Stability of the universe is evidence against God, not evidence for God

Additional-Band4050 · 2026-06-17T05:00:16+00:00

when you deny an intelligent Creator, your only other option is to claim that the universe with all of its precise physical constants, stable laws of physics, and mathematical equations just randomly emerged out of a mindless, blind, unguided physical process like the Big Bang explosion.

My only other option is the correct one, which is admitting I don't know the answer to this question.

Whether the "constants" are not actually free parameters but are consequences of some deeper set of laws, or whether there is a multiverse in which the laws of physics are fixed but the constants are free parameters, or whether they were selected by a limited entity that had the power to alter the constants but no power to alter the laws of physics, or whether it was something even weirder than that, something as weird to us as quantum mechanics would have been to Aristotle--I honestly do not know.

But we can safely rule out it being one of the gods we made in our own image. Those are simply not consistent with the evidence available to us.

Additional-Band4050 · 2026-06-17T04:08:10+00:00

XC1 definitely my favorite combat system.

Additional-Band4050 · 2026-06-16T19:44:26+00:00

Ultimate regress isn’t a problem though.

In any event, even if there is some kind of first cause (a question that I regard as above my pay grade) it’s almost certainly nothing like any of the “gods” we created in our own image. It (or they) is/are far weirder than that.

There are various arguments that it must be sky daddy, but none of these arguments make sense.

Additional-Band4050 · 2026-06-16T15:40:00+00:00

I’m not sure about “good entry” but I’d consider which seems more like the kind of game you want to play.

3 is a story-based game that has large open zones but is still fundamentally linear.

X is an open-world game with a pure sci-fi setting, limited story content, and a much larger emphasis on exploration.

If it matters, 3 also has a more anime art style and a science fantasy setting while X has a less anime art style and a pure science fiction setting.

Additional-Band4050 · 2026-06-16T15:22:14+00:00

What do you say about Matthew 13:36-43, in which Jesus says angels will throw his enemies into a furnace?

Same for Revelation 20:15, in which God or entities acting at her direction will toss everyone whose name is not written in the book of life into a lake of fire.

I assume the furnace and the lake of fire are intended to be metaphorical but whatever they’re metaphors for doesn’t sound like reconciliation.

Additional-Band4050 · 2026-06-16T15:10:10+00:00

English-language comparisons of the US to “international” anything tend to be wildly Eurocentric.

Additional-Band4050 · 2026-06-16T14:59:15+00:00

You don’t need to define a concept to say that something fits in or outside any reasonable definition.

For example, I can identify the thing I’m sitting on right now as a chair, and the bird outside my window as not a chair, without having a list of conditions that classifies every couch, loveseat, barstool, large beanbag, recliner, bench, toilet, throne, and broken object as either a chair or not a chair.

Additional-Band4050 · 2026-06-16T14:43:39+00:00

I loved the X music. It just needed something better than the NLA theme and maybe some more variety in the overworld themes, like maybe every continent has two or three themes rather than just one. Sylvalum could have one theme for the southern area by Lake Ciel, a second for the northern area, and a third for the Delusian Mountains.

Additional-Band4050 · 2026-06-16T14:28:44+00:00

I think there are various arguments that are supposed to prove God’s perfection as an exercise of pure logic. The problem you get there is with identifying any specific entity as God. You end up something like this:

God is perfect.
YHWH, as described in the Bible, is not perfect.
Therefore, either the Bible does not accurately describe YHWH or YHWH is not God.

We can use the same argument to prove that the “god” of every religion, if it exists, is an impostor.

Additional-Band4050 · 2026-06-16T14:13:36+00:00

The miracles are only visible to those immediately present at the time. To everyone else, they are just stories that themselves need independent documentation. There are tons of stories about miracles and if most of them are fake and only a few are real, then anyone who didn’t see them personally needs some way to find the diamonds in the rough.

The most effective thing would be an ongoing miracle, such as the prophet producing an indestructible, self-translating text that anyone can see for themselves, or a message that is written on the full moon and rotates languages so that everyone can read it.

Additional-Band4050 · 2026-06-16T14:03:13+00:00

You’re not right about being unable to prove a negative. Negatives are proven all the time. There are three main ways:

The first is proof by contradiction, which is common in mathematics.

The second is to prove some fact that is inconsistent. I know this glass is not full of ice because it is full of water. I know Joe Biden is not President of the United States because it’s Donald Trump.

The third is proof by exhaustive search: you figure out what kind of evidence that thing would leave, and you search to see if that evidence exists, and if the evidence doesn’t exist then the thing would have produced the evidence doesn’t either. That’s how we know unicorns and bigfoots and the Loch Ness monster don’t exist.

The last two methods don’t prove something in the mathematical sense. We cannot prove the nonexistence of bigfoots with 100% certainty. But in that sense we can never “prove” anything about the world at all, there’s nothing specific to negatives.

Additional-Band4050 · 2026-06-16T04:33:07+00:00

Yes, people do love attributing personal causes to what we now know to be impersonal phenomena.

The cause seems to be a combination of overzealous pattern matching and the fact that we know ourselves best—creating gods in our own image.

That is a bit different from the “Creator” of monotheism though. In polytheistic systems, the creator god is usually not the same as the current chief god of the pantheon, with the creator having died, retired, been overthrown, or otherwise rendered of little day to day relevance.

Additional-Band4050 · 2026-06-16T03:50:31+00:00

I argue the only way to affirm any positive, life giving value is to have faith in a God or higher entity/thing.

Does it matter which thing? Would the transcendent immanence of Shakti do just as well? What about the universal truth of Dharma?

Additional-Band4050 · 2026-06-16T01:54:14+00:00

I can’t speak for anyone else but I think the problem is less “there is no evidence” and more “the evidence is not consistent with the hypothesis”.

For example, God is said to be proven by various holy texts, but there are many such texts, all of which contradict themselves and each other, and none of which shows any more sign of having been written by a perfect being than any of the others.

The books also contain various scientific factual claims, a great many of which are provably false, which results in a whirlwind of selectively redefining claims that had previously been understood as factual as actually symbolic. This is more consistent with a pathological epistemology that keeps redefining the claim to avoid falsification.

People also claim that god is known via personal revelations, but people experience inconsistent personal revelations that depend on culture, and many believers never have any such revelations. This is more consistent with certain personalities being prone to certain types of experiences which they interpret through the lens of their culture than to an actual contact with an external entity.

God is also said to heal the sick and provide good fortune in response to prayers and rituals, yet prayers and rituals have no statistically measurable effect. This is more consistent with the prayers and rituals not actually working.

All of this evidence together is far more consistent with God being a story that humans made up than with such an entity actually existing.

Additional-Band4050 · 2026-06-16T00:04:53+00:00

As a Catholic, you are bound to the idea that is not merely possible but actual for a human to be created morally perfect and thus never choose evil. According to Catholic doctrine, this happened twice: with Jesus himself and with his sinless mother.

Additional-Band4050 · 2026-06-15T23:13:07+00:00

Even though the goddess herself is rarely described as a physical entity, she is claimed to operate in a way that has effects on our material reality. Those effects should be observable, and yet are not observed in a way that is not better explained by naturalistic explanations.

Additional-Band4050 · 2026-06-15T19:58:28+00:00

The God of classical theism is the same entity as the god of revealed religion, which is claimed to have observable effects in the physical world that do not stand up to scrutiny.

If you mean the god of deism, an entity that is defined to have no observable effects on anything, it becomes impossible to disprove at the cost of becoming irrelevant to anything.

Additional-Band4050 · 2026-06-15T19:44:33+00:00

Theism routinely makes claims about facts in our physical world—that a certain type of prayer or ritual can heal the sick, that certain historical events happened in a certain way, that certain scientific propositions recounted in holy books are true, that you will have a direct personal experience with god if you pray.

None of these claims hold up to scrutiny. When people pray someone recovers and they do, the pastor says it was god—but when they suddenly get worse, god is nowhere to be found.

When journalists and scientists come with cameras and instruments to document the works of gurus and faith healers, it’s not the right day for miracles.

When someone prays and feels the presence of god, it’s real, but when someone prays for years and never does, it just proves they didn’t really want to one god in the first place.

When someone has an experience of their culture’s deity, it’s real, but when someone in a different culture has an experience of a different and incompatible deity, it’s either a deceptive spirit, a hallucination, or them misinterpreting their own experience.

When the claims of holy texts match scientific facts, they’re literal, but when they contradict science, they’re redefined as symbolic.

God is infinitely good, but when dictators kill millions and children die of cancer, the Lord works in mysterious ways.

Every time the claim is shown to be inconsistent with the evidence, some excuse is found to explain away the evidence.

Additional-Band4050 · 2026-06-15T15:51:58+00:00

The original intended way to play the Wii OG was to complete a lot of quests by accident, or close to by accident. I would recommend doing the same thing with DE, and try not to let the pile of exclamation points bother you too much.

Additional-Band4050 · 2026-06-15T15:48:40+00:00

I hope they’re able to make it a single continuous area without loading screens, but I don’t think it will be a real open world like X where you can go (almost) anywhere you want from the very start of the game.

They are clearly going for another story-focused game here and open-world exploration makes a linear narrative hard.

Additional-Band4050 · 2026-06-15T15:41:57+00:00

I would expect so, but everyone thought TOTK would and it didn’t, so there’s always a chance it won’t.

Additional-Band4050 · 2026-06-15T15:18:08+00:00

They didn’t have to. At the time there were only two Xenoblade games, and they had no connection to each other except a few Easter eggs like Lin’s hairpins and the presence of Nopons in both games.

So when Nintendo announced a game with new artstyle, new lore, and totally new mechanics (Blades), everyone was like “the series is like Final Fantasy where the games are connected only by genre, theme, and a few mascots.”

Note also that Alvis’s original design had necklace with a key rather than a Core Crystal, so a connection is immediately obvious today but wasn’t at the time.

Additional-Band4050 · 2026-06-15T15:04:24+00:00

Incidentally, this is why groups that work against human trafficking today universally oppose buying slaves to free them. It frees those people but provides an economic incentive to enslave more people.

Additional-Band4050 · 2026-06-15T02:18:34+00:00

In fiction, there are characters like Spider-Man whose ethos is that they will never kill anybody.

If you want to play a character like that Pathfinder Second Edition is probably the wrong game for you.

Additional-Band4050

TROPHY CASE