no, i dont agree at all with the "random" nature of the universe. i dont think there is anything that is truly random, i dont belive in chance, luck, or coincidences. i also think the claims you are making are at least as outrageous as you seem to think mine are. You say, nothing + nobody + blind chance = everything. I say God is the fundamental explination of all things. The burden of proof rest on both of us.

Yes I'm using the word "chance" incorrectly as Tony pointed out, but given what is testable about our universe, I could (I've said this before) claim that there is an Almighty Yeti (who created us in his image) that no one can see created the universe in it's entirety. I would have as much proof (repeatable testing) as you do about your god.

So prove to me the Almighty Yeti doesn't exist.

I suppose techinically the universe is not random in any way if you have the ability to predict the outcome of every single energy transfer. Last time i checked the science wasn't quite there, but at least there are people actively working on it.

Faith doesnt predict tomorows weather or build a better airbag. How many important scienctific theories have been tested, proved and adopted from a religious facility?

Do you mean the idea of God, or God Himself?

I'm saying I have no proof for lack of a god or Of a god, and for the same reasons I don'd believe in a ToothFairy. I'm not going to jump to an illogical conclusion there is a god.

now most assuredly if naturalism is right then it is at this point, at the study of man himself, that it wins its final victory and overthrows all our hopes: not only our hope of immortality, but our hope of finding significance in our lives here and now.

This is stricly an opionion and contains no facts.

on the fully naturalistic view all events are determined by laws. our logical behaviour, in other words our thoughts, and our ethical behaviour, including our ideals as well as our acts of will, are governed by biochemical laws; these, inturn, by physical laws which are themselves actuarial statements about the lawless movements of matter. these units never intended to produce the regular universe we see: the law of averages (successor to lucretius's exiguum clinamen) has produced it out of the collision of these random variations in movement. the physical universe never intended to produce organisms. the relevant chemicals on earth, and the sun's heat, thus juxtaposed, gave rise to this disquieting desease of matter: organization. natural selection, operating on the minute differences between one organism and another, blundered into that sort of phosphorescence or mirage which we call consciousness - and that, in some cortexes beneath some skulls, at certain moments, still in obedience to physical laws, but to physical laws now filtered through laws of a more complicated kind, takes the form we call thought. such, for instance, is the origin of this paper: such was the origin of Professor Price's paper [the paper he is responding to]. what we should speak of as his 'thoughts' were mearly the last link of a causal chain in which all the previous links were irrational. he spoke as he did because the matter of his brain was behaving in a certain way: and the whole history of the universe up to that moment had forced it to behave in that way. what we called his thought was essentially a phenomenon of the same sort as his other secretions - the form which the vast irrational process of nature was bound to take at a particular point of space and time." - C.S. Lewis in the essay "Religion without Dogma?" contained in the book titled, "God in the Dock"

heres a good quote i found
In reply to:

"Chance" in evolution, or any other scientific theory, is a semi-quantitative statement about our ignorance --- our lack of precise knowledge of the initial conditions, or our lack of understanding of how a particular final state is selected.



Just becuase we dont know the exact circumstances something (say how we could evolve and you end up typing a thought) does not mean thats not the way it happens(ed).

So youre saying theres some kind of "soul" because you refuse to believe you're just a pile of biochemical reactions?

So my choices here are an invisble thing that is "me" that no one can prove exists, or that my brain is a complex system of chemical reactions.
These reactions i manipulate on a daily basis by ingesting drugs, which then effect my mental/physical state.

Down these lines, does the soul store information? we've proved if you remove pysical parts of the brain the person loses mental abilities, at what point does the soul "take over" information control? how would you prove this?
How can you make the leap from the physical reality to an imaginary one?

The whole idea for a soul seems designed to control other human beings afraid of their own mortality.