Posted: Jan 06, 2015 10:24 am
What we're dealing with are imaginable possibilities, of which there are many in the pantheon of creation mythology, and trying to quantify the probabilistic likelihood of this-or-that mythical creator existing appears very much like an exercise in determining the flavour of cremé d'rectal. Trying to take on this fine-tuning by designer hypothesis in these kind of terms is giving it far more credit than it deserves - after all, the point it is supporting is a patently fallacious self-referential assertion: The existence of all things are contingent on the existence of God; things exists therefore God exists necessarily.
OK, so if God exists and creates all things he's going to need some substrate in which to put them all (and he might create one for that purpose, or he could just borrow one, or get it from a catalogue perhaps), but God 'the creator' is indistinguishable in every regard from every and any other imaginable possibility framed in similar terms, so there is nothing particularly special or unique about God which demands we go to these extra lengths to refute the basic premise of the Abrahamic faiths; that we are created things in a universe created by an entity we are duty-bound to revere.
Edit: I guess what I'm saying is that I think it's important to avoid engaging in this 'debate' only on the apologists terms, as this can quickly drag us into a burden-shifted dead-end.
OK, so if God exists and creates all things he's going to need some substrate in which to put them all (and he might create one for that purpose, or he could just borrow one, or get it from a catalogue perhaps), but God 'the creator' is indistinguishable in every regard from every and any other imaginable possibility framed in similar terms, so there is nothing particularly special or unique about God which demands we go to these extra lengths to refute the basic premise of the Abrahamic faiths; that we are created things in a universe created by an entity we are duty-bound to revere.
Edit: I guess what I'm saying is that I think it's important to avoid engaging in this 'debate' only on the apologists terms, as this can quickly drag us into a burden-shifted dead-end.