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What does replacing the Big Bang with God lose out on? Both of them share the attribute of serving as a termination point for materialistic explanations. Anything posited past that point is unfalsifiable by definition, unless something pretty significant changes in terms of our understanding of physics.
If there's an unmoved mover/uncaused cause, that means that there's at least one non-materialistic answer that's unavoidable. Materialism's whole point is that no non-materialistic answers are necessary, that it offers a seamless answer to all our questions. This is a seam, and not a small one either. And as I argued in our last go-round, it's not the only such seam.
Simplicity, in the information theoretic sense, since you're dispensing with all the complexity involved with God. And that is the case, while waffling about omniscience and the lot might sound simple in natural language to a brain that, at the first go around, doesn't see all the glaring issues with that package deal, good luck showing the Kolmogorov complexity isn't ridiculous. And complexity needs to be justified, and boy does God not constrain expectations in the least.
Explaining "all but one" beats the alternatives on offer. Mathematics is not considered invalid because it begins from base axioms. Besides, our intuition is hopelessly flawed in such matters, whether or not the Big Bang was an Uncaused Cause remains an open question in physics, and the universe doesn't give a shit about how much of an affront it is to our sensibilities it is to have things like that around. Time itself ceases to have meaning both before the Big Bang (which started the clock), or in more prosaic entities like black holes.
Besides, why isn't the Big Bang covered by "materialism"? It can very well accept such a primitive, since nobody claims that black holes are a failure of the same. Our intuitive notions of causality went out the window the moment quantum mechanics, with all it's superposition, entanglement and reference-frame/observer dependent definitions of cause and effect arrived.
If it conflicts with intuitions or our notions of "satisfying" answers, so much the worse for the latter. The math does a better job, or at least works while our intuitions halt and catch fire.
Infinite universal cycles, simulation, and God are all equally non-materialistic, and it seems to me that information theory doesn't apply to non-materialistic explanations. In what sense would it? In what sense is God more complex than a universe looping according to non-observable physics without beginning or end? Is there math that can be shown proving one less complex than the other? You mention Kolmogorov complexity, but I'm skeptical. Wikipedia provides:
...I don't think you can write a computer program that produces either "God" or "A looping Universe" or "The computer the universe is being simulated on" as output in any meaningful sense, so I don't think you can meaningfully calculate the Kolmogorov complexity of any one of these, nor compare their complexity to determine which is the "least complex". All three concepts are, by definition, outside the bounds of observable reality, which means that whatever statements you make about them are unfalsifiable. I see no reason to presume that you can meaningfully do math on unfalsifiables.
It doesn't, actually, if the alternatives do not conflict with materialism when materialism gives answers that seem reasonable. Christians did not reject the concepts of math or gravity or the rocket equations. The whole claim of Materialism is that it was better because it left no need for anything further. It turns out that it does in fact need further things, and in addition appears to require discarding quite a large amount of solid evidence. Those realities pretty seriously undermine its claims to primacy through simplicity, occam's razor, etc, or that people are forced to it by a hard-nosed commitment to only draw forced conclusions.
There are no forced conclusions are forced. All reason is irreducibly axiomatic. We all believe as we will. We each make our bets and take our chances.
Because the math says it happened, but the math also says it can't happen. That is just another way of saying "we don't have a good explanation for this phenomenon."
Our "intuitive notions of causality" are the foundation of Materialism. Abandon those, and what remains? If you get to appeal to miracles, why shouldn't I?
The math doesn't do a job at all. It isn't supporting your conclusion. Your commitment to Materialism is axiomatic, not ultimately dependent on the outcome of a formula.
I genuinely do not see how that applies. Why is a simulation or an infinite universe non-materialistic? I'm not being intentionally obtuse, I don't see it.
If a simulation bottoms out in a basement universe, then there's clearly a materialistic explanation for everything running inside it for one.
Infinite cycles of universes, multiverses and the like do not mean that they don't meet the criteria, which I consider interchangeable with materialism for all practical purposes, of being described by the "true" laws of physics, or at least better ones than we have today, which work mighty well within the one universe we have to work with. Ignorance is not the same as incompatibility.
You can produce entities with a conception of "God" by running human DNA, plus a support structure for the same. That's how we ended up running about and uttering His name.
The Kolmogorov complexity of a concept can be much less than the exhaustive description of the concept itself. Pi has infinite digits, a compact program that can produce it to arbitrary precision doesn't, and the latter is what is being measured with KC. I believe @faul_sname can correct me if I've misrepresented the field.
A Big Bang is defined by extrapolating backwards from the laws of physics, as well as additional supportive observations. If you posit a God that's responsible for the Big Bang, then he's got that much complexity and much, much more.
Further, it's the combination of complexity and no added value when it comes to constraining expectations that severely disprivileges claims of God being a more succinct/favorable/supported explanation for anything, let alone the origin of the universe.
Abiogenesis? Evolution? Don't tell me there isn't a sizeable number of Christians who deny either/both. At the very least, I presume you believe that God set up the parameters to produce either.
No, it can be better because it's better than everything else on the table.
I see no reason to disagree. As Yudkowsky said, there's no argument that can convince a rock.
"Our explanation is better, even accounting for incompleteness"
No? I mean, to hell with the initial reasons for why people adopted materialism, that is irrelevant in evaluating its truth value, or if not entirely irrelevant, then hardly the most pressing aspect.
I fail to see how the Big Bang counts as a miracle, as the word is commonly used.
It predicts the universe originated from a pointlike singularity, which both conforms with observational evidence, and is more than the Bible gets right.
Sounds right to me.
You're just not determined enough. I think you'll find the most effective way to convince a rock of your point is to crush it, mix it with carbon, heat it to 1800C in an inert environment, cool it, dump it in hydrochloric acid, add hydrogen, heat it to 1400C, touch a crystal of silicon to it and very slowly retract it to form a block, slice that block into thin sheets, polish the sheets, paint very particular pretty patterns the sheets, shine UV light at the sheets, dip the sheets in potassium hydroxide, spray them with boron, heat them back up to 1000C, cool them back off, put them in a vacuum chamber, heat them back up to 800C, pump a little bit of dichlorosilane into the chamber, cool them back down, let the air back in, paint more pretty patterns on, spray copper at them really hard, dip them in a solution containing more copper and run electricity through, polish them again, chop them into chips, hook those chips up to a constant voltage source and a variable voltage source, use the variable voltage source to encode data that itself encodes instructions for running code that fits a predictive model to some inputs, pretrain that model on the sum total of human knowledge, fine tune it for sycophancy, and then make your argument to it. If you find that doesn't work you're probably doing it wrong.
Do you think we can rigorously define the Kolmogorov complexity of the Christian God, and/or infinite looping universes based on unknown physics?
So there's the trivial answer, which is that the program "run every program of length 1 for 1 step, then every program of length 2 for 1 step, then every program of length 1 again, and so on [1,2,1,3,1,2,1,4,1,2,...] style" will, given an infinite number of steps, run every program of finite length for an infinite number of steps. And my understanding is that the Kolmogorov complexity of that program is pretty low, as these things go.
But even if we assume that our universe is computable, you're not going to have a lot of luck locating our universe in that system.
Out of curiosity, why do you want to know? Kolmogorov complexity is a fun idea, but my general train of thought is that it's not avtually useful for almost anything practical, because when it comes to reasoning about behaviors that generalize to all turing machines, you're going to find that your approaches fail once the TMs you're dealing with have a large number (like 7 for example, and even 6 is pushing it) of states.
We're debating epistemology, and @self_made_human is arguing that some unfalsifiable theories about the origin of the universe are superior to others because they are "lower complexity" in the information-theory sense, which he proposed measuring through Kolmogorov complexity. My position is that there is no way to rigorously measure the Kolmogorov complexity of the Christian God, or of the Karmic Wheel, or of a universe that loops infinitely via unknown physics even in principle; you cannot measure things you cannot adequately describe, and mechanisms that are unobservable and unfalsifiable cannot be adequately described by definition.
There are a few things I imagine you could be saying here.
I am guessing it's either 2 or 5, but my response to you will vary a lot based on which it is and the details of your viewpoint.
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