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.
You’re the one who cited Jefferson and now you’re impeaching him?
The intellectual integrity of the new atheism on display.
No, I am just pointing out the vapidity of your incredibly prolix posts.
Since your model “deist” Thomas Jefferson said it, it’s really dishonest of you to disown him now.
But, then, it’s typical of fundamentalists to do that. I’m just trying to keep to the evidence.
Who is disowning him? What evidence? This is like arguing with a Creationist.
This is like arguing with a Creationist.
Well, I have been pointing out that there really is only a conclusion that separates the methods of the fundamentalists and the new atheists.
What evidence?
You see those lines that begin http:?
Who is disowning him?
Am I arguing with a trinity of Gordons?
275. Gordon Says:
September 17th, 2010 at 12:03 pm
Hmm an expert generator of oxymorons apparently–”rational Christianity”,
“No one sees with greater pleasure than myself the progress of reason in its advances towards rational Christianity”. Thomas Jefferson @274, see link immediately below the quotation.
So much for the pop-atheist use of Thomas Jefferson, though not really since like the Tea Party, FOX TV crowd, it’s not really about evidence and the truth is it, not when it’s all about ideology.
No, I am cavilling with your use with approval of that quote or purported quote “rational Christianity”….there are sooo many Jefferson quotes that go against this….and it is a classical oxymoron. You are the ideologue. I will admit there is a god if there were any (that is any, one iota, epsilon) evidence for one. I think Jefferson means by that quote that the progress of reason advances towards “rational christianity” i.e. rational Christianity is when deluded Christians admit that Jesus was mortal, and denies superstitious dogma. The new atheists are the same as the old ones…those folks who can use their cerebral cortex who haven’t been unalterably brainwashed as children, or “born-again” as so-called adults.
It made perfect sense to me when I saw it. You don’t understand what he means because you are not informed about non-conformist Christianity of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. If you’d bothered to inform yourself outside of the polemical anti-religious literature you might know more. Since he endorsed Priestley maybe you should read that book I linked to from googlebooks. Both volumes.
But, as I said about Hawking and Carroll, Jefferson on the topic of God isn’t any more authoritative than the clerk at the grain store down the road from me. Belief in God is the most non-authoritative matter, since it relies entirely on personal experience and not on reputation or how many letters you can tack onto your name. You seem to still be laboring under the mistaken idea that I’m trying to convert you to faith. I am not because, 1. that’s none of my business, 2. if it was I’d have no idea how to inspire that kind of experience in you.
My only motives in this are 1. keeping the new atheism from being a problem for the political left through the massive bigotry against the large majority of people by a small and obnoxiously conceited faction, 2. the irritation at seeing such arrogant people being so demonstrably wrong.
I know a number of atheists who very much want to distinguish between themselves and the new atheists. My brother calls himself an agnostic now for just that reason.
Born again. As I wasn’t raised in that tradition that’s about as far removed from my thinking as Muggletonianism. I think you might be laboring under media induced stereotyping of Americans.
I agree, any fool can have an opinion on God. Belief in God is “non-authoritative and relies entirely on personal experience.” That is why it is entirely unreliable and insupportable. There is absolutely no
evidence for it, but then religious folk do not seem to need evidence when they have blind faith. Faith without evidence leads to monstrous results as has been apparent since religion first evolved. I very much doubt that you know many atheists personally. Atheists are not such a small minority, even in the religiously surfeited USA. It is just that in the USA, it is still somewhat dangerous to admit that you are a rational person, and certainly no politician can do so. The fall all over themselves grovelling over their supposed belief. The USA is perhaps even more religiously polluted than the Middle East.
Look at all the rapture-apocalypse Palin clones. “Massive bigotry against a large majority…” lol
If you came across a delusional mentally ill patient, and you pointed out their delusions, how is that bigotry. Once again, paraphrasing Sam Harris-“When a large number of people have delusional thoughts, that is religion. When one person has delusions, he is mentally ill. Religious people are not insane, but their core beliefs absolutely are.”
I think I’ve been over the “evidence” question, showing how widespread the desire to dispose of that requirement in science is among the new atheists, rather definitively. I could have linked to a previous post on this blog which makes a case for doing just that but was trying to be polite. I did when I wrote about it on the blog I write for.
For you to endorse Hawking’s statement, contained in a book in which he explicitly calls for changing the rules that have governed science since its beginning in favor of materialist scholasticism because it suits his professional field, which has painted itself into a place where the evidence they need is not and likely will never be available, is hypocritical.
Other than your fellow fundamentalists on the other side of the aisle, religious believers don’t assert to a scientific knowledge of religion, they call what their religion produces belief. Which is certainly has more intellectual integrity than asserting that the fervently desired and professionally advantageous belief in evidence free things is science.
Quite often in religion, it is belief in things that are inconvenient for believers and so can’t be dismissed as a mere opinion. The requirements that are included in Jewish law and Christianity are often at odds with personal preference.
While people whose work requires long periods of time concentrating on details about the physical universe find it convenient to dump all of religion into a category of thought, as you do in your last paragraph, what they are doing has nothing to do with the reality which is extremely complex. “Religion” can’t be reduced into a statistical average and considered as such, it has no characteristic that can be generalized in that way. I can fault some of the real scientists among the new atheists for being ignorant out of personal necessity, though those people should certainly realize, once informed of their mistake, that they shouldn’t continue with it. Most new atheists have no such excuse and their bigotry is exactly the mirror of Sarah Palin’s.
You do know that by a large majority, Americans don’t have a very high opinion of Sarah Palin, and if the surveys are correct, that majority consists largely of religious believers, just as the majority of Americans who accept evolution are religious believers. There are more religious believers in the United States of whom that is true than the surveys indicate are atheists. And, hard though it might be for you to believe, there are atheists who are enthusiastic fans of Palin and her ilk. Your Christopher Hitchens supported George W. Bush, after all. I’m not sure if Sam Harris might have supported him but he certainly supported his invasion of Iraq, which, as mentioned, is responsible for the deaths of well over a hundred thousand Iraqis and others, has turned back the clock on womens rights, and has immeasurably strengthened the power of theocrats inside Iraq and in Iran. Some of those are reasons many religious people, including myself, opposed the invasion from before it began. For all my criticism of John Paul II, Iraq was one thing where he was mostly right.
What do you call Sam Harris when he supports an insane policy such as the invasion of Iraq? Or some of the things he said in End of Faith which are so bad that he’s walked them back, not terribly convincingly? What do you call Christopher Hitchens with his insane attraction to violence – vicarious in his soft-handed case — going back to his time as a Trotskyite and on into his neo-conservative period? Dawkins and Dennett, with their beliefs in memes and their Just So stories, explanatory myths with no evidence…. I’ll leave it to any objective witness to judge those. And yet you think someone who believes in God is automatically mentally ill. I really did mean it when I said that Lawrence Krauss lost my respect when he endorsed them, I hope out of ignorance, but I can’t assume that someone of his intelligence doesn’t actually know what they have said and stood for.
Yes, and any rational objective witness will come to the conclusion that they are correct. Just like an American to pull out the “Trotsky” stuff. Gee, I bet you loved Senator McCarthy. When it comes to defending irrational, superstitious ideas, you are of Sarah Palin’s “ilk”. The thing you are not seeing about Iran and Iraq is that the problem is the Islamic religion and the mullahs. They will have to be dealt with before the whole region is subsumed in conflagration and Israel is destroyed ( which is the neo-con Palin Apocalypse favored by many americans. As far as Krauss goes, you are simply finding out that a whopping majority of good scientists are atheists, as he is. People like Francis Collins are anomalies and merely look foolish. Look at the AAS polls. Those who are not are basically innumerate humanists and music teachers..
Religion poisons everything. For example see how a science blog has been hijacked by a deluded Crusader.
Gordon, I think you really should look at Chris Hitchen’s bio and look at his role in Trot politics in Britain in the 60s. You really are quite ignorant of American politics as well. I guess you’d have similar things to say about my distant cousins Mary McCarthy and Eugene McCarthy. It really is the name that’s getting to you, isn’t it. I’ve found that some Brits have trouble with it.
Obviously you don’t understand what the Ba’ath party in Iraq or Syria were all about or that before the invasion that Hitchens and Harris supported the government was quite secular, with women generally having considerably more liberty and freedom than in other countries in the region. Now, of course, due to the brilliant regional-political analysis that they signed on to, the theocrats in both Iraq and Iran are far more powerful than they were.
I really don’t mind if a majority of scientists are atheists at a time when it’s fashionable among them, they can follow the materialist faith to their graves, for all I care. I don’t care if they all drive a particular model of car or think anything else unconnected with those topics in which they have any professional credibility. I also wouldn’t necessarily ask one about an area in science in which they have no professional or avocational expertise either. In fact, if they’re foolish enough to not see that their professional credentials in examining the physical universe gives them no credible insight into religious questions unrelated to the evidence that science has developed, I’d be far less likely to take them seriously on those topics. Though they have every right to their own ideas, just as everyone else does, though they seem inclined to not extend those rights to people who disagree with them. Who does that remind you of? Hint: not Francis Collins.
Trying to promote the incredibly sloppy standards of psychology within the real science of biology is one of the most irresponsible things that has been done within science in the post-war period. Well, that is if you don’t count things like weapons science and petro-geology. I don’t think extending that trend into the core of the hard sciences is going to do anything good. And it doesn’t seem to me that the big names in those efforts are religious believers.
Oh, and that Crusader remark, ironic considering how the Iraqi insurgents use that word for the invading forces. And even more ironic since I’m not a Christian.
If Sean Carroll wants me to stop posting comments here he can ask me to stop and I will. I wouldn’t have posted one after 263 if Gordon hadn’t decided he wanted to try again.
lol, so you want the last word desperately…so, if you are not a Christian with an Irish name, you must
be a stealth atheist or a new age flake. The psychic research remarks lead towards the latter.
Finally, an apology to Sean and to Anthony for indulging myself here and using many
ad hominem attacks, but I was having fun and being trollish. I do believe in what I said, and suggest Anthony chkdsk and defrag his brain to remove corrupt files 🙂
Oh, I thought you took this seriously. Maybe that explains it. I can assure you I did.
As I said, I do believe in what I said.
It’s been 5 months into my recovery from 3 weeks loss of of consciousness due to a neuromuscularimmune-respiratory-circulatory collapse. “Thanks” to medical technology I survived; when I woke up I could not talk due to a tracheotomy, my vision was a total blur, and I my hands were strapped to the bed. I endured countless venipunctures, intravenous lines, blood transfusions and medical what-have-you just to bring me back to quasi-normalcy. Being a scientist investigator hacker, I accept technological advances and their contribution to the advance of society. However, I am also a skeptic and sometimes still struggle about all the efforts to keep me alive. I have always believed in God though. I didn”t have any Out of the Body Experience as others have reported. Thanks to badly needed lens implant in both eyes I can now see, read and go back to my reasearch using the Internet as one of my resources. Still stuck in a wheelchair though, like Hawking. Sincerely, I don’t think he has settled the issue of God, that is, by using physics. Scientists have to think a bit harder. Scientists and Creationists seem to polarize society leading to extremism in opposing directions. God is beyond either theology or physics. Take it from somebody who has just survived death and now living with the still vivid memory of scientific process and spirituality. Alas, I’m still my old self, and continue my research on tne relationship between neuroscience and religious experience. it’s time for both scientists and creationists to come to the bargaining table and work together for the advance of society. After all, isn’t it all that”s worthwhile?
Sympathies for your horrible ordeal, but clearly Creationism is demonstrably false, and most science is
largely verifiable. They cannot work together to “advance society”. Science advances society; creationism retards it by promoting blind and irrational superstition, interfering with the education system by brainwashing children and hijacking curricula. Also, I think that it is difficult to
call oneself a skeptic and have “always believed in God”.
I didn’t see anywhere in Doc Lalana’s comment where “promoting blind and irrational superstition, interfering with the education system by brainwashing children and hijacking curricula.” is advocated. I mean,Gordon, come on, you seem to be unwilling to look at evidence to corroborate a point and especially evidence produced that refutes you and the common wisdom of the new atheism, but unless your screen was incredibly tiny it was still on the same screen while you made your baseless association to a commentator whose comment criticizes creationism. I think it’s fairly clear it’s not a demand to change the meaning of science, unlike creationists or some scientists are, as we have been discussing.
If I’d said that what I read in the comment was far more compatible with genuine skepticism, it being explicitly a personal conclusion based in personal experience, than your repeated and baseless accusations of mental instability, based in your ideology, I’d have the obligation to base it on your comments made here. Tedious though that would be and would become as you denied it.
I decided to re-read the thread because I am engaged in an argument with someone making similar accusations about me or I’d not have seen that Gordon is still drawn to this argument like a moth to a candle flame.
Anthony: “Its time for Creationists and scientists to come to the bargaining table and work together for the advancement of society”. That is the statement. My comment about this is what Creationism
is and does. Yes, he criticises Creationism, but suggests that it somehow “come together” with science.
That is impossible and you know it. BTW you might be interested in a debate on youtube between Christopher Hitchens and David Berlinski called “Does Atheism Poison Everything?” Hitchens absolutely and totally annihilates ID’er Berlinski –it is almost as embarrassing as your comments on this blog…
You don’t seem to be able to understand that the extraordinary claim is not that there is no evidence for a God. It is that a God exists. Your demands that I provide “evidence” of some sort makes absolutely no sense. Where is your evidence for your claim? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. But Noooo. You use the squid defense—you escape in a cloud of ink.
The mistake you make is saying you make an argument. You make statements. I am beginning to think that you are a shill for the inappropriately named “Discovery Institute”.
Oh, no. That line that Carl Sagan lifted from Marcello Truzzi again. You want me to point out some problems with it?
1. If the regular methods of science aren’t sufficient to dispose of claims that someone decides are “extraordinary” then they aren’t reliable to test any other claim either. I’ll point out in passing that multiverses is a massively extraordinary idea without any evidence at all.
2. The nature of a claim isn’t defined only by what someone decides is extraordinary but what is actually claimed. If someone claimed that you can use probability to prove that God almost certainly exists, then you could look at their argument and find problems with it, as has been done with such claims in the past. Oh, by the way, Dawkins’ mirror image of that fails for the same reason. You just don’t seem to be able to put God to the test of probability anymore than you can the probability of alien life. Insufficient data that is of known relevance, and that’s just a start. If someone claims that God is spirit and so not susceptible to physical testing, I’d like to know how you would refute that idea.
I’ve read that some of Truzzi’s friends said he was thinking of repudiating the line just before he died. It’s too bad he didn’t because, while it sounds good, it’s really sloppy thinking. I’d recommend people look up Truzzi because he was quite a few marks deeper at thinking about skeptical issues than the guys who threw him out of CSICOP.
I wish you guys wouldn’t mistake Carl Sagan’s Demons as a logic textbook.
As a long time subscriber to The Nation magazine, I got my fill of the Hitchens act over about two decades. “Atheism poisons everything” sounds like a rather bigoted proposition to me, and one that is probably guilty of the same kind of dishonest reductionism that the new atheism practices so I’d probably think anyone on either side was participating in a dishonest exercise. That the eternal Oxford boy wonder does well at that silly sport doesn’t surprise me. I’d rather go hammer and tongs on a blog which isn’t quite as much dependent on show biz.
Oh, and “the advancement of society” isn’t the same thing as “science”. There was the instance of Pat Robertson making an anti-climate change spot with Al Sharpton for Al Gore, just for instance.
You should read all his essays online in Slate magazine. They are incredible.
Don’t get into “climate change”. Climate is and always has been changing and Gore is a
self-promoting moron. Pachauri, head of the IPCC is a corrupt fraud. Robert Laughlin, a Nobel winner (like Gore, only deserving it) in condensed matter physics, has jumped into the fray on the side denying that human contribution is significant, and that, anyway, meliorating attempts are like spitting in the ocean.
Back to the religion thing, are you sure that Anthony McCarthy isn’t a pseudonym for Dwaine Gish?
Actually, religion poisons everything. Carl Sagan wasn’t perfect, but he was a hell-of-a-lot better than any religious delusional. Bertrand Russell was once asked “What if there is a Heaven and you get there and God asks why you didn’t believe. He replied “Not enough evidence.” He could have replied
“No evidence”.