The Key to the Universe

António Pedro Marques · 14 Aug 2010, 21:16 · from 2010-August.txt.gz

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From: entonio at gmail.com (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Ant=F3nio_Pedro_Marques?=)
Date: Sat, 14 Aug 2010 22:16:20 +0100
Subject: (urth) The Key to the Universe
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	<AANLkTikX8RU1uTy6w-ebd7coqLPuYM2_ZuQ5uCaS+Pcz at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <4C6707A4.1020104 at gmail.com>

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 3:40 PM, Jeff Wilson<jwilson at io.com>  wrote:
>
>> That's begging the question, in the original sense. Somehow intelligence had
>> arise for the first time in the universe, unless you have a steady state
>> universe where intelligence has always existed. There is very strong support
>> for the Big Bang, so the steady state model is not convincing locally.
>
> Of course, theism begs the question in an isomoprhic way; it ignores
> the question, "And where did God come from?"

It doesn't, because it posits something extraneous to the universe(s) and 
hence not accountable to observed processes such as space, time and 
causality. Or as it's usually put, 'not contigent'. Whereas 'scientism' 
makes a leap of methodological faith and says contigent things may 
ultimately need no justification. That's why the idea of infinite universes 
appeared: rather than overcome contingency by justification, one tries to 
overcome it by infinite supply.

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