Don wrote:
Here’s the deal. Present evidence, not validations, for the natural fine-tuning of the fundamental forces and for the natural origin of those forces and I’ll use that as a model for my evidence for the existence of God.
I assume a non-answer is because there is no answer.
While I’m under no obligation to respond to Don’s challenge ( a fact he seems unable to comprehend) he continues to badger me to do so. So here is my response.
Like many of your comments, Don, I really don’t know what point you’re making here. Your challenging me, I think, to provide evidence that the fine-tuning of the universe arose by natural means. I declined to engage with this evasive irrelevancy but as it is preventing you from answering our questions about the evidence for God, I’ll reiterate points I’ve previously made here and here. God forbid you should search for these for yourself, or indeed that you should remember the one from last year, which you commented on.
You presuppose the universe is fine-tuned for life. The evidence demonstrates quite conclusively that it is not. With 99.9999% of it inanimate, it is evident that what the universe is ‘fine-tuned’ for is inanimacy.
Statistically, however, given there are billions of planets, the likelihood that at least one will have conditions capable of giving rise to life is good. Indeed, the sheer enormity of numbers makes it highly probable. This is not ‘fine-tuning’, which implies conditions were created in order for life to arise. They weren’t. Conditions happened to be conducive for life’s emergence, though only after 3.7 billion years of inanimacy. That is all.
You come at this from the assumption that life is the most incredible thing the universe could possibly produce. We don’t know this. If the universe were conscious it might think stars or worm-holes much more impressive. Life is but one of the phenomena the universe has produced. We think it’s the most amazing achievement because we are it. This doesn’t mean it is. Indeed that same conscious universe might regard life as a bothersome infestation of one of its more insignificant planets.
No God is required to explain the phenomenon of life and therefore, applying Occam’s razor, we can safely conclude that no God had a hand in its creation or development here on Earth. Certainly not your small, man-made tribal deity, YHWH.
So, as you promised, let’s see you apply these same principles to demonstrate your God’s existence and/or that of a supernatural plane. You can make use of empirical evidence, probability theory and logic but you mustn’t appeal to myth, the Bible or ‘spiritual experiences’ that originate inside people’s heads. Have at it.