Evolution theory serves as the catalyst for that attitude you display. Rejection of subjectivity in general, and denial of the fact that freedom is real .
You are not a defender of science, you are just expressing the very common original sin of eating from the tree of good and evil. Social darwinism is the anti-thesis of science.
The five have mutually exclusive truth claims. That must mean that any actual knowledge of God is hopeless. I don’t think anyone is arguing against the possibility of God. But the arguments for this possible God are stripped of religious narrative. Religious narratives serve one fundamental purpose, to help humans explain the meaning of their existence and unavoidable death. I don’t think the possible God can satisfy this basic need of the human psyche.
The problem is that the beliefs that don’t survive may be foundational. I come from the evangelical Christian tradition, so I’m most familiar with the implications of modern science for Christian beliefs. Genetics and paleontology make it clear that Adam never existed. If no Adam, then what are sin and guilt? If no sin, then what is the purpose of the Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection? How can the purpose be atonement? Can Christian beliefs survive the loss of guilt and atonement? But how to preserve them in the face of known scientific facts? Above all, if no Adam, where do you draw the historical line on the eternal human soul? If humans exist past physical death, since what point in evolution? Who was the first human to go to heaven or hell? If death is just natural, but the eternal soul is something that God bestowed upon evolved hominids, what kind of God forces a sentient being to suffer forever in hell rather than to just stop existing as before? If there is no hell, then what is the purpose of atonement? Christianity definitely cannot survive the loss of an afterlife, what would be the point? Without a special creation, Fall, and common descent from Adam, the Christian belief system truly falls apart. Arguments to the contrary are fanciful. The fundamentalist literalists are right about that.
I am disappointed that you did not respond to my post, but let me respond to this statement.
Most people do not take nothing as the default state, only atheists do that. We ask the question, why is there something rather than nothing?, or why is there meaning rather than chaos?
The reason matter/reason is not the default state, is because it is not. This again is what the Big Bang Theory states. There was no matter/energy, time/space before the Big Bang.
So what was there? The logical answer is that God is the default state. Our faith has done the hard work long ago, and now it the task of scientists to fill in the spaces. Meanwhile Christians will continue to do the really hard work of making God’s Kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.
We have the choice between a self-existent universe and a self-existent God (I AM Who I AM.) Science itself shows us that the universe is not self-existent, while God (YHWH) is uniquely self-existent.
I’m having a hard time understanding how you know that the self-existent God that caused the universe is the biblical God (YHWH)?
There can be and is only one self-existent God.
See Exodus 3:13-15. The God of the Bible identifies Godself as self-existent, YHWH.
“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.”
That’s still wrong.
What’s the probability of you coming into existence, John? Your parents have to meet, each of their parents have to meet, each of your grandparents’ parents have to meet…go back just a few generations and the probability of your existence shrinks to almost nothing. But it doesn’t end there. Only 1 among 50 million sperm cells fuse with an egg during conception. In each of the unions leading up to you, the exactly right sperm cell had to fuse with the exactly right egg cell to make your existence possible. If a different sperm cell had won the race in any of your ancestral unions, you wouldn’t be here! That’s how improbable your existence is. Close to impossible, I’d say. Yet you’re here and we know you came about by entirely natural processes with no intervention from outside.
Likewise, no matter how tiny the probability of life-permitting values are, they can still come about in unison by random chance. It doesn’t require any cosmic fine-tuner to precisely set the dials. Abandoning teleological thinking will help you appreciate this better. You just have to understand that life or humans need not be something special, and that equally special or mundane phenomena can also have a narrow range of permissible values.
Wayne,
It’s not wrong. Abandoning teleological thinking will not only fail to help us see anything better, it will require us to become antagonistic to some of our most basic cognitive inclinations. That’s always a bad policy unless there is some very good reason for it. And there isn’t even a moderately plausible reason for it, let alone a good one.
You don’t seem to understand that life in general, and humanity in particular, are already something special. This has nothing to do with Copernicus, but everything to do with perceiving value and significance, which can be done quite apart from any knowledge of physics or calculations of the likelihood of specific outcomes. If you will stop requiring empirical verification for everything you think (which cannot be done consistently anyway), you will see how utterly fantastic it is that there is anything in existence that is even remotely like us. That fact requires an explanation, and the theistic explanation is a perfectly good one. Your explanation amounts to an acceptance that we won some sort of cosmic lottery, and that’s just a brute fact for you. That is far too much tolerance for brute fact. When you say that the fine-tuning facts “don’t require” a cosmic fine-tuner, you are correct, but do you see that you are now just repeating Schloss’s point that we have compatibility? Saying that the facts “don’t require” a fine-tuner is much weaker than your original claim that they don’t support one at all. So if all you want to say is that we are not rationally compelled to accept a fine-tuner, then fine. But that is compatible with the fine-tuning facts making it look very much like a fine-tuner did set the dials. It is reasonable to think so, even if the dumb-luck hypothesis has not bee ruled out.
Here’s a thought experiment. Imagine throwing a handful of marbles into a closed and empty room, and letting them all come to a stop. If we note the exact positions at which each marble came to a stop, we might be able to calculate the probability of that exact configuration of marble positions, and of course it will be very low. “Close to impossible, I’d say,” but of course not zero. But nothing suggests design because some very improbable configuration had to become actual. The marbles had to stop somewhere, and whatever configuration we observe will have a very low probability. And you want to say that this is directly analogous to the fine-tuning case, and that the inference to a fine-tuner is just as bad as the inference to design in the case of the marbles. Right?
But those two scenarios are not analogous. To run an proper analogy with the fine-tuning case we would have to specify ahead of time a configuration of marbles, then throw the actual marbles into the room, and then note that the actual configuration is identical to the one that we had drawn up ahead of time. And at that point we could indeed reasonably think that the game was rigged. Our empirical data would support the conclusion that someone had rigged the game. (ID enthusiasts like Dembski like to call this “specified complexity,” but I believe they go too far by claiming that the inference to design is rationally compelling. But they are surely correct that we have to think of the cosmic fine-tuning as an instance of the second experiment, not the first.) So you are correct that “no matter how tiny the probability of life-permitting values is they can still come about in unison by random chance.” But that’s not the most reasonable thing to think. Too much brute fact. That’s why the multi-universe hypothesis is advanced in the first place, because it expands the experiment to allow for an astronomically large number of “throws.” The multi-verse advocates would not be doing that if they were not impressed by the argument from “just one throw.” And so we have compatibility, and perhaps a fair measure of epistemic support. And that’s what Schloss was claiming from the beginning. Remember that you were the one supporting Coyne’s intemperate claim of incompatibility. But now you seem to be content with saying that fine-tuning doesn’t PROVE God. Ok, that’s right.
Caleb,
The problem of religious diversity does not show that none of the traditions can be correct. It is true that each of the five entails that the other four are false, and there is indeed a large qualitative difference between the two pantheistic traditions and the three monotheistic ones. But that does not prevent us from engaging in rational discourse about them, or from subjecting any of them to rational scrutiny. There is no need to do any stripping of religious narrative. We just need to sort out the competing claims as well as we can.
The problems you raise regarding an historical Adam and (his?) relation to some essential Christian doctrines have been discussed very frequently and thoughtfully here on the BioLogos site. If that is your primary concern, I would refer you to those other pages and comments. For my part, I think that Adam can be regarded as non-historic without threatening original sin, or incarnation, or atonement, or resurrection. (I assume that by “crucifixion” you were thinking of atonement. Crucifixion is not a problem by itself.) But I also agree that evolutionary biology does not require us to abandon an historical Adam entirely. There are a wide variety of options and possibilities here. Loren Haarsma has classified and described them very carefully.
I agree that Christianity cannot survive the loss of an afterlife, but I’m not seeing the potential threat to that at all.
Wayne, in response to the Barron video you wrote: “Absolutely nothing new here, same tired old …”
That would have to qualify as an understatement to say the least, regarding “old” anyway. One of the problem for yours and Caleb’s responses which never seemed to graduate much past mockery is that Aquinas was apprehending this Biblical truth long before anything commonly acknowledged as modern science. So the whole charge of “trying to keep God safe” is anachronistic. Dismissing something as “same old tired …” is not a coherent answer to it. Old or not, it is a reality that, if true, doesn’t go away just because of familiarity, boredom, or pandering after something new. The charge that this God does not provide anything of explanatory value (translate: of scientific explanatory value) is just begging the question and declaring by fiat that there can be no absolute God that provides the ground being of everything. It’s true that such a thing won’t be scientifically proven either way, but then again, Christians (most of us) haven’t elevated science into the end-all be-all of everything. That would be your playground.
Caleb, your concluding statement after referring to the demise of Christianity if certain literalistic origins doctrines are refuted is revealing. You wrote “The fundamentalist literalists are right about that.”
The theism in any former fundamentalist Christian is apparently removed easily enough, but the fundamentalism it would seem almost never lets go of its prisoners. Beleaguered atheists remain shackled to it through their every argument, and then seem puzzled when many thinking Christians don’t share the same mental confinement. You will need to at least try to think outside that box for communication purposes if nothing else if you hope to understand centuries old doctrines much less impress any thinking Christians today with alleged arguments showing the unreasonableness of Christianity.
I’m very familiar with the ideas that try to preserve or restate a historical Adam, and I find them to be forced, unconvincing, and hopelessly diverse. No one would think them up without starting from the premise that the Bible has to be true. If you simply let go of that assumption, there just isn’t evidence for a historical or biological boundary for soul, sin, or afterlife. Maybe because they simply don’t exist. The more probable explanation is that human intelligence and morality exist on a continuum with other animals, different in degree but not kind. There is overwhelming evidence for this from animal behavior, neuroscience, and genetics. I know that many believers do not consider it an option to reject the religious narratives of the Bible or to give up the idea of a unique human soul, and I respect them for trying to reconcile their faith with facts.
You’re almost there, John.
The face on Mars:
A woman on Mars!
Is it reasonable to conclude that these are artifacts made by human-like intelligence? They sure look like it.
Or is it just some random forces at play - wind erosion coupled with an interplay of light & shadow playing tricks on us, giving the illusion of intelligent activity?
According to John’s arguments, both possibilities should receive equal weightage. So the face on Mars and woman on Mars could imply alien activity. But that claim of his will be ridiculously misguided. There’s no evidence for aliens anywhere in the universe to begin with. There’s no shred of evidence for alien handiwork on Mars as well. Then John could say that aliens do exist and they visited Mars, but they covered their tracks, left no traces and made their work look exactly like natural forces at play. And he can challenge us to disprove that claim. But if the aliens perfectly mimicked natural forces, then they would be indistinguishable from nature and therefore redundant as an explanation. A redundant explanation will not be favored especially if it lacks supporting evidence. This is what’s happening with the bogus “fine-tuning” argument as well. One can argue that a God set the parameters, but in the absence of any evidence for a God, that explanation will quickly go out of contention. If God cannot be detected by empirical means and his modus operandi mimics natural processes, then God is a redundant and useless explanation. At the same time, we do know that any set of parameters can come about by sheer chance. We see chance events materializing in day-to-day life. For eg: a person winning the jackpot does so by beating very high odds. Improbable events can and do happen. Therefore, it is way more likely that whatever constants the universe ended up with was a result of accident and chance. That it eventually led to humans was again a matter of chance and contingency.
You’re right, and I think it’s because I still take truth claims about absolute reality very seriously. I’ve tried to believe in a vague compromise between science and Christianity, but I just can’t. I respect those who try, but I can’t get past the indications that theology is all made up, no matter how ancient and sophisticated it is. As a rigorous scientist, I spend my life doubting and trying to falsify hypotheses, but that’s impossible with religious dogma. Religion allows doubt only if it strengthens faith and dogma. It takes some very serious compartmentalization for a good scientist to embrace the anti-intellectual nature of faith. There are too many contradictory faith claims and no way to test which ones are true.
Caleb,
Well, I guess I don’t see that the problems are quite that difficult. I tend to think it is more a matter of sorting out what God intends to teach through Scripture, and that doesn’t require a stubborn refusal to be sensitive to overwhelming empirical evidence. I doubt that belief in sin and an immortal soul are motivated exclusively by Christian belief. Most of humanity has believed both of them, including most of non-Christian humanity.
John
Let me know what kind of luck you have in teaching science to dogs.
This is wrong as well.
The multiverse hypothesis was not put forth to negate the fine-tuning argument. I have seen many creationists reiterate this fallacious claim, but it’s just not right. The multiverse is a natural prediction of other theories such as the theory of inflation (which is well supported already). Although last year’s gravitational wave discovery didn’t bear out, if gravitational waves are confirmed to exist, that would lend more credence to the existence of a multiverse. See:
That’s a subjective opinion. There’s nothing that suggests that humanity should be regarded as something special which warrants something even more special, aka God. Science does not hold such a view, only theology does.
You seem to be forgetting that humans did not pop up from out of the blue one fine morning. From atoms to molecules to life’s building blocks, biochemical reactions, the first cell, multicellular life, animals, mammals, primates, apes, hominins and hominids, it’s been a long and arduous path to get to humans. It’s absolutely reasonable to expect a maximally powerful God to circumvent all these steps and create humans in a jiffy. However, the incredibly long and twisted journey towards humans is very much suggestive of an unguided and unintentional natural process channeled by a plethora of random chance events.
Wayne,
I can’t wait to play poker with you. You never seem to make the inference to design, so I could cheat to my heart’s content. I could get ten royal flushes in a row, take all your money, and you would remain perfectly happy knowing that “improbable events can and do happen.” Or would you… ?
If you want to say that you wouldn’t because my cheating is a significant possibility that must be seriously considered, you would be right. But you are wrong to assign a low prior probability to the possibility that God exists and was aiming at a life-containing universe. We humans tend to think that naturally anyway, but even if we didn’t there is abundant historical precedent for taking that possibility seriously. So it is not correct that there is an “absence of any evidence for God.” It isn’t directly empirical evidence, but it’s good evidence nonetheless.
I’m not sure why you are considering the possibility that God’s activity (or aliens’ activity) might “perfectly mimic natural forces.” They might of course, but then we would not be inclined to think there was any intentional activity. It is only in cases where such activity does NOT mimic natural forces that we would be inclined to posit a personal explanation.
The images from Mars are a good example here, but not because they show that there is anything wrong with the fine-tuning argument. It is because they show that we do have strong inclinations to infer intentional activity when we see improbable events matching up with patterns that are already familiar to us, and also that those inclinations come in degrees proportional to the degree of resolution we discover in the patterns. The photos are indistinct and difficult to discern. For that reason we easily defeat any inclination to think aliens were at work, and those who don’t defeat that inclination (i.e., the people who post articles on social media) are not reflecting carefully enough. But we can easily imagine the degree of resolution being so great that we would have no choice but to ascribe it to some sort of intentional activity. Suppose the Mars rover had returned a fully detailed map of New York City, complete with bridges and streets. And Central Park. We wouldn’t know how it got there, but we would be quite sure it wasn’t just wind erosion, and we would also know that a person of some sort was responsible for its being there.
In the case of cosmic fine-tuning, the match with the “narrow” life-permitting ranges is quite striking. It generates a great deal of cognitive pressure to think there was intentional activity. It can be defeated of course, but only by strong counter-evidence, which we lack. (The problem of evil is sometimes cited as such. You haven’t tried that yet, but for the record I don’t think that will work either.)
Wayne, the fine-tuning argument does not force unbelievers to become believers. If anyone is making that kind of claim for it, that person is over-reaching. But it can supply us with important evidence that we don’t live in a completely naturalistic universe. There is nothing “bogus” about it, unless someone over-reaches. But that, in turn, requires that claims of incompatibility (such as Coyne’s) be dropped. It is not rational for Coyne to make those charges against religious belief. If he were merely noting that theism had not been proved, he would be reasonable and right. But he wants more than that, and he’s going to have to give it up.
That is a lame argument and you should know it. The probability of John’s existence is 100%.
However the possibility of any human existence is an a-rational world you suggest is 0%.
I think the the whole point of Coyne’s book has been misrepresented. Our conversation here has certainly turned into a debate about Theism vs. Naturalism, but that isn’t Coyne’s argument at all. He never claims that theism is incompatible with science. In fact, he states throughout the book that science has not and never will be able to disprove the existence of God (not that science has the burden of proof). Rather, he argues that faith and religion are incompatible with science (as stated clearly on the book cover). His point is that the epistemologies of science and religion are diametrically opposed. Religious truth claims are dogmatic and unfalsifiable. Scientific truth claims are provisional and falsifiable. A science that were to accommodate religious claims would be pseudoscience. I mean religious claims that are redundant with natural causes and are unfalsifiable. Of course, there are some ways that science can interact with religion. Faith itself is a legitimate research subject. There are entire scientific disciplines devoted to the biological basis of spirituality and morality. Religious claims can provide considerable insight on the human psyche. Also, some religious claims are falsifiable and can be tested, for example, a geocentric cosmos, YEC, Noah’s flood, common descent from two original humans, and the efficacy of prayer.
Wayne,
Guth himself has been quite straightforward about the fact that a discomfort with the “flatness problem” (the apparent fine-tuning of the geometry of the early universe) was a significant motive for him in developing inflationary cosmology, and that it also contributes to its attractiveness for many physicists. Inflationary theory does indeed solve the flatness problem, and thus removes some fine-tuning facts from the list (but many others remain). If it had not proved fruitful in its consequences, it would not have lasted long. But because it now has an impressive track record of consistency with empirical data, it can be frequently cited in disputes about cosmic teleology. And in that context there is no question that the reason it is cited is because the disputant would like to help himself to a very large number of “throws.” So the motive of negating fine-tuning is indeed present in both the development and the application of inflationary theory. The confirmation came from other sources.
We can now be reasonably confident that inflationary theory is correct. But let’s note that it does not relieve us of the need to find empirical evidence for other universes before we may confidently believe they exist. And we lack such empirical evidence.
But there is another level at which all of this becomes irrelevant. Let’s suppose that the multiverse hypothesis is correct, and that enough universes exist to explain the selection effect of fine-tuning. That means that the laws of physics are, in effect, a very prolific universe generator. And they didn’t have to be. They are contingent, and therefore could have been such that they do not generate universes at all. And presumably there are many more sets of laws that do not generate universes than there are sets of laws that do. (This is a purely intuitive judgment, and is severely complicated by the fact that both sets are infinite. Still, most people seem to share some useful version of it, and that includes many physicists and set-theorists). And now we are right back to some sort of teleological conclusion. And this one shows signs of being permanent and indefeasible, because the only way to deny it is to argue that the actual laws of physics are logically necessary. The result might be that teleological thinking can never go away.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
This is a place for gracious dialogue about science and faith. Please read our FAQ/Guidelines before posting.