4Read more at location 688
Note: la spiegazione materialista è complicata e nemmeno spiega xchè le proprietà degli oggetti si mantengono nel tempo. perchè il mondo è ordinato? l ipotesi teista offre una spiegazione ragionevole: il lavoro di una xsona intelligente è ordinato. inoltre dio essendo infinitamente buono nn vuole rendere il mondo comprensibile alla sua creatura... william paley: vedere un ordine nel mondo nn significa che è stato fatto in un istante e nn in un processo la spiegazione darwiniana è completa ma nn ultimativa: xchè esistono certe leggi e nn altre? il fine tuning. dio o il caso? ricorrere alla coincidenza nn è mai una spiegazione forte... obiezione: tu nn puoi che xcepire un mondo ordinato quindi il fatto che ti appaia tale non rsprime alcuna coincidenza.. confutazione x analogia: joe viene rapito e lo si tortura con la roulette russa (99 proiettili in un caricatore da 100). si spara ma nn parte nessun colpo. joe: nn posso credere alla coincidenza lo avete fatto x spaventarni. torturatore: dubbio assurdo: nn è una coincidenza il fatto che sei tra noi: solo essendoci puoi formulare la tua ipotesi. è chiaro che l assunto del todturatore è fallace. controanalogia. perchè nn consideriamo le leggi scintifiche un puro arbitrio dettato da una coincidenza visto che sono ricavate da un esperienza estremamente limitata e x di più percepita nel modo estremamente specifico tipico degli uomini? risposta: semplice, xchè uno lavora con i dati che ha. morale: il teista nn spiega ciò che xcepisce ma ciò che è. il mondo ordinato e nn la sua xcezione del mondo ordinato richiede una spiega imho: nota la differenza con l argomento di plantinga contro l evoluzione. in quel caso la teoria contestata prevede esplicitamente che nn siamo fatti x la verità bensì x adattarci all ambiente. l evoluzione nn è uno spreco? no. 1 l uomo ha bisogno di un ambiente 2 nn esiste solo l uomo: il mio cane nn è uno spreco. del resto qs è il punto di vista della scienza.... universo infinito. bisogna spiegare xchè dura. xchè le leggi sono costanti. xchè ad un certo punto emerge l uomo. il paradosso di khalem. troppi problemi. multiverso. se i molti universi sono simili nulla di nuovo. le teorie inflattive ipotizzano un gruppo di universi simili di qs tipo. ma se i molti universi sono differenti nn possiamo più parlare di coincidenza x la presenza umana. un miltiverso di qs tipo è molto complicato. vale la pena di postularlo in assenza di indizi seri? no. l ipotesi teista resta la più semplice e spuega xchè la scienza spiega... Edit
HOW THE EXISTENCE OF GOD EXPLAINS THE WORLD AND ITS ORDERRead more at location 688
Note: 4@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ L ORDINE DELL UNIVERSO. X O MATERIALISTI UNA COINCODENZA. PER IL TEISTA: CONDIVISIONE DEL SAPETE. PIANO POSSIBILE. BELLEZZA Edit
There is a physical universe consisting of innumerable differently sized chunks of matter.Read more at location 690
It is extraordinary that there should exist anything at all. Surely the most natural state of affairs is simply nothing: no universe, no God, nothing. But there is something. And so many things.Read more at location 695
the whole progress of science and all other intellectual enquiry demands that we postulate the smallest number of brute facts. If we can explain the many bits of the universe by one simple being which keeps them in existence, we should do soRead more at location 697
every object, however distant in time and space from ourselves, has the same powers and the same liabilitiesRead more at location 702
If there is no cause of this, it would be a most extraordinary coincidence—Read more at location 704
Suppose we stop with Grand Unified Theory. Then every atom and every electron in the universe has just the same powers and liabilities—those described by Grand Unified Theory. And that, if you allow yourself only scientific explanations, is where you stop. That, says the materialist, is just how things are. But that sort of stopping place is just where no rational enquirer will stop. If all the coins found on an archaeological site have the same markings, or all the documents in a room are written with the same characteristic handwriting, we look for an explanation in terms of a common source. The apparently coincidental cries out for explanation.Read more at location 713
each other electron in repelling every other electron with the same electrical force.Read more at location 720
Oak trees behave like other oak trees, and tigers like other tigers.Read more at location 721
if material objects behaved totally erratically, we would never be able to choose to control the world or our own lives in any way. So, in seeking an explanation of why all material objects have the same simple powers and liabilities as each other, we should seek one which explains why they are such that the approximate powers and liabilities of medium-sized material objects (including those of importance for human life) which follow therefrom are readily detectable by humans.Read more at location 739
The simple hypothesis of theism leads us to expect all the phenomena which I have been describing with some reasonable degree of probability. God being omnipotent is able to produce a world orderly in these respects. And he has good reason to choose to do so: a world containing human persons is a good thing. Persons have experiences, and thoughts, and can make choices, and their choices can make big differences to themselves, to others, and to the inanimate world. God, being perfectly good, is generous. He wants to share. And there is a particular kind of goodness in human persons with bodies in a law-governed universe.Read more at location 744
we can choose to learn how the world works and so learn which bodily actions will have more remote effects. We can learn quickly when rocks are likely to fall, predators to pounce, and plants to grow.Read more at location 749
Like a good parent, a generous God has reason for not foisting on us a certain fixed measure of knowledge and control, but rather for giving us a choice of whether to grow in knowledge and control.Read more at location 760
The suitability of the world as a theatre for humans is not the only reason for God to make an orderly world. The higher animals too are conscious, learn, and plan—and the predictability of things in their most easily detectable aspects enables them to do so.Read more at location 766
But beyond that an orderly world is a beautiful world. Beauty consists in patterns of order. Total chaos is ugly.Read more at location 767
God has reason to make an orderly world, because beauty is a good thing—in my view whether or not anyone ever observes it, but certainly if only one person ever observes it.Read more at location 770
Humans see the comprehensibility of the world as evidence of a comprehending creator.Read more at location 773
The orderly behaviour of material bodies, which he describes as their tendency to move towards a goal (e.g. the falling body tending towards the ground, the air bubbling up through water), was the basis of the fifth of St Thomas Aquinas’s ‘five ways’ to prove the existence of God:Read more at location 780
The argument from the existence and regular behaviour of material objects to a God who keeps them in existence with the same powers and liabilities as each other is an argument which satisfies very well the criteria set out in Chapter 2. The hypothesis of theism is a simple hypothesis which leads us to expect these observable phenomena, when no other hypothesis will do so. On the materialist hypothesis it is a mere coincidence that material objects have the same powers as each other, and not a simple stopping point for explanation.Read more at location 788
There is also the marvellous order of human and animal bodies. They are like very very complicated machines.Read more at location 796
Very many eighteenth-century writers argued that there was no reason to suppose that chance would throw up such beautiful organization, whereas God was able to do soRead more at location 805
God is able to bring about the existence of such bodies. That he does so, we saw in Chapter 3, is a simple hypothesis. Hence there is good reason to believe that God is the creator of human and animal bodies.Read more at location 810
The best-known presentation of this argument was by William Paley in his Natural TheologyRead more at location 813
The argument does not, however, give any reason to suppose that God made humans and animals as a basic act on one particular day in history,Read more at location 829
Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) taught us the outlines of the story, and biologists have been filling in the details ever since. The clear simple modern presentation in Richard Dawkins’s The Blind Watchmaker (1986) is deservedly popular.Read more at location 832
This explanation of the existence of complex organisms is surely a correct explanation, but it is not an ultimate explanation of that fact. For an ultimate explanation we need an explanation at the highest levelRead more at location 857
So, even given that there are laws of nature (i.e. that material objects have the same powers and liabilities as each other), why just those laws? The materialist says that there is no explanation. The theist claims that God has a reason for bringing about those laws because those laws have the consequence that eventually animals and humans evolve.Read more at location 862
Some soups different in chemical constitution from that from which the earth actually began would also, given the actual laws of physics, have given rise to animals. But most soups of chemical elements made from differently arranged fundamental particles would not have given rise to animals.Read more at location 867
The primitive soup existed because the earth was formed in the way it was; and the earth was formed in the way it was because the galaxy was formed in the way it was, and so on … until we come right back to the Big Bang, the explosion 15,000 million years ago with which apparently the universe began. Recent scientific work has drawn attention to the fact that the universe is ‘fine tuned’.Read more at location 870
(For a simple account of some of this work, see John Leslie, Universes (1989).)Read more at location 873
Of course, the universe may not have had a beginning with a Big Bang, but may have lasted forever. Even so, its matter must have had certain general features if at any time there was to be a state of the universe suited to produce animals and humans.Read more at location 880
Again the materialist will have to leave it as an ultimate brute fact that an everlasting universe and its laws had those characteristics, whereas the theist has a simple ultimate explanationRead more at location 887
Darwin showed that the universe is a machine for making animals and humans. But it is misleading to gloss that correct point in the way that Richard Dawkins does: ‘our own existence once presented the greatest of all mysteries, but … it is a mystery no longer … Darwin and Wallace solved it’Read more at location 897
It is misleading because it ignores the interesting question of whether the existence and operation of that machine, the factors which Darwin (and Wallace) cited to explain ‘our own existence’, themselves have a further explanation.Read more at location 900
An objector may invoke a form of what is known as the anthropic principle to urge that, unless the universe exhibited order of the kinds which I have described (simple laws operating on matter in such a way as to lead to the evolution of animals and humans), there would not be any humans alive to comment on the fact. (If there were no natural laws, there would be no regularly functioning organisms, and so no humans.) Hence there is nothing surprising in the fact that we find order—we could not possibly find anything else.Read more at location 935
Suppose that a madman kidnaps a victim and shuts him in a room with a card-shuffling machine. The machine shuffles ten packs of cards simultaneously and then draws a card from each pack and exhibits simultaneously the ten cards. The kidnapper tells the victim that he will shortly set the machine to work and it will exhibit its first draw, but that, unless the draw consists of an ace of hearts from each pack, the machine will simultaneously set off an explosion which will kill the victim, in consequence of which he will not see which cards the machine drew. The machine is then set to work, and to the amazement and relief of the victim the machine exhibits an ace of hearts drawn from each pack. The victim thinks that this extraordinary fact needs an explanation in terms of the machine having been rigged in some way. But the kidnapper, who now reappears, casts doubt on this suggestion. ‘It is hardly surprising’, he says, ‘that the machine draws only aces of hearts. You could not possibly see anything else. For you would not be here to see anything at all, if any other cards had been drawn.’ But, of course, the victim is right and the kidnapper is wrong. There is indeed something extraordinary in need of explanation in ten aces of hearts being drawn.Read more at location 943
The theist’s starting-point is not that we perceive order rather than disorder, but that order rather than disorder is there. Maybe only if order is there can we know what is there, but that makes what is there no less extraordinary and in need of explanation.Read more at location 953
Another objector may advocate what is called the many-worlds theory. He may say that, if there are trillions and trillions of universes, exhibiting between them all the possible kinds of order and disorder there can be, it is inevitable that there will be one governed by simple comprehensible laws which give rise to animals and humans. True. But there is no reason to suppose that there are any universes other than our own.Read more at location 958
Note that I am not postulating a ‘God of the gaps’, a god merely to explain the things which science has not yet explained. I am postulating a God to explain what science explains; I do not deny that science explains, but I postulate God to explain why science explains.Read more at location 971
