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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]There's a lot of gobbledygook on here.[/quote]

Yep.

One small observation:  I can never understand the folks who somehow believe that "god" explains the universe, the existence of morality, or what have you.  Take the origin of the universe:  atheists don't believe a god created the universe.  So "believers" ask, "Well, how did it begin then?"

"We don't know."

"Ah ha!  *I* know!  It's God!"

But you don't explain a complex phenomenon by grafting another, even more complex, explanation on top.  To say that "God did it!" is to say, "I don't know."

"A central thesis of the argument is that, compared to supernatural abiogenesis, evolution by natural selection requires the supposition of fewer hypothetical processes and thus, according to Occam's razor, a better explanation than the God hypothesis. He cites a paragraph where Richard Swinburne agrees that a simpler explanation is better but reasons that theism is simpler because it only invokes a single substance, God, as a cause and maintainer of every other object. This cause is seen as omnipotent, omniscient and totally free. Dawkins argues that an entity that monitors and controls every particle in the universe and listens to all our thoughts and prayers cannot be simple. His existence would require a "mammoth explanation" of its own. The theory of natural selection is much simpler than the theory of the existence of such a complex being, and thus preferable.[5]"

[quote]
One of the greatest challenges to the human intellect, over the centuries, has been to explain how the complex, improbable appearance of design in the universe arises.

The natural temptation is to attribute the appearance of design to actual design itself. In the case of a man-made artefact such as a watch, the designer really was an intelligent engineer. It is tempting to apply the same logic to an eye or a wing, a spider or a person.

The temptation is a false one, because the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer. The whole problem we started out with was the problem of explaining statistical improbability. It is obviously no solution to postulate something even more improbable. We need a "crane" not a "skyhook," for only a crane can do the business of working up gradually and plausibly from simplicity to otherwise improbable complexity.

The most ingenious and powerful crane so far discovered is Darwinian evolution by natural selection. Darwin and his successors have shown how living creatures, with their spectacular statistical improbability and appearance of design, have evolved by slow, gradual degrees from simple beginnings. We can now safely say that the illusion of design in living creatures is just that – an illusion.

We don't yet have an equivalent crane for physics. Some kind of multiverse theory could in principle do for physics the same explanatory work as Darwinism does for biology. This kind of explanation is superficially less satisfying than the biological version of Darwinism, because it makes heavier demands on luck. But the anthropic principle entitles us to postulate far more luck than our limited human intuition is comfortable with.

We should not give up hope of a better crane arising in physics, something as powerful as Darwinism is for biology. But even in the absence of a strongly satisfying crane to match the biological one, the relatively weak cranes we have at present are, when abetted by the anthropic principle, self-evidently better than the self-defeating skyhook hypothesis of an intelligent designer.[/quote]

More here:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_Boeing_747_gambit

Frankly, I find this infinitely more compelling (and interesting) than the idea that there's a god-like being out there.[/quote]

I really have a hard time believing physics can come up with an explanation for why energy has to exist at all.  An explanation for why there isn't just nothing.  Once you postulate energy, you can use many world theories, etc to maybe explain everything else.  But you are still left with "who created god", just rephrased as "why is there energy (=anything)?"[/quote]

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