God?

[Jimmy Jazz]

...Norris?

[tokage]

Ptah!
Think of this: if there is any potential of life developing, any potential at all, even if it's below a millionth nanodigit of a percent, then what's the total chance of life eventually developing?
100%! Why? Because the universe won't simply 'end'! Things die, others explode, but all the while new things get created, too, and thus there is an ever-constant chance for life over all eternity!
And since eternity would be infinite, that obviously means that there WILL be life at SOME point.
That life is us.

No, I don't believe in 'god'. I believe in the universe.

Your logic is only feasible under the assumption that the universe has no beginning or end, which is a completely abstract theory that can't be disproved or proved. Does that last part of 'neither prove or disprove' sound familiar? I hate it when people try to claim their ideas/beliefs are better when in reality they're just using the same logic as nearly everyone else and trying to disguise it with a poor redirection of readers' attention. But I digress. Even an infinite universe wouldn't have infinite chances, because time doesn't loop in on itself. Every single moment is unique; there may be similar ones, but never the same ones, and never in the same order of occurrence. Just like there is infinite time for a single thing to happen (life being created), there is an infinite amount of possibilities that COULD happen, and they don't necessarily have to include something like life being created. That WOULD be by pure chance, and it would be an extraordinarily slim chance at that.

In fact Glabbit is quite right. And you don't even need infinite time or some other additional belief. You yourself said the chance of life developing in a universe is extraordinarily slim. That alone is enough, we just are that universe that developed that way. In fact talking about stochastics in this case doesn't lead anywhere. It is pretty moot to discuss possibilities when you only witnessed one experiment. Say you role a perfect dice, every outcome has the same possibilities and the outcome is a 1. Now everybody knows that the outcome is 1 and the possibilities don't mean anything anymore. They could be anything, the dice doesn't have to be perfect and you can't judge, because you only rolled it once, not 10000 times.
In the end the question, why this universe is made as it is, is quite simple. If it wouldn't be like it is now, there would be no humans that could be witness to how it is. Instabel universes may be far more likely in your theory, but that just doesn't matter. We know there is a universe and it should be no surprise, that it is a human friendly universe because otherwise we wouldn't be here.
That is just called the Anthropic principle.

[Ragdollmaster]

Uh... no. Just no. I'm not even going to bother explaining myself here. EDIT: No wait, actually I am because that's my innate weakness. I should be a teacher...

Moving on, what you said has nearly no relation to what I said, and little relation to what Glabbit even said because he was talking about probability in relation to an infinite timeline, that all possibilities would happen in such a timeline eventually. Seems like you're just saying "Wel dur we exist becuz we do if we culdnt exist than we wuldnt be existing lulz", which unfortunately has no real logical application to this conversation; it's more or less a random manifestation of Captain Obvious in a mostly serious thread. Under your logic, eventual random creation of life could have just as easily occurred by the hand of a sentient creator people tend to call "God", or perhaps a giant fish who can construct matter using one of his nineteen penises. You also may want to read that article you posted, oh great WikiPedia scholar, as the Anthropic Principle states no more and no less than that theories concerning certain subjects like chemistry and astrophysics have to include life on Earth as a variable. BUT; that is the END result of this conversation. We're talking about HOW it got there, so the Anthropic Principle would only have a retrospective application.

Also, no one can be 'right' in this kind of subject, kthxbai. There's only completely illogical theories and slightly illogical theories.

[Glabbit]

Well, alright, I'll admit that it doesn't really mean every possibility would have to happen, but the point I'm making is that it's silly to think we couldn't be a chanced phenomenon. No matter what the chances were, be they a hundred or a billionth, our being here is the de facto proof that this chance came out.
Right?

[invertin]

Of course, that is assuming that the universe does/will last forever.

Which it most likely won't (or at least that's what modern science tells us).

[Ragdollmaster]

Glabbit: Well, not exactly. Our existence could point to many things. There are several possible paths leading up to creation; random chance, a sentient and all-powerful being, the universe itself becoming aware, or maybe it's like The Matrix and we're all just living in a computer simulation; who knows? The point is they all have the end result. You can't just look at that result and then assume that it occurred from one out of several paths. Eg, if you just see a fallen tree in the woods, you might assume that lightning knocked it down. Someone else who sees it could think it was chopped down intentionally. Another person might come to the conclusion that the tree was befallen by an illness and broke down from instability.

Of course, a thorough inspection could reveal which of these happened, but we can't inspect anything tangible about creation. We've things like fossils and evidence of the Earth being really old, but that by itself proves nothing; scientists shoot each other down every day in an effort to bring forth their thoughts, which are the only ones that could be possibly correct. Similarly, we've got religion, but there are hundreds of sects of thousands of religions, none of which fully agree with each other.

TL;DR: We can only really speculate about this based on partial information when we don't have the full picture. Therefore, any certainty gained about a belief on this subject is misplaced without warrant or proof that would allow sure certainty in any theory.



invertin: There's no reason at all to assume modern science to be correct. 2,000 years ago, people were sure that insects magically spawned, that the Earth was the center of the universe and a completely flat planet, etc, based on what they knew. Who's to say everything we've learned is correct? A mistake or misconception in a seemingly minor aspect of knowledge could go and influence many findings after it. Of course, modern science is pretty convincing as is

[invertin]

I never said it was right, but it's what we have to believe until modern technology becomes old technology.

[Ragdollmaster]

Huh. That's kind of weird, how people will believe in something until there's a replacement for it, even if they know the initial belief is misplaced. Human nature?


(also i haff hijakked ur thred. itz no longer pures metaphysikal spechulationz butt includez logic aNd phillosophie)

[yuiop952]

Who is this god everyone is talking about.................... Ohhhhhhhhhhhh do guys mean the fairytale character who created the earth?

[Ragdollmaster]

*facepalm*

Sorry to say you completely fail at acting like a badass. Well, not completely. You got half of it down.



^That half.

You should probably stop posting considering you haven't really read through any of this stuff. Wait, can you read? It's easy to read "God" and then get your mommy to type that out while you slurp lemonade from your big boy sippy cup, but not being able to properly read would explain such a retarded reply. Then again, maybe you've just got some kind of debilitating mental illness. Or it could just be that you're really stupid... well, whatever the case, I wouldn't worry about it too much, since I'm pretty sure you can get some kind of permanent worker's compensation for not being able to train for a job.

Hidden note, I bet his reply to this would be some implication that the donkey posted above is a picture of me or my mother. Tedious predictability...
tl;dr: I just generally loathe ignorant douchefags who think they're actually smart.

[TheBigCheese]

The fact that life is a one in a billion chance is completely irrelevant.

Our galaxy has approximately 70 sextillion stars. From our point in the universe we can observe maybe 200 billion galaxies. Do the math. Unless the chances of life on a planet less than 14,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 to one, then life has a fairly reasonable chance of sprouting up.

And that's only in the known universe, who knows how many planets are out of our visible range.

Simply put, life is extremely probable in the scope of the universe.

[Glabbit]

The point is they all have the end result. You can't just look at that result and then assume that it occurred from one out of several paths.

Uh, I never actually did that.
Note that I was speculating over the silliness of ruling out one of those possibilities, rather than saying "this is how it happened m'fog".

I find it tiring to read through entire posts like that from someone who didn't quite read my own properly... ah well.

EDIT: Heh... Here I was thinking how good it was that we've managed to at least have a semi-intelligent conversation of this length without any rage-outbreaks or particular flaming... and then yuiop952 comes along and sends RagdollMaster off exploding... That made me lol.

And TheBigCheese, Yes, Thank you, that was exactly what I was trying to get at.
And if anyone's going to ask the most silly question of 'then why did we sprout up here, and not somewhere else', then I'd kindly like to explain that had we sprouted up anywhere else someone would've probably asked the same question anyway.

[Ragdollmaster]

TBC: What if they are actually less than 14,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 to one? You can't calculate what you don't really know. Too many variables to just boil it down to "Out of so many planets, at least ONE will eventually host life randomly"; again, "We can only really speculate about this based on partial information when we don't have the full picture."

Also, this seems slightly different than what I thought Glabbit was talking about, although it may be a mistake on my interpretation. Note: I have not ever nor will I ever deny the possibility that life is completely random, but I won't accept it as that because there are many other possibilities, and it's impossible to be certain of which one is true.

Glabbit: Well, I was mainly responding to this;

No matter what the chances were, be they a hundred or a billionth, our being here is the de facto proof that this chance came out.

which I thought was you saying that the mere existence of humans is proof that we are here by chance. Maybe again a misinterpretation by me, or maybe you worded yourself wrong, but whatever. My earlier post mainly responded to this;

Think of this: if there is any potential of life developing, any potential at all, even if it's below a millionth nanodigit of a percent, then what's the total chance of life eventually developing? 100%! Why? Because the universe won't simply 'end'! Things die, others explode, but all the while new things get created, too, and thus there is an ever-constant chance for life over all eternity! And since eternity would be infinite, that obviously means that there WILL be life at SOME point.

which is where I put the whole Infinite Possibilities + Infinite Time != Every Possibility Occurring equation/thing.

To lighten the serious mood, here is a picture of a penguin:



NOTE: All my posts in this thread from now on will have a picture of an animal in them, for greater justice.

[invertin]

Like you've said. Modern technology implies that the universe will end at some point. You are all ignoring that because modern technology can be wrong.

But just because it CAN be wrong doesn't mean it isn't.

In short- You don't know that the universe is going to last forever, so the infinite time point is completely moot.

penguin

EEEEEEVIIIIIIIILLLLLLEEEVIL
EVILEVILEVILEVIL

EEEEVILLLLL

*falls over*

[Ragdollmaster]

In short, any point made in this thread is just assumptive speculation, invertin Of course no one can be sure about this stuff. Just because it CAN be wrong doesn't mean that it isn't. Every point is moot from that perspective.