Do you believe in God?

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Frankly, I have never heard of any of those people... the entire point of all of the concepts is the idea that a Mind created the universe in such a way as to have it people.

You are showing that you have not actually looked at the videos I have posted... because if you had, you would not be asking those questions...which is why I can say that you two are demonstrating your superficial understanding of the issue. I have a cousin who has spent a life time belittling religios people for fun, including me... of course struggling with undiagnosed Asperger's syndrome I had a hard time extemporaneously communicating my ideas and therefore would "lose the argument." Also, I only had largely intuitive, self derived notions of the concept of God at the time. I have since spent countless hours in pursuit of a comprehensive, rigorous understanding of theology and philosophy, and the tables have turned completely... now I understand that the burden of proof is also on the atheist... so basically both sides can lay out arguments and the "elegance" of each solution can be evaluated.

But you said atheists were wrong to point to...

So which is it?

The "chance multiplier" would be accounted for by God's fine tuning/special intervention/embedding of potencies/Leibniz-ian Monads.

I dont pay attention to fundamentalism or young earth creationism because it is trivial to my pursuit of truth. I do not claim to be a complete scholar of the history of Christianity... far from it. As I say, my approach to religion, spirituality, and the God question is very PRIMARILY influenced by non-Christian ideologies. Also... I know it doesn't really mean anything necessarily, but it may be a fun fact for people to know that twice in my life I have identified as an atheist. (because, as I mentioned, my entire family on my dad's side (except for my dad) are deeply skeptical and even cynical... and self-identified atheist, who took great pride in their "intellectual superiority." I first became spiritual after my dad heard that I was belittling a Christian (I told him I did it because I thought he would be proud.) He explained to me that the universe is a mysterious place and presented me with the truth that you cannot know that there is no God. He presented me with Pascals Wager (in its correct interpretation)... and told me to think about it. Some 2 years later I began to read Descartes meditations on First Philosophy... and the seed that my dad had planted in my mind germinated.
Later, after my time attending college, I became sickened with the overwhelming secularism and "materialism" that i encountered.... conjoined with my cousins repeating all of these "atheist theories," which I could not refute. At this point in my life I decided to just go ahead and look up debates between Christians and atheists... just to see what sort dialogue would play out. (I was sure the christian would get destroyed) And I was stunned to find that time and time again the Christians had more convincing arguments than the Atheist. (it was not and has never been close) The bottom line is I can name the debates in which I feel the atheist most accurately and honestly presented the outworking of his/her worldview... but I do not agree with them in the end, and find myself aligning with the theist. That is not to say I agree with everything the theist says or disagree with everything the atheist says... everything is on balance... this subject is a spectrum/continuum.

Has anyone peeped that series I keep pointing to? It discusses this issue in a very interesting way.

The physical constants aren't properties of the universe, they are properties of the calculations of physicists. Not quite the same thing. Theists often use nonsense probabilities to lend pseudoscientific support their claims. Even if you were able to show that the universe appeared "on it's own" (whatever that means), you are still far from showing that God was the cause. And far from explaining why God can be self caused but the universe can't be (special pleading fallacy).

There are many mistakes in this book. Krauss has presented the majority of arguments as "scientific" as a clever way to mask this book for what it is, a way to justify atheism. My official rebuttal based on the scientific merit of the book is published on the Cornell U' arXiv, and can be found by Googling: arXiv:1405.6091 , I don't think Amazon allows the public posting of web links. However, I have been told by some that my rebuttal is very technical in nature, so I will present a simpler, non-mathematical version here. Basically, religious or not, the non-scientist reader will walk away with a very wrong impression of what science is, and the workings of quantum gravity and cosmology are seriously misrepresented in this book. I will highlight some of these below, but for the full technical presentation, please see: arXiv:1405.6091, (can be typed directly into Google).

1. Claim 1: "General Relativity tells us unambiguously that a closed universe whose energy density is dominated by matter like starts and galaxies, and even more exotic dark matter, MUST one day recollapse in a process like the reverse of a Big Bang - a Big Crunch" (Page 27).

This is not entirely true. Barrow and Tipler formulated the closed universe recollapse conjecture, in which they gave conditions for which a closed universe MAY recollapse, it is not guaranteed. This has to do with the topology of the spacetime, and the corresponding Einstein equations. Calogero and Heinzle have given conditions for which closed universes do not recollapse despite having dominant matter in the form of starts, galaxies, dark matter, etc... Krauss fails to mention this very important point.

2. Claim 2: "Considering the geometry of the universe is like imagining a pencil balancing vertically on its point on a table. The slightest imbalance one way or the other and it will quickly topple. So it is for a flat universe. The slightest departure from flatness quickly grows. Thus, how could the universe be so close to being flat today if it were not exactly flat." (Page 93).

The entire basis of this claim is that the universe was ALWAYS spatially homogeneous and isotropic, and was therefore of Robertson-Walker type. But even in this case, the claim that Krauss makes that a flat universe is unstable is just not correct. Indeed, a flat universe is only unstable if the equation of state parameter is greater than or equal to -1/3. In fact, a flat universe would be stable at all times in the future if the equation of state parameter was greater than or equal to -1 and less than -1/3.

There is a larger point to consider as well. The assumption that Krauss makes about universal homogeneity and isotropy, (universal in the sense of time) is not necessarily a good assumption. The early universe may have had conditions dominated by anisotropies such as large primordial magnetic fields and shear viscosities. One simply cannot then assume that such a universe is of Robertson-Walker type, for symmetry dictates that one must consider more general models, such as the Bianchi metrics. In the Bianchi cosmologies, a flat universe of Robertson-Walker is very often a stable future asymptotic state, so Krauss' analogy of a pencil balancing vertically on its point completely falls apart, because any deviations from spatial flatness would NOT in this case cause the orbits to change, i.e., they would remain in the neighbourhood of the flat FLRW point.

3. Claim 3: Krauss claims on several occasions in the book that the total energy of a closed universe is zero.

This is completely incorrect. It is well-known in General Relativity theory, see for example Page 457 in Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler's classic book, that one simply cannot measure the energy, mass and angular momentum for a closed universe. As a light analogy, where would one put the scale to measure the mass of a closed universe? If the universe is closed, ALL things must be inside it, so there is just no way one can make a measurement outside of the universe, because by definition, the entire universe is closed. For the more technical reason behind this, please see my earlier-referenced paper. One can only define the mass/energy of a universe if that universe is asymptotically flat and/or stationary, that is, it contains a timelike Killing vector, for which our universe does not. Our universe admits six symmetries, three for spatial rotations, and three for spatial translations, it is NOT time-translation invariant, therefore, there is just no accurate way of describing the total energy of our universe, especially if it is closed.

4. Claim 4: Krauss claims that "in quantum gravity, universes can, and indeed always will, spontaneously appear from nothing".

This is yet again another fabrication, that depends completely upon what one considers to be nothing. Now, as other reviewers have pointed out, Krauss' first definition of nothing is the nothing of quantum field theory, which is the vacuum. Krauss then likens the idea of particles spontaneously being emitted from a vacuum as analogous to universes popping out from nothing, but the analogy is seriously flawed. First, according to quantum field theory in curved spacetime (I refer to Robert Wald's book on this subject), spontaneous particle emission only makes sense if one can accurately describe particles, the thing is in general curved spacetime where one does not have Poincare symmetries, there is just no good way to define a "particle", quantum field theory is therefore a theory of fields, not particles. Then, what is known as things popping out of a vacuum only can occur in spacetimes that are asymptotically stationary, since these are the only spacetimes for which one can have a well-defined vacuum state in a particle sense. This is the most important point, because this is not nothing in any sense of the word. One HAS a spacetime which is the background geometry out of which particles are being emitted. To call such a spacetime nothing is a serious misrepresentation of the facts.

Krauss separately claims that through the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, namely, Vilenkin's prescription to solve the WDW equation, and the Hartle-Hawking prescription, one can have a universe appearing from no space and no time, a true nothing. Once again, this is false. Ignoring the philosophical notion that Krauss is assuming that physical laws exist for this to happen and all the deep questions that come with that, there is a larger misrepresentation here, namely, that this is not nothing. The Wheeler-DeWitt equation is built "on top of" what is known as superspace, which is the space of all three-dimensional geometries. Our universe for example is a point in this superspace. What the Wheeler-DeWitt equation does in analogy with quantum mechanics and the wavefunction is that it "selects out" a point in this configuration space, one then calculates probabilities of how likely our universe is within the context of this superspace. This is however, not nothing in any sense of the word again, for one just doesn't have one space, he has a whole collection of spaces, to call superspace nothing is very wrong. The ultimate goal in science is testability and verification. For any of these arguments to hold true, one must prove that before the big bang of our universe there really existed such a superspace, Krauss does not make any remote argument for this or mention any of the points above, which is seriously misleading the audience.

Claim 5: Finally, Krauss makes the very problematic claim that “the structures we can see, like
stars and galaxies, were all created by quantum fluctuations from nothing” [Kra12]. The
issue that is not being addressed here is the fundamental transition problem of going from a
pure quantum state to a classical state. The reason for this is first and foremost due to the
problem of quantization, which in its general form, is seldom addressed in even advanced
physics textbooks on quantum mechanics.
Groenwold [Gro46] and van Hove in their seminal work explicitly showed that no complete quantization of a classical system is possible.
Therefore, the point that Krauss makes that all classical structures arise from quantum
fluctuations is not true in general, as it is not even possible to fully quantize all possible
classical systems. Further, with respect to the transition problem, one needs much more
additional structure than the Hilbert space of quantum mechanics to get back to classical
mechanics. One would need to introduce a distinguished class of operators, or
a well-defined set of commuting operators to obtain the classical system. This goes back
to the philosophical problem of what one means by nothing. Indeed, for Krauss’ claim to
hold true, this entire quantization structure including these sets of operators must also be
somehow defined, which, as we point out again, Krauss has no plausible explanation of the
origins of these necessary structures.
Further, following GFR Ellis' work, we note that it is important to note that in the real universe, the future
evolution is not uniquely predicted by the past, precisely because of inflationary perturbations!
The inhomogeneities that occurred on the last scattering surface were the result of
quantum fluctuations during inflation. They were not determined uniquely by the state of
the universe at the start of inflation because of the inherent quantum uncertainties. As is
also pointed out by Ellis, suppose we knew every detail of the state of the Earth and the
life on it two billion years ago, this would not uniquely predict that humans would exist
today, because the random quantum events leading to cosmic ray emission can change the
genetic traits of animals, thus influencing biological evolution.
Quantum fluctuations are also not fully responsible for allowing emergence to occur, and
there must be genuine emergence, namely, the emergence of complexity that that occurs
in order for the macroscopic levels or order that we see in the universe. For this to occur,
there must be a precise interplay between not only bottom-up causation, but top-down
causation as well. The interested reader is encouraged to see the full paper on the arXiv for further details on
this very important point.

Sincerely,
Dr. Ikjyot Singh Kohli

I'm belittling an idea. And it doesn't bother me at all if someone is offended when I belittle their precious idea. If they can be an intellectual and separate the idea from their own ego, we will get along just fine. Let me be clear, if people get offended... I. Don't. Care.

I'm not the one saying there's a God.

Of course, but in this case it isn't true that I don't have the foggiest idea.

Yes, because I think that those consequences overwhelm any potential benefits.

I don't feel that religion is necessary to help people. Sadly, even the moderates of religion give cover to the institution itself, and seem to make it palatable for others. I certainly don't have a problem with people doing good, but it's often poisoned by religion. Catholic hospitals, for instance, have gained a monopoly in many places as sources of health care. Unfortunately, they can't help but inject their religion into their service, saying they have a right to refuse certain kinds of life saving care, and to deny their (female) employees health care.

I never said religion was all bad, or has only bad consequences, that's a straw man argument. Only that I feel the bad outweighs the good, and they do nothing that couldn't also be done in a secular way.

It's not a hole in my argument. Even Hitler did good things. I'm sure he was nice to his family and pets.

There can be two sides to whether religion is an ultimate benefit to society. I will grant you that.

There are two sides (or more) to whether God exists. On this subject I don't think the sides are equal. I maintain the God side is full of faulty reasoning and logical fallacies. And it represents an especially deplorable and dangerous idea, that it's good to believe in things without reliable evidence. Furthermore, religion seeks to undermine our own reasoning abilities by popularizing several unreliable forms of evidence as if they were valid. For instance, vague prophecies claiming to be fulfilled in the same book in which they were mentioned (with no other evidence), personal anecdotes, and the confirmation bias often given as proof that prayer works. And they defend their side in part by putting up a good show of being offended when their beliefs are questioned. Did they care if I was offended when I was coerced to say "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance? No, they don't care at all in condemning me to eternal torture!

It's intellectually dishonest to suggest that there are always two equally valid sides to every argument. Yes, it's possible to hold an ideology that says religious people should be banished or worse from society. But it's not as much of a danger because there is no book telling people that. No book that tradition has deemed a good book to live your life by. Atheism is more often found in combination with humanism and democratic values. But religion is an especially insidious ideology due to it's holy books, and the esteem with which those books are held, and the abhorrent, immoral things those books tell people to do and believe. You may say some people are good in spite of those books, and I say they are good in direct proportion to their lack of adherence to them.

Thank you for pointing out one of the great dangers of religion. It can be used by unscrupulous people to justify all sorts of bad behaviors. Why? Because holy books are often full of bad behaviors! For instance, the Bible approves of slavery, and was used to justify slavery for centuries. The fact that other religious people also used it to fight slavery doesn't cancel that out.

Doesn't make them equally justified. And I think I do change minds. Maybe not immediately, but maybe people will think about their own reasons for believing.

A premise asserted without evidence can be denied without evidence.

But now we are actually getting to something important. Personal experiences. Why are they proof? Are our brains always reliable? Are perceptions always reality? Can the mind by tricked? Is there such a thing as mass psychosis? Optical illusions? Do our beliefs affect what we see? Science reveals that trusting the mind to perceive truth is misguided and often in error. So, you who demand proof, why is personal experience proof of anything?