Please explain why saying “that’s a subjective opinion” is any reason whatever to think the opinion is wrong. If you want to argue against it, then do so. As it stands, it is a subjective opinion that is shared by the vast majority of humanity, which is at least something in its favor. If you have an argument that shows it is mistaken, then present it.
You are correct that “science” does not hold (contain?) such a view (concept?), and that theology does (though ethics does also). So what? If science were able to show that there is nothing special (significant, valuable, important, etc.) about life in general, and human life in particular, then we would have a conflict. But science doesn’t weigh in on those things, so we don’t have a conflict there either. Remember that you are arguing for an incompatible relationship between science and theology.
I assure you that I’m not forgetting anything about natural history. The way you cite the “arduous path” to humans indicates that you regard it as an instance of the problem of evil: If God exists, He would create us in a jiffy. But we weren’t created in a jiffy. Therefore, God does not exist. I understand you to be endorsing that argument. Is that right?
He [Coyne] never claims that theism is incompatible with science. … Rather, he argues that faith and religion are incompatible with science (as stated clearly on the book cover).
I haven’t read Coyne’s book which may explain my need for clarification on your statement above. Is Coyne (or are you) somehow seeing Theism as being in a separate category from faith and religion then? If theists are a subset of ‘religionists’, something I imagine we would all agree on here, then I’m having trouble making sense of your (or Coyne’s) distinction above.
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).
Actually, if I may quibble on this point: the party claiming to have a scientifically backed assertion is the party that inherits the burden of proof. So aggressive theists who testify that science shows there is a God have a burden of proof. Aggressive anti-theists who claim that science shows there is no God have a burden of proof. It is scientifically damning for either cause when it always resorts to the sleight-of-hand of making a claim sound scientifically backed, but then declaring that the burden of proof is not theirs. The only thing demonstrated (and it’s a philosophical demonstration not a scientific one) is the impotence of empirical science to adjudicate or referee on a particular matter in which it is one of the players.
Or to put this in Bertrand Russell’s terms, if I declare it as scientifically established that there is no teapot orbiting between Mars and Jupiter, then I had better have the evidence to back up my claim. Why, you might ask then, do I strongly doubt the teapot’s or the Spahgetti monster’s existence? Because, unlike with Theism, I was given no reason to entertain those possibilities in the first place. Where are the hospitals of St. Spaghetti monster? Where is the first church of Teapot? Where are the transformed and redeemed lives spent in devoted service to those entities? These things aren’t scientific evidence, but they seldom claim to be. But it is evidence, nonetheless --not proof. Just evidence. And yes, other religions too have their venerated traditions and long-standing positive contributions to communities. Again, not proof that every detailed doctrine about any particular religion must all be true any more than I would make that claim for Christianity (which I don’t, Christian though I am). But, unlike the teapot, it does all count as evidence to provoke a more serious look. That is the fatal flaw in Russell’s approach.
Faith itself is a legitimate research subject.
You easily claim that … until it is your faith in science that is summoned for examination. Then the objections start flying. “But what I have isn’t faith at all … that’s just the way reality is!” … runs the retort. So proclaims every dogmatic zealot at his particular altar. A healthy thing that. It means you routinely commute the highways entirely and hopelessly outside of the reach of empirical science. Much essential, and beautiful (and yes, evil too) commerce transpires along those ways.
The primary point of Coyne’s book is revealed in the final chapter and that is, according to him, faith in God is incompatible with faith in science including medicine.
This is an obvious false dichotomy and straw man, which does not stand the light of reason even for a minute.
The big difference (which I shouldn’t have to tell you explicitly) is that you are real and the evidence for you is overwhelming. But the same doesn’t apply to a fictitious concept like God for which evidence is totally lacking.
Those are artificial structures. We would instantly recognize those as the handiwork of some intelligent agents. But the case of natural structures is entirely different. One must rule out any natural causes before one can attribute them to something supernatural.
It is striking only if you look at it teleologically, think life is special, humans are special and improbable means impossible. Otherwise it is unremarkable. There’s no such thing as fine-tuning in reality.
Not an instance of the problem of evil, but a problem of logistics. I would put it this way. If there is/was an (all powerful) God who wanted to create a universe for humans, it is reasonable to expect him to create earth immediately after the Big Bang, and create humans and other organisms soon after. Why wait 10 billion years to create an earth and another 4 billion years to make humans? (One could add a lot more…why make most of the universe hostile & inhospitable? Why create dinosaurs only to hurl asteroids at them and massacre them? Why put the earth in a deep freeze for hundreds of millions of years?) It doesn’t make sense at all. Otherwise, one will have to concede that God is not an all powerful being, he has limitations. But such a lame God will conflict with the viewpoint of most religions. You have an obvious incompatibility between facts and faith right there.
Your “big difference” is precisely the difference I described as a “significant possibility that must be taken seriously.” Adding that the evidence for my reality is overwhelming is just another way of saying that you must take my existence seriously. You must also take the evidence for God seriously (I am not claiming that it is compelling). You are incorrect that the evidence for God is totally lacking, and you may not help yourself to tendentious terms like “fictitious” when the very point in dispute is whether God is fictitious or not. These obligations are not coming out of the blue… they are minimal rules for rational discourse. So I’m not playing the imperialist here… everybody has to abide by them. I suspect you think that there is no evidence for God because you insist that all evidence must be empirically verifiable, or it shouldn’t even count as evidence. But we have already beaten that horse. You are relying on a faulty epistemological principle there, and it is not difficult to see that it is faulty.
If you are willing to grant that a map must be regarded as an artificial structure, then you would presumably grant the same if the map were found on Mars. The very fact that it is recognizable as a map places it into the “artificial structures” category. Natural causes are already ruled out once we recognize it as a map. That’s the only point I was trying to make there, and you seem to agree.
Human beings have a natural tendency to think teleologically. We must regard our natural cognitive tendencies as placing into some contact with reality, or a debilitating skepticism will follow. Those who don’t think teleologically at all (you seem to be in this category, or st least you say you are) have squashed that tendency, and we have to ask why. Perhaps there is a good reason. But if there is no good reason, then something epistemologically improper is going on.
The fine-tuning argument is valid in principle, except it turns out many of the universal constants cannot be otherwise than they are. It appears we can derive what the universal constants are from pure mathematics ordered by the zero, without having to measure the universal constants in the physical universe.
Empathy is a subjective issue. You are making a category error insisting that science can identify empathy.
How this works is that forms of free will for many situations provide a survival advantage. For example, choosing provides a predator surprise in attack, and provides a prey unpredictablitiy in escape. Varying the use of muscles by free will, reduces wear and tear on them. etc.
So these animals have all kinds of sophisticated ways of choosing things. And science can describe as fact how this choosing works. However “empathy” and such, are in reference to the agency of decisions, and that is categorically a matter of opinion, which means one can only reach the conclusion by choosing the conclusion.
Which still means you can say the elephants are empathetic, but say it as judgement, not as fact.
Besides making a category error by saying you can identify empathy as fact, you are also making the error that you are describing the behaviour of these animals in terms of being forced, omitting the freedom.
Again, these 2 mistakes you are making ALWAYS come together. When somebody asserts to know as fact what is good and evil, or in your case, asserts to know as fact what is empathy, then they will of logical neccessity also deny free will is real. That is how racists assert the worth of people as fact (reject subjectivity), and regard human behaviour in terms of it being predetermined by race (deny free will).
Thank you for the interesting article on the Big Bang and gravitational “waves.”
The problem I have with this is, “How can you claim that the multiverse theory is true based on a new preliminary report?” That does not sound like good science.
You need to say what science indicates at the present, which is the multiverse is purely speculative, and in the absence of any other evidence, the universe appeared out of nothing, no matter, no energy, no space, no time. If that is true, which is what our best science says, how can you deny the possibility of creation by God in terms of a metaphysical fact.
“What came before the big bang? “No one from our collaboration is allowed to answer that”
John Kovac, Harvard University” This quote came from the article that you cited. The reason for this is because it is not a scientific issue, as I have said, but a metaphysical question that atheism cannot answer.
There is an article in the science magazine, Discover, (dec/2008) that is entitled: Science’s Alternative to an Intelligent Creator: The Multiverse Theory.
Touche. You can’t know it unless you accept divine revelation as a source of knowledge. Natural theology and reasoning your way to faith always break down at some point because you cannot get around the a priori commitment that the Hebrew Scriptures reveal the character and actions of the one true God.
Ever look at any of Plantinga’s “warranted belief” discussions? It is a good explanation of how someone can rationally believe in God and revelation. It won’t get you from atheism to theism, but it does an interesting job defending the intellectual credibility of theism and Christianity.
I’ll take it as a frank admission that science is incompatible with faith which validates my original position. You conceded that faith accepts non-empirical evidence. But unlike faith, science only works on empirical evidence. Why is empirical evidence the best method to uncover the truth? Because it is verifiable. Evidence based on mere instinct or intuition may not be verifiable and, more often than not, can be wrong.
We have several examples that demonstrate this. For instance, ancient thinkers concluded by intuition that the earth is the central pivot of the universe around which all heavenly bodies revolved. However, empirical inquiry showed this to be totally wrong.
Here’s another example: Which among these three animals are more closely related?
If we go by intuition, we’re most likely to conclude that dolphins are more related to sharks. They have similar appearance, features and share the same aquatic lifestyle. But looks can be deceiving. Counter to our intuition, empirical evidence shows that aquatic dolphins are more related to land-dwelling cows! Here’s how:
Although dolphins have no legs, dolphin embryos develop hind limb (back leg) buds which are later absorbed back into the body. This strongly suggests that dolphins evolved from land-dwelling ancestors. Otherwise why should an aquatic animal develop legs at all?
Living in the water, dolphins need no hair. However, their embryos show rudiments of whiskers (hair). Hair is a unique feature of one group of animals called mammals which includes cows as well as humans, but not sharks. The presence of hair attests to a mammalian ancestry for dolphins and shows that their ancestors were terrestrial.
Shown below is the DNA sequence for a gene involved in odor perception (smelling) in various mammals. You can see that the sequence is nearly identical in all species listed, except that in whales & dolphins it has a few changes (highlighted in black) which renders the gene non-functional. Thus, although whales & dolphins have no need to smell air, they still retain a broken version of that gene!
The fossil record we have recovered clearly demonstrates how a four-legged land-dwelling animal took to the water and slowly evolved into a whale-like form:
Thus, empirically verifiable evidence from multiple lines of inquiry all converge on the same conclusion - dolphins & their kin are more related to cows than to sharks, defying common sense and intuition. The power of science as the basis of knowledge is this mode of investigation. Methods that do not rely on this method (like philosophy & faith) are very much prone to errors. That is why the case for God is dismissible in the absence of empirical data.
There is no evidence for John T Mullen as being the owner of his decisions. The existence of the soul which does the job of choosing is also a matter of opinion.
That is the only way the concept of choosing can function. Facts are obtained FORCED by evidence, resulting in a 1 to 1 model of what is evidenced.
Facts require force, while choosing requires freedom. That is why it is a logical impossibility to get any fact whatsoever about the agency of any decision. To say it is fact, means to impose the logic of being forced, breaking down the concept of free will.
The title gives the wrong impression that the multiverse theory was proposed as an alternative to a creator. But if you read beyond the catchy title, you can see that the multiverse was not proposed as an alternative to anything. It is a natural fallout of the theory of inflation. I’ll quote from the article you mentioned:
“By the mid-1980s Linde and Tufts University physicist Alex Vilenkin had come up with a dramatic new twist that remains nearly as controversial now as it was then. They argued that inflation was not a one-off event but an ongoing process throughout the universe, where even now different regions of the cosmos are budding off, undergoing inflation, and evolving into essentially separate universes. The same process will occur in each of those new universes in turn, a process Linde calls eternal chaotic inflation.”
And also from the Nat Geo & New Scientist articles I have already posted above:
“In most models, if you have inflation, then you have a multiverse,” said Stanford physicist Andrei Linde…Essentially, in the models favored by the BICEP2 team’s observations, the process that inflates a universe looks just too potent to happen only once; rather, once a Big Bang starts, the process would happen repeatedly and in multiple ways."
“Each observation that brings better credence to inflation brings us closer to establishing that the multiverse is real…“Inflation depends on a kind of material that turns gravity on its head and causes it to be repulsive,” says Alan Guth at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, another author of inflationary theory. Theory says the inflaton particle decays over time like a radioactive element, so for inflation to work, these hypothetical particles would need to last longer than the period of inflation itself. Afterwards, inflatons would continue to drive inflation in whatever pockets of the universe they inhabit, repeatedly blowing new universes into existence that then rapidly inflate before settling down. This “eternal inflation” produces infinite pocket universes to create a multiverse."
In short, if inflation is true then a multiverse in inevitable. And that will explain why our universe ended up with its unique set of parameters by sheer chance.
You can spare us the biology lesson here, as those facts are not in dispute.
You may not take my claim that legitimate evidence does not have to be empirically verifiable as an admission that science is incompatible with faith. That is a truly miserable inference.
Any sort of evidence is potentially defeasible, and that includes empirical evidence. No one doubts that empirical inquiry can overturn intuitive judgments. It can also overturn the results of previous empirical inquiry. That means that the reasonable deliverances of empirical inquiry (i.e., science) can also be wrong. The reasonable thing to do is to retain whatever we have until there is persuasive counter-evidence, of any sort. Regarding a wide variety of theological claims, science has not provided persuasive counter-evidence. Your original position has not been validated. In fact, it is mistaken.
It’s not about the biological facts, but about how empirical method trumps other forms of knowledge. I made that clear. What seems logical to us can in fact be wrong and empirical scrutiny is the best way to discern the truth. That was the point.
Of course, science can be and has been wrong, but that’s how scientific progress occurs. It’s self-correcting. Again, that’s a strength, and not a weakness, of the method because it allows us to refine, update and hone our understanding. What self-correcting procedure does theology or philosophy have? Nothing. Information from those realms remain static for ages however inane they might be, until science comes along and corrects them!
A moot point which I have already called out. The burden of proof is on those making a proposition, not on those questioning it. By your logic, the existence of Santa Claus and the Flying Spaghetti Monster should also be considered possible since science has not provided counter-evidence against them! To consider God, one needs POSITIVE EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE for the same, which is woefully lacking.
You’re never going to admit it. But it’s obvious to anyone who has followed this discourse. Faith relies on non-empirical means while science sticks entirely to the tried & tested empirical method for arriving at answers. The two are fundamentally incompatible. To accommodate both, one has to enforce a forced marriage. See this article by Dennis Venema, for instance: http://biologos.org/blog/intelligent-design-and-common-ancestry-part-2
He presents the science so beautifully. I would have whole-heartedly recommended this to anyone interested in science, if not for this last bit he says in the end:
“It seems instead that the most reasonable conclusion from the evidence is that the Creator brought about the diversity of life – including humans – through common ancestry.”
What evidence does he have that the creator brought about the diversity of life? Nothing. He abandons all critical thinking & reasoning he had upheld until that point and makes a leap of faith! Such accommodationism sticks out like a sore thumb, it just doesn’t work!
@Wayne
In a sense you are right there is a connection between multiverse theory and the inflationary theory, however it is not a direct connection.
The connection is not that one implied the other. The connection is that some asked the question was ours configured in such a way as to produce life. If not by design then by chance, which follows if it made any sense, which it does not.
Why, because the odds are astounding. Hawking astoundingly defends the odds by citing the urban legend of the millions of monkeys with the typewriters writing a Shakespeare sonnet, but this myth does not even come close to saving it. One expert I read said it would take 10 to the 500 billionth power universes to come up with one universe like ours with the right configuration.
Mainly however because we have to live in this universe on this planet in this solar system. The question is not whether there other universes, because they would be totally incapatitible with ours. The question is our universe and how does it work? If it is random, then it does not.
The question is Does our universe have a Logos? Yes or No? If yes, we need to work together to understand it. If no , which is the stance atheists seemed to be forced to take, that is useless.
The article in Discover did voice the opinion that scientists were faced with the option of the multiverse theory or a fine tuning God. I would not go that far. However I would say that the multiverse theory is a very weak reed upon which to justify the claim that God did not create the universe.
