An Honest question on the creation on the earth
Offline I have been wondering this for awhile.
The earth is very rare to have all the things going for it, that it really needs to have human life. For instance...
The sun is just the right size unlike 90% of other stars it is not to big not to small. If it were bigger human life would be limited if not impossible. If smaller the same applies.
The sun is just the right distance away from us, same applies.
The right amount of oxygen is present in our air, if there was just 1% more oxygen fires would burn to strong for us to handle as easy. Or %1 less it would be a ton harder to breath.
The fact that there is water, there has not been 1 100% claimed planet that is said to have water in its liquid form (correct me if I am wrong)
The list goes on and on...
There was a study done on all of this that took a very conservative 1 and 10 chance of these and many more things just happening by "chance" and compiled them. (Now keep in mind things like water on this earth 1 and 10 is easily more in the 1 to 100 or 1,000 range. ) Taking all these things in a 1 and 10 range the chances of our earth being where it is are 1 and 1,000,000,000,000 (1 trillion) this is just planet placement alone.
So as the "rational response team" says I don't want to belive in a fairy tale. You are telling me that I should take a 1 and 1,000,000,000,000 chance on my life after death.
Convice me otherwise please.
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Offline The earth is very rare to have all the things going for it, that it really needs to have human life.
Remember that life adapted to the conditions of Earth, not vice versa. Also, human life is not an ideal form of life. Life exists where humans could not without non-biological aid, eg. Antarctica.
There was a study done on all of this that took a very conservative 1 and 10 chance of these and many more things just happening by "chance" and compiled them. (Now keep in mind things like water on this earth 1 and 10 is easily more in the 1 to 100 or 1,000 range. ) Taking all these things in a 1 and 10 range the chances of our earth being where it is are 1 and 1,000,000,000,000 (1 trillion) this is just planet placement alone.
Stellar and planetary formation is not the same as casting a die. Neither is the chemical and physical make up of the planets nor the possible formation and evolution of life.
You could also state that golf is impossible, because the chance of the golf ball landing on a specific leaf of grass is extremely small.
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Offline I have been wondering this for awhile.
The earth is very rare to have all the things going for it, that it really needs to have human life. For instance...
The sun is just the right size unlike 90% of other stars it is not to big not to small. If it were bigger human life would be limited if not impossible. If smaller the same applies.
The sun is just the right distance away from us, same applies.
The right amount of oxygen is present in our air, if there was just 1% more oxygen fires would burn to strong for us to handle as easy. Or %1 less it would be a ton harder to breath.
The fact that there is water, there has not been 1 100% claimed planet that is said to have water in its liquid form (correct me if I am wrong)
The list goes on and on...
There was a study done on all of this that took a very conservative 1 and 10 chance of these and many more things just happening by "chance" and compiled them. (Now keep in mind things like water on this earth 1 and 10 is easily more in the 1 to 100 or 1,000 range. ) Taking all these things in a 1 and 10 range the chances of our earth being where it is are 1 and 1,000,000,000,000 (1 trillion) this is just planet placement alone.
So as the "rational response team" says I don't want to belive in a fairy tale. You are telling me that I should take a 1 and 1,000,000,000,000 chance on my life after death.
Convice me otherwise please.
I see your point entirely but it actually works against you. This planet has perfect conditions for life but 99.99999% of the universe isn't, in fact most of it is empty space, a void of nothingness. Most celestial objects don't have life on them and don't have the right conditions for life. In fact some parts of the earth do not provide easy environments for life, deserts, tundra, frozen ice caps. We live in a place which has life because it is in exactly the right place. Seeing as there are billions of stars and quadrillions of planets, of course there are going to be some flukes. Earth is a fluke, a marvellous, fantastic fluke, it may be one of only a few such flukes in existence. It might seem mind boggling but why should it, it's simple probability.
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This is understandable, and I will show you where there are holes in your arguement. You are under the assumption that our universe is perfect for life. Well, this is where you are wrong. Our universe is perfect, therefor we can HAVE life. There are other universes obviously, not just ours. They are probably incapable of producing life, space is vast and infinite, for all we know there are an untold amount of universes, and ours just happens to be the one capable of sustaining life. You are under the assumption that our universe is the only universe and is too much a of a coincidence for it to be anything but god. Don't get me wrong, you're trying to use reason mostly to come to your conclusions, that is always to be applauded. That this is too perfect to be chance. Well, we are one universe in what could be untold trillions. If that is true, then one that could support life was bound to pop up eventually.You have to look at all possibilities before you can decide on one.
"Why would God send his only son to die an agonizing death to redeem an insignificant bit of carbon?"-Victor J. Stenger.
You may want to pop into my Infinite God topic.
Well, I'm not sure I want to go with the statement that "there are other universes." The multiverse theory, at present, is untestable, so I think it's probably not productive to rely on it.
You're making a pretty simple mistake, actually. In the deep south, we call it "putting the cart before the horse" or the "chicken before the egg."
Think about it this way. Suppose you come home one night, and there's a great big hole in your roof. During the night, it rains. In the morning, there is exactly one foot of water in your house. You survey the situation and say to yourself, "How incredible that this hole in my roof was precisely big enough such that exactly one foot of water is now on my floor!"
Well, duh. There is one foot of water on the floor BECAUSE of the hole. The hole isn't there because of the water! If the hole had been bigger or smaller, the results would have been different.
Same with the earth. We are here because of the proximity to the sun and availability of water. The sun and earth are not here because of us!
Same with the universe. What you see happened because of the nature of the universe. Think about the immensity of the universe. If only one in a million planets is exactly the right distance from exactly the right size star, then there are hundreds of billions of chances for life to occur. If only one in a million actually generates life "randomly" then that means there are hundreds of thousands of planets with life. It's not so improbable.
Actually, one of Jupiter's moons has water. That's in our solar system. Oh, and out of the trillions of planets, how many have we surveyed? Um... that would be 8. I don't think you're in a position to say that there's no water anywhere else in the universe.
Bollocks.
What did these objective studiers use as a basis for their facts. Again, we have surveyed exactly eight planets, and we've just begun to look at a significant portion of stars in our galaxy! These "odds" are nothing but a fanciful guess based on absolutely no evidence.
No. You've got all sorts of problems with this statement.
1) 1 in a trillion is a made up number with no factual basis.
2) Even if that number is true, then with the immensity of the universe, it would still be LIKELY that there is life somewhere. If you happen to be asking the question, it must be you!
3) Even if there is only a one in a trillion trillion chance that life exists, then your life proves that it happened. People win the lottery, you know!
4) Even if you can reduce the odds to such a small number that even scientists would concede that it was a practical impossibility, that proves ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about how we got here.
5) Suppose that somehow or another, you manage to prove that life on earth was created. This proves NOTHING about the creator. Only that it/they existed at the time of life's creation. It/They might be long dead. They might have left and are off somewhere else creating life, paying no attention to us whatsoever. Your bible says it's true. Whoop-de-freakin-do. So does the book of Mormon. So does the Koran. Hey... come to think of it... every single religion that's ever existed says it's true. How stupid would it be for a religion to say, "Hey, don't believe this. It's false."
There's this awesome discipline called logic. You should learn about it. Then you would know that what you've done is argue from ignorance and wonder. You've also taken several leaps of logic, known as non-sequiturs. Basically, your argument wouldn't make it through the first week of a high school logic class.
Seriously. This is one of the weakest arguments for the existence of god.
Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin
http://hambydammit.wordpress.com/
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You just helped prove that humans evolved on earth from a species that originated on earth. Congratulations.
In case you didn't understand my comment, and since you're a theist you probably didn't, I'll explain it to you.
Life evolved on Earth in orbit around Sol. Therefore life is adapted to the conditions it evolved within. Obviously we're suited to our star and it's distance. It's been there for 4 billion odd years. Sometimes the lack of logic from theists really makes me shake my head.
Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.
The earth is very rare to have all the things going for it, that it really needs to have human life. For instance...
Skip it. I know all of the bandwiths for the Goldilocks Argument. Lets see... distance, magnetosphere, lunar orbit tilt, size, existence of exasolar shield...
The sun is just the right size unlike 90% of other stars it is not to big not to small. If it were bigger human life would be limited if not impossible. If smaller the same applies.
That's a lie. The sun's size does not matter, only the relationship between the distance from the sun and the luminosity of it. Because the planet needs to be within the temp range for liquid water. You just made up that 90% of stars statistic. And even if that was true...you do realize that only 0.1% of all stars have solar systems. Do you know how many stars there are...
6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
Do you know how many planets there are?
5,000,000,000,000,000,000
Do the math.
The sun is just the right distance away from us, same applies.
Same side of the same coin as the above.
The right amount of oxygen is present in our air, if there was just 1% more oxygen fires would burn to strong for us to handle as easy. Or %1 less it would be a ton harder to breath.
Actually...the reason oxygen exists in the air is because of the photosynthetic processes of cyanobacteria and the algae that followed it. The amount of oxygen had to stabilize for the existence of life, because it was primordial life which created the oxygen in the atmosphere. Ergo, what you just did was reason in a circle. Life and oxygen concentration are two sides of the same coin.
The fact that there is water, there has not been 1 100% claimed planet that is said to have water in its liquid form (correct me if I am wrong)
There are 5,000,000,000,000,000,000 known to exist? How many have we studied? 8.
There was a study done on all of this that took a very conservative 1 and 10 chance of these and many more things just happening by "chance" and compiled them. (Now keep in mind things like water on this earth 1 and 10 is easily more in the 1 to 100 or 1,000 range. ) Taking all these things in a 1 and 10 range the chances of our earth being where it is are 1 and 1,000,000,000,000 (1 trillion) this is just planet placement alone.
Most of those factors were the same side of the same coin making them redundant.
Care to cite this study? Come on, this is a highly sophomoric tactic.
Even if the chance was one in a trillion, that still leaves 5 billion planets supporting life. The Drake equations indicate that every stable solar system should have one planet that could theoretically sustain life.
Convice me otherwise please.
Study astronomy. Most of the zone bandwiths are two sides of the same coin...for instance
Existence of the Earth;s moon. Not special. Most planets have moons. In fact, Earth is unusual in having just one. Most planets have multiple moons
Existence of the exasolar gas giants to shield from asteriods: That one is a given. The laws of astrophysics dictate that terrestrial planets form close to the sun and gas giants farther away. Any terrestrial planet will have gas giants to cover it's back.
Lastly...look into the anthropic principles. From the point of view of the undoubtable billions of dead planets, they certainly don't feel they were placed in a special orbit by a loving God. It is physcologically natural to conclude that our planet could only have existed via the careful assemblage of factors...but is it logical?
"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.
-Me
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Great pic. That's the Hubble Deep Space Field, unless I am mistaken. Each of those pinpoints of life is not a star...it's a galaxy. Each galaxy has billions of stars, and many of the stars have a handful of planets. Who knows how many harbor life?
"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.
-Me
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Sorry but that's a cart before horse scenario. It's easy to look and say at the earth and conclude that it must have been designed for us when in fact we were 'designed' - and in no way do I use that term in the sense of a pre-planned construct - for it.
The thing is, that's not how mathematical probability works. First of all, as soon as you start throwing in arbitrary estimates - after all, who is anyone to say that each variable has a one in ten chance or that they are all dependent on each other? - you invalidate the model. Sure, you can use reasoned estimates but an assumption of 1 in 10 is not a reasoned assumption.
In any event a one in one trillion event isn't actually that unlikely given the estimated size of the universe.
I'm not going to do that but I am going to ask you this:
The odds of your parents producing you with the specific genetic code you have are 1 in 70,368,744,177,664. This is based on your parents having two complete stes of 23 chromosones and the odds of a specific combination arising being 2^23 per parent (or 1 in 8,388,608 if you prefer). As there are two parents then you have to multiply the probabilities to get at the huge figure shown - a figure that is 70 times greater than your example.
And that's just for one generation.
Think about it. That's all I ask.
Freedom of religious belief is an inalienable right. Stuffing that belief down other people's throats is not.