“Make sense” is a judgement call.

There’s a logical fallacy called “argument to incredulity”, which basically says, “this isn’t true because I can’t believe it’s true”.

If you look at the history of what people have believed or not believed, you’ll find that a lot of people thought is was reasonable to believe some pretty crazy things.

So, your argument doesn’t really hold much weight…

Posted: January 18th 2009

See all questions answered by Eric_PK

Frankly, it doesn’t matter if it “makes sense” or not. If the data and evidence lead us to a tentative conclusion that all the matter and energy in the universe emerged “by chance,” then we would be fools not to accept that conclusion whether it seemed sensible or not.

Asking whether or not a given hypothesis, theory, or observed fact makes sense is missing the point entirely. Whether or not an idea makes sense to you, my cousin Larry, or anyone else says nothing whatsoever about its truth or falsehood; it says more about the person saying “That doesn’t make sense!” than it does about the idea in question, specifically that they don’t understand idea X, and perhaps aren’t willing to entertain ideas that they personally do not feel jibes with their common sense, their worldview, or their preconceived notions of how things ought to be.

You can ask the question “Does this make sense,” but you have to put it in context for it to be anything other than an oblique appeal to ignorance. “Does it make sense, given the evidence from geology, paleontology, genetics, and biology that humans were created ex nihilo 6000 years ago?” The answer there is no.

But without proper context, that question, or any other, is simply an appeal to the ignorance of the listener: “This does not make sense to me. Does it make sense to you? If not, then of course it’s false!” Whether it is asked by an atheist or a believer, it still says less about the idea being discussed than about the people discussing it.

It is vaguely reminiscent of The Chewbacca Defense, but with less emphasis on rapid-fire non-sequiturs.

Posted: January 15th 2009

See all questions answered by Akusai

You’re assuming too much from the get-go. Everything need not have been created at all. Instead, it may have existed forever.

We know of no way matter and energy can be created or destroyed. This doesn’t prove that it cannot be created, but you have to imagine some special hypothetical case to allow that to happen. It’s more straightforward to simply picture an eternal universe, or series of universes, made of infinitely old matter.

That said, it is possible that this universe emerged by chance, according to one hypothesis from a quantum foam that regularly spawns matter spontaneously. Stephen Hawking takes that one seriously.

Once the universe does exist, chance has very little to do with what happens in it. Stars and planets form not by chance but by gravitational accretion of matter. Life formed not by chance but through countless combinations of chemicals thrown together by ancient weather and lava flows. Complex life formed partly by chance, because mutations are random, but mostly through the straightforward, non-random process of natural selection.

Posted: January 14th 2009

See all questions answered by SmartLX