Flew's position, if you're characterizing it correctly, is ridiculous. It's the opposite of the Copernican Principle, an ugly proposition that was hawked by one of Slate's writers for a while. Follow the link if curious. Both ideas make the mistake of assuming you can deduce the probability of our existence based on the fact of our existence -- a single data point. That's a lousy idea.

But Flew aside, I don't find Julian's argument very convincing. Requiring epistemological parsimony of the Underlying Cause of Everything is pointless. Assuming such an investigation is coherent at all, the first principle of the universe is inevitably going to be arbitrary, since everything follows from it. It won't be grounded in any underlying principle, principles will be grounded in it. If you can't do any explaining beyond that point, it's incoherent to talk about the complexity of the underlying cause's explanation.

At some level the universe is just a fiat. Whether that fiat comes from an equation or a consciousness, I've got no idea. But I know the latter is a much more comforting idea.

It would seem that Habermas finally got to Flew, which is too bad

Damn! Use first names, please.  At first I thought you meant the real Habermas and worried he had gotten keen on Jesus without me noticing.

If you are talking about carbon based life... and anything outside carbon based life is currently star-trek-like science fiction... but if referring to carbon based life, there are a number of environmental requirements necessary for life to be possible... and an number of additional requirements for life to be reasonably plausible.

The argument here is simple. If it can be determined that the chances of enough of these environmental requirements "coming together" by chance is so outrageously rare... to a point where the number of "attempts" needed is millions of times larger than the number of estimated stars in the Universe, then it is reasonable to conclude:

(1) it is highly doubtful that life is on other planets

(2) our existence in the first place is practically a miracle. (there are interesting parallels between these odds and the difficult odds surrounding the possibility of a single celled creature "coming together" from raw materials)

Basically, where this all comes together is the fact that some of these requirements are independent of each other. For example, suppose that there is a 1/10 chance that a pickup truck will pass by your house today. Then suppose that there is also a 1/10 chance that a green vehicle will pass by your house today. Therefore, there is roughly a 1/100 chance that a any particular vehicle that is BOTH green and a truck will pass by your house today. Notice that you have to multiply the denominator (not simply add them). Therefore as you increase the simultaneous things that have to happen just right, the odds become order of magnitudes more rare.

Next consider what would happen if these 1/100 type odds were 1/million type odds. Next, consider what would happen if there were hundreds of these requirements multiplied with each other... you are now talking about odds which are easily considered beyond impossible to occur by random chance.

Many evolutionists will say "well, we're here". But consider this. If you were sentenced to die by firing squad and the best and most loyal sharpshooters were all arranged to shoot you at the same time from short range. Next, ALL bullets missed you or misfired. What would a reasonable person conclude? They would conclude that there was a conscious, mindful, or guided reason or motive or purpose involved. Perhaps they purposely decided to shoot blanks only to scare you? Only a fool would conclude that ALL ten sharpshooters actually missed and/or the guns malfunctioned by random chance alone.

BTW, the leading book on this is called The Privileged Planet

Just to preemptively rescue the thread: I'm hoping we can argue this question in epistemic terms, not an empirical handicapping of evolution.

Sorry, Miguel! I'm deducting 10 points from myself for sloppy exposition.

preemptively rescue the thread
...whatever...

but let me add, Kriston said:

One eventually wants to come to terms with the mechanism by which the Creator Created, so there still exists a need for a scientific account of the process

...something which we should seek and ask about...

However, NOT ever finding a satisfactory answer here doesn't rule out the possibility of a Creator. In fact, itt strikes me as funny when philosophical naturalists demand that the supernatural must be ruled out unless a full natural explaination or naturalistic accounting of the supernatural is available.

If my 2 year old doesn't understand why he is getting a vaccine shot, his lack of understanding doesn't take away from the reality/fact/truth/purpose of the procedure.

An atheist is just someone who's too smart for his own good. Without faith, and mysticism, life would be truly boring.

Kriston, you hit on something that might explain it all, the parallelism of the rise of human intelligence and God. Perhaps the fact that the second exists is because the first exists. We see the creation story as something close to our own, that is we prefer a story that is about us rather than about something else. Reminds me of the Ptolemaic solar system--its about us at the center. It will probably have the same fate.

J. Scott Barnard:

There are plenty of mystical and faith-filled relgious experiences that have very little or nothing at all to do with God.

the flaw in Rob McEwen's reasoning (and that of the Gonzalez & Richards and the authors of Rare Earth, Ward & Brownlee) is that they are essentially trying to make assertions about probabilities which have very large error bars and for which the data is scanty. The thing both studies lack is a sufficient recognition that, when the system is sufficiently complex, our models can easily underestimate the number of options simply because we are not being sufficiently imaginative.

This is especially disappointing since good counter examples are already clear. For example, one of the things that is very hard to model is the formation of planets. It is a complex process more like weather than physics, so it is not well-suited to simple cartoon models which work fairly well for gross properties of things like stellar mass/age relationships. Well, the formation rate of planets is one of the crucial factors in the Drake equation (or any of these probability chains that Rob McEwen mentions). For years and years, people were predicting that it would be hard to form planets or solar systems with the multiple planets. the arguments were things like: they won't form in binary systems (too distruptive) & most stars are in binaries. they won't form without the right protostellar disk densities, etc. But in the end, it is starting to look like essentially every system we look at has a detectable planet, and planets in orbits that were thought very unlikely for the same sorts of arguments. We are also realizing that many more orbits may be stable than we originally thought (mostly based on discovering objects in those types of orbits in our solar system or amoung the moons). Thus, the probability of a given star having a planet is starting to look closer to 100% than the 1% originally included in incarnations of the Drake equation.

Another example where people should be more careful about arguing down the probability is the probability of a habitable planet in a particular system. This has always hinged on requiring an earth-type planet in the habitable zone, which in turn requires a large planet at the right distance to provide the stability. Well... we now realize that binary planets are far more common than thought, large moons are basically ubiquitous, and migration from outer to inner solar-system is far more common than we thought. Rather than an earth at 1AU and jupiter at 5AU, we can have earth orbiting jupiter both at 1AU. I won't even go into the size of the habitable zone and how we keep finding life in places we did not expect to find it (volcano vents, antarctic submerged lakes, etc).

In other words, giving up and saying, 'this is just too unlikely, it must be GOD!' is the refuge of the lazy.

The people who strive to attack evolution or abiogenesis on rational grounds are really quite a show. It's like they WANT to be intelligent but they've just always had something holding them back... a childhood of dogma perhaps? Their values are those of empiricism and evidence, yet they can't even see what's right in front of their own face.

Why does there have to be a Creator?

Isn't the most rational position to affirm the irrationality of attempting to rationally deduce the existence or non-existence of God?

Can something emerge from nothing? If so, that's irrational, but allows for a Creator. If not, then there is no Creator, because there is no Creation per se, since what is will always be and always has been infinite in duration without beginning or end.

Now, if the argument is simply a more parochial argument about the Creator of our own universe, or our own DNA, or ourselves, independent of cosmic 'what is and will always be' considerations, then we are still far away from having the available information to make a sound argument, and we are also not debating aethism and belief in terms of the God of Abraham, who is the be-all end-all of all existence, i.e. 'what is and will always be'.

Instead, we're just arguing if there is a local God (or sheriff) who created us, or perhaps some aliens (or, even more intriguing, perhaps ourselves).

In any case, the matter of our being here conscious within this cosmos is truly a miracle, since the most sensible stance to take, should one insist on taking one, is that something cannot come from nothing, and therefore this cosmos or miracle we are amidst 'is and will always be' - imminent, infinite, and forever (in whatever forms and fields it may take).

That's the true miracle - that there is no Creation, and no Creator, in the biggest picture. And once we accept that, since having no evidence or reason to deny it, arguing over our own creator and parochial neighborhood gods or aliens may make for great fun, but it's certainly not an argument one could carry on with St. Thomas Aquinas. Instead, it's just an argument between two sets of non-believers, one who proudly does not believe (smug), and one who desperately seeks reasons to believe (guilty).

Meanwhile, the wiser among us refrain from taking a position either way, and especially refrain from any argumentation on the matter beyond simple explication of the absurdity of the whole affair.

If you are a believer, due to personal revelation, more power to you. Perhaps both the aethists and the agnostics are similarly envious...

Nice job on the Drake equation, Astroguy.

I also think that Rob McEwen conflates the issue of probabilities in the Drake equation with the issue of likelihood of universal constants being what they are; the former having to do with the likelihood of ET, the latter to do with origins of the universe/creation.

While one can argue over the values in the Drake equation, I have not been persuaded that it even makes sense to discuss the Gravitational constant, Permittivity, etc., as values that are more or less likely than any other. Put another way, arguments of the form "The physical properties of the universe that make life possible are so unlikely that there must be a simple explanation (i.e. God)" is not coherent to me. Maybe it's related to Astroguy's comment about current science not having sufficient imagination, but it seems more existential than that.

Can something emerge from nothing? If so, that's irrational, but allows for a Creator. If not, then there is no Creator, because there is no Creation per se, since what is will always be and always has been infinite in duration without beginning or end.

So, to summarize...
as it was in the beginning /
it now and ever shall be /
world without end /
amen, amen

Okay, triteness over. But there is a point to that: the creation of the universe as science understands it is, at some level, axiomatic. At some point you have to say "that's just the way it is; there's no quote-unquote reason for it being that way". Explaining patiently that time didn't exist before the Big Bang doesn't really help -- there's still a disconnect with the empirical tradition. Presumably we'll arrive at a theoretical framework from which everything follows, but it seems inevitable that that framework will seem arbitrary.

I think this is more our fault than the universe's. We're limited by our explanatory algorithms. Admittedly, the deterministic idea that events have causes is more sophisticated and useful than the -- let's say animist -- idea that actions are performed by actors. But when you drill back far enough in the causal chain, determinism falls apart, too, because there will be something that doesn't have an antecedent cause. That doesn't invalidate determinism, but it does mean that both approaches require a leap of faith of sorts. Given that, I'm not sure that there's an obvious reason for preferring a secular, scientific explanation over a properly-constrained Deist account.

"Noted athiest thinker"

atheist

[Typo corrected.]

Tom: A Deist account is an introduction of an actor, not a cause, so long as the Deist account assigns the Creative motivation with intelligence. Though your first causal mystery is in some sense addressed by the submission of a Creative agent, you are left with 1) the problem of arriving at a descriptive naturalistic account of the universe, a problem that is not mitigated by original intelligent motivation and would presumably be solved without reference to said Creation, unless we're invoking magic; and 2) yet another question to account for, the causal factors responsible for the Actor, which I assume would be chalked up to an irreducible mystery. There's singularities no matter which way you go, sure, but God is less satisfying by a number of criteria.

A Deist account is an introduction of an actor, not a cause, so long as the Deist account assigns the Creative motivation with intelligence

I agree. My point is just that a first cause or a first actor both stop being explanatory and start being declarative at some point.

There's singularities no matter which way you go, sure, but God is less satisfying by a number of criteria.

The only one that immediately comes to mind is that deterministic scientific explanations have worked for everything else, so why not assume it applies universally? But surely the first event, ever, qualifies as a special case that might require special treatment.

Practically speaking, I don't know what I believe, or which option to favor. I suspect that the idea of a first actor is an artifact of some basic aspect of human social understanding, or maybe even our underlying biology. But just because it's an intuition doesn't mean it's necessarily wrong, and I just don't see a convincing reason for preferring one account over another.

I'm hopeful that if we can develop a rigorous scientific accounting of how consciousness arises we'll be able to make more informed guesses about all of this (that's right, cognitive science: the answer to everything).

There are plenty of mystical and faith-filled relgious experiences that have very little or nothing at all to do with God.

Good.

astroguy:

You make a lot of good points. However, the problem here is that you are conveniently arguing against 40+ year old versions of my point. Science has matured since then in a number of ways (on both sides of this issue).

You may be correct that a few things once thought rare back then may not be so rare... However, many additional things have now come to the attention of scientists as having been extremely fine tuned regarding earth as well as necessary for life. It is the combination of the many dozens of unique and necessary requirements that demolish the few parts that you rail against. The audience at this site may willingly accept your arguments because they are predisposed to that point of view in the first place. However, if anyone here were to actually read either "The Privileged planet" or some of Hugh Ross's analysis of this subject, they would then likely view your points as they would the defense attorney’s presentation at the O.J. Simpson trial... very convincing if that is all you hear... but not so convincing if you've heard most of the best arguments from both sides.

Rob W. said:
There are plenty of mystical and faith-filled religious experiences that have very little or nothing at all to do with God.

Good point. However, while many of these (non-theist) mystical and faith-filled religious experiences are simply experiences (i.e. emotions)... some involve claims of extra-material or supernatural phenomena. (out-of-body experiences, predicting the future, "remote viewing", "mind over matter", & other physic phenomena).

If you want to be a consistent materialist (or naturalist), you have to discount these supernatural phenomena as fantasies or delusions in the same way that you would discount the supernatural claims of organized theistic religion. You can't say that one is phony "because it is not proven" without saying the same for the other.

...but isn't it interesting how many people do just that... they reject God because Evolution "killed God", but years later embrace "new age" mysticism complete with a belief in supernatural occurrences.

The underlying motive is obvious. People don't want to believe that we might actually be ultimately morally accountable to a Supreme Being.

Actually, Rob, I doubt that anyone else here is arguing about a God to whom we ought to feel morally accountable. In defense of your model it least addresses the metaphysical conundrum of adding a hyperconscience to the universe, even if only to tell science to scram—that preserves in some sense a realm of science and a realm of faith (magic, if you will). It seems to me that Flew's model does no work toward a descriptive/explanatory account of the universe, and potentially confounds it by submitting an inexplicable new metaphysical agent in the name of explaining natural phenomenon. I guess we can quibble as to whether Flew's Creator is metaphysically distinct or some set of observable natural phenomenona "intelligently organized" or something, but then the utility of Creation really drops off the scale.

So. Anybody see Star Trek V? As if God would need a ship—what was that all about?

the whales were supposed to be God?

Drake's equation falls victim to Bertrand's Paradox.

That is to say, there is no justification for the inherent choice of a probability distribution, rendering the calculation arbitrary and indefensible.

The claim that life is rare in the Universe is premature, and founded upon an unreasonably inadequate set of data points.

Nice try melior... but Bertrand's Paradox depends on an infinate number of possibilities. However, according to the leading scientists (non-creationist ones, btw), the Universe is NOT infinate, but rather, is finite.

There are rough estimates as to the size and scope of the Universe and... suppose that they were mistaken and the Universe were 1,000 times larger that what we know about today... this still wouldn't present enough possibilites to overcome the odds I've referred to.

Also, to be sure, when you say "Drake's equation", you are referring to a hypothesis from 1961 which is but a shadow of its more contemporary versions. (But I'm sure that you knew that... you probably meant this whole line of thinking in general.)

An atheist is just someone who's too smart for his own good. Without faith, and mysticism, life would be truly boring.

If you're making the assertion that my life must be boring for me because I lack faith and mysticism, you're incorrect. If you're only making the assertion that your life would be boring for you without faith and mysticism, then the only "atheist" one may conclude is "someone who's too smart for his own good" is a parallel you who lacks the faith and mysticism but shares the requisite other traits, and who exists only hypothetically. Or perhaps you're asserting that a parallel me who exists only hypothetically finds life even less boring than I do-- so much so that his non-boredom makes my non-boredom seem like true boredom.

But either way, am I to conclude that faith and mysticism fulfill the same function as-- in my life anyway-- first person shooters?

All this was throroughly investigated by David Hume ages ago. The design argument is fundamentally weak, and more importantly it tells you nothing at all about the designer.
And Flew really read and understood Hume, apparently this must be a distorsion or a misquote.

...maybe some reading this thread will finally realize how/why atheists are dogmatic about their religion called atheism. They will do/think anything to hold onto it, in spite of the scientific evidence.

Don't get me wrong. I haven't proven God. Also, there have been some good points made on their side of the argument, too. However, the way they jump to a declaration of victory so quickly without near enough facts/evidence/arguments to back themselves up is so telling. You can tell that they desperately want to be correct, regardless of the evidence.

It seems to me that Rob McEwen is committing the glorious non sequitur of conflating an "existence" of god (whether or not that's true) with validating his own brand of theism.

Whether or not there's a superior intelligent being in the universe doesn't change the facts of physics and biology that we observe.

There may very well be a "Q" like being (from Star Trek) that exists somewhere. That doesn't invalidate proven observations of decent with modification, for example.

kmw:

On the contrary, I never said anything that would indicate that I thought that this proof for a "higher power" was necessarily proof of the existance of my God. Read the thread. It's not in there.

What I did say was that I had reason to believe that many here didn't like to believe in a Supreme Being because of the fear that they might be morally accountable to such. The fact that others may or may not have this fear... which would equate to a fear of the existance of my God (who is both loving and jealous) rather than "Q" ...this fear is not the same thing as whether or not I'm stating that this scientific particular scientific evidence proves my particular God (the God of Moses and Abraham, to be sure!). I guess I see how it would be easy to make such assumptions or draw such conclusions about what I said... but, technically, you've put words in my mouth.

Rob McEwen said:

• but, technically, you've put words in my mouth.

Fair enough.

Ultimately, I conclude that most people probably don't fear moral accountability to a supreme being, because they already don't fear being accountable to:

*their employer
*to the government
*spouse and relatives

If the root of your question is, "why don't more people believe..." I'm definitely not one to answer that for anyone.

I'm going to make a guess, and assume that you follow some form of Protestant line of thought. Would that be correct? Just curious.

I do, however, think most people fear aging and/or death, which is more relevant to the subject at hand.

You can manipulate or deceive your employer, government, spouse, and/or relative (as least some or most of the time)... but you can't trick a Supreme Being who is omnipotent and omniprescent.

Regarding the question, "why don't more people believe..."

Luke 13:22-35
He went on his way through towns and villages, teaching and journeying toward Jerusalem. And someone said to him, "Lord, will those who are saved be few?" And he said to them, "Strive to enter through the narrow door. For many, I tell you, will seek to enter and will not be able.

Here (according to the Bible), Jesus clearly says that MOST will not believe... and this is reenforced in a number of other places in the Bible as well.

...but I think we are getting off track from the original discussion... I just wanted to address your questions...

Maybe if Rob would learn to spell "existence," I'd believe he's actually thought about this stuff.

"What's befuddling is why any of these considerations are supposed to provide any support whatever for the God hypothesis. To think that they do seems to rely on a kind of ignotum per ignotius: We have no satisfying account of complex phenomenon X, so we explain it in terms of, even more complex phenomenon Y, a mind capable of consciously producing X. Why is this supposed to be satisfying? Why, in the absence of a culture in which religion is pervasive, would anyone resort to this kind of explanation? Indeed, why would anyone count it as an explanation at all?"

Hmmm...claims of divine revelation (and religious history) and extensions of the concepts of consciousness are just two sources that come to mind. Flew's book on his "conversion" makes the specific point that he finds the explanation of God less complex than the naturalistic possibilities being offered by atheists and scientists, so this may simply be a matter of opinion. The oneness of universal physical laws and indeed their existence also seem ill-explained by a conceptualization of the universe that relies on the absence of a controlling intelligence. Flew seems to be asking if it is really reasonable to presume that these complex and universal (in the most practical sense of the word) elements/attributes came about through a process corresponding to chance? If so, then not simply the how (which remains ever elusive) but the probability are legitimate avenues of investigation. It is no longer enough to say, "well it just happened," in the same sense as one might claim they got the winning lottery ticket. Only the presumption of naturalism allows for one to assume that this is the simpler explanation.

"One eventually wants to come to terms with the mechanism by which the Creator Created, so there still exists a need for a scientific account of the process. Having arrived at that description, the need for a magical Creator will have been obviated..."

Not at all. There is all manner of physical phenomenon that can only be ultimately explained by intelligent action. For example, one can develop a scientific account of the process of watchmaking for example, and still easily determine the necessity of the watchmaker.

"?the universe is a hostile quark soup for a long time before it becomes the seat of the genius of man?so this parallelism becomes less satisfying the more descriptive your account of the universe gets."

On the contrary, the more complex the universe gets, the greater the argument for the necessity for some outside agent as Creator becomes. Increasing complexity only adds to the unlikelihood of chance or happenstance as an actor on the creation of rationally behaving laws and symmetries.

Considering that in the vast majority of theistic views, including Flew's, that an actor God would exist outside of the ordinary material (and thus temporal) realm, the time factor becomes rather meaningless. Flew's book contains a few good references to the idea of time in relation to an intelligent creator and the ideas he forwards, while only briefly described in the book, seem spot on, especially as they deal with a considerable problem in materialism - the relationship of space-time to the infinite.