Comment by bigstrat2003
2 years ago
Technically it requires faith to assert that the universe did not have its origin from some intelligent supernatural being, just as it does to assert the opposite. The only thing we can truly say based on the data is "we don't know for certain at this time".
No, it doesn't (at least not if you are adhering to the scientific method). This is a very common bit of religious propaganda, and it is 100% wrong. Intelligence has some very specific and readily identifiable characteristics. In particular, it has high Kolmogorov complexity [1]. This is what distinguishes intelligence from other forms of complexity, like chaos or the decimal expansions of irrational numbers. And there is no evidence of high Kolmogorov complexity in the creation of the universe. To the contrary, all of the evidence points to extraordinarily low Kolmogorov complexity at the foundations of our reality, things that can be described in just a few pages -- maybe even just a few lines -- of math. So to posit an intelligence as the explanation is every bit as unjustified as positing that the Tooth fairy is responsible for the coin under your pillow.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity
If we live in a simulation, there is a simulation creator.
Serious physicists agree that the simulation hypothesis is a possibility, so you are the unscientific one saying that believing there might be a creator is believing in the Tooth fairy.
Of course the simulation hypothesis is a possibility. So is the tooth fairy. And both of those hypotheses have the same amount of supporting data. (Actually, the tooth fairy has more because people really do get money when they leave teeth under their pillows.)
> at least not if you are adhering to the scientific method
All the information you have comes from your five senses. Isn't some kind of faith necessary to believe that the scientific method would lead to an accurate understanding of reality?
That depends on what you mean by "an accurate understanding of reality." One can observe empirically that the scientific method converges towards something which enables you to predict the outcomes of experiments more and more accurately is it converges. Whether you want to call that "an accurate understanding of reality" is a terminological quibble, but it seems like an apt label to me.
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And here you're equivocating on the word faith.
In your post, "faith" either means "accepting best current evidence and logic" or "believing that there's a supernatural explanation without any evidence whatsoever" and it can't rightly mean both, because those definitions are incompatible.
No. Recall the statement I was responding to:
> it requires faith to assert that the universe did not have its origin from some intelligent supernatural being
That is false. It does not require faith to assert this, any more than it requires faith to assert that the tooth fairy does not exist, simply because neither the tooth fairy nor ID have any supporting evidence. Actually, the tooth fairy does have some supporting evidence, namely, that people do sometimes get money when they leave teeth under their pillow. There is no evidence for any process with high Kolmogorov complexity at the root of creation. None. Zero. In the absence of any such evidence, it requires no faith to assert that whatever is at the root of creation is not intelligent.
I agree with you, which means I think we're talking at cross purposes and/or your replied to the wrong person.
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