Chris,
CC: While I have some respect for your thesis because it protects science
from meddling by people who are theists first and scientists perhaps not at
all, I disagree with it.
HVT: You need not, of course, agree with it. But I see it as far more than a
rhetorical means of protecting science from the "meddling ignorami."
CC: I don't think that the "giftedness" of the Universe requires that kind
of explanation. If it did, then surely the creator of it would *also*
require that kind of explanation: How is it that there just *happens* to be
a God who can create universes, etc.? Why is there a God rather than nothing
at all? Surely this can't be chance, can it? The need to regress to yet
*another* creator to create creator is obvious.
HVT: Try this: The attribute of self-existence, or aseity, has traditionally
been reserved for deity. To ascribe that attribute to the physical universe,
then, is to ascribe a God-like attribute to the universe. The worldview that
you then have is more like pantheism than atheism. By the way, I don't mind
admitting that there is more Mystery here than the human mind can fully
comprehend.
CC: At some point, something must simply *be*, and must simply have the
basic properties needed to produce the next level closer to where *we* are.
I see no reason nor value in going beyond some sort of basic, dumb "stuff"
that has one or two basic attributes that allow it, from time to time, at
least, to form at least one "universe" that can, somewhere within itself,
support the evolution of life.
HVT: Chris, surely your choice of the phrase "one or two basic attributes"
for those qualities that a universe must have in order to make humans from
quarks would win the gold medal for understatement in any Olympic
competition. Think about it. I don't say that as a put-down, just as
something that I think needs to be appreciated.
(skip paragraph)
CC: In short, although we just don't know, we don't really gain anything by
positing further-removed causes that themselves would then need even more
remarkable explanatory causes.
HVT: If our only or chief concern were to give some sort of account for the
universe's formational history, perhaps Occam's razor strategy would be
attractive to me. However, I seek a way to do that as a secondary issue, the
primary issue being the search for a way to find meaning in the whole of the
human life experience.
Good conversing with you,
Howard Van Till
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