Brauser agree +7, OP congratulations for becoming a believer.Indeed there is God.🙏🙏
Learning about crossovers helped convert me from atheist to a believer in God
Let’s see if this one survives.
I have been an atheist for 50 years. Recently I became a believer. One factor that helped tip the scales is the “fine tuned universe” argument - the idea that the physics constants, e.g. the mass of an electron, are so finely “selected” that if they weren’t very close to what they are, life wouldn’t exist. This is an argument for a creator. The best counter argument seems to be that there are an infinite number of universes and we got lucky.
When I got into audio, and started learning about crossovers, I was ASTOUNDED at how well the pieces fit together. Octaves are exact doubles of frequency. 3dB describes so many seemingly unrelated phenomena. But the one that really got me was the magic of capacitors and inductors. They share no parts, other than wires sticking out at each end (usually), one acts due to voltage, one acts due to electromagnetism, one resists AC, one resists DC. And yet, somehow, they are mirror images of each other, using almost exactly the same equations, behaving perfectly orthogonal to each other, even to the extent of how powerfully they perform their function (3dB again). How is this possible? Could this have happened due to random chance? I smell a creator.
- ...
- 94 posts total
Beautiful video, @mahgister ! First: I’m assuming (hoping) the people discussing this topic don’t dispute proven scientific theories such as evolution, which led to the complexities of the cell shown in that video. (If you are, for example, a Bible literalist who believes in six actual days of creation, and that God put dinosaur bones in the ground just to fool us, then I can’t have a discussion with you, as any argument you advance will always reduce to the tautology of belief). But if you understand the basic tenets of evolution, you will understand that there can be emergent properties generated from simpler sub-parts; "emergent" means the property can’t be seen in the sub-components. This leads to seemingly "intelligent design" due solely to random variation, environmental selection processes, and a length of time so long that humans cannot fathom it. That is the big thing: If you wait long enough, even the highly improbable eventually happens. Our written history (read: collective knowledge) is but a blip compared to the timescale of geologic processes, which in turn are a tiny fraction of the timescale of the universe. Our civilization can not experience anything on these timescales. To the extent I believe in anything, I would simply quote Einstein, who said "I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings." That’s what I think most of you talking about symmetry of equations, or inductors and capacitors, are saying. But it doesn’t require a Creator. Just time and the physical laws of the universe. If there were an actual God-Creator, personally interested in what I do, I would assume She endowed me with rationality. So She should think I’m an idiot for taking the word of the Torah or the Quran or the Bible without any proof. Why would a God who endows me with rationality not provide rational proof of Her existence? And if this God-Creator is good, then why all the evil in this world? Graham Nash summed this up nicely in the lyrics of Winchester Cathedral (his sentiment is Christian-centric but applies universally to those religions that posit a Creator):
|
The problem of evil is solved by free will and reincarnation... Which is a censored fact by christian church fathers... Today reincarnation can no more being described as a fantasy... The intelligent design of the cosmos is solved in principle if we distinguish an impersonal "intelligent" process separated from consciousness levels... Intelligence is not consciousness...Consciousness is not intelligence... A slime mold can solve very complex optimization problem without consciousness... An A. I. can be very intelligent without any consciousness... Tomorrow man will create "artificial consciousness" a consciousness not grounded in the universal intelligent field ... We are free creator but we must remind ourself our own spiritual responsability... Nowadays pure evil rule our life , corporate powers, pure separated and isolated intelligence without any consciousness... We need to free ourself...Of materialism , of hubris, and we need to respect all conscious beings from cell to stars...If not pure intelligence separated from the universal intelligence field is auto destruction ... About evolution we are mislead by our concept of time... Creation is not the act of a bearded god in the past...it is an ongoing participated process in which we are all co-creators with the source... Time dont exist by itself , save for our filtering/tuning brain /body ... The most difficult idea to represent is levels of consciousness separated from levels of intelligence and crossing and uniting in each organism....When we represent it in ourself we discover that all that exist is ONE manifest as an internal pluralities... Then i am not pantheist as Spinoza, i am panantheist... All is source and from the source but the source is also transcendant absolute infinity... Impersonal transecendance and personally manifested love...It is WHAT YOU ARE....There is two levels in each one of us...listen and you will hear... I trusted mystics and mathematicians on par with one another... I trusted philosophers way less... I trust the products made by engineers but i trust no engineer philosophy... 😊 |
The OP evidently means to invoke the “anthropic principle” when he mentions the “fine tuned universe argument.” Many believers in God appeal to this principle, as it seems to support the “argument from design,” perhaps the most intuitively appealing of any of the arguments for the existence of God. However, this involves a misunderstanding. The anthropic principle only states the tautological truism that, were it not for us as observers, the observed features of the universe would not be. That is, the construal of this principle as support for some kind of Supreme Designer gets the causality backward. The principle is just an extension of Kant’s fundamental insight: that “reality” is necessarily relative to the observer who experiences, and so defines, it. Space and time are not independently real, they are features of the observer; thus, all the spatio-temporal features of the universe determined by physics—our physics—are extrapolations of features of our own minds. This is NOT to say that the very existence of some unknowable reality depends on us. But the knowability of that, or any, reality does, tautologically, depend on the knower (and the cognitive and bodily structures of the knower).
For what it’s worth, it seems to me the wisest thing to “say” about God is what Meister Eckhart—a 13th century German Catholic (Dominican) mystical theologian—wrote: “Now notice this. God is nameless, for no one can know or articulate anything about God. A pagan teacher [Aristotle] speaks to this point in saying that what we can know or express about the First Cause is more than anything else what we are than anything that the First Cause is or might be, for it is beyond all human expression and understanding. If I were to say that God is good, I would be wrong; it is more correct to say that I am good and God is not good…. And because God cannot become better he cannot become best, for all three of these terms—good, better, and best—are far from God’s reality…. If I go on to say that God is wise, it is not true—I am wiser than God. If I further say that God is a being [that he exists], that is not true. God is a being beyond being and a nothingness beyond being…. So be silent and do not flap your gums about God, for to the extent that you flap your gums about God, you lie and you commit sin.” |
Hickamore, thank you for taking my OP seriously enough to respond to it in kind. I appreciate that. Your point seems to be that matter and energy exist, therefore, how surprising is it that we find harmony in the mathematics (for example) that we use to understand this existence. My response is that you are starting at the endpoint, that matter and energy exist, That appears to be just as much a religious statement as is the suggestion of a creator. BTW, I think you will find that the idea of multiple universes is not a dismissed straw man, as you say, but it is currently an active theory which is offered to explain the “finely tuned universe” argument, which is based on the idea that many of the physical constants of the universe, [e.g. gravitational constant, Planck constant, elementary charge], have very little wiggle room in their range for life to exist.
zasouswing, I also thank you for addressing my post directly. Your point seems to be that it’s not surprising that we find harmony and beauty in the way, for example that the capacitor and the inductor seem to mirror each other so perfectly because we set up the measuring system to achieve that exact result. While I agree that we set up a very clean measurement system (metric and physics), I don’t see how that explains, for example, that an inductor’s low-pass cutoff frequency rolloff has the exact same slope as as that of a capacitor’s high-pass at the opposite end, using a different mechanism of operation, and using no common parts. It just seems too good to be true. But I could be wrong. |
- 94 posts total