On your second point, I'm talking about galaxies that are beyond the reach of even those telescopes.

It doesn't say *why* the universe is fine-tuned that way.

Barrow and Tipler put out a huge piece of work on it in 1986, but there were some objections to the main thrust of their argument in British Journals of Science and Philosophy:

"Barrow and Tipler's attempt to stave off the inference to divine design by appealing to the Weak Anthropic Principle is demonstrably logically fallacious unless one conjoins to it the metaphysical hypothesis of a World Ensemble. But there is no reason for such a postulate. Their misgivings about the alternative of divine design are shown to be of little significance."

British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 38 (1988): 389-395

http://bjps.oxfordjournals.org/cont...

The Anthropic philosophy basically tells us what we should or should not be surprised at, and Barrow and Tipler said we shouldn't be surprised at seeing the fine-tuning of the universe.

But there is a great example that illustrates the weakness of this argument. Suppose you are sentenced to death by firing squad and 100 trained marksmen take close aim at your heart. The commander yells, "Fire" and you hear all the guns shoot at once - but you notice you didn't get hit and you are still alive.

Are you not to be surprised that you exist and didn't die? The anthropic philosophy would say, "why should you be surprised that you are observing yourself when it could be no other way? If you had been killed, you couldn't observe yourself!"

That doesn't make any sense. Anyone would be surprised to still be alive in such a situation, so the anthropic principle doesn't seem to satisfy. It's not very strong.

But if there is absence of evidence it's consistent with the notion that something does not exist.>

In the wider context, it's important to show that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

To illustrate this all one has to do is think about the planet Neptune, which was discovered in 1846. It certainly existed before 1846 and our absence of evidence was not evidence of absence in that case.

This goes with everything. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

But to your point, we know that given certain context, absence of evidence is indeed consistent with the notion that something does not exist.

We can ask if in the United States there exists a state called Trapezoid. We know that no such state exists because there is no evidence for it.

The question therefore becomes, what kind of evidence would one expect to find if "X" exists?

In the case of <God does not exist because he can't be seen, heard or observed> I would say that the kind of evidence expected is wrong.

God, as the classical definition of theism goes, is a timeless, spaceless, immaterial being that is all powerful, omnibenevolent and so forth.

We can't hear anything that is spaceless and immaterial, nor can we see it or observe it directly. We shouldn't expect to find evidence of God in this way. It's as if one were expecting God to be a material being that is standing around us somewhere, to be heard and seen.

Science can only discover material, and then classify it. God is immaterial so science can't access God himself, by definition.

Is the atheist now going to say, "Well, if your god can't be verified, then we shouldn't believe god exists"? No because if only those things that can be verified are to be considered true, then the very statement <if your god can't be verified, then we shouldn't believe god exists> shouldn't be considered true either because it is not a scientific statement itself.

The bible says, "In the beginning was the logos" and they translate "logos" simply as "word". But "logos" means reason, discourse, logic.

Also, I think it can be argued that theism, the belief that God exists, is a Properly Basic Belief, as Alvin Plantinga has written.

Often times atheists will argue this way and try to shirk the burden of proof. They say atheism is just a lack of a belief too - the belief that "God exists".

Both the atheist and the theist make truth claims about propositions. Propositions can be true or false.

Atheism = the proposition "God does not exist" is true.

Theism = the proposition "God exists" is true.

It's not science.

From wiki,

"The anthropic principle (from Greek anthropos, meaning "human") is the philosophical consideration that observations of the universe must be compatible with the conscious and sapient life that observes it."

To employ the anthropic principle you just have to say, "so what?" to everything you see, no matter how amazing or incredible. They just give "so what" a fancy name.

The anthropic principle does not tell us why the universe is fine tuned for the existence of life. It's not a necessary condition, and a universe with billions of conscious observers is much more unlikely than, say, a Boltzmann Brian scenario.

A Boltzmann Brain is a "hypothesized self aware entity which arises due to random fluctuations out of a state of chaos". Think of it like a quantum brain sort of popping in and out of existence.

Leibniz' Cosmological Argument tries to answer the question: why is there something rather than nothing?

Leibniz' Argument:

1. Everything existing has an explanation of its existence, either in the necessity of its own nature or in an external cause.

2. If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is God

3. The universe is an existing thing.

4. Therefore the explanation of the existence of the universe is God.

That's Leibniz' argument from cosmology.

Is this argument any good? Does it tell us why there is something rather than nothing?

One of the main objections to Leibniz' argument is that the principle of sufficient reason seems false. There can't be an explanation of why any contingent states exist at all, because if there is some explanation then it too needs an explanation, and if it is necessary then all subsequent explanations must also be necessary and not contingent.

Some theist philosophers have answered this objection by agreeing that ultimately there must be a stopping point, a being whose existence is unexplained. Philosophers like Swinburne say that in trying to answer the question of why there is something rather than nothing, we must eventually come to the existence of some contingent being. Such a being would not serve to explain its own existence but will explain the existence of everything else. So Swinburne argues that God is the best explanation of why everything else but the Ultimate Cause exists instead of just nothing at all.

However, the formulation of Leibniz' argument used in this post avoids this whole objection and the idea that God is contingent. Premise one only requires that any existing thing to have an explanation either in its own nature or some external cause. This is compatible with the idea that there are just some brute facts about the world. It precludes the idea that some things could exist inexplicably, which is more plausible than its contradiction and that's all we need to have a good argument.

So all of this boils down to two kinds of beings that can exist: contingent beings and necessary beings. God is a necessary being.

<sugardom>, this is not special pleading for God's existence. Remember, atheists had claimed for centuries tjst the universe itself just existed, always and uncaused.

If the atheist subscribes to mainstream science, then he knows that the universe began to exist 14.7 billion years ago. Therefore we know that the universe didn't always exist. Therefore we know that the universe is contingent.

The Cause of the universe must therefore be timeless, spaceless, immaterial and all powerful, since all these things didn't exist until the (contingent) universe existed. This is obviously the profile of God as a timeless, spaceless, immaterial all powerful being.

Atheists can no longer hide from the contingency or cosmological arguments by way of an eternal universe. And since they used to claim that the universe itself was an uncaused cause, they can't try to take that away from your argument either.

I could go on and on but it's tough typing this on my iPhone with one finger! Please excuse any autocorrect mistakes.

He is.

Nothing can be more fundamental than that. It's almost as if God is saying that He is the personification of existence itself.

You know, <sugardom>, there was a time before scientists could see the expanding cosmic background radiation. A time before science settled on the Big Bang. Back then, philosophers argued (rightly as it turned out) that the universe couldn't be eternal in the past but must have started to exist at some point.

They reasoned that there could be no such thing as an infinite regression into the past. The idea was that if the universe existed always and had a past that extended infinitely, then we would never come to the present moment, as there would be an infinite number of moments to traverse before we could arrive at the present moment.

So if we look at how causes are connected in a chain, we realize that since the chain can't be infinite in reality, it must have a starting point; the Uncaused Cause.