re: #863 Icculus

The point is infinite regression. If it’s the big bang, what put the singularity there for that to happen… What was there before that… and before that… It seems silly to argue over whether there’s a creator or not, when it’s impossible to prove one way or the other, and much easier to err on the safe side.

If the universe was created by a creator deity, then who created THAT creator deity, and who created HIS creator, and so on and on ad nauseum ad infinitum. Yep; we’re talking Creator Turtles all the way down a bottomless infinite regression pit.

If you insist upon exempting the deity from explanation (even though a deity wise and powerful enough to intentionally create a universe would have to be more complex than that universe, hence require more explanation than it), I would counter that, since the addition of a nonexplanatory creator adds nothing but an explanatarily superfluous and unnecessary entity to the situation, why not just stop with the universe and say that IT needs no explanation? That’s where William of Occam’s Razor would naturally slice.

And if by ‘erring on the safe side’ you are referring to some version of Pascal’s Wager, there’s a flip side to that bet.

If you take this one and only life of which you are certain and, rather than devoting it to living as you choose to live it (and that could be quite an ethical way - just ask Buddhists, Taoists, atheists and Confucians) you just spend it in thrall it like a grifter placing a chip on a cosmic celestial roulette wheel angling to hit the jackpot for a plum position in Paradise, and there is no afterlife, then you’ve wasted your one and only chance for the sake of nothing.

On the other hand, if you allow your own rationality and reason rather than one or another ancient scripture among many to dictate your life path course, and there does happen to be a deity-ruled afterlife, any deity who would punish you for living according to the dictates of your intellect and conscience would have to be a vindictive, irrational, and evil deity indeed, and its absence would be preferable to its presence, so its punishment would be for you, a reward. And if there is indeed no afterlife, then at least you spent your one and only certain life as you saw fit.

I always considered it to be less virtuous anyway to do good and avoid evil because one believed in and feared a smiling bully with a pie in one hand and a club in the other threatening and cajoling one to do so, than it would be if one does good and avoids evil simply because it’s the right (as opposed to the wrong) thing to do.