Not all believers in a creator are dumb, may be deaf, so accomplished atheist explain this:--
by prologos 43 Replies latest forum tech-support
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cofty
Good point
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prologos
Sir Isaac, believed in a creator, God perhaps, opined that God would have to fine tune the solar system once in a while to keep it working.
In line with this idea, believers in evolution now reason that the overwhelming evidence for the succes of that process, as explaned means
that there is no more need for a creator to help life along, therefore no need for a God. After all, the solar system, (Newton's comments notwithstanding) has done well for long enough for us to come on the scene, without the finger of God being evident in supernatural changes.
But is not the evolutionary process of life the mark of a greater genius than the one-off fixed species idea of genesis 123 ?
Is not the the idea of a benefactor, creator that has chosen to be undiscoverable a possibility, seemingly a feature even, of nature?
Once we learn how it all functions, the donor, benefactor, creator might still be anonymous, and like it that way.
No videos please, some of us are hard of hearing.
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cofty
Are you proposing Intelligent Design while carefully avoiding using the term?
There is nothing that requires the meddling of a creator so it's a superfluous notion.
Occam's Razor?
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rmt1
"fine tune the solar system once in a while to keep it working."
This is the finest argument for why we need vastly more science and statistics on extrasolar planetary systems, their accretion models, particularly the frequency of comet shielding jupiters at jupiter distances, and if at all possible, the frequency of terrestrial magnetic fields, and the frequency of terrestrial moons. The closest thing in our solar system to fine tuning is jupiter and what it does with asteroids and comets, and the moon and what it does, and the odds that it formed how it did, and what it did and continues to do for the earth. But raw numbers and computer modelling, and things called gravitational focusing, and impact parameters, and Lagrange points, and Hill spheres, and Roche lobes, and conservation of angular momentum, and virial theorem, along with hydrostatic equilibrium, can address these marvels.
Edit add: The carbon/oxygen ratio is a recent hot item in planetary science that offers questions on the prevalence of water. If there's "too much" available carbon, it grabs the oxygen and there is much less oxygen to form water. But if there is "just" the right ratio of carbon to oxygen, there's plenty of oxygen left to form water. There are a surprising number of stellar effects that can alter where the ordinarily average complement of carbon gets placed early on. So more research, more modelling, more observations, more white papers are required. Unless that happens, all we really have is a god, a firmament, two waters, an old book, an aetiology, and some people that rely on what their parents and culture told them, and their intuition, when more quantitatively and qualitatively powerful tools of analysis exist. Their choice.
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MadGiant
The god of the gaps.
A boundary where scientists face a choice: invoke a deity or continue the quest for knowledge
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Writing in centuries past, many scientists felt compelled to wax poetic about cosmic mysteries and God's handiwork. Perhaps one should not be surprised at this: most scientists back then, as well as many scientists today, identify themselves as spiritually devout.
But a careful reading of older texts, particularly those concerned with the universe itself, shows that the authors invoke divinity only when they reach the boundaries of their understanding. They appeal to a higher power only when staring into the ocean of their own ignorance. They call on God only from the lonely and precarious edge of incomprehension. Where they feel certain about their explanations, however, God gets hardly a mention.
Let's start at the top. Isaac Newton was one of the greatest intellects the world has ever seen. His laws of motion and his universal law of gravitation, conceived in the mid-seventeenth century, account for cosmic phenomena that had eluded philosophers for millennia. Through those laws, one could understand the gravitational attraction of bodies in a system, and thus come to understand orbits.
Newton's law of gravity enables you to calculate the force of attraction between any two objects. If you introduce a third object, then each one attracts the other two, and the orbits they trace become much harder to compute. Add another object, and another, and another, and soon you have the planets in our solar system. Earth and the Sun pull on each other, but Jupiter also pulls on Earth, Saturn pulls on Earth, Mars pulls on Earth, Jupiter pulls on Saturn, Saturn pulls on Mars, and on and on.
Newton feared that all this pulling would render the orbits in the solar system unstable. His equations indicated that the planets should long ago have either fallen into the Sun or flown the coop—leaving the Sun, in either case, devoid of planets. Yet the solar system, as well as the larger cosmos, appeared to be the very model of order and durability. So Newton, in his greatest work, the Principia, concludes that God must occasionally step in and make things right:
The six primary Planets are revolv'd about the Sun, in circles concentric with the Sun, and with motions directed towards the same parts, and almost in the same plane. . . . But it is not to be conceived that mere mechanical causes could give birth to so many regular motions. . . . This most beautiful System of the Sun,
Planets, and Comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.
In the Principia, Newton distinguishes between hypotheses and experimental philosophy, and declares, Hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. What he wants is data, inferr'd from the phænomena. But in the absence of data, at the border between what he could explain and what he could only honor—the causes he could identify and those he could not—Newton rapturously invokes God:
Eternal and Infinite, Omnipotent and Omniscient; . . . he governs all things, and knows all things that are or can be done. . . . We know him only by his most wise and excellent contrivances of things, and final causes; we admire him for his perfections; but we reverence and adore him on account of his dominion.
A century later, the French astronomer and mathematician Pierre-Simon de Laplace confronted Newton's dilemma of unstable orbits head-on. Rather than view the mysterious stability of the solar system as the unknowable work of God, Laplace declared it a scientific challenge. In his multipart masterpiece, Mécanique Céleste , the first volume of which appeared in 1798, Laplace demonstrates that the solar system is stable over periods of time longer than Newton could predict. To do so, Laplace pioneered a new kind of mathematics called perturbation theory, which enabled him to examine the cumulative effects of many small forces. According to an oft-repeated but probably embellished account, when Laplace gave a copy of Mécanique Céleste to his physics-literate friend Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon asked him what role God played in the construction and regulation of the heavens. Sire, Laplace replied, I have no need of that hypothesis.
Laplace notwithstanding, plenty of scientists besides Newton have called on God—or the gods—wherever their comprehension fades to ignorance. Consider the second-century a.d. Alexandrian astronomer Ptolemy. Armed with a description, but no real understanding, of what the planets were doing up there, he could not contain his religious fervor:
I know that I am mortal by nature, and ephemeral; but when I trace, at my pleasure, the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies, I no longer touch Earth with my feet: I stand in the presence of Zeus himself and take my fill of ambrosia.
Or consider the seventeenth-century Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens, whose achievements include constructing the first working pendulum clock and discovering the rings of Saturn. In his charming book The Celestial Worlds Discover'd, posthumously published in 1696, most of the opening chapter celebrates all that was then known of planetary orbits, shapes, and sizes, as well as the planets' relative brightness and presumed rockiness. The book even includes foldout charts illustrating the structure of the solar system. God is absent from this discussion—even though a mere century earlier, before Newton's achievements, planetary orbits were supreme mysteries.
Celestial Worlds also brims with speculations about life in the solar system, and that's where Huygens raises questions to which he has no answer. That's where he mentions the biological conundrums of the day, such as the origin of life's complexity. And sure enough, because seventeenth-century physics was more advanced than seventeenth-century biology, Huygens invokes the hand of God only when he talks about biology:
I suppose no body will deny but that there's somewhat more of Contrivance, somewhat more of Miracle in the production and growth of Plants and Animals than in lifeless heaps of inanimate Bodies. . . . For the finger of God, and the Wisdom of Divine Providence, is in them much more clearly manifested than in the other.
Today secular philosophers call that kind of divine invocation God of the gaps —which comes in handy, because there has never been a shortage of gaps in people's knowledge.
As reverent as Newton, Huygens, and other great scientists of earlier centuries may have been, they were also empiricists. They did not retreat from the conclusions their evidence forced them to draw, and when their discoveries conflicted with prevailing articles of faith, they upheld the discoveries. That doesn't mean it was easy: sometimes they met fierce opposition, as did Galileo, who had to defend his telescopic evidence against formidable objections drawn from both scripture and common sense.
http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/tyson/read/2005/11/01/the-perimeter-of-ignorance
take care
Ismael
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rmt1
Clarion.
I recall a sensation that bordered on mystical as I watched my orbital mechanics code spit out these columns of numbers for an arbitary eliptical orbit. I could see how the planet sped up at perihelion and slowed down at aphelion. The kinetic energy remained half the potential energy at all points, when the numbers reached max at perihelion and when they reached min at aphelion. A bound orbit, you see, is characterized by the gravitational potential energy being twice that of the kinetic energy of the orbiting body. I had heard about this. But it was entirely different, sepuchral, seeing it with my own eyes. All the code had was a number and an operation. It operated on the number. It spat out a new number. That number became an input. But the effect of these many tiny operations - that was an entire orbit, repeated ceaselessly.
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Apognophos
Of course it could be considered evidence of a creator that the universe is so fine-tuned that life was able to evolve, except for a couple big problems:
1. We don't know how hard it is for life to evolve. There's life on this planet which doesn't require oxygen. There are plants that don't need soil. There are bacteria that grow in kerosene. With all this incredible variety, and not having properly explored even one planet yet (the Mars Rover is nice, but doesn't count for much), we simply can't say whether life is a natural result of chemical processes of all sorts or whether it needs really specific conditions to develop.
2. We don't know how many tries the universe has taken to develop life. If the universe continually undergoes a big crunch and big bang, its values could be getting altered each time until finally conditions are just right for life. Of course such a process of continual rebirth would be rather miraculous itself, but because we still know so little about the universe, it could just be as natural as ripples in a pond. Another possibility is that there are basically an infinite number of parallel universes coexisting (as suggested by some quantum physicists).
In either case, we could be talking about a situation where, even if the odds of life developing are one in a trillion, if there's a trillion universes that exist or have existed, one of them is going to develop life. Since we don't know how many universes there are or have been, we can't state what the odds are that life is here, so we have no basis for saying that it's incredible. It's not a very satisfying answer, but there you have it.
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jgnat
Prologos: Sir Isaac, believed in a creator, God perhaps, opined that God would have to fine tune the solar system once in a while to keep it working.
This is the logical fallacy of "appeal to authority". I think Sir Isaac Newton went off the rails later in life in his occult studies.
His prediction for the latest date for end of the world is 2060. My granddaughter will have to debunk that date.
Prologos: Is not the the idea of a benefactor, creator that has chosen to be undiscoverable a possibility, seemingly a feature even, of nature?
Early theories to explain expanding space, gravity, and the nature of light included the thought that there is aether in which everything is suspended. We now have light pretty figured out and it turns out that at the atomic level and smaller, electrons have qualities of both energy and matter. No invisible, yet-to-be-defined ether required.
Occam’s razor points to the simplest solution; no invisible, anonymous intervener required.
I should mention as an aside that I do call myself Christian and I do pray to God. I however, won't ignore where logic leads me, or expect the bible to make scientific sense.