Atheism - alive and well in Thailand?

[attrayant]

How is that proof that the universe was created by 'chemical chance'?

You have 'proved' that the universe most likely started from a single point. Fine. Now where is the proof that the spark of creation came about by 'happy coincidence'?

First of all, your use of scare quotes isn't doing you any favors. If you want to cast aspersions on something I've said, just come out with it and skip the droll sarcasm.

Secondly, your request for the impetus of the big bang is a tall order, as you probably realize. We must again rely on deductive reasoning using our knowledge of the laws of nature. But even then, we can only hypothesize. Your suggestion that somebody should perform magic (by "conjuring up some matter into existence and expanding it into a universe") is impossible with our present technology. I suspect you know this as well, which means you're purposefully setting the standard of proof so high that it can never be met.

I'm a little annoyed by your playful use of the word "chance", as if something happened by mere luck. Whatever happened 14 billion years ago, it didn't happen by chance. It happened in accordance with the laws of nature - some of those laws we are still trying to understand. Just a few months ago, the analysis of cosmic background radiation (called the BICEP experiments) resulted in some huge breakthroughs in the confirmation of gravity waves. The European Space Agency's Planck Observatory is taking that data to confirm findings of its own. In short, there's a lot of work still going on in cosmology.

Presently, cosmologists aren't sure if the universe even had a beginning, although we can still continue to use the imprecise term "big bang" to refer to the universe as we currently know it. General relativity suggests there must have been a singularity, but our discovery of gravitational waves earlier this year has given us some new toys to play with in our thinking about what happened before the big bang. String theory says that the big bang was not the beginning of our universe, rather it was just the end of the universe's previous state.

But let's not get bogged-down into the weeds of string theory and general relativity here. As I said before, this is not really the forum for that sort of number crunching. What we should do is circle back around to the topic of this thread, which was about atheistic and theistic beliefs.

The natural question to ask, it seems, is this: If science still isn't clear about how the universe sprang into existence, or how it changed from a prior existence into the current one, what other hypothesis do we have that's equally valid (and by valid, I mean possible based on our knowledge of what happens in nature) and can withstand the same burden of proof? Even if no satisfactory answer about the various permutations of the universe are soon forthcoming, that does not open the door to conjecture about mythological beings.

And that is where any appeal to religion begins to fall apart. The moment we start adding magical beings into the hypothesis, we have broken the law of parsimony which states that entities must not be multiplied unnecessarily. As soon as you start tossing more unknowns into a hypothesis, you make its eventual resolution less likely, not more. Many of you will recognize this maxim as Occam's razor, but I prefer Christopher Hitchens' version: "That which is asserted without evidence may be dismissed without evidence".

Edited September 18, 2014 by attrayant