So the Origins Conference sponsored by the Skeptics Society was held last Saturday, and a good time was had by all. Or, at least, a good time was had by most. Or, maybe the right thing to say was that a good time was had much of the time by many of the people.
More specifically: the morning session, devoted to science, was fun. The evening entertainment, by Mr. Deity and his crew, was fantastic. In between, there was some debate/discussion on science vs. religion. Ken Miller is a biologist who believes strongly that science should be taught in science classrooms — he was an important witness in the Dover trial — and who happens also to be a Catholic. He gave an apologia for his belief that was frustrating and ultimately (if you ask me) wrong-headed, but at least qualified as reasonable academic discussion. He was followed by Nancey Murphy, a theologian who was much worse; she defended her belief in the efficacy of prayer by relating an anecdote in which she prayed to God to get a job, and the phone immediately rang with a job offer. (I am not, as Dave Barry says, making this up.) And Michael Shermer and Vic Stenger represented the atheist side, although both talks were also frustrating in their own ways.
But all of that just fades into the background when put into the same room as the sheer unadulterated looniness of the remaining speaker, Hugh Ross. Despite warnings, I didn’t really know anything about the guy before the conference began. The taxonomy of crackpots is not especially interesting to me; there are too many of them, and I’d rather engage with the best arguments for positions I disagree with than spend time mocking the worst arguments (although I’m not above a bit of mockery now and then).
So I was unprepared. For those of you fortunate enough to be blissfully unaware of Ross’s special brand of lunacy, feel free to stop reading now if you so choose. For the rest of you: man, this guy is nuts. And he’s not even the most nuts it’s possible to be — he’s an “old-earth” creationist, willing to accept that the universe is 14 billion years old and that the conventional scientific interpretation of the fossil record is generally right. Still: totally nuts.
Ross’ talk took two tacks. First, he explained to us how the Bible predicted that: (1) the universe started from an initial singularity; (2) it is now expanding; and (3) it is cooling down at it expands. The evidence for these remarkable claims? A long list of Bible verses! Well, not the verses themselves. Just the citations. So we couldn’t really tell what the verses themselves said. Except for poor Ken Miller, who was trying to salvage some last shred of dignity for his side of the debate, and had the perspicacity to look up one of the verses on his iPhone. (Praise be to technology!) I’m not sure which verse it was, but that’s okay, because they all say precisely the same thing. Here is Isaiah 45:12, in the New International Version:
It is I who made the earth
and created mankind upon it.
My own hands stretched out the heavens;
I marshaled their starry hosts.
What’s that? You don’t see the bold prediction of Hubble’s Law, practically ready for peer review? It’s right there, in the bit about “stretched out the heavens.” To the mind of a non-crazy person, this is a poetic way of expressing the fact that the dome of the sky reaches from one horizon to the other. To Hugh Ross, though, it’s a straightforward scientific prediction of the expansion of the universe.
Here is Ross in person, going through some of these same arguments:
(Yes, that video is embedded from “GodTube.com.”)
His second tack was to explain how our universe is finely-tuned for the existence of life. We’ve all heard this kind of claim, from real scientists as well as crackpots. But Ross and his clan take it to grotesque extremes, as detailed in the website for his Reasons to Believe ministry. Where, by the way, they don’t believe the LHC will destroy the world! Rather, it will “provide even new reasons to trust the validity of Scripture.” It would be nice if they would tell us what those reasons are ahead of time. Does Scripture predict low-energy supersymmetry? Large extra dimensions?
According to Reasons to Believe, the chance of life arising on a planet within the observable universe is only 1 in 10282 — or it would have been, if it weren’t for divine miracles. (Don’t tell them about there are 10500 vacua in string theory, it would ruin everything.) They get this number by writing down a long list of criteria that are purportedly necessary for the existence of life (“star’s space velocity relative to Local Standard of Rest”; “molybdenum quantity in crust”; “mass distribution of Oort Cloud objects”), then they assign probabilities to each, and cheerfully multiply them together. To the non-crackpot eye, most have little if any connection to the existence of life, and let’s not even mention that many of these are highly non-independent quantities. (You cannot calculate the fraction of “Sean Carroll”s in the world by multiplying the fraction of “Sean”s by the fraction of “Carroll’s. As good Irish names, they are strongly correlated.) It’s the worst kind of flim-flam, because it tries to cover the stench of nonsense by squirting liberal doses of scientific-smelling perfume. If someone didn’t know anything about the science, and already believed in an active God who made the universe just for us, they could come away convinced that modern science had vindicated all of their beliefs. And that’s not something any of us should sit still for.
There is a reason why all this is worth rehashing, as distasteful as it may be and as feeble as the arguments are. Namely: there is no reason whatsoever to invite such a person to speak at a conference that aspires to any degree of seriousness. You can invite religious speakers, and you can have a debate on the existence of God; all that is fine, so long as it is clearly labeled and not presented as science. But there’s never any reason to invite crackpots. The crackpot mindset has no legitimate interest in an open-minded discussion, held in good faith; their game is to take any set of facts or arguments and twist them to fit their pre-determined conclusions. It’s the opposite of the academic ideal. And it’s an insult to religious believers to have their point of view represented by crackpots.
Which, if you want to be excessively conspiratorial, might have been the point. Perhaps the conference organizers wanted to ridicule belief in God by having it defended by Hugh Ross, or perhaps they wanted to energize the skeptical base by exposing them to some of the horrors that are really out there. Still, it was inappropriate. If we non-believers are confident in our positions, we should engage with the most intelligent and open-minded exemplars of the other side. Shooting fish in a barrel is not a sport that holds anyone’s attention for very long.
Where do you get ’software’ without a “software engineer?”
Heck! Who said that life is “software”?
Faulty approaches to a problem necessarily lead to nonsensical answers.
Just projecting our “engineer mindset” onto nature is of course bound to raise silly paradoxes.
I would like to point to 3 overlooked facts about life, complexity and other such topics.
1) ANY living thing grows from inside out, not by “mechanically” bringing parts together in an outside-in fashion, so may be the logic which drives it is somewhat different from the “engineer view” of analysing the “purposes” of each piece and cog.
2) Complexity buildup doesn’t require any “design”, any iterated function system does creates more and more intricate structures whithout any “purpose” or “plan”.
An iterated function system isn’t a computer artifact, ANY repeated process, i.e. any process which rehash all or part of its output as the input of the next iteration, is an iterated function system.
So whatever “properties” the reshuffled stuff has which metrics (of any kind!) are altered by the iterated process, these properties begin to show patterns (without any “purpose”) just because they are caught in attractor basins, see also Barnsley’s Fractals Everywhere for an introduction.
No plans, no purposes, nogods!
3) Last but not least, don’t forget that if we are the ones asking “questions” while we are ourselves a tiny part of the whole it is no wonder that we run into self referential paradoxes and capacity limits (a part willing to hold a full model of the whole) but any other kind of “entity” would meet the same constraints.
“Where do you get ’software’ without a “software engineer?”
I read that the Buddhist approach, is to maintain (noble) silence, in the face of question whether there is God. Reason being Buddha taught in a time period where Hinduism had many understanding of God, and Buddha told his disciples that whatever answers he gave, people would misunderstand. Thus he taught the path. He thought it was more meaningful to remain silent than attempt to deliver discourses on them (like do we exist after death or do we not exist) given the paucity of human vocabulary. He taught a method of verifying reality through meditation and asked his followers to lead a good life and spend time doing self verification than imagine the truth. Given that science was not developed 2500 years ago, and given that science came in the 16th/ 17th century, or some may say a bit earlier, this seems pragmatic, for that time, capitalizing on the centuries wealth of meditation skills generated in the Indus Valley in India, and maintaining silence on issues such as- is the universe finite or infinite, do we exist after death or do we not exist? Dalai Lama from one of the three branches of Buddhism has realized there is catch up for monastics in science and he has sought to bring science to the monastics.
While there is value in preserving ancient modes of verifying reality as preserved by (Buddhist) monastics through 2500 years, there is also value in acquiring scientific mode of verifying objective reality of the universe. Each serve their purpose and one does not exclude the other, though on this front, the Catholic Church has the opportunity of launching its priests in the science direction that other world religions have yet to. There is much thus to learn from the Catholic Church science scholars especially when issues like creation science and ID hover on many genuine Christian minds.
The Protestant or Evangelical approach of personally reading their own Bible compared to the Catholic Church’s mode of leaving it to Catholic scholar priests to read them and teach them, has each its own positive points. When early Christian settlers came to this country, it is said many left to avoid persecution and one can assume they would read their own Bible and interpret it themselves. These early Christians lived their lifes according to their faith, and made this nation what it is today. Today they still live and if they have focused on some important things to keep faith and live productive lifes, like say Buddhist monks who live in forest and focus on meditation, and teach it, then we cannot pooh pooh their understanding of life and measure them by our yardstick of science. We must find common ground, to connect and bridge the gap to move forward as a civilization to enrich our lifes and that of our future generations. Amen.
LOL…
Given the current “state of the Onion” are you sure that this is a good point in support of your “cause”?
So, faith has to be “kept”? Against what?
Also, what do you mean by “understanding of life”?
Aren’t you confusing pleasant fantasies with knowledge about “how things actually work”? (which is what science strives to improve)
Folk psychology even with a good dose of “holy” make up give rise to disastrous opinions and decisions, see the conundrums exposed in Breakdown of Will (more details in the précis).
There is NO way that there could be any common ground between science and any religion, for a very simple reason: Evidence!
Science relies only on evidence, i.e. something that anyone can check for himself and which has intersubjective validity (in the long run and in spite of any “conflict of theories”), whereas every religion (including Buddhism) rejects evidence and always foster whimsical fantasies which are bound to clash with each other since they are not based on any facts outside the feverish minds of the religionists.
It’s a mild form of schizophrenia!
I have no doubts that actual true schizophrenics are not lying about the hallucinations they hear and see, unfortunately these have no relationship whatsoever to the real world except for weird quirks in the schizophrenics own brains and neurophysiological states.
It is the same for the religionists “spiritual feelings”!
In other words: be submissive!
Beware, Islam beats all others at that, it is even the very definition of the word Islam.
WOW!!!
1) It is your view that science and religion cannot go hand in hand. OK that’s your view. There are priests who are full time scientists who would not agree with you. I too do not agree with you.
2) It is your view that religion is a mild form of schizophrenia. That’s a radical view, un-medical (thus unscientific too) too by general standard of medicine. Yet many people have their religion.
3) The only point I would make is, that, if you choose to go on a free ten days course on meditation [According to the tradition of pure Vipassana, courses are run solely on a donation basis.] http://www.dhamma.org/en/docs/core/code-en.pdf , then there is A starting point for discourse. Otherwise, by analogy it may be like a nomad discounting science because he lived in a pre science era. Likewise modern era man MAY discount ancient skills because such skills are not academic curriculum and there is no GPA for that. Drop me a note when you return after ten days. IF after 10 days you found the EVIDENCE that meditation is a mild form of schizophrenia you would have the ADDITIONAL and ballistic ammunition to deep six meditation the ancient technique of some religions 🙂
4) Amen!
What is the so-called “common ground” between science and religion anyway? Sure religious people can be good scientists, particularly in fields where there is no conflict of ideas between faith and reason, but even where they might clash — as in cosmology or evolution, many religious scientists are capable of putting their beliefs aside and going where the science takes them.
But that’s not really common ground. In more liberal Christian circles, new scientific findings are accommodated by religion by modify the established religious beliefs. Thus when the Earth is discovered not to be at the center of the Universe and that it is not only 6,000 years old, mainstream Christianity gave ground to science, it did not share it.
On the other hand, fundamentalist Christians simply wall themselves into their ever shrinking playpen and willfully ignore anything that refutes their petrified belief system. They cede no ground, but adamantly refuse to share any common ground either.
From the other side, general claims about deities, creators, supernatural beings, and miracles will always be outside the remit of science. There is no common ground here either. Sure, you can test specific claims, but again the answer will fall on one side of the fence or the other. There is nothing to share.
Yes, science and religion are different disciplines or rather science and theology. The common ground advocated by Father George Coyne S. J. is the unification of our knowledge from science and from theology, on the tendered supposition that there is a universal basis for our understanding, in different disciplines. That where there are conflicts and contradictions obtained through different disciplines, they are seen as temporary and apparent, and serve as spur to further knowledge to a richer unified understanding.
Quote-
” It is this last criterion which I would like to discuss, since it appears to me to extend the epistemological nature of the natural sciences towards the realm of other disciplines, such as religious thought. Put in very simple terms this criterion is nothing else than a call for the unification of our knowledge. One could hardly be opposed to that. The problem arises with the application of this criterion. When is the unification not truly unifying but rather an adulteration of knowledge obtained by one discipline with the presuppositions inherent in another discipline. History is full of examples of such adulterations. It is for this reason that scientists have always hesitated to make use of this criterion. And yet, if applied cautiously, it appears to me to be a most creative one for the advancement of our knowledge.
The supposition is that there is a universal basis for our understanding and, since that basis cannot be self-contradictory, the understanding we have from one discipline should complement that which we have from all other disciplines. One is most faithful to one’s own discipline, be it the natural sciences, the social sciences, philosophy, literature, religious thought etc., if one accepts this universal basis. This means in practice that, while remaining faithful to the strict truth criteria of one’s own discipline, we are open to accept the truth value of the conclusions of other disciplines. And this acceptance must not only be passive, in the sense that we do not deny those conclusions, but also active, in the sense that we integrate those conclusions into the conclusions derived from one’s own proper discipline. This, of course, does not mean that there will be no conflict, even contradictions, between conclusions reached by various disciplines. But if one truly accepts the universal basis I have spoken of above, then those conflicts and contradictions must be seen as temporary and apparent. They themselves can serve as a spur to further knowledge, since the attempt to resolve the differences will undoubtedly bring us to a richer unified understanding.”
I cannot offer an example of what Father George Coyne sj means, but I would on my own give such examples to flesh out those points. The perception of a solid chair would contradict the perception at deep molecular level. The perception of a person would contradict the perception at a deeper level that there is no one (or no one at home- the core of Theravada Buddhism). These contradictions are apparent and temporary and serve as a spur to richer unified understanding. Maybe these would not be the type of examples of Father George a renowned astrophysicist would have in mind http://clavius.as.arizona.edu/vo/R1024/GCoyne2.html One would have to ask him Director Emeritus of the Vatican Observatory
Tel: (520) 795-1918 in Tucson or 39-06-698 85266 in Rome
E-Mail: gcoyne@as.arizona.edu
But what I had in mind, when I mentioned common ground, then, was a knee jerk reaction to the battle between ID proponents and critical atheists, who see ID as death of science education among this nation’s youth. .. the future scientists and future Noble Prize winners. There is cause for their concern as apart from the Dover case, there are a string of legal cases in the different states in this country, where the school science syllabus is being challenged along those lines whether elements of ID is science and should be part of the science syllabus or not. I think the common ground, is the recognize the contribution that Christianity has made and the beneficial impact it has on its sincere and genuine adherents, while slowly leading them to understand that the God that Christianity teaches is elevated by an understanding of God according to the likes of Father George than of ID proponents. The common ground is not to dismiss Christianity altogether merely because they are playing catch up on science.
What you don’t understand is that there’s no actual knowledge coming from theology. Religion and science don’t compete for knowledge. Science has won hands-down there. What “knowledge” exactly have you gotten by faith? Or even meditation?
Religion nowadays is only good for comfort/social bonding. Even maybe some (misguided, but that’s my opinion) philosophy. But whenever it even goes near a claim about actual reality, it doesn’t hold a candle to science.
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If a person has not seen a brain scan and MRI it is hard to explain. Likewise, without meditation experience, it is difficult to explain. Nonetheless, here goes – to meet your curiosity of what [IF ANY, and your ASSUMPTION, there can be NONE ( no knowledge) save for and from SCIENCE]
I could not find the link and so have to type them out-
quote –
The mind is then riveted on the object of its attention, the act of mindfulness becoming almost simultaneous with the object of its attention such as the rising and the falling of the abdomen. (In other words the rising of the abdomen becomes concurrent with the act of noting it, and similarly with the falling of the abdomen.)
The physical object of attention and mental act of noting are occurring as a pair. There is in this occurrence no person or individual involved , only this physical object of attention and the mental act of noting occurring as a pair. The yogi will in time actually and personally experience these occurrences. While noting the rising and falling of the abdomen he will come to distinguish the rising of the abdomen as physical phenomenon and the mental act of noting of it as psychical phenomenon; …… Thus the yogi will distinctly come to realize the simultaneous occurrence in pair of these psycho-physical phenomena.
Thus with every act of noting, the yogi will come to know for himself clearly that there are only this material quality which is the object of awareness or attention and the mental quality that makes a note of it. This discriminating knowledge is called ( pali word ) the beginning of the (another pali word) . It is important to gain this knowledge correctly. This will be succeeded as the yogi goes on by the knowledge that distinguishes between the cause and its effect, which knowledge is called (another pali word).
As the yogi goes on noting he will see for himself that what arises passes away after a short while . Ordinary people assume that both the material and mental phenomena go on lasting throughout life. In fact that is not so. There is no phenomena that lasts for forever. All phenomena arise and pass away so rapidly that they do not even last for the twinkling of an eye. The yogi will come to know this for himself as he goes on noting. He will then become convinced of the impermanency of all such phenomena . Such conviction is called [ another pali word].
This knowledge will be succeeded by [ another pali word] which realizes that …… …. Next the yogi will become convinced that all these psycho physical phenomena are occurring of their own accord , following nobody’s will and subject to nobody’s control. They constitute no individual or ego entity. This realization is [ another pali word] .
For the first time it dawned on me, you want to treat the bible like a science book, and thus only would you conclude that science wins hands down on knowledge as compared to faith. So while the creationist and ID proponents want to treat the Bible like a science book, even though it was written before the advent of science. You also want to treat the Bible like a science book and thus on that level playing field, the Christian faith/Bible fails to deliver the knowledge that science has delivered. WOW!!!
If Christians are told not to treat the Bible as a science text book, the antagonist camp should also be told not to treat the Bible / Christian faith as a reservoir of science knowledge.
For example, faith could bring about INSIGHT , with it , life goes well, for no matter how intelligent and full of science knowledge, a person without insight might take his life, might consider murdering another or embezzle. Is knowledge the domain of science? Can science alone claim to provide insight. These are questions you should consider, when you make comparisons on basis of knowledge and what is the definition of knowledge.
I don’t know what you’re babbling about. Why would I treat the bible like a scientific book when I’m saying it’s not even in the league of reality-based books, let alone science?
Andy how does what you quoted qualify as knowledge? That’s just individual experience put in some vague “spiritual” rhetoric. What I’m saying is simple. Faith (or “spirituality”) does not tell you anything reliably real about the universe. I’m talking about real knowledge. Why do I even have to qualify this knowledge as “real”? You keep quoting “Father” Coyne, but why do you think that’s true, what he says? Appeal to authority?
If parties antagonistic to the Christian faith/Bible do not treat the Bible as a reservoir of science knowledge, then, they could grant it a latitude that it could possibly be a reservoir of other forms of knowledge for many people, over the ages. What this knowledge might be, would be for adherents and practitioners of the faith to say. If there is NO expectation that Christianity should contain scientific knowledge, then there is no need to indicate that science wins hand down, for it could also be said of Christianity that it wins hand down over science in other areas ( like number of adherents to the faith) to number of scientists or people with keen scientific mind but not in the profession of science careers.
What is reality depends on what is ‘real’. A chair looks solid and real, but a microscopic or deeper level, it is all molecules or ??? So if one describes the chair as made of real wood, and thus a real chair, that is one reality. If we bring in the scientist and ask him to put it together into electrons etc, that is also real. Insight meditation or vipassana is about unraveling the reality comparable to the molecular level by the human of the human using the human himself /herself. That is also real knowledge. Just as knowledge of a carpenter making the chair is real knowledge. Just a different understanding of real and reality.
Father Coyne sj is a Jesuit priest, and one of the many orders of Catholic priesthood, the Jesuits. From early Church history, Jesuits have been scholars of the Catholic Church and today too. There are many other orders, some serve the poor, some teach in school, etc. To be a Jesuit they need to have at least 2 undergraduate degrees, one of which is theology and other of their choice. Many go on to have PhD or more than one PhD. They serve God through their scholasticism. Compared to other world religions, there is no other world religion that has such an organized demanding religious & secular scholastic training for their priests/monks. They certainly set the high point. The Supreme Court case some 30 years ago Anguillard v Edwards was a case where creation science was shown to be not science. Nonetheless today the battle is still on, with ID. Thus the issue of Christians understanding of God and science is an important issue here, a real issue for Christians. The advantage that Catholic Church can offer fellow Christians have not be availed because of the divisions between Catholic and Evangelical. If there was ecumenism not just in worship, but also in acquired scholastic learning undertaken by religious Catholic/ Christians of all stripes, then the cutting edge views of Father Coyne could benefit the ID debate, to show that God does not need ID. It actually belittles God to make God the “God of the Great Gaps”.
I trust this reply finds you well.
The Industrial Revolution could have happened just as easily 2,000 years ago, rather than 200 hundred years ago.
Question: Then why didn’t the Industrial Revolution happen 2,000 years ago? Why did it take so long to happen?
Answer: Because mainstream science insisted that the Earth was a motionless object at the center of the Universe, and anybody who dissented from that belief was ridiculed and ostracized and had detrimental things done to them by the educational community, the civil authority, and the religious leaders.
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Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler put cracks in the wall which allowed Newton to come up and finish knocking the wall down. It wasn’t religion that held up that wall for so long. It was mainstream science in the beings of Aristotle and Ptolemy that held Mankind back for almost 2,000 years.
Once Newton knocked the wall down with his Mechanical Universe, men and women everywhere were free to think, postulate, and experiment, and distribute their findings freely. This lead to breakthroughs in technology which enabled the Industrial Revolution. It wasn’t that way when Aristotle and Ptolemy ruled the science universe. Before Galileo, mathematics was thought to be unimportant. Scientific experiments were unheard of. Don’t blame that on God, blame it on the people who were responsible.
You atheists can criticize religion all you want, but nothing you have said so far can be used to rule out the existence of God.
Not ruling out the possibility of God,… is no different than not ruling out the possibility that the Earth is moving. When Aristotle and Ptolemy ruled out the possibility of a moving Earth just because their stomachs couldn’t feel the Earth moving, they actually doomed the Human Race to living through the Dark Ages. They blinded themselves, and they set up an authority that made certain that everybody else who wanted to eat and not get burned up while tied to a post, remained silent and went with the status quo.
If you don’t rule out God, that doesn’t stop you from continuing to ask questions about how things in the Universe work. Not ruling out the possibility that our world was created does not mean that you have to give up the quest for factual truth and accept magic as an answer. Throw all of those scriptures and religions in the garbage can where they belong. Do not rule out any possibility as to how the Universe and physical reality as we perceive it came to be, unless you are ready to prove how it happened.
You don’t need to rule out something for which there is no evidence, nor reason to exist at all. It goes back to the unicorns question. God, in the 21st century, is unnecessary. You can believe in it if you want, but not because you need it to be real.
It depends on where you put god. Did he create “man”? Nope, evolution explains that. Move god farther back. Does he make the planets go? Nope, Newton and Einstein explained that. Move god farther… You will always move him to accommodate what we have actual evidence for (i.e. scientific knowledge). If you’re willing to move him further and further, then of course you can say it doesn’t stop you from asking questions. But then in what sense can you say god is god? Either you are willing to cede to science, or you’ll just stop asking questions. Either you say at some point “God did it” and stop, or you never say it and god never did anything in the first place.
And about the history of science, you’re wrong. That the precursors of science, no matter how huge they were, had their faults just means they were human. In any case, the cases you mentioned were more based on philosophy, evidence was hard to come by, and the concept wasn’t even well defined. And Aristotle and Ptolemy in no way paved the way to the Dark Ages, what are you even talking about? That was dogma (a.k.a. religion). I don’t even think most religious people dare to blame it on “science”.
Science is just a method, not a set of beliefs. It doesn’t dictate what you should do or think, it just lays out the facts and you do whatever your feeble human mind tells you it’s right, given that knowledge.And also, science has evolved. It has progressed. It tends strongly to not make the same mistakes.
“But then in what sense can you say god is god?”
I may not do justice to Father Coyne sj’s explanation so I shall attempt a summary of it and leave you with the detailed explanation for comparison.
I think Father Coyne sj says god is god, when science yields observational data [ of precise empirically measured value with only a slight difference, of one part in a million, it would have been impossible for human beings to have emerged.] that general physical theory has no theory for. In statistics, pure chance has to be ruled out. The theory of simultaneous universes cannot be scientifically verified. Based on that, Father Coyne sj, invites one to return to an examination of the religious concept of the creation of the universe by God against the background of modern cosmology. He says one is free to accept the invitation or not, and one “can stay firmly put within one’s own discipline and continue to seek the answer there, uncontaminated by possible solutions arising elsewhere.”
Quote – # 6. An Invitation to Think of Life as Destined
A much discussed question among cosmologists over the past two decades is the one arising from the so-called anthropic principle. Many distinctions are made concerning its true meaning; they range from the so-called “weak” principle, which essentially states that, as observers in the universe, we see the universe as related to us, to the “strong” principle, which requires a certain teleology intrinsic to the universe. For our purposes it is necessary to state only the following well-established cosmological facts: (1) the existence of the human being has required a fine-tuning of the physical constants and the laws of nature which we find empirically by scientific investigation in the universe; (2) there is no general cosmological theory which explains why those constants should have the precise values they do and the laws should be as they are.
Many examples of the fine-tuning I have referred to have been discussed. The argument is essentially the following one: of the many constants of nature, e.g., the velocity of expansion of the universe, the mass and charge of the electron as compared to the proton, the gravity constant, etc., the empirically measured value is so precise that had it been only slightly different (in general, one part in one million) it would have been impossible for human beings to have emerged. Why, therefore, are the values of all the constants so precisely what they are?
Let me give just a few examples. In expanding, since its beginning in a Big Bang, the universe has cooled to the current temperature of about three degrees Kelvin (absolute zero scale). In so doing it has followed the normal, well-known law for gases: as a given volume of gas collapses it heats up; as it expands it cools down. If the current temperature of the universe were much different than it is, the Earth would not be able to dissipate its energy and it would continuously heat up. Life on the surface of the Earth would not be possible beyond a certain temperature. Why is it that the temperature of the universe is just the value that it is, after having begun at millions of degrees? Examples of this kind could be multiplied many times over. For instance, if the energy levels in helium, carbon, and nitrogen were not precisely the values they are, the thermonuclear fusion processes which have given us the heavier elements could not have taken place. Without those heavier elements we would not be here. In fact, in order to have the right proportion of elements in the universe to form the human organism, three generations of stars were required. As we have seen in Sec. 2, the only way known to scientists to manufacture the heavier elements is in the thermonuclear furnaces of stars. As a star lives out its life it converts the lighter elements (hydrogen, helium, etc.) into the heavier elements (carbon, silicon, oxygen, etc.). When it dies, it regurgitates this heavier material to the universe. The next generation of stars, born from this material, goes through the same life cycle, so that the universe is being constantly supplied with the heavier elements. To arrive at the chemical abundances required for the human organism three generations of stars had to perform in this way.
The cosmologist, of course, first seeks the answer in a general physical theory that will explain all of the values. No such theory exists. Next, we seek to explain the fine-tuning by statistics. Pure chance is ruled out because the probability that it could have happened by chance is unacceptable scientifically. The statistical argument then moves to the possibility that there are many universes, existing either simultaneously or successively. Each of these universes would have its own set of physical constants and of the laws of nature. If we have enough such universes, even an infinite number, then the probability that one such universe like ours would come to be is quite acceptable. However, none of these many universe proposals succeeds very well, either because data is lacking or they are not verifiable. Verifiability is an important and indispensable criterion of scientific validity. In the many-simultaneous-universes theory the universes are separated by distances greater than the light travel time for the total age of the universe, and, therefore, in principle non-verifiable because non-communicating. In the successive-universes hypothesis it is difficult to see how there could be any possible data which could verify the existence of a universe before the last Big Bang.
The inability to provide thus far a strictly scientific explanation to what is a strictly scientific problem, i.e., the anthropic principle, may be, according to the discussion above of the criterion of unifying explanatory power, an invitation to think that the explanation lies in a teleological consideration. It is important here to emphasis the word “invitation”, so as to preserve the epistemological independence of the various disciplines. One is perfectly free to accept the invitation or not. One can stay firmly put within one’s own discipline and continue to seek the answer there, uncontaminated by possible solutions arising elsewhere. But it seems to me that the invitation is a very real one and well-founded; it, therefore, also seems to me that it requires serious reasons to reject it. Those serious reasons must confront the long history of religious thought that there is a person at the source of the existence of the universe and that said person had a purpose or a design in “creating” the universe, a design which included, perhaps even centered upon, our existence.
What is being proposed, of course, is an invitation to return to an examination of the religious concept of the creation of the universe by God against the background of modern cosmologies. One of the most productive areas of research in modern cosmology is the application of quantum mechanics to an analysis of the origins and very earliest stages of the universe. It is important to note that our observational knowledge of the origins and early stages of the universe is very limited, we might say non-existent. But we can argue back quite rigorously to the physical conditions which characterized those stages by applying physics and mathematics to what we observe in the universe today. Amidst the myriads of such observational data there are three principal observations which emerge and which allow us to reconstruct the early universe: (1) from the measurements of distant galaxies and clusters of galaxies we know that the universe is expanding with very precise conditions; (2) from the measurement of the abundances of helium, lithium, deuterium and other light elements, we know that much of that material had to be created under extremely high temperature and density conditions in the early universe; (3) from a measurement of the current temperature of the universe, the so-called cosmic background radiation, we can establish the temperature conditions of the early universe. When we combine all of this and other observations we can determine the age of the universe, its approximate mass and its mean density.
This summary of the results of modern cosmology represents an amazing feat in the combination of our knowledge of elementary particle physics and observational astrophysics. But the nagging questions remain: how did it all begin? when it began were there not certain initial conditions which determined how it would evolve? Did the universe really come to be in all its specificity from quantum fluctuations at its origin. Such considerations also suffer from problems of verifiability. The question also arises as to whether they really provide ultimate explanations.
It is precisely here, I believe, that religious thought can play a role in cosmology. Many of the concepts which are essential ingredients in the cosmological models have important implications in religious thought and those implications must also enrich cosmological thinking, so that the latter may have the greatest unifying explanatory power, a criterion for its veracity. In exploring these implications, however, it is essential that the fundamental significance of the concepts in the various disciplines not be confused. On the other hand the precise thrust of interdisciplinary dialogue is that a wider perspective will be gained on the fundamental reality by inter-relating the concepts arising from the diverse disciplines.
“You don’t need to rule out something for which there is no evidence, nor reason to exist at all.”
For over 1,800 years, mainstream science ruled out the possibility that the Earth moves. Aristarchus of Samos was known for his heliocentric view in the 3rd century B.C.E. Mainstream science didn’t accept it until about 3 hundred years ago. A moving Earth was ruled out despite the evidence, not because there was ‘no evidence’ of a moving Earth.
“It depends on where you put god. Did he create “man”? Nope, evolution explains that.”
Darwin’s evolution explains the existence of life the same way Ptolemy explains the apparent retrograde motions of the planets. Your claim that a mutation fusing 2 chromosomes into 1 need only happen once, doesn’t hold water. If a human/ape ancestor gestated an offspring with a normal 24 chromosome arrangement on one side, and a mutated 23 chromosome arrangement on the other side, that organism would suffer from a monosomy condition and would not likely live long enough to be born, much less reproduce and start a new species. Cells have a hard time surviving with monosomy conditions. We know this because of what we observe in reality. Monosomy conditions do not cause new species to arise.
But wait. You and many others will say that their must be some mechanism that we just haven’t figured out yet. Isn’t that just leaving something up to ‘faith’ and avoiding reexamining your conclusions? Isn’t that exactly what you accuse religion of doing?
“Science is just a method, not a set of beliefs.”
Faced with completely contradicting evidence in the fossil record, evolutionists make up a ‘fudge-factor’ called “punctuated equilibrium.” There is absolutely no evidence of a “punctuated equilibrium” mechanism. It’s just a belief. Just like the ‘belief’ that there is no God.
“How did the Universe get here?” To answer that question using the scientific method, you cannot rule out the possibility that the Universe is a creation made by an unknown intelligence of some kind,… because you just don’t know, and you just don’t have any evidence otherwise.
Oooooh! THAT’s an “explanation”!
But…
Where did the “unknown intelligence of some kind” came from?
This is a classic “virtus dormitiva” fallacy.
Somehow I think you’re getting your science facts from the Discovery Institute.
And, there hasn’t been a “mainstream science” for more than a few hundred years, and as I said, it progresses. Somehow religious people think science is another, equal, absolutist form of knowledge. It isn’t.
By the way, if you’re really interested in learning how the chromosome non-problem is solved, you’d read this carefully. And then this. Whatever your feelings for/against (I’m betting on “against”) PZ Myers are, he does know his biology. If we dirty “atheists” don’t have a problem, or even admire (like me), Ken Miller when he talks science, then you shouldn’t have a problem with PZ when he does as well.
There is no aneuploidy (had to look up that word). The genes remain, there is no lost chromosome, just two fused. If you still wanna pursue that there’s a problem there, then there’s your god stopping you from further knowledge.
Strange…
I got a perfectly sensible comment in response to Interested ignored, moderated? spam blocked?
I try this as test with a different browser: a picture is worth a thousand words
Kevembuangga : “a picture is worth a thousand words”
Love is worth 13.7 billion pictures ( not 12 billion, not 15 billion, but 13.7 bi)
Mike Schuler: “Darwin’s evolution explains the existence of life the same way Ptolemy explains the apparent retrograde motions of the planets. Your claim that a mutation fusing 2 chromosomes into 1 need only happen once, doesn’t hold water. If a human/ape ancestor gestated an offspring with a normal 24 chromosome arrangement on one side, and a mutated 23 chromosome arrangement on the other side, that organism would suffer from a monosomy condition and would not likely live long enough to be born, much less reproduce and start a new species. Cells have a hard time surviving with monosomy conditions. We know this because of what we observe in reality. Monosomy conditions do not cause new species to arise.”
Mike,
Are you saying that if an animal with 24 pairs is mated with another with 23 pairs, that monosomy results and the offspring cannot survive. Is this your case for the point that since apes have 24 pairs and humans 23 pairs, that, apes and humans could not have the common ancestor, and thus, man cannot have evolved from some other animal but is a special creation ?
Andyo: “By the way, if you’re really interested in learning how the chromosome non-problem is solved, you’d read this carefully. And then this. Whatever your feelings for/against (I’m betting on “against”) PZ Myers are, he does know his biology. If we dirty “atheists” don’t have a problem, or even admire (like me), Ken Miller when he talks science, then you shouldn’t have a problem with PZ when he does as well.”
Andyo,
Are you saying that common ancestor could have 23 pairs, and from there descended humans with 23 pairs, and by value neutral error in copying, a descendant could have 24 pairs (like say the apes)? Is this your case for the point that, number of chromosomes do not matter, as there can be duplication or deduction of numbers and biotic animal evolution continues, and thus, evolution is proved, and that man evolved from some other earlier animals, whatever that be, whether 23 pairs or 20 pairs or 24 pairs, so that accordingly to reach our 23 pairs, there would be no change, increase of 3 pairs, reduction of 1 pair?
Quote – [Destiny of Life and Religious Attitudes, 2005, in Life as We Know It, ed. J. Seckbach (Dordrecht: Springer Science 2005) ] Father Coyne sj –
“…We certainly do not have the scientific knowledge to say how each living creature came to be in detail. We do not know precisely how each more complex chemical system came to contribute to the process of self organization which brought about the diversity of life forms as we know them today. Most importantly, we do not know with scientific accuracy the sufficient elements in nature to have brought about the unbroken genealogical continuity in evolution that we propose actually happened. There are, in brief, epistemological gaps which prevent natural science from saying that a detailed theory of biotic evolution has been proven. What we have presented is the most adequate account conceivable at this time considering the available empirical data. And that empirical data, with respect to biotic evolution, comes from various independent scientific enterprises, including molecular biology, paleontology and comparative anatomy……
On 1/30/2006 http://www.catholic.org/national/national_story.php?id=18504 Father Coyne sj said
” Nonetheless, in 1996 in a message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences Pope John Paul II declared that: “New scientific knowledge has led us to the conclusion that the theory of evolution is no longer a mere hypothesis.” The new scientific knowledge has also led to what is now called neo-Darwinian evolution, for the most part in continuity with Darwin but obviously progressing beyond his science.
The most recent episode in the relationship of the Catholic Church to science, a tragic one as I see it, is the affirmation by Cardinal Christoph Schönborn in his article in the New York Times, 7 July 2005, that neo-Darwinian evolution is not compatible with Catholic doctrine and he opts for Intelligent Design. To my estimation, the cardinal is in error on at least five fundamental issues, among others: (1) the scientific theory of evolution, as all scientific theories, is completely neutral with respect to religious thinking; (2) the message of John Paul II, which I have just referred to and which is dismissed by the cardinal as “rather vague and unimportant,” is a fundamental church teaching which significantly advances the evolution debate; (3) neo-Darwinian evolution is not in the words of the cardinal: “an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection;” (4) the apparent directionality seen by science in the evolutionary process does not require a designer; (5) Intelligent Design is not science despite the cardinal’s statement that “neo-Darwinism and the multi-verse hypothesis in cosmology [were] invented to avoid the overwhelming evidence for purpose and design found in modern science. “
No! Interested. You miss the point completely. According to Darwin’s theory of evolution, all life on Earth evolved from a common ancestor. That means that Apes, and Chimpanzees (assumed to be the closest biological relative of Humans) have a common ancestor with the Human Race (that means you and me).
Apes have 24 pairs of chromosomes. Humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes. If Apes and Humans have a common ancestor as Darwin’s theory holds, we now have a mathematical problem. How do you get from 24 pairs of chromosomes to 23 pairs of chromosomes over a long, gradual, period of time? You either have 24, or you have 23. Which is it? 24 or 23?
Darwin knew that organisms passed on their heriditary traits to their offspring. He just didn’t know how that was accomplished (mechanically). His only goal was to try to debunk religion. He didn’t know about chromosomes or genes, or the fact that traits are passed on with “software.” That is, information stored on an infromation storage device (i.e. the chromosome).
If it is true that us Humans (with 23 pairs of chromosomes) are a species that evolved from a common ancester of Humans and the Great Apes (Gorillas, Chimpanzees, etc. with 24 pairs of chormosomes) it had to happen all at once, and it had to happen at least twice and at the same time.
You can’t ditch arithmetic. I’m sorry, but you can’t stand there and claim to be a scientist at the same time as you are scooting things under the rug with your foot.
117 Kevembuangga on Oct 16th, 2008 at 11:07 am
Oooooh! THAT’s an “explanation”!
Oooooh! You knocked down your own straw man. I’ll repeat:
That was a “statement.” It was not an “explanation.”
WTF? Where did the Universe come from? I hope I’m not sitting here debating with dumbass college kids that never had a job.
Oh sh*t. Maybe I am debating with dumbasses that never had a job. That seems like a more logical explanation for this thread, considering the fact that I’m one of the few people on this site that can use their real name.
Well, Mike since you clearly don’t even want to accept the possibility that you’re wrong, and are just saying the same things over and over again I’ll probably just leave it at that. You have been provided with an explanation which came from both PREDICTION and EVIDENCE. Either you still don’t understand it, or you don’t want to understand it. God has stopped you from further knowledge. What’s next, the complexity of the eye? The bacterial flagellum?
The conclusion is not a matter of simple arithmetic, because your premise is wrong. It did NOT have to happen twice at the same time. Read the link. Watch Ken Miller’s video. There you go, from a staunch atheist to a staunch theist, both get the science the same.
You remind me of what happened with Behe at the Dover trial. He kept on insisting on the eye, the flagellum and other “irreducible complexity” examples, despite biologists demonstrating and explaining each of those things are pretty reducible after all. Even when presented with mounts of papers and books explaining exactly what he claimed was unexplainable, and admitting he’d not read them, he still kept insisting on the same things over and over. That’s how god gets you to stop asking, hopefully you’ll see it.
Interested,
You’d find the explanation given by PZ Myers in both links I provided before answer exactly your question. By the way, it is not just “what I’m saying”, it is an explanation that was both predicted, and when tested, evidence was provided. The links also have links to the papers, I think. Also, you might wanna check out the video of Ken Miller explaining these things I also linked above.
And about father Coyne, I really don’t see what’s the big deal with what he’s saying. It is nothing but (I’m sorry, you seem to be a fan) poor philosophical ramblings of a priest. Let me ask you this, if the catholic church didn’t accept evolution, would you? What credibility exactly does the catholic church have over any layperson on matters of knowledge of the universe (hint: none), let alone a scientist?