I find that strange, if God is the ultimate universal authority It would be “him” controlling what happens to the crystal, It would not be a random event happening to a crystal but a planned one. Even if a watch came together in such a way, it would not mean intelligence wasn’t part of such an occurance. To say it happened randomly requires just as much “proof” as to say it happened “intelligently”.
“Ultimate” does not mean that He would control every instance of every happenstance - it can mean simply that He is the originator of the order that is manifested in natural occurences. There’s a continuum between atheism and theistic predestinarianism that almost always gets left out of these conversations.
I wonder, even, if randomness is not just an illusion caused by our limited ability to follow cause-and-effect relationships. For instance, when you flip a coin, while the result might appear random, it isn’t really. It is completely determined by the amount and direction of the force you apply to the coin as it interacts with the amount and distribution of weight in the coin, the resistance and movement of air, etc. If you could get a reading of every force that would be involved, you could predict the behavior of the coin.
And of course, if randomness is illusiory, so is probability. They are just things that we use to describe aspects of reality which are too complex for us to predict completely at this time.
Probability is just a tool to deal - imperfectly- with our lack of complete information. The physical world is deterministic. The fact that we are not clever enough to fully know how it works doesn’t mean it is random.
Your statement assumes that there are a finite number of rules in the physical world. But that’s a different matter. Even in a purely deterministic universe, “first cause” is either designed or not designed. Since there was no cause of “first cause”, by definition, If it was not designed, it was random.
Unless it was neither designed nor random, but eternal.
That is not a deterministic view of the universe. There’s no a caused b caused c …
Unless the first cause was not a part of the universe (really, it couldn’t have been, unless you think things can cause themselves)…
Which is another way of saying it wasn’t first, in the strictest sense. “First cause” is kind of like saying “the beginning of time”, since time is how we percieve sequences of causality. But since “beginning” is defined in terms of time, the beginning of time has no meaning.
What I mean by all that is that the idea of first cause itself may be a fallacy, and that “eternal” is that same fallacy expressed in a different way.
If I ask you why ‘A’ happened you can answer : well, A happened because of B - or you can answer : A was a random event - it had no cause. The problem with the second answer is that it’s not really an answer.
So…What caused the universe ? Well, let’s say god or the “first cause” did. And what caused this “first cause” ? That’s a legitimate question…wich in my opinion can’t be answered. To say that god is a random event (if I understood you correcly) is not a big piece of information, is it ? =]
Time began at t = 0. The First Cause Argument ask the question of what happened at t < 0. What happened before time? This question does not make sense?
There are only two explanations for the universe:
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God did it.
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There is a natural, unknown explanation.
As history has revealed, time and time again, it is a natural, unknown explanation. Man has been asking questions about his environment since man could ask questions. Time and time again, the answer has been a natural explanation, not god. Who makes the Sun set? Who makes it rise? Who through lightening at me? Who nourishes the land with rain?, etc, etc, etc,
As questions to these unknown answers evolve and take different form, the abstraction of god evolves also.
What is time? Do you have a definition for it? I don’t. Who says there can’t be time before the physical universe? Before you can say that, you have to get a widely accepted definition of time.
Those are all how those things happen, not why. We still can’t predict the weather, because we still don’t know all the causal factors involved or how to measure them. So, you really have no basis in saying that some thunder god didn’t cause you to be hit by lightning. You have no way of knowing.
No one knows why gravity happens either, so who can say that God does not make the sun “rise”. Scientists like to make you believe they’ve answered all the questions, but they’ve actually answered very few. They’ve just made the questions more detailed.
Time may well not have had a beginning, but current thought and evidence indicates that the universe did. If these be the case, then there could have been time before there was a physical universe.
There is no evidence for the supernatural.
I am confident that Perkele, Taranis, Chaac, Jupiter, Zeus, etc don’t exist. Here is how science explains lightening:
http://www.public.asu.edu/~gbadams/lightning/lightning.html#explanation
Either read up on Newton or Einstein or you can create your own gravity god. The field is wide open, so you have a chance to create a monopoly.
Science has not answered ALL the question. Science helps us explain the natural world, instead of saying “god did it”. I am very biased towards a scientific explanation, than a theological/natural religion explanation.
These “the physical universe is deterministic” statements are truly hilarious. Ever heard of uncertainty principle?
Of course. And I consider such a ‘principle’ hilarious…
I like how Stephen Hawking answered with a question: "What is North of the North Pole?"
Current evidence strongly indicates that all matter and energy in our reference frame were once concentrated at a single point. That’s all it indicates. Ideas about how that point came to be and about the state of the universe - if any - before it are purely speculation. Many concrete speculations exist, but until a way is found to test them, they remain nothing more than speculation.
The universe is, by definition, all that exists and all that has ever existed (even if God or something like it exists, then He is by definition included). We talk of a multiverse - multiple universes - only because we do not yet have terms to distinguish all the matter and energy we are aware from all that exists and has ever existed. If those turn out to be different, and separate terms are needed to differentiate them, terms will be chosen.
There is no evidence that the universe “began”, nor is there any that it didn’t. Science does very well tolerating open questions, unlike some other purported methodologies for discovering knowledge.
Exactly! I would like to stress that this only applies to The First Cause Argument, where you reach a negative time. We really do not know if time had a beginning or always existed.
Why?
Still clinging to disproven hidden variable hypotheses?