Learning about crossovers helped convert me from atheist to a believer in God


Let’s see if this one survives.    

I have been an atheist for 50 years.  Recently I became a believer.  One factor that helped tip the scales is the “fine tuned universe” argument - the idea that the physics constants, e.g. the mass of an electron, are so finely “selected” that if they weren’t very close to what they are, life wouldn’t exist.  This is an argument for a creator.  The best counter argument seems to be that there are an infinite number of universes and we got lucky.  

When I got into audio, and started learning about crossovers, I was ASTOUNDED at how well the pieces fit together.  Octaves are exact doubles of frequency.  3dB describes so many seemingly unrelated phenomena.  But the one that really got me was the magic of capacitors and inductors.  They share no parts, other than wires sticking out at each end (usually), one acts due to voltage, one acts due to electromagnetism, one resists AC, one resists DC.  And yet, somehow, they are mirror images of each other, using almost exactly the same equations, behaving perfectly orthogonal to each other, even to the extent of how powerfully they perform their function (3dB again).  How is this possible?  Could this have happened due to random chance?  I smell a creator.  

alanhuth

Showing 1 response by snilf

The OP evidently means to invoke the “anthropic principle” when he mentions the “fine tuned universe argument.” Many believers in God appeal to this principle, as it seems to support the “argument from design,” perhaps the most intuitively appealing of any of the arguments for the existence of God. However, this involves a misunderstanding. The anthropic principle only states the tautological truism that, were it not for us as observers, the observed features of the universe would not be. That is, the construal of this principle as support for some kind of Supreme Designer gets the causality backward. The principle is just an extension of Kant’s fundamental insight: that “reality” is necessarily relative to the observer who experiences, and so defines, it. Space and time are not independently real, they are features of the observer; thus, all the spatio-temporal features of the universe determined by physics—our physics—are extrapolations of features of our own minds. This is NOT to say that the very existence of some unknowable reality depends on us. But the knowability of that, or any, reality does, tautologically, depend on the knower (and the cognitive and bodily structures of the knower).

 

For what it’s worth, it seems to me the wisest thing to “say” about God is what Meister Eckhart—a 13th century German Catholic (Dominican) mystical theologian—wrote: “Now notice this.  God is nameless, for no one can know or articulate anything about God. A pagan teacher [Aristotle] speaks to this point in saying that what we can know or express about the First Cause is more than anything else what we are than anything that the First Cause is or might be, for it is beyond all human expression and understanding.  If I were to say that God is good, I would be wrong; it is more correct to say that I am good and God is not good….  And because God cannot become better he cannot become best, for all three of these terms—good, better, and best—are far from God’s reality….  If I go on to say that God is wise, it is not true—I am wiser than God.  If I further say that God is a being [that he exists], that is not true.  God is a being beyond being and a nothingness beyond being…. So be silent and do not flap your gums about God, for to the extent that you flap your gums about God, you lie and you commit sin.”