Sure maybe. But there's a long way from "life was intentionally created on Earth" to "an interventionist God created the entire universe". Perhaps aliens seeded life on Earth. So even if the appearence of life on Earth couldn't be otherwise explained, I don't think it would be particularly compelling evidence for the kind of religion that people tend to believe.
How does the existence of the universe prove that there is some timeless, extra-universal intelligence with the power to create universes? If there were a creator, it would add more questions than it would answer.
Look around you... the fact that earth is habitable...the gases of the atmosphere are ideal for humans...the rotation of the planet allow for day and night...the distance from the sun(a little bit closer or further away and we would have been in trouble)...the human body in all its intricacies.
Did your god intentionally design the system so that the sun sometimes gives people skin cancer? And is it intended that this cancer causes them to die slow and painful deaths?
And we have finally come to the first line of defence for atheists...why do bad things happen. I could go on for hours but I would suggest to maybe take this off YN if you are really interested in my answer?
Did you not say the system was "a perfect construct"? The side effect where it kills people prematurely doesn't seem very perfect. Anyways, nice programmed deflection you have there.
The only thing that proves is that the universe exists. Claiming that someone created it is only moving the question, because who then made the creator?
This is a very famous point raised by theologians many centuries ago. Circular reasoning can hardly count as valid. What if the creator always existed? And besides no major religion deals with this point so I wouldn't have an answer.
What if the universe has always existed, and every few billion years or so, a portion of it explodes outwards into a completely new direction of space?
Or for the other side to prove that you are wrong. Let's be honest here, none of us can "proof" the existence or non existence of a creator but we have been endowed with intelligence and humility to hopefully come to the right conclusion.
> Let's be honest here, none of us can "proof" the existence or non existence of a creator.
Indeed, let's be honest, we cannot prove anything.
> but we have been endowed with intelligence and humility to hopefully come to the right conclusion.
So then, the right conclusion would simply be that we don't know, right?
You are free to have some preference, i.e, you prefer that a creators exists, and that's fine, but as you said earlier, let's be honest we cannot prove it.
So with the humility that was endowed to us, let's just acknowledge what we don't know.
And that's why people are trying to understand :)
Religion isn't unquestionable, doubt is a key to faith. There's an entire academic discipline devoted to critically studying the divine, theology.
That is not an excuse for avoiding and denying any insight into creation or trying to fill the gap with gods of course. I strongly disagree with the thread starter's sentiment
I didn’t mean to suggest that one is not allowed to question religion (these days), I meant questioning religion becomes either a useless spiral of circular logic or you finally wind up at the point I made about faith. That’s been my experience at least.
All that said, reading Jordan Peterson’s book has increased my opinion of the Bible and the knowledge about the human condition that it contains, but as an allegory, not a literal history.
Not quite. Since we know the markup of the chemicals of the universe we also know that it has a beginning and an end date or simply put that energy was required to set it off. That would explain that it can't be timeless whereas we simply do not have any attributes or what the creator is made of hence can't come to a conclusion regarding his mortality
Causality is a concept found in this universe/reality. All meta-reality concepts like causality, time, place, identity, information, and such originating from within are underjustified for considerations outside it.
