I think that just about everything you have said here is badly mistaken, but I’m going to limit this post to the issue of definition. It is not a matter of mere convenience that the word “God” has come to mean “maximally perfect being.” The definition was not made explicit until Anselm (11th century), who grounded the definition in the notion of worthiness of worship. But earlier Christian, Muslim and Jewish authors give strong indications that they implicitly assumed it (this includes the biblical authors), probably on the same ground. Since Anselm the definition has been used to draw conclusions about what “God” is like. Sometimes there are disagreements (for example, Medieval writers tended to assume that perfection entails “impassibility,” while Modern writers tend to assume the opposite), but some properties seem to be undeniable consequences of the definition: maximized personal qualities such as rationality, desire, love, justice, etc., power to do anything logically possible, knowledge of all logically knowable truths, and so forth. Minor modifications become necessary to address occasional difficulties, and some think the problem of evil requires additional modifications. But there is nothing arbitrary or convenient about any of this. The issue is whether a maxiamlly perfect being exists, and the word “God” is simply a designator (or name, if you like) for such a being. The contours of this debate have been established for almost 1000 years now. We may not simply use the word “God” for whatever we please. But you seem to think that is what is going on. That is just not correct. If you want to engage the debate thoughtfully you are free to do so, though you will quickly find yourself wading into deep waters. But it is terribly wrong to say that this is “just a believer’s convenient claim.” (And whether such a being can be inserted into any situation is also not obvious, but even if it could that fact would be irrelevant to whether such a being exists.)
Beauty is outside of science. Beauty is a love for the way something looks. Love is outside science.
God and the soul are outside of science.
What does God, the soul, love all have in common?
They are all referred to in terms of agency of decisions. As making a decision turn out the way it does.
So there is a specific category to which evidence does not apply. Evidence applies to what is chosen, not to agency of a decision.
The tooth fairy does not apply to agency of a decision. Unless you refer to the soul of the tooth fairy.
You should have learned this aged 11 or something in my opinion. You should have learned how choosing works at school, so we are not inundated by people lacking all knowledge about it.
Scientists agree that the universe was created out of nothing by the Big Bang which created time, space, and matter/energy.
Since no thing can create itself out of nothing, especially matter/energy which cannot think, then it seems that the material did not create the universe but the spiritual. It also seems that God, being all powerful, all knowing and all wise, and good, is the only One Who would be able to accomplish this feat.
Please note that God did not create Godself, but the universe. if the universe were purely physical, which cannot think, then the universe would not be rational, but it is, as all natural laws attest. Therefore this is further evidence that a rational God created a rational universe as a home for rational beings.
Further the universe has meaning and purpose because it is not purely physical, but has a spiritual dimension. This is further evidence that God created the universe.
Therefore God is the only rational explanation for the creation of the universe and its form, that is its science, and meaning, that is its philosophy and theology.
Definitions have no meaning unless they are grounded on verifiable facts. This is obviously lacking in the case of God. Different religions define God in different ways. In some cases God has no form, in some others God has a distinct form. Some religions hold God as omnipotent while others insist there are multiple Gods with different powers - a division of labor among them! You have a glaringly obvious incompatibility right there among various types of religion. Even individual people can have personal definitions of what God means. There’s no way to reconcile all these countless definitions since none of them are based on objectivity or empiricism. And none of them are testable or falsifiable either. Thus, faith stands out in sharp contrast to science. But that doesn’t stop people from making faith-based conclusions to explain the universe. This is the incompatibility that Jerry Coyne is pointing out. He’s absolutely right about it. In reply to Coyne, Jeff Schloss has only used the ambiguity surrounding God to suggest no matter what science discovers, they’re still not inconsistent with a creator.
The Universe came into existence through a Big Bang. Fine.
We don’t know what caused the Big Bang. There are several scientific hypotheses for it and none of them involves God. As my point (2) above states, all competing hypotheses must be ruled out leaving only God as a possible explanation, before you can conclude that God triggered the Big Bang. Since that requirement has not been met, the Big Bang is not an evidence for God.
That’s one thing. If you claim a God exists who triggered the Big Bang, you must also explain where that God came from. What is he made of? Where does he reside? How does he operate? All these must be answered objectively. Simply invoking a God is useless as an explanation, since you’re only pushing the problem one step back and not actually solving it.
That’s flat out wrong. None of these are outside of science. Beauty, love, emotions etc are neurosensory perceptions which we can study. We know why beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder because we can pinpoint the genetic and molecular mechanisms which underlie the difference in perceptions among individuals or even among species. For e.g.: see this:
Your response exemplifies the gross confusions that afflict both Coyne’s book and any other attempt to circumvent perfectly legitimate theistic arguments (such as fine-tuning, among several others) by claiming there is conceptual confusion where there is none. For example…
This is crude empiricism, and it is not defensible. It is reminiscent of the logical positivism that dominated philosophy in the early 20th century, but has since died a very well-deserved death. It is not too strong to say that we now KNOW that meaning cannot be reduced to empirical verifiability. But you seem to be an unreconstructed positivist. Try to apply the above principle to ethics (to leave religion out of it for a moment), and you will have to conclude that ethical claims are also meaningless because they are not grounded on verifiable facts. That’s the easiest way to see that the principle is false, but there are others (for example, the principle does not meet its own criteria for being meaningful; or that science itself is full of definitions of terms that are essential to a variety of theories that are inconsistent with each other, but all of which are consistent with the empirical facts).
The varying concepts of “God” found in the religions of the world, or even among individuals, do not imply that all concepts of God are equally defensible or viable. Again, run an anology with ethics and this is easy to see. But it is also easy to see that we can readily eliminate the concept of Zeus hurling thunderbolts from Olympus, but that it is very difficult (indeed, impossible, in my view) to eliminate the concept of a maximally perfect being. We are not dealing with a free-for-all of divine concepts, because we DO have NON-EMPIRICAL ways of evaluating such claims. (Note: all the poly-theistic traditions can indeed be eliminated.) In fact, as far as the historic religious traditions are concerned, we can make a very good case in our age that all but five can be eliminated. So we are dealing with variants of those five, and that simplifies things quite a bit. But in any case there is no reason why we should not make faith-based claims to explain the universe that can peacefully co-exist with what is now known from the deliverances of our best scientific (i.e., empirical) inquiry. Not only is there no “glaringly obvious incompatibility,” there is not even a moderately plausible incompatibility. Coyne is horribly wrong about that, and it is pretty easy to see the error. What known scientific facts are incompatible with the essential elements of the faith traditions that include “God” as a suitable variant of “maximally perfect being?” Cite one please. I claim (with Schloss) that there are no such facts.
And while I’m at it, Roger does NOT need to explain where God came from, or what He is made of, or where He resides. It would be good to explain how He operates, and that is difficult, but we are NOT without resources to do that. But even that question does NOT need to be answered empirically (which, I take it, is what you mean by “objectively”). Invoking God is a very reasonable stopping point to the demand for explanations, provided we understand God according to the very long-standing tradition of maximal perfection, for which we have perfectly respectable reasons (note that I did not say “rationally compelling reasons”). This is all pretty basic stuff in the Philosophy of Religion. The fact that Coyne does not seem to understand them (note that I did not say “persuaded by them”) is very bad for Coyne.
…The common discourse we all use has a structure to it, an inherent logic. And that logic is creationist in the sense that in common discourse freedom is regarded as real, and any question about the identity of the agency of a decision can only be answered by choosing the answer.
So you are using 2 contradictory ways of understanding, in common discourse you regard beauty as a matter of opinion, but intellectually you regard it as a matter of fact issue. Contradictions are not allowed. Except it shows your intellectual maturity if you can handle contradictions consciously, but you are not conscious of the contradictions between your common discourse knowledge and your intellectual knowledge.
And again, I shouldn’t have to deal with this. This is a humongous failure of the school system that they don’t teach people how choosing works.
And whenever I see on the news somebody young killing people at random, then I blame science and the school for failing to teach how choosing works, causing their conscience to dysfunction. And actually with adults as well, why should we expect adults to behave with a conscience, when they are not taught how choosing works at school? When actually the reverse is happening at school and university, that they are made to be confused how choosing works, because of evolution theory destroying and replacing all knowledge about how anything is chosen in the universe.
This is to echo, affirm, and add to what John says to you above. Not only is God a “very reasonable stopping point”, but by definition God will be the stopping point of all explanations. Hence the charge that creationist doctrines can be “science-stoppers”, which indeed they can be. I’m not saying that an appeal to God is always warranted or productive. Only that if an appeal to God is made, then it is unreasonable to then think that God is only just one more step in an infinite regress that itself begs for further explanation. I heartily recommend this video by the Catholic Priest, Father Robert Barron, to any New Atheists willing to spend a few minutes listening. It will help you at least avoid talking past Christians in your conversation when you speak of “God”. It does no good to insist that God be just one among many possible hypotheses competing with all the others to struggle to the top. If any such “god” were discovered (e.g. if General Titov looking out his spaceship had actually seen a white-haired old man toodling around in earth’s orbit, or some slate of hypotheses is all exhausted until only a god-hypothesis is left) then we can be sure of this. Any such found apparition or unexplained phenomenon would most certainly NOT be God, though of course it is also incorrect to conclude that God is not there. But Barron elaborates quite well on all this.
Roger: I thought we knew what caused the Big Bang, a singularity or mega dense mass of matter that was the beginning of the universe, time, and space. What we do not know is where the singularity came from, other than nothing.
Wayne: There are several scientific hypotheses for it and none of them involves God.
Roger: Since the Big Bang is not about the matter/energy, but the creation of matter/energy, It is not about time/space, but the creation of time/space. Thus the cause of the Big Bang is not about science or physics, but metaphysics. While science does not deal with God, metaphysics does.
Since science cannot tell us what happened before the beginning of time, space, and matter/energy, scientific hypotheses must be ruled out when considering the origin of the Big Bang leaving the field open to a metaphysical cause like God.
Wayne: That’s one thing. If you claim a God exists who triggered the Big Bang, you must also explain where that God came from. What is he made of? Where does he reside? How does he operate? All these must be answered objectively.
Roger: You must be kidding. Why are saying that I must prove the existence of God before I can say that there is any evidence for God’s existence? Did scientists have to fully describe the Higgs particle before they could run experiments to see if it existed? Scientists still really do not know what gravity is and yet this does not keep them from talking about it.
God is all powerful, all wise, and all knowing. What more do you need to know?
Invoking God is not useless as an explanation of the Creation. Separating God from the universe means that the universe is not divine and is not eternal and infinite. This is the basis of the science enterprise. If the universe created itself then existentially it is divine, and science as we know it is dead.
The Big Bang Theory tells us that the universe did not create itself. It is a fact that it came from the metaphysical reality, which is almost by definition God. If God is infinite, then God had no beginning. There is nothing unreasonable about that.
God Is Who God Is, while the universe and humans are not. That is the metaphysical Truth. The Truth is never useless.
If the issues at stake weren’t so serious, I might laugh out loud. Theology shows the great power of human imagination. It’s amazing the things that humans can think up. A God that is the source of all being is just as arbitrary as a God who is a projection of humanity. The God that Father Barron is describing doesn’t sound very personal to me. But perhaps this is the only God that is compatible with modern scientific facts. This God is conveniently in another category, that cannot leave footprints, that cannot be measured or tested, that maybe isn’t even a being! I completely agree that science will never be able to disprove this God. But are you saying that the Gods of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity are false? Are sacred scriptures revelation or not? How can this anti-Yeti God be known? And if it can be known, then why not detected empirically? Either God interacts with physical nature or not.
The argument that “there is something, even when there doesn’t have to be something” is a huge assumption. How do we know that the observable universe doesn’t have to exist? How do we know that the Big Bang came from nothing? And seriously, are we still comparing life to watches? Last I checked, the camera recording Father Barron isn’t a self-replicating organism. There are no known examples of self-replicating cameras (I hope!), but the origin of H. sapiens is well-established. I’m sorry, but I just don’t get how God can be personal without leaving any footprints. And if the “existence of everything” is the only footprint we have, then everything theologians have thought up about God is just a figment of human imagination.
“perfectly legitimate theistic arguments such as fine-tuning…”
Don’t agree. Fine-tuning is by no means a legitimate theistic argument as I have already explained above. The whole fine-tuning claim is mistaken. The universe ended up with some random parameters from which life followed. It’s meaningless to look back now and say that the values are tuned for life. That’s akin to saying that the earth was fine-tuned to produce mountains. No, mountains are a mere consequence of how the earth ended up being, how its properties ended up being. Teleological thinking should be abandoned.
“you will have to conclude that ethical claims are also meaningless because they are not grounded on verifiable facts”
Of course they are. For e.g., is consumption of alcohol ethical or unethical for you? You’ll most likely say that it is ethical for you. But in the Middle East that’s totally unethical. What’s meaningless to you is pregnant with meaning for another culture. That’s what happens when ethical claims are not based on facts and are simply derived from culture. Same with definitions. My statement holds true.
“Note: all the poly-theistic traditions can indeed be eliminated”
Try telling that to the Hindus!
No religion is going to accept that their account of creation and the creator(s) are wrong. In fact Hindus vouch for the accuracy of their account, and not that of Christianity, because Hindu texts talk about a very ancient universe & earth, unlike the young age portrayed by the Bible. Your interest in eliminating competing creation stories itself makes the incompatibility very obvious.
Will people of different faiths ever congregate at a conference to discuss and settle outstanding issues and reach a consensus on the creator and creation tales? That will never happen because the conflicts are unresolvable through rational or empirical means. It’s the same with science and faith. Both make statements about reality. While scientific statements are evidence and reason-based which can be tested & falsified, those derived from faith are not. Coyne is totally right in pointing out this incompatibility. Your haste to brush incompatibilities under the carpet only proves the point.
“What known scientific facts are incompatible with the essential elements of the faith traditions that include “God” as a suitable variant of “maximally perfect being?” Cite one please. I claim (with Schloss) that there are no such facts.”
Plenty of them.
First and foremost science has not uncovered any shred of evidence for God, let alone a maximally perfect one. No scientific observation has ever detected a miracle or phenomenon that warrants a supernatural explanation. As such, bringing God into the picture is incompatible with whatever science has established thus far. The only way to believe in a God is by means of faith which is not founded upon reason or evidence, and therefore, incompatible with the scientific process.
What theists like Schloss are doing is to accept all of science and then attribute the first cause to God. This, as I delved into many times already, is very easy to do since God is a completely unknown and undefined “flexible” concept that can be inserted wherever one desires. You don’t run the risk of having to test or falsify it - just claim God is beyond the purview of science. Since God cannot be touched by science, they’re compatible and can coexist peacefully. But this patch up is quite visibly a forced marriage and not a natural union of principles.
The universe shows no purpose.
Humans look like a product of chance, rather than being an intentional result of creation.
Most of the visible universe is a highly inhospitable & deadly place. It doesn’t seem like a safe haven meant to spawn and nurture life-as-we-know-it.
The earth originated 10 billion years after the Big Bang and humans didn’t appear for another 4 billion years - not what one would expect from a God who created a universe to have moral beings in place to sing his glory!
More of your blatant rejection of subjectivity altogether. It’s not only the existence of God which is a subjective issue, what emotions people have is a subjective issue as well. That is why we have a democracy with freedom of opinion and religion, it recognizes the validity of subjectivity.
With communism, scientific socialism, they only found facts to be valid, so they simply threw out the freedom of opinion and religion. They planned the economy according to what they knew as a scientific fact what is good and evil for people. Both nazism and communism were much more popular at universities than with the population in general is my impression. There are all sorts of ideologies coming from universities where objectivity is competed against subjectivity to the destruction of subjectivity. A sort of head vs heart struggle, but then on a societal scale, and with more ruthless efficiency in destroying the heart.
And human beings do not look like that every part of them is randomly changed in any direction, and then the fittest preserved. Everybody who looked at organisms prior to all this evolutionism all concluded they look designed.
We would expect much, much, much more variation if that were the case, that it was by chance. Looking at the mathematics the power of natural selection to sort is much weaker than the power of random mutations to corrupt. In science the model using the theory has to accurately refelect reality 1 to 1. You cannot point to reality and say that apparently natural selection is stronger than random mutation, it has to show in the model.
Most of what you say here can be corrected by even a slight familiarity with contemporary Philosophy of Religion. I have found Reasons and Religious Belief by Hasker/Peterson/Reichenbach/Basinger (Oxford Univ. Press) to be especially good, but any introductory text on the topic will suffice for this. Please note that I am not claiming that the arguments for God’s existence or for any particular religious tradition are rationally compelling, but only that they are strong enough to make certain kinds of religious belief reasonable. Reasonable people grant the religious ambiguity of human life, even if they remain unbelievers. Unreasonable people write as you have, and (I’m sorry to say) as Coyne writes. The irony is that you claim to be relying on reason alone, but the result is an abandonment of reason. About some specifics…
We humans have cognitive powers that enable us to think about how things might be, even if they are not the way things actually are. We do that all the time, unproblematically. That’s one of our rational abilities. When we do that we find that “most” of the ways things could have been make our existence impossible (and likewise for the existence of mountains… so what?). The word “most” can cause some trouble, because even though the range of life-permitting (or mountain-permitting) values seems small compared to some range of possible values, it turns out that if the range of possible values is infinite then every finite range will seem small compared to that. So we can’t normalize the probability space as we might like. But this does not affect the epistemic effect of the fine-tuning facts. Holding the rest of physics fixed, we find that the life-permitting range of values for several constants is very small compared to all the finite ranges that include all the values that seem to be genuine possibilites! That fact alone is sufficient to lead us to strongly suspect a selection effect. One type of selection is theistic, where God intentionally selects the values because He wants a universe that contains life. This possibility has strong historical support. The other possible selection effect derives from the hypothesis of multiple universes, for which we have no evidence at all (and we may be prevented from ever acquiring such evidence). The theistic solution is therefore quite reasonable, and it is supported to some degree by the fine-tuning facts. That’s all that is required for rationality, and it remains undefeated. If someone wants to say that this applies only to “life as we know it,” that person would be correct. But we cannot even contemplate life as we don’t know it, precisely because we don’t know it. Nothing changes when we note that we have not considered something we are incapable of considering. I take it as obvious that you have not shown that “teleological thinking should be abandoned.”
About the Hindus, they are one of the five! I suppose I should have delineated them earlier, but I had hoped that it would be obvious that the five are Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism (including all their variants). Hinduism belongs on the list because it has universal scope and an unbroken historical pedigree that extends back to antiquity. There are even monotheistic variants of Hinduism! (Though most variants of Hinduism are pantheistic.) The universal scope appears when it is understood that the allegedly poly-theistic Hindus do not regard their “gods and goddesses” as the ultimate ground of reality. So Hinduism can survive modern scrutiny. But the point was that NOT ALL religious beliefs can survive modern scrutiny. Science really does falsify some religious beliefs, including some variants of the “big five.” Go back to the example of Zeus on Olympus. Even if you find someone who tries to defend it, that person would be irrational for doing so today (provided he/she has a minimal education). The same goes for young-earth scenarios, by the way. Religious belief CAN and SHOULD be subjected to rational scrutiny, and when they are some of them won’t survive. BUT SOME WILL!! It is your indiscriminate classification of all religious belief as equally irrational that prevents you from making the appropriate distinctions here. Again, read up on contemporary Philosophy of Religion.
There is a glaring failure of reason in the following three sentences:
No Wayne, No!! A lack of empirical evidence for x does not entail that x is incompatible with y (where y is something for which we do have empirical evidence). This is a completely general logical principle. It doesn’t doesn’t depend on what x and y are. But your three sentences violate it shamelessly! Please look again at what you wrote. Does a lack of empirical evidence for “the Taj Mahal is beautiful” show that the beauty of the Taj Mahal is incompatible with, say, the periodic table of elements? To show incompatibility, you have to cite a fact that is known through empirical inquiry (i.e., science), then conjoin it with the religious belief in question, and then derive a contradiction from the conjunction. That task is very hard, but it can be done with some religious beliefs. It cannot be done with all religious beliefs though, and it cannot be done with belief in the existence of God as “God” is generally understood. (And there is a way that “God” is generally understood.) I asked for a specific fact that is incompatible with theism, and you gave me a truly awful inference.
Ethical relativism is a well-worn topic in philosophy, and some reasonable people have developed subtle and sophisticated versions of it. I think they are wrong, and so do most others, but that’s irrelevant at the moment. Your attempt to resist the analogy with ethics relies on a crude and uncritical relativism that takes it as obvious that there are no universal ethical principles. Even in the unlikely event that ethical relativism should turn out to be correct, it will never be obviously correct, and it will always be rational to think that there are universal ethical principles that cannot be verified empirically. So the analogy stands for the purpose of showing that positivistic empiricism is false (and you rely on positivistic empiricism when you insist on empirical verification for everything).
Regarding your final four claims, the first two are false and the third is true but does nothing to defeat fine-tuning (as I suspect you intended it). But perhaps your 4th claim (about the time after the big bang that the earth and humans appeared) is an attempt to cite an incompatible scientific fact. The incompatibility would indeed follow if we could be sure that “God” (as generally understood) would not use such a long time to create “moral beings to sing His glory.” But why should anyone think that?
Much of reality is counterintuitive and contrary to appearance, which is why science is the only method that can produce reliable knowledge. Prior to modern science, everybody also concluded that the earth was the unmoving center of the universe, that the sky was a metal dome, that natural disasters and disease were acts of God, and that humans were created separate from other animals.
Human reason is plagued by confirmation bias. And the human drive for personal power can corrupt any ideology, theist or otherwise. This is the precise reason why science is the only way to reliable knowledge. That is Jerry Coyne’s point: science is the way we keep ourselves from believing what we want to believe and seeing what we want to see. Faith is subjective and arbitrary. How can unfalsifiable and mutually exclusive claims be sorted out? Science prevents confirmation bias, and faith thrives on it.
People have a well documented prejudice against regarding freedom as a reality. It is this weakness of man which is established in science. Anybody who says freedom is not real is only fooling themselves in the first place. Freedom is regarded as a reality in common discourse, and the reference to it is unavoidable. Somebody denying freedom is real intellectually necessarily contradicts himself between saying what is true intellectually and saying what is true in common discourse.
It’s true that some intuitive appearances can be overturned by further reflection on other intuitive appearances, but why think this is the norm? Exactly how much of reality is counter-intuitive and contrary to appearance? Do we have a way of quantifying this? Perhaps most of our intuitive judgments remain undefeated. What sort of study could settle this?
Confirmation bias afflicts science too, but perhaps we can agree that peer review, institutionalized public discourse and repeatability of experimental results can minimize the negative effects of confirmation bias. But the first two can apply to faith claims too. Only the third is exclusive to science. Why should the lack of empirical verifiability disqualify anything from the possibility of knowledge? What account of knowledge are you using that would limit knowledge to empirically verifiable claims, and why should anyone accept that account? How should we go about analyzing knowledge in the first place?
At a basic level we will have to rely on intuitive judgments (what seems to us to be the case), or else become complete skeptics. Empirical knowledge (i.e., science) is no exception to this. We may find that science can provide us with more wide-spread agreement, but why is that a reason to limit knowledge to empirical inquiry? Why can’t there be some knowledge with much agreement, and other knowledge with less agreement?
I just saw Fr. Robert Barron’s video on who God really is.
Absolutely nothing new here, same tired old argument. God, with a capital G, is something that gave rise to the universe. He’s beyond the detectable limits of science. He’s beyond experiments and tests and cannot be falsified. How convenient!
The Father simply repeats what I have said all along. Place this vague concept called God outside the confines of science and declare He’s not incompatible with science at all! Since the Father doesn’t have to define or describe God, he’s safe.
Now, if at all science discovers what caused the Big Bang, the Father can say, look didn’t I tell you that there was something that caused the Big Bang, now see science has confirmed it!
Such a God is indistinguishable from natural processes and useless as an explanation. It doesn’t tell us anything new.
The Father also asks “Why is there something rather than nothing?”
But why should nothing be the default state? Why can’t something be the default state? Can the Father ever find that out with his faith? No never, leave the hard work to scientists.
