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07:27
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A: Is God’s very existence the ultimate miracle?

ac15Your argument seems to be almost identical with ones of Dawkin's over the years If we want to postulate a deity capable of engineering all the organized complexity in the world, either instantaneously or by guiding evolution, that deity must have been vastly complex in the first place. The creat...

Rebuttals to this answer are being posted here.
@Mark I have to admit that those answers are quite unsatisfying due to their tautology. But I guess that's what faith is.
@DKNguyen I just asked the question. Stay tuned for a couple of days. That said, would you mind pinpointing where the tautology is?
@Mark thanks for posting it there, I didn't really know about that SE; but I disagree with your framing: it's not an unnecessary extra step, but rather a 'solution' worse than the problem, really
And I guess @DKNguyen point about the tautological character of the responses is that they basically boil down to "god needs no reason/explanation BECAUSE he is his own sufficient reason/explanation"
@ac15 Yeah, that. It's more like the answers say "What you think are the rules, aren't the rules, because there are no rules." Or more specifically in this case, "It isn't an extra step, or even a complicated step. It is in fact simpler, because it is."
07:27
@DKNguyen omg, I loved this, thank you
It’s honestly surprising how Dawkins is seen as a weak philosopher when these are some of the best arguments against God period. In fact, most philosophers I know do not even make this argument
@Baby_philosopher it's possible Dawkins's (and also Sagan's, check Mark's link) background in natural/empirical science is fundamental in informing him to be sensitive of resources and complexity, in that while the sciences do have 'thought experiments', (1) these aren't its main tools, while for some areas of 'traditional'/'academic' philosophy might often be the only ones, + (2) [I would take a guess that] they tend to be at least a bit more 'grounded' than, say, Nozick's death ray, or Thomson's violinist stuff that philosophers conjure at will without batting an eye
God did not come into existence.
@stackoverblown We atheists have been saying this for ages!
I feel like there is a workaround besides it: The chain of logic aserts that an object can only ever create something less complex than itself. While somewhat intuitive, this is an assumed true requirement that I personally do not believe in
07:27
@Hobbamok Dawkins himself asserts that the complexity of the universe is built upon a few simple constants. If that's possible in a world governed by entropy, surely it's possible for an agentic God.
@Baby_philosopher Dawkins is seen as a weak philosopher because none of these arguments are new, and he brings little to the table. He's just failing to cite the work of his predecessors. (I've heard he has a low opinion of philosophy in general.)
This isn't an answer. You are quoting someone who makes the same arguments as the OP so you are basically repeating the question, albeit better phrased, but not answering it.
@terdon I do consider it an answer; if you don't, that's on you
Can you point to what part of this is answering "Is God’s very existence the ultimate miracle?" You yourself state at the very beginning that the question is essentially a restatement of some of Dawkin's quotes which you then proceed to reproduce and end with "there seems to be no workaround it". None of that is actually addressing the question, it only mentions someone else who has raised it, and that you don't know of a workaround, but doesn't actually address the question itself. I completely agree that these are good arguments, they just don't answer the question and instead repeat it.
@terdon if you're really taking 'the question' to mean an isolated 'exactly what it says in the title, no reading in-between', I really don't think I can help you
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Well no, I mean the whole thing. All you are doing here is just quoting Dawkins who is making the same points. They are very good points, absolutely, but how can repetition of the same points be answering those points? If you are reading a different question, then maybe explain that, or at least put something here that isn't simply quoting someone else. As it stands, all I see is a list of quotes that are making the same good points the OP did, but no answer.
@terdon Because it shows the flaw in the argument. If one declares the Universe is too complex to have formed spontaneously and requires a creator, we must also put that creator under the same scrutiny.
@Schwern well yes, that is the point made in the question. And it is one I have no issue with, and in fact completely agree with. But since that is the question, I would expect an answer to give something different than just a better phrasing of the question.
@terdon Sometimes rephrasing the question reveals the answer. In this case, the question pre-supposes the existence of a creator. Dawkins flips it around, why do we allow for a spontaneous creator if we don't allow for a spontaneous Universe? Dawkins answer is yes, the spontaneous existence of a creator would be even more miraculous than the current explanations for the creation of the Universe, and that's why supposing a creator doesn't solve the problem of the creation of the Universe.
@terdon I guess I was thinking more in terms of intertextuality, implying something along the lines of "well, yes, this problem you raise is (relatively) well-known, it comes up repeatedly in the writings/thoughts/wtv of a well-known evolutionary biologist, and it doesn't really seem to have any sort of solution compatible with mainstream empirical science". The question in the title itself is secondary, almost irrelevant, to the implicit question "does anything I've just said make any sense?" I take from context
@DKNguyen Just so you know, many new rebuttals have been posted since the first time you checked.
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@Mark I've been checking every now and then.
 
4 hours later…
11:56
some tyrannical fucktard unilaterally and arbitrarily deleted the most voted answer, nice

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