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Lawrence Krauss A Universe From Nothing Pdf Free Downloadl !NEW!


The laws of physics, chemistry and logic are adequate for understanding the universe insofar as we can understand it. These laws are useless for trying to prove the existence of God, or His characteristics if He were to exist. Moral considerations do not limit our understanding of the processes that control the universe but they are crucial in trying to understand God.In my much younger days, I set out to read the Bible from cover to cover. I got to a point where I could not conceive of a God of such callousness and cruelty as was represented therein. But the cruelty in religious traditions is nothing compared to the cruelty in nature. Consider, for example, that a few million years ago there were likely at least 8 species of hominids (and possibly as many as 16). Only one survived and became the progenitor of the human race. Why? It seems that as the head size and cranial capacity of the hominids increased, only one species was able to solve the problem of giving birth, and it did so by giving "premature" births -- at 9 months instead of the 21 that would be expected.Cruel nature is credible; a cruel God, especially an infinitely cruel one, is not credible. Intelligent design, indeed?




Lawrence Krauss A Universe From Nothing Pdf Free Downloadl


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I am surprised by how many posts here make highly controversial claims that are supposed to refute the fine-tuning argument without being aware that the claims are highly controversial or offering any argument for them. Most are confidently stated, with little support. In this post, I will address several of the objections raised by previous posts. I deal with most of these in articles I have written, many of which are posted on my personal website (search for Robin Collins). Here I will just give brief responses.OBJECTION 1: God must be as complex as the Universe posted by Colin and Arvoasitis on March 18thThe first objection was raised by two posters. It is a common objection that is often promoted as a simple, fatal objection to the fine-tuning argument but is rarely argued for. The first post claimed ?That being [God] is by definition several orders of magnitude more complex than anything it would have created?; and the second claimed that ?if God the Intelligent Designer exists, He is certainly more complicated than our universe and beyond our comprehension.?It is hard to see how the statement in the first post makes sense. A common definition of God is a being, or ground of being, that is all powerful, omniscient, perfectly good, and eternal, and that sustains everything in existence. How is it part of this definition that God is more complex than anything God could have created? That is certainly not stated in the definition I just gave. It is not like the case of unicorns, where it is part of the definition of a unicorn that it has a horn, or like the case bachelors, where part of the definition is that a bachelor is unmarried. The second post just asserts the claim without any argument backing it up, as though it is supposed to be obvious. So, neither author offered any reason for thinking God must be more complex than the universe.Those who offer this objection would have to show that for any being to have the attributes that God has would require a high degree of underlying complexity. Consider consciousness (awareness). One might argue that from our experience with humans and other organisms, consciousness always is associated with a complex structure, namely the brain. This, however, does not give us much reason to think that consciousness NECESSARILY requires a complex, internal structure, since nothing in our CONCEPT of consciousness requires this ? and typically a connection of necessity is established by showing that the corresponding concepts must go together. If one thought that the property of being conscious was reducible to a certain complex set of interrelationships, then one would have a reason to think that of necessity it requires a complex structure to exist. No plausible analysis along these lines has yet been given, and many philosophers (both theists and atheists) have thought none can be given. In any case, it is clear that our concept of consciousness is not that of having a complex structure, since as children we knew we were conscious before we had much of an idea of what a complex structure is. So, I think it is plausible that an entity (or ground of being) could be conscious without having any internal structure, just as an electron has the property of having a negative electric charge without having any internal structure sustaining it.The claim that God?s has unbounded awareness (i.e., God is omniscient) is also important for the claim that God has minimal internal complexity. If there were some truths God were ignorant of (but it was possible for a being to be aware of), then there would have to be some law or principle external to God, or something about God?s nature, that determined which truths God was aware of and which he/she was not aware of. That would add complexity to reality. So, I think a plausible case can be made that an unbounded consciousness need have no internal complexity. Similar things could be said about the other properties of God.OBJECTION 2: Sample of One Objection posted by Bill on March 19 ?By its very name, the universe is a single data point. No pattern, be it a line or curve, can be constructed or extrapolated from a single point.?I never present the fine-tuning argument as a form of extrapolation. Rather, I present it as the confirmation of the God hypothesis by the existence of a fine-tuned, embodied-conscious-agent- permitting universe. Single data points in the poster?s sense CONFIRM hypotheses all the time. The existence of the cosmic microwave background radiation discovered in the 1960s was a single data point under the poster?s criterion since it is a feature of this universe, yet it strongly confirmed the big bang theory. Many other examples from science can be given. So, at least as the objection was stated, I do not see it as having much merit.OBJECTION 3 Other Life Forms Objection posted by Duncan on March 20th?Our existence is just one outcome in the set of all possible forms of intelligent life, and we just don't know how big that set is or what it looks like.?The point of this objection is supposedly that we do not know enough about what kinds of intelligent life (or in my terminology, embodied conscious agents who can significantly affect each other through their choices) can exist to say whether it requires fine-tuning. This is just not true; all we have to know is that embodied conscious agents require stable, reproducible complexity. A universe in which the strong nuclear force that binds neutrons and protons together is too weak would have no atoms other than normal hydrogen. It should be obvious that highly complex entities that can significantly interact with each other cannot be made with just hydrogen ? whether in gas or liquid form ? let alone evolve; for example, we are not going to find intelligent life forms evolving in the sun?s atmosphere. As another example, if the dark energy density were not tuned to within 10^120 of its naturally occurring value (the Planck scale), then either the universe would expand so rapidly that the matter in the universe would never condense into galaxies or stars, or the universe would collapse long before it cooled sufficiently for galaxies and stars to form. In either case, stable reproducible complexity is not going to evolve ? e.g., without stars, there will not be any usable energy sources, such as the volcanic vents the author mentions. Matter would just be evenly distributed in space, such as one atom per cubic meter. I think people who raise this objection just have not carefully considered the fine-tuning evidence.OBJECTION 4. Lack of Explanatory Value Objection posted by Steve on March 21stSteve Tighe raised the objection that the God hypothesis does not buy us anything of explanatory value. Although often presented as an inference to the best explanation, I believe this is a bad way of presenting the argument (as I stated in my interview). One problem is that there are many different kinds of explanations, each with their own criteria for what constitutes a good explanation, with these largely depending on one?s pragmatic ends. A better way of framing the argument is either to claim that the fine-tuning data strongly confirms theism over its naturalistic contenders. The situation can be thought of as follows. Define ?elaborated theism? as the claim that God exists conjoined with claims that God does not require fine-tuning (for the type of reasons stated above) and that a universe with embodied conscious agents realizes goods that could not otherwise be realized. Before the fine-tuning evidence, many have found elaborated theism as not completely implausible, especially when compared with the contending hypothesis that the universe just happens to exist. Suppose that one is such a person. You might have doubts about the coherence of the God hypothesis (or the other two claims that are part of elaborated theism). The fine-tuning evidence will not itself give you insight into why you should find theism coherent, or make the other two conjuncts seem more plausible when considered alone. I claim, however, that it should make the naturalistic hypothesis much less plausible: not only is naturalists stuck with the inherent implausibility of claiming that the universe?s existence is a brute fact, but now they are stuck with the hugely coincidental fact that is set just right for the existence of embodied conscious agents. So, I claim, the inherent plausibility of naturalism has gone way down. Although the inherent plausibility of theism has not gone up, its plausibility IN RELATION to its major contender ? naturalism ? should significantly go up.


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