this any worse than the infinite regress you implicitly choose with multiple universes? At least with God, we have a conception of a Being that is a First Cause. The regress is not, in fact, infinite, in spite of what Dawkins and others have said. Not everything that exists logically requires a cause. The proper statement is that everything that begins to exist has a cause. A beginningless First Cause is the end of regress. And not baseless–because there are, as I said, multiple lines of evidence in favor of God. The theistic solution just fits, better then other explanations.

As for the appearance of design. To invoke a designer is to immediately shoot yourself in the foot. Have you explained anything? No. You’ve just started off an infinite regress. And what’s the antidote to the regress? To simply declare that God exists outside of space and time. This is a baseless cop-out.

This line of thinking dooms your infinite universe argument to a baseless cop-out. As I said before, all arguments regress to an unprovable (subjective) premise/axiom that cannot be reasoned to from objective reality. Empiricism has limitations ya know.

Pascal’s Wager is still weak beyond words. It’s hardly a good reason to believe in something simply because of the potential outcomes of the belief.

Pascal’s Wager is very good for its intended purpose. You must recall that Pascal was a gambler and the first expert in risk management. As you have admitted now that you have no choice but to gamble. You have to act. When you have to act, and the choices are completely undetermined by probabilities, as you’ve said, then the proper action – the rational action – is the one based upon the greatest potential reward to risk ratio.
Which God, you ask? That’s another question and you’d have to study many different things to determine which God makes the most sense of the world, which theology is internally consistent, etc. Pascal was formulating his Wager in a place and time where it was explicit which God he was talking about and the questioner was not comparing the rationality of believing in the pantheon against disbelief, was comparing the belief in the God revealed to us through His Son.

As for agnosticism being an argument from ignorance. That is a terribly ignorant statement. Agnosticism is admitted and accepted ignorance. I admit and I accept that I do not know.

My statement was not ignorant in any way. I said agnosticism is an appeal to ignorance and that’s exactly what it is. Just as the goofy theist in your scenario waves his arms in the air and determines that design must implicate a designer because of his own personal lack of imagination (this is not how we come to believe in God, by the way) is appealing to ignorance, so is the agnostic. Take the existence of fine-tuning, for example: you see no evidence (independent of this argument) for the existence of God and appeal to our ignorance in order not to make a decision. You suggest that because we can’t disprove a universal negative that there might be infinite multiple universes increasing the probability of ours being fine-tuned to what it is. You appeal to the supposed ignorance of what kinds of life-forms may exist (violating all of our actual knowledge) to say that the fine-tuning is not that special. But we are not arguing from ignorance on this subject, we are arguing from what we know (the observed fine-tuning) and our background knowledge (other evidences for the existence of God and personal experiences).

You say you see no evidence of God, and that is ignorance of evidence. As I said, this does not make the position irrational, but it is no argument against the rationality of belief by those who are not ignorant of the evidence.

As for the appearance of design. To invoke a designer is to immediately shoot yourself in the foot. Have you explained anything? No. You’ve just started off an infinite regress. And what’s the antidote to the regress? To simply declare that God exists outside of space and time. This is a baseless cop-out.

You are arguing a side issue here, namely, the applicability of ID science, as opposed to the rationality of belief in God. Making the common-sense inference that apparent design is likely real design is not a shot in the foot. And it is not an attempt to explain the design. It is acknowledging what is obvious and true. With this acknowledgment comes the ability to do many other things. The history of science is the history of men and women who acknowledged that design and, rather than shooting themselves in the foot, set about studying, understanding, modeling and explaining the design.

Okay, very well. I have to choose whether I believe or not. Pascal’s Wager is still weak beyond words. It’s hardly a good reason to believe in something simply because of the potential outcomes of the belief. If someone offers me money to believe in something, it may be rational fro me to pretend to believe to get the money, but it woudln’t make the actual belief anymore reasonable. Secondly, which God? One could apply PW to an infinite range of Gods. So what’s the point? Why not simply say “I don’t know”? Then you don’t beleive, but you’re not pretending to know of an absense of God.

As for evidence for premises. What you’ve argued for here is not the rationality of theism, but the irrationality of confidently believing in anything. If you were to ask me what I think I know for certain, the only thing I could really have any claim at is my own conscious experience itself as it is the only thing I have direct access to. The contents of that consciousness may be a big heap of illusions, but the consciousness itself is directly experienced. However, I can have pragmatic and procedural knowledge based on rational considerations of the evidence I perceive and am presented with. Hence, I will act assuming gravity will ccontinue to apply even though I have no basis for this and do not claim to know it and will admit that any such claim would be unfounded. I can act assuming that other people are out there because my experience (which is all that I have) compellingly tells me it is so in a myriad of ways. and if you were to start telling me that others are illusions, I’d have to admit that you could be correct. However, I would still have to act as if they are not because e very real and immediate consequences to going the other way. You could tell me that others are just robots with no consciousness, and I could not disprove this. However, it would not be reasonable to act as if this were true, as it would produce immediate and real negative consequences, and I certainly wouldn’t want these others (be they hallucinations or not) to start treating me like I was a mindless robot.

But as for Gods? On what grounds can such belief be rationally based?

As for agnosticism being an argument from ignorance. That is a terribly ignorant statement. Agnosticism is admitted and accepted ignorance. I admit and I accept that I do not know. I don not go and say “ohh, look at all this complexity, how did it get here. Someone must have designed it because I just can’t think of any other way it could have come to be”

As for the appearance of design. To invoke a designer is to immediately shoot yourself in the foot. Have you explained anything? No. You’ve just started off an infinite regress. And what’s the antidote to the regress? To simply declare that God exists outside of space and time. This is a baseless cop-out.

Now, of course, the rational, reasonable, common-sense thing to do in the face of all of this apparent design is to reason that it looks designed because it is designed.

I agree. So why would someone say the apparent design is not design? On what logical/empirical basis would they conclude that if it was not demonstrated to be true? I have no answer. Maybe Ron does. Seems like the reasonable thing to do – logically, empirically and philosophically – is hold on to what is apparantly true until you learn otherwise.

You can rationally prove anything if you’re going to allow for axioms that are indefensible.

Premises have no reasoned defense. You can’t reason your way to a premise, they are assumed true because they seem true.

Again, the pitfalls I’ve described above have been found in every theistic argument I’ve ever heard. They’ve been present in the premises, and no one I’ve ever heard has been able to step out of the hole without disqualifying their argument.

Naturalistic premises suffer from the same problem so I fail to see why this is unique to theistic arguments. If you can give a logical argument/reason to support a premise then it isn’t a premise is it? Ask “how?” or “why?” enough times and every naturalistic argument will suffer the same fate.

Now, you can say something like “that’s your opinion”, but when a person cites personal experience (for instance) and cannot give any reason to support the implicit notion that their personal experience is more likely to be right than that of a person of another religion, I feel pretty confident in my opinion.

SteveK: You misunderstood me. What I meant is that I do not know the answers to the big questions and those who claim they do know have provided woefully insufficient argumentation to justify their knowledge claim.

That makes sense now.

Recall above I cited a list of pitfalls that I have never heard a theistic argument avoid.

Every argument is dependent on a set of premises or axioms. Theistic arguments that don’t violate logic fail for the same reason many naturalistic arguments fail – because the person you are convincing doesn’t accept one or more premise. It’s not as if great theistic thinkers don’t have logical arguments – they do – it’s just that naturalists don’t accept the setup for one reason or another.

Charlie:

Well, to be more clear about my position: I think that any position other than agnostic atheism is based on irrationality and/or ignorance (willful or not). Personal experience, in my opinion, should become far less compelling when one finds out that there have been billions of people who have had what they have deemed to be compelling personal experiences with regard to irreconcilably different beliefs.

As for Pascal’s Wager, who ever said that we *must* choose? I don’t understand why so many people think that they’re somehow obligated to say “Yes, a God does exist” or “No, a God doesn’t exist”. Why not simply say “I don’t know”?

Debate decline accepted and understandable. They can be quite taxing.

I can’t find the previous comment you’re referring to, and I’m not sure I understand just what you’re asking.

Well, I didn’t quite get it right. Here’s the comment you made in this recent post.

There are some things I will come back to, like the misconceptions surrounding the “scientific method” we all learned in school: science doesn’t always use it, science doesn’t only use it (other disciplines employ many of the same methods). There’s some very fascinating stuff there to discuss.

I don’t claim to know anything about the big questions. I just strongly doubt that anyone else knows either.

You know nothing about the subject matter but you know enough about other subjects to conclude that everyone is probably wrong. This makes no sense at all.