Theists: What would a godless universe look like?

mikkel_the_dane said:

And there is the subjectivity again. You subjectively use philosophy differently than me and then turn around and declare assumptions, which are not facts, facts.

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You make predictions all the time and you are correct about them all the time. That this is the ultimate reality or not is a complete red herring. The fact is if you can predict things regularly and with great precision and replicability what other explanation would you have for that beside the fact that the observable universe is at least somewhat knowable, fair and natural?

And again the subjectivity. God is commonly agreed upon, therefore God exists. You are doing an appeal to popularity.

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Yes, the god concept exists. Things you imagine exists...in your imagination of course, but your imagination exist. The great question of deities is not if we can conceive them, but how do they exist and what they are precisely? Note that as an atheist, I don't believe in gods, but if you tell me that your god is Kim Jung Un, I'll have to agree with you he does indeed exists and there is no reasonnable doubt about it.

epronovost said:

It's a bit of a pendantic point to be fair, but the universe isn't "a subject" with a set of rules like a game of monopoly with a set of rules of which you could still change some rules or even cheat and break the rules. What we call the observable universe itself is just a set of rules that cannot be broken.

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the Gods don't break the rules. they didn't create the rules so that they would break them.

epronovost said:

You make predictions all the time and you are correct about them all the time. That this is the ultimate reality or not is a complete red herring. The fact is if you can predict things regularly and with great precision and replicability what other explanation would you have for that beside the fact that the observable universe is at least somewhat knowable, fair and natural?
...

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Okay, one step at a time. We are in a natural universe, so you are the effect and the universe is the cause. You know that brains can trick people and they can have hallucinations and so on. In effect your brain produces your experiences and the brain is the effect of the universe.
That was cause and effect.

Now for the next step. We can't rule out a Boltzmann Brain universe. I am not talking about the actual probability of you being in one. I am talking about this: How do you test it? How do you decide based on testing where you are in one or not.
All you do as you point out, is that you figure out that your experiences are coherent. They would be so in both types of universes, they are covered by the "laws of nature" in both. In short your experiences are both caused with regularity and coherence.

Step 3. The observable universe is not observable, all you have, are your experiences. You know, that what is behind your experiences have regularity and coherence, but that is all. You don't know if the universe behind your experience are as it appears to you or different and you are e.g. in BB universe with in effect a computer and power source and you are a subprogram and the computer simulates your experiences of an universe that is not there.

Step 4. You don't even know the actual Laws of Nature in the BB universe, because your experiences don't have to match the actual BB universe. All you know, and you pointed it out, is the regularity and coherence and that it caused you.
Now that is not God. It could be natural, but you can't tell.

To sum up - you don't have control over the universe what ever it is and you can't claim you know what it is in itself as different from you, because you don't have access to that. You just have the experiences of regularity and coherence.

So here what I believe in and have complete trust in and act everyday as if it was real; i.e. with faith. I have faith in that the actual universe is as it appears to me and that you are also there as you and that you are not a simulation and what not.
I am in effect an atheist and naturalist. I just have faith in a natural universe. Indeed it might be a God of sorts, but I don't know that. I can't rule it out, so if it is a God, it is a natural God to me.
I am skeptic and I don't believe in evidence and knowledge like you do. I have tested it using a combination of science and philosophy as based on my experiences that come to me and I have found that I can't do as you and others do. I have to be honest, I act with faith as if the universe is real, but that doesn't mean it is.

Regards
Mikkel

syo said:

the Gods don't break the rules. they didn't create the rules so that they would break them.

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You can't know that. If you decide that, then you are bigger than the Gods. You don't control them and can't tell them what they should do or not. So you can't know if they do break the rules or not. If you know you would be a greater God, than them.

mikkel_the_dane said:

Okay, one step at a time. We are in a natural universe, so you are the effect and the universe is the cause. You know that brains can trick people and they can have hallucinations and so on. In effect your brain produces your experiences and the brain is the effect of the universe.
That was cause and effect.

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A bit of a pedantry, but your brain doesn't "produces experience" it analyses stimuli. It basically transform an external or internal stimuli into "an experience". The stimuli triggers an analysis which produce an experience. So in a causal chain, stimuli produces experiences is a correct formulation.

Now for the next step. We can't rule out a Boltzmann Brain universe. I am not talking about the actual probability of you being in one. I am talking about this: How do you test it? How do you decide based on testing where you are in one or not.
All you do as you point out, is that you figure out that your experiences are coherent. They would be so in both types of universes, they are covered by the "laws of nature" in both. In short your experiences are both caused with regularity and coherence.

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That's why sollypsism is a red herring. It's simply a conceptual trap since its accuracy has no effect on anything.

Step 3. The observable universe is not observable, all you have, are your experiences. You know, that what is behind your experiences have regularity and coherence, but that is all. You don't know if the universe behind your experience are as it appears to you or different and you are e.g. in BB universe with in effect a computer and power source and you are a subprogram and the computer simulates your experiences of an universe that is not there.

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"Observable universe" means the universe we can perceive. That's why it's called "observable" and it's the only universe you can and ever will be able to perceive and live in. All other conceptual universe are completely pointless. That they are true or not makes no difference what so ever and it's rigorously impossible to know that they exist or not. No matter what, even if you believe that we are in a simulation or anything of the sort, it will not change your understanding of the world, your perception of the world, your ability to live in the world, your ability to make prediction, your enjoyment of the world, etc. It's the very definition of completely pointless. Pramatic philosophy seeks to weed out and discard those completely pointless asumption. Why talk or debate things that are undemonstrable and, if true, would have absolutely no effect nor use?

Step 4. You don't even know the actual Laws of Nature in the BB universe, because your experiences don't have to match the actual BB universe. All you know, and you pointed it out, is the regularity and coherence and that it caused you.
Now that is not God. It could be natural, but you can't tell.

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You haven't defined what God is supposed to be in that context so I indeed I can't tell you if it's God or not. The only characteristic of God I can parse from your text is that God isn't natural thus you exclude, druidistic deities, animist deities, pantheism, living-gods, olympian deities, norse deities, ancestral cults, conceptual gods and probably a couple more that I might not have thought about.

To sum up - you don't have control over the universe what ever it is and you can't claim you know what it is in itself as different from you, because you don't have access to that. You just have the experiences of regularity and coherence.

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Precisely and that regularity and coherence is knowledge. You can increase your predictive capacity by studying the universe. Thus there is knowledge. What there is not, is absolute certainty, but that, in and on itself is a definitional problem, not an actual problem.

epronovost said:

A bit of a pedantry, but your brain doesn't "produces experience" it analyses stimuli. It basically transform an external or internal stimuli into "an experience". The stimuli triggers an analysis which produce an experience. So in a causal chain, stimuli produces experiences is a correct formulation.



That's why sollypsism is a red herring. It's simply a conceptual trap since its accuracy has no effect on anything.



"Observable universe" means the universe we can perceive. That's why it's called "observable" and it's the only universe you can and ever will be able to perceive and live in. All other conceptual universe are completely pointless. That they are true or not makes no difference what so ever and it's rigorously impossible to know that they exist or not. No matter what, even if you believe that we are in a simulation or anything of the sort, it will not change your understanding of the world, your perception of the world, your ability to live in the world, your ability to make prediction, your enjoyment of the world, etc. It's the very definition of completely pointless. Pramatic philosophy seeks to weed out and discard those completely pointless asumption. Why talk or debate things that are undemonstrable and, if true, would have absolutely no effect nor use?



You haven't defined what God is supposed to be in that context so I indeed I can't tell you if it's God or not. The only characteristic of God I can parse from your text is that God isn't natural thus you exclude, druidistic deities, animist deities, pantheism, living-gods, olympian deities, norse deities, ancestral cults, conceptual gods and probably a couple more that I might not have thought about.



Precisely and that regularity and coherence is knowledge. You can increase your predictive capacity by studying the universe. Thus there is knowledge. What there is not, is absolute certainty, but that, in and on itself is a definitional problem, not an actual problem.

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You are somewhat good at philosophy, but it is not science. You are doing first person justification for how it doesn't make sense to you, but I still wouldn't exist as me, if you were in a certain variant of a BB universe.
You have tried rationally to reason, how it doesn't make sense. That is philosophy not science.

Aupmanyav said:

Yeah, I was quite surprised. Then how come we have these polymers and oligomers? Biology is about substance.

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biology is about life
physics is about substance

God set the chemistry into motion at the very beginning
He did pinch the singularity and then snapped His fingers
all the rotation we see over head needed to be in play BEFORE the expansion began

as the elements form the rules take form as well
gold is noble
iron......not so much

and why do we have have complex chemistry?
so that life can form

Life as well as Physics is about what we term as substance. The chemistry is not complex. It contains only points of energy enveloped in uncertainty and probability. But it does its job well. I do not know about who snapped the fingers at singularity. Humans will probably know it in some future.

Lyndon said:

It would be a universe devoid of any kind of life.

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And you determined that, how exactly?

Super Universe said:

You didn't get the life you wanted so you don't believe in God. That's the atheist motto.

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I'm an atheist and that isn't my motto at all. I'm actually quite please with my life.
Perhaps you shouldn't assume what other people's motivations are nore what they think of their life and instead actually ask them.

What would a godless universe look like? It wouldn't exist.

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On what is that based?

Hockeycowboy said:

If there was a creator but he was evil.....there’d be no sunsets, no beautiful scenery, no tasty food. No happy times.

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Why are you ignoring all the nasty stuff that also exists?
If the existance of a beautifull sunsets is evidence of gods, is then a parasite that reproduces by laying eggs in eyeballs after which the larves eat the eye from the inside out evidence against gods?

If this is evidence for a god:


Is this then evidence against a god?




If the ugliness of the world isn't evidence against god, then why would the beauty of the world be evidence for a god? The only answer seems to be: for the purpose of a special pleading fallacy.

Maybe a better question is....Why has God stayed away for the most part?

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An obvious explanation fitting of the data, would be that gods stay away, because there are no gods.

Super Universe said:

Atheists say God does not exist, not, maybe God exists or doesn't exist. They are absolutely sure God does not exist but they have not explored even .1% of the universe so how would they know?

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That's not what atheism is.
And I'm sure people have brought that to your attention in the past as well.

People believe what they want to believe, that's why

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I don't. I believe whatever can be reasonably and rationally justified with valid evidence.
I don't "choose" my beliefs by any means, like how I would choose a steak dinner over chicken.

I belief by compulsion of what the verifiable evidence points to.
For example: all evidence points to the fact that I will die if I jump from the top of the eiffel tower. So when at the top and wishing to go down and still be able to tell the story, I'll take the elevator instead of jumping.

It is not a "choice" to believe that I'll die otherwise. I can't "just decide" to believe I'ld survive and honestly, sincerely believe it. It's just not possible.


Also, please note that atheism is defined by not believing a certain specific thing (and not by believing the opposite either)
Theism is the thing that requires "believing" something.

Atheists think, if God is a loving God then how come I didn't get the toy I wanted one Christmas?

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No, not at all. At least not in my case.
In fact, the idea of this god being benevolent or malicious, has little to no impact on my assessment of the plausibility of that god.

If a god exists, I see no reason the exclude that god of being a douche or psychopathic a-hole. I don't see why gods should necessarily be benevolent beings. Nore is their existance determined by wheter they are good or evil.

You didn't get the toy you wanted one Christmas because your parents were bad people, not because God did not exist.

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So not only do you happily pretend to be a mindreader, on top of that you also insult our parents?

Why would a godless universe not exist? Atheists and scientists think that there is a grand unified theory of everything, basically math and theory that explains how the universe formed itself without a supreme being. There is no such thing because that is impossible.

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Define "impossible".

Hockeycowboy said:

It has to do with enjoyment.
Things we consider “Horrible and disgusting” usually aren’t beneficial.

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Completely disagree.
The ability to feel pain for example, is very beneficial. It's a warning system that alerts us of danger. To not be able to feel pain or suffer, sounds nice on paper, but in reality it extremely lowers your chances of surviving to see another day.

For example, while asleep you might be caught in a fire and not wake up.
Pain impulses alert you of accute danger.

Same with desease symtoms. If you didn't have them, you wouldn't suffer. You also would notice that you are ill resulting in not getting treatment or taking necessary rest. That won't end well either in many cases.

If we didn't experience fecies as "disgusting" then that would also severely impact our health as then it wouldn't bother us that there's doodoo on the floor in the living room.

The same feelings of "disgust" also make sure that don't eat rotten food which might give us food poisoning and other horrible outcomes.

So, the things we experience as "horrible and disgussting" are extremely beneficial. Arguably actually a lot more beneficial then being able to enjoy a lovely sunset. Enjoying a sunset doesn't help you survive and stay healthy. But feelings of suffering and disgust DO.

There’s way too much purposeful interaction to really support a naturalistic view.

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What "purposefull interaction"? Care the give an example. Give me your best one.

And attraction (of molecules) does not lead to function.

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But evolution does.

TagliatelliMonster said:

And you determined that, how exactly?

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Anyone who talks about God, was taught about God, whether you are a scientist or not a scientist.

The stories and themes God, said and learnt and argued about.

If anyone owned the use of general everyday human common sense, then you would not even bother talking science, unless you chose to be a scientist...for it is only for scientific purpose, which was not and never was God.

Yet if science did not think God were not real, then they would not be arguing, would not even bother thinking about any reference to God and would just do science.

So when you have a huge organization of science that studies God concepts, you prove to your own science self that you believe that God exists.

You cannot discuss something as a condition unless it exists.

Yet for some reason science seems to conclude that God does not exist.

So then you would ask their mind, why would a scientist who named God the stone and Earth and a planet that explained how that planet created as a O body, existing, self present its own Immaculate Heavens?

Do you all own a brain problem?

If I was a human doing an assessment on science for the sake of everyday natural humanity, first I would think about a reason why you all seemingly own some mind condition.....actually and be honest about it.

What would make your mind/brain and psyche different to my own.

And common logic would state, if science did not exist until a human practiced it, designed it, built the machination for it...then controlled that machination, then the designer brain/mind would no longer exist, as the original Designer self of the statements for the beginning of science.

You would have left yourself a message for the inherited mind disappearance of self in your own future, and named that identification the bible....and today do not even seem to realize you told your own MATHS self, that by the time a particular year in the future came about, your mind lost to the conditions of AI massed/amassing feed back designed communications would finally convince you to destroy us all.

Seems like it is happening if you took a better look. Or maybe someone in your organization, not quite like you will see what I mean and take some action on behalf of real humans with consciousness before it is too late.

mikkel_the_dane said:

You can't know that. If you decide that, then you are bigger than the Gods. You don't control them and can't tell them what they should do or not. So you can't know if they do break the rules or not. If you know you would be a greater God, than them.

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?
Ask God to break a rule for you.

I only tell what I see.

Hubert Farnsworth said:

I have a genuine question for theists and it is not meant to be a trick in any way. There are many things that I would expect to see in a universe containing a benevolent, omnipotent, personal god that I don't see in this universe, which leads me to conclude that such a god is unlikely to exist. I'm curious as to what theists would expect to see in a godless universe, and how a godless universe would differ from one in which a god existed. What would you expect this universe to look like if no gods existed, and how would that be different from the current universe?

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I don't think such a universe is possible. Any universe with some kind of intelligent life will find some way of creating a God for itself.

So either a universe devoid of all life as some pointed out or one of as many Gods as there are minds which exist to create them.

syo said:

?
Ask God to break a rule for you.

I only tell what I see.

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I didn't ask to you to ask God to break a rule.
If there are rules God can't break there is something great than God.
And you can't know what God will do or not. If you do, you are greater than God.

Nakosis said:

I don't think such a universe is possible. Any universe with some kind of intelligent life will find some way of creating a God for itself.

So either a universe devoid of all life as some pointed out or one of as many Gods as there are minds which exist to create them.

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I tend to agree. Even if God isn't real, if there are minds intelligent enough to think about the possibility of a god, there will be people who believe in God. However, if God was real and is a personal god as the bible god is, I would expect no one to be an atheist.

Hockeycowboy said:

Things we consider “Horrible and disgusting” usually aren’t beneficial.

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Advice to God: next time, I would recommend to design that sort of warning system for sin, too. It would simplify things a lot.

Ciao

- viole

mikkel_the_dane said:

I didn't ask to you to ask God to break a rule.
If there are rules God can't break there is something great than God.
And you can't know what God will do or not. If you do, you are greater than God.

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I am simply saying that Gods create the rules and then they do not break their own rules.