How do atheists explain this? (Genuine Question)

[LovePrevails]

it wouldn't be surprising if certain geometries were inherent in the universe because the universe is a geometrical entity based on consistent laws,some of which we have discovered. This neither proves nor disproves a creator, it is simply an observation about the universe.

 

It wouldn't be surprising if certain secret societies chose an affinity for those numbers based on those geometries.

That has gone on since the Pythagorean who basically worshipped mathematics.

[Jer]

"Things that happen 1 in 64 million times actually happen all the time"

[Justin K.]

Mathew M.

Yeah that's a good point. Cuz I like being a provocateur. No I just didn't really think about it. I was definitely relating it to a creation vs. Natural occurrence argument. I came on, I saw the word atheism, I had read something about this moon thing, it was on my mind so I asked. I then immediately received a tide of psuedo intellectual snobbery. I did recieve a few thoughtful responses also. But I enjoy trying to argue positions the other way sometimes just to know I've really exhausted it and to see/test what kind of responses a group will give when not toeing the party line let's say. I'm not here as a substitute for my social life. I've read a lot of nasty things online about this group and how if you have any ideas that aren't Stefs you get shunned & ridiculed. I don't care about any of that. I admire Stef a great deal. My only real gripe is the animal issue.but I can compartmentalize how I feel about a person from their opinion on something I disagree with .i was told the message board was of much better civility & intelligence. Idk about that yet. I hope so, but it seems pretty much the same.just with less number of idiotic dissenting opinions.

[Kevin Beal]

Mathew M.

Yeah that's a good point. Cuz I like being a provocateur. No I just didn't really think about it. I was definitely relating it to a creation vs. Natural occurrence argument. I came on, I saw the word atheism, I had read something about this moon thing, it was on my mind so I asked. I then immediately received a tide of psuedo intellectual snobbery. I did recieve a few thoughtful responses also. But I enjoy trying to argue positions the other way sometimes just to know I've really exhausted it and to see/test what kind of responses a group will give when not toeing the party line let's say. I'm not here as a substitute for my social life. I've read a lot of nasty things online about this group and how if you have any ideas that aren't Stefs you get shunned & ridiculed. I don't care about any of that. I admire Stef a great deal. My only real gripe is the animal issue.but I can compartmentalize how I feel about a person from their opinion on something I disagree with .i was told the message board was of much better civility & intelligence. Idk about that yet. I hope so, but it seems pretty much the same.just with less number of idiotic dissenting opinions.

And this post here is something other than pseudo intellectual snobbery? Do I understand that correctly?

 

Apparently, you are so superior to your detractors that you can simply claim that they are uncivil, unintelligent, are mindless party liners, have no social life and their opinions are idiotic, and that's it, it's established.

 

It's hard to imagine something more deserving of the label "pseudo-intellectual snobbery". My eyes have rolled so far back into my head that I can see my prefrontal cortex turning green, ill, while I try to comprehend your response, haha.

 

Oh, please. Who are you trying to convince?

[packmule]

Here is another proof that God exists:

 

Abraham Lincoln was elected to Congress in 1846.

John F. Kennedy was elected to Congress in 1946.

Abraham Lincoln was elected President in 1860.

John F. Kennedy was elected President in 1960.

 

The names Lincoln and Kennedy each contain 7 letters.

Both were particularly concerned with civil rights.

Both wives lost children while living in the White House.

Both Presidents were shot on a Friday.

Both Presidents were shot in the head.

Lincoln's secretary was named Kennedy.

Kennedy's secretary was named Lincoln.

 

Both were assassinated by Southerners.

Both were succeeded by Southerners.

Both successors were named Johnson.

 

Andrew Johnson who succeeded Lincoln was born in 1808.

Lyndon Johnson who succeeded Kennedy was born in 1908.

John Wilkes Booth, who assassinated Lincoln, was born in 1839.

Lee Harvey Oswald, who assassinated Kennedy, was born in 1939.

Both assassins were known by their 3 names.

Both names are composed of 15 letters.

 

Lincoln was shot at a theatre in Washington D.C., and Kennedy has a theatre in Washington D.C named after him. (The Kennedy Center)

Kennedy was shot in a car called a "Lincoln."

Booth ran from the theater and was caught in a warehouse.

Oswald ran from a warehouse and was caught in a theater.

Booth and Oswald were both assassinated before their trials.

 

And here's the kicker -

A week before Lincoln was shot, he was in Monroe, Maryland.

A week before Kennedy was shot, he was in Marilyn Monroe.

 

Therefore God exists!

[labmath2]

If you are okay with calling it a coincidence. But that's a real hell of a coincidence. There has to be a physical reason why. I was hoping for something like a physical law as to why a ratio would have to be a certain way for a planet or star orbiting or being orbited by its neighbors to make it possible - because Venus & Mars have some odd 2:5 ratios & when you map their patterns they form things like pentagrams and hexagrams & stuff. I wanted a way to resolve the last glimmer of any notion we are all caught in some strange Archon experiment. I don't really believe that I was looking for the answer to how I know it isn't the case. There has to be a better answer than coincidence, it's just too many and too specific not to involve some kind of law.

I basically gave you something to look into that could physically explain some of those coincidences and you called me disingenuous. I would go through the equations step by step and explain it to you,  but i got a B- and C+ in my physics 1 and 2 class, respectively, so i am not confident i will not screw something up. If you go through it and it offers no explanation, that is fine, now i you know, but do not dismiss it before even doing the work.

[J. D. Stembal]

...to see/test what kind of responses a group will give when not toeing the party line let's say. I'm not here as a substitute for my social life. I've read a lot of nasty things online about this group and how if you have any ideas that aren't Stefs you get shunned & ridiculed. I don't care about any of that.

 

You are pretending very hard not to care when your motives appear to be to stir the pot.

 

Why does it matter what our responses are? You start a thread, and you sometimes get replies. That's how forums usually work.

 

Why are you here?

[ProfessionalTeabagger]

Mathew M.

Yeah that's a good point. Cuz I like being a provocateur. No I just didn't really think about it. I was definitely relating it to a creation vs. Natural occurrence argument. I came on, I saw the word atheism, I had read something about this moon thing, it was on my mind so I asked. I then immediately received a tide of psuedo intellectual snobbery. I did recieve a few thoughtful responses also. But I enjoy trying to argue positions the other way sometimes just to know I've really exhausted it and to see/test what kind of responses a group will give when not toeing the party line let's say. I'm not here as a substitute for my social life. I've read a lot of nasty things online about this group and how if you have any ideas that aren't Stefs you get shunned & ridiculed. I don't care about any of that. I admire Stef a great deal. My only real gripe is the animal issue.but I can compartmentalize how I feel about a person from their opinion on something I disagree with .i was told the message board was of much better civility & intelligence. Idk about that yet. I hope so, but it seems pretty much the same.just with less number of idiotic dissenting opinions.

Oh please do not start playing the victim and stop with the obnoxious passive aggression. You are being responded to exactly the way you would on any average forum like this one. You are being treated more than fairly. Take your idiotic numerology nonsense to an actual atheist or skeptic website and see what they say. You'll get torn apart just for the title alone.

Where do you get off calling us intellectual snobs just for daring to criticize your nonsense? Also please do not insinuate that if we don't take you seriously that we are somehow living up some cult-like reputation of "shunning" or ridiculing those who do not agree with Stef. We're not going to be manipulated by that crap.  

[Justin K.]

Where do I get it? From reading the thread. From the gate it was "the jerk in me wants to ridicule you but instead..." Followed by nothing but ridicule. Then straw man central station. We post other coincidences nothing to do with the topic in no way pertinent or in any way as specific and act like it is the same thing. At least a half dozen times someone commented about it not proving God's existence when A) I never said it did B) I said pretty emphatically I didn't believe it did. I don't think it proves anything. It does however, circumstantially suggest an intelligent design - perhaps not of God the way theologians describe God, but an intelligent if not perfect entity, perhaps. It is funny to me just how spastic atheists will become even at the mere mention of it. Many, the same people who tell me I'm too harsh & not convincing them with vitriol when I talk about animal rights. Like on one hand, I must gently persuade them from horrifically cruel actions. But when it is their turn, no "catching more flies with honey than vinegar" necessary, intolerance full steam ahead.

But there were a few responses like love prevails that made sense to me. And actually Labmath2 - you were fair, I apologize, I had read your response with many others in machine gun fashion that I kind of lumped it in with the others - but when I re-read it , I concur- that was wrong of me to do so.

 

And to jer, that was funny I liked it. That is usually how I explain any but if synchronicity. It is just in this example there were several coincidences which I suppose is the same thing end of the day, just a probability, but I've done DMT when I was younger, & remember it being all math. Before I had ever done any drugs I had what I can only describe as a hallucination staring at the door one day, I saw rows & rows of moving numbers & then the next day I thought of Zeno's paradox in math class which stumped my teacher only to learn some years later that I certainly wasn't the first to do so. Since we do see numbers in nature like pi, golden ratio, Fibonacci - I wondered if the act of "creation" with or without God could be related to it.

[Magnus]

I enjoy trying to... see/test what kind of responses a group will give when not toeing the party line

 

Yeah, everyone else's statements were totally sincere, but you were just testing us. We're like lab rats, here for your experimentation. But you're above it all, watching us from heights we can't even imagine.

 

I mean, it's pretentious and deceitful to "test" people with arguments you later pretend not to believe. But that doesn't matter, because we didn't pass your test, right?  When it was our turn, we werent' "catching more flies with honey than vinegar." It was just intolerance full steam ahead, right? 

 

After all, you had a chance to make a sincere, legitimate, meaningful argument, about something, anything, and you chose to "test" people instead of discussing things that matter to you.  I can see why we disappoint you. So intolerant, we are.

[Sal9000]

Actually, it is pretty common in astronomy that orbits of planets form a ratio of small integers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_resonance

[hannahbanana]

If you want a mathematical explanation, I'd suggest reading up a little bit on statistics. It sounds counterintuitive, but events that have 1/1000 chance of happening, or 1/1000000 chance of happening, actually happen many times a day. There are just THAT many opportunities for an event, no matter how unlikely, to occur. I'm not sure what the probability cutoff is for an event to be truly unlikely, but it's pretty darn high.

So if an event that has a 1/1000000 chance (or something like that) to occur can happen many times in one DAY, imagine expanding that to years, decades, centuries, millennia.....you get the point.

Now, this is just talking about in one relatively small place - the Earth. Imagine expanding the probabilities of events out to cover the entire UNIVERSE, which is a pretty big freaking place. Almost anything could happen.

The field of statistics can explain these common ratios and events...in fact, I'd even say it would be weird for there NOT to be some similarities when it comes to a sample size as huge as the universe (or even our solar system, for that matter) and ALL of human history.

 

Now, if you want to get into the astronomical ratios and stuff, there are actually mathematical equations that quantify the force of gravity that you can use along with the Newton's laws of physics to show that, since forces will always want to reach the point of least strain, there are "wells of stability" that objects will reach. The forces here are balanced out in such a way that it is very difficult to leave that position. I would guess that the similarities in ratios have something to do with the mathematical equations, as well as the fact that when we are talking the size of suns and planets, differences in mass and distance become very negligible to an extent, so that the ratios become essentially equal in many situations.

 

Of course, I'm not an astrophysicist so I can't say for sure, but I DO know enough about physics and probability to know that there is definitely a mathematical explanation for it, no god needed.

 

I guess you COULD argue that the existence of laws of physics=existence of god, but I really think that's a stretch.

[2bits]

Justin K, there are many good arguments against numerology already and they are easy to find. Google "numerology debunked". Even the top hit is a good start. It's an age old superstition, so we've had ages to compile its fallacies.

 

People are bad at intuiting probabilities, so it's not surprising that they are mystified by an "impossible" set of coincidences. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-our-brains-do-not-intuitively-grasp-probabilities/

[J-William]

 

You know how to tell when someone has a genuine question? they preface it by saying it's a "genuine question"

 

Same thing goes for when someone says they're being honest with you :-D

[shirgall]

You know how to tell when someone has a genuine question? they preface it by saying it's a "genuine question"

 

To be fair to the OP, there are a million advertisements that start with the same phrase ("How do atheists explain this?" or "Atheists can't explain this!")  making their round through conservative web sites.

 

Admittedly the posting is along the same lines as those ads.

[Lars]

Most religious people don't over-complicate their irrelevant case for God referring to what they perceive as impossibly improbable universal order.

[Lingum]

The claim is that the coincidences surrounding the measurements are so improbable, they indicate intelligent design. However, those measurements are rounded and inaccurate, which makes them probable. This would mean that, if the theory of intelligent design was true, and symbolism was a factor, then intelligent design would be inaccurate. This means your hypothesis can't prove intelligent design with accuracy to symbolism. The hypothesis is self-detonating.

 

Secondly, I can't figure out why there are lots of man made instances in your claim; freemasonry, skull and bones, card games. How could this possibly have any relevance to intelligent design? In fact, several of your units of measurement are man made, arbitrary or based on natural phenomena. Why would an intelligent creator operate on units of measurements that are man made? Think about it! How could he predict those units of measurement, when if he made some change to the universe, we wouldn't have developed them, or entirely different units of measurement. Apparently, he has solved a linear algebra equation that includes all factors in the universe he's working on, just so you could see some coincidences with your man made units of measurement. I think the notion is sillier the more you think about it.

 

Thirdly, I think most of your claim can be attributed to the fact that you're using simplified conclusions from physics, without the necessary familiarity with mathematics and physics to interpret them.

• Units of measurements are man made
• Units of measurements are often based on natural phenomena - often times not accurately (chosen by humans)
• Equations in physics use units of measurements
• Equations in physics use constants to describe natural phenomena, to accurately describe the physical world

If you're not familiar with the mathematics and physics that you have used to support your claim, you could easily be projecting symbolic significance to what is a byproduct of man made mathematical equations or practices

[Justin K.]

2bits, that is an excellent response an almost exactly the way I explain it in a chapter in my book. Hannabannana & a few others commented similar.

However, Sal's response was actually what I was wondering about (& why I asked if anyone knew) because I don't want to publish the wrong thing. But if that post is correct than that means everyone who was so certain it was apopenia was wrong.

 

Magnus get over yourself. I just meant b/c I'm new. Maybe it is the marketer in me but y'know, in used to like sending an email or writing a direct mail piece, you need a provocative headline to get opened. If you want your stuff read. You can change it up a bit after that. In fact that's a good half the emails or tweets you read.

 

But again thank you to all who commented thoughtfully. Relating to normal synchronistic events in life, I concur with what 2bits posted exactly. Where it comes to the ratios of planetary orbits, I think there is actually a more logical reason for it.

To lingum;

Great response also. I'll just say that I mentioned earlier I had out in many other numbers that were obviously man made just for whoever may be interested in it & to strengthen the idea this is what religion really revolves around. Like 666 being the 36th triangular number or the sum of a magic square.

 

I mean I did say right in the first post, I ask genuinely, non facetiously, I don't believe in God, that was all in the first post. Maybe when after giving all the moon trivia then adding "and science doesn't find any of this strange" was too the other way idk.

[Magnus]

Pi day is only two days away, dude. It's pretty sciency.

[Matthew Ed Moran]

So you thought you had to lie to get input on something you were working on in your book? You know what that suggests to me? That you really think you're unworthy of other people's time.

 

Because if you would have just been honest and said you were asking for help with your book, I bet you a million bitcoins the reception would have been positive and helpful, as it so consistently is when people are asking for input on their awesome endeavors on this forum. But instead you were dishonest, and by doing that, you made sure you weren't worthy of our time.

 

So maybe it was the marketer in you that resorted to dishonesty. Or maybe it was the inner-child who thought he had to deceive and make a show to get other people's attention.

[Justin K.]

I think you guys are being quite over dramatic. I didn't lie. I said right in the first post.

[jp1131]

What I don't understand is why so many people responded to this, when most the of responses are in no way trying to further discussion. I don't think these posts are a productive way of showing the OP that the people of FDR are respectful and open to controversial discussion.

 

To the OP, some of those numbers are interesting. The natural state of our would has very orderly numerical patterns which do not seem to be random in any way. I personally like the Anthropic Principle. The numbers involved in showing that the universe seems to be perfectly and specifically designed for life are quite interesting. Though I didn't see much you posted that could be used in favor of the Anthropic Principle. Honestly I didn't see much in your post that could be used as significant evidence for anything specific, but I will say the numbers and correlations you made are interesting. Thanks for the interesting read.

[Kevin Beal]

What I don't understand is why so many people responded to this, when most the of responses are in no way trying to further discussion. I don't think these posts are a productive way of showing the OP that the people of FDR are respectful and open to controversial discussion.

I'm sorry you feel that way. I disagree with your assessment, but you are certainly free to elaborate.

 

Specifically, I don't know what you mean by "controversial", "furthering", "productive" or "respectful". It seems that you and I have different ideas about what those words mean. The problem may simply be that these are adjectives which don't explain the actual facts as they are, and more describe your judgment about them. Which doesn't actually further the conversation, which was your complaint, but again, this may be because of our different understanding of those words.

 

I appreciate your concern. I just wish that I had something specific or principled that I could take away from your criticism. All I really know so far as that you didn't like it, which is fine. It's just that, ideally, when criticizing people, you give them something to use, something they can apply. And by that, I mean along the lines of what this post here is about, about the adjectives, the imprecise language, the purpose of criticism, etc.

 

Hope that makes sense. Take care!