Was It Designed?

Originally posted by wafflehead: ↑

It's not. We invoke the word 'God' because it has general usage and kind of has a universal meaning, but by all means choose some other word.

We have no idea what God is, at best it's a name we give to some force, energy, external to physical reality that directs, coordinates, limits, adds purpose, etc. Humans play ball with it by universally believing it exists in some form, is the Cause, or first Cause, or the ongoing Cause. Every tribe, culture, nation has built their existence with some form of this Cause as the focal centre of their culture, that not a small thing to just dismiss.

And what's the alternative, a cyclic system, okay I tend to think it is a cyclic system along the lines of Hindu Cosmology, but even then some cohesive, directing purpose surely still needs to be acting on the system or we are accepting that matter / a universe and all therein, is self-causing, self-organising and the producer of life and cognition. I don't see how that can be the answer either.

No system causes itself before it exists then applies exacting limits and has life and cognition as a byproduct. There is absolutely no need for anything to evolve, let alone exist, the ability to evolve need not be an aspects of the very first organism and yet it was and for that single celled thing to become human and everything else just because of vast amounts of time, competition and changing circumstance is a bit too much like literal Genesis for me.

How can there be a natural explanation to a universe existing? We know enough to know that the universe can't possibly have caused itself. We know this because every single thing in this universe has a cause so the universe is a no more than a vast collection of effects.

Give it a go by all means but it's beyond me, I can't fathom any way for a universe and all the junk in it to exist without some kind of external agent, as annoying and unsatisfactory as that might be.

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What to me is interesting is the human reaction to the questions of God and the beginnings of the Universe (and also the beginning of life)
Humans concede (most it appears) that the beginning of the Universe is a mystery but appear to accept that God / First Cause/ Creator /... just exists.

It seems that only those options that people can associate with everyday experience are accepted. The universe is not that simple and mostly does not confirm our everyday experiences.

For this reason, Hindu cosmology is rejected because in everyday life, time is not reset to start again, and a start or restart from a subatomic size is rejected because subatomic physics is not within our everyday experience,

We seem to know that within our everyday experience, we have no answer to how the universe started but seem to be happy to invoke an external agent having no clue as to what the agent is or what external means.

The human reaction to the question to me is as entertaining as the answer to the question is.