Stephen Hawking has a new book coming out (The Grand Design, with Leonard Mlodinow). Among other things, he points out that modern physics has progressed to the point where we don’t need to invoke God to explain the existence of the universe. This is not exactly a hot flash — I remember writing an essay making the same point for a philosophy class my sophomore year in college — but it makes news because it’s Hawking who says it. And that’s absolutely fine — Hawking has a track record of making substantial intellectual contributions, there’s every reason to listen to him more than random undergraduates waxing profound.
This issue is, of course, totally up my alley, and I should certainly blog about it. But I can’t, because I’m on hiatus! (Right?) So, as an experiment, I made a video of myself talking rather than simply typing my words into the computer. Radical! Not sure the amount of information conveyed is anywhere near as large in this format, and obviously I didn’t sweat the production values. I fear that some subtleties of the argument may be lost. But if we’re lucky, other people elsewhere on the internet will also talk about these questions, and we’ll get it all sorted out.
Let me know if the Grand Video Experiment is worth repeating and improving, or whether it’s just a waste of time.
Something that I should have said, but didn’t: there doesn’t need to be some sophisticated modern-physics answer to the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” The universe can simply exist, end of story. But it’s still fun to think carefully about all the possibilities, existence and non-existence both included.
Very well, JimV, you have defined your version of atheism. Since you didn’t address the actual meat of the point, can you define your version of “agnostic” and differentiate that from your version of “atheist”? Furthermore, can you step outside of this thread, and outside of yourself, and define what both terms mean to the general public?
I can define “blue” as “the color of the top light on a stoplight”…you know what, never mind. No more analogies. I tried to use the symmetry analogy, but that was also a car wreck.
“…the Society for Psychical Research is, I believe, one of the oldest academic societies): …”
Yeah, that and the Wiccans–they just don’t use the adjective ‘academic” improperly.
Being a physicist or mathematician certainly doesn’t protect you from holding delusional
thoughts (Bernard Carr)–look at Sheldrake and Brian Josephson, John Nash. There is nothing wrong with doing psychic research so long as the studies are properly done, but haven’t enough been done and debunked (Randi, Martin Gardner, etc) to bury it for awhile amongst the flaky detritus of New Age drivel. I suppose you think that Deepak Chopra is a deep thinker.
Since this is nominally a science blog, and seems to be hijacked by psychic faith-heads, I will
stop posting. Perhaps then the blog will move on to discuss real phenomena.
Since this is nominally a science blog, and seems to be hijacked by psychic faith-heads
Randi, Martin Gardner, etc)
Martin Gardner, didn’t care for his puzzles and thought he was very capable of dishonest polemics but at least he had some scientific and mathematical credibility. James Randi. Oh, yeah, very sciency. If you happen to learn all of your science from TV and comic books. I haven’t been tempted to buy the magazine with that story about him up till now but I think you’ve changed my mind. And you turn your nose up at Brian Josephson.
Jim V. I’m glad to see you’re energy efficient. Just imagine how energy efficient members of those “primitive tribes” are and I’ll bet they don’t look down on you.
Anthony at 220
Thanks for that, I never knew Richard Feynman spoke at the Parapsychological Convention in 1984! A measured comment by him as well. I will give your link as well:
http://www.tricksterbook.com/ArticlesOnline/HymanReview.htm
Gordon, this subject is now being taught at university level, alongside psychology. See the classic introductory university text by Drs. Watt and Irwin, Introduction to Parapsychology (5th Edition, 2007):
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Introduction-Parapsychology-Harvey-J-Irwin/dp/0786430591
So you see the subject is being taught and studied as you quoted at 228: “There is nothing wrong with doing psychic research so long as the studies are properly done.” A bridge of agreement!
So there is real science here. Again I say, can this be related to multiverse physics and does this all relate to the “God issue”, the actual subject of this thread? It is a physics issue not woo woo!
BTW, Randi and the JREF are a peculiar phenomenon well left to their own devices.
It’s two in the morning. The wife shouts down to her frantic husband on his PC, “What are you doing down there? Come to bed!”
“Someone’s WRONG on the internet!”, he yells back.
Two thousand miles away on the other end of the line, Fido (a dog) is bashing the keyboard of his master’s computer. He turns to his friend Rex (dog) and says, “On the internet nobody knows you’re a dog.”
There was one other detail I skipped about the quote from Christopher Hitchens. It seems to elude the new atheist sloganeers that the suicide bombers and planners of 9-11 had a significant number of people with training in techology and science among them. Though, from what I’ve read, they didn’t have any who took the Islamic prohibition on killing the innocent or suicide seriously. They also ignore that they were uniformly men. So, why do they focus on that one characteristic to taint all religious believers, including those who died in the bombing? It’s bigotry of course. The kind that you can see if you go back and look at the literature of bigotry against any group, Jews and the Irish, for example. The literature of bigotry always assigns vicarious blame to people based on some aspect of identity, ignoring the ones they choose to. For people who like to categorize maybe that’s a good indication of where the new atheism should be placed.
“Since you didn’t address the actual meat of the point, can you define your version of “agnostic” and differentiate that from your version of “atheist”? Furthermore, can you step outside of this thread, and outside of yourself, and define what both terms mean to the general public?”
I defined agnostic (and gnostic, its opposite) in a previous comment (off the top of my head), but I’ll try again. As to what the general public thinks, let’s restrict that to the general public who has looked into the issue, which would be … wikipedia:
“Atheism, in a broad sense, is the rejection of belief in the existence of deities.[1] In a narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities.[2] Most inclusively, atheism is simply the absence of belief that any deities exist.[3] Atheism is contrasted with theism,[4] which in its most general form is the belief that at least one deity exists.[5]”
Hey, mine is the most inclusive definition! Who knew? It’s just the one that makes the most sense to me and is used by the people whose writing on the subject seems clearest to me. Anyway, if it is fair for there to be over 1000 varieties of Christian, and god knows (no he doesn’t – atheist joke) how many different religions, can’t there be a few different varieties of atheist?
Here’s my second try at agnostic, from an online dictionary:
gnostic – possessing intellectual or esoteric knowledge of spiritual things
agnostical, agnostic – uncertain of all claims to knowledge
The big stumbling block here, I think, is the idea of “proof” or “certainty” – in mathematics there is proof that flows from initial axioms – assumptions – by a rigorous chain of logic; in science, there is no proof, no certainty, because we don’t know what the axioms are. They are always subject to change, as we delve more deeply into the universe’s workings. In science, there are hypotheses which may become theories if the evidence for them mounts up and stands up over time – but tomorrow someone may discover something deeper. As I see it, all good scientists are agnostics – at least in their own fields of research. Yet most scientists are atheists, which puts them in my category.
From my experience of atheists, they seem to fall into two general categories, the liberal atheists and the fundamentalist atheists. Liberal atheists are, generally, those who say ” I don’t believe there is a God” the fundamentalists say “I know there isn’t a God”. The really hard fundamentalists hold that anyone who doesn’t claim to know there isn’t a God is unworthy of respect. Oddly, they seem to fall into categories that are very similar to those that religious believers fall into. And, as with with religious believers, it’s the liberals who are the most reasonable and easy to get along with.
What is really interesting is the atheist fundamentalist pretense that all religious believers are the worst of hard line religious fundamentalists. Which is more convenient than observing real life and taking into account the enormous variability of religious expression, which is so variable that it would take several paragraphs to just outline it in simple terms. But why the idea that “religion” is the expression of a genetic complex is absurd was talked about already.
These lapses in rigorous observation and logic among the self-appointed owners of science are one of the most interesting things about the new atheist phenomenon, mirroring the lapses in moral integrity of religious fundamentalists. It’s also one of the things about them that seems to generate an enormous amount of irony of exactly the sort that their polemics against all religion consists of. Which is just one more irony.
Since you don’t seem to even need me to keep drivelling on, all sorts of crap is taught now at universities–there seem to be whole departments of it I don’t really think at this point, psychic research should be done to any degree–it has been debunked by experts like Randi (not a scientist, sure, but an expert debunker and a professional at deceiving naive and self-deluded researchers.)
Now it has a cult-like following and it generates its own hagiographic literature —it is similar to the UFO cults, and, say, Lysenkoism. Really, we do not have any bridges. It is to the shame of any University (Duke) that this is taught other than, say, mesmerism, or cold fusion, as a passing mania for historical purposes.
Jim V, why should it surprise anyone that people who spend their lives looking only at the physical universe would come to have a point of view which saw little if anything else? While I wonder about those polls that your assertion relies on, it wouldn’t surprise me if, in today’s culture of science, atheism wasn’t a predominant strain of thought that people in science might be influenced by.
What is irrational is that anyone would think that a career which focuses exclusively on the physical universe that is treatable by science would gain any credibility in matters entirely outside of their professional field. I wouldn’t go to a scientist if I needed a lawyer or a carpenter if they didn’t have any professional credentials in those fields. Why should I think what they have to say about religion would be any more credible than what a carpenter or farm worker would think about it?
I think that the phenomenon of those who have constructed theories of multiverses or evolutionary psychology or memes, might be a clue into what happens when they try to move their science past where there is any evidence to support what they want to find, a further synthesis of their systems. Perhaps their emotional investment in materialism and their faith that there is a discoverable further synthesis leads them in a general direction where people head when there isn’t evidence available, speculation based on their experience and what has given them the most edification in the past. In which case you wonder why they’re so critical of other people, in other walks of life, doing the same thing. Though I’ve never encountered a farm worker or a carpenter who would mistakenly think that their line of work was relevant to it in anything but a metaphorical sense.
Alan, in light of Gordon’s hectoring, I would like to give you some more information. Please write to me
amatechidnes@gmail.com
I do have a lot of spam filters that cut out most invective so just send me a place I can send that to you.
I know it’s bad of me but I can’t help but point out that Lysenkoism was an anti-Darwinist theory that was adopted and promoted by an anti-religious, atheist government. I don’t know what religious ideas Lysenko might have held but it would be surprising if someone who practiced religion could have held his position at the time. I’ve always been curious about anything that Corliss Lamont might have had to say about it during the time that Stalin was in power.
Lysenkoism was mentioned just as another crazy idea, like psychic phenomena (sic). Somehow now you are conflating psychic delusions and religion—hmmm I guess they arise from the same source.
Gordon, not endorsing your adjectives and one noun, I think you’ll find that’s been done on this thread already and it wasn’t by me.
I was under the impression that Richard Dawkins was indicating that he was moving in the direction of accepting some of it, now that, as he always has to first, he’s invented a term to cover himself. “Perinormal” or some such construction? Though he seems to have reassured James Randi that his fraudulent challenge is safe as he can still weasel out of making an honest man of himself.
I think that Jerry Coyne’s a better writer than Dawkins, though he’s less measured and ruder, albeit less inclined to invent stuff out of thin air.
Friday’s my slow teaching day. And I did admit I was being bad.
Scientists study reality – in all its aspects. They are biased against unreality, because history has taught us how easy it is to cling to primitive* notions and rationalize away the conflicting evidence. Unreality is very pernicious. That might even be stated as the first rule of science: beware unreality. (Feynman said it differently and much better: don’t fool yourself.)
This is pretty thin, elementary stuff for a science blog. No wonder all the usual great commenters are avoiding this thread.
* There’s that word again. In context here, it is a relative term meaning less-developed. The turbines I designed 20 years ago are more primitive than the ones I design today. No condescension to my previous self is implied. I did the best I could with the tools and skills I had then.
Jim V. I have that effect on new atheists. Usually when I ask for the evidence they insist they’ve got but don’t seem to want to share. They don’t like persistence.
“Scientists study reality”
I was always told they observed phenoema, measured and quantified what they observed, anaylzed that, published it and waited for the reviews and responses to come in. Though as seen on this thread, that’s terribly out of fashion.
As to the charge of unreality, your spinning that yarn and when asked for your evidence that it was real, calling it a story would seem to give you nothing to complain of on that count.
This isn’t the first time Stephen Hawking has made some grandiose claims. Remember when he destroyed math?
http://aspoonfulweighsaton.blogspot.com/2006/04/great-hoax_21.html
RobReynolds, I liked that. The line about everyone seeing a paper by Hawking and assuming it’s right does, actually, say just who he is for most of the people who talk about him with absolutely not the first clue as to what his work consists of. I’ve seen it all over the internet, the new atheists figure they can say “Hawking says” and they’ve won the entire argument.
I guess I’ll have to ask Lawrence Krauss or someone else if physicists have a comprehensive and exhaustive knowledge of even one of the objects they study because the physicists here don’t seem to want to answer it. “We don’t know” would be a perfectly valid answer, by the way. As long as it was the honest one.
Answer what, exactly? And what Hawking says has nothing really to do with “new atheism”. Also, physicists don’t assume automatically that his papers are “right”. There is always a vigorous debate, and he has admitted errors, unlike the Pope, for example.
His comment about God is simply like Laplace’s to Napoleon–that he has no need of that hypothesis.
All the arguments for God’s existence have been refuted. Now the religious should provide some evidence for a God, or they should shut up. Sean should close this thread before it melds into
the psychic hotline.
If you think that physicists don’t have knowledge of even one of the objects they study, you had better move to a cave and eat roots and berries ( you are using a computer—-the level of the discussion here would improve immensely.
Gordon, the refutation of your first line is to be found all over many blogs of the English Speaking Peoples where new atheists seem to believe that all they have to do is say “Hawking said” to win the argument hands down. They seem quite puzzled when the problems with their faith statements are pointed out.
You want the discussion shut down? Why? Because no a-deus ex machina has swooped in to save your ideology from its most basic contradictions?
Your resort to the hobby horse of frat boy “skepticism” doesn’t hold for what I said, as anyone with an ability to read would see. Though it has given me an opportunity to try, try and find out what Dawkins was indicating with his neologism “perinormal” which he seems to be walking away from. Oddly, walking back stuff he invented seems to be a habit with Dawkins.
Oh, and as it was the topic of my blog post this morning:
— All the arguments for God’s existence have been refuted. Now the religious should provide some evidence for a God, or they should shut up. Gordon
Call me old fashioned but for the people who are always demanding evidence of the supernatural they seem to have exempted themselves from having any for their assertions about the natural universe. If they want to construct self-referenced, scholastic models of possible universes that’s their affair*, though as pointed out in Physics World if they want funding for it, that makes it everyone’s business.
But if they want to extend their speculations past physics and into religion, they either have to give up their demands for evidence from religious believers** or they have to put up their evidence relevant to the subject of religion. They’re not going to get to have it it both ways from anyone with a sense of fairness and integrity. That is one rule in real life that they are not going to get away with changing in their favor anymore. No more than I’d accept it by those claiming to be able to use science to confirm their supernatural beliefs.
I don’t fault science for not being able to dispose of God, it never having been the subject matter of science anymore than it is double-entry accounting to begin with. Hawking and the others should realize that they are relieved of that task and take the opportunity to look for that missing confirmation in the physical universe that they obviously so much want to have.
How about Fr. Barron’s take on this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-yx5WN4efo&feature=player_embedded
No, I only want Sean to consider capping this thread because you keep posting boring and totally irrelevant posts even when there are no responses. As far as I am concerned, science has mostly disposed of god in the sense that that hypothesis is highly improbable. I guess you can go on talking to yourself, but there are medications for that.