Proving the Existence of God
In 1966, Stephen Hawking published his first — completely valid — proof for the existence of God. Over the next seven years, he followed this with even more powerful valid theorems proving God’s existence.
So how did Hawking, who successfully proved God’s existence, remain an atheist? Simple. He simply denied that the assumptions he used in his proofs were true. As a matter of logic, if the assumptions in a proof are not true, then the conclusions need not be true. What assumptions did the young Hawking make? He assumed that the laws of physics, mainly Einstein’s theory of gravity, were true. In the summary of his early research, namely his book The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time, Hawking wrote:
It seems to be a good principle that the prediction of [God] by a physical theory indicates that the theory has broken down, i.e. it no longer provides a correct description of observations.
Hawking then began working on quantum gravity, in hopes that God would be at last eliminated from the equations. Alas, it was not to be: God was even more prominent — and unavoidable — in quantum gravity than in Einstein’s theory of gravity. In his latest book, The Grand Design, Hawking has pinned his hope of eliminating God on M-theory, a theory with no experimental support whatsoever, hence not a theory of physics at all. Nor has it been proven that M-theory is mathematically consistent. Nor has it been proven that God has been eliminated from M-theory. There are disquieting signs (for Hawking and company) that He is also unavoidable in M-theory, as He is in Einstein’s gravity, and in quantum gravity.
In spite of what the atheist press is telling you, it’s looking bad for atheism today. And it is extraordinary the lengths an atheist like Hawking will go to avoid the obvious: God exists.
The alert reader will have noticed that in the above quote, Hawking did not actually use the word “God.” But this is what he really meant. To see this, let us recall just what the word “God” means.
Consider the opening words of the (original) Nicene Creed: “We believe in one God, the omnipotent Father, Maker of all things visible and invisible.” These words give the basic definition of “God” used by Christians and Jews: God is the Cause of everything, but He Himself has no cause. God is the Uncaused First Cause. In his Second Way, Thomas Aquinas proves the existence of the Uncaused First (efficient) Cause, and Aquinas concludes, “to which all give the name ‘God’ (quam omnes Deum nominant).”
So now let us return to the theorems of the young Hawking. By following the history of the universe back into time — in other words, by following the causes of the current universe back into time — Hawking proved that all of these causes had a common cause; a common cause that did not itself have a cause. This common cause was an Uncaused Cause that was beyond the control of the laws of physics, beyond the control of any possible laws of physics. Rather, the entire universe began at this Uncaused First Cause.
In exactly the same way that Aquinas used the word “create,” we can say that the Uncaused First Cause, whose existence was proven decades ago by Hawking, “created” the universe.
Hawking called this Uncaused First Cause a “singularity.”
But given the properties of this “singularity,” it is God. So I have replaced the word “singularity,” which Hawking actually used in the above quote, with what it really means according to Aquinas.
To show how this Cosmological Singularity — the Uncaused First Cause — can manifest itself as a personal God would require a book, which I have written. Indeed, the personal nature of God is not obvious in Hawking’s proof of His existence. But neither is it obvious in the proof of Aquinas, and Aquinas also required a book to establish God’s personal nature.
The interesting thing about Hawking’s existence proof for God is that it can be tested experimentally, since it is based on experimentally confirmed physical law. I published a paper in a refereed physics journal a few years ago pointing this out. Eventually the experiment will be done, but it will require tens of thousands of dollars for equipment.
So don’t despair, my fellow theists! The recent slew of best-selling books by atheists attacking religion, supposedly using science, is their last gasp. Remember the great words of Gandhi: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
We theists are now at stage three.
So, you have written a book,good for you. I doubt you will make sales like Dawkins or Hitchens with your style though! There is more to the success of those new atheist authors than science. There is a self-righteous anger in those books that make them highly engaging to those looking for certainty. This is highly reminiscent of the tone of american entrepreneurial christianity. Thoughtful christians have considered these issues and moved onto more fruitful ground.
There is really no point in refuting atheists. It only encourages them. Examples of action are so much more powerful
Actually, Mr. Stanley, the New Atheists’ media success isn’t due to their own merits. Take for example Prof. William Lane Craig, who is far more knowledgeable and well-spoken than any of the New Atheists on the subject of religion (and indeed, more photogenic, since we’re speaking to the issue of media success). Rather, their media success is because those in the corporate media tend to like their message, and so those in the media promote their message.
The reason for this is the same reason this temperament is so prevalent in academia. Both academia and the corporate media in our modern day are grafted to the hip of the state, and the natural tendency of the state is to tolerate no God before it. As the inherent inclination of the state is to aggrandize all allegeance to itself–even to the extent of seeking the abolition of the family (as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels set forth as one of the Communist goals in their Manifesto of the Communist Party); as the natural tendency of people is to owe a higher allegeance to their own family than to the state, which for the state is among the ultimate heresies. The rise of Christianity in the West somewhat shifted this fulcrum of power, so that the state rulers could no longer proclaim themselves gods. The old order was not completely thrown off, but this shift was enough to enable voluntary society to gain a foothold. This liberalization in thought and action brought about by Christianity is *the* great turning-point in history which allowed the rise of free inquiry enough to lead to the Scientific Revolution (its inception dated to the publication of devout Catholic cleric Nicolaus Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium).
Thus the love affair by academia and the corporate media with collectivist ideologies, beginning in a major way in the 19th century. If the state hadn’t loved Marx, almost no one would even know his name today. (As contrast his ideology’s popularity with governments and their toadies with that of the great liberal thinkers of the 19th century, including the great French liberals of the 19th century who Marx admits in his writings is where he obtained his class-conflict theory from [the original being the state against voluntary society]–of which he butchered, making it into a struggle of voluntary actors in society against each other, with the state as the Savior. All of these great 19th century liberal thinkers are virtually unknown today.) The state loves Marx because Marx’s Communism is the ultimate aggrandizement of the state: God marching upon the Earth, to use Georg Hegel’s phrase.
And so modern society being basted in collectivist and atheist ideologies is simply nothing more than the state striking back at Christianity, attempting to regain the ground it lost. Although atheism isn’t the state’s ultimate goal, for the state desires that society worship it as God. But Christianity must be torn down before that can occur.
Indeed, the occultic Thule Society (Thule-Gesellschaft) sponsored the German Workers’ Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei) was later transformed by Adolf Hitler into the Nazi Party (i.e., the National Socialist German Workers’ Party). It is interesting to note that Hitler’s Master Plan was the abolition of Christianity and the formation of a state religion that was to be a type of pagan New Age religion, as the recently released (and previously classified) Nuremberg documents prove:
“The Nazi Master Plan: The Persecution of the Christian Churches”, U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) Research and Analysis Branch, July 6, 1945; posted at the Rutgers University School of Law, Camden, New Jersey website in Winter, late 2001.
Claire Hulme and Dr. Michael Salter, “The Nazi’s Persecution of Religion as a War Crime: The OSS’s Response Within the Nuremberg Trials Process”, Rutgers Journal of Law and Religion, Vol. 3, No. 1 (2001).
Mike Sepanic, “Camden online legal journal to offer first public look at rare Nuremberg Trial documents”, Rutgers-Camden Public Information Office, January 2, 2002.
Edward Colimore, “Papers reveal Nazi aim: End Christianity”, Philadelphia Inquirer, January 9, 2002.
Joel Miller, “Hitler’s war on Christ”, WorldNetDaily.com, January 12, 2002.
Uwe Siemon-Netto, “Analysis: Nazis vs. Christians”, United Press International (UPI), January 14, 2002.
Acquinas couldn’t do it, and no one alive today can make the case, either.
Then, too, evidently the “right” is just as sullied with “social reality” as the left.
Hi, Sharpshooter.
Prof. Tipler doesn’t here get into all the details of his identification of the cosmological singarity with God (likely due to space considerations), focusing mainly on the definition of God as being the uncaused first cause, a definition held by all the Abrahamic religions.
Yet Tipler’s Omega Point Theory demonstrates that the known laws of physics (i.e., the Second Law of Thermodynamics, general relativity, quantum mechanics, and the Standard Model of particle physics) require that the universe end in the Omega Point: the final form of the cosmological singularity and state of infinite informational capacity identified as being God.
The Omega Point is omniscient, having an infinite amount of information and knowing all that is logically possible to be known; it is omnipotent, having an infinite amount of energy and power; and it is omnipresent, consisting of all that exists. These three properties are the traditional quidditative definitions of God held by almost all of the world’s leading religions. Hence, by definition, the Omega Point is God.
And given an infinite amount of computational resources, per the Bekenstein Bound, recreating the exact quantum state of our present universe is trivial, requiring at most a mere 10^123 bits (the number which Roger Penrose calculated), or at most a mere 2^10^123 bits for every different quantum configuration of the universe logically possible (i.e., the powerset, of which the multiverse in its entirety at this point in universal history is a subset of this powerset). So the Omega Point will be able to resurrect us using merely an infinitesimally small amount of total computational resources: indeed, the multiversal resurrection will occur between 10^-10^10 and 10^-10^123 seconds before the Omega Point is reached, as the computational capacity of the universe at that stage will be great enough that doing so will require only a trivial amount of total computational resources.
Additionally, we now have the Feynman-Weinberg-DeWitt quantum gravity/Standard Model Theory of Everything (TOE) correctly describing and unifying all the forces in physics: of which also inherently produces the Omega Point cosmology. For the details on the Omega Point cosmology and the quantum gravity TOE, see:
F. J. Tipler, “The structure of the world from pure numbers”, Reports on Progress in Physics, Vol. 68, No. 4 (April 2005), pp. 897-964. http://math.tulane.edu/~tipler/theoryofeverything.pdf
Reports on Progress in Physics is the leading peer-reviewed journal of the Institute of Physics, Britain’s main professional body for physicists. It has a higher impact factor than Physical Review Letters, which is the most prestigious American physics journal.
You have an awful lot invested in the existence of the magic sky daddy. “God exists” is an invalid hypothesis. By the same token someone could say that “leprechauns exist.” We could search the world over and never find a Leprechaun. But the believer in leprechauns could say “that the leprechauns are there you just didn’t search hard enough. Quit torturing yourself. If you want to believe in God or leprechauns fine. Occam’s razor pretty much states that we do not multiply entities beyond necessity. You broke that rule in the first sentence.
Hi, Praetorian. Actually, Franciscan friar and theologian William of Ockham’s epistemic razor logically requires that the Omega Point (i.e., God, i.e., the cosmological singularity) exist.
The reason for this is because if the known laws of physics (i.e., the Second Law of Thermodynamics, general relativity, quantum mechanics, and the Standard Model of particle physics) are true, then God exists by logical necessity. To avoid this conclusion results in an infinity of statements which are both true and false at the same time, per the Principle of Explosion in the field of logic. This result is a gross violation of friar Ockham’s razor of the highest magnitude.
Regarding proposed solutions to the black hole information issue, all except for Tipler’s Omega Point Theory share the common feature of using new laws of physics that have never been experimentally confirmed–and indeed which violate the known laws of physics–such as with Prof. Stephen Hawking’s paper on the black hole information issue which is dependent on the conjectured string theory-based anti-de Sitter space/conformal field theory correspondence (AdS/CFT correspondence). See S. W. Hawking, “Information loss in black holes”, Physical Review D, Vol. 72, No. 8 (October 2005), Art. No. 084013; also at arXiv:hep-th/0507171, July 18, 2005. Hence, the end of the universe in finite proper time via collapse is required if unitarity is to remain unviolated before a black hole evaporates (i.e., if general relativity and quantum mechanics–which is what the proof of Hawking radiation is derived from–are true statements of how the world works).
It’s known that the Bekenstein bound is required if general relativity and the Second Law of Thermodynamics are to be mutually consistent (e.g., see Bekenstein’s papers on this). There’s been debate as to the proper form of the bound (i.e., between the area form of the bound, and Bekenstein’s original energy times radius form of the bound), but unitarity and the Second Law of Thermodynamics themselves select which form of the bound is correct as applied to the latter universe’s collapse, because if the area form of the bound were correct in this situation then this gives a direct vioation of the Second Law, as then the universe’s entropy must decrease as the radius of the universe goes to zero. So if the area form of the bound were correct in this situation, then we either preserve the Second Law by not having the universe end in collapse, in which case unitarity is violated; or we preserve unitarity by having the universe end in collapse in finite proper time, in which case the Second Law is violated.
So logically this means that the energy times radius form of the Bekenstein bound is the correct form to apply to the latter universe’s collapse. Yet since the radius of the universe is collapsing to zero, energy must grow at a greater rate than the radius going to zero, otherwise this gives a direct violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, for then entropy would be decreasing. But the only way for the energy to grow faster than the radius of the universe going to zero is for event horizons to be eliminated (which generates gravitational shear energy much faster than the radius going to zero), thereby allowing entropy to grow as opposed to decrease, per the energy times radius form of the Bekenstein bound.
Yet this is by definition the Omega Point cosmology, for by eliminating event horizons the universe is forced to end in a solitary-point final singularity, called the Omega Point.
The foregoing is all that is required to derive the logical necessity of the Omega Point cosmology if the Second Law of Thermodynamics, general relativity, and quantum mechanics are true statements of how the world works (see Tipler’s aforecited 2005 Rep. Prog. Phys. paper for fuller details). These three known laws of physics, if they are correct, logically require the Omega Point cosmology.
So, you have arrived at Stage 2 … you’re laughing at those who do not agree with you. Congratulations! You’re only two stages away from losing …
Try not talking down to people. Their views are just as important to them as yours are to you. For all you know, you’re the one that is wrong, AND all the books you have read are fairy tales.
I have noticed that you get really upset over religion, “sky daddy” etc. Calm down. Infact I was surprised you were not the first post when religion was part of the blog.
People are going to believe what they choose and it’s not up to you. All the things you quote and get wound up about are nothing but thoughts. Thoughts, nothing more. Argue all you want to, your opinion is important to you and ours is to us. Thoughts, nothing more.
Life is good, I don’t care who “invented” it, or where we got our start! I believe in a “higher power” because it makes me feel good. Certainly not because somebody wrote something in a book that someone might have said at some point in time.
And how do you know there are no leprechauns?
I’m sure in all your insecurity you’ll have a nasty answer, it doesn’t matter because you will have missed the point entirely. LOL
Ahh yes, a higher power makes you happy. Therefore it’s correct! Yeah, just like belief in Santa Claus. It makes kids them happy, therefore by that logic, it’s true and they are not fools when they ignore each piece of evidence that shows that Santa isn’t real. Good one.
““God exists” is an invalid hypothesis.”
God thinks you’re a dink. He hopes you’ll get over it when you grow up.
Ok, let me get this straight– if I think the multidimensional infinities of the universe sprang into spontaneous existence at the magic word of the invisible sky wizard, that’s nothing but credulous superstition .
But if I think the same thing happened all by itself, that’s Science.
Is that right, or am I missing something?
You completely miss the point. Science can only relate what is KNOWN. Science is the search for both knowledge and the ‘how’ something works. Simply because Science (or any moniker you wish to label a somewhat discreet process of achieving meaningful and objectively factual information through a process of explained and/or exhibited empirical data put together in a coherent fashion) cannot necessarily speculate (although many things have been and are being predicted which has been/is true) beyond what is known. The further point here being that simply stating that a (only one, not more than one, less than one? And, ‘He’, might I add; laughable even if we were to call it ‘She’. Sex… really?) god must exist because it’s the ONLY (plausible?) explanation? Also, at MOST you’d be a Deist, not even a proper Theist. This is absurd to the highest degree. Which of the proposed religions do you suppose this (single) god speaks for? Oh, don’t tell me, it’s… X! Also, to nail the final god-sized object into the coffin of this entire debate, would it not be most plausible that if we were to say that either (a) a complex entity (apparently the MOST complex entity; capable of creating all that we know, and ALL other causes after itself (himself?)) was *the* FIRST cause; or (b) *the* FIRST cause was some sort of fundamental particle (however, particle is not the appropriate word) or, in other words, some fundamental physical ‘essence’ (perhaps just one, perhaps a ‘few’) which slowly/quickly accumulated until ‘form’ upon ‘form’ begat what Science would be willing to call a Universe -or- (and I do not agree with this, but am willing to allow for the speculation of) an entity of such complexity and consciousness that it be labeled ‘god’ (however, could be more than a single one, but even more doubtful than this latter possibility). In either case, the result is the same: a natural process created either scenario. It appears as though your ‘god’ (of the more than 2000+, you may have your choice of them) is *still* probably nothing more than a natural process; again, this is assuming you choose the MOST complex example (any form of immediate consciousness is essentially infinitely more complex than the “spontaneous first-particle theory” would suggest). Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening.
a definition held by all the Abrahamic religions.
But not a sufficient definition to portray any Abrahamic god. If we allow “first cause” as god it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with all those books full of easily disproven garbage.
Oh, but it can!
You are the proof of God’s existence. You are a personally conscious, living being, intelligent, capable of love and selfsacrifice.
No effect may possess a quality not found in its cause.
Humans have not always existed. They had a cause.
That cause must possess all of your qualities or it could not give them to you. And, ultimately, that cause cannot be material because science tells us that matter is not eternal.
Since nothing comes from nothing, Something has always existed. That Something has to be nonmaterial; a personally conscious, intelligent, living being capable of love and selfsacrifice and, incidentally, of creating and maintaining our universe. Got it?
WhiteTiger
You are exactlymcorect!!!
Well done
Were I to suspend my disbelief and go with the notion that a single divine entity set into motion the time, matter, and energy in the universe in such a way that a certain portion of his creation embodied aspects of his nature and can only posess aspects of that creator and the converse (“That cause must possess all of your qualities or it could not give them to you”), then “from whence cometh evil?”
Ahh yes, just like lightning is proof of Zeus or thunder is proof of Thor. No, we are not proof of a mythical being named Yahweh (God). We got here a FARRR different way than what old desert myths describe, sorry.
white tiger, you ought to read my post (http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/proving-the-existence-of-god/#comment-862681); I think you’ll find that your explanation is as stereotypical swiss cheese is.
Consider the opening words of the (original) Nicene Creed: “We believe in one God, the omnipotent Father, Maker of all things visible and invisible.” These words give the basic definition of “God” used by Christians and Jews: God is the Cause of everything, but He Himself has no cause. God is the Uncaused First Cause.
The Creator does not have Gender, and has both genders. Father and Mother both, as original Hebrew testifies. It is only when translated into English from Hebrew that the Divine Presence(Shekhinah, which is Female) is either neutral or male. But the Original is clearly Female.
Imagine what else has been corrupted.
be careful extending such observations too far. Just because a word is “feminine” in the grammar of a language doesn’t mean it describes a feminine object. In Irish, for instance, “cailín” (girl) is masculine and “stail” (stallion) is feminine. There are more examples in Irish as well as in many other languages around the world.
I’m not saying that somehow proves a masculine gender for the divine presence, just that what you’ve stated does not prove a feminine gender (either real or assumed on the part of the early Hebrews).
Patrick is right. All Hebrew nouns have a “gender” but they don’t necessarily represent a masculine or feminine quality. Day (yom) and night (lailah) are masculine, while year (shanah) is feminine. Nothing sexual about it. It’s true, the mystics have delved into the “feminine” qualities of the Divine presence (shekhinah), but such anthropomorphic musings don’t represent mainstream thinking.
I find religion fascinating. Every person believes they are right and the last word.
Maybe it is because we do not have a definitive answer to “where do we come from”..science says one thing, religion says an other.
What fascinates me the most is man’s willingness to
snub,argue, hurt, show you words that someone wrote as the ultimate truth, kill in the name of their god/religion, esp., if you do not agree with them. Absolutely amazing. Just because someone wrote something 2000+, 800 or 1000 years ago does not make it true, or a lie. And I do not care.
I am not a christian, I “DO” believe in a higher power, whether you call this power George or God.
I believe in a higher power because it helps complete my reasoning for this life. And George/God loves me, and others.. sometimes.
People invented God because they are afraid of death.
All you really said is, “I’m afraid of death, and to overcome my fear I’ve rejected God.”
http://www.medicine.mcgill.ca/cmds/benjamindwiker.html
Epicurus (341-2 71 B.C.) was first and foremost a moral philosopher, not a natural philosopher. His goal was the achievement of tranquility; the means to this goal was materialism. “Do not believe there is any other goal to be achieved by the knowledge of meteorological phenomena,” Epicurus admonishes his readers, “than freedom from disturbance.” Epicureanism is, then, a way of life seeking a universe to support it. Epicurus employs the atomistic materialism of Democritus, not because he has empirical evidence that it is true but because it fits his ethical goal of freedom from disturbance. If we were already tranquil, he says, “we would have no need of natural science.” We may begin to grasp this relationship of ethics to physics by examining Epicurus’s famous four-part cure.
Don’t fear god;
Don’t worry about death;
What is good is easy to get;
What is terrible is easy to endure.
Take the second part first. Epicurus is right that the fear of death is a great cause of anxiety. Not only do we fear extinction, but we also dread divine punishment or we hope for eternal reward. All this anxiety could be cured, however, if the universe were such that these concerns are groundless. The “cure” is materialism: Eliminate the soul, and such worries may disappear with it. Epicurus adopts Democritean atomism for just this purpose. Following Democritus, Epicurus claims that the universe is constituted by only two thing: atoms and void.
Fear has to do with punishment. We fear death because we have a guilty conscience. That in itself indicates that we were created accountable to a higher moral Being. You can suppress and explain away guilt, or you can find a religion which addresses the problem. Some religions have strict rules you have to keep in an effort to feel better about yourself, whilst others offer forgiveness. Either way, the existance of such religions suggests not that we invented God, but that we have a genuine need arising from a relational problem. Deny your need and forgo the medicine if you will, but that doesn’t soleve the problem!
Actually nothing could be further from the truth. Fear is a survival instinct, as is fear of death. All animals possess it, and homo sapiens is no exception. One fears death because it is the end of one’s existence, and its nature is unknown. Some people postulate an afterlife where in one way or another we are liberated from the suffering inherent in a Darwinistic world where we struggle from one breath to the next against all the forces of nature, be it Heaven or Nirvana or any of a hundred other iterations. Some people attach a hell or punishment aspect for people who don’t live their lives according to the way that particular group dictates they should.
While one could argue the proof of existence of god or a creator or a divine force as an explanation for things human understanding of science has not yet explained, such as the origin of the laws of physics or any number of other questions, one would be hard pressed to offer even the slightest evidence of the mere existence of an afterlife, let alone its nature.
Similarly, what can be known about the nature of god? Even if we accept any of hundreds of religious doctrines to be the holy and inspired word of god, how can he be trusted? Not to pile on the poor guy, Lord knows he has a hard enough time getting people to believe he exists in the first place, but if god is anything like us, he is imperfect and unwilling to admit fallibility. If we are created in his image, that is all we can know about his nature, that it is one with our own. As powerful people are oft wont to be, god would likely be a out-and-out liar. Of course he would describe himself as almighty, perfect, infallible, all knowing, the truth, the way, and the life, etc. But since he is the only “authority” on the issue and his true nature cannot be empirically discerned, his word, especially in his description of himself, must be judged accordingly.
This is the dawn of a new era. To prove G-d we have to resort to an equation. The new deists consider a higher power as part of an Algebraic equation ie X to the third power. Instead of referring to G-d/George or who or whatever, we now have to refer to G-d as X. May X bless you to the third power!
it was not some anonymous translator with a shady agenda, it was Jesus himself in the NT who taught us of God the Father. Although scant, even the OT references God as father, and quite definitely as male. Quite right, don’t rely on linguistic anomolies to work stuff out. As English speakers we’re not used to gendered language, that’s why it seems so strange to us that a German calls a tomcat ‘she.’
I don’t know. I think if you listen to many Atheist talk, phase four might be, feed you to the Lions. Many of them give lip service to freedom, acting as libertarians, but I think many, many proclaimed atheists would just as soon wipe any reference to God, and the God fearing, from public discourse, convinced of its necessity so that man can evolve to the next level. Evolution is a creation story. A theology crafted by those that sought a theory that would explain away the need for God. And without believing humans evolved this far, they cannot proselytize their theology of mankind making another evolutionary jump forward, if it were just free of the constraints of outmoded religious thought.
I’m sure your post will be met pejoratively with talk of pink unicorns, invisible men in the sky, and fairy tales (Atheists seem so repetitive in the criticism) as if the idea of extra terrestrial beings who are able to shield themselves from our obviously limited perception is so far removed from other cosmological notions such as, say, the M theory.
An atheist could care less about a god, except in the metaphorical sense. It would appear from Tipler’s article that Hawking purpose has been to debunk god. His purpose has been to understand the physical universe, and like Einstein, uses god a metaphor….nothing more.
>>Hawking called this Uncaused First Cause a “singularity.”<<
Yet Hawking describes a situation where there is no beginning. What he describes is a universe where singularities are portals to other universes. From our vantage point in this universe it would be hard to prove one way or another what goes on beyond a singularity.
The notion that atheists spend a lot of time second guessing their choice is off the mark. We may lament the attribution of events in our universe to a god by some, but I for one am glad I shed the myths of my past.
Several years ago Hawkings astounded the physics world by admitting a mathematical error about black holes. When he fixed the mathematics he found that black holes radiate their energy back into the universe and are not a portal to other universes. If only all scientists had his integrity.
M-theory is little more than mathematical masturbation. It generates few if any testable hypotheses and is more akin to Intelligent Design theory then real science. Professor Lee Smolin’s book “The Trouble with Physics” is a good exposition of how Physics has been led down a black hole since discipline has become infatuated with theoretical mathematics instead of experimental verification. If you pick up a physics textbook from 1972 it will be little different than one used in Physics today. There has been no progress in fundamental physics in the past 40 years. That itself is an indicator of the falsity of Hawkings and similar work.
It may be you are correct in your assessment:
>>There has been no progress in fundamental physics in the past 40 years. That itself is an indicator of the falsity of Hawking(s) and similar work.<<
But my point was, that Hawking wasn't trying to prove or disprove the existence of god. God's existence is irrelevant to physics, or what you call "fundamental physics".
I have the utmost respect for Hawkings. However, M-theory is not physics in the sense that Einstein’s or Heisenberg’s theories are physics. It is a combination of mathematics, philosophy and a form of theology masquarading as science. It that sense it is no different then Dembski’s Intelligent Design Theory. Hawkings and other M-theorists are engaged in creating a new religion with a new set of scriptures and a “holy priesthood” that are far less accessible to the common man then traditional religion.
Science can’t prove or disprove the existence of God. Further, even if you postulate an uncaused first cause (which facially sounds like double-talk), this does not advance the claim that this singularity is the God of the Old or New Testament, who demands praise, worship and blood sacrifice from humans.
Exactly, Bob. While the explanation of how all this got here is unanswerable, the idea that any of man’s inventions of God have any basis in reality is difficult to take seriously.
L. Ron Hubbard = Greek Gods = Christianity = Islam = Hinduism = any other man-made religion. They are all primitive (and hopelessly inadequate) attempts to explain the inexplicable.
Quite rightly you left out Judaism. The Jews do get it right.
no more right than any other ..sorry.
I´d rather have it straight from the horse´s mouth, anonymous.
In Astrology we have solved the issue with God. We have so many ways to explain it all. That is why so many Astrologers were the first to be killed by theocrats. “Belief is in the the domain of the ninth house or Sagittarius and Jupiter is exalted in the sign of Cancer.” Now if you know anything detailed about Astrology, then you would be able to decipher that statement. The world is trying to grapple with concepts that need different tools of analysis. I am not saying that Astrology is “the” solution. It is not, but it is a lot better than other systems, when logic (Gemini) fails. That is why Gemini is opposite to Sagittarius.
The discussion of “god” is an irrelevant distraction invented by the corporate power structure to keep people’s eyes away from their violence and greed. Atheists and Christians alike fan the flames of racism against Muslims to pave their way for their genocidal slaughter or enslavement to corporate oil barons. Rod Parsley and Richard Dawkins alike both truly serve the dark god of Wall Street.
The immediate question is: Can Throbbin Yobbin think? Let us see. He tells us that Christians and atheists “fan the flames of racism against Muslims …”. Well, to make any sense at all, the sentence should read ” … fan the flames of religionism against Muslims …”.
I wonder why he wants to call it racism? Is he a moron or just dishonest, feeling that racism is a more damning accusation?
And just who is fanning the flames – Muslims who fly planes into buildings or the people who respond after a little study by deciding that they don’t like Islam?
I think “Throbbin Yobbin” has a disease. He either can’t think well enough to write coherent sentences, or he is dishonest and hopes to bamboozle people on behalf of his own, false god.
Do you think the Bush regime could have gotten away with the merciless, genocidal slaughter of white people? Could he have gotten away with marching Norwegians into the death camps of Abu Gharib (Auschwitz) and Gitmo (Dachau) in order to steal their oil? He needed to rely on the latent racism of the America people so he could get away with it.
In addition, who is to say Muslims were really behind what happened on that fateful day in September? The Bush regime blocked investigations into finding the truth of the matter and Obama has not re-opened them. Who knew what when? Who gave what orders? It’s time to open all of the sealed documents and find out!
He did not worse than they do to their own people..in the name of the pedophile they worship.
Arabs/Persians ARE white people.
I don’t care how smart anyone is, they can’t prove or disprove whether or not there is a “God”. It is, or would be if there is one, so far and away bigger (for lack of a better word) than anything a person can imagine unless you put limits on “it”. Trying to do so logically is like a math proof. It’s pretty, it’s logical and it’s based purely on your beginning assumptions. But in the case of whether or not “God” exists the only assumptions that I’ve heard are limits. Assumptions are always limits. If you assume “God” is infinite then you cannot prove it because it has no limits. “God” must be (oops there’s a limit) bigger than the universe if “God” created it. Unless like in Larry Niven’s Warlock stories “God” created himself at the beginning (whatever the “beginning” really was). It’s like the old saying, “you can’t get there from here, you have to go somewhere else to start.” In this case you have to die to know. Or if the atheists (me) are right you will simply cease when you die. “Knowing” there is a “God” is an act of faith, not proof.
Yeah, David Hume settled this philisophical point some time ago. Take a leap of faith if you want. But sitting around (in a cabin, like Descates, or anywhere else) and thinking real hard won’t reveal any “proof” of such matters.
When Moses asked God what name he (Moses) should give to the people for God; God said, “Tell them ‘I Am’”.
God, alone, is singular.
…and yet “Elohim” is plural…
In the Hebrew Bible, “Elohim” literally means “powers” (the plural of “Eloha”) and does not necessarily refer to G-d. Often the term Elohim is used in the Bible to refer to a court of judges, or to the royal court of a mortal king, or even to the false deities worshipped by idolators.
In the Jewish sense, the term used in the sense of referring to the Singular Source of All Powers, which is clear in the Torah: “Sh’ma Yisrael, H” Elokeichem, H” Echad” (Hear, Israel, the Lord your G-d, the Lord is *One*).
“Who has gone up to heaven and come down again- who has cupped the wind in his hands? Who has bound up the waters in a cloak- who has marked out all the ends of the earth? What is his name, what is his son’s name, if you know it?” -Proverbs 30:4
Why cannot men just accept the fact that existence exists? Why must existence — the universe — have a prior or “first cause“, usually ascribed to a supernatural ghost whom no one has seen (except Moses) and who seems to be a bit shy about showing His face (unless it is in the form of “miracles“ and catastrophes that claim millions of lives and cause incalculable destruction and burning bushes and a divine derriere)? Scientists have kept going further and further back in time to date the “Big Bang.” But, was there ever such an event?
What is the nature of this obsession with “first causes” and the “Big Bang”? the two phenomena — God and this measureless hunk of stuff (was it square, round, or Platonically “extra-dimensional?) that just exploded to form galaxies and everything else — are manifestations of the same fallacy. they are conceptual doppelgangers. What caused the big hunk of stuff to explode? Aha! It must have been God snapping His fingers! For if this big hunk of stuff had existed for measureless time, why could it not have continued in that state? What caused God to snap His fingers? Was He bored with having this big hunk of stuff as His sole companion? Was He in a mischievous mood?
But, wait — where did He come from? What are His antecedents? Can He produce a birth certificate? How did He come by His whimsical powers? What is His true gender? Or does that question apply? Is He genderless? How long has He been around? Or is “time” an inappropriate measurement? How did He occupy His time (not yet invented) throughout eternity? Did He just sit on His throne, tattooing His fingers on the not-yet celestial armrests, and then yawn? No answers are forthcoming, nor will they ever be because God’s existence requires proof of a positive, and that will never be accomplished, because…there is no evidence. the concept of God and the concept of a “Big Bang” of a hunk of stuff that just grew tired of being a big hunk of stuff (was it matter as we know it, or just incomprehensible fairy dust?) are two sides of the same coin.
It is a fallacy which philosophers and theologians have been wrestling with for centuries, sometimes as allies, sometimes with mutual, finger-wagging animosity, trying to find answers from the perspective of “infinite regression,” which is as impossible as attempting to square a circle. Those who follow the path of infinite regression will find only madness. they simply cannot fathom the concept that existence exists, and has always existed in one form or another. I have always been skeptical of the “Big Bang” theory, anyway. It exactly parallels belief in a supernatural being. It is a “first cause.“ But no one has been able to credibly reconcile the existence of either as mutual phenomena. there was God, and there was this big hunk of stuff (not yet “matter” or “energy”) floating in an indescribable void (the “nothingness“ of space, which to exist, must have at least two objects by which to measure it). their other alternative to the exploding big-hunk-of-stuff hypothesis is that God simply wished existence into existence.
then they face the questions of: What is He made of? And where did He get the idea of “existence”? If space and matter had yet to be created, where exactly did He exist? Believers will reply that such questions invalidly assume that God’s (or the big hunk of stuff‘s) resident venue of spatial dimensions is similar or are our own. After all, before God snapped His fingers, or the big hunk of stuff exploded, there were no “spatial” measurements. there were no dimensions. But if we can assume no commonality of spatial attributes or dimensions — if we cannot even know them — why should we bother with speculation on what cannot be known?
Postulating the existence of God or the Big Bang is a form of the classic Abbott and Costello routine of “Who’s on First?“ A long line of philosophers, from Plato to Kant to Nancy Pelosi (she of the pass-the-bill-so-she-can-let-you-see-what’s-in-it school of reality) averred that we cannot know anything for certain or at all. the same approach applies: Why bother contesting the non-rational or the irrational?
You see that this cannot be resolved rationally. It is a close cousin to that hoary old lawyer chestnut, “When did you stop beating your wife?” the big-hunk-of-stuff argument and the supernatural argument both rest on the premise that there must have been a “first cause,” which is an invalid application of cause and effect, which can only be applied to what one can perceive as real, that is, to what is, and not to what is unproven, unknowable, or impossible. But, the Big Bangers and God advocate reply desperately, “But, it‘s a personal God!” :
In that case, we must have faith, they claim. They revert to the “Who’s on First?” argument — back where they started. It’s their “last gasp,” not the atheists’. And the atheists, who require evidence of the assertion, can only smile, throw up their hands, and walk away.
To quote Billy Madison, “At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought.”
First paragraph: existence, okay, but then strawman, then doubting the Big Bang?
Second paragraph: I have no idea what caused the big bang, but equivocating down to “God snapping His fingers in boredom” doesn’t make an argument
Third: Where did he come from? Your first 2 paragraphs said how everyone fails to grasp “existence” and “things always being there” but now God has to has a cause? Then the rest of your questions really have nothing to do with either the existence of God or the validity of the Big Bang. It should also be pointed out that to inquire about attributes of God requires him first existing. For example, you can’t question Canada’s foreign policy without first accepting that Canada is a country.
So to ask “where did he get the idea of existence” is a good question, but totally irrelevant to existence of god or the big bang.
Fourth: As it turns out, effects have causes. Weird I know, but those 3rd grade teachers were on to something. With that in mind, following this to its logical conclusion requires something that’s uncaused or something who’s effect can chronologically precede its own cause. That means the universe has always been the same aka steady state theory, or the universe had a distinct beginning aka big bang theory. Guess which one is scientifically observable? I’ll give you a hint, the universe is expanding, therefore…
Fifth: See 3. Valid questions, just not at all relevant.
Sixth: nothing to comment on
Seventh: ok, real argument now, that the first cause is invalid application of cause and effect. You can make that argument with Aquinas (not really, but that’s another tangent) but not with the Big Bang since it meets your application of cause and effect. The Universe can be observed, so I have no idea why you’re reducing cosmological scientists to appeals to faith.
Eighth: No one, neither Aquinas nor LeMaitre, has made such a claim. Only argument.
To quote Billy Madison, “At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought.”
Right.
First paragraph: existence, okay, but then strawman, then doubting the Big Bang?
“Okay” means: conceded rational thought. Self-contradicted already. Funny locution that last one, “doubting” the Big Bang… why, is that an article of faith too? The ironic thing is that scientists almost universally will tell you that there is no such thing as “proof” of facts, that all theories remain in doubt (i.e. “falsifiable”). So who is *really* treating science as faith here? It’s not the scientists…
Second paragraph: I have no idea what caused the big bang, but equivocating down to “God snapping His fingers in boredom” doesn’t make an argument
It isn’t an argument, it’s a summation of the religious position (including your faith in the Big Bang), but with different imagery.
Third: Where did he come from? Your first 2 paragraphs said how everyone fails to grasp “existence” and “things always being there” but now God has to has a cause?
Existence is implicit in all knowledge (knowledge of what? of something that is real, i.e. that exists); “Existence exists”, contra “God exists”, is not a specific claim; it is merely the identification of an axiom underlying all knowledge and claims thereto — yes, including even “God exists”. The latter, however, IS a specific claim allegeing the existence of a specific entity named God (that, you know, exists) with a specific nature that sets him apart from other things that are not God.
Such claims bear the onus of evidence, in order to distinguish itself from arbitrary, made-up claims — to distinguish statements worth investigating, from random noise that happens to sound like language.
No argument, including Tipler’s, has ever met this standard. The only dodge would be to assert the existence of God *without* presupposing existence… good luck with that.
“Existence exists” is tautological, and evidenced by its implicit presence in all knowledge and claims thereto. “God exists” is an arbitrary claim, evidenced by nothing.
The last refuge of the better religionists at this point (the ones who aren’t seething in resentment at this point) is to try the angle that God is existence. Well, the problem there is the idea that God/existence is conscious. Conscious of what? A consciousness conscious of nothing but itself is a contradiction.
It should also be pointed out that to inquire about attributes of God requires him first existing.
In other words: existence is implicit in the claim that God exists — i.e. existence must be prior to God. Oops!
For example, you can’t question Canada’s foreign policy without first accepting that Canada is a country.
Correct. That’s Sparrowhawk’s point!
As noted above, rational men reject the claim that God exists, for lack of evidence; it’s arbitrary. The existence of existence, however, is tautological and self-sufficient. Talking about the existence of any particular entity, such as God, presupposes that he exists — but there’s nothing in the concept of “Existence” that presupposes anything other than itself. That it does is nothing but arbitrary emotionalism by the religious.
So to ask “where did he get the idea of existence” is a good question, but totally irrelevant to existence of god or the big bang.
OF course, as it makes no cognitive sense to be discussing the attributes of the nonexistent.
Fourth: As it turns out, effects have causes.
Certainly, that’s the Law of Causality. This law is a component part of — what, exactly? Starts with an E…
Weird I know, but those 3rd grade teachers were on to something. With that in mind, following this to its logical conclusion requires something that’s uncaused or something who’s effect can chronologically precede its own cause.
This is the same as claiming that the surface of the earth *must* have an edge — or that there exists a “singularity” at the poles. Try it — within the context of the two-dimensional latitude-longitude system, can you tell me what’s north of the North Pole?
You can’t of course; in the lat-long system, the poles are singularities. And yet, if you travel to the poles, they are physically unremarkable.
“Singularities” are mathematical artifacts, no more. Trying to claim these as “evidence” for God is a joke — funny as hell, because mathematical singularities are usually markers for error, the points where a system is telling you “there’s more going on here than this system can address.” In the case of the North Pole, the “more” is the third dimension, which we know as “up” and “down”.
That means the universe has always been the same aka steady state theory, or the universe had a distinct beginning aka big bang theory. Guess which one is scientifically observable? I’ll give you a hint, the universe is expanding, therefore…
You might as well be telling the primitive residents of a mountain range, that either the mountains go on forever and ever and ever… or they must stop at an edge. Never mind oceans, deserts, forests…
Seventh: ok, real argument now, that the first cause is invalid application of cause and effect. You can make that argument with Aquinas (not really, but that’s another tangent) but not with the Big Bang since it meets your application of cause and effect. The Universe can be observed, so I have no idea why you’re reducing cosmological scientists to appeals to faith.
Singularities, notwithstanding Ray Kurzweil, represent the edges of mathematical theories, not of reality itself. Just as the North Pole is a “singularity” in a certain mathematical coordinate system, but is in fact physically unremarkable, the “Big Bang” represents our current mathematical models reaching their limit. All they tell you is that the system of reality is not “closed” at the point that the math says it should be.
And so, when theists insist that what lies outside that glitch must be God, they are being as arbitrary as they were that first day in the unrecorded past when Og insisted to Grog that since they had no explanation for lighting, or rain, or the seasons, that they too must be God.
The singularity Hawking is addressing is a real physical singularity, not a coordinate singularity. The event horizon of a black hole is also an example of a coordinate singularity (in the Schwarzschild solution) — it can be made finite by the appropriate choice of local coordinates.
I disagree that “mathematical singularities are usually markers for error” — singularities crop up routinely. They have to be dealt with rigorously or you don’t get the right answer, but by themselves they don’t indicate error. Examples abound, from the simple (like the latitude/longitude singularity you mention) to the arcane (like the poles in a propagator).
BTW it is a fairly common occurrence for a coordinate system to generate singularities in curved manifolds. That is why the usual treatment of coordinatizing manifolds involves the overlap of multiple different coordinate systems. In the case of the North Pole, the “more” is not “up” — the third dimension is irrelevant — but rather “more” is our ability to overlap a new coordinate system over the old. Imagine spreading a giant chessboard blanket over the North Pole and associating latitude/longitude pairs with locations on the blanket. Now we can excise the immediate neighborhood of the pole from the lat/long system and still retain the ability to name our location anywhere on the surface of the globe….
Wow, Fred Hoyle has been reincarnated.
You mean the atheist belief that we are all the result of magical proteins that self assembled into people over millions of years is more plausible?
I throw my hands up and laugh. God or magic, what’s the difference? We’s all gots religion.
“Existence exists”, eh?. “I am that I am”. Neat, huh? An atheist unwittingly writes down God’s description of himself as transcribed by Moses.
Imagine, Sparrowhawk, that computers have become as powerful as … well, as powerful as they promise to become in not too many years. Since there is nothing supernatural in general (I assume that you believe this), there is nothing supernatural about mind. A mind is just the result of Turing computation. One could exist as a subroutine on a computer. The subroutine could get all of its inputs from other subroutines which model other minds, bodies, and the rest of the universe which these minds interact with through their subroutine bodies.
Sparrowhawk writes the subroutines and compiles them into a program, and with a big click, starts this universe and its inhabitants rolling. Computer time (not the same as Sparrowhawk’s time – but that’s another metaphor) passes. Sprwhwk, the subroutine, is “born”. He reads about all the science that has been done by other subroutines, science which examines all aspects of the rules of the universe in which he exists. One day, Sprwhwk declares, “there was no big click. There was no Programmer. It is a fallacy which philosophers and theologians have been wrestling with for centuries of cycles … “.
Sprhwk basically makes Sparrowhawks assertion above.
A person who believes that there is nothing supernatural in our universe has no choice but to believe that the above scenario is possible – that we could create on the computers in our near future, a universe in which a being called Sprwhwk could repeat Sparrowhawk’s long, self assured, speech against the mystical. And yet, Sprwhwk’s logic, obviously, would be completely wrong, for there would indeed be a big click at the beginning of Sparrowhawk’s world, and a Programmer who creates the world of Sprwhwk, who would be, amusingly enough, Sparrowhawk, himself.
I have not here proved the existence of a theistic God. What I have done is show that the assertion that in this world there is nothing supernatural about its inhabitants minds and existence leads immediately to the conclusion that we can construct a world whose inhabitants, in asserting that there is nothing supernatural, are wrong, and that the argument they use, the same argument, whatever it is, that atheists use in our world, must be fallacious. There is no proof that God does not exist. It is not a reasonable assumption. Hitchens and the rest of the super confidant, super aggressive atheists, rest their assurance upon fallacious pillars. Therefore, they ain’t nearly as smart as they think they are. Any agnostic is a more careful thinker.
Atheists should stop swaggering around as if they were intellectual superiors. They believe what they believe by faith alone. Furthermore, it is a faith that turns a closed mind to the evidence (not proof), that the supernatural exists – evidence such as that they are conscious – among other things. Consciousness is not scientifically explained by the invocation of emergence. That invocation is just a ritualistic chant by those who wish to deny. Isn’t it funny that Descartes started it all when he wrote, “I think, therefore I am” and todays philosophers of atheism, imagining that they are following in the track of this first modern thinker, add, “we have thought a lot more and we conclude: therefore, we are not”?
Tipler’s argument does not “prove” the existence of God. It rests on the assumption that the identification of the singularity with the God of the Bible is correct. There is no logic by which his assumption can be deduced. But to anyone who believes in the God of the Bible, he has hit the nail right on the head.
Imagine, in Sparrowhawk’s program, a subroutines called “mohsis” could exist. Sparrowhawk, caring about his beings and wishing them to know the reality of their existence, could pull an interrupt and run a routine that puts into “mohsis” mind, the truth about Sparrowhawk the Programmer, and the big click, and then start up the program again. Sprwhwk, would reject it, using fallacious reasoning that somehow, lack of proof is proof of falsity.
blockquoteImagine, Sparrowhawk, that computers have become as powerful as … well, as powerful as they promise to become in not too many years. Since there is nothing supernatural in general (I assume that you believe this), there is nothing supernatural about mind. A mind is just the result of Turing computation. One could exist as a subroutine on a computer. /blockquote
This is a popular image from science fiction. But it should be noted that there is no evidence whatsoever for the proposition that a computer program can be self-aware. Even the proposal that the mind operates like a Turing machine is hypothetical at best and arguably counterfactual.
There was a recent a href=http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/28165 rel=nofollowBloggingheads.tv vlog entry, a dialog between Eliezer Yudkowsky and Massimo Pigliucci/a, in which you might be interested. Eliezer is adamant that computers can be a platform for consciousness, but Massimo is not so sure. I side with Massimo. I wish he had asked Eliezer the question, If you really believe that consciousness doesnt depend on the kind of paper the computation is written on, then consider an actual computation on actual paper. Do you believe the computation on paper is conscious?
At the moment this comment is displayed stripped of formatting and some punctuation. Weird.
I was not ready to post that last, but I hit the wrong button. It is irreversible. Perhaps I’ll copy it, finish it, and post it again. Please ignore the above post.
That should be “please ignore the next post”. We’ll see if this appears in a sensible location.
And all three of these little posts are attached to the wrong post. They are supposed to be attached to the first version of my reply to bbbeard’s 5:08 PM, September 14th post.
I do not believe that computers can have a mind. I said that if there is not something supernatural about mind, then a mind could be modeled as a Turing machine. That leaves the possibility that I believe there is something supernatural about mind – and I do. My metaphor adopts Sparrowhawks rejection of the supernatural and examines the consequences. I am assuming that the only reasonable explanations for mind that are consistent with science are that it is either something that is Turing computable or that it somehow involves quantum superposition.
By “supernatural”, I mean “not amenable to reduction to a consequence of natural law”, “having unpredictability (which would make it natural – i.e. it would have a nature which we can understand).”
We cannot reduce the result we measure, when we collapse a quantum superposition, to a consequence of natural law. “Subnatural”, as C. S. Lewis called it, might better describe this unpredictable choice of “the universe” better than “supernatural”, except that quantum uncertainty can be amplified to have consequences in the everyday world. As you have said elsewhere, the universe is not deterministic.
Perhaps even the human brain is not deterministic. Delta t could be sufficiently amplified in the brain in a series of neural firings so that consciousness and will involves a superposition of the time order of neural discharges. If so, mind would be beyond the understanding of reductionist science. Neurologists making ever more detailed observations of the state of the brain would actually be collapsing the wave function and destroying the functional superposition in which mind resides. Funny, isn’t it, that we have this mysterious, subjective, private thing called mind, and we also have quantum mechanics which can strongly suggest that observation is the necessary trigger in the collapse of the wave function, and yet, if Frank Wilczek is correct as he says in his recent Bloggingheads TV interview, the idea that mind is involved in wave function collapse is “fringe”. One would think it an easy and comfortable fit if not ready for presentation as a scientific theory.
Anyway, if there is any other choice than that mind is either Turing computable or else mind involves quantum superposition, what is it?
My metaphor assumes, I admit, that these are the only two choices for mind. If mind involves quantum superposition, then it is supernatural as I defined it above. In rejecting the supernatural explanation for mind, then, how do we escape the metaphor I have drawn in which sprwhwk spouts Sparrowhawks reasoning, which we can see is false?
(OK, I guess this is my finished version)
I do not believe that computers can have a mind. I said that if there is not something supernatural about mind, then a mind could be modeled as a Turing machine. That leaves the possibility that I believe there is something supernatural about mind – and I do. My metaphor adopts Sparrowhawk’s rejection of the supernatural and examines the consequences. I am assuming that the only reasonable explanation for mind that are consistent with today’s science are that it is either something that is Turing computable or that it somehow involves quantum superposition.
By “supernatural”, I mean “not amenable to reduction to a consequence of natural law”, or, equivalently, “having unpredictability (predictability would make it natural – i.e. it would have a nature which we can understand).”
We cannot reduce the result we measure, when we collapse a quantum superposition, to a consequence of natural law. “Subnatural”, as C. S. Lewis called it, might better describe this unpredictable choice of “the universe” better than would “supernatural”, except that quantum uncertainty can be amplified to have consequences in the everyday world. As you have said elsewhere, the universe is not deterministic.
Perhaps even the human brain is not deterministic. Delta t could be sufficiently amplified in the brain in a series of neural firings so that consciousness and will could involve a superposition of the time order of neural discharges. If so, mind would be beyond the understanding of reductionist science – at least according to current quantum mechanics. Neurologists making ever more detailed observations of the state of the brain would actually be collapsing the wave function and destroying the functional superposition in which mind resides. Funny, isn’t it, that we have this mysterious, subjective, private thing called mind, and we also have quantum mechanics which can strongly suggest that observation is a trigger in the collapse of the wave function, and yet, if Frank Wilczek is correct as he says in his recent Bloggingheads TV interview, the idea that mind is involved in wave function collapse is “fringe”. One would think it an easy and comfortable fit if not ready for presentation as a scientific theory.
Anyway, if there is any other choice (compatible with science) than that mind is either Turing computable or else mind involves quantum superposition, what is it?
My metaphor assumes, I admit, that these are the only two choices for mind. If mind involves quantum superposition, then it is supernatural as I defined it above. In rejecting the supernatural explanation for mind, then, how do we escape the metaphor I have drawn in which sprwhwk spouts Sparrowhawks reasoning, which we can see is false? If mind is not supernatural then it must be computable. If it is computable, we look forward to the creation of mind on the kind of computer that will be available in the near future. The sprwhwk could exist, and using typical atheist reasoning, conclude that the Big Click and the Programmer do not exist, but sprwhwk would be wrong. Therefore, typical atheist reasoning is wrong, if there is nothing supernatural. Therefore, it could not be reasonably concluded that there is nothing supernatural, even if there is nothing supernatural (quantum collapse becomes predictable in a deterministic theory). OTOH, if there is something supernatural (no possible deterministic theory of quantum collapse exists), typical atheistic reasoning is fallacious.
These don’t seem to be the only two alternatives. In particular, it is quite a leap to insist that the mind — or, as I might put it, “brain function” — is reducible to computation, which is what you are implying by invoking Turing machines. Most processes (not just brain processes) are not equivalent to computation, no matter how well approximated they are by computation. The path of a pitched baseball, for example, can be approximated by numerical integration of the equations of motion using estimates of the lift, drag, and moment coefficients of the baseball, the density and viscosity of air, the mass of the ball, etc. But the process itself is “analog” and is not congruent with the output of a digital computer.
I hope it won’t hurt your feelings for me to say that is a lousy definition of “supernatural”.
Case in point. You may not like the natural law (or “the nature of the natural law”) but quantum mechanics provides the very paradigm of natural law. Quantum electrodynamics is the most accurate scientific theory ever devised. The results of some individual experiments in quantum mechanics are not deterministic. That’s the law. I think it’s foolish to declare it to be “supernatural” just because nature doesn’t behave the way you think it should. It would seem that it is your conception that is “subnatural”, not nature.
I’m with Frank W on this one. But if you can design an experiment to test the hypothesis that the non-determinism of mental processes can be tied directly to quantum mechanical uncertainty, I’ll buy you a Coke.
How about “mind relies on analog processing of external input”? It doesn’t have to be computable and it doesn’t have to be quantum mechanical.
@bbbeard
It’s a very good definition. The supernatural can only be what is beyond analysis. That is because if we could analyze it we would say we understood it and call it part of nature. If there is a pattern in something, we can analyze that pattern and say we understand it.
Since the supernatural can only have a random appearance, the only way a human could detect the supernatural (failing to find order is not detection) would be for it to be associated in some way with something natural. So …
… suppose the supernatural wished to become obvious to a human. An example of something without order and unpredictable that is associated with something natural would be the sudden appearance out of thin air of a human being. If another person saw this, he would be shocked. If the appeared human said, “I am supernatural”, the shocked person would be at least halfway there to believing it.
Now I said that for the supernatural to be obvious – detectable – it would have to be allied with something natural. The appeared human is the natural aspect, in this example. The only thing that is supernatural is the random, unpredictable appearance. To clarify this, imagine that the appeared human’s appearance occurred inside a house unwitnessed by anyone. He goes outside and upon meeting another person, says “I am supernatural”. In this case, the result would be an alarmed person scrambling for his speed dialer to call the police (OK, maybe he would be slightly amused). This is because the human form is completely natural. Only the sudden appearance is supernatural.
Just for a moment, accept the God thesis. People say, “If God exists, where is he?” Well, in this thesis, God is everywhere, but all that you can understand is the order around you, which is the natural aspect of God. I’ve explained this. The supernatural aspect of God is what is beyond our analysis, something without order. We cannot detect it unless it is allied with something that has order.
People say, “In the olden days, people explained things like tornados and floods as God’s fury. Now we understand these things. God is always retreating. What kind of a God is that?” Well, the olden days people had it right. We don’t understand these things, today. We only partly understand them. We understand the natural aspect. There is also a random aspect in the weather. We call it chaotic and we say that no matter how many sensors we put in place, we cannot predict the weather beyond a few days. Quantum superposition is amplified by the process of chaos making weather unpredictable in principle. The butterfly effect means that indeterminate wave function collapse becomes indeterminate weather. Something without order and unpredictable is allied with our understanding of the processes going on in a tornado. A tornado has a supernatural aspect, as I defined it above. So these dumb old guys naming God as the cause of their fortunes and misfortunes weren’t so dumb really, and God hasn’t retreated one bit. We understand how energy flows through a tornado, but we can’t understand or predict, even in principle, why one blows up a house and another dies over a field.
OK, what I have said accords with my definition of “supernatural”. But it is not really a definition at all (you were right, it is a lousy definition). It is a thesis about the supernatural. Then define “supernatural”, you might demand. I can’t, I reply. Did you have “my mother” defined for you before you were able to recognize and talk about your mother?
Well, other than computing the nth degree of accuracy in an analog system, and barring quantum uncertainty (because that’s one of my alternatives) what is not computable about something analog? The pixels on my monitor, and their discontinuous in time color, look just like the analog scene outside my window, if the divisions in time and space are small enough. What, in principle, prevents the computation of an analog phenomenon right down to the level where quantum effects (my alternative) make it not computable?
You may not like the natural law …
Why would you say that?
… but quantum mechanics provides the very paradigm of natural law.
It provides the very paradigm of the random associated with the natural. It is where we can detect the supernatural, as I described above, because what order we can find is associated with randomness. I hear it said ad infinitum that “Quantum electrodynamics is the most accurate scientific theory ever devised.” So what? It is also a theory that has built in, unavoidable, indeterminism. That’s why Einstein didn’t like it. Remember? God doesn’t play dice with the universe? That it is super accurate and also indeterminate is precisely the alliance of randomness with order that is the only way the supernatural could be detected.
That this supernatural aspect of nature is God is faith. There is nothing scientific about it. Nothing I can say would “prove” it, either to you or to me. It is not inconsistent with science. Occam’s razor, a method for picking the best scientific model, does not apply because the God thesis is not a scientific model. It just isn’t an anti-scientific model either.
Everything we “know”, we know by faith. That “ma” is your mother, is faith. That after 10 trillion occasions in your everyday life conservation of momentum has never failed, it will not fail the next time is an act of faith. Some acts of faith are easy. Some are harder. That momentum will continue to be conserved in our everyday experience is easy. That you should be patriotic is harder. The hardest act of faith, for a Christian, is believing in the Christian God.
I don’t “talk to Jesus”. Reading the Bible does not bolster my faith, it shakes it. I don’t have a pastor and I don’t go to a church. Mocking the common expressions of Christianity is just mocking people. Most people have not followed my path to Christianity, and they have not dealt with the “challenges” of science at all. Just as you can mock “holy rollers”, I can mock the vast majority of people who get their science from popularizations and “gee whizz” magazines. Most of them, if I asked them to show how the uncertainty principle arises from waves by using the Fourier transform, would scratch their heads in mystification. That increasingly accurate specification of momentum requires an increasingly inaccurate specification of position is just a fact to them with no logical connection to the wave nature of particles that they could understand. Yet they gulp down the popularizations and “gee whizz” magazines and seem to know far more than I know about the latest theories. Inflation? It seems like a moment of magic to me. I don’t understand it at all. I know I don’t understand it. What would make the universe inflate? I cannot say, because I cannot understand it, whether or not it makes sense at all. Inflation never plays a role in my thinking, because I cannot understand the logic in it. But we have people waving around the latest ideas they read in Discover magazine, in a completely ignorant way. It has never even occurred to them to ask, “is that mathematically logical and consistent with the rest of physics”. They just glom it up – “gee whizz” (there, I mocked them). The vast majority of the people running around claiming that atheism is intellectually superior (“duh, the burden of proof is with the god people” – there, I mocked them again) don’t ever really think at all.
Well, same goes for all these Christians that are mocked by the “intellectually superior” atheists (BTW, Buddhism is not atheism in my taxonomy). They are mocking expressions of Christianity by people only lightly acquainted with critical thinking.
I am enlightened, at least a little bit. The burning of Giordano Bruno was not an act of Christianity. I’ll leave it as an exercise for you to figure out why it wasn’t. It is related to the reason why crime in American cities and corruption in politics are not expressions of the idea that is the United States (substitute your own favorite country if you are one of the many who hate the United States).
@bbbeard
And I’ll buy you one the day that you can design an experiment to test the hypothesis that they can’t.
@bbbeard
Youknowwho said:
Append: Mocking these Christians and their expressions of their faith no more touches Christianity than my mocking of Discover magazine waving people and their lightly-acquainted-with-mathematical-models “Gee whizz!” expressions of faith in science touches science.
Here’s a little more.
I forgot to mention the other way that the supernatural being what is random makes sense. Think of a very intelligent being, a being more intelligent than any human or even than all of humanity. Assume that it speaks its thoughts. Then we would not be able to predict its speech because, if we could, we would be as intelligent as it. Of course, if it said things that made sense to us, this would make it seem like a being thinking in the ordinary (metaphor for “natural”) way. But insofar as we could not follow its thoughts, its thoughts would be nonsensical and chaotic (metaphor for “random”) to us. So what is supernatural, if it is an intelligence beyond ours, should appear chaotic and random – unpredictable – to us.
I have listened to about half of Yudkowsky vs. Pigliucci so far. Well I’m on Milano’s side too, but I think he blew it. When Eliezer suggested that the Church-Turing theorem be taken to mean that all of physical reality is computable, Massimo, had he demurred, would have stopped Eliezer’s strong case in its tracks. Instead Massimo was reduced to saying, “I’m not convinced, I’m not convinced.” It was disappointing to me to hear Eliezer suggest that the brain could be Turing modeled right down to the atoms “and their quantum fields”. Well, the apparently true randomness, or indeterminism, of quantum collapse cannot be modeled on a deterministic machine, but Massimo gave Eliezer all the chips, IMO, when he went along with it. If quantum superposition is important in the phenomena of consciousness, free will, and thought, then its game over for having consciousness, free will, or thought on a computer.
Of course, I have yet to watch the rest of the video, so maybe Massimo does a better job in the second half.
Why? Because everybody wants to lord what they “think” is right over what anyone else believes. Your opinion, or mine , is no more “out there” than what anyone..anyone else..”thinks”.
Isn’t Dawkins the person who is tied to a wheel chair? If my question is correct, then he sort answered his own question about GOD. Christians need to do what GOD wills them to do and leave the rest to HIM.
I think you are getting Hawking and Dawkins confused.
Oh come on! This puts me in mind of the old map-makers who used the catch-all phrase “Here be dragons” to denote areas of unexplored territory.
Since the dawn of time religion and the existence of God/gods has always been used to explain away anything that mankind can’t readily understand. Over the centuries science has been able to properly and logically explain away many of those things that previously had been attributed to some sort of divinity (planet movements, weather patterns, etc etc) so really all we are still saying here is that if there is something that mankind has yet to get its relatively puny brains around then it can only be explained by the presence of God.
The logic being used appears to be “We can’t explain it therefore God has to exist.” Ridiculous. We can’t explain it because we aren’t clever enough. To declare that God exists simply because our knowledge is too incomplete to know any better is so backward its frightening.
If people want to believe in divine existence then good luck to them – everyone has to find their own answers in life. But to hear and read so called “learned” men try and use science and maths to prove or disprove Gods existance is nothing short of embarrassing.
Atheists are like Sphere in Flatland, who showed square the third dimension of Spaceland, but when square inquired about the possibility of a fourth, and fifth spacial dimension, Lord Sphere scoffs at the preposterousness of it. Likewise humans stare into the petri dish, through a microscope, and they manipulate minute matter then scoff at the idea that something greater might be doing likewise. We haven’t even gotten a spacecraft 1% the distance to our own Ort cloud and some pretend to know the mysteries of the universe. Arrogance.
Sparrowhawk says: “Why cannot men just accept the fact that existence exists?”
Oh, I don’t know. Why do we wonder anything? Why didn’t we just accept the fact that the earth was flat? Why didn’t we accept the fact that the sun goes around the earth? Man was born to wonder.
Oh, and Mr. Atheist? One more question. You say that you want evidence. Where is your evidence that the universe is all there is?
“Oh, and Mr. Atheist? One more question. You say that you want evidence. Where is your evidence that the universe is all there is?”
That is what the word “universe” means: the totality of all things that exist. So no evidence is required, and your question is without meaning.
You need to bone up on your cosmology. That is certainly not the definition of the universe. Why do you think Hawking is postulating other universes? Yikes, I am almost embarrassed for you.
Even Darwin and his fellow biologists were searching vigorously for a way to show that life evolved and changed on its own, thus invalidating the notion that God created birds, fish, plants, each according to their kind, etc. Darwin was working to oppose the ‘watchmaker’ theory, that if you find in a meadow a complete and working watch, then you have to assume the existence of a watchmaker, likewise the universe compels the presumption of the existence of its creator.
Darwin sat on his theory for some time, knowing it would be taken up as a banner on the side of science in its war against religion. And it has always been thus.
Darwin, though, could not get past the creation point. And there are no fossils of lizards with vestigial feathers or half-grown stumps of wings, no real fossil record of the sort of change one must presume in order to completely credit evolution from the first single-cell organism on to the present.
Hawking is like Darwin. He presumed God but sought a way to disprove Him at the same time. God was a theory to him to be disproved by a better one.
Ultimately, Hawking is saying “the paradox is over. I declare the universe created itself. Ex nihilo, from nothing, something, and the something that did not exist nevertheless had the power of creative action, and created itself.”
No dictum in science or philosophy is clearer than “ex nihilo”. When there is NO THING, nothing can appear. Nothing plus nothing equals nothing. Hawking has descended into the irrational in his desperate attempt to avoid, disprove, de-activate, the God he will soon have to personally deal with. He is backed into the corner of time, age and infirmity, and will soon know the truth. Yet he still resists.
Technically speaking, that makes him a pantheist, not an atheist. Pantheists believe the Universe itself is God.
> Thoughtful christians have considered these issues and moved onto more fruitful ground.
A nice, sweeping generality. Perhaps, then, Aquinas, C. S. Lewis, Greg Bahnsen, and many many other Christians are not thoughtful…?
The purpose of Christian apologetics is to bolster the faithful — not to convert atheists, but to give them pause.
Regardless of our faiths, all of us live as if life has meaning. We behave as if there were some absolute truth or moral principle to guide us, and we all expect the universe to exhibit orderliness. But none of that follows from a materialistic view of the universe. Atoms, electrons, photons, quarks, etc. — as Peggy Lee asked, is that all there is? If so, then higher truth does not exist at all except as brain chemistry, and when all the brains are dead, so too will be any higher truth. It’s another way of saying that truth doesn’t matter, because entropy wins in the end. It’s another way of saying there is nothing valuable, because all things we value today, along with humanity itself, are doomed. It’s another way of saying thought and feeling and conviction and honor are all on the same level as appetite and lust and any other animalistic urge — it’s just brain chemistry doing its thing.
It would seem to follow, then, that the modern materialist/atheist ought to simply smile an ironic little smile to himself and let the rest of us be. He has cracked the code: there is no higher truth at all — and if he is sufficiently self-aware, he also knows that this boomerangs back at his own position. He knows that all talk of goodness and honor is a conceit, one that formed most likely in mankind as some sort of evolutionary trick for survival. Let them think they know God. It appears to make us stronger. But as for him, he sees the self-deception inherent in this “god” instinct.
But as Ron White likes to say, these modern materialists have the right to remain silent, but not the ability. Their higher truth is that there is no higher truth, and, by not-God, they will live to see you embrace their not-faith. So these modern Elmer Gantrys of atheism come spilling out of their labs and copy rooms with evangelical zeal to take on the benighted spiritualists. Dawkins tut-tuts that a loving God would not have designed the parasitic wasp; you see, absolute morality does not exist — but if it did, it would have to adhere to Dawkin’s vision of what it should be. Christopher Hitchens fulminates like an Old Testament prophet on the evils foisted upon us by religion — and apparently blind to the evils that were visited on us by the religion of non-religion. How blind do you have to be not to see the body count of that most atheistic of religions, communism? Where does evil come from, if the good is defined as God’s will and there is no God to will it? Just ask Hitchens, he will tell you.
If people lived in a two-dimensional world on a sheet of paper, they might find themselves wondering at the physics of ink. It appears to form a pattern of sorts, but it’s only an appearance, they’re sure. The ink forms shapes which occur in sequences and phalanxes, and with a distinctive color, odor, and chemical make-up. They would find, in fact, that there is a certain predictability to how the patterns recur and which ones recur the most often. Some even go so far as to suggest that where order exists, there must exist also Someone who orders things, a great Author who is trying to communicate some sort of message. But the two-dimensional atheists snark that, nonsense, given enough time, these patterns can easily form themselves, and thus we have no need for this “Author” hypothesis.
But in this three-dimensional world, we know beyond doubt that the least important part of a book is its paper and ink. My guess is physics, as grand as it seems, is the least important part of our own world.
Brill!
“It would seem to follow, then, that the modern materialist/atheist ought to simply smile an ironic little smile to himself and let the rest of us be.”
For the most part, we do. You’re blaming atheists as a whole for the action of the virulent extreme. It would be as if I held all Christianity responsible for Fred Phelps.
Jeff, what is it you’re doing now? By engaging me, you show that you are one of those who, having cracked the code, still is not inclined to turn us the amused smile.
In any event, I wasn’t making a moral judgment; actually, it’s my point. If follows from materialism that there is no higher truth, but only mere brain chemistry. So, in effect, you are arguing even though you already know that brain chemicals don’t care who is right or wrong, they just do what brain chemicals do. One might prefer the configuration of his own brain chemistry to another’s, but neither objective truth nor a just and right conclusion are settled by mere preferences. (By what criteria do we judge one set of brain chemicals superior to anothers? Or to a monkey’s?) To engage in debate on the subject is rendered simply frivolous. That’s fine. I’m often frivolous myself.
Yet (many) atheists sound awfully unfrivolous. They seem to behave as if higher truth matters, even if they don’t quite believe in it. Why? After all, believers and unbelievers alike are cast into the same meaningless void upon death. The good guys and the bad guys both perish. When the last intelligent being has uttered his last intelligent thought, it’s over. No exalted idea or righteous deed will survive us, but rather meet the same fate as all of our stupid notions and animalistic impulses. And the universe, having swallowed us up somehow (whether by supernova or gravitational pressure), won’t and can’t be made to care.
Yet, to atheists, it matters. Go figure.
Fred Phelps is fine; it is your phrasing that troubles me:
“You’re blaming atheists as a whole for the action of the virulent extreme.”
Now, is there a Soros manual how to make facile arguments? Just substitute Muslims for atheists, and somehow a pattern emerges. Is that what you do for a living? Just mildly curious, really.
This is called adding insult to injury. Here we have a believer, F.J. Tipler, attempting to hijack investigations into theoretical physics in order to bolster his non-sensical mysticism. He does so in possibly the most irritating way imaginable, by playing childish word games and pretending this constitutes logical argumentation. That he does this from “inside the temple of science” is shameful. I feel no obligation to “let the rest of you be” if you are going to try to appropriate physics — My Town! — for your obscurantist purpose. Rather than recognize the absurdity of Tipler’s position, you seem to want to twist our rejection of Tiplerism into some kind of inconsistency on our part. Epic fail.
If you really believe this, why don’t you test your faith against the theory of gravity by jumping off the Empire State Building — while chanting a prayer for levitation?
> If you really believe this, why don’t you test your faith against the theory of gravity by jumping off the Empire State Building — while chanting a prayer for levitation?
bbeard: perhaps you feel as strongly about Gerald Schroeder as you do about Tipler. If so, perhaps you should work to have him excommunicated from your, uh, church.
>> My guess is physics, as grand as it seems, is the least important part of our own world.
> If you really believe this, why don’t you test your faith against the theory of gravity by jumping off the Empire State Building — while chanting a prayer for levitation?
I don’t think your science is bad here, just your philosophy. Of course gravity works on a human body at about 32 feet per second squared, and of course I would be smashed to bits. But before you do a backflip in the endzone, consider that I never challenged the laws of physics, but only dismissed their importance. You and I may even not be in disagreement here — unless, that is, you are willing to argue that no idea, or set of ideals, or truth, or act of kindness or sacrifice, can ever be worth dying for. If there are such ideas, ideals, and truths, then physics simply cannot compete.
I’m not sure there are any ideas worth dying for. But I am fairly sure that there are ideas worth killing for. And when one makes that momentous decision, one will find that a sound understanding of physics will be very helpful indeed.
Well, that is sadly consistent with a materialist philosophy. It would indeed follow that transcendent truths, ideals, values, etc. are not worth dying for if they don’t exist. So two cheers for consistency. But would you want to be stuck in a foxhole with someone who believes that?
But you do care about truth enough to spend your time on a comments board squabbling over it. I would simply raise the question I raised earlier: why? It is practically certain we shall be dead in a hundred years in spite of the march of medical science. The electrical charges swirling in our brains will cease. The complex molecular structures comprising our brain cells will become mere water, carbon dioxide, and other much simpler structures, having served first as food for worms and bacteria. The thoughts you’re having now will come to an end. You can write them down, but that only borrows time, as the world we know is doomed one way or the other, even if it takes eons. Surely Christians and atheists can agree on that? Physics wins again, right?
So why bother to argue over the truth? You’re really going to waste the precious hours of your current chemical configuration (life, that is) arguing over something that does not have eternal importance? The truth is but a chemical reaction in your brain, after all. Right? How can it be otherwise?
Unless there is something that transcends human beings, provides an orderly landscape for thinking, bequeaths us logic, shows us goodness, and will continue to do so for all eternity. Truth does matter. But there is only one way that it does.
For some reason I’m not being offered a “Reply” option to Reformed Trombonist’s comment, so I will reply to my own comment.
I should first point out that I am a Buddhist. Buddhists are atheists, at least in the Christian taxonomy. I am also “ethnically” Buddhist, descended from a long line of Buddhists, so I probably don’t conform to the popular media’s image of Buddhists.
Buddhists recognize that “truth” is an idealization that has prospered mainly in the West. I prefer to make “accurate” statements, and leave “truth” to people who believe a man in the sky controls everything. But I’m not fastidious about the distinction, and I will use the words “true” and “false” as shorthand on occasion.
I am also a theoretical physicist. And I know how hard it is to do valid science. Most of what gets reported as science is not “good science” but is more typically “sloppy science”. What Frank is proposing is not even “sloppy science”, it is nonsense.
But, getting back to your question, in my view Buddhism covers the huge majority of issues that man faces in daily life. Science, by which I mean “good” science or “valid” science, covers only a small fraction. But Buddhism is all about enlightenment, not obscurantism. Buddhism gives way to science — when science advances, Buddhism humbly retreats. In that sense Buddhism is fully compatible with science. For instance, once upon a time Buddhism postulated a complicated creation story. Now that we understand, through decades of careful observation and analysis, that the observable universe is approximately 13 billion years old and is undergoing accelerating expansion, the creation story gets demoted to the amusing fairy tale shelf. That’s the way enlightenment works. Unfortunately, Christianity by and large seems to operate on another principle, that there is a God in Heaven who once gave revelations to some poor fishermen and shepherds, and no amount of evidence can overcome faith in what is written in the Gospels.
I actually get along fairly well with most Christians, because modern Christianity is largely a doctrine of lovingkindness, which has a large role in Buddhism as well. But we part ways when it comes to epistemology.
Buddhism also has a complicated notion of “self” which most Westerners can’t or won’t comprehend. So the fact that this material body (that is typing on a keyboard to make characters appear on computer screens around the world) will someday dissipate has very little to do with the good that is being done by sweeping away misconceptions.
So, in a word, I do this for enlightenment.
> Buddhists recognize that “truth” is an idealization that has prospered mainly in the West. I prefer to make “accurate” statements, and leave “truth” to people who believe a man in the sky controls everything.
Sincerely, I don’t want to misunderstand what Buddhists believe, let alone misrepresent. But I have spoken with Buddhists before on this very same subject, and it seems to me that they get a lot of mileage out of ill-defined concepts. At once, you want to deny, or at least not give credence, to the notion of “truth”, yet on the other hand, you speak of gaining “enlightenment.” What is there to gain enlightenment about, if not something that is true? But, if experience is an indicator, you will duck and weave, holding semantics up as a shield; when I press you on truth, you will shrug and say we’re not sure there is any such thing; when I point out that a materialistic world leads to valueless universe, you will speak of “enlightenment.”
Very well. How can accuracy exist without truth to back it up?
> Buddhism gives way to science — when science advances, Buddhism humbly retreats. In that sense Buddhism is fully compatible with science. For instance, once upon a time Buddhism postulated a complicated creation story. Now that we understand, through decades of careful observation and analysis, that the observable universe is approximately 13 billion years old and is undergoing accelerating expansion, the creation story gets demoted to the amusing fairy tale shelf.
I would point out that Christianity is one of the reasons science became such a success in Western culture. Without a belief in an orderly universe, there is little incentive to look for it. Francis Bacon knew this. So did Einstein.
> That’s the way enlightenment works. Unfortunately, Christianity by and large seems to operate on another principle, that there is a God in Heaven who once gave revelations to some poor fishermen and shepherds, and no amount of evidence can overcome faith in what is written in the Gospels.
Why does a Buddhist care about evidence? I’m being serious, not snide, or at least not intentionally so. What is so important about being “accurate”? What eternal moral code is being served?
> I actually get along fairly well with most Christians, because modern Christianity is largely a doctrine of lovingkindness, which has a large role in Buddhism as well. But we part ways when it comes to epistemology.
We part in other ways as well.
> Buddhism also has a complicated notion of “self” which most Westerners can’t or won’t comprehend.
Or believe in.
> So the fact that this material body (that is typing on a keyboard to make characters appear on computer screens around the world) will someday dissipate has very little to do with the good that is being done by sweeping away misconceptions.
Where does this “good” come from? What is its nature? How do you derive it from protons, photons, and gravitational fields? Or is it chemical in nature? And why do you believe in it if you can’t prove its existence?
> I do this for enlightenment.
And that’s it? Christians are often faulted for believing in a “man in the sky” controlling all things. Why is that harder to believe than believing that goodness, or accuracy, or enlightenment, just hangs out there in the universe, disembodied from a god? For all the corroboration that’s physically available, it might as well be supernatural. It seems to me belief in Buddhism has all the epistemological challenges Christianity has, and then some, as it does not explain the existence of transcendent concepts, it just sort of shrugs at them.
Perhaps the concepts seem ill-defined to you because your introduction to Buddhism has been fragmented and half-hearted. And you create obstacles in your mind where none exist. If you were unfamiliar with quantum field theory, and didn’t delve deeply into it, you might think the ‘doctrines’ about Feynman diagrams and renormalization are pretty ill-defined, too.
The problem is that your notion of “truth” is bound inextricably to language. You are used to thinking of individual statements as being either True or False. There is a long-standing confusion in Western culture, extending at least back to the time of Plato, about the reality or unreality of the ideal world that is represented by language. Plato argued that sense-perceptions, being untrustworthy, do not deserve the status of “reality”, and instead he argued that mathematical proofs, being eternally “correct”, are “real”. It is only in this realm that statements map directly to the objects of thought, and acquire a definite truth-value.
In the actual world, there is nothing eternal, not even the universe. Statements are contingent and temporary, cocooned in context, not “true” or “false” on their own.
Language is only one tool of communication, reasoning, and insight among many. Now, there is a long tradition of epistemology regarding language, in Eastern and Western cultures, but it is recognized in Eastern culture that insight and enlightenment can occur quite independently of language. Western philosophy is not quite as developed in this regard. Even as recently as Wittgenstein, we find assertions that reasoning requires the use of language (“Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen”).
So the truth value of individual statements is problematic. It is certainly possible to make accurate statements such as “The outside air temperature is close to 93 degrees”. This is an accurate statement, but is it “true“?
LOL. Tell that to Giordano Bruno. I think science has been successful in the West despite Christianity. When did Christ ever declare that the universe is “orderly”? Quite the opposite, I would argue. By all accounts he ran around Galilee performing miracles (I would call them “magic tricks”), turning water into wine, walking on water, raising the dead. This would seem to argue against an orderly vision of the universe, and quite obviously encouraged mankind to go down the path of turning to intercessory prayer for divine intervention rather than investigating and controlling the physical universe. Your own attitude toward physics betrays this anti-scientific bias.
Well, as I’ve pointed out, Buddhism is compatible with science in a way that Christianity isn’t. “Evidence” is key to formulating valid scientific inferences. Buddhism, unlike Christianity, promotes insight and enlightenment as part of the progression of karma in the universe — “Knowledge is good” as Emil Faber clumsily formulated the idea. Christianity is decidedly more obscurantist in nature.
And there are no eternal moral codes.
In Buddhism, the Buddha was merely a really smart guy (one of many such Buddhas who have trod the Earth, so we sometimes use the term “Shakyamuni Buddha” to refer to the founder of Buddhism). The catalog of good and bad in Buddhism has been handed down and evolved during the last 2500 years of human history. The rules aren’t eternal. They are just the best we can do. And since Buddhism isn’t monolithic, there are doctrinal differences on some items. I’m not going to lecture you on the doctrinal differences because I can sense you’re not ready.
Where did this “God” come from? This is much a deeper riddle for Christians than the origin of “good” in Buddhism. First of all, your “God” is a figment of your imagination. But more problematically, you ascribe wonderful mystical triune omnipotence to this figment, so you have trouble imagining any other figment that could create such a being. Good luck with that.
Are you really arguing for a “difficulty of belief” standard of epistemology? Well, okay. Goodness/accuracy/enlightenment don’t “hang out there”. Buddhism and Platonism aren’t really compatible.
Actually, there is quite a lot of Buddhist scholarship on transcendence. But it’s generally not worth explaining to people who aren’t ready to hear it. Buddhism, unlike Christianity, is not a proselytizing religion. If you’re not raised in the tradition, you generally have to come to it when you’re ready.
When you are ready to learn more about Buddhist doctrine, I have to say a pretty good starting point is provided by the conversation between a friend of mine and me at http://blog.bbbeard.com/2008/09/17/dharma-dudes/. He wrote the main blog post and I contributed some comments. The post http://blog.bbbeard.com/2008/08/19/buddha-noodling/ is also good background.
I can hardly believe that you are claiming that in Buddhist societies there is no evil, or that there are no evil professing Buddhists.
Here’s the thing. Modern science was born in Christendom.
Churches with power began when Rome adopted Christianity and intervened in Christian affairs. Power attracts the kind of people who want power and will do what it takes to get it and keep it, so it is not surprising that churches ended up doing evil (as well as good). In a similar way, the cloak of respectability attracts people to claim scientific legitimacy for their unscrupulous enterprises. Junk science abounds does it not?
So if the fate of Bruno forces the conclusion that Christianity is bad for science, then by similar reasoning, the existence of junk science forces the conclusion that science is bad for science.
Heh.
But I’m not going to lecture you any more about Christianity because I can sense you’re not ready.
> Perhaps the concepts seem ill-defined to you because your introduction to Buddhism has been fragmented and half-hearted. And you create obstacles in your mind where none exist.
Actually, I agree, sort of. All of us, atheists included, come to the table with presuppositions. I presuppose the Bible is true and base my world view on that. It has certain advantages over other presuppositions.
> The problem is that your notion of “truth” is bound inextricably to language.
Well, there is one thing you and I both share in, and that is we are both using language to express our notions of truth. This is what I meant when I noted that Buddhists then to shrug and shrink into amphiboly and ambiguity. You are perfectly willing, at least on this comments board, to use language to employ logic and reason. But when I press you on the higher truth that (in my view) must stand over logic and reason to make them worth their salt as an arbiter in this discussion, you demur that *my* problem is that my truth is bound to language. Fine. Language is your problem too, in this discussion and every other discussion in which you employ language.
> You are used to thinking of individual statements as being either True or False.
I’ll take that as a proposition. Is it true or false? Your style of argument seems to allow logic to be employed only when you wish to employ it, and considers it irrelevant when your opponent does.
> In the actual world, there is nothing eternal, not even the universe. Statements are contingent and temporary, cocooned in context, not “true” or “false” on their own.
Which brings us back to my earlier question: why do you argue vigorously for your vision of truth, believing as you do that there is no such thing as eternal truth? In fact, isn’t all this rather un-Buddha-like of you? You appear to become awfully offended when your vision of science is somehow challenged, but wouldn’t Buddha just say suffering is part of life, and that the problem here is your desire that should accept your point about science?
It is only accurate if there is an objective reality that is true.
> LOL. Tell that to Giordano Bruno.
Fine, you tell it to Alfred North Whitehead and J. Robert Oppenheimer, neither one of whom was a Christian. Whitehead said that Christianity is the mother of science because of “the medieval insistence on the rationality of God.”
> I think science has been successful in the West despite Christianity.
Then why did it flower to a greater extent in the West? As Francis Schaeffer noted, “The Chinese had an early and profound knowledge of the world.” But they had no confidence that the nature could have a code that we could understand because they had no assurance that a rational, divine being was behind it all.
> When did Christ ever declare that the universe is “orderly”? Quite the opposite, I would argue…
The scriptures did so declare, and Christ came to fulfill scripture. E.g., “Dominion and awe belong to God; he establishes order in the heights of heaven” — Job 25:2. Why would it have been so remarkable that Christ performed miracles if it were not generally understood that miracles are out of the order of nature? The ancient Jews may not have been great physicists by our modern reckoning, but even they understood that making wine out of water and raising the dead were not natural acts.
> And there are no eternal moral codes.
So, again, why do you waste time arguing as if your arguments have any importance? I have noticed that even the people who fervently insist there are no eternal moral codes behave as if there are. And of course they do, because the moral codes are there and even its doubters know in their hearts. The essence of morality is relationships. Moral codes are eternal because God is eternal, and also because God is three Persons in one. Morality is a reflection of the relationship that exists between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Without being based on this eternal relationship, morality would have had to be invented, and thus would not be eternal. Without its eternal nature, it would be arbitrary, and subject to refutation (i.e., Euthyphro’s dilemma).
> …your “God” is a figment of your imagination.
…says the man who does not believe in a higher truth. Do you have a permanent disclaimer somewhere that goes, “There are no higher truths except the one I’m about to tell you?”
It’s like my other discussions with Buddhists. My notions of truth are inextricably bound to language, and yet you inextricably use language to inform me of this. Truth doesn’t exist unless it is the truth you tell. Indeed, truth doesn’t matter, but accuracy somehow does. God is a figment of our imaginations, but enlightenment and karma are not figments of yours. Things sound awfully arbitrary in there.
> But more problematically, you ascribe wonderful mystical triune omnipotence to this figment, so you have trouble imagining any other figment that could create such a being. Good luck with that.
If another being created God, then that being would be God. There is either an Absolute Being, or there is not.
> Actually, there is quite a lot of Buddhist scholarship on transcendence. But it’s generally not worth explaining to people who aren’t ready to hear it.
It is not worth arguing with me, explains the man who is arguing with me.
Not sure where you got that from. The point in question is whether Christianity — and here I focus on official Christendom — has helped or hindered the advancement of science. I think it’s quite clear that the Church, and its traditions of scholasticism, intolerance, and inquisition, kept mankind in darkness for over a thousand yeras and violently opposed the discoveries of Renaissance scientists.
Well, again, it was born despite Christendom. It’s mildly obscene for Christians to claim credit for modern science — it’s like an abortionist claiming credit for a baby that survived a botched abortion.
Don’t get me wrong — I think modern Christians are for the most part quite decent folk and generally have the right idea about how to treat their fellow humans. But you’re fooling yourself if you think Christianity has comprised the same attitudes throughout its history and has been a benign and positive force throughout.
No, it’s junk science that’s bad for science, and that’s why some of us in this thread are so strongly critical of Frank Tipler’s post.
And your analogy is disastrously faulty. In the cases of Galileo and Bruno, their abuse was at the hands of the Church, not some aberrant crank. Until 1822 — 180 years after Galileo’s death — it was the official position of the Church that Galileo was wrong. Do you get that? Generations of Church leaders held that Galileo was wrong. In was not until 1992 that the Church cleared Galileo of wrongdoing. In the case of Girodano Bruno, who was burned at the stake by the Church — again, by the Church, not by some aberrant loner — has never been officially cleared. As recently as 1942, Church officials maintained that Bruno deserved his fate.
Heh. You got that right. I’ll let you know when I’m ready to talk to Jesus.
The difference is that I realize that language is just a tool, just an approximation to reality. The objects we manipulate when we attempt to be logical are just shadows of what is real. I wish we had a better means of communication. If we had the time and proximity we could sit together in meditation.
Well, very little of what you have said seems logical to me. You seem to want to insist on the reality of your conceptualizations and not acknowledge that there is a reality which goes beyond your conceptualizations.
I’m not sure I would call it “my vision of truth”, since that implies there is something to see; it might be more accurate to call it “my understanding of the nature of truth”.
It is a common Western misconception to confuse non-attachment with passivity, or withdrawal. If the life of Buddha showed anything, it showed that withdrawal from the world is not the path to enlightenment. It’s almost as though you think the fundamental tenet of Buddhism is “What-ever!!!“…. It’s not.
I’m simply trying to clarify, using my poor command of language, what is and what is not. Out of loving kindness, that is. And I don’t feel like I’m suffering at all.
Well, there is “reality”. I’m not sure how you intend the modifier “objective” — perhaps to distinguish from a “subjective reality”? I think I would call it “reality” vs “illusion” or “conceptualization”. And you seem to be obsessing about that word “true” again, as though your conceptualizing about perfection corresponded to some reality.
You see, you probably think this is logical. But I’m not citing Bruno as an authority on Papal science policy, I’m providing him as an example of someone burned at the stake for his scientific inquiry. This is a vivid counterexample to the proposition that Christianity has been good for science. In response you name two fuzzy-thinking academics with pretensions of mystical insight? It seems illogical to me, so I don’t feel obligated to treat this response as ‘relevant’. In fact one might construe your response as an argument from authority, which is formally a fallacy of defective induction.
Whitehead is also credited with saying “Religion is the last refuge of human savagery”. Why does what Whitehead thought have anything to do with… anything?
Religion is the intermediate phase between superstition and science. It seems obvious that a “phase transition” will not be simultaneous everywhere, and since, if it happens, it has to start somewhere, I’m not convinced your question is meaningful. The birth of modern science would have been difficult anywhere, but in no sense did the superstition, intolerance, and inquisitions of Christianity smooth this process.
But if I were forced to speculate about the particular factors that encouraged the growth of science, I would point first to the happy circumstance that the West was the first to uncover the fruitful notion of “conquest by measurement”. I don’t think this had anything to do with Christianity, any more than the invention of the place-value number system was due to some special quality of Hinduism.
I realize Christians are fond of claiming selected passages in the Old Testament as proof of Christ’s divinity, but surely you realize that the rest of us know that the fulfillment of extant prophecy is no more convincing than the feats of Carnac the Magnificent?
You’re assuming that the pre-scientific worldview included an “order of nature” whose violation would be “miraculous” and extraordinary. And you seem to be unaware that the ancient Near East suffered a plethora of charlatans — “magi” — who performed miraculous feats, in whose tradition Jesus squarely fell.
You also seem to be forgetful of the long tradition of “miracles” after Jesus. There are somewhere between 2500 and 10,000 saints recognized by the Catholic Church, each of whom performed the requisite number of “miracles” in order to exhibit sainthood. Turn on your TV and you are likely to find someone claiming miracles. It is against this backdrop that a claim for Christian beneficence to science appears especially ludicrous. And that’s even before we start counting the burnings.
Again: enlightenment, lovingkindness, karma. Why do you insist on some supernatural justification? I don’t feel I need anything supernatural to motivate me to go about my daily business.
I know you must think this recitation of catechism is logical, but it isn’t. There is absolutely no need to assert supernatural beings to justify morality.
Well, as I’ve already pointed out, there is not. Don’t you think an Absolute Being would create a bigger universe than the one we observe?
Language is a poor tool for… oh, wait, I’ve already explained this. The fact that you don’t seem to understand what I’m saying is evidence of the futility of using language to describe reality.
I’m not arguing with you, I’m enlightening you.
There are a lot of things I could teach you, if you had the time and interest. Most of them can’t be taught within the comment thread of a blog post. That doesn’t mean they aren’t worth learning. One might even say that things worth learning take some effort to learn.
You really need to let go of these preconceptions about truth and what people tell you. Or you will be reincarnated as a turtle.
Just kidding.
Sorry, bbeard, I must have done something wrong, as I think my latest response sank to the very bottom of the comments. I hope this one doesn’t.
This is putrid nonsense, Frank. How can one construe the (still hypothetical) Big Bang singularity as the “omnipotent Father”?
You’re welcome to harbor whatever religious beliefs make you happy and fulfilled. In fact, I encourage everyone to seek their own path to understanding the vastness of the aspects of the universe we cannot yet comprehend, especially contrasted with how little science has explained. But as a scientist, I am annoyed by your mad attempts to torture science to be in compliance with scripture. Many of your other columns are insightful and valuable. But nonsense likes this makes you an unnecessary embarrassment to science….
Bernard, I can understand your annoyance at the idea that Tipler’s identification of the (still hypothetical) singularity at the beginning of our universe is science. But what is wrong with it as a religious tract which claims that the (still hypothetical) singularity can be identified with the God of the Bible? Isn’t a scientist entitled to argue that his religion is consistent with science as he understands it? Certainly enough atheist scientists do it (which, as putative science, should also be annoying, yet we find few scientists objecting).
Isn’t a scientist entitled to argue that his religion is consistent with science as he understands it?
Frank is going way beyond an argument that his religion is consistent with science. He flatly states that Hawking, and by extension of consent, “science”, has proved that God exists. And that assertion is nonsense. Then he tips his hand that his assertion is true provided one substitutes the word “God” for the word “singularity”. Again, nonsense. That’s like saying that science has proved that the Earth orbits God, because science has proved that the Earth orbits the Sun, and you only have to substitute the word “God” for “Sun” and you’re done. A four-year-old child could spot the flaw in this argument. It’s nonsense.
I did say above in my reply to Sparrowhawk that Frank has not proved that the singularity is God, that he has assumed it, so it’s his faith – but it fits. I haven’t read any of his books. I’m assuming that they could be “translated” into a religious tract.
I am not strongly defending his thesis. I have my own ideas. They are not inconsistent with the idea that (if there is) a singularity at the beginning of time could be identified with the God of the Bible.
I guess I could say that your objections seem to be too fierce. What about all the supposed scientific authority in so many atheist tracts, eg Dawkins et al? Are they not bamboozling the public in the same way that Tipler is?
I agree that he steps over the line in claiming “proved”, but I read it as his defiance of the supposed scientific and intellectually superior position of atheists. It’s his personality. But “translated” into “interpretation”, “metaphysics”, a “religious tract”, is his position not tenable?
Other than the ridiculous claim that he has “proved” his position, can you disprove it? Is it actually inconsistent with physics?
The vast majority of grammatical English sentences are nonsense. It’s fruitless to try to disprove them. Science does not progress by trying to identify nonsense and disprove it. We try to find patterns and accumulate evidence until a coherent account of nature emerges. Valid science covers a pitiably small fraction of reality but it does it well enough to give us flush toilets, antibiotics, and robotic spaceships that land on other planets. All of which, to me, makes it worth defending. And BTW, we seldom use the word “proof” except in a mathematical context.
This only solidifies my belief that science these days has become faith based.
First, it is impossible to logically eliminate the possibility of God. A God that is omnipotent and omniscient is by definition unfalsifiable. Every time you cite evidence, you can simply say the divine faked it.
Like take this example: dinosaur bones. “Aha!” the atheist says, “where is that in the bible?” God left it out, you reply. “But the bones are 65+ million years old!” How do you know that? were you there when it died?” “No, but carbon dating says…” Well, then maybe God created the atoms to make it look like as if they were 65+ million years old. “And its buried far too deeply in the ground.” Oh come on, you aren’t even trying anymore.
And so on. That kind of logic works for any supposed proof against God. The best an atheist scientist can do is say that the world can be explained without the existence of God. And indeed except for that pesky issue of original cause, you mostly can.
Meanwhile Quantum Physics asserts that observation alters reality. That may or may not be true, but its not science. Science is observation and experimentation and reasoning from both on the assumption that the divine is not involved. So how exactly do you observe nonobservation? Its crap.
Furthermore what quantum physics suggests is that we all have the psychic ability to alter our own universe. Which would seem to support a lot of the religious concepts rather than refute them.
That being said with original causation, it seems hard to understand how anything can be the original cause. Like if you say it is God, well, okay, so um, where did He come from? I believe in God, but I am less than impressed with this classic so-called proof of God.
I would finally notice that what is counted as evidence of His existence is very selective with the atheists. The atheists would have us discount literally millions of eyewitnesses over the centuries witnessing what can only be described as divine events. Is there anything else in the history where we have so many witnesses but everyone wholesale discounts their accounts? For instance, no one alive has ever seen the American Revolution. But no one doubts it happened.
The fact is no one is likely to settle this question in my lifetime. Maybe Jesus will come down live on TV, but even that is likely to leave a few doubters. So the whole thing sounds like a waste of time. You either believe, or you don’t. I can’t help you.
Hiscross
That was needlessly ugly. Bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people. That is almost empirically true. If you claim to be a Christian, you are not representing my faith very well.
How much circumstantial evidence would it take to prove a murder with no body.
I think less evidence than athiests demand for proof of existence of an almighty being.
Incidently, my Faith increased immeasurably when I lost my religion
“So don’t despair, my fellow theists! The recent slew of best-selling books by atheists attacking religion, supposedly using science, is their last gasp. Remember the great words of Gandhi: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
We theists are now at stage three.”
Taking the last first: Careful, there Professor. Stage three just might be where ‘pride goeth before the fall’.
Interesting that he invokes Gandhi – who said “I like your Christ, but not your Christians”
This atheist – which means not a theist, not to be confused with anti-theist (methinks the Professor is confused on this) wonders why such a Quixotic endeavor from the Professor. Long settled – since before the days Protagoras who said:
‘As to the gods, I have no means of knowing either that they exist or do not exist. For many are the obstacles that impede knowledge, both the obscurity of the question and the shortness of human life.’
It seems to me that what Hawkins is saying is we have evidence now of what has long been taught in philosophy and epistemology for millenia: God is an unknowable in absolute terms. Indeed, I believe I am on safe ground by stating that God transcends the physical.
But I must note, the Professor doesn’t claim a potential proof of God-as-Absolute, he instead claims a proof of a Personal God is nearly at hand – we just need some money ….
Bingo!
In my 50+ plus years I have learned this: Anytime someone claims to know what God is, or what His specific purpose for us is, or even come close to those (as the Professor does) one should immediately do two things:
1. Check your perimeter.
2. Check your wallet.
For you are being conned, you are the prey. Think about it: What would Physics have to do with the concept of a Personal God? Isn’t that – by definition – subjective? Physics does not deal with the subjective, it deals with the objective reality.
So what is the Professor’s purpose? I can only speculate but I’d lay hard money down on this: Power, of the absolute kind. To be on the “winning team”. That power, rooted in tribalism, leading to fascism. Hasn’t humankind had enough of this?
Sparrowhawk’s comment is spot on — there is absolutely no basis in reason or reality to give any credence whatsoever to the notion that existence was created out of non-existence by an omnipotent, omniscient, supernatural being in another dimension. There is simply no reason to believe such a thing — the decision to believe it is wholly emotional and arbitrary, as demonstrated by the fact that the believers then proceed to make an arbitrary choice of which of dozens of conflicting religions to adopt and endorse.
But worst of all — by a very wide margin — is the disastrous attempt of “conservatives” to defend capitalism, freedom and America based on *faith*. When a politician like Sarah Palin declares that she is in favor of capitalism and freedom based on her faith in God, she is declaring that reason is on the side of capitalism’s and freedom’s enemies — she is declaring that in reason there is no reason to advocate either thing.
Nothing could be more disastrous to the cause of capitalism and freedom. It is the proximate cause of the failure of these religious conservatives over the last 50 years. Despite poll after poll showing that conservatives outnumber liberals by something like 2 to 1, it is the liberal agenda that has been inexorably advanced over America to the destruction of capitalism and freedom.
Declaring that reason is on the side of one’s enemies — and that one’s political convictions depend on mysticism and blind faith in the ghosts in another dimension — is hardly inspirational and will alienate the rational members in any society. Religion will be the political death of both “conservatives” and America.
What staggeringly closed-ended ignorance, refuted by its own words, to wit: There is absolutely nothing but basis in reason and reality to give nothing but credence to the notion that existence was created out of non-existence — such as Big Bangists naturally must — the definition of “creation” being the only important variable.
The As Yet Unknown is, logically and for want of another conceptual basis, a relatively “omnipotent, omniscient, supernatural “being” in another dimension”, those dimensions popping into and out of existence as physicists themselves are wont to have them! Call it “God” or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, but ascribe properties befitting either in order to begin to grasp what both are!
Before the big bang…there had yet to have been a big bang, no?! *
There is nothing but reason to assume that a priori is a valid state — the decision to believe it is utterly rational and inescapable, as demonstrated by the fact that a priori is as much a concrete concept as the question “why?”!
For crying out loud in the dark! Your assertion that “believers then proceed to make an arbitrary choice of which of dozens of conflicting religions to adopt and endorse” is utterly beside the point and says, literally, infinitely more about your biases and pet hatreds than the subject at hand.
Nonsense and irrelevant. Biases completely confirmed; “argument” surrendered.
Your secprogg sermonizing is laughable. Your level of thought, primitive.
—
*Don’t you get it? “God”, as an unproved concept, is the finest debunking of atheism possible. If God does not exist — and since God cannot be proved to exist except by reason — the atheist must contend with the concept of the pre-state pre-state. Believing in “God” does not define God; it merely adopts awe and in so doing, pushes the nature of God off to where it must necessarily lie: In Mystery!
Is man mad? Or is man — the mind, here — how the Universe asks the critical question why, pushes these explorations, and inescapable concludes that it does not know what it does not know?
The Atheist perpetually asks the wrong question. The Atheist argues against God by poking at religion. You’re at least a couple of orders of magnitude below the mark.
So, is the mind mad when it struggles with the eternal and inescapable question of Why, or is it supremely sane, having grasped its very purpose? Entire pyramids were built with rope and timber. Will you limit an entire and critical cause by impugning the tools at hand?
Ten, your comment is pure nonsense and drivel. You haven’t provided a whit of evidence, reason or logic to support the notion that existence was created by a supernatural being out of non-existence.
But I long ago gave up expecting rationality from religious people. Consider some of the nonsense they claim to believe.
Christianity, as one particular religion, is the belief that a cosmic Jewish zombie — who is three entities rolled into one and is thus his own father — can make you live forever, provided you communicate to him telepathically that you accept him as your master, so that he can remove from your soul an evil force that is present in mankind because a woman made from a rib was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magic tree.
I submit that anyone willing to swallow that load of lunacy is completely outside the reach of reason — and that certainly seems to be where you are.
To you I’d certainly hope it would be. The confirmation is appreciated. See, you’re simply not thinking (and one concludes it’s denial and not lack of ability):
Existence preconcludes non-existence.
Everything was preceded by Something.
How? Why?
Your answer? SARAH PALIN AND THE XTIANIST WINGNUTS! SEE, NO GOD!
But you conclude we exist.
But you conclude Existence exists because you entertain non-existence. Oops.
Of course you do — it’s how you shoehorn what you refuse to consider into what you refuse to accept in order to short-circuit what you cannot fathom. And you consider this…rational?
Whatever. This topic, is it about your cartoon of one religion? Weren’t you disabused of this notion already?
Ergo QED, right? You cartoon and deny therefore you are.
Existence preconcludes non-existence.
I take it you mean things that exist can’t not exist? Seems a bit tautalogical, but as good a place to start as any.
Everything was preceded by Something.
Here you’re on thin ice. I’m not convinced that you can’t have something that’s its own cause. But granting the premise, what necessitates the cause of the Universe to be “omnipotent, omniscient, supernatural ‘being’ in another dimension”? What evidence is there that it wasn’t a mechanistic result of some higher-order “universe”?
You and Prof. Tipler are just as bad as Prof. Dawkins. You cannot prove or disprove God using science or logic any more than you can turn a wrench with a hammer. It is the wrong tool for the job. That’s why there’s faith.
How? Why?
We don’t know, probably never will. The only clues we have to the laws outside our universe come from our universe itself. It is very easy and very difficult to extrapolate from a single point. As for why, why must there be a why? If you need a why then believe the Invisible Sky Father says so. It’s as provable as any other idea and if it helps you sleep at night so much the better.
Ten wrote:
To you I’d certainly hope it would be. The confirmation is appreciated. See, you’re simply not thinking (and one concludes it’s denial and not lack of ability):
You’ve yet to state a single fact that supports the notion that existence was created out of non-existence by a supernatural being. Declaring that I am “not thinking” is not proof of anything.
Everything was preceded by Something.
That is simply not true, and if it were, it would also apply to god and you’d be right back with the same problem.
The law of causality states that effects have causes — but it does not state that everything that exists — or, indeed, existence itself — may be viewed as an effect that demands an explanatory cause.
And so there is no basis whatsoever for the assertion, “Everything is preceded by something”. It is another wholly arbitrary, empty claim.
You haven’t provided a whit of evidence, reason or logic to support the notion that existence was created…
But you conclude we exist.
…by a supernatural being out of non-existence.
But you conclude Existence exists because you entertain non-existence. Oops.
Nonsense. I conclude that “existence exists” because it is a perceptually self-evident axiom presupposed by and implicit in ANY and ALL claims to knowledge of any sort whatsoever.
Of course you do — it’s how you shoehorn what you refuse to consider into what you refuse to accept in order to short-circuit what you cannot fathom. And you consider this…rational?
An empty claim, devoid of substance.
Christianity, as one particular religion, is the belief that a cosmic Jewish zombie — who is three entities rolled into one and is thus his own father — can make you live forever, provided you communicate to him telepathically that you accept him as your master, so that he can remove from your soul an evil force that is present in mankind because a woman made from a rib was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magic tree.
Whatever. This topic, is it about your cartoon of one religion? Weren’t you disabused of this notion already?
In other words, you know you cannot defend it and thus you seek to defuse it — that’s what the “Whatever” is intended to convey.
Ergo QED, right? You cartoon and deny therefore you are.
More nonsense. I have never claimed that my ability to “cartoon and deny” is proof of my existence.
The bottom line is that your position is that since I cannot disprove god’s existence, I am obligated to “consider it”. That’s a ridiculous notion. There are an infinite number of hypothetical things the existence of which cannot be disproved — witches, warlocks, UFOs, ghosts, goblins, demons, the devil, voodoo, zombies, vampires, etc — do you feel an equal obligation to believe in all of those things as well?
By the way, there is a very good reason why you cannot disprove the existence of something like “god”. It is because proof, which consists of facts, reasons, evidence, etc only pertains to that which DOES exist. That which does NOT exist will never give rise to any facts, reasons or evidence of its non-existence — it will never manifest itself in reality in any manner whatsoever.
This is why you “cannot prove a negative” and why the burden of proof must rest with the person claiming the existence of something. So far, you’ve failed to provide the slightest evidence for god’s existence, much less come close to proving it.
You’re a master of self-supporting circularity, Mr. Smith. Tacitly boasting that you can’t know all, you prohibit experience and knowledge that falls outside your narrow definitions and experiences. Assuming it’s the domain in which God is found, which is highly suspect, science requires open mindedness, not that sort of rote, anticipatory denial.
Not so incidentally, the concept of God tends to center on the privilege and obligation of the human mind to not be a puppet — the free will argument. IOW, every thin demand you issue that God demonstrate Its existence to you naturally falls on deaf ears. Its, mine, the next man’s.
The claim that a believer then in effect promotes proofs of the negative is more than a little ironic when a narrow mind like yours, presumably, contents itself with no end of explorations of the unknown, calling it science.
I demand you produce a Terran world orbiting another star, supporting humanoid life. Yet you seek on, faithfully. Multiply that times a thousand. A million. I’m betting you’re still not blushing at the absurd double-standard you secproggs thrive on.
The difference between us is that I don’t begrudge you that pursuit; I simply state that you may not begrudge others theirs based on your narrow demand that God play by your rules when every serious exploration of God shows that’s not exactly in the cards.
If seeking what you have no evidence of is science, then seeking God — undefined by any sensory nature but of Whom there is nothing but logical and spiritual evidence in the vast beauty and reason of Its powering the highest forms of spirituality — must be…divine. (Some thinkers present strong arguments for physical evidence as well — what spins the electron, what motivates the Forces, what animates the particles and states, what moves the Universe to be the Universe. Is it turtles all the way down, or is it turtles down to a point beyond which they just hover? It’s your choice, so choose one…)
And sure, this is where you scoff. So be it. But you do so having just added two important questions to those you already deny exist. I don’t take you seriously because you don’t take logic seriously.
Yet you’d probably continually assert that science is not religion and that the spiritual mind somehow owes you a scientific debt of experience, that built on your preconceptions and definitions. The spiritual mind is already on a trek of experience — having made the step beyond, it finds there nothing but confirmation. Looking back on ignorance, it finds that from this side, all the pieces fit and beauty, light, and life add up.
I’ll ask you again: Is the spiritual mind mad?
See, you’re still in the wrong domain. This is philosophy; the natural sciences are a door down on your left.
Of course it’s irrational to you. We know that- “For the preaching of the Cross is foolishness to them that are perishing, but to we who are being saved by it, it is the power of God.” It’s also the most irrational thing to reject, because for what reason would many people choose to die when they knew for certain what the Truth was, unless they were testifying to the Truth and held it as more important than their own lives?
Gee, when you put it that way, it makes Christianity sound like a tissue of lies
But it does remind me of Kirk’s Question: “Why does God need a starship?”
It reminds me that anything can be mocked.
I think that you profess sympathy for Buddhism. Is Buddhism inconsistent with the teachings of Christ?
Speaking of mockery, or the abstinence from thereof, have you heard of this conversation between Einstein and George Sylvester Viereck (the questioner) as reported in Saturday Evening Post October 26th, 1929?
This is reported in Max Jammer’s Einstein and Religion [Princeton University Press, 1999]. The book makes it absolutely clear, however, that Einstein was no theist, but a deist in the tradition of Baruch Spinoza. Christians can console themselves with the thought that Einstein believed in a deterministic universe which would leave no room for a theistic God, and he appears to have been wrong about that.
That conversation is reported in Chapter 1, if you want to check it.
I’m not seeing a “Reply” link to your comment so I’ll reply to mine.
I’m not sure where you’re going with this. But if I recall the Gospels correctly, Jesus replaced the Ten Commandments with Two: (1) Love God, (2) Love your neighbor as yourself. So, (1) Yes, and (2) No. There is no deity in Buddhism. But modern Christianity and Buddhism are both focused on lovingkindness, so there is compatibility, if not consistency, in outlook.
From the standpoint of epistemology, the two religions are very different. Christianity is based on revelation and faith. Buddhism is based on insight and enlightenment. Buddha said that faith is only a vehicle, a means to an end, while Christians elevate faith to a central principle. So to some extent Christianity leans toward obscurantism, while Buddhism is more inclined to free inquiry.
No, I was not familiar with this particular exchange. Einstein famously deployed deist language to describe his worldview, though. I don’t think it has any bearing on the validity of general relativity. Einstein also had some very peculiar views about quantum mechanics, which time has shown to be wrong. So science casts that part of his work aside.
Galileo was a devout Catholic, despite his being the very paradigm for free inquiry victimized by Christian intolerance. Science sets aside his religious views, just as we ignore his theories about the nature of comets.
Newton spent the last half of his life studying divinity. Science ignores this effort, just as we have moved on from the corpuscular theory of light.
Also FWIW Heisenberg was a virulent anti-Semite. We ignore this when we discuss his matrix approach to quantum mechanics.
I think all these examples are cautionary tales about how hard it is to escape one’s cultural milieu. We swim in a cultural sea that distorts everything we see and think. It is mildly amazing that science, as a system of gathering knowledge, works so well despite these biases.
Christianity is based on revelation and faith. Buddhism is based on insight and enlightenment.
I think that revelation and insight are the same thing. I also think that enlightenment is a consequence of faithful seeking.
I understand that Christian monasticism has its roots in Buddhist monasticism.
“there is absolutely no basis in reason or reality to give any credence whatsoever to the notion that existence was created out of non-existence by an omnipotent, omniscient, supernatural being in another dimension.”
And you KNOW this ABSOLUTELY based on what evidence? If you do know, you must be God!
“There is simply no reason to believe such a thing — the decision to believe it is wholly emotional and arbitrary”
Really? Have you read Josh McDowell, C.S. Lewis, Ravi Zacharias? They, and others appeal to historicity, philosophy, and logic.
“Religion will be the political death of both ‘conservatives’ and America.”
America was much more religious back in the 1700s and 1800s; if what you say is true, why/how did we survive past those centuries?
Layne asked:
“there is absolutely no basis in reason or reality to give any credence whatsoever to the notion that existence was created out of non-existence by an omnipotent, omniscient, supernatural being in another dimension.”
And you KNOW this ABSOLUTELY based on what evidence?
I know it based on the fact that no one has produced any reason to believe otherwise.
“There is simply no reason to believe such a thing — the decision to believe it is wholly emotional and arbitrary”
Really? Have you read Josh McDowell, C.S. Lewis, Ravi Zacharias? They, and others appeal to historicity, philosophy, and logic.
Tell me the reason to believe such a thing — if you have one.
“Religion will be the political death of both ‘conservatives’ and America.”
America was much more religious back in the 1700s and 1800s; if what you say is true, why/how did we survive past those centuries?
We survived as long as we did because of our Constitution and because the Founding Fathers insisted on a separation of church and state. We will ultimately perish because of what I wrote in my last post: those alleged defenders of freedom, the “conservatives”, have offerred only faith-based defenses — thereby implicitly conceding REASON to be on the side of those seeking the destruction of our freedom.
Mortimer Adler said it best when he said “God is that thing that is capable of exnihilation”(creating something from nothing). Everything else said about God is mythology.
Hawking is begging the question – he attacks a strawman. M-theory calls into question the belief, in some creeds, that God created everything. But whether He created the universe or is an artifact thereof is akin to the medieval debates about angels dancing on the head of a pin – much ado about nothing.
The strongest argument for the existence of a supernatural creator is the “argument from design” – popularized by the Rev. William S. Paley, ca. 1850. The more our understanding of reality has grown the argument grows stronger. The most complicated structure we have found, DNA, is hundreds of orders of magnitude more complex than others found in nature. There is no satisfactory, much less plausible, explanation of its origin within our understanding of physical laws – not natural equals supernatural.
Any denial of the existence of God must answer the fundamental question: “Whence cometh DNA?”.
There is no satisfactory, much less plausible, explanation of its origin within our understanding of physical laws – not natural equals supernatural.
150 years ago there were no “satisfactory” [to whom, anyway? You?] answers to, e.g., the dilemma of dinosaur bones. This one’s been solved.
Anti-science/anti-reason religious types have stupidly waged war against reason since Kepler (and the renaissance period in general) and at this point the faithers have lost **every** single battle. God has been pronounced as the answer in knowledge gaps to the point that the entire faither argument is known widely as “God of the gaps.”
God is here. (points to gap)
Ummm… no, you can explain that bit with theory X.
Oh. God is here, then. (narrower gap)
Ummm… no, you can explain that bit with theory Y.
Oh. (Rinse, lather, and repeat.)
Indeed, one of today’s knowledge gaps is the lack of a complete blow by blow explanation describing precisely how DNA came to be. But… so? The history of the advancement of science says that the faithers will lose this time as well. They have yet to win. They won’t win. They can’t. All they have — indeed, the ONLY thing they have, is the ability to point out the obvious: the existence of a knowledge gap, as if the scientific community is too dim to grasp the presence of incomplete knowledge.
None of this ought to have any bearing whatsoever on god’s existence. Some people like to think god exists and cares. It gives themn solace and comfort, and this is a positive thing that ought to be encouraged.
The problem of course is that many people are unwilling to keep their belief private. Oh, no. They have to parade their ignorance as if it were virtuous and try to use this as a way to dictate or affect public policy. I find it humourous to imagine that the same people who consider themselves virtuous and campaign against embryonic stem cells will be astonished to find themselves in one of the circles of the hell they believe in for standing in the way of research that can save lives. Read Inferno: Escape From Hell by Niven and Pournelle for a fun example of unintended consequences.
They have to parade their ignorance as if it were virtuous and try to use this as a way to dictate or affect public policy.
As opposed to the atheist regime of Stalinist Russia?
Heh. Some faiths are more equal than others.
Very true. Some of us are better at ‘fantasy” and win. Some of us are dumber and accept some book somebody wrote that said god spoke to them..others, get whisked away in light beams and return pregnant..hey,who knew. Until you can prove, no conjecture please, that god exists, there will be a thousand different views and people touting them…
Mine is the original religion
Mine is the newest religion
Mine is the religion god spoke with “exclusively”
Mine is the religion ..blahblahblah
All in all, we cannot prove nor disprove. So, it is what you as a human decide to believe and how it makes you feel.
Religion is a box made to control man.
Spirituality is a freedom of your heart and mind to accept what makes you feel good, helps you treat your fellow man with compassion.
So who do you think came first…Hammurabi or Moses with those 10 laws to live by?
Man kind needs to think outside the box and not just accept what the local box religion says..
As opposed to the atheist regime of Stalinist Russia?
There’s a vast gulf between basic atheism as being utterly ambivalent re gods and a modern era political regime abusing “atheism” as a substitute opiate for the masses in the form of a malevolent control mechanism. Those who invoke the Stalin era deliberately (or stupidly) conflate intent with ability: Torquemada, the Crusades, etc could have easily had the same ridiculously high death count had these occured in an era of 20th century populations and technology.
Of course, you’d be required to actually KNOW something about the pre-20th century era (and atheism) to fully grasp the size of this gulf, and I doubt that you (or most of the uber-religious types, for that matter) do. Therefore I’m expecting the lame and otherwise brain dead death count argument to be continued by others using different phrasing.
Dear Mr. Alston,
I think you read far more into my comment than was actually there. Yes, the “God of the Gaps” argument has been raised many times. As you pointed out, it has been refuted many times. But until it was refuted it was a valid argument.
You wrote: “The history of the advancement of science says that the faithers will lose this time as well.”.
The history of science is just that – history. It is the story of actual events. Bookies make a living off of people who believe that past is prologue. It seems to me that the belief that science will eventually explain the origin of DNA is as much a leap of faith as those of us who do not.
It seems to me that the belief that science will eventually explain the origin of DNA is as much a leap of faith as those of us who do not.
So…. in the previous 900 times faith has tried to crap on science it has lost, therefore faith is owed one? Nah. Given the track record there’s no reason outside pointless hope that the 901st battle will come to a different result than the 900 losses faith has already endured. This isn’t a coin toss, and I’m guessing that math isn’t your friend.
I really can’t fathom your position nor those like it. It seems that you could simply accept that Natural Selection etc is the best explanation of the mechanism used by your creator and be grateful man’s reason allowed you a peek behind the curtain… i.e. if anything accepting Natural Selection ought to *bolster* your faith, not dampen it. It’s sad that whomever taught you about your creator was so unimaginative as to conjure up such a weak deity.
Many of the faithful accept man’s ability to perceive Natural Selection as but another facet of the creator’s plan. This is understandable; denying reality as shown by science is a bit like denying that the moon orbits the earth. As Galileo had put it, his job is to tell the church how the heavens go, and the church’s job is to tell him how to go to heaven.
Faith needn’t collide with science.
In the article Hawkings says M-Theory can show that god isn’t required to have created the universe. This is almost certainly true. This doesn’t say that god didn’t create the universe, just that god wasn’t a requirement. The job of science, as per Galileo, is to explain how things work. Faith tells us why they work (i.e. the purpose of the universe, if any.) For all we know god created a universe for us (and others) for his/her own reasons; e.g. assume a universe is self-creating but even so is mathematically unlikely to produce sentient life. Nothing prevents god/gods from fudging this and creating one that certainly does produce sentient life.
Faith needn’t collide with science. And yet the faithful carefully orchestrate such collisions on an alarmingly regular basis. Why? Who here is being manipulated, and by whom and for what reason? Are the taskmasters of the church truly working on your behalf?
“This is almost certainly true.” An admirable formulation; the rest is not so good.
Dear Mr. Alston,
You certainly have a vivid imagination. You presume things about me that have no basis in what I have written.
Math is not my friend? I won’t bother with the whole magilla – suffice it to say that I have taken post-gradute classes in mathematics, have muddled my way through quantum mechanics and the tensor calculus of General Relativity and spent 45 years designing information systems.
This is indeed a coin-toss. The results are in no way affected by the prior results of seemingly similar questions.
You seem to think there is a war between religious believers and science. This is a very naive view. It is rather akin to writing a history of soccer that concentrated on the violent hooligans that have disrupted some events. The Catholic Church happens to agree with Darwin in princilple. A Catholic Priest, Jacques LeMaitre, orgignated the “Big Bang” theory. Theologians have no arguments with science. Scientism is another matter altogether.
As for me, I do not attend church nor do I subscribe to any organized doctrine. I just sorta rolled my own – based upon reading thousands of books and thinking about it for a bit more than 60 years.
Regards,
Roy
The human ego is confounded by something greater than its imagined reckoning. Logic and other attributes of left brain thinking are inadequate tools for measuring the ideals of omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscent, yet from our lizard brains upwards we sense a striving to define what we do not, can not, and want to know. Good luck on the impossible!
Hawking has taken on himself a burden and a responsibility completely unsuited to his identity. He has forgotten that he is a human being.
God (who calls Himself I AM THAT I AM) is not dependent upon the “proofs of humans” to feel free to continue in His identity. Neither is He waiting for a consensus on our part as to whether or not what He says about Hismelf is true.
It’s no wonder that people of faith drive Hawking and obama crazy, so they define us and deride us(clinging to my Bible here). Then, having defined us and derided us they confidently go on their way in their self-given satisfaction, knowing all is right in their world (as they have defined it).
Psalm 2 still says that God in heaven “will laugh and have them in derision.”
So any self-referential claim is valid? If I write on a pizza napkin that God Exists, must God exist?
Of course not. I guess you don’t know that there’s a difference between God “self-referencing” and you “self-referencing?”??? I’m not skilled enough to debate you on semantics, but trust me in this: there’s a considerable difference between you making notes on pizza napkins and God making “self-referencing” declarations. You’ll have to take up the details of that truth with Him. He is quite capable of speaking for Himself.
“You’ll have to take up the details of that truth with Him. He is quite capable of speaking for Himself.”
Except clearly He isn’t – indeed you could reasonably say that He is extraordinarily quiet on all fronts. Faith is admirable but to say that someone who exists purely on faith alone can speak for themselves is…well…a stretch. Sorry to be a smart-ass but reason also has its place.
Sure, in Scripture, right? And had it been written on a pizza napkin? In my hand?
See, you cannot define inspiration. Your faith is admirable, but your grasp on the circularity of “I believe it because it’s written” is not.
The larger our understanding of science becomes the greater it proves the existence of a creator or singularity. The current young earth theorists are even finding it hard to support their claims with factual science. The big bang itself proves that conditions that are so precise had to have happened for life to begin, including the exact materials needed. Good luck indeed!
the trouble all these philosophers have is that they cannot understand or accept “infinite”. yet it is right in front of their face.
It is depressing, disappointing and sad how many athiests,deists, agnostics and other God-deniers there are on this site!
Unfortunately for all of you, denying His existence does not make Him go away. Nor does it remove your obligation to Him.
I pity all of you!
It is depressing, disappointing and sad how many theists and other Dog-believers there are on this site!
Unfortunately for all of you, believing in Its existence does not make It real. Nor does it create an obligation to It.
I pity all of you!
God´s existence is provocative, that is why. It is like showing a red rag to a bull: an atheist must simply rage. Just as has been preordained.
So if I “preordain” that theists will rage at the non-existence of God, can I pass the donation plate, too?
No no no….. dont give in to that nonsense…it is not rage…it is reason.
Disagreement is not rage. If you wish to ascribe false emotions to others then you are deliberately putting forward a false argument.
You guys give me a belly laugh! Never fail to stoop to the bait. Ought to make you think.
The burden of proof is on the god-people, not on atheist. The simplest explanation of the universe is that it simply exists an has always existed without any need for a creation explanation. But go on, keep believing in your thunder gods.
Crusader:
Both Hawkings and Tipler would agree on one thing. Your assertion that ” The simplest explanation of the universe is that it simply exists an has always existed without any need for a creation explanation.” is contradicted by scientific observation. The evidence for the bang is overwhelming. The red shift (expanding universe) and the 3 degree Kelvin cosmic background temperature is only explaned by an explosive expansion from a single point. A steady state universe would not show any signs of an outward expansion and the cosmic background temperature would not be uniform. A steady state theory would have to come up with complex special rules to explain this. Perhaps you can succeed where Fred Hoyle failed.
Explosive expansion, yes. Single point, not necessarily.
The cosmic microwave background temperature, BTW, dates back to an era when the universe was about 400,000 years old, so the CMB does not by itself differentiate theories with a singularity at t=0 from other theories in the class of Big Bang theories. Some of these other theories, BTW, are based on models of the inflationary universe which extend arbitrarily far back in time before the Big Bang (so much for the “First Cause”!)
And these musings will remain theories for all time because those events are non-observable. All we can ever know about is thee bang.
Well, in principle, models based on inflationary cosmologies can have observable consequences. For instance, inflationary cosmology makes a prediction about the correlation function of the tiny differences between the local and the average temperature of the CMB. That such correlations are actually observed is evidence that the inflationary theory is basically correct. And we can do this even if the inflationary era itself cannot be seen in telescopes…. So it may well be the case that the self-reproducing inflationary universe leaves some kind of ‘fingerprint’ on the universe, perhaps a correlation function of dark matter density, or perhaps a predictable density of magnetic monopoles. We just don’t know enough yet.
So your pessimism is premature, I think….
bbbeard:
It’s good have a civil discussion.
The data only supports an phased expansion of s single universe. As I understand it the bubble off the bubble off bubble was dependent on black holes being a gateway to another universe. Hawkings has shot that one down even though it was his work to begin with. Unlike so called climate scientists Hawkings stands behind his work and admits his mistakes.
On another point, the observed variation in temperature is quite small and could be a product of pure randomness. Not saying it is only that random variation cannot be excluded.
Perhaps the reason that fundamental physics and cosmology have stagnated is that we learned all we can because we have learned everything that is learnable. All the rest is speculation. I know this is distasteful to many scientists but that maybe the reality. So whether you go with M-theory or God is equally valid, not it the post-modern sense, but because we are only left with our imaginations. Either Hawkings or Tipler is right. The only way we will know is if Tipler has the right answer. If Hawkings is correct we will just fall into oblivion as ignorant as we were on the day of our birth.
The phenomenon I’m talking about involves inflationary bubbles that are the result of instability of the inflaton field, not the topological peculiarities of general relativity.
The mathematical concern is the spatial correlation function of the CMB “defect”, i.e. the difference between the local temperature for a given fraction of sky and the global average of the CMB (subtracting out the dipole due to Earth’s motion relative to the CMB, of course). Two spots of sky that are close together will have temperature defects that are nearly the same. As you increase the distance between the spots the defects have a correlation that depends on distance in a way that can be measured precisely and also compared with the predictions of inflation theory. And no, it’s not just random noise — it has a particular signature.
Ok, I’m convinced. All you can say is that the expansion from the singularity proceded in seveal pulses culminating in the bang. Anything beyond that is speculative. As Steven Weinberg said in the first three minutes the initial conditions were destoyed in the bang.
People have such limited imaginations. Even if the universe had existed from the infinite past, it could still be created. Here, I’ll create one myself to illustrate:
Argumentadinfinitum was a universe that had always existed. It was peopled with scientists, philosophers, and religious people, and all they ever did was argue.
I just created that universe. My time axis is not the same as my universe’s time axis, which is all that is needed.
=”The burden of proof is on the god-people, not on atheist. The simplest explanation of the universe is that it simply exists an has always existed without any need for a creation explanation.”
yep: the Universe [I think] is infinite in every respect. there is no other way for it to exist. sadly, a lot of folks simple cannot apprehend “infinite”: no beginning; no end.
as far as “scientific” evidence goes the only thing consistent with “science” is that today’s theory will be superseded by a new theory tomorrow. all this shows over time is that we really don’t know much at all.
In an infinite universe all things that can happen, will happen however unlikely or improbable. Thus, the infinite universe contains the Jewish/Christian/Islamic god, who will be found to have somehow ‘created the universe. It also contains every other god, and aliens, and Santa Claus.
This idea answers nothing….well, it doesn’t provide the answers theists and atheists seek.
An infinitely old universe would have died the heat death, so it is thermodynamically impossible. Face it, there was a Beginning; that fact is obvious from thermodynamics, and there is no way to weasel out of it.
Why does existence exist, Crusader? No strawmen please.
Ten, in 30, asks:
Why does existence exist, Crusader? No strawmen please.
Because non-existence cannot exist. Existence is the only thing that CAN exist. Period.
Non-existence cannot exist? Which means existence…must?
Must? By what Law?
Ah, but aren’t you faithful…
Ten wrote:
Non-existence cannot exist?
That is correct.
“Non-existence” is to existence as the “unreal” is to reality — neither can exist.
“Non-existence” is not some sort of alternative form of being or state of existence that competes with existence for metaphysical significance. “Non-existence” is not a thing, it is the absence of a thing, it is only a concept for the blank, the void that results when something that previously existed ceases to exist.
Existence exists — and only existence exists — and it always has and always will.
Wait a minute. If non-existence cannot exist, then what have you done with Roy Rogers? He used to exist!
Well, as long as you’re trading in baldfaced assertions, you’re dead wrong, of course: Do explain why the nature of nothing isn’t somehow nothingness.
Explain why God — unknown and undefined, except by what appear to be spiritual circumstantial evidence, to coin a phrase — is simply impossible, but material Existence is absolutely certain. We can leave order and entropy and thermodynamics aside for now, just to make it easier.
This ought to be good.
Law of Non-Contradiction. Non-existence isn’t feasible because something existing must verify it. If there is something, there’s not nothing. And, yes, it must, MUST be verified. Or are you simply willing to believe it’s there by faith???
Inapplicable. For example, possessing a dual nature, light is simultaneously both particle and wave. Non-existence hasn’t been proved to preclude existence and existence hasn’t been proved to preclude non-existence. It seems existence is likewise dualistic, just as God is as seen through man’s mind.
The conundrum of “when” non-existence became existence is just as thorny for the atheist as the theist, and in fact seems thornier for the atheist. The theist merely displaces the question, that being the domain of God, or less figuratively, the Creator, whether it be conscious of whether it be extranatural process.
I admit and even welcome that I do not know what I do not know. The atheist prevents me not knowing in certain ways according to his faith and dogma.
The abstract “God” simply provides an exit or entrance for that which is unknown. On the other hand, God is a matter for philosophers and theologians. Atheists run afoul of both the logical arguments — not that God is provable but that God, apparently by Its nature, is not disprovable — and they run afoul of the science they attempt to coop.
That’s circular. Perhaps consistent with the fundamentals of quantum mechanics, the observer changes things and if there is no observer — if there is no verification — there is simply no state. Hence, void. Your/our inability to conceive of it does not prove it is not a state, albeit a stateless one.
Of course. And?
If I believe it, it then cannot exist, my observation eliminating the possibility of it existing, per the above. The observer just changed the experiment, and should an experiment exist, the stateless void is not stateless.
And if no verification exists?
So, is it turtles all the way down or not? Another question remains: What animated the first atom, electron, quark, superparticle? What animates them all? Are you simply willing to believe they’re all there by faith?
Ten, unable to reply to you direct, but after considering this a little I think that there is something to this that I’ve never seen discussed before. That is, that supposed strange nature found in quantum physics where particles will seem to behave differently based on observation may also be analogous in Logic, as well. This applies to the subject of Existence in an interesting way. If I were to argue Existence formally using Modern Symbolic Logic the class of all things in Existence will have a complementary class of all things Not in Existence (where there are no objects we can offer to that class). Or if I have a class of Nothing, I will have a complement of Something (of which, only the Something class will have objects in it.) In this way, while we are formally observing Nothing, it exists, for our purposes, and as a class, and as we reason about it. An empty class. And in this way I say it is like a particle.
However, if I am to “informally” consider Nothing I might decide that non-existence has no material implication, as I do (…I am not forced by logic to accept Nothingness as more than a concept), or one might suggest that it is understood based on Intuitive Logic (as it seems you do), in either case we may be attempting to explain Existence where it is now behaving like a wave. I am expounding on the crest, and you the trough, or maybe it’s vice versa, but perhaps we are seeing the calculus of the same wave. Also, I would venture to say that a conceptual wave that describes Existence would be of such magnitude that to explain it’s trough and crest would seem like contradictions. …The crest being right in your face, and the trough being infinitely receding.
Yes! It seems this occurs now and again…perhaps leading certain Eastern mystics, when asked about the nature of natures, to smile and go silent. The Is, is, all reason aside, and straddles paradox. Surely God smiles, or more awesomely, surely we find Reality such that we conclude that in this way, God smiles. But why?
I find that the best argument for God is that which demands that there is no God: In so relegating God to the projections of Mind, we should turn attention to the nature of Mind instead. Are we mad? Do those of us who adopt the spiritual as being as real as the physical (for the physical is decidedly odd at the small end of the spectrum) not find immense logic there? And meaning? Do we begin to grasp Why here? Why would we do such a thing?
And, at this point the secprogg “scientist” closes the venue and declares victory.
Yes, and in formulating Nothing, can we establish that it is at the least a construct, one that may have preceded Something and may, seemingly consistent with the Laws of Something as we know them, follows Something when Something ceases to exist?
If not, I keep asking what animates and powers Something. Every last action and state in material existence has a cause and effect status, do they not? Then how would we suspend those terms at precise moments when they either spontaneously originate of annihilate themselves? And by what Laws then and there, should “then” and “there” be meaningful?
To science, everything is interdependent, except the very causes of existence. I find this as remarkable as the notion that Nothing simply cannot be the default “state”, no explanation given and by that metric, none admittedly possible.
I’d summarize my remarks with these: How is it that Something, being active and decaying, and in that akin to all states that exist “above” the void of the stateless — such as light vs darkness, temperature versus zero energy, and so on — is assumed to be the default and Nothing is assumed to be impossible?
Secondly, considering that the implicit atheist argument is that statelessness is impossible, why aren’t heat, light, and energy self-generating? More correctly, since in a way they are self-generating — they all emerge from the action of other consequences built upon the quantum universe — where do those actions derive their motivation?
The question about turtles forces the mind to confront that one of two impossibilities exist (“impossibilities” meaning, as with all quantum properties as I understand but a tiny portion of them to be) that either everything is built upon an infinite progression of ever smaller particles (with every one of them dancing its dance simply because it does) or that at some “point”, say at the level of the superstring, they simply animate themselves.
How an abstract like “God” be found hostile to these explorations is a mystery. “God” is vastly less alien to reality than the theory that in effect, Everything is self-generating and self-animating. I’d say the default condition should be Nothing, not that in Something, a Universe exists that by that existence, numerically defies all reasonable odds for doing so. The numbers are ludicrous…yet here we are, existing in the most exquisite order and tension. Including that dualism is a faint but real property of logic! Such joy.
What spins the atom? What turns the planets? We know what we call them and we calculate either to impossibly small tolerances, but to this day we have no idea why they do what they do. Rather, we faithfully depend on them for existence itself.
Proving something is different than explaining something.
Fire was proven before it could be explained. Early man mastered the making of fire but could not explain how it occurred.
I am a Jew. If G-d did not exist neither would I.
I am proof of G-d but not an explanation of G-d.
” A G-d you could explain I could not worship. ” Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits
It is very true that there always seems to be something whose existence is unexplained that “just exists because it does so stop asking why”, in Hawking’s case is quantum gravity, to explain the universe.
Godel the mathematician and best friend to Einstein created a proof for the existecne of God.
Scientists today still do not understand the full implications of his work or skim by them because they
do not understand them at all. There is no such thing as time; only measured interval…
We are made of star dust in world made of star dust. What other miracles do you want?
I heard something similar from a Nobel Prize winner. Chemistry, not physics it was.
I like G d. I like people who like G d. The people who don’t like G d? In general they’re not as likable as the rest of us.
“I like G d. I like people who like G d. The people who don’t like G d? In general they’re not as likable as the rest of us.”
Well, there’s no accounting for taste. I personally know many likable people, some of whom are religious and some not. As far as I can tell, there’s no correlation between religious belief and likability. When deciding whether I like people, I tend focus less on how religious they are, and more on whether they behave like smug, condescending, self-righteous douchebags.
Religion is so much more than some kind of explanation of the origin of the Universe, and engages human consciousness on so many other levels.
When it comes to what you might call “the sensation of consciousness” itself, science is unable to shed any light. All attempts get tied up in knots. “Brain activity” hardly explains anything except for the nature of the ever-changing display within consciousness, not consciousness itself. However this avenue of inquiry is more likely to lead to Buddhism than to Christianity.
Prof. Tipler doesn’t here get into all the details of his identification of the cosmological singarity with God (likely due to space considerations), focusing mainly on the definition of God as being the uncaused first cause, a definition held by all the Abrahamic religions.
Yet Tipler’s Omega Point Theory demonstrates that the known laws of physics (i.e., the Second Law of Thermodynamics, general relativity, quantum mechanics, and the Standard Model of particle physics) require that the universe end in the Omega Point: the final form of the cosmological singularity and state of infinite informational capacity identified as being God.
The Omega Point is omniscient, having an infinite amount of information and knowing all that is logically possible to be known; it is omnipotent, having an infinite amount of energy and power; and it is omnipresent, consisting of all that exists. These three properties are the traditional quidditative definitions of God held by almost all of the world’s leading religions. Hence, by definition, the Omega Point is God.
And given an infinite amount of computational resources, per the Bekenstein Bound, recreating the exact quantum state of our present universe is trivial, requiring at most a mere 10^123 bits (the number which Roger Penrose calculated), or at most a mere 2^10^123 bits for every different quantum configuration of the universe logically possible (i.e., the powerset, of which the multiverse in its entirety at this point in universal history is a subset of this powerset). So the Omega Point will be able to resurrect us using merely an infinitesimally small amount of total computational resources: indeed, the multiversal resurrection will occur between 10^-10^10 and 10^-10^123 seconds before the Omega Point is reached, as the computational capacity of the universe at that stage will be great enough that doing so will require only a trivial amount of total computational resources.
Additionally, we now have the Feynman-Weinberg-DeWitt quantum gravity/Standard Model Theory of Everything (TOE) correctly describing and unifying all the forces in physics: of which also inherently produces the Omega Point cosmology. For the details on the Omega Point cosmology and the quantum gravity TOE, see:
F. J. Tipler, “The structure of the world from pure numbers”, Reports on Progress in Physics, Vol. 68, No. 4 (April 2005), pp. 897-964. http://math.tulane.edu/~tipler/theoryofeverything.pdf
Reports on Progress in Physics is the leading peer-reviewed journal of the Institute of Physics, Britain’s main professional body for physicists. It has a higher impact factor than Physical Review Letters, which is the most prestigious American physics journal.
A fascinating comment.
I understand that the odds of the Earth existing so as to allow (or cause?) life (including the Mind, staggeringly) are virtually infinitesimal. I understand too that the odds of the Universe having the properties needed for existence itself are less than one in the number of particles that exist. It’s a kinda big number and evocative of your comment. Thank you.
At some point one concludes that the mystery well exceeds the fact obvious to the Atheist that in not Knowing, s/he knows that s/he knows.
I.e., there are no absolutes. Except that there are absolutely no absolutes.
Sparrowhawk and similar: why does one need a positive proof to speculate on the cause of the universe? You think atheists are logically sound in presuming that the universe was not created by a God as understood in contemporary theism until you have evidence? I generally do not conflate the likelihood of something with the existence of evidence much less my ability to perceive same. Think about that for a second. Meanwhile, your hubris requires you to do that. Think about that for a second, also. You’ll make the connection. There may well be a God and you may well not have the capacity to interpret the evidence… correct? But my point is simply that your hubris is unjustified.
By the way, you rely almost exclusively on faith every single day. Any one of the truths you accept without evidence might be a lie in ways that aren’t immediately clear to yourself. That being the case, it’s hard to take a smug atheist as seriously as I am even by responding to your post.
lennyb asked:
Sparrowhawk and similar: why does one need a positive proof to speculate on the cause of the universe?
You can stop right there.
The notion that the universe — i.e. existence — is an *effect* requiring a cause is a contradiction. Existence is everything that exists — existence is ALL that exists, because non-existence, by definition, does NOT exist. To assert, therefor, that there must be some external, outside-of-existence CAUSE for existence is to contradict the meaning of the concept.
Existence exists — and only existence exists. It is not an *effect* to be explained by a *cause*.
That’s a cute word game. Until any word signifying a complete and utter void enters the discussion.
In this thread and without proof you’ve handily excoriated the negative-provers by yourself proving (somehow) that something that you say could not exist may not exist. (Remember: QED!) Now prove that a state without any property whatsoever — a Prior State of statelessness — could not have existed.
For extra credit, what spun the first atom, Mr. Smith? More turtles?
More rope?
Why cannot men just accept the fact that existence exists?
Existence doesn’t care about feelings.
The point of insisting that the “first cause” be a conscious entity rather than reality itself, is to permit oneself the hope that if reality does not fit one’s wishes, one can simply appeal to that consciousness to change the inconvenient fact.
The reason why religionists hate the Left is not because they are “atheist”; it’s because they eliminate the middledeity and simply claim to author reality themselves.
Feelings? Is this about feelings?
Why does existence exist, Crusader? No strawmen please.
Where does your Creator come from, Ten?
I’m quite sure I have no idea.
And your Universe?
How is adulation of one’s status as a Theist any different than adulation of anything other than God?
Why even waste anyone’s time trivializing spirituality by politicizing it?
You know what you have to do to enter the kingdom of heaven and you haven’t done it so why preach to the rest of us?
Would you like me to send you some money?
Since I am not in the business of being popular, I will confess that I am appalled.
It’s like the last 2500 years of philosophy and theology never existed.
It’s like materialism and “scientism” were the only terrain of any discussion.
I’m not going to comment about the article, nor about the comments.
And instead of writing a lot of words I will quote from an Poet who lived a long long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, and who said the final word on the matter:
“to be, or not to be, that is the question”.
A “scientific” proof of the existence of God ?
Oh my.
And we discuss for and against a pseudo-concept like that ?
A “scientific” proof of the existence of God has nothing to do with REASON, with a philosophical proof of the existence of God, it’s a self-contradictory pseudo-concept !
Oh my.
The atheists with their pseudo-thoughts were already a problem to cope with, now we have even the theists…
The funniest anyway are the atheists commenting here and stating that existence is just existence …and good night.
Great minds indeed !!!!
Right. Everyone has their primary assumption. Atheists want to make existence a given, something that cancels out in their logic because they refuse to acknowledge it’s utility when they cannot stand above it (or, I dare say, beyond it – imagine that!)…(and this is based on what they desire to find the universe to be – a playground – so, they are biased), while believers, essentially true searchers, do not cancel existence and give credit to something far greater and inherently benevolent than themselves (obviously) that put them in such a position. They begin with Humility. They search for truth truly.
Conversely, even a believer that does not love existence can understand the magnitude of it’s place in Reason. That is why atheists are, perhaps, worse than criminals, since they stand among society preaching their death openly. Also, if an atheists sees the futility in their logic when negating their conscious Existence they appeal to their own images and ability, corrupting themselves and cutting the Weight of their logic to insignificant worth; nevertheless, lording it over “religion” and “belief” as superior. Liars.
Or as one of my great heroes, at least, put it
“Excuse me, but what does God need with a starship?”
Captain James T. Kirk, USS Enterprise.
All this really is is that atheist proverb made real: If God didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent him. And gee, I wonder if this freshly discovered “God” will support homosexuality. It’s a mystery.
God is only known through Grace. Grace and Truth come from Jesus Christ. -Thank you, Father, for showing your truth to little children and hiding it from the learned.-
(Conservatives, you are selling your foundation, as it were, that “men are endowed by their Creator”. Evolution is a Trojan Horse, and IS ALWAYS a rejection of the Bible. (If you don’t know that Darwinian Evolution and Natural Selection are not synonyms you are not in the know. Created Kinds are the limitations of Natural Change. This is what is KNOWN. We can only predict that dogs will always be dogs based on what is KNOWN. Do you think otherwise? Maybe, you DO believe in myths after all? If you believe in Darwinian Evolution you necessarily DO BELIEVE that frogs have turned into princes, literally, over millions of years. Think about what you are swallowing.)
(It is absolutely backwards and spurious for those who believe in Jesus to say, “God could have used Darwinian Evolution over millions of years”, because why are you even trying to merge Evolution with God suddenly? Do you not know that Jesus testified of Genesis, and Genesis excludes the possibility of Darwinism? Also, Death was not until Adam sinned. You don’t take Jesus at His word, or Genesis, and trusted in the so-called science of Darwinism. Then, because you find that Evolution DOES NOT HAPPEN, and science doesn’t answer everything, and needs a Miracle Agent you find it necessary only then to bring God back into your thinking. Those who do this, Do you really think you honor God?)
This article is also a Trojan Horse.
(Revelations speaks about a Beast, that comes out of the sea, and the whole world worships it.)
You have come to the basics as to why a number of people don’t feel comfortable with God. And that reality is religion. Religion is the most evil of man’s inventions. There may be a God, but he certainly can not be found in church.
No, Socialism is the most evil of man’s creations. The death toll for a couple of Stalinist months surpasses anything done in the name of religion. P
Epic Fail. If the Crusaders (and later, Torquemada et al) had access to 20th century technology, weapons, and population densities, it would have been a more even number. You’ve conflated ability and intent.
On average, the sum of collectivism has democided two and a half million people for each year of the last century.
You’re suggesting that Christianity numbers among its attributes the ability murder a quarter billion of its own adherents every hundred years? Good luck.
Mr. Alston:
Gee whiz, genocide in Rwanda only took knives and Machettis. You know, the kind of weapons availble to the those evil Crusaders and Inquisitors. I
Christianity is but one religion assailing science or otherwise vying for ultimate power. And malevolent religion continues. This isn’t solely about christians vs atheists. Consider the fact that we in the west are happy to see more secular (less violent?) muslims and are wary of letting Iranian mullahs have nukes. To this day religious belief mixed with politics threatens the lives of millions.
Regarding earlier periods of time there’s also the hidden death tolls to think about, e.g. medieval churches slowing or otherwise halting medical progress in the face of the plague thus helping kill up to 1/3 of the population per outbreak. Muslims were less prone to plague death due to the use of face masks and hand washing, etc. but hey, they’re the wrong religion and therefore wrong in all things.
Then of course there’s the accidental killing of 85% of the new world population when the Spanish decided to enslave all of the Tainos and Caribs (and relations) who failed to convert to christianity. This one alone makes Stalin *and* Hitler seem like amateurs; the new world population was as high as 60 million when the Spanish arrived. That the indians died accidentally is of no consequence; the Spanish *intent* was enslavement.
Of course, the Spanish had lots of African slaves at the time, but then again they disliked the arrangement from *the Pope* that divided the globe such that the Portuguese were the exclusive slavers in Africa. Tainos and Caribs could be caught without the need of a Portuguese middleman.
Were all Spanish churchmen on board with this? No. Many were horrified and petitioned Fernando/Ferdinand and later Charles V on behalf of the indians; many gave up their lives to protect them. But when discussing religion vs atheism etc one needs to see the big picture.
Bottom line?
The thought that the misery/death toll attributable to religious malevolence can be favourably compared to deaths caused by devout atheism is laughable and one that only the history-challenged can entertain. The admixture of religion and politics results in just as much death and misery as malevolent atheist psychopaths.
I wrote nothing offensive. If you feel uncomfortable it’s not my fault. I also wrote nothing of religion. Do you think that any time a person speaks of Jesus or the Bible they are being religious? (How can Jesus or the Bible win with you?) What doctrines did I try to persuade? I am for a straight-forward reading of the Bible for those who accept any of the Bible. That is not necessarily doctrine, because when you read anything you are supposed to respect the authors intention. (That is why that clever guy who wrote The Da Vinci Code introduced his novel as non-fiction.)
Either the Bible is what it is, or it is nothing. That is the implication that can be deduced by it’s own claims, because it claims that it is inspired by God. You can test the Bible upon itself, but you have to be seriously trying to understand, using actual logic, and to not bring your biases along (i.e. Naturalism, Darwinism, or any foundational assumption). I personally have only found it to check out, and the problems I had at first were entirely based on my own lack of understanding. I believe it is inspired by God.
David;
The secular philosophies have racked up far more corpses than the religious ones. I do not believe the philosophy is at issue, but rather the imposition of it by force. If religious belief is not synonymous with good behavior, neither is non-belief, to put it mildly.
In a letter to the editor in yesterday’s Wall Strre Journal was the following (in my words): God is listening to a group of scientists here on Earth discussing His nonexistence. God is bemused and joins the group. One scientist is saying that God does not exist because he, the scientist, can make life from dirt. God asks the scientist to show him how he makes life from dirt. The scientist bends down and gets a handful of dirt. God says, oh, no get your own dirt.
interesting comments and topic
To those who see SCIENCE and MAN as the only correct and RIGHT way to see things about why and how we arrived into being and what controls or what makes us random “lifeforms”
I must ask you- how has science fared over the last 5700 years in KNOWING what’s what?
Seems to me with every bit of newer “knowledge” or “discovery” SCIENCE throws out it’s previously considered absolutes in favor of NEW absolutes- by definition SCIENCE is therefore NOT TRUTH- TRUTH does not change- you think we get closer by using 5 senses and math. Some athiests say oh that OT G-d! Mean and killer of man (noah’s Ark) how is that diferent than making people throw out their entire belief everytime we discover new theories?
The Truth that did not change was known by Abraham 5700 years ago and many others who considered such matters in the past- THE ONE-the big G is NOT KNOWABLE by your little pea brain- and if was intended for you to know you would
Obviously MAN (collectively) we have a lot to learn about Science and God-NONE of us see the BIGGEST picture- not even Hawkings with all his physics- in 50 years another man’s ideas will replace his! and GOD? still unchanged, still absolute, still the beginning the alpha and omega-
the silly people on here who try and SMEAR and slander all those of faith with accusations of taking the USa in theocracy and say they don’t believe in science are not operating with full deck, just SPEW they heard and repeat like good little parrots, many HUMANS are able to easily accept BOTH science and GOD b/c one does NOT deny the other-
like much of life in the material plane we live in a world of paradox, of seeming “reality”- Some Science people are MORE narrow minded than the Jesus worshippers you seems to find so ignorant – those minds are MORE than closed to any discussion outside what exists in PHYSICAL reality—how unimaginative, how limiting!
this discussion has avoided any mention of non Western religious concepts- where some believe in “the ancestors” and some have quite different explanations of existence and it’s creation……………..
the oft repeated MYTH that the church only worked to suppress science is not wholly ture- yes some times- but as often provided the funds and means for science
so please quit trying to use it as a debate point
I have been on both sides of this debate, and I find both sides being quite unfair and judgemental- I say it does not amtter if you do not belive in G-d- He requires nothing of the sort from you
There is a similar discussion on Richard Fernandez’s article, Children of a Lesser God, on this same site two weeks ago here:
http://pajamasmedia.com/richardfernandez/2010/09/03/children-of-the-weaker-god/
I presented a simple proof for God here:
http://pajamasmedia.com/richardfernandez/2010/09/03/children-of-the-weaker-god/#comment-121694
I wish to point out again, a la C.S. Lewis, that unless we have FAITH in REASON, that we believe we can find Truth by our powers of Reason and that we all share that same power working in basically the same way in each of us, then our discussions are futile.
WE CANNOT ESCAPE our dependency on FAITH! And again per Mr. Lewis, when we lose our Faith in God we inevitably lose our Faith in Reason.
Have you ever just contemplated ‘existence’ ? Why do we exist ? Aren’t we so lucky to exist ? What if the cause of our existence didn’t itself/Himself exist ? What would non-existence (of everything) look like ? Why does the First Cause exist ? What if the First Cause didn’t exist ? Aren’t we lucky the First Cause exists ? Will we one day cease to exist ?
Try it. You will soon realize that ‘existence’ is a line that the human mind cannot cross. We experience existence but we cannot understand it. It is a well way too deep for creatures to fathom. We can only accept it, or mumble platitudes about it.
The Deity doesn’t spend much time trying to prove He exists. In the entire Jewish/Christian Holy Scripture, there is a SINGLE VERSE addressing the issue:
[b]“The heavens declare the glory of God; And the firmament shows His handiwork.” Psalm 19:1[/b]
This is the original proof from Intelligent Design – most probably written by King David.
And the corollary is also a single verse:
[b]“The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God.’”[/b] Psalm 14:1
Anyone can know God THROUGH EXPERIENCE if one wishes to do so. Incredible but true that God, Who created all things visible and invisible, is a HUMBLE God.
Being Himself Humble, He values humility in His intelligent creatures whom He made in His Image. If you are an agnostic/atheist, simply say the following prayer SHOWING humility by kneeling when you say it:
“Lord of the Universe, if you are there and you care about me, I don’t want to miss you. If you are there, I want to know why you made me and what meaning my existence has. I will keep my eyes and my heart open, Thank you.”
If you are sincere, God will respond …
Im not sure it is possible to contemplate non-existence, or nothingness. As soon as you start to comprehend it at all, there you are. And even the Bible, I believe, confirms that nothingness does not have existence, since the lost will be cast into outer darkness with gnashing of teeth and weeping. Why not simply vanquish them to Nothingness? Also, the smoke that rises from hell is said to rise up forever as a sign of remembrance, seems to hint at the same. I also think that God, perhaps, who is the only one capable of finding such a thing out, would most likely find Nothingness to have no purpose, and also a deviation of his character to Have, as it were, Nothingness.
Also, the function of Peace would not be sovereign as the only source of Peace if Nothingness could exist. The rule being to never negate the One True God, and you can find out most anything.
That’s my point … the human mind cannot cross that line even if it existed … which it can’t … in fact the concept ‘nothing existing’ is an oxymoron. God has always existed.
But still, try to wrap your mind around how blessed we are to exist, that God exists. How does God View His Own Existence ? It’s humbling …
In Theology, God is the GROUND of existence. He does not exist in the same way that his creation does. So when we debate God’s ‘Existence’, we know not really of what we speak.
All we can really debate is whether the universe was created, and if so, how; was it created by an Almighty, Eternal, Omniscient Being.
.
“For though they had the knowledge of God, they did not give Him glory as God, nor give Him thanks. Instead, they became vain in their reasoning and their senseless minds were darkened.”-Romans 1:21
No.
That’s the short answer. And no one is at “stage 3″ for any kind of validation of God except in a countdown on imploding reasoning. Call it belief, call it a desire for some kind of moral code because you can’t imagine one yourself, call it a desire to cling to a child-like belief in an all-knowing father figure who will always be there to protect you from a hostile world and your own screw-ups, but let’s not pretend it’s anything more than that — a rationalization for a state of unjustified emotional security. It’s just an unfounded belief, like a ball and chain in the place where your mind’s wings should have grown.
Proving the existence of God?
Paul ran into this same “Uncaused Cause” worshiped by the Greeks 2000 years ago and we can review his answer.
THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES
CHAPTER 17
23 For as I passed by, and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription,
TO THE UNKNOWN GOD.
Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you.
Perhaps, youve gone about it best?
How disappointing to see this thread break down to just another sophomoric science versus religion argument.
This isn’t about rival sciences, it’s about rival theologies. Tipler and Hawkings agree on most of the science. How funny that a couple of posts by the defenders of the atheist against theocratic science reject the science behind the big bang like a bunch of primitive fundamentalists. Just because Hawkings gussies up his theology in fancy and elegant mathematics doesn’t make it science. Science yields observable and testable propositions and M-theory produces neither. It is as much a faith based belief system as any religion. Hawkings has been called this generations Einstein but my guess is that he would tell Hawkings that he has produced a beautiful work of mathematics but it sure ain’t physics.
This theist “quest” to prove the existence of God or more accurately, to prove the fallacy of atheism must be necessitated by a need to reinforce a belief based on faith, a “belief in, devotion to, or trust in somebody or something, especially without logical proof” (from the Encarta ® World English Dictionary © & (P) 1998-2005).
As an atheist I respect the right and the choice of theists to embrace their belief in a God based on faith but not on any proof based on scientific principals widely accepted as valid within the scientific community. The fact that “the young Hawking,” now 68 years old, continues to struggle with the existence or non existence of God does not have much to do with, never mind prove, there is a God one way or the other.
Hawking is a renowned, brilliant mathematical physicist many believe on a par with Albert Einstein who also struggled in his attempt “to know the mind of God.” It is an unending quandary that is probably inherent in human nature; that which, no matter how much closer we get we never quite fully understand must be the work of a Creator.
Atheists conclude that that leads one to wonder who or what created the Creator and so on and so on which leads to more and more confusion and ever more rationalizations to narrow down the target or else to alternately conclude that infinity exists, that time before the big bang existed, and that the universe is more beautiful, powerful, complex and enigmatic than any God we can imagine whose image we supposedly resemble. On every level, physical, emotional, spiritual, etc., what a smug, arrogant, narcissistic fiction that latter is but that’s branching off on another perhaps more controversial tangent.
Theists can and always will, find holes in the atheists arguments lest they become that which their psyches will not allow them to accept and, in some cases, lead them to abhor. Why the abhorrence? Maybe, in part, because, like fervent theists, some atheists cannot refrain from demonstrating their own intolerance by expressing an equal measure of disdain; not an admirable trait on either side of the argument for that’s what it is; not the divine, wrathful hand of your favorite deity guiding one of his faithful flock to strike down a blasphemous evil.
Not that my opinion matters much but I will give it to you anyway based on the following: A theists beliefs don’t have a damn thing to do with me and my disbelief likewise to him or her but contrary to what seems to be the predominant theist view my moral compass is no different than theirs except I don’t need the threat of eternal damnation and eternal immersion in a raging inferno to make me behave myself. Perhaps that’s the result of being brought up in a Christian dominated environment; can’t argue that point. I cannot speak for all atheists but, rejoice in your faith, your belief, your personal connection to your God; it bothers me not at all but I ask that you give me and the Godless atheists the same consideration and respect. “Godless” is not an evil social disease; at its essence it’s just another state of mind, another belief system given the equal protection afforded by the U.S. Constitution.
We can coexist without the unnecessary rancor.
We can coexist without the unnecessary rancor.
Highly unlikely.
First, the forces of the faithful have been attacking reason (without a single known success) since the renaissance (ascent of reason) and it doesn’t seem likely that this will let up.
Second, even the faithful who try to resolve faith and evolution by positing evolution as their deity’s mechanism invariably hit a brick wall where it concerns the evolutionary tenet that morals / ethics are emergent properties. They view evolution superfically as mere mechanics and tend to be unwilling to deal with the ramifications (this is likely due to how evolution is presented in schools; few seem to discuss man’s development of morals and ethics, and obviously this is in part due to incomplete knowledge.) They reckon morals are handed down by their deity. As such this says they’re not truly on the same page as science and reason after all; they’re essentially treading water in a different gap (god of the gaps redux) where science has yet to explain how such emergence functions.
Since you are godless you are held as amoral (or deluded regarding the origin of your own morals.) There is no reconciliation of faith and reason for the majority of the faithful. Nor shall there ever be.
“Highly unlikely.”
An admirable formulation; the rest is not so good.
That’s a nice handful of vague, presumptive, and familiar attacks on yet another creationist cartooning. Are these the contents of a universal atheist quiver that gets handed around?
Because if so, it looks like there are more than one reason to doubt them.
@@G.L, your Faith in Reason is admirable. Do you have a proof that Reason leads to Truth or that we are all working for the most part with the same faculty, Reason, enabling us to have a ‘rational’ discussion ? Or is Faith enough for you ?
@@G.L, your Faith in Reason is admirable. Do you have a proof that Reason leads to Truth or that we are all working for the most part with the same faculty, Reason, enabling us to have a ‘rational’ discussion ? Or is Faith enough for you ?
The question is which one of these tenets can operate alone.
From a purely pragmatic viewpoint, Faith doesn’t conjure up medicines, tractors, or GPS spacecraft. Reason gives us these things. Faith, on the other hand, sometimes tries to take these things away: news stories over the years show how poorly Faith alone works — death from refusal of blood transfusions, etc. Reason is the *only* thing that works reliably. That Reason eventually leads to Trvth is an article of Faith. However, Trvth isn’t required; incremental progress is as much as much as can be hoped for. Reason sans Faith still results in man’s progress. The converse isn’t true.
Somehow we are sliding here towards the primitive. Is that by design or necessity?
@@G.L.
“The question is which one of these tenets can operate alone.” This is your question, not mine.
Reason does not operate unless one has faith in it. One does not make the effort to reason through the meaning of all one’s experiences unless one has faith that such effort is worthwhile. One does not make conclusions and plans unless one has faith that the reasoning behind them will lead one in the direction one wants to go.
Granted, this faith in Reason is innate. We never really question it or even think about it unless some deep thinker like C.S. Lewis points it out. It is in a sense faith in oneself. But beyond that, we also put some faith in the reasoning of other people; this also seems innate.
You suggest this is mere pragmatism, a result of our experiences with Reason. And I will give you this, that our experiences with the MATERIAL of the universe does give us some assurance in the power of Reason e.g. in hard science and the applications (see my proof of God, link in #45).
But in our experiences with OUR OWN DECISIONS and those of other people, we have no such assurance. We, and others, many times make decisions leading to very undesirable consequences for ourselves and for those we love. So from the viewpoint of mere pragmatism, it seems mere hit or miss in this area. Nevertheless we still maintain our faith in Reason. In fact, we will accuse ourselves and others of being ‘unreasonable’ rather than question the power of Reason itself. For we expect, have Faith, that WHEN WE DO employ Reason, our decisions will TEND towards good results – though this is not guaranteed by every circumstance.
With almost all of mankind, I have Faith in Reason. But it is NOT just mere pragmatism.
G.L.Alston,
You make wide sweeping assertions and denunciations that would do any bible thumper proud.
Can you provide any of your sweet reason to back your claim that Torquemada would have killed like Stalin? I ask, not because I want to see the reasoning, because there is none. I just find it interesting how you confuse bombastic assertion with reasoning.
“I’ll bet math isn’t your friend”, you fling out in a bullying style to someone who, surprise, surprise, turns out to be a longtime student of math.
Do your evolved morals teach you to be kind?
Why equate a metaphysical singularity with a deity that people worship? What reason is there to associate them?
It’s to push Darwinism (which is not to say, Natural Selection). That is the bottom line. It is a silent premise in the article (an enthymeme). In fact, right now, there is a surge of Creationism in the world, and this article is supposed to be friendly to those who have doubts about meshing a theory “red in tooth and claw” with a Righteous and Loving God, etc. The “god” of this article is a blank that you can project your desires onto, or even your community-organizing visions. Of course, this is not to explain myself fully, so do not jump the gun, if you please, if you are against me.
And that would be the limitation of Aquinan proofs- they only prove that there is a God, but they say nothing about His nature.
Wow, at first I wondered why this article was featured on Pajamas Media. I find mostly voices of reason here on things political and social but most of this thread represents emotion and wishful thinking that we actually are able to understand anything fundamental about the origin and purpose (if there is one in any sense that we could understand) of the observed universe.
Also, the “theist versus atheist” argument is laughable. Until further evidence, only agnostics have an unassailable position. You can no more be sure that there is not a god than you can be sure that there is one. Both are unfounded belief systems – notwithstanding the old tomes and stories handed down throughout the centuries with many self-serving interpretations.
And besides, isn’t it all in the definition and description of god? If you define the term generally enough, for example: things beyond our understanding will be deemed to be due to “god”, then most everyone can agree that there is one. When someone starts getting really specific – as if they know – then it all breaks down. Since we all have differing abilities or inclinations to understand things like survival of the fittest and M-theory, we can make up our own minds about where god/religion needs to be called into use for our own purposes.
Now I’ll duck.
It seems fitting that if there was a God he would give individuals the full capability of seeing, if given the proper effort, the universe as they well like (as God is Just) (and, hence, all human debating), seeing as how he put us here, and made Salvation a thing of Faith… (bear with me). Could it be so easy as the difference in magnitude given to certain premises when considering God per the individual? Making that connection is something only a, say, Holy Spirit could do.
The significance of Life, Love, Purity, or Righteousness (in Reason) is really on a scale for humans. So, a so-called non-believer may say they do not ultimately accept such things, but the fact is (yes, the fact) is that formally and categorically atheists are really simply giving Zero values for such things. They cannot ban them from existence by their denial. We speak of them, and Reason about them. That is significant. Therefore, different outcomes are inexplicable. Are they equal? If an absolute truth exists, that will determine it.
And if you think that there would be far more versions of the Universe and Origins if all people were seeing what they want, remember: we are all alike, think similar thoughts, have similar experiences, and similar biases. You would actually expect only a handful of Valid options for what the Universe is and where we come from in that understanding.
This thread. Amazing to me. Monkeys and dolphins can’t do this. Kudos to all who try to figure it out, on both “sides” of the debate.
“Seek, and ye shall find.” –Jewish carpenter, c. 0 A.D. (or C.E., if you prefer…)
More like c. 30 AD
“…I won’t get to get what I’m after…’til the day I die…” -The Who’s “The Seeker”
“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” Paul’s 1′st letter to the Corinthians, ch.13
The glass we look through right now is tinted so dark, it’s illegal in most states.
Micheal Smith: Existence exists — and only existence exists. It is not an *effect* to be explained by a *cause*.
Says You. I dont see how your point (if it is intended to me more than a vocabulary exercise) is any more or less valid than anyone elses point on this thread. Moreover, your statement asserts something, then fails to support it with actual evidence other than half-clever word play, which is exactly what many people attribute to theists. Ironic. It really is a pot-kettle issue. Im surprised you choose not to see that, and willful ignorance in my book is always the worse variety.
Me? I tend to think that before we can any of us make fancy philosophical pronouncements on existence, creation, etc., we kind of have to get a better handle on understanding (drum roll please) the notion of… time. Seems like that is important whenever we talk about beginnings or ends, expanding and contracting universes, etc. And yet nobody popping off about God or singularity seems to really have a grasp of it or even attempt an explanation. Think about it. Much of the accomplishments in physics — Archimedes to Newton, Bohr, etc. etc. right on through the present — can be explained in terms a layman can understand. Not so with time. Tricky, that. And to intelligently discuss whether there are causes and effects involving existence itself, well, I think its all speculation until someone can do something groundbreaking with the notion of what exactly time is. Then again, thats the problem with theoretical physics — without experimentation, its so much speculation. As is yours on existence, if you like. And Hawking is no different than you or I in that respect.
Frankly, your comment doesnt do anything to challenge my own assumptions on theism or non-theism. I wish it did though. We could all use something to turn our ideas on the subject upside down and inside out. Not saying my comments get there either, in fact they dont. Im rather disappointed to find that my opinion is that my opinion is simply my opinion, and has no bearing on whether and what existence truly is. But at least I do not presume to know that which I do not. Maybe that means Ill be able to tune in better whenever the next breakthrough happens.
Exactly. And Mr. Smith misses (denies?) the irony.
The statement, “Existence exists — and only existence exists. It is not an *effect* to be explained by a *cause*” is not necessarily wrong, but it is not clarifying either. It is redundant. It has no utility. And that is, to say, “So, what?”
A human cannot account for existence, but we can think about significance. That’s the end of the rainbow. It is about a Value judgment that individuals make about any concept we know. It’s our choice. And that is where beliefs are established, whether atheist or not, an individual will themselves establish a value.
You ask about the concept of time. We know quite a bit about it, postulated as a sub-theorem to Einstein’s Law of Relativity in 1916. The one constant in the universe is the speed of light, 186,000 miles per second. If I am on a space-ship traveling at 185,000 miles per second, and shine a flashlight forward, to me the light shoots forward at 186,000 miles/sec. To a distant observer, it also travels at 186,000 miles/sec, not 185,000 + 186,000 as it would if you stand on a moving train and throw forward a baseball (with the speed on the train plus the throw). Hence, time slows down as you approach the speed of light. Gravity or mass affects time. Time is different on the sun (slower) than on earth which is slower than on the moon. This has been measured and confirmed by our astronauts. If I lived on a theoretically huge planet, only one day could pass there for me versus maybe 1000 years on earth. Hence the law of relativity, meaning time is relative to where you are. Dr. Gerhard Schroeder in “Genesis and the Big Bang” explains that the perception of time halves as the universe doubles, and this has produced a 1 trillion extension of time since the big bang. This concept we know as ‘red shift’ and is commonly used to measure the age of distant stars as they shoot away from us. Is the Bible right or is science right as to the age of the universe – Schroeder explains both are. He attacks time from multiple perspectives explaining how the 16 billion years of existence of the universe determined by science translates back to the six days of the Bible (Torah), further supported by Jewish scholars in the 12th & 13th centuries. Before anything was, there was no time. Time was created with the universe, but did not ‘grab hold’ until matter was created. He also explains Jewish thought and how the six days of creation according to the Torah line up very nicely to the the scientific explanation of when and how life developed as we know it. “Existence” has a Latin base: Exis Stere, meaning to stand out of Essence. The only Essence being God. Happy reading.
Psychedelics literally open doorways into other dimensions. They can take one to meet “god” and other spiritual agents. The science of psychedelics and spirituality is going to grow and expand. Psychedelics do not produce hallucinations they bring higher realities into our awareness. If anything, it is psychedelics that can and have proven the existence of a “hereafter” and a Creator.
ha..yeah, what ever dude.
He’s right, but in ways that are better left unexplored. The Greek word for drug abuse, pharmakia, is the same as the word for sorcery. There’s a reason for that. Sorcery does indeed access the spiritual plane, but it contacts with the demonic, not the divine. It’s a good way to wind up possessed, or dead.
A GOD we can’t see is visible in the love from others.
To all the adherents of materialism,
I find it quite ironic that these same cosmologists can theorize with a straight face that 74% of the universe consists of “dark energy”, 22% of “dark matter”, and only 4% consists of visible matter; where neither dark energy or dark matter have been proven to exist. They postulate the existence of a “multiverse” or multiple universes. I have no qualms with any of these theories; however, in all of these speculations, they do not leave open the smallest possibility for the existence of GOD. They are unable to unify three forces with something as mundane and basic as gravity, yet can make pronouncements with certitude about the existence of GOD.
In the end, all of these arguments are about tautologies in propositional logic (like debating how many teeth a horse should have, rather than opening his mouth and counting). We do not have the technology to explore the universe at the Plank length where these mysteries will be revealed.
You need expand the paradigm with other types of inquiry:
There have been many medically scientific studies about near death experiences which have statistically proven phenomena which can not be explained by materialism.
The Shroud of Turin can not be replicated by current technology. (For the naysayers, the carbon dating samples were contaminated with interweaving of the original linen and dyed cotton in the middle ages)
Until you bring these other arguments to bear, the comments posted here look like a dog chasing its tail…
In fact, these ‘dark’ extrapolations may prove to have just been a way to fudge the figures, to make them come out ‘right’ … time may tell …
And the my “not finished” comment came out attached to the wrong post.
You see Bernard? God is giving us signs that he exists by inserting inexplicable random errors into the results of our postings – you with the strange formatting result, and me with the wrong linkage as well as with “previews” mysteriously becoming “submissions”.
Most humorous is that theist and atheist alike argue about the existence of a specific god. Both seem to accept the Judeo-christo-islamic definition of the Divine. They ignore the older definition completely–the one not fraught with the insane contradictions of the One God.
It strikes me that both are holding tightly to their belief in that definition.
‘A Day Without Yesterday’: Georges Lemaitre & the Big Bang / MARK MIDBON
In January 1933, the Belgian mathematician and Catholic priest Georges Lemaitre traveled with Albert Einstein to California for a series of seminars. After the Belgian detailed his Big Bang theory, Einstein stood up applauded, and said, “This is the most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation to which I have ever listened.”
In the winter of 1998, two separate teams of astronomers in Berkeley, California, made a similar, startling discovery. They were both observing supernovae — exploding stars visible over great distances — to see how fast the universe is expanding. In accordance with prevailing scientific wisdom, the astronomers expected to find the rate of expansion to be decreasing, Instead they found it to be increasing — a discovery which has since “shaken astronomy to its core” (Astronomy, October 1999).
This discovery would have come as no surprise to Georges Lemaitre (1894-1966), a Belgian mathematician and Catholic priest who developed the theory of the Big Bang. Lemaitre described the beginning of the universe as a burst of fireworks, comparing galaxies to the burning embers spreading out in a growing sphere from the center of the burst. He believed this burst of fireworks was the beginning of time, taking place on “a day without yesterday.”
After decades of struggle, other scientists came to accept the Big Bang as fact. But while most scientists — including the mathematician Stephen Hawking — predicted that gravity would eventually slow down the expansion of the universe and make the universe fall back toward its center, Lemaitre believed that the universe would keep expanding. He argued that the Big Bang was a unique event, while other scientists believed that the universe would shrink to the point of another Big Bang, and so on. The observations made in Berkeley supported Lemaitre’s contention that the Big Bang was in fact “a day without yesterday.”
When word of the 1998 Berkeley discovery that the universe is expanding at an increasing rate first reached Stephen Hawking, he said it was too preliminary to be taken seriously. Later, he changed his mind. “I have now had more time to consider the observations, and they look quite good,” he told Astronomy magazine (October 1999). “This led me to reconsider my theoretical prejudices.”
Hawking was actually being modest. In the face of the scientific turmoil caused by the supernovae results, he has adapted very quickly. But the phrase “theoretical prejudices” makes one think of the attitudes that hampered scientists seventy years ago. It took a mathematician who also happened to be a Catholic priest to look at the evidence with an open mind and create a model that worked.
Is there a paradox in this situation? Lemaitre did not think so. Duncan Aikman of the New York Times spotlighted Lemaitre’s view in 1933: “‘There is no conflict between religion and science,’ Lemaitre has been telling audiences over and over again in this country ….His view is interesting and important not because he is a Catholic priest, not because he is one of the leading mathematical physicists of our time, but because he is both.”
To quote Hal Lindsey “You’ve heard me say before that most of the time I don’t have to look at a calendar to know that Easter is near. I usually just have to look at Newsweek’s cover. Like clockwork, if it bashes God, Jesus Christ, Christianity, or Christians, it must be close to the sacred holiday! Last year, Newsweek’s Easter cover featured a somber announcement: “The Decline and Fall of Christian America.” Of course Christianity, has always been Newsweek’s target. As Colleen Raezler, a guest columnist for onenewsnow.com wrote: “This Holy Week has been typical. Newsweek proclaimed “The Decline and Fall of Christian America” on its cover. The Washington Post/Newsweek “On Faith” blog featured a post that belittled the significance of Jesus’ death and resurrection. The Discovery Channel aired a documentary that painted Jesus as little more than an opportunistic politician who caught a bad break in a trial.”
Like Hal Lindsey said in 1969, “People are not abandoning Christianity so much as abandoning organized religion,” It is organized religion which is being left behind. Newsweek’s thoughts continued along these lines. “This can only be good for the United States,” argued one commenter. “We have lost our competitiveness in Science and the quality of our Education has been declining thanks in part to religious minded people who have been corrupting both Science and Education with nonsensical concepts such as Intelligent Design.”
I guess the authors of those anti-Christian articles and comments never envisioned a method of thinking along these perpendicular lines: To quote Stephen D. Snobelen “Isaac Newton was the greatest scientist who has ever lived. It is, in fact, generally accepted that he is the greatest scientist who ever will live, since no one, no matter how brilliant, will ever again be in such a unique historical position. Isaac Newton was born on Christmas day in 1642 and died in 1727. His most famous work, Philosophiae Nauralis Principia Mathematica (commonly called the Principia), was published in 1687. His discoveries span all aspects of the physical world with special emphasis on experimental and theoretical physics and chemistry and applied mathematics. He invented virtually the entire science of mechanics and most of the science of optics. During this time he invented such mathematics as he needed or as interested him including the discipline known as calculus. His (and the world’s) greatest scientific work, the Principia, was published only after his friend, Edmund Halley, accidentally learned of the existence of Part I which Isaac Newton had written 10 years earlier and put in a drawer. Halley convinced him to finish Part II and III and allow Halley to publish the work. Of unequaled mental ability during his entire adult life until his death at age 85, Newton’s powers are legendary. It is often told, for example, how later in his life a problem in mathematical physics posed by the great mathematician, Bernoulli, was forwarded to the Royal Society. The problem, to determine the curve of minimum time for a heavy particle to move downward between two given points, had baffled the famous 18th century mathematicians of Europe for over six months. Receiving the problem in the afternoon, Newton solved it before going to bed.”
What some of our illustrious college professors do not want anyone to know is: Newton he devoted a substantial portion of his enormous energy to the study of the Bible and Biblical texts and history. He read the Bible daily throughout his life and wrote over a million words of notes regarding his study of it. Isaac Newton believed that the Bible is literally true in every respect. Throughout his life, he continually tested Biblical truth against the physical truths of experimental and theoretical science. He never observed a contradiction. In fact, he viewed his own scientific work as a method by which to reinforce belief in Biblical truth. He was a formidable Biblical scholar, was fluent in the ancient languages, and had extensive knowledge of ancient history. He believed that each person should read the Bible, and through that reading, establish for himself an understanding of the universal truth it contains. With his prodigious knowledge of ancient history and languages and his unequaled mental powers, Isaac Newton is the best qualified individual in this millennium to have written about the prophecies. His study of the Book of Daniel began at the age of 12 and continued to be a special interest throughout his life. Moreover, he writes of the prophecies with a modesty that indicates that he, himself, is in awe of the words he has been given an opportunity to read. Then, on 22 February 2003, the Daily Telegraph (London, England) published a front-page story announcing Isaac Newton’s prediction that the world would end in 2060. One reason why Newton’s heresy, apocalyptic thought and prediction about the 2060 date became news in February 2003 is because most members of the media and the public had no idea that Newton was anything other than a “scientist”. For many, the revelation that Newton was a passionate believer who took biblical prophecy seriously came as something of a shock. It seems that both the media and the general public have a notion of Newton as a “rational” scientist that makes it difficult to absorb the knowledge that Newton was practising prophetic exegesis—studies many see as antithetical to the enterprise of science. The media has perpetuated a myth that science and religion are inherently in conflict (the fact is, sometimes they are; but religion has also often stimulated the development of science).”
How important was biblical prophecy for Newton?
Extremely important. For Newton, biblical prophecy forecast the divinely-ordained events of the future. He believed the interpretation of biblical prophecy was “no matter of indifferency but a duty of the greatest moment”. Prophecy allowed Newton to see history in advance. It also identified an evil, apostate system (Babylon) that pure Christians must flee to avoid destruction and the wrath of God.
How does biblical prophecy work for Newton?
Newton believed both in God and that the Bible was a revelation from God. He also believed that God was not bound by time as are humans, allowing Him to see the “end from the beginning”. Thus, to use Newton’s own words, he was convinced that “the holy Prophecies” of the Scripture are nothing else than “histories of things to come” (Yahuda MS 1.1, folio 16 recto). At the same time, biblical prophecy is written in highly symbolic language that requires skilled interpretation. Newton rose to this challenge as he attempted to discover the future of the world in the words of the prophets.
Newton was not only reluctant to set dates, but that he was convinced the end would not come in his lifetime. He took seriously biblical passages that assert that no-one except God knows the time of the end. Nevertheless, this excerpt shows that even Newton was fascinated with the prophetic conundrum of the date for the return of Christ and the beginning of the Millennium. Finally, although Newton’s statement was meant to demonstrate that the time of the end was several centuries away from his perspective, history has now caught up with his predictions, which helps explain the current interest in his apocalyptic calculations.
Newton was not a “scientist” in the modem sense of that term. Instead, he was a “natural philosopher”. Practised from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, natural philosophy included not only the study of nature, but also the study of God’s hand at work in nature. Newton was committed to a notion of natural philosophy that saw the discovery of God and His attributes as its chief end. For this reason, any serious study of Newton’s natural philosophy must include an understanding of his theological views. For example, Newton’s famous concepts of absolute space and time were fundamentally based on his notion of God’s omnipresence and eternal duration. It is also clear from his private manuscripts that Newton believed the ideal natural philosopher would also be a priest of nature. For Newton, there was no impermeable barrier between religion and what we now call science. Throughout his long life, Newton laboured to discover God’s truth – whether in Nature or Scripture. Although he recognized disciplinary distinctions, Newton believed that truth was one. Thus, Newton’s study of Nature and Scripture were in a certain sense two halves of a whole: the discovery of the mind of God.
In conclusion: If the greatest scientist who ever lived had no problem believing the Bible, what excuse will evolutionists, atheists, agnostics, or other so called men of science have on Judgment Day!!
why are you worried about what others believe?
when anyone can prove ANY/all these theories posted here, please call me
Just because someone writes something does not make it true.
It’s called having love and empathy. We shutter to think about what fate will come to those who deny Christ.
Wasn’t Newsweek recently sold for $1.00?
Thanks for that, callMeRoy.
There can of course be no conflict between an Omniscient, Almighty Creator and that which He creates. To God be the Glory!
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Just to let people know, Tipler has falsified the quote which he attributes to Hawking.
Here is what Tipler says Hawking said:
It seems to be a good principle that the prediction of [God] by a physical theory indicates that the theory has broken down, i.e. it no longer provides a correct description of observations.
Here is what Hawking actually said:
It seems to be a good principle that the prediction of singularities by a physical theory indicates that the theory has broken down, i.e. it no longer provides a correct description of observations.
In “The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time”, Hawking wasn’t referring to God in the least. He wasn’t making an oblique reference or anything like that. He was talking about singularities and the theories that suggest their existence. (back when he wrote this, black holes had never been observed, and so were merely theoretical constructs)
What Tipler has done is not only taken the Hawking quote WILDLY out of context, but he has purposefully falsified the quote to make it say what he wanted it to say rather than what it actually said. Tipler has lied here and purposefully deceived. Tipler has blatantly lied here and has disgraced himself and his personal witness to others.
And just to show the larger context of Hawking’s quote which Tipler falsified and lied about, I’ll re-type it from my copy of the book.
from Pages 362-363 of “The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time”
…. On the other hand the theorems on singularities did not depend on the full Einstein equations but only on the property that RabKaKb was non-negative for any non-spacelike vector Ka; thus they would apply also to any modification of General Relativity (such as the Brans-Dicke theory) in which gravity is always attractive.
It seems to be a good principle that the prediction of a singularity by a physical theory indicates that the theory has broken down, i.e. it no longer provides a correct description of observations. The question is: when does General Relativity break down? One would expect it to break down anyway when quantum gravitational effects become important; form dimensional arguments it seems that this should not happen until the radius of curvature becomes of the order 10-33 cm. This would correspond to a density of 1094 gm cm-3. However one might question whether a Lorentz manifold is an appropriate model for space-time on length scales of this order. So far experiments have shown that assuming a manifold structure for lengths greater than 10-15 cm gives predictions in agreement with observations (Foley et al (1967)), but it may be that a breakdown occurs for lengths between 10-15 and 10-33 cm. ….
So, when I pointed this out on another blog someone there said it was just Hawking trying to use “singularity” rather than “God”.
No, he was talking about what we know today as “black holes”. This is obvious to anyone who is familiar with the book.
Tipler replaced “singularity” (referring to black holes) with “God”, thus changing the entire meaning of what Hawking said.
That’s not some sort of clarification of what Hawking meant, that’s blatant lying.
Tipler is equivocating a singularity with God. That was the point of the article, and his change is in brackets. Courtesy goes to the author.
But Hawking wasn’t referring to God or in any way intending to do so. He was referring to black holes.
If Tipler wants to equate God with a Black Hole, he has some serious issues. We’ve observed lots and lots of Black Holes around the galaxy and in other galaxies. Is Tipler suggesting that we should just say “God” when we refer to Black Holes?
That’s nonsense! If I were to say “There is a supermassive Black Hole at the center of our galaxy,” and you were report that I said “There is a [God] at the center of our galaxy”, would that be even remotely accurate?
No! You would have deliberately falsified and lied about what I said.
That’s exactly what Tipler has done. Hawking was referring to what we call Black Holes (back then they hadn’t been observed and were just theoretical ideas) but Tipler decided to change the quote to say “God”.
There are two disturbing possibilities.
1) Tipler purposefully lied and falsified what Hawking said.
2) Tipler equates God with Black Holes.
“Tipler is equivocating a singularity with God.”
And apparently, you believe Tipler is equivocating a Black Hole with God.
Does that not disturb you even in the slightest?
And, Tipler’s mention that Hawking provided a proof of God in 1966 is exactly the same thing. Hawking wrote “Singularities and the Geometry of Space-Time” in 1966, providing theoretical proof for the existence of singularities (aka Black Holes).
That Tipler (and you?) thinks providing proof for the existence of Black Holes is the same as providing proof of the existence of God is bizarre.
I don’t know if Tipler knows or understands singularities are black holes, but I do know he wants to suggest they are what he perceives God to be. What does that have to do with me?
Proposition: “God Exists”
1. Define “God” rigorously
2. Define “Existence” rigorously
Then get back to us and we’ll talk. Until then you’re wasting our time.
Hawking should ponder why it is that Newton’s theological musings have been forgotten, and think about what lesson might be learned from this.
> The difference is that I realize that language is just a tool, just an approximation to reality.
Paul said we see through a glass darkly, but then shall know face to face. It sounds to me as if Christianity is well aware of language’s shortcomings. What I was pointing out, however, was something different. We both use language to argue our points, and any shortcomings it possesses apply to your arguments as well as mine. Somehow, you’re trying to use that fact to tilt the field in your favor. Sorry, it’s a level field in that regard.
> Well, very little of what you have said seems logical to me. You seem to want to insist on the reality of your conceptualizations and not acknowledge that there is a reality which goes beyond your conceptualizations.
If you find a logical goof in what I say, it’s fair game. But mostly you have been challenging not my logic, but logic itself — that is, when I employ it. (E.g., saying that I am stuck on viewing statements “as either being true or false.”) But when you announce a proposition (e.g., “Your god is a figment of your imagination”), all of a sudden it’s okay to propose a statement that is either, by its construction, true or false.
> It is a common Western misconception to confuse non-attachment with passivity, or withdrawal. If the life of Buddha showed anything, it showed that withdrawal from the world is not the path to enlightenment
I’m asking, why not be passive? What is so special about your understanding of nature that it is worth arguing for? If truth doesn’t exist, how can your understanding can be more worthy than anyone else’s? And it goes further than being active or passive — you get downright offended.
E.g., “This is putrid nonsense” — never mind how, if nothing can be really true, how anything can possibly be considered nonsense. Something can only be nonsense if something else to which it is being compared happens to be true.
E.g., “This is adding insult to injury” — aren’t insults just language? And isn’t injury just something that’s part of your karma?
E.g., “He does so in possibly the most irritating way imaginable, by playing childish word games and pretending this constitutes logical argumentation.” Here, you are so offended that, all of a sudden, Western conceptions of logic become important.
> And you seem to be obsessing about that word “true” again, as though your conceptualizing about perfection corresponded to some reality.
You misunderstand, then. The concept of true/false is important only if there is an objective reality. The idea is to get right with reality. Along the way, often, there are unfortunate detours, but the problem then is not with reality, but with our conceptions of it. We do that because truth matters, and it cannot matter unless something, or Someone, has an eternal standard to meet.
> I’m providing [Bruni] as an example of someone burned at the stake for his scientific inquiry. This is a vivid counterexample to the proposition that Christianity has been good for science.
Compared to what? Western civilization, a child in many if not most respects of Christianity, has taken science through every significant scientific theory and the vast majority of technical knowledge mankind possesses. When Newton, a Christian, discovered calculus and physics, what were they doing in Thailand? Or Tibet? One unfortunate fellow gets burned and it’s all negated? You probably think this is logical.
> In response you name two fuzzy-thinking academics with pretensions of mystical insight? It seems illogical to me, so I don’t feel obligated to treat this response as ‘relevant’. In fact one might construe your response as an argument from authority, which is formally a fallacy of defective induction.
I am aware of argumentum ad verecundiam and its shortcomings; are you aware that labeling a source as “fuzzy-thinking” is to employ a question-begging epithet? As I stressed, however, the reason Christianity was hospitable to science is its belief in an orderly, rational God. The reason is important; quoting authority was a lagniappe, and a particularly nice one coming from scientists or philosophers of science who weren’t particularly partial towards Christianity.
> Religion is the intermediate phase between superstition and science.
Sorry, that’s faith talking, not your science.
> The birth of modern science would have been difficult anywhere, but in no sense did the superstition, intolerance, and inquisitions of Christianity smooth this process.
Funny, though, that out of several thousand years of recorded history, the Reformation happened, a Biblical understanding of God became the norm in northern Europe, and within the space of five centuries science blossomed mainly in the same countries that embraced Reformed theology. I suppose it could have happened anywhere or anytime. Say, in ancient Phoenicia in between sacrifices of children to Baal. Or later, say, in the Soviet Union, in a sudden burst of Marxist science, Lysenko leading the charge.
>> Job 25:2
> I realize Christians are fond of claiming selected passages in the Old Testament as proof of Christ’s divinity…
Sorry, but you challenged me for it, so you get to hear it. I proposed that the Christian God is an orderly God. You responded that Christ did not proclaim that to be so. I showed you the scriptures support it, and Christ proclaimed the scriptures. In that context, the scripture serves only to bolster my proposition that Christians believe in an orderly God.
> You’re assuming that the pre-scientific worldview included an “order of nature” whose violation would be “miraculous” and extraordinary.
What I am assuming is that the Jews knew people don’t just come back to life. Jesus spoke of his miracles as “signs” of His authority. If the Jews’ view of nature held that there is nothing miraculous about the dead coming back to life, it would have held little authority as a sign.
> And you seem to be unaware that the ancient Near East suffered a plethora of charlatans — “magi” — who performed miraculous feats, in whose tradition Jesus squarely fell.
If Jesus were a charlatan, it would have been a hard trick to pull off, what with hundreds of witnesses, and surely his disciples would have known Him to be a fraud. How many people are willingly endure a life of extreme hardship and persecution, and ultimately suffer a hard painful and degrading death, for something they know to be a fraud? These apostles, however you see it must have been pretty special people.
> You also seem to be forgetful of the long tradition of “miracles” after Jesus. There are somewhere between 2500 and 10,000 saints recognized by the Catholic Church, each of whom performed the requisite number of “miracles” in order to exhibit sainthood…
That’s nice. I’m not a Catholic, though.
> I know you must think this recitation of catechism is logical, but it isn’t. There is absolutely no need to assert supernatural beings to justify morality.
I propose that, if God is a figment of my imagination, then morality is a figment of yours. Your evidence for its existence and authority is no more empirically grounded than my belief in God. We can’t see it, can’t locate it, can’t measure it, can’t explain where it comes from, and can’t explain why it holds any authority over us, ie., why it ought to be obeyed. Your knowledge of physics can’t help you here. Justify morality? With your world view, you can’t even show it exists.
> Don’t you think an Absolute Being would create a bigger universe than the one we observe?
God had two basic choices: make a universe small enough so we could see the edges, or big enough so that we couldn’t. All you’re saying is if you were God, you might have done things differently. If I were God, pizza wouldn’t be fattening and men wouldn’t have nipples.
Also, smoking and drinking would be good for you.
Our friends on this thread are too kind to point out that we are getting repetitive. I will try to hit a few new high points and leave you the last word.
You seem to need a layer of the supernatural in order to justify action. Most people manage to get up every day and do what they think is right without having to base that action on some imaginary man in the sky. I’m like that. I get to be passionate and compassionate about what I want, without having to premise that on the supernatural. Why is that hard to understand? I, on the other hand, understand completely that you think that if you just had a supernatural reason for doing what you do, it would make it — and you — really special.
How can you maintain a straight face saying that? Consider, for example, Nobel Prize winners. Jews have comprised 25% of the winners of Physics Nobel Prizes (and 36% of the US total), for example. How can you give Christianity credit for this? I think it’s an insult to Jews to maintain thei achievements are due to some kind of rationality on the part of the Church — a Church, which, by the way, persecuted them mercilessly for centuries!
As I’ve written elsewhere in this thread, giving the Church credit for science is like giving credit to an abortionist for a baby born after a botched abortion. The Church has tried to strangle scientific inquiry at every turn, forcing scientists to bend their knee to ridiculous fairy tales formulated by generations of worthless theologians.
Your ignorance of the Inquisition would be amusing if it weren’t so tragic.
If I’m not mistaken, Catholicism is the largest Christian sect, and has held a monopoly on Christianity in the West for most of the time since Jesus. Now you’re disowning Catholic beliefs? So… are you backing off the claim that Christianity encouraged science, and instead claim that Protestantism did? Too funny. Coming soon: “I’m not Mormon, either”, “I’m not a Lutheran”…. FWIW my branch of Buddhism is Zen. Don’t hold me accountable for those crazy Theravadans!
But seriously, the Reformation was a good thing, from the standpoint of science, primarily because it broke the monopoly of the Catholic Church and enabled people to conduct their affairs in a secular sphere. That is, by getting religion out of the affairs of science, science fluourished. Seems to be more compatible with my thesis than yours.
Christ proclaimed some scriptures. Did he specifically endorse Job 25:2? I must have missed that part of the Gospels. Or did he claim that everything in the Old Testament was valid? No, of course not, because he had his own agenda and he specifically amended key doctrines — like the Commandments.
Most Jews at the time, like most Jews today, were and are unimpressed by Jesus’s manipulations, just as people did not line up to worship David Copperfield after he made that jumbo jet disappear. You speculate that the Apostles were sophisticated enough to see through any trickery, but I find little basis for believing this. It seems much more likely that they were unsophisticated, easily gulled believers in magic — like the overwhelming number of people at the time. Of course, that made it more likely that they would lay down their lives for a great magician, not less. Because they did not have a strong sense of reality, it was easy to persuade them that they could have eternal life.
Well, the morality to which I largely subscribe is based on thousands of years of human experience and evolution. The whole point is that I didn’t make it up, but other people did. I suppose you could reply that you didn’t invent God, so he’s not your figment. But you’re not even willing to admit that He is a manufactured construct, something people invented. That’s why I say He is a figment of your imagination, while it is incorrect to say that Buddhist morality is a figment of mine.
I was trying to make the point that your Absolute Being seems to have a lot of undefined characteristics and capabilities. Just like any figment of your imagination.
Well, this has been a lot of fun, and the best PJ Media thread ever. You are welcome to have the last word.
Foxnarf, well done, although I would quibble with your use of “we know” and “postulated” in such revealingly close proximity right at the outset of your post. But no matter, a worthy contribution to the discourse.
However, my point was not to do with summarizing contemporary theoretical physics re: time. Quite the contrary, in fact you made my point come into stark relief. You succinctly stated physics theory as if it were some answer or rebuttle to the questions on this thread. But your post was regurgitation of well understood theoretical “postulations”, some of which are supporte in part by experimentation, but none of which are an answer to anything. I stead, what I am after is a way of translating those theories into something meaningful to the philosophical existence debate. To postulate and then ascertain that time is relative is marvelous observationally verified fact. But it does nothing to explain what it is. That is what we need as a prerequisite to really discuss theism. Just my opinion.
I came late to this discussion and there are too many responses to read, so this may have been said.
There seems to be an assumption of one “god”. Why? Logic and physics tells me that it more likely that there are at least two. The true “God” (capital G) and a man made god (small g). The true God made the universe as we know it, destructive as it is, and the laws of physics that govern it in some experiment and then went on to bigger and better things we can’t see or imagine. The man made god that is associated with mankind’s morality and lack thereof, has constantly changed since the beginning of time and will keep on changing. Most of what has been said bases all the discussion on a Christian or Jewish god. This god is just the latest of a lot of god’s. In a few thousand years this god will be looked at as an ancient anomaly when some new religion is the rage, but the true God who made this universe will still be out there somewhere. For most past religions people have tried to take credit for the true God as being part of their god. Then the next religion comes along and throws out most of the last man made god but still want to take credit for God in their next god. Why can’t we finally admit that there is God and then there is god?
Physicists usually go running to “God” when they can’t figure stuff out. It makes them sound smart, when in fact, they failed the test.
I see lots of claims. Precious little supporting evidence for those claims. And by “little” I mean absolutely no evidence.
Who Is Stephen Hawking?
Stephen William Hawking is many things.
Theoretical physicist, cosmologist, astrophysicist, best-selling author, divorced from his second wife and father of three with three grandchildren, British recipient of America’s Presidential Medal of Freedom, (Retired) Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, Hawking is celebrated as one of the most brilliant men alive, if not the most brilliant man alive, if not the most brilliant man who has ever lived. He was the first to theorize Hawking Radiation emitted by Black Holes in the universe and has more degrees and awards, and fans, than one can count.
Amazingly, despite having contracted crippling neuro-muscular dystrophy, a form of ALS or Lou Gehrig’s Disease in his 20′s, at 68, he continues to think deeply, write prodigiously, and actively publish his thoughts.
Being a dolt, I shouldn’t comment on Hawking’s many accomplishments but some of his publicized views and opinions of late have to be termed, at the minimum odd, at the extreme, bizarre.
It comes down to the question, Do we continue to take seriously even a deep thinker with an I.Q. said to be in the area of 160 when he begins to contradict himself and to publicize his unsubstantiated and bizarre reflections? Also, should we take seriously mathematical-scientific geniuses–such as Einstein or Hawking–when they make theological observations?
One recent bizarre Hawking comment concerned aliens. He wasn’t referring to Mexican illegals but to the extraterrestrial, ET, type. . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=1879)
there can be no evidence for or against god because the notion is nonsense. you can’t say what it is or where it is. the notion is vacuous and completely devoid of cognitive content.
the bible is just a lot of stories about events that never happened and people who never existed. jesus never existed. the fictional god of the old testament is cruel mean and immoral.
Sharpshooter @ #2 asserts that Aquinas didn’t do it. I bring Bernard Lonergan’s “Insight: a Study of Human Understanding” as refutation and its own arguements as my justification that he did.
Let’s be pragmatic about this! I am sure there is a place for an intellectual discussion on the evidence for or against the existence of God, but for whom are we arguing? It would seem we would like to prove ourselves right and others wrong. We would like some credit for having proven or disproven something. What is of overriding importance however, is that IF there is an ultimate truth, and IF there is a God who requires some kind of response from me, I am in agreement with him. If he exists, he will hold me accountable for my response to the truth, and not for how clever I was to argue any point with fellow human beings! Jesus indicated that knowing the truth came from revelation based on the state of heart(willingness to respond and order one’s life accordingly), rather than of the mind. I find many of the issues raised on this forum interesting and stimulating, but it is the height of arrogance to think that the human mind can outshine its creator. This is why faith is a matter of the heart, not because belief in God isn’t intellecutally viable, but because the human mind has its limitations. God’s way is illumination of the heart, which leads in turn to an enlightened mind. The OT tells us in God’s words, “My thoughts are not your thoughts. My ways are higher than your ways.” The NT, explaining the work of Christ tells us, “You have been given the mind of Christ”. What was not ours initially (understanding), becomes ours as a gift, by faith. Some might argue that my point is invalid since I use Bible verses, when the Bible itself is in question. But one should consider the internal evidence of the Bible. Does it answer questions that science is unable to answer? Of course it does, but those answers are only of use to an honest seeker, and not a quarrelsome debator!
Of course there is a God. IF not, we are nothing more than random assortments of matter. Therefore we would have no reasont to assume that the things we beleive to be brue of reality are actually true. (no more sothan rocks or dust, anyways) If we want to continue believing that we can actually know some truth. We must believe that we are intended to know some truth. Without God there is no intention to our existence and therefore no reason to assume that we can know any truth.
If your one of those people who don’t believe that we can know any truth, then there is no sense in trying to convince someone that your right about anything because you don’t believe its true anyways.
There is something which is rarely mentioned in discussions about the great design: Hawking does not only deny the existence of God, but also the truth of materialism.
While asked why there is matter rather than nothing, the theist will refer to the existence of God which has itself no explanation, whereas the materialist will say that matter is eternal and that it just exists without any cause.
Hawking rejects both possibilities: for him, matter exists because of the pre-existence of abstract law of natures with highly complex mathematical structures : such laws preceded matter itself and had been already “there” before the first particles popped up out of existence.
In this sense, Hawking’s opinion is closer to a form of idealism than to materialism.
This is a beautiful example of religious polemics. Hawkings, according to the article, proved the existence of a personal deity. But there is nothing “personal” about a deity who flips on the universe’s light-switch. Does he care about me? Does he care about you? Is he even aware of us? At best, Hawkings can be called a deist.
Is this the deity of the Torah, the Gospels, the Koran? Does he want us to keep the Sabbath? Accept Jesus as our personal savior? Fast on Ramadan? Please!
Finally, if the deity started the universe, what started the deity? This argument is no more intelligent than the ancient Indians who claimed the earth was riding on the back of an elephant. When asked what the elephant was riding on, the answer came, a giant turtle. Etc.
By the way, someone named Stephen Hawkings raised this argument. Surely not the same Stephen Hawkings you claim proved the existence of the deity! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down
Actually, he proved a first cause, or possibly a creator. Really there are only two possibilities. A first cause/creator, or some variation of a cyclic universe. The laws of thermal dynamics pretty much rule-out any ordinary cyclic universe. So you either have to invent new physics, or you have to accept the existence of a creator.
However, creator of the universe is just one attribute we apply to God. While it is true, if there is a God he must be the creator of the universe, the reverse is not necessarily true. The creator of the universe need not be God. It could well be the “creator” or “first cause” meets none of our other criteria for being God
Ouch.. This is an extremely stupid article.
Does the universe need a God?
Does the universe need God? Yes, the universe needs God if it can be shown that everything in the universe cannot be explained naturally. Scientists claim that there is no fact, no event, no natural phenomenon in the universe for which they cannot provide a natural scientific explanation. But this claim is untrue. We can show that there is at least one fact in the universe for which they will never be able to give any natural explanation. This fact is that light has got some very peculiar properties if we are to believe that the following two equations of special theory of relativity are not giving us bluff in any way:
t1 = t(1-v2/c2)1/2
l1 = l(1-v2/c2)1/2
The first equation shows that for light time totally stops, and the second equation shows that for light any distance it has to travel is reduced to zero. For light even infinite distance is reduced to zero. These two equations together show that as if light has no space as well as no time to move. But light cannot have these two properties naturally. Or, these two properties cannot naturally arise in light. If one asks “why”, then we will give three reasons:
1) like everything else light was also created after the big bang,
2) like everything else light was also placed in a universe full of space and time,
3) light has in no way been artificially deprived of space and time.
A thing may naturally have the two properties of spacelessness and timelessness in following two cases only:
1) if it is placed in a world where there is no space, no time;
2) if placed in a world full of space and time it is artificially deprived of space and time.
But light is neither placed in a world having no space, no time, nor is it artificially deprived of space and time. So there is no apparent reason as to why light will have these two properties. In spite of these facts we find that light is having these properties. So if it is having these properties, then it is having them not naturally, but by some unnatural means. Anything being placed in space and time cannot naturally lack space and time until and unless it is artificially deprived of them. So it is an enigma that light in spite of its being placed in space and time will still be having no space and no time. At least the above two equations of STR are saying so. And here I am challenging the whole scientific community all over the world: let them bring any damn scientific theory here – relativity theory, quantum theory, string theory, M-theory, multiverse theory, parallel universe theory, or any other theory that they can think of – and let them show with their theory how there can naturally arise in light those two properties of spacelessness and timelessness. And I am saying with full confidence here that they will never be able to do that. This is only because there will always be two constraints due to which the properties of light can never have any natural explanation, and these two constraints can never be overcome by any scientific theory. I have already mentioned what are those two constraints: a) light is placed in a universe full of space and time, and b) light is not artificially deprived of space and time. This is the only gap that can never be bridged by any scientific explanation. This is the only gap that will require a supernatural explanation.
Philosophy is dead. Is Logic dead also?
“Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.”
- Stephen Hawking in “The Grand Design”
“As recent advances in cosmology suggest, the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes to appear spontaneously from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”
– Stephen Hawking, Ibid
Here three questions can be asked:
1) Which one came first, universe, or laws of gravity and quantum theory?
2) If the universe came first, then how was there spontaneous creation without the laws of gravity and quantum theory?
3) If the laws of gravity and quantum theory came first, then Hawking has merely substituted God with quantum theory and laws of gravity. These two together can be called Hawking’s “Unconscious God”. Therefore we can legitimately ask the question: Who, or what, created Hawking’s unconscious God?
Not only this, but there are other problems also. If the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes spontaneously appearing from nothing, then initially there was nothing. Then wherefrom appear those laws of gravity and quantum theory to allow universes appearing spontaneously from nothing? In which container were those two laws of nature?
Now regarding the M-theory: I have already written something on multiverse theory (not yet published anywhere). There I have come to the conclusion that if there are an infinite number of universes, then only within that infinite number of universes there will certainly be at least one universe in which life will emerge. If the number of universes is only 10 to the power 500, then it is very much unlikely that any one of them will support life, because no universe will know which set of values the other universes have already taken, and if everything is left on chance, then there is every probability that all the universes will take only those set of values that will not support life. There will be no mechanism that will prevent any universe from taking the same set of values that have already been taken by other universes. There will be no mechanism that will take an overview of all the universes already generated, and seeing that in none of them life has actually emerged will move the things in such a way that at least one universe going to be generated afterwards will definitely get the value of the parameters just right for the emergence of life. Only in case of an infinite number of universes this problem will not be there. This is because if we subtract 10 to the power 500 from infinity, then also we will get infinity. If we subtract infinity from infinity, still then we will be left with infinity. So we are always left with an infinite number of universes out of which in at least one universe life will definitely emerge. Therefore if M-theory shows that it can possibly have 10 to the power 500 number of solutions, and that thus there might be 10 to the power 500 number of universes in each of which physical laws would be different, then it is really a poor theory, because it cannot give us any assurance that life will certainly emerge in at least one universe. So instead of M-theory we need another theory that will actually have an infinite number of solutions.
Now the next question to be pondered is this: How did the scientists come to know that an entire universe could come out of nothing? Or, how did they come to know that anything at all could come out of nothing? Were they present at that moment when the universe was being born? As they were not present there, therefore they did not get that idea from the creation event. Rather they got this idea being present here on this very earth. They have created a vacuum artificially, and then they have observed that virtual particles (electron-positron pairs) are still appearing spontaneously out of that vacuum and then disappearing again. From that observation they have first speculated, and then ultimately theorized, that an entire universe could also come out of nothing. But here their entire logic is flawed. These scientists are all born and brought up within the Christian tradition. Maybe they have downright rejected the Christian world-view, but they cannot say that they are all ignorant of that world-view. According to that world-view God is omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent. So as per Christian belief-system, and not only as per Christian belief-system, but as per other belief-systems also, God is everywhere. So when these scientists are saying that the void is a real void, God is already dead and non-existent for them. But these scientists know very well that non-existence of God will not be finally established until and unless it is shown that the origin of the universe can also be explained without invoking God. Creation event is the ultimate event where God will have to be made redundant, and if that can be done successfully then that will prove beyond any reasonable doubt that God does not exist. So how have they accomplished that job, the job of making God redundant in case of creation event? These were the steps:
1) God is non-existent, and so, the void is a real void. Without the pre-supposition that God does not exist, it cannot be concluded that the void is a real void.
2) As virtual particles can come out of the void, so also the entire universe. Our universe has actually originated from the void due to a quantum fluctuation in it.
3) This shows that God was not necessary to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going, as because there was no creation event.
4) This further shows that God does not exist.
So here what is to be proved has been proved based on the assumption that it has already been proved. Philosophy is dead for these scientists. Is it that logic is also dead for them?
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I ask sincerely, if athiest hate God so much, why do they devote their life to Him? They claim to be “defending themselves” and many of them say ‘let people believe what they want because they will anyway,’ yet are the first to get upset when someone brings up God. They then use “logic” to justify why what a Christian claims as true to be untrue. If that defies their own logic then how can anything said beyond that point be credible?
And if it doesn’t matter who believes what then why are they so upset to begin with? According to athiest, no God means no life after death therefore an arguement against “the make-believe” is like getting upset how someone wrote a fictional book, no?
Alse, though I’m no science major, everyones’ quoting to disprove God is still incomplete and doesn’t explain anything.
Christians recognize they don’t have all the answers, and that’s ok, but those, athiest and claimed Christians alike grasping for straws makes little sense as well.
This said, please respond with a logical answer, not a smart alec response, because that’ll just prove my point.
Thank you
“It’s better to die hoping there’s a heaven than to die and find out”
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