To: gore3000
"Imagine that you are a cosmic explorer who has just stumbled into the control room of the whole universe. There you discover an elaborate "universe-creating-machine", with rows and rows of dials, each with many possible settings. As you investigate, you learn that each dial represents some particular parameter that has to be calibrated with a precise value in order to create a universe in which life can exist. One dial represents the possible settings for the strong nuclear force, one for the gravitationl constant, one for Planck's constant, one for the ratio of the neutron mass to the proton mass, one for the strength of electromagnetic attraction, and so on. As you, the cosmic explorer, examine the dials, you find that they could easily have been tuned to different settings. Moreover, you determine by careful calculations that if any of the dial settings were even slightly altered, life would cease to exist. Yet for some reason each dial is set at just the exact value necessary to keep the universe running. What do you infer about the origin of these finely tuned dial settings?"
I don't think this is fair to use. If they weren't set this way, then there would be nobody to talk about it. It's like I tell you to pick up a rock. You pick up a rock and show it to me. I comment on how unbelieveable it is that you picked up this rock with these exact specifications. This rock is 1 in 1 trillion and you picked it up. Amazing! Nonsense. There is no need to talk about impossibility of odds after the fact, it adds nothing to the debate. Insanely impossible things happen everydai. What are the odds that I misspelled everyday just then! Wow! 1 in 1 trillion I bet! There must be a god.
To: B. Rabbit
I don't think this is fair to use. If they weren't set this way, then there would be nobody to talk about it. It's like I tell you to pick up a rock. You pick up a rock and show it to me. I comment on how unbelieveable it is that you picked up this rock with these exact specifications. This rock is 1 in 1 trillion and you picked it up. Amazing! Nonsense. There is no need to talk about impossibility of odds after the fact, it adds nothing to the debate. Insanely impossible things happen everydai. What are the odds that I misspelled everyday just then! Wow! 1 in 1 trillion I bet! There must be a god. It's not the same thing. A rock has no specificity, no purpose. The Universe has a tremendous amount of specificity, of purpose (in addition to complexity). We ordinarily think of things which have all three - complexity, specificity and purpose as designed. Some examples would be works of art, houses, automobiles, computers, etc. We can pick them up like the rock, but we do not think it arose at random. We may know know the name of their maker or the name of their designer, but we do know as surely as we are typing to each other here, that it was not a randomly occurring thing. We know with complete certainty that there was a human mind behind it.
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