Well first of all, as I think I made clear, a main point I’ve been arguing for is precisely that we can’t know about the meta-reality behind our universe, and so those that claim it is logical to be a theist and therefore illogical to be an atheist are wrong. As an atheist, I’m interested in discussing atheism with those who have negative and often, in my opinion, incorrect thoughts about atheism.

And, as I’ve also tried to make clear, there are non-theistic metaphysical speculations that appeal to me much more than theism, and I’m interested in describing them. Theism is so embedded in our culture that many people, even if they aren’t particularly satisfied with their theistic beliefs, don’t have any clear ideas of alternatives. I like to provide those for people to think about.

You also write, “There is a truth and we should seek it,” and “we can know there is a point to all this and we can know it is imperative to find out what the point is.”

I am a believer in seeking truth, although I don’t believe there is “A Truth” that we can find, nor do I believe there is necessarily a cosmic Point to the existence of the universe or to our existence in it. I believe in meaning but not Meaning. I find being a human being a remarkably challenging opportunity within which the search for truth about our external world and our internal life is a vital part.

I guess you can be motivated by a desire for entertainment, but I don’t think that about you.

There is a truth and we should seek it.

Now, I agree that there are some things we can’t know i.e. what was the cause of the first cause, but we can know there was a cause, and we can know there is a point to all this and we can know it is imperative to find out what the point is.

I must repeat, before signing off: laws specify conditions under which things are observed to happen, they are dynamically inert — they do not create materials and events.

Plato speaks of a world in which there are forms that are instantiated, not a world in which forms create themselves into imperfect instantiations. [Thence we deal with the doctrine of the demiurge and get into the world of Gnosticism.]

For instance, reliably, when we have heat, fuel and air, we have a fire. That is a natural regularity, and it has the characteristic: LOW CONTINGENCY.

Where we have high contingency, here, a fine tuned, highly complex, finitely old cosmos that is evidently adapted for cell-based, carbon chemistry based life, we are needing to account for the opposite: HIGH CONTINGENCY.

That is traceable to one of two main sources, per induction on experience and the reasons why that ecpxperience makes sense. Namely, chance or agency.

For chance, we are looking at a quasi-infinite multiverse of some form, which is inherently beyond empirical test. It is speculative metaphysics, not physics.

Even if we find evidence of other universes, we would not be able to find evidence of a quasi-infinite cluster of such sufficient to give probabilistic resources to overcome the sort of cosmological and origin of life and life forms odds we are discussing.

the otehr option is the directed contingency of a designing mind.

And, as tot he notion that such minds can be physically accounted for without residue, I have already addressed that above, and in more details here.

As to the attempt to confine inferences to mind to inferences to human minds, I excerpt from just above:

we have no good reason to confine the list of possible acting intelligences to humans. (For instance, many animals show at least limited intelligence, and extraterrestrial intelligences are at least possible. So are demons, gods, angels and even God.)

So, we must let the circumstances tell us what the candidate intelligences credibly at work in a situation may be.

But, that is very different from the epistemic status of — per reliable induction on signs of intelligence — accepting that intelligence is at work on observed CSI.

G’day all . . .

GEM of TKI

Does that answer your question?

Most of what you wrote about has been covered above. However I will say that I am aware that in science laws are descriptions of the regularities we find in actual objects. The question as to whether laws can exist independent of the objects that manifest them is similar to the question as to whether a mind can exist independent of matter. These are questions, in a way, about whether Plato was right.

I’ll submit that the theist who wants to claim that a non-material mind-like being, God, could have created the universe, needs to acknowledge that analogously laws existing in some Platonic fashion could have created the universe.

Conversely, if one wants to stick with the in-this-world understanding of laws as descriptions of things we find in matter, then we should stick with understanding likewise that minds are descriptions of things we find in matter.

Hazel, when you come on this board are you seeking to challenge your understanding or affirm it?

I too have been watching.

Pardon a couple of notes:

1] Re, 69: The design inference takes certain characteristics of human beings as primary and extrapolates to speculations about other intelligent agents, including a God who created the universe

The design inference, a methodology that extends Fisherian style statistical reasoning to situations of high contingency and observed functionally specific complexity does no such thing.

The design inference first looks at an observed fact: some things in our world of experience show mechanically regular deterministic or stochastic patterns that can be reduced to descriptive statements that we term natural law.

For instance, heavy objects fall through a natural regularity we characterise as gravity.

It then contrasts that with situations where we have very high contingency: under apparently similar situations, we may have quite different outcomes.

For instance, if the falling heavy object is a die, the uppermost face after it tumbles and settles is highly contingent.

That sort of contingency may result in a credibly undirected outcome, or a credibly directed one. We term the first, chance, and the second intelligence or design. To discern teh two, it then applies the criterion of specified complexity: a sufficiently complex and specified outcome is far more credibly the product of intelligence than of chance. (For instance, the specification may. per Orgel 1973 on, be by virtue of configuration-based fine-tuned functionality.)

And indeed, that is our general experience where we can directly experience or observe the causal process.

That is, we now have a reliable induction, a “law” of experiential reality if you will — CSI, especially FSCI, is the product of intelligence. (Such is of course provisional and open to refuting counter-example, just as is the epistemic status of all other scientific laws.)

Next, we have no good reason to confine the list of possible acting intelligences to humans. (For instance, many animals show at least limited intelligence, and extraterrestrial intelligences are at least possible. So are demons, gods, angels and even God.)

So, we must let the circumstances tell us what the candidate intelligences credibly at work in a situation may be.

But, that is very different from the epistemic status of — per reliable induction on signs of intelligence — accepting that intelligence is at work on observed CSI.

2] . . . I have contrasted this with taking the natural laws that we find in the world as primary, and offered the extrapolation that similarly meta-processes are the cause of the universe.

Boiling down, you are first implying that chance plus mechanical necessity are adequate to explain observed reality. [The directly experienced phenomenon and fact of the reasoning, communicating, acting mind, as discussed here, is sufficient to show that this is not credibly so. But, that's an aside.]

You are in particular committed to the idea that lawlike necessity or stochastical processes characterised by law, are enough to account for the universe.
Immediately, that raises the issue raised by Robin Collins et al: such an enormously complex and fine-tuned, functionally specific universe-generating law would be a capital instance of FSCI, crying out for a designer.

But, more fundamentally, laws are DESCRIPTIONS that we provisionally make; what is primary is the existing objects that interact based on forces that reveal themselves through natural regularities. When we identify and describe then successfully test such a regularity, we call it a law.

So, we must clarify our terms.

When we do so, we come up against having to address existing objects in an observed physically existing cosmos that on the usual estimates dates to some 13.7 BYA. This leads us straight to the contingent/ necessary being point SB has been making all along.

For, credibly, the OBSERVED universe is contingent, and had a beginning. Per rationality 101, “that which has a beginning has a cause.”

So, we see that a contingent universe points to a non-contingent cause rooted in a necessary being.

What are the live option candidates?

Patrick summarises:

. . . we got 2 options:

a) a self-existent intelligent being with the capability manipulate energy (although it could be posited that this being was the original ‘verse in a limited multiverse and ‘evolved’ its intelligence out of an energetic form; whatever)

b) an infinite or at least growing multiverse (which is necessary to generate the probabilistic resources) . . . .

Both choices are “supernatural” in that its the superset of our natural universe. Both can potentially provide evidence for their existence via observable effects in our universe.

Aptly put.

So, what is the evidence: massive fine-tuning that forms a knife-edge balanced cosmos suitable for life. [Summary here.]

Most interesting of all, as Patrick hints at, the speculative, methaphysical possibility of a quasi-infinite multiverse does not eliminate the force of the point. For, LOCAL FINETUNING is just as wonderful as is global; as John Leslie’s famous fly on the wall illustration shows:

. . . the need for such explanations does not depend on any estimate of how many universes would be observer-permitting, out of the entire field of possible universes. Claiming that our universe is ‘fine tuned for observers’, we base our claim on how life’s evolution would apparently have been rendered utterly impossible by comparatively minor alterations in physical force strengths, elementary particle masses and so forth. There is no need for us to ask whether very great alterations in these affairs would have rendered it fully possible once more, let alone whether physical worlds conforming to very different laws could have been observer-permitting without being in any way fine tuned. Here it can be useful to think of a fly on a wall, surrounded by an empty region. A bullet hits the fly Two explanations suggest themselves. Perhaps many bullets are hitting the wall or perhaps a marksman fired the bullet. There is no need to ask whether distant areas of the wall, or other quite different walls, are covered with flies so that more or less any bullet striking there would have hit one. The important point is that the local area contains just the one fly.

So, we are right back at the issue of the adequacy of explanations for the observed cosmos, including ourselves in it as intelligent beings.

And, as linked in my first link above, chance plus necessity acting on material objects is not credibly adequate to explain the four big bangs: origin of a fine-tuned life facilitating, complex cosmos, of information-rich cell based life in it, of equally information rich body plan level biodiversity, and last but not least: of minds that are both rational and moral.

On pain of self referential absurdity.

But, an intelligent creator certainly is. So, we are well within our epistemic rights to think in such terms at worldview level. And, to use the explanatory filter when we think at the scientific level.

And, to use the resulting inductive evidence on the reliable roots of signs of intelligence as we address not only scientific questions of origins of life and life forms, but also scientific questions on the origins of the universe of our experience and observation.

G’day, all

GEM of TKI.

You write, “I watched the whole conversation and really it comes down to personal choice of what the causeless cause is. Or as Hazel put it: “So I wouldn’t say I have faith in unknown laws, although I would say – have said – that that explanation is more appealing to me, and more likely to be true if I had to bet, than a divine being.” Sounds like faith rephrased to me, even though you object to that word. If you truly believed that “we need to live with uncertainty”–which is agnosticism–then you would not have a personal preference–which is atheism.”

I agree that this comes down to personal choice. I see myself as both an atheist and an agnostic, in the following sense. I am an atheist because I lack any positive belief in a God. I’m agnostic because I’m aware that I can’t really know what the nature of metaphysical reality is. Even though I have metaphysical preferences which make more sense to me than a belief in God, and which fit in with my overall understanding of my life, I have no strong sense that I know that I am right about any of the particulars of those preferences.

You quote Stephen as saying, “The proposition on the table is this: IF something exists, then a self-existent creator follows,” and then you added, “Very true, and I don’t see why Hazel rejects it.” You followed this with, “The real question is whether this “self-existent creator” has intelligence.”

Exactly. I have never argued for the proposition that our universe has no cause – the topic of the whole conversation has been about possibilities as to what that cause might be. My point has been that an intelligent, conscious, willful divine being is not the only possibility, and that a meta-verse of some sort of impersonal, lawful reality could create universes. The question of whether this “self-existent creator” has intelligence is indeed the issue.

You conclude by saying, “We’re now back to considering the evidence on our own Earth.”

I think this is an important point. As I have argued, these metaphysical speculations are primarily fueled by analogies with our human experience. (This is one reason I think we could be totally wrong about the cause of the universe – because it might be something totally alien to our experience. It might be all these ideas of time, cause and effect, law, being, etc. are just not relevant concepts in the meta-verse.)

The design inference takes certain characteristics of human beings as primary and extrapolates to speculations about other intelligent agents, including a God who created the universe (and who perhaps continues to be actively present.) I have contrasted this with taking the natural laws that we find in the world as primary, and offered the extrapolation that similarly meta-processes are the cause of the universe. This is actually the central issue, I think – what is going on in our universe and on our own Earth – and this philosophical discussion about the cause of the universe is secondary.

Stephen said:

The proposition on the table is this: IF something exists, then a self-existent creator follows.

Very true, and I don’t see why Hazel rejects it, since a multiverse is both self-existent and “presumably” a creator in the form of spawning off new universes with varying constraints on their energetic form. So the real question is whether this “self-existent creator” has intelligence.

So we got 2 options:

a) a self-existent intelligent being with the capability manipulate energy (although it could be posited that this being was the original ‘verse in a limited multiverse and ‘evolved’ its intelligence out of an energetic form; whatever)

b) an infinite or at least growing multiverse (which is necessary to generate the probabilistic resources)(when I say “growing” I mean for example that universes could be energetically degrading back to nothing but there is at least one stable self-existent universe creating new ‘verses every so often; there could only be an average of 4 ‘verses in existence at any time but since the multiverse is itself timeless it would presumably eventually create a well-tuned ‘verse like our own eventually…it’s just that the whole Star Trek multiple dimensions with multiple yous and me existing at the same time is thrown out the door)

Both choices are “supernatural” in that its the superset of our natural universe. Both can potentially provide evidence for their existence via observable effects in our universe.

The problem is that even if we find evidence for another universe (I know some physicists are thinking of ways to potentially test this) we have no way of knowing whether it’s an infinite multiverse. Even then a multiverse can co-exist with an intelligent self-existent being. For example, the multiverse could be endlessly spawning chaotic/non-balanced ‘verses and the intelligence shapes them. But that’s assuming we can even test this hypothesis, which many physicists admit is unlikely.

So now we get back to considering finding effects of an intelligence, which is what ID is in a nutshell. The problem is that our own biological life could have been seeded by intelligence contained within this universe. But that’s when people say, “Who designed them/it?” Personally I reject the assertion that our universe must be homogeneous. So while we know the laws in our tiny pocket of the universe there could a sector where an “unknown law” operates and intelligence(s) could evolve.

So how could we reject that hypothesis? Analyze whether seeding via traveling over extra-solar distances is feasible (although there will be a degree of uncertainty since this unknown intelligence may come up with something we did not). If it’s not then we’re back to looking for other forms by which an intelligence could operate.

I believe that wraps up the conversation. We’re now back to considering the evidence on our own Earth

This dead end sounds like a good place to stop to me.