Intellectsamosa

Do you believe in God?

3mo ago2.6K views

PinkHedge

I remember a dialogue from Young Sheldon where he says “Do you know that if gravity was slightly more powerful, the universe would collapse into a ball? If gravity were less powerful, the universe would fly apart. That is, the gravity is precisely powerful as it needs to be. What are the odds that all happens by itself”

Intellectsamosa

instahyre3mo

Simulation probably

ScholarlyTreasury

Startup3mo

That's thinking of it backwards, though.

If we attempt to trace the origin of life on earth, we know that the first building blocks were formed in the primordial soup [1][2][3]. These organic molecules went through the process of natural selection (the more stable combinations were able to survive and proliferate, while the less stable ones simply died off), and gradually gave rise to increasingly complex life forms.

To simplify it a bit: The chemical reactions that kickstarted life originally just happened randomly amidst innumerable other reactions taking place. Among the organic molecules that were created as a result of these reactions, some were able to "survive", while some weren't, depending on their chemical stability. The ones that "survived" were able to create copies of themselves, and undergo the same trial-and-error process of linking with other molecules, which in turn underwent natural selection, resulting in more complex organisms.

Knowing this, it's clear that life adapted to the environment, and not the other way round (nature didn't — and couldn't, because it has no agency to perform conscious actions — create the conditions necessary for life to exist).

I think what he says might be an oversimplification. If the initial conditions of the big bang were such that they resulted in stronger or weaker gravity, the physics might have been different, yes, but who's to say if it would've been any more or less conducive to life than the current conditions. A lot would also depend on what we define life to be — maybe in Sheldon's alternate universe, life (if it existed — and you see, even whether or not it exists depends on how we define it) would've been something entirely different than life as we define it on Earth.

The trouble with claiming that God created the universe with just the right conditions for life to exist is that it presupposes that someone (who people refer to as God) created the universe, that God is both conscious and intelligent, and that he/she/it/they existed before the big bang — which is a contradiction, because we know with enough certainty that matter itself came into existence after the big bang. Consciousness, intelligence, and agency too require life to exist at all in the first place, and life as we know was formed billions of years after the big bang. Since people believing in God are the ones claiming that an intelligent creator exists (as opposed to "I don't know how the universe came into being"), they need to provide sufficient proof to substantiate their claim — which is nigh on impossible.

Making this claim just dodges the question instead of addressing and attempting to answer it — if God exists, who created them? And couldn't someone just as well claim that not God but a unicorn/teddy bear/werewolf/vampire/whatever created the universe? That would still leave us none the wiser about how the universe was created, apart from being simply unhelpful by making a huge leap and leading us to a totally hypothetical and fantastical line of inquiry.

To be scientific, a theory needs to be testable and falsifiable. This claim is neither, and is thus no better than a fantasy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primordial_soup (read just the introductory couple of paragraphs first, and then the other links in order) [2] https://evolution.berkeley.edu/from-soup-to-cells-the-origin-of-life/how-did-life-originate/ [3] https://www.livescience.com/18565-life-building-blocks-chemical-evolution.html