The Atheological Argument from Scale

[Metacrock]

So many things wrong with this.

you know I'm right. I pegged it.

Do you perceive me as aiming to try and win an argument here?

duh!

I'm having an open discussion. I'm not attacking you or your beliefs, just pointing out something I perceived to be in error.

than why don't you listen? you are circling the wagons.

Besides, there's no possible way I just am not thoroughly convinced that Christianity is an accurate belief system, is there?

You can't be you don't know anything about it. I'm sure you are convinced that the straw man the atheist web sties gave you that they pass off as Christianity is really stupid. I am convinced of that too.

You have never even heard the phrase "God is being itself" that says it all.

Nobody involved in this discussion ever said that "God can't be there because the world is too big".

stop being dishonest and face the facts. that's exactly what the argument says. that's just the blunt nutshell itself.

You leave me no choice but to refer to you as Captain Strawman from now on

All you can fight is straw men. you haven't even bothered to learn the basics of Christian theology except through the lens of its' most ignrnat camp,

you are not honest enough to face the fact of what your argument says.


Argument from SCALE! gee it's not saying it' too big it's just is' the wrong scale. is that what you think?

you can't see a link between the name fo the argument and saying it's too big?

[drgodsauce]

The major problem that atheist face intellectually is setting their sights so low out of their hatred for fudies that that's all they know about. They can't deal with real Christian theology because they have never heard of it. They could win an argument wtih Jethro Bodine or Uncle Jed but when a real Christian theologian comes along they freak because they have no ideas what he' talking about beaus they haven't bothered to learn theology.

Please stop generalizing all atheists. You're telling me all I know about are fundies? That's completely ridiculous. My girlfriend of four years is a catholic. I spend a great deal of time with moderate Christians. What could have possibly given you the impression that I only see fundies when I look at the religious community?
Besides, "Real" Christian theology seems to be a pretty abstract, subjective term. Of the dozens of Christians I talk to on a regular basis, you're the first to adopt positions anywhere close to the ones you do

[Metacrock]

from the OP:"It seems that God could have easily created a universe much simpler and smaller. "

why SMALLER?

could that be because it's too big?

God could have made the world not as small but saying it's too big is a straw man. is that your position? maybe you could explain the substantial difference between not as small and too big. I*'m sure there's some profound meaning there I'm missing.

[drgodsauce]

stop being dishonest and face the facts. that's exactly what the argument says. that's just the blunt nutshell itself.

Congratulations, you just revealed that you didn't read my first post:

Yeah, I agree with robertb, I don't find this argument compelling in terms of the existence of a god in general.
It's a good question to ask of specific claims (a prime example being the creation story in Genesis), but it applies a limiting characteristic on a being of potentially limitless power when applied to the concept of a deity rather than a claimed deity

[Doug Shaver]

So, what do you think of this? Is the vastness of the universe evidence against the existence of God?

No. It looks to me like an argument from ignorance. "I can think of no reason why this is so. Therefore, there cannot be any reason why this is so."

I'm OK with the notion that God, if he exists, might manage to think of some reason for something that would never have occurred to me.

[Metacrock]

Congratulations, you just revealed that you didn't read my first post:

I quoted it. it says that.

you are assuming the bible is all of Christian thought. it's not.

Let's quote more of the OP:

One of the arguments proposed by atheist philosophers in support of atheism is the so-called "argument from scale".

that tells us who. next it says this is what the argent says.

It claims, basically, that the universe is unnecessarily vast;

that's a little summary "it says..." what does it say? too vast. that's fancy word for "too big."


and that if God existed, he would have made it much smaller than it is.

again with the size? if it should be smaller than its too big.

It's been advanced most notably by Nicholas Everitt in his book "The Non-Existence of God", and by many other thinkers, such as Richard Carrier.

more bout who but doesn't change what it says above.

[drgodsauce]

I quoted it. it says that.

you are assuming the bible is all of Christian thought. it's not.

Says what? That i think the Argument from Scale attempts to apply limitation to the concept of something without limits? And for that reason I don't find it compelling?

Or did you neglect the word "my" and think I was referring to the initial argument.

This is getting very old.
No, I am not saying that. Stop attributing claims to me that I didn't make.

[Metacrock]

Says what? That i think the Argument from Scale attempts to apply limitation to the concept of something without limits? And for that reason I don't find it compelling?

Or did you neglect the word "my" and think I was referring to the initial argument.

This is getting very old.
No, I am not saying that. Stop attributing claims to me that I didn't make.

can't tell the players without a program.

[Requiem]

@Zombie:

interesting, but i think it depends on our understanding of the 'useless' structures. they may just be redundancies created by the process that brought us about due to probabilities alone.

Well, i (and many other theists) think that God created the Universe personally and directly, not through some unguided "process". And even if it was so, He would still be responsible for the results of this process.

or some think the universe could be a large computer and the various structures, apparently black holes, are the means of transforming and storing data. i think ray kurtzweil talked about this in one of his books.

Mmm, what kind of information would they store, exactly? It's a thesis quite hard to verify (without being sucked in and atomized by the black hole of course )

or they may be pertinent to some of the holographic universe theories somehow.

How so?

@Metacrock:

that just reacquires second guessing God. The only way they can claim to know God's true purposes is to be God.

Also that arguments assumes a big man in the sky not a ground of being kind of concept of God.

It seems that even postulating God as the Ground of Being, nebulae and comets still look pretty useless.

@Enegma:

The fact that the Earth isn't at the center of the universe isn't as big as a problem. Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards, in The Privileged Planet, show that according to medieval thinking, the center of the universe was the worst place to be, and not some special "place of honor". So that would be really subjective, maybe.

Moreover, if the White Hole cosmology of Russell Humphreys is correct (yeah, i know that many skeptics consider creationist scientists to be nuts, but a very similar cosmology has ben proposed by two secular scientists, Joel Smoller and Blake Temple, and even George Ellis talked in some intrview about another theory in which the earth is located inside a sort of bubble, so maybe it isn't all that off-limits) the Earth would in fact be at the center of the universe.

Anyway, please stick to the topic, not that the earth is not in some special place or that the universe is too old, but that is too big to have been created by a God. (or that its "bigness" counts nonetheless as evidence against his existence.)


@Pontus:

"The heavens are telling of the glory of God; And their expanse is declaring the work of His hands." (Ps. 19:1)

I guess there is a reason for the universe being big :)

This is one of the replies that i find more convincing. But a skeptic might reply that the ancient hebrews thought that the firmament was a vault encased with tiny Swarovski crystals, and this didn't stop them from thinking that the cosmos was wonderful. In fact the sky is awe-inspiring even if you don't know that the stars are enormous balls of incandescent gas.

[Requiem]

@Robertb and Drgodsauce:

Some Old Earth Creationists, like Hugh Ross, tried that route (that "Without that stuff, the elements that make up your body would never have been created and you would not be around to ask this particular question.") But as i see it the Creator could have chosen different laws of nature that didn't require the wasteful creation of trillions of stars and planets to make us. Don't you think?

@Seasanctuary:

To affirm what Enegma said, how do apologists get away with making Cosmological and Teleological arguments based on an anthropocentric world, unless facts indicating a non-anthropocentric world undermine such arguments?

But obviously christian philosophers argue that the world is anthropocentric in terms of importance, not in terms of cosmological location!

On revelation, i don't see the Bible making assertions on the dimensions of the universe, either big or small. And it wouldn't have been of much use to tell ancient hebrews that their universe was very big. On this see Tekton on the principle of accomodation: http://www.tektonics.org/lp/nobrain.html . It is not that God accomodates to human error (as some theologians erroneously think), but that he abstains from revealing unnecessary information (i agree that such a book, that contained the mysteries of the universe, would "crack the earth's crust"!)

@nightbringer:

I find the argument from scale to be pretty weak. I don't see any reason why God must create as small a universe as possible and consider that there may be good reasons as to why he would avoid such a universe. The shear scale of the universe often brings people to reflect on the 'smallness' of their own lives. I know that as an agnostic I was filled with wonder at the size of the universe and this made me think about the God question.

Interesting. So maybe God really created a big universe to show us "how wonderful is the work of his hands"!

[Requiem]

from the OP:"It seems that God could have easily created a universe much simpler and smaller. "

why SMALLER?

could that be because it's too big?

God could have made the world not as small but saying it's too big is a straw man. is that your position? maybe you could explain the substantial difference between not as small and too big. I*'m sure there's some profound meaning there I'm missing.

I think you're misreading me. I said that God might possibly have created a cosmos much smaller than the one we have now, without all the unnecessary entities (black holes, quasars, asteroids etc.). A universe the size of the Solar System would be fine.

No. It looks to me like an argument from ignorance. "I can think of no reason why this is so. Therefore, there cannot be any reason why this is so."

I'm OK with the notion that God, if he exists, might manage to think of some reason for something that would never have occurred to me.

That's very honest and thoughtful of you. Thanks for the contribution.

(i want to thank all the other posters as well, you gave me much things to reflect about! )

[Metacrock]

I think you're misreading me. I said that God might possibly have created a cosmos much smaller than the one we have now, without all the unnecessary entities (black holes, quasars, asteroids etc.). A universe the size of the Solar System would be fine.



That's very honest and thoughtful of you. Thanks for the contribution.

(i want to thank all the other posters as well, you gave me much things to reflect about! )

But it's not really an argument, because it asserts so many assumption that are just designed to argue against a big man n the sky, that's not God. You to assume from the outset you know about how God would do things, then you are ruling all modern concepts of God and just insisting upon old mythological ideas.

[drgodsauce]

But it's not really an argument, because it asserts so many assumption that are just designed to argue against a big man n the sky, that's not God. You to assume from the outset you know about how God would do things, then you are ruling all modern concepts of God and just insisting upon old mythological ideas.

He's merely stating that it would have been within the realm of possibility for God to create a smaller universe. He's not asserting any assumptions whatsoever.

[EvoUK]

Just because believing a god created the entire universe, with millions of galaxies, each with millions of stars, which has existed for roughly 14 billion years, to then take a special interest in a species of bald, brainy apes in the spiral arm of a backwater galaxy somewhere, who have only existed for around 250,000 years (or 0.000025% of the time the universe has existed) is self-evidently absurd, doesn't mean to say it isn't true.

However, the concept actually strikes me as incredibly arrogant. As though the omnipotent creator of the universe will be interested in a bald, brainy ape on some backwater planet which evolved billions of years after the "creation" of the universe.

Or, in other words, I think when it comes to the idea of a personal god, or more specifically, not some ambiguous "something out there" deist kind of god, I tend to look at the universe in which we live. Photos like the ones taken of galaxies from the Hubble telescope help to hammer home the fact that on the scale of the universe, our Earth is just an insignificant speck of dust. That's already true in our galaxy (our sun is one of millions), and the Hubble picture just amplifies that by many orders of magnitude (our galaxy is one of millions- many bigger).

Pictures like these make it painfully clear that most religious people seem to suffer from a severe case of hubris, believing as they do that the universe was created to support our puny little species. It's not so much objective as how absurd and laughable I find the concept.

[Requiem]

He's merely stating that it would have been within the realm of possibility for God to create a smaller universe. He's not asserting any assumptions whatsoever.

Well, i have one assumption: that God works in a logically consistent way and that he doesn't create things that don't have some function or purpose in his plan.

To EvoUK: i think there is evidence both philosophical (anthropic principle, rare earth hypothesis, etc.) and historical (revelation) that God has a big interest in the human species, and that he created this universe only for us. Of course this is contestable, but it isn't the topic of the current thread.

Oh, and i have one of those Hubble photos as my current wallpaper!