At a certain point "God" is going to be a simpler explanation than "infinite universes with infinite cosmological constant variance", etc.
I can't say I understand this statement, but I'll venture this friendly amendment: explanations come from rules, or at least a method of description that allows us to say why result A obtained and not result B. (Or maybe an explanation that the process was random, and therefore that this part of the process cannot be explained.) So I think the problem--if there really is one--is with the word "arose" in your sentence, not "infinite." I can see no problem with invoking the infinite in a useful explanation (note that theists do this all the time!), but I can see a problem with having no account of why our universe "arose" and not some other one.
Of course, I think that just about every physicist would be happy to admit this! (Those that don't think they have an answer, that is--possibly involving the anthropic principle.) After all, answering questions is their job, so acknowledging an unknown is just the beginning of a research agenda, not an admission of defeat.
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Despite it's explicitly Christian focus, I like The Screwtape Letters as a kind of cognitive psychology fable, and this part seems apropos:
> I have great hopes that we shall learn in due time how to emotionalise and mythologise their science to such an extent that what is, in effect, a belief in us [devils], (though not under that name) will creep in while the human mind remains closed to belief in the Enemy [God]. [...] If once we can produce our perfect work—the Materialist Magician, the man, not using, but veritably worshipping, what he vaguely calls “Forces” while denying the existence of “spirits”—then the end of the war will be in sight.
... If you're worshipping a property of physics you're doing it wrong. :)
But maybe instead of approaching every problem with the "how did this happen by chance" angle and answering it with ("infinite possibilities multiplied by infinitesimal probability = 1" i.e. "infinity/infinity = 1") and instead approached it with "how could this have been done intentionally by a sufficiently advanced species" angle, we may make more progress in this and related "mysterious" fields (abiogenesis, for example)
Explaining lightning with Zeus instead of electricity just raises more questions.
You can "explain" absolutely anything with god/magic, and many religious people do. Try that with multiverse. It doesn't work.
"Life arose because there is an infinite multiverse and we just happened to be in one of the infinite universes where both the cosmological constants that allow life to be possible are the correct values and chemicals randomly combined on the right planet to allow increasingly complex structures to evolve."
"The parting of the red sea story happened because there is an infinite multiverse and we just happened to be in the one where atmospheric turbulence whipped up a windstorm sufficiently powerful to move water in the red sea and someone documented it"
"Infinite Multiverse" means you can explain away any improbable event with "well, there are infinite universes so the probability actually approaches 1 across all universes"
If you can test the existence of another “universe”, it's really the same universe.
Plus, even if you have a model of a multiverse in which the component universes have variation on particular axes, you can still ask why you have such a well-constructed set of parameters such that varying them will allow life somewhere on the multiverse. Multiverse is not only a non-terrible hypothesis, it's one that doesn't do anything but kick the problem it is meant to explain one step further down the road without transforming it's general shape.
Missed the edit window, but non-testable, not non-terrible.
(1) There is a God who decides how things are.
(2) Many universes exist.
Actually I usually feel that the second is simpler than the first, despite my prejudices as a near-Catholic. But I'm increasingly skeptical about efforts to maintain that there's only one, unplanned, universe.
So 1) there is a god or 2) many planets exist.
I suggest that most possible universes would have zero regions containing life.
It's like marveling about how come that those two (great/ugly/wonderful/annoying/...) people are my parents, given that there are so many people in this world. What are the odds?
Sure; but my point is, it's really quite unlikely that the one and only unplanned universe would have life, at all. Life then seems like evidence for something...
"It's like marveling about how come that those two [...] people are my parents"
By contrast, I'm not sure what that would be evidence about.
The original version had a lot more religion in it, particularly Christian eschatology.
This also leads to the possibility that our universe is actually a simulation running in another universe with different conditions.
If you really want to screw up your brain, consider that the universe hosting the simulation of our universe might be the result of a simulation in our universe that hasn't been started yet.
Let's assume there was a state were any universe was equally possible. When was that state? Does it make sense to describe states before the big bang, the beginning of time as we know it?
Even if it does make sense and our universe is very unlikely. It still can be pure luck (what I was trying to say with the parents example). The existence of our universe is no hint of its likelihood.
This is why so many scientists have heartburn with "anthropic" explanations. They can't be tested.
But, as a Christian, and someone who studies the Bible daily, I can say that at the very least, the God of the Bible is falsifiable.
For instance, if you could prove any one of the following statements to be true, the Christian message would fall apart (and indeed, some of these are even called out in the Bible as essential to its message). If you want a roadmap to debate Christians, here you go:
- Jesus Christ never existed as a real human being.
- Jesus wasn't "sinless" (according to the Biblical
definitions of sin).
- There exists at least one other person than Jesus who
has never sinned.
- Jesus wasn't crucified by Roman soldiers at the behest
of Jewish religious leaders.
- The resurrection of Jesus didn't happen.
- Jesus' mother wasn't a virgin.
- Jesus never actually claimed to be God.
- The Genesis account of creation.
- The Genesis account of a great flood.
- The Genesis account of the destruction of Sodom and
Gomorrah.
- That Joseph interpreted a Pharoah's dream and became
second-in-command of Egypt.
- That Egypt never had a 7-year famine which they
survived because of storehouses of grain.
- That Egypt never enslaved Israel.
- That the plagues mentioned in Exodus never befell the
Egyptians (notably the plague of the firstborn).
- That Israel didn't walk across the Red Sea.
- That the Egyptian army wasn't drowned in the Red Sea
in pursuit of Israel.
- That Samson never existed.
- That Esther never existed.
- That Esther wasn't a queen who saved Israel from
genocidal annihilation.
- That Ruth never existed.
- That Jonah never existed.
- That Jonah never preached in Nineveh.
- That Jonah was never swallowed by a whale/fish.
- That Daniel didn't serve in the court of the
Babylonian/Medo-Persian empires.
- That Daniel didn't accurately predict hundreds of
years of political wars and intrigue in the Ancient
Near East before it happened [0].
Not to do your job for you, but consider that there are several ways to do this:
- Discredit the Biblical story's internal consistency.
- Find contradictory archaeological evidence.
- Find contradictory, reputable historical accounts.
- Come up with valid textual criticisms.
Good luck and Godspeed! ;-)
[0]: https://www.christiancourier.com/articles/869-amazing-prophe...
2) You might want to go look up biblical archaeology. Quite a lot of the history in the Bible has been disproven.
3) Simply being factually correct is necessary but insufficient. Falsifiability is about disproving a prediction called a hypothesis. Very few religions have tenets that allow you to put the pieces together and make a novel prediction that can then be tested.
And, if I were being particularly uncharitable, I would argue that the fact that the Second Coming has been predicted over and over and yet still has not occurred is actually significant disproof of the existence of the Christian God.
I often hear something to this affect, would you be willing to provide 3 specific claims/events documented in the Bible that have been disproven?
2. The entire book of Joshua. If that's not specific enough for you, the conquest of Jericho. Jericho was not inhabited at the time.
3. The existence of the unified monarchy of Israel under King David and Solomon.
Some years ago, I read a paper by two Israeli archaeologists disputing the idea that the northern Kingdom of Israel arose out of a split of the unified King David/King Solomon kingdom. What bemused me was that the evidence directly confirmed what the biblical record says and yet the conclusion was that the evidence had to mean that the two kingdoms of Israel and Judah had been independent from the very beginning.
I find it interesting that the Hittites were, for a long time, only known by the biblical records. Yet, it found in recent times, (the last two or so centuries) that it was a large thriving kingdom that disappeared from history.
As far as Jericho is concerned, what evidence have you seen that is was uninhabited at the time. I have seen various archaeological papers that directly support the biblical story.
One of the major problems that is faced today is that we have no sure way of measuring the time periods of the artefacts found with any real precision. The +/- errors are just too large to be sure of precise timing.
Unless we actually develop the technology to view the past, we will always be unsure of what and when events occurred. It becomes a matter of "faith" as to what you end up as believing as "truth".
What god, if any, you believe in is a personal decision. I believe that Jesus Christ is God (one with the Father and Holy Spirit) and that He is the creator of the universe and that He takes a personal interest in every single person who has lived, is living or will live. But whether or not you so believe is entirely up to you. He has given you the free choice to do so.
For those who think science "proves" that there is no God, my to you is why are there so many scientists who believe in a god and in particular believe in Jesus Christ as God, especially when they come from a background of no belief in any god or gods?
What made it compelling to them to change their minds and believe in Jesus Christ?
Of course, on the other side, there are those who believed and no hold the view that there is no god. One must also ask them why did they change their minds about the matter.
The biggest problem is that the conquest of Israel, as depicted in Joshua, is impossible. Joshua gives a lot fairly specific details about what kinds of regions would have been particularly despoiled, and while there is some archaeological evidence of war, they can't add up to the tale of Joshua, even on a superficial level (such as the destructions being a millennium apart, a pretty major chronological conundrum). In terms of historicity, Joshua has much in common with a kind of King Arthur mythology for the ancient Hebrews.
Furthermore, the entire history as depicted is pretty heavily massaged into a pattern of "king does well, Israel prospers; king does bad, Israel suffers." So much so that even most of the good leaders get specific episodes of transgressions resulting in punishment (Joshua is the only figure off the top of my head that doesn't have such an evidence). The text should therefore be treated as unreliable and nonindicative of history until we have corroborating evidence to support textual evidence.
The latter bit is where most of the archaeology to support the Biblical narrative falls flat. Sure, you can point to evidence that people lived in Jerusalem around 1000 BC... but that's all the evidence says. We don't know if they were even following Jewish law, for examples, least of all if Jerusalem was the capital of a major regional power.
Note that I write this as someone who would consider himself a Christian. But I do acknowledge that the Bible is not an accurate source of literal history.
So to say that the amount of archaeological evidence is not extensive enough to validate the details found in Joshua and that the details given in Joshua are impossible is a bit extreme.
Your comment about the history of the kingdom following the "fortunes" of the various kings is also not matching what we can see in modern day history. If one looks at the modern histories of different countries around the world, one can also see similar patterns. Countries quite often follow the actions of the leadership of that country, bad leadership worsens a country, good leadership tends to better a country.
It doesn't always follow this pattern but for the discussion, close enough is an indicator.
To say that this should be treated as unreliable and non-indicative of history really means that we should treat all (and I mean all) historical records as completely suspect. As I remarked earlier, the only indicators of the Hittites was found in the OT until relatively recently. If it is correct in such a minor (extremely minor) point, shouldn't we expect it to be at least somewhat indicative in the major points?
You can either accept based on what we do have or not accept based on what we do have. That's your call. I have yet to come across anything that amounts to the biblical record being bogus. Even the stuff used to refute has not done so as far as I am concerned.
As far as "Jewish" law is concerned, the biblical record quite clearly says that the Israelites did not follow the Mosaic Law for varying periods of time during their history and that they followed after other gods. In point of fact, it evens tells of an event where one of the Mosaic books hadn't been know for at least a couple of generations, since it had been found hidden in the old temple for that entire period.
One of the interesting aspects of the OT, at least from my point of view, is that it doesn't hide the failures and foibles of the leaders and people of that time. King David, who is called a man after God's own heart, is described in terms that indicate how variable he was, good and bad. I mean to say, he slept with one of his leading officers' wife and then to hide the fact, got the man killed.
Stories like Lot and his daughters and their getting of child by their father or the actions of Tamar with her father-in-law Judah, or even Abraham and how he tried to hide his marriage to Sarah (by calling her his sister, which she was) from the various Kings he came in contact with.
These are the stories of real people not whitewashed for religious reasons.
Essentially, the bible is a book about the relationship between God (Jesus Christ) the Creator and people. It is not afraid to tell it like it is. The stories could be about anyone today, we are no different.
I listened to an Islamic Imam who was teaching his followers how to deal with Christians when they come. He basically was telling them that they should use all the "naughty" stories in the bible to get the Christians to run away. For those who don't understand what the books are about, this is a good tactic.
It is up to each individual to test the veracity of what they are told and to weigh up the evidence presented to them. This is applicable irrespective of the subject matter, irrespective of the field, irrespective of the consensus.
I can't prove that Jesus' mother wasn't a virgin any more than you can prove that my great-great-grandmother wasn't a virgin.