The Book of Daniel is fake. And all things are filtered through faith. Whereas faith should be filtered by nature. What ‘inexplicable details of the development or evolution of some aspects of creation’ are there? Any will do.
You will have to take that up with the late Sir Isaac…but no, it is not a fake, has some pretty good historical details, some of which historians and archaeologists have verified… I would say the biblical text is a commentary on history – just the “deets” that are necessary to tell the story…as for the “inexplicable stuff” … later…but seriously, read what Francis Collins has said …
So what about the second alternative, that the fine-tuning of the universe is due to chance?
The problem with this alternative is that the odds against the universe’s being life-permitting are so incomprehensibly great that they cannot be reasonably faced. Even though there will be a huge number of life-permitting universes lying within the cosmic landscape, nevertheless the number of life-permitting worlds will be unfathomably tiny compared to the entire landscape, so that the existence of a life-permitting universe is fantastically improbable.
Students or laymen who blithely assert, “It could have happened by chance!” simply have no conception of the fantastic precision of the fine-tuning requisite for life. They would never embrace such a hypothesis in any other area of their lives—for example, in order to explain how there came to be overnight a car in one’s driveway.
the above comes from another website…you could do as well by reading Collins in some of his writings, I am sure…You are on a website that he founded, after all…
Fred Hoyle apparently predicted some things about the carbon nucleus “to enable it to overcome the comparative instability of the mass-eight beryllium…” later work by another scientist bore out Hoyle’s prediction. “I am told that Fred Hoyle said nothing shook his atheism as much as this discovery” – see the book God’s Universe by Owen Gingerich, p 57
“Mathematical physicist Roger Penrose calculated that the odds of our universe starting with such low entropy purely by chance were one out of 10 [symbol] 10 [symbol] 23…” The symbol used looks like an upside down capital V…blog.magsicenter.com
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This energy level, while needed to produce carbon in large quantities, was statistically very unlikely to fall where it does in the scheme of carbon energy levels. Hoyle later wrote:
Would you not say to yourself, “Some super-calculating intellect must have designed the properties of the carbon atom, otherwise the chance of my finding such an atom through the blind forces of nature would be utterly minuscule. A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.”
– Fred Hoyle[19]
The Book of Daniel. It’s a false prophecy by an unknown cabal written four hundred years after its setting. You can see the join. Where it runs out of historical road and goes off piste. If I want to know the principles of mathematics, I’ll take it up with my superbly flawed hero Newton. He was a pathologically righteous murderer by proxy you know.
And for the third time of asking, got anything inexplicable? Has Collins? Something I don’t know about?
Ah, the myth of fine tuning. Nature self tunes. It has nothing to do with chance. Whatever that is.
And since you haven’t practiced them, you cannot know about them – knowledge of them can only be had by practice.
Daniel was not “a false prophecy”…and there are various discussions on dating…but it certainly existed before the Messiah came (that is, Jesus)…there is good stuff in the book, although (frankly) it also has lots of things people have hashed over a good deal
Fine tuning is a phrase, and quite a nice one. A myth is fiction. When someone in the sciences uses “fine tuning,” in regards to the universe, we can presume quite naturally that they refer to details that “got it right”…not myth.
Would you not say to yourself, “Some super-calculating intellect must have designed the properties of the carbon atom, otherwise the chance of my finding such an atom through the blind forces of nature would be utterly minuscule. A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.”…comes from a magazine article pub Nov 1981
– Fred Hoyle[19]
There is no question that The Book of Daniel is a fraud. None at all. It. Is not a false prophecy for 99% as it’s just history pretending to be prophecy. Which of course IS false. The 1% is false as in failed ‘prophecy’. What’s Messianic about it? If it were prophecy it would be in the Nevi’im not the Ketuvim.
Genius like Newton’s and Hoyle’s comes at very high price. The latter failed to get a Nobel because of his failure to think scientifically after his peerless realisation of stellar nucleosynthesis. He will always be one of the giants of the golden age of science fiction.
Neither God nor chance tune nature.
Goodness! Daniel is an awesome book…I really enjoyed it and getting into all the controversies (about three disputes per verse in at least the first six chapters) and reading Neo-Babylonian history (elsewhere) to better understand the life and times…How on earth can you ask “what’s messianic about it?” when it is often mentioned as one of the reasons why Judaism (around the turn of the BC/CE time period) was toying with the notion of a binary-but-One deity (precursor to the Trinity) and that Judaism around that era was expecting (based on Daniel) that a Jewish man would soon come who would be both Messiah and God.
Now if you dispute THAT, what can I say Klax???..it’s known!!
–excerpt from the Guardian…Oct 2010…“Apart from his earlier work, his arrogant, misplaced assumption of his own genius together with his blunt northern stubbornness, of which he was so proud, caused him to be wrong so often on high-profile issues that people have forgotten when he was right,” says Sir Harry. “The Nobel committees go to inordinate lengths to do the best they can and in this case I think they thought Hoyle was so arrogant and dismissive of others that he would use the prestige of the Nobel prize to foist his other truly ridiculous ideas on the lay public. The whole scientific community felt that.”
In short, science matters more than the individual. Hence the sacrifice of Fred Hoyle.
Messianic Second Temple Judaism predates the fraudulent Book of Daniel by over three hundred years. Again what is Messianic about The Book of Daniel? That’s an open question. And where in Jewish messianism is the belief that Messiah would be God? Again, an open question.
Hoyle sacrificed himself for no rational reason whatsoever. Losing the plot often goes with genius.
not an open question, Klax…really not…as for Hoyle, “losing the plot” is neither here nor there…he is cited as an example of an atheistic person who had a moment when his atheism was challenged by some of the details of the development of the existence we see around us. .and even stuff we cannot easily see (like carbon atoms, etc) …that was my original assertion. There are stated positions (such as Hoyle’s atheism) and then there are moments when the data (small details or laws of probability, etc) challenged that professed atheistic certainty with a “hmmm, rum thing! could actually have happened once” – like the long-ago Oxford don in Lewis’s musings. This “means,” if nothing else, that the laws of probability wobbled on that (and likely other) points. HOW did this happen just by chance in a universe less than 14 billion years old?
well…and what then? some people are challenged enough that they change their minds about a purposeless, just-by-chance Universe. (like Flew for example…and Lewis…and Collins…and more). Others don’t…that is not the issue here though. The reality is that there is a cleverness at the heart of it all.,…and it is really difficult for someone to refuse it without some level of determination.
But every so often reality trips up that determination and they say “rum thing!” or other phrases…before they decide to suppress the reality of that chink and go on their way again.
And as for the other matter, which has just arisen, there are Jewish writers also who discuss the expectations of a Messiah who would be Jewish and also God…and the book of Daniel was part of the mix in all that…I am not going to get into more than one issue with you here…esp on a site designed to discuss Evolutionary Creationism and Materialistic Evolution…“Somehow the universe knew we were coming…” another quote which you will argue with, I am sure. I thought Christy had a pretty nice definition of EC in her posting about 8 days ago. I appreciated reading that. Have a good one…
Which Jewish writers?
The fallacy of incredulity is no excuse for saying God did it and otherwise giving up being scientific. Philosopher Flew’s ‘conversion’ to deism at 81 was due to his encountering ID at that vulnerable age and his not being a scientist.
What has the universe being 13.8 gy old got to do with anything? How did WHAT happen just by sharpshooter chance in it?
God did it isn’t a fitting conclusion for the incredulity one feels, I agree. But there is every reason to give up “being scientific”. Science is a fruitful activity but not a fitting way to be. Being should come first. One shouldn’t sacrifice that on the alter of science. It accomplishes nothing and costs you way too much. To practice science requires a narrowing of focus but if you accept a narrowing of being you’ve overpaid.
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