Are you a truth seeker?

nozzferrahhtoo wrote: »

The problem here is not reminding me what I said. I clearly know what I said, having said it. The problem is you understanding what I meant, or at least pretending not to so you could try (though seemingly fail given your return) to bug out of the conversation.

Again my position is that no one can really be 100% certain of anything, but what I also said was that of all the things I can feel most certain about the axiom "I think therefore I am" is the guiding principle as the most certain anyone can be about anything.

You can misrepresent that any which way you want of course, but to maintain adult mature honest conversation I would merely suggest you attempt to understand the meaning of my words with my help, as opposed to presuming to tell me what I think and then presuming to correct me when you are the one wrong about it.



A safer assumption would be to assume that if I am talking about you, I will say "you" but if I talk about a group like "theists" then I am talking about a group of theists. Since I said "theists" in this situation and not "You" your assumption above is also a wrong one.



And I am sure that has been really nice for you. All I can tell you however (again that is, having told you twice already now) is that I find the topic irrelevant. Until such time as a theist, any theist, can prove there ever actually was "nothing"..... then conversations about how "something came from nothing" is simply irrelevant to me. Just like I would not have any interest in investigating a murder if in fact I had no reason to think a murder had taken place at all.



Having not observed "every observable phenomenon" I would never claim to know what "every observable phenomenon" does or does not do. That would be dishonest and madness. All I can comment on are the phenomenon I have observed. The universe is a massive place. It is simply chock full of phenomenon I have not observed. So how the hell would I know about those ones?

That said however, Fourier above who tends to show up when the conversation errs in this direction, has already addressed your assumption and told you how and why you are wrong. This is his career/wheelhouse so I would merely suggest you take it up with him. You might find it more educational than you expected.



I know where the text came from silly That is not what I was asking. I mean where did the author actually pluck those figures from? How were they calculated? Saying something has a "1 in X Billion probability of occurring" is useless until the speaker can show how they actually arrived at those figures. The author in the link you provided simply did not do this. So the figures are possibly simply made up. How would I know?

Come back to me with a link that actually shows the workings, and does not fall for the fallacies I adumbrated in the previous post, and then I will have something to work with.



"With at least 200 billion galaxies out there (and possibly even more), we're very likely talking about a Universe filled with around 1024 planets, or, for those of you who like it written out, around 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 planets in our observable Universe"

There are any number of billions of planets in the universe. However that is only the observable universe. So the reason I say "countless" is that there is quite likely to be (but who knows really, given it is not observable) even more outside our observable range.

So what your issue with me saying "countless billions" is, is not clear.



Except yes it has, entirely so. Once again when you are working backwards from a chosen event to work out the probabilities of that event occurring.... then you are placing a selective bias on this event that is beyond it's due and not justifiable. If you deal out a deck of 52 cards for example then the result will not look amazing. Because it is not. However if you work out the probability of having got that exact sequence it will SEEM amazing in retrospect.

Retrospective probability is simply not as interesting or amazing as you, and your cherry picked link, wish to pretend it is. Human hubris of course leaves us prone to THINKING it is. Which is why a link like that will impress the impressionable lay man who doesn't know better. But it simply will not work for someone like me.



It was not meant to. It was merely meant to highlight one important aspect of the truth. Which is that life that forms to fit a niche in our universe, and becomes sentient, could of course feel like the niche in which it finds itself is perfect for it's own existence. And it might marvel at that impression. But it is a mistaken impression. Life that evolves over millenia to fit a niche is going to form to fit that niche well over time. Life formed to fit it. There is no evidence that it was formed to fit life. Which is the creationist narrative.



You can not know that to be true. You just imagine it to be true. For all we know any number of combinations of laws of nature would produce sentient life. We simply do not know. The theist/creationist narrative is simply to PRETEND that it can happen in one way and one way only. But that is all it is. Pretence. You simple do not know what other universes are possible. Hell you simply do not even know what other forms of life, sentient or otherwise, are possible in THIS universe in planets with conditions much different to our own.

Pretending to know more than you do, or can, is the central move in the narratives of most theists alas. Doubting it and saying with honesty "That is something I/we do not know at this time" is the core move in the atheist one.

Lane's analogy is similarly flawed thinking for exactly the same reasons. It might seem remarkable if 100 shooters miss you. But if shooters often miss, and you have 100 shooters shoot at enough victims..... then statistically they are all going to miss eventually. There will eventually have to be, simply be sheer probability alone, a squad who all manage to miss at the same time.

That survivor will of course feel from THEIR perspective like it is a crazy and amazing and magical event. Because that is the flawed thinking the human mind is prone to, but from the perspective of a probability set an event like that popping up occasionally is simply not amazing.

We see the same flawed thinking in people who think they are psychic for example. I have heard stories like "I have not thought of my ex best friend for 35 years. Then one day I suddenly thought of him. And then 5 minutes later he actually phoned me!!!!!".

The speaker THINK it is amazing. But there are millions of people thinking of their past every day. There are millions of people phoning each other every day. By sheer probability, the two will coincide and overlap sometimes. Another mundane event will seem like magic to the person to whom it happens.

So Lane could not be more wrong. Which, from what I know of him, is nothing new.