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That is something that can be tested. It can be proved or disproved.

OK, then under your bed. That's something I can't test. (But yes, the analogy was not very appropriate; FSM would serve better).

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The unseen branch thing

Not quite; I have personally experienced many branches and got credible accounts on lots of others. If I were to draw a very precise, to molecular level, picture of a branch and asked myself whether it exists, the answer would be "probably not, but similar ones do".

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Besides, if you took a worldwide poll asking people if they believe in some sort of higher being, the result would be overwhelmingly in favor of it. I would say that counts as a "clue of its exitence".

Countless different, incompatible and mutually exclusive higher beings, some being forgotten, others invented. This tells about humans and their desire for simple explanation of the world, for hope and comfort, or for cunning use of those needs in others in order to controll them; it tells me nothing about Universe. As you pointed out quite eloquently later in your post, cosmological questions are not decided by vote.

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By the way, what are the odds of life forming and evolving on Earth after the Big Bang? Pretty close to zero I imagine.

Oh, prety high, judging by very crude experiments on formation of organic molecules. Probability of evolution taking exactly the road it has or any other particular one is close to zero: little green men in Andromeda galaxy have little reason to believe that exactly these two chaps mentioning them in their argument exist (but we do, as you will be quick to point out).

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... the people that lived before us appear to have been more and more dumb.

On the contrary, they (say, from Cro-Manon onward, that is Homo Sapiens, not other Homo species) were every bit as ingenious as we are; perhaps even a bit more so, because with development of civilization evolutionary pressure weakens.

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Flatland and '2001: Space Odyssey' argument

Exactly. I think you are making my argument here. All "gods" I am hearing about are ridiculously anthropomorphic: two-dimensional beings describing two-dimensional gods; Arthur Clarke (in "Lost worlds of 2001" - bits and pieces that Kubrick rejected) describing civilization that gave us a push millions of years ago in full detail, completely with kids with toy ray-guns.*

You will find in my other posts on this topic (while the horse still kind of moved) that I am not dismissing in principle the idea of the Universe being created, or tuned. It is just that we cannot know anything about it**, so that postulating any particular scenario is completely arbitrary and irrelevant. While I cannot know our Universe wasn't created in the way Benford's Cosm or Brin's Earth describes, I could safely bet my life on it. (Actually, acording to most of today's prevalent religions, by choosing not to adopt "just in case" attitude towards existence of their gods I am betting my ethernal life, am I not?)

Cheers!


*) BTW, reading this was a major disappointment; Clarke completely missed the idea; obviously, the movie was more or less completely Kubrick's work.

**) Even if we found something like the image in Pi (from Sagan's Contact), it would still not be the proof of the Universe being created. Pi has infinite nmber of digits, so 'infinite number of mokeys' argument applies. But, of course, by 'we' I mean hunams as we are here and now. A million years from now, who knows?
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