Do you believe in God?

[HenrySwanson]

This smacks of a "mysterious ways"-style copout to me.

If it could be absolutely proved that this universe was a simulation or a fictional construct, I'm sure you have seen it'd only intensify our desire to discover who or what created it, why and where they came from.

I'm not surprised Russell's teapot was "created" (or, more properly, conceived) as a response to this kind of endless what-if speculation.

I guess it's a product of my skepticism that I wouldn't care personally since I'd never have enough proof.

E.g. There's a theory that the "real world" in the Matrix is just another component of the matrix, so what's the point investigating.

Don't confuse this with a lack of interest in scientific inquiry - I just feel apathetic about the origins of this universe after certain experiences I've gone through.

 

[Danoff]

Hmmm, here's the full report of exactly what he predicted pre-game:

Yea. A lot of that stuff was predictable. He made his prediction during the second at-bat. So it wasn't going to be the first. A fastball is the most likely pitch to cause a home run. The pitcher intentionally throwing a few balls early on is also entirely predictable based on pitcher stats and strategy. The location of the hit can be based on batting stance (handedness) and batter stats.

It's really not as random as it seems. That guy is steeped in baseball.

 

[Famine]

I don't see why you'd need to explain "their" creation.

Given the topic here has been the creator-led origins of the universe, it should be quite obvious why you'd need to explain that.

Every entity you place in the way also needs to have come from somewhere, whether it's a deity, or a hyper-intelligent alien being indistinguishable from a deity, or an AI, or something that created the Matrix. Every time you say "well, this entity could be the explanation" you're just kicking the can down the road because you're not covering where that entity came from.

 

[Liquid]

(People who experience extreme coincidences)

I wonder what their outlook on the universe was after their experiences.

Why does that matter? However they came to terms with the incredible things that happened to them, it doesn't take away that being struck by lightning seven times, surviving three sinkings or surviving two atomic bombs is coincidental. You can call it lucky or unlucky but it's still coincidental.

If anything somehow "engineered" those specific things to happen; if something somehow made Violet Jessop board the Olympic, Titanic and Britannic in that particular order rather than her simply being employed on those vessels coincidentally; if something somehow made sure Roy Sullivan was electrocuted seven times rather than extreme misfortune due to his job and location; if something somehow guaranteed that Tsutomu Yamaguchi was not only at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in that order but also survived them and became famous for it based on nothing more than happenstance, if anything deliberately ensured that happened it only raises more questions than answers:

Why them and not other people?
Many people work on multiple ships so why did Violet Jessop go through the Olympic-Titanic-Britannic and not Doris Wright?

Why those specific events and not other events?
Why did Tsutomu Yamaguchi find himself under two nuclear attacks instead of being in a log cabin up a mountain?

Why did those things happen at all in the first place?
What does the Manhattan Project and the unfolding of WW2 have to do with Yamaguchi's life?

Why did they happen in that specific order?
Why didn't Violet Jessop board the Britannic first and never set foot on the Titanic nor the Olympic?

What about the people who might have come close to also suffering the same experiences?
Why was Roy Sullivan struck seven times and someone else is struck by lightning maybe... once?

It is extremely unlikely that something deliberately engineered those specific circumstances and can answer the hypotheticals I've just mentioned. It's Graham's number to one but it's still possible. Pure, scarcely believable coincidence.

 

[Danoff]

If anything somehow "engineered" those specific things to happen; if something somehow made Violet Jessop board the Olympic, Titanic and Britannic in that particular order rather than her simply being employed on those vessels coincidentally; if something somehow made sure Roy Sullivan was electrocuted seven times rather than extreme misfortune due to his job and location; if something somehow guaranteed that Tsutomu Yamaguchi was not only at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in that order but also survived them and became famous for it based on nothing more than happenstance, if anything deliberately ensured that happened it only raises more questions than answers:

It's also worth questioning how likely each of those was to happen to someone. How many people traveled from Hiroshima only to be killed at Nagasaki for example. It looks like the bomb killed roughly half of the population of Nagasaki. So a lot of people survived. If 2 people traveled from Hiroshima to Nagasaki that day, 1 of them had a decent chance of surviving both bombs. I bet it was more than 2. Even if it was only 1, it's still decent odds.

How many people survived the olympic only to be killed on the titanic.

 

[Liquid]

It's also worth questioning how likely each of those was to happen to someone. How many people traveled from Hiroshima only to be killed at Nagasaki for example. It looks like the bomb killed roughly half of the population of Nagasaki. So a lot of people survived. If 2 people traveled from Hiroshima to Nagasaki that day, 1 of them had a decent chance of surviving both bombs. I bet it was more than 2.

It's estimated that around 70 people survived both but Yamaguchi was the only one proven beyond doubt by the Japanese government.

 

[Danoff]

@HenrySwanson

Yea. A lot of that stuff was predictable. He made his prediction during the second at-bat. So it wasn't going to be the first. A fastball is the most likely pitch to cause a home run. The pitcher intentionally throwing a few balls early on is also entirely predictable based on pitcher stats and strategy. The location of the hit can be based on batting stance (handedness) and batter stats.

It's really not as random as it seems. That guy is steeped in baseball.

Ok to be fair, I watched the video again, and it was apparently pre-game call where commentators were encouraged to make crazy predictions. The way the video is strung together confused me on that. 2nd at-bat seems like the most lucky of the grouping. Even when it's a 3-1 pitch the commentators are already saying "well you know it's going to be a fast ball". And that's not just based on the prediction, 3-1 puts pressure on the pitcher to pitch it straight. Even pre-game they were calling that the pitcher was a "fast ball pitcher". So the selection of that particular pitcher seems like the safe bet.

2nd at-bat, I don't have a great way for that to have been predicted. But I'm not as far into baseball as those commentators so maybe there's a way to predict that as well. Like maybe they knew the pitcher would be likely to be in rotation for the 2nd at-bat, and Tui's background prior to the major leagues was likely a factor as well.

 

[MatskiMonk]

With less cloud over Kokura, Nagasaki wouldn't have even been bombed. With less cloud over Nagasaki the death toll would likely have been higher, with more cloud over Nagasaki, Fat Man might have been aborted in the sea.

You can call Yamaguchi being the man that survived two atomic bombs as being such an incredible coincidence that it must surely been the work of a divine hand... in reality, all that had to happen was for the wind to blow. 80,000 people died at Nagaski, to make Yamaguchi the guy who survived two bombs, a divine hand would have had to decide to kill those 80,000 people in the first place - and yet an unknown number at Kokura were also spared, quite possibly including some that fled Hiroshima after the LeMay leaflets... so exactly where's the miracle... is it that he didn't die, that he was in those two cities, that the population of Kokura were spared?

This is all getting really rather silly. Stop it.

 

[UKMikey]

You can call Yamaguchi being the man that survived two atomic bombs as being such an incredible coincidence that it must surely been the work of a divine hand... in reality, all that had to happen was for the wind to blow.

Japanese people have been known to believe in a divine wind, but these astronomical coincidences are nothing more than pattern recognition as far as I can see. The god of the gaps.

This is all getting really rather silly. Stop it.

Coincidentally (ha ha), it's hard not to recognise a pattern in the same poster creating series of different posts on wildly varying topics which continually provide anecdotal examples of a phenomenon occurring until one of them sticks, but that's another matter.

 

[MatskiMonk]

Japanese people have been known to believe in a divine wind,

I'm glad someone picked up on my phrasing

Coincidentally (ha ha), it's hard not to recognise a pattern in the same poster creating series of different posts on wildly varying topics which continually provide anecdotal examples of a phenomenon occurring until one of them sticks, but that's another matter.

The thing is, we see these things as intuitively improbable, so we notice when it happens - but that's only really because of the boundaries applied to the situation. It probably doesn't seem that miraculous that you, me, Danoff, Henry, Liquid and Famine are having this discussion, but if we just consider the sequences of events that had to happen for this situation right here to occur it would most certainly be far, far less probable than someone surviving both Atomic bomb attacks.

Perhaps it's slightly paradoxical...

Every single thing that happens is the inevitable outcome of everything that occurred before it, yet the probability of any single identifiable thing that happens after 14 billion years is so unimaginably small that every single thing could be considered as miraculous.

 

[UKMikey]

I'm glad someone picked up on my phrasing


The thing is, we see these things as intuitively improbable, so we notice when it happens - but that's only really because of the boundaries applied to the situation. It probably doesn't seem that miraculous that you, me, Danoff, Henry, Liquid and Famine are having this discussion, but if we just consider the sequences of events that had to happen for this situation right here to occur it would most certainly be far, far less probable than someone surviving both Atomic bomb attacks.

Perhaps it's slightly paradoxical...

Every single thing that happens is the inevitable outcome of everything that occurred before it, yet the probability of any single identifiable thing that happens after 14 billion years is so unimaginably small that every single thing could be considered as miraculous.

This is undoubtedly true but not what I was hinting at so I'll stop being obtuse.

Whether it's political correctness, Muslims being predisposed towards terror attacks solely because of their religion, British Afro-Caribbeans being more likely to be arrested for knife crime, guardianship for babies born in artificial wombs or liberal outcry about videogame rape, these conversations seem to always take the form of Henry posting something improbable and often supported only by anecdotal evidence, another poster replying with a general principle explaining why it's unlikely or near impossible to be generally the case, which he then replies to with another anecdote or hypothetical to be purity tested, followed by another and another until we get dizzy from going round in an infinite conversational loop.

That's the pattern I'm kind of sensing.

 

[Danoff]

This is undoubtedly true but not what I was hinting at so I'll stop being obtuse.

Whether it's political correctness, Muslims being predisposed towards terror attacks solely because of their religion, British Afro-Caribbeans being more likely to be arrested for knife crime, guardianship for babies born in artificial wombs or liberal outcry about videogame rape, these conversations seem to always take the form of Henry posting something improbable and often supported by anecdotal evidence, another poster replying with a general principle explaining why it's unlikely or near impossible to be generally the case, which he then replies to with another anecdote or hypothetical to be purity tested, followed by another and another until we get dizzy from going round in an infinite conversational loop.

That's the pattern I'm kind of sensing.

Henry does have the distinction of being one of the few members that I've seen walk back, substantially, from a strongly held opinion though. So despite the fact that he needs a lot of convincing, I do give him the benefit of the doubt that he's honestly testing his opinions against others to see whether they are convincing.

 

[HenrySwanson]

Given the topic here has been the creator-led origins of the universe, it should be quite obvious why you'd need to explain that.

Every entity you place in the way also needs to have come from somewhere, whether it's a deity, or a hyper-intelligent alien being indistinguishable from a deity, or an AI, or something that created the Matrix. Every time you say "well, this entity could be the explanation" you're just kicking the can down the road because you're not covering where that entity came from.

Which is part of where the lack of interest comes from when trying to look for it scientifically (but mostly the solipsism).

There's always going to be an "and before that there was....?"

Perhaps it's ignorance in physics (or that particular branch of physics), but will it ever be possible to be answered convincingly?

Why does that matter?

Out of interest.

When you experience such phenomena, does one's outlook change.

This is all getting really rather silly. Stop it.

I find it interesting.

Perhaps I'm veering into @Dotini territory, but I like exploring things I see as oddities that could have a deeper meaning*.

That motorway blowout happening just moments after having those thoughts is only one of a number of weird things I've been experiencing since 2015.

*I see it as that, although I acknowledge I'm in the minority here.

@HenrySwanson

Ok to be fair, I watched the video again, and it was apparently pre-game call where commentators were encouraged to make crazy predictions. The way the video is strung together confused me on that. 2nd at-bat seems like the most lucky of the grouping. Even when it's a 3-1 pitch the commentators are already saying "well you know it's going to be a fast ball". And that's not just based on the prediction, 3-1 puts pressure on the pitcher to pitch it straight. Even pre-game they were calling that the pitcher was a "fast ball pitcher". So the selection of that particular pitcher seems like the safe bet.

2nd at-bat, I don't have a great way for that to have been predicted. But I'm not as far into baseball as those commentators so maybe there's a way to predict that as well. Like maybe they knew the pitcher would be likely to be in rotation for the 2nd at-bat, and Tui's background prior to the major leagues was likely a factor as well.

How many (if there is an amount of) times would he have to make such a call for you to entertain the possibility of there being something at play other than chance?

guardianship for babies born in artificial wombs

This one is going to be a big ethical debate when the technology arrives.

The others....fair enough.

 

[Famine]

Which is part of where the lack of interest comes from when trying to look for it scientifically (but mostly the solipsism).

There's always going to be an "and before that there was....?"

Perhaps it's ignorance in physics (or that particular branch of physics), but will it ever be possible to be answered convincingly?

That's ultimately not relevant, but yes it's possible. We have pretty good ideas now and really the limiting factor is the type and amount of particles and energy we can detect, plus black holes give us a lot of information about what happens when there's no physics any more...

... and it's not the creation of creator entities.

 

[MatskiMonk]

I find it interesting.

Yet you're closed to demonstrable reason in favour of conceptual rubbish, yet have the cheek to hold the former to standards that you don't hold the latter to.

 

[Danoff]

How many (if there is an amount of) times would he have to make such a call for you to entertain the possibility of there being something at play other than chance?

Well I think the examples I gave demonstrate that even that one specific example is not down to pure chance. It comes from an understanding of statistical likelihoods, which is a big part of baseball.

 

[HenrySwanson]

but yes it's possible.

Can you expand?

EDIT: With Chemistry and Biology I find there's an easier end (or starting) point to grasp.

Yet you're closed to demonstrable reason in favour of conceptual rubbish, yet have the cheek to hold the former to standards that you don't hold the latter to.

I get the maths.

But there has to be a reason other than upbringing that some scientists, and those with a background in science, still believe in a god or....something.

Well I think the examples I gave demonstrate that even that one specific example is not down to pure chance. It comes from an understanding of statistical likelihoods, which is a big part of baseball.

But is there a threshold which would make you have a think about alternative explanations.

 

[Famine]

Can you expand?

b u t y e s i t ' s p o s s i b l e .

 

[Danoff]

But is there a threshold which would make you have a think about alternative explanations.

I don't understand. That was an alternative explanation - that the event is predictable.

It turns out that you can cheat at roulette. If you learn a particular wheel, you can learn based on when the ball enters a certain part of the wheel where it will land, and they let you make a bet after the ball passes that point. So people have learned to cheat at roulette, and have done so successfully. Roulette is supposed to be not statistically predictable. Unlike the baseball example, you should not be able to predict the future in this game. So if someone walks up to the table and starts successfully predicting roulette outcomes, to something that should not be predictable, what possibilities should we conclude? Suppose don't know that you can cheat at roulette, and believe that it is a game of pure chance.

Do we conclude that this person knows the future? Do we conclude that their bet placement is guided by divine power or by the will of the universe or something? Obviously not, we conclude that we must be wrong in our assumption that this event cannot be predicted.

The same is true of the baseball scenario, though it is a less impressive example. We know going in that the event is somewhat predictable, and that the various parameters of the prediction (3-1, fastball, etc.) are correlated in the data. And we also know that the person making the prediction is aware of the data correlations and calls these games for a living.

So suppose someone is able to predict a lot of these events correctly is what you're saying? Let's say they even wagered something significant to them apriori on a correct outcome and still guessed correctly. Would I consider that this person can somehow see the future? First I would have to rule out that the prediction could be done accurately at that level based on a statistical understanding of the parameters being guessed, their correlations, etc. I'd need to see that it was a >3 sigma guess, depending on how many people were guessing of course, maybe it needs to be 6 sigma. My next consideration would be whether it was fabricated, and also whether the commentator was working together with the players to make the event come true.

I can't even fathom how many things I would have to eliminate before considering that the person could see the future and for some reason chose to see the very near-term future of a baseball game to make a prediction as a commentator.

 

[Exorcet]

That motorway blowout happening just moments after having those thoughts is only one of a number of weird things I've been experiencing since 2015.

Are you also recording the moments when you have a random thought and nothing related happens?

 

[MatskiMonk]

But there has to be a reason other than upbringing that some scientists, and those with a background in science, still believe in a god or....something.

Genetic pre-disposition towards blind hope as part of the human survival mechanism.

 

[HenrySwanson]

b u t y e s i t ' s p o s s i b l e .

Genuinely curious.

With chemistry we can say:
Alkanes are a homologous series of hydrocarbons.
Hydrocarbons are hydrogen and carbon.
Hydrogen has the atomic number 1.
This is because of it having 1 proton.
A proton is....etc etc

With physics there seems to be a lot more "woo" factor, and I want to know how it's possible to arrive at a beginning state.

Are you also recording the moments when you have a random thought and nothing related happens?

Impossible, which is why I'm not calling this scientific.

But ever since 2015, things have gone all sorts of crazy in my life, and the chances of some of these events occurring are incredibly slim*.

Some of them would have required hallucinogens to explain (which I didn't take).

* Given the current understanding of the world.

I can't even fathom how many things I would have to eliminate before considering that the person could see the future and for some reason chose to see the very near-term future of a baseball game to make a prediction as a commentator.

It doesn't have to be that he can see the future.

It could be part of some predetermined plan for the solipsist to learn from.

Genetic pre-disposition towards blind hope as part of the human survival mechanism.

There's absolutely no room for it coming from their lived experiences? It's all just a bunch of biochemical reactions?

------

What would people make of the universe if they had a dream like this thought experiment:

What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness, and say to you, "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence" ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: "You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine."

 

[MatskiMonk]

There's absolutely no room for it coming from their lived experiences? It's all just a bunch of biochemical reactions?

Ultimately I'd suggest lived experience is still just a bunch of biochemical reactions, how else do you remember things, or even experience them in the first place? But that aside, I do believe some people are more likely to be open to the religious explanation for events, based on their genetics, but obviously environmental factors will also play a part - as has been mentioned countless times in this thread, how people interpret religion itself is often a reflection of their surroundings.

For what it's worth I have questioned things myself... https://www.gtplanet.net/forum/threads/self-improvement.263911/post-7697483

If people have a need to believe, there's a good chance they will - and I think it's fair to suggest the existence of the belief is where people find the benefits they attribute to god, and not in god itself.

 

[Famine]

I want to know how it's possible to arrive at a beginning state.

Right now, it's not. We're limited - as we have been before - by what particles and waves (and both) we can use to observe things, and we can get extremely close to the beginning state (and predict end states), insofar as the word "beginning" applies here.

Will it be possible? It's certainly possible that it will be, yes.

We do already have objects within the universe that show us what happens when space-time as we know it ceases to exist in a practical sense - objects that were predicted by previous theories and confirmed decades later - and that gives us a very, very good idea what happens when space-time as we know it never existed, as well as the pathway from one state to the other, which was also predicted by previous theories.

The fact that even they aren't stable-state objects and have properties that fit with and are predicted by previous theories, as well as their spontaneous quantum interactions outside the zone of space-time collapse. We've even seen what happens when two such objects collide with one another (and that's truly bizarre, but again predicted by previous theories).

 

[Ghost Lap]

“Let every man come to God in his own way.”

 

[Famine]

“Let every man come to God in his own way.”

No women or children allowed, eh? Standard.

 

[UKMikey]

No women or children allowed, eh? Standard.

I think little children can come as well, so long as they suffer.

 

[TRLWNC7396]

I don't think you appreciate just how insanely large "a few billion years" really is. Billions are just hopelessly enormous numbers.

A billion years ago was sometimes during the 1950's. A billion minutes ago was close to the year zero. A billion hours ago stretches understanding.

Yes, billion is a hard number to grasp.

But so is everything about both evolution and creation.

Also the teacher doesn't know in advance who is gonna fail (well he may have an idea tho)
And he doens't test them to test them, he does the test to see how much of the stuff he taught has stuck in their brains.

Also if you fail a math test, nothing bad happens, but a bad grade.

When we came into this life, we did so with the understanding that we wouldn't remember everything that we knew before. That makes understanding all that is happening much harder, I know. But we all feel good about good things. So, what is real and what isn't is more about what we choose to believe. It's hope and trust, not always pure knowledge.

This smacks of a "mysterious ways"-style copout to me.

If it could be absolutely proved that this universe was a simulation or a fictional construct, I'm sure you have seen it'd only intensify our desire to discover who or what created it, why and where they came from.

I'm not surprised Russell's teapot was "created" (or, more properly, conceived) as a response to this kind of endless what-if speculation.

It depends on what you understand.

I worked at a medical packaging facility for (basically) 18 years. (Medical Action, Inc. It has been purchased by Owens and Minor) I started on the production floor running a machine that made sterilization pouches for in-house sterilization. I also ran (pretty well) every machine on the floor at some time or another.

I then moved to the warehouse and handled ALL of the product that went through that company (or at least (pretty well) all of the parts).

My third position was in the quality department. I learned about processes, calibration, and sterilization. I even went to a place that has two sterilization facilities literally right next door to each other. On is gamma, the other is ETO (Ethylene oxide). I learned about the dangers of both. One can kill you by tearing you apart (gamma), and the other can kill you by a flammable poison. Seriously dangerous stuff! (One ETO place exploded, and took out everything within over 1/4 mile!)

So, the reason for all of these explanations: I was working on checking our sterilization load usage (when it costs $10K per load, and we/they send 2-4 per day, it adds up) to make sure that we were getting the heaviest load we could pull off.

I had a graph that showed our weight per load. It was rather all over the place, but it was mostly in a line. The weights went from around 10K pounds to 30K pounds.

I had handled every part that was used in those loads. I had run every machine. I had seen the process from beginning to end, and I realized that each of those dots represented some AMAZING amounts of knowledge and information.

And that is all JUST in one type of manufacturing.

It dawned on me that God has the ability to understand LITERALLY everything.

And I realized how little I (and everyone else) knows.

That is why I live with faith, and the understanding that I CAN'T have all of the answers.

So, yes, I give some trite, somewhat simple explanations.

But, seriously, can anyone explain everything?

25 Heywood Road
Arden, NC 28704

Look it up.

 

[MatskiMonk]

It dawned on me that God has the ability to understand LITERALLY everything.

Need to watch out for them ETO fumes.

edit:

Seriously though, those dots on the graph you refer to are examples of thousands of years of cumulative human knowledge multiplied by millions of people working to solve problems using scientific understanding and principles. God has literally no bearing on that one way or the other, and the fact that God popped into your head whilst thinking about it is nothing to do with anything.

 

[Liquid]

A billion years ago was sometimes during the 1950's.

Either this is cosmic satire of Young Earth creationism or you meant seconds.