Yes I am familiar with Linde's take on that, he is usually a little tongue-in-cheek about it, but even that slight possibility... well what are the odds? e.g. if they are a trillion to one, this could easily be far less improbable than complete fluke, and does not preclude the common conception of God at all. There are several studies, at Bonn for one, seriously investigating direct signs of intelligent coding in the fabric of our universe- things like specific digital resolutions to space/time, data compression algorithms that reflect our own techniques etc.
Just as atheism eventually morphed to accommodate the primeval atom it once mocked
, 'OK so maybe there WAS a creation event, just not a deliberate one'
we are beginning to the signs of ID being eventually accommodated likewise
'OK so maybe it WAS intelligently designed, just not by God'
atheism of the gaps again ?
we are the only beings we know of that are sentient, aware of, capable of exploring and appreciating creation, and hence giving thanks and sharing love with it's creator- is this in any way inconsistent with our being it's primary intended beneficiaries?! We have an ear on an entire galaxy and hear nothing but deafening silence. Puzzling? remember Lemaitre was right, the universe DID develop from a tiny seed, a literal self extracting archive of information..
why create a small 'Truman show'/ Copernican world where we soon bump up against the wall- when for the same 'price' you can have a wondrous awe inspiring cosmos to explore. i.e, to me the former would be far more consistent with an unintended fluke, than the latter
well the jury is still out on that, but regardless-
appreciating creation is all about learning, investigating, progressing, stripping the layers one by one, having our curiosity and ingenuity tested to it's limits, drawing us out and beyond ourselves and our planet. The world acheives this balance incredibly well, as we might expect from a good design. Again without God, this would have to be chalked up to yet one more staggering coincidence.
because of love, the ultimate motive and hence power of explanation for the universe existing at all. You cannot have good without bad, we must know both and choose good, choose love. That's the point of free will. You cannot force somebody to love you, or it's not love is it?
Why is the possibility Linde suggests slight? There seems to me to be no particularly good reason for favoring the Deity hypothesis over this one, and no real way of estimating the probability of either, although I suppose the pocket universe explanation does have some theoretical foundation that the former lacks.
There is also the problem of attribution. Such a God could exist, as you posit, without creating us intentionally. Even if we conceded the cosmological argument, for example, it is not necessarily an argument for human life. Perhaps God fine tuned the universe for dolphins, perhaps for a different, alien intelligence that exists in another corner of the galaxy or in a different galaxy altogether. Maybe the particular intelligence God wanted to create was created and fulfilled its purpose, and now the universe is totally without purpose. I mean, there’s an awful lot of space out there, where presumably there are other planets that are capable of supporting life. And if there are not, it is puzzling that an omnipotent God would create that vast canvass instead of adopting the pre-Copernican model, if we are the intended end result.
I have no idea why books like the Bible would play any role. Language itself is fairly new, and whatever influence those books have had, it is still a relatively new development in the collective timeline of our species.
Concerning other species: Actually, we are not really the only beings so capable of the things you describe. There are a host of others (primates, cetaceans, cephalopods, etc). Granted, they do not have human sentience, human awareness, human capabilities of exploration and the (entirely subjective and ill-defined) appreciation of “creation.” We really have no idea if they have religious sensibilities, although we do have strong evidence that the Neanderthals did, in fact, have some religious sensibility, based on ritual burial practices, including possible evidence of secondary burial.
Concerning extraterrestrial intelligence: I am not as bothered by the “deafening silence” as you are. The fact of the matter is that the time and space scales are simply vast and enormous, and our failure to detect radio signals is entirely understandable, particularly given the relative youth of our own radio technology and the possibility, if not probability, that the technology passes out of use over time and is supplanted by other communication technology that does not illuminate the cosmos. After all, if light speed is the true limit and cannot be easily circumvented or circumvented at all, we would anticipate these signals to reach us perhaps long after the civilization that sent them had disappeared, or for our own signals to reach distant civilizations only thousands to millions of years into the future, if at all. A signal that passed us by in 1000 C.E. would have been unnoticed, for example, but a thousand years later it might have been successful.
And beyond that, you have to be looking for signals in order to find them if they are out there, which has only recently been the case for humans. Moreover, this assumes that the signals would be intelligible to humans, which is quite an assumption given that the operation of natural selection in a wholly alien environment is unlikely to produce little grey men or humans with forehead ridges a la Star Trek. If you want to see truly alien aliens and the problems that humans encounter when attempting to communicate with them, I highly recommend Stainslaw Lem. Beyond even Lem, there is also the possibility of non-carbon based life in this solar system or elsewhere, which would compound the communication problems.
If
“appreciating creation is all about learning, investigating, progressing, stripping the layers one by one, having our curiosity and ingenuity tested to it’s limits, drawing us out and beyond ourselves and our planet,” then it is safe to say that the existing religious traditions have not been about appreciating creation, since by and large they act to discourage all of what you have described. Oh sure there have been exceptions to this, but the exceptions simply serve to highlight the rule, which is resistance to anything that undermines creedal dogmas.
There is also no evidence that humans were designed. That does not mean that they were not designed, it just means that there is no empirical basis for believing it to be true, as opposed to a subjective experiential basis, or even an inter-subjective experiential basis a la Christian or Islamic revelation. Now there are certainly things we do not understand about the evolutionary process, and the effects of certain constraints on evolution, but attributing these things to supernatural intervention is to simply posit the god of the gaps. There are also problems with the cosmological argument, but even if we accept that there is a cosmic creator or at least a creative intelligence that orders the cosmos, we have insufficient evidence to justify a belief that it is responsible for designing humanity. Even if I am wrong, however, and there is evidence of design, it is certainly not evidence of the design discussed in the traditional religious traditions, which denies theistic evolution as much as it denies natural selection.
Finally, concerning morality: Again, we find the problem of attribution. There is absolutely no basis for concluding that this entity would be a person, let alone a person with the attributes of human beings. I do not know why love should be the ultimate motive of any such creative intelligence. Moreover, your reply is non-responsive: I highlighted a number of possible transgressions that could just as easily substitute traditional morality, some of which (i.e., vegetarianism and environmentalism) would make much more sense given what we know about the impact of humanity on this planet, others (i.e., the sneeze that triggers the tsunami) which would explain penalties for seemingly innocuous behavior in a meaningful way. The moral codes of the Abrahamic religions, by contrast, seem to be designed to accommodate beliefs and practices typical of a certain period and locale, not indicative of any transcendent morality.
Keep in mind, I am not, strictly speaking, an atheist, any more than the early Christians were with respect to Zeus (although perhaps more so; they might have thought he was a demon or something). I am atheistic with respect to the traditional conceptions of God you are defending here though, and for good reason.
''a-naturalist''
