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Re: God IS.

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Posted by Joe Postma/">Joe Postma on September 8, 1999 15:48:07 UTC

: Forgive me for butting in, but the evidence I see for god is in "coincidences". If all existence is the result of only physical laws, then we have no need for a god that interacts with us. There might still be a god, but it should not concern us as such a god would have no influence on us. Based completely on physical laws, randomness would be the rule and coincidences would occur in accordance with the laws of probability. : So what convinces me that there is an interfering god or force or whatever you want to call it, is that the coincidences in my life are so highly improbable that there has to be something like a god or at least a supernatural conspiracy to arrange for them to happen. That suggests to me that there may be purpose in all that happens, but I do not see strong evidence for purpose, even though I believe in it. It's a creation of my thinking that I hope has some truth to it. : Likewise, as a scientist, I do not see evidence of god in astronomy. In fact I see evidence of evolution in astronomy and many of us take that to be evidence against god. : However, I do see mechanisms in astronomical observations and in particle theory and cosmology that is suggestive of a supernatural world. But we have to look elsewhere to determine what information populates it.

I'm quite open to criticism, I welcome anybodies opinion. In regards to the laws of physics being the source of randomness, I must seriously disagree. It is precisley the existence of the laws of physics that give the universe its inherent order and predictability. There are proceses that are probabalistic in nature (ie. quantum mechanics, biological and planetary evolution), but they are not random. If they were random, the probability of a certain event happening would be the same as any other event, and then it would be impossible to do science at all. Probability would be a meaningless term. In fact, existence itself would be impossible, because cause and effect relationships, the order upon which existence is fashioned, would not exist. One may wish now to introduce the argument of the existence of chaos, but that would be a mistake, and, no offence, a misunderstanding of the concept of chaos. Chaos Theory simply says that, in some physical processes, if one changes the initial conditions of an event ever so slightly, the outcome of the event may turn out significantly different than if the intial conditions hadn't been changed(ever so slightly). This implies a limit to the predictability of nature, and therefore to the laws of physics, but only in so far as the error in accuracy of the knowledge of the intial conditions of an event. So fundamentally, if one knows the intial conditions of an event to 100% accuracy, the event can be predicted accurately to its completion. But because there are always small uncertainties in our experiments(originated by the measuring devices themselves), complex experiments may appear to behave randomly. You can see then that it is not nature that has some inherent "chaos" in it, but it is simply a technical problem inherent to our measuring devices, not to nature itself. Also, as a scientist, why do you believe in purpose if you do not see strong evidence for it? Is that not a logical contradiction of who you say you are? In fact, a scientist should believe in nothing, because beleif implies faith, which is the antithesis of science. A scientist merely accepts and acknowledges the reality of nature, and seeks to understand it.

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