Science Increasingly Makes the Case for God

Well, it would seem scientist are beginning to think that it's almost impossible to believe that everything just happened by chance. The universe is just to big and perfect to just happen. This should shake up some people.


Science Increasingly Makes the Case for God
wsjdottcom/ ^ | Eric Metaxas

The fine-tuning necessary for life to exist on a planet is nothing compared with the fine-tuning required for the universe to exist at all. For example, astrophysicists now know that the values of the four fundamental forces—gravity, the electromagnetic force, and the “strong” and “weak” nuclear forces—were determined less than one millionth of a second after the big bang. Alter any one value and the universe could not exist. For instance, if the ratio between the nuclear strong force and the electromagnetic force had been off by the tiniest fraction of the tiniest fraction—by even one part in 100,000,000,000,000,000—then no stars could have ever formed at all. Feel free to gulp.

Multiply that single parameter by all the other necessary conditions, and the odds against the universe existing are so heart-stoppingly astronomical that the notion that it all “just happened” defies common sense. It would be like tossing a coin and having it come up heads 10 quintillion times in a row. Really?

Fred Hoyle, the astronomer who coined the term “big bang,” said that his atheism was “greatly shaken” at these developments. He later wrote that “a common-sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with the physics, as well as with chemistry and biology . . . . The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.”

Theoretical physicist Paul Davies has said that “the appearance of design is overwhelming” and Oxford professor Dr. John Lennox has said “the more we get to know about our universe, the more the hypothesis that there is a Creator . . . gains in credibility as the best explanation of why we are here.”

http://finance.yahoo.com/mb/BAC/#mb...tls%3Dla%252Cd%252C12%252C3&mbtc=mb-tab-topic

 

Interesting perspective even with a fallacious appeal to probability.

Of course our universe is "fine tuned" because both it and we exist to observe it.

Since we are still striving to comprehend the workings and nature of our universe I suppose utilizing the combination of a "designer of the gaps" argument and an appeal to probability is as unfalsifiable as the "no god" argument.

 

How is it an appeal to probability? An appeal to probability would say that because something can happen it must happen. The point made is that the universe as it exists is absurdly improbable without some guidance.

The anthropic principle that the universe is fined tuned because we exist and observe it to be so is also a fallacy. That assumes there were a great number of universes created without those fine tuned parameters (i.e. random parameters) and this one was the lucky one.

 

no it doesn't


SUNDAY, DEC 21, 2014

Religion’s smart-people problem: The shaky intellectual foundations of absolute faith

Religious belief the world over has a strenuous relationship with intellectualism. But why?

by JOHN G. MESSERLY



Should you believe in a God? Not according to most academic philosophers. A comprehensive survey revealed that only about 14 percent of English speaking professional philosophers are theists. As for what little religious belief remains among their colleagues, most professional philosophers regard it as a strange aberration among otherwise intelligent people. Among scientists the situation is much the same. Surveys of the members of the National Academy of Sciences, composed of the most prestigious scientists in the world, show that religious belief among them is practically nonexistent, about 7 percent.

Now nothing definitely follows about the truth of a belief from what the majority of philosophers or scientists think. But such facts might cause believers discomfort. There has been a dramatic change in the last few centuries in the proportion of believers among the highly educated in the Western world. In the European Middle Ages belief in a God was ubiquitous, while today it is rare among the intelligentsia. This change occurred primarily because of the rise of modern science and a consensus among philosophers that arguments for the existence of gods, souls, afterlife and the like were unconvincing. Still, despite the view of professional philosophers and world-class scientists, religious beliefs have a universal appeal. What explains this?

Genes and environment explain human beliefs and behaviors—people do things because they are genomes in environments. The near universal appeal of religious belief suggests a biological component to religious beliefs and practices, and science increasingly confirms this view. There is a scientific consensus that our brains have been subject to natural selection. So what survival and reproductive roles might religious beliefs and practices have played in our evolutionary history? What mechanisms caused the mind to evolve toward religious beliefs and practices?

Today there are two basic explanations offered. One says that religion evolved by natural selection—religion is an adaptation that provides an evolutionary advantage. For example religion may have evolved to enhance social cohesion and cooperation—it may have helped groups survive. The other explanation claims that religious beliefs and practices arose as byproducts of other adaptive traits. For example, intelligence is an adaptation that aids survival. Yet it also forms causal narratives for natural occurrences and postulates the existence of other minds. Thus the idea of hidden Gods explaining natural events was born.

In addition to the biological basis for religious belief, there are environmental explanations. It is self-evident from the fact that religions are predominant in certain geographical areas but not others, that birthplace strongly influences religious belief. This suggests that people’s religious beliefs are, in large part, accidents of birth. Besides cultural influences there is the family; the best predictor of people’s religious beliefs in individuals is the religiosity of their parents. There are also social factors effecting religious belief. For example, a significant body of scientific evidence suggests that popular religion results from social dysfunction. Religion may be a coping mechanism for the stress caused by the lack of a good social safety net—hence the vast disparity between religious belief in Western Europe and the United States.

There is also a strong correlation between religious belief and various measures of social dysfunction including homicides, the proportion of people incarcerated, infant mortality, sexually transmitted diseases, teenage births, abortions, corruption, income inequality and more. While no causal relationship has been established, a United Nations list of the 20 best countries to live in shows the least religious nations generally at the top. Only in the United States, which was ranked as the 13th best country to live in, is religious belief strong relative to other countries. Moreover, virtually all the countries with comparatively little religious belief ranked high on the list of best countries, while the majority of countries with strong religious belief ranked low. While correlation does not equal causation, the evidence should give pause to religion’s defenders. There are good reasons to doubt that religious belief makes people’s lives go better, and good reasons to believe that they make their lives go worse.

Despite all this most people still accept some religious claims. But this fact doesn’t give us much reason to accept religious claims. People believe many weird things that are completely irrational—astrology, fortunetelling, alien abductions, telekinesis and mind reading—and reject claims supported by an overwhelming body of evidence—biological evolution for example. More than three times as many Americans believe in the virgin birth of Jesus than in biological evolution, although few theologians take the former seriously, while no serious biologist rejects the latter!

Consider too that scientists don’t take surveys of the public to determine whether relativity or evolutionary theory are true; their truth is assured by the evidence as well as by resulting technologies—global positioning and flu vaccines work. With the wonders of science every day attesting to its truth, why do many prefer superstition and pseudo science? The simplest answer is that people believe what they want to, what they find comforting, not what the evidence supports: In general, people don’t want to know; they want to believe. This best summarizes why people tend to believe.

Why, then, do some highly educated people believe religious claims? First, smart persons are good at defending ideas that they originally believed for non-smart reasons. They want to believe something, say for emotional reasons, and they then become adept at defending those beliefs. No rational person would say there is more evidence for creation science than biological evolution, but the former satisfies some psychological need for many that the latter does not. How else to explain the hubris of the philosopher or theologian who knows little of biology or physics yet denies the findings of those sciences? It is arrogant of those with no scientific credentials and no experience in the field or laboratory, to reject the hard-earned knowledge of the science. Still they do it. (I knew a professional philosopher who doubted both evolution and climate science but believed he could prove that the Christian God must take a Trinitarian form! Surely something emotional had short-circuited his rational faculties.)

Second, the proclamations of educated believers are not always to be taken at face value. Many don’t believe religious claims but think them useful. They fear that in their absence others will lose a basis for hope, morality or meaning. These educated believers may believe that ordinary folks can’t handle the truth. They may feel it heartless to tell parents of a dying child that their little one doesn’t go to a better place. They may want to give bread to the masses, like Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor.

Our sophisticated believers may be manipulating, using religion as a mechanism of social control, as Gibbon noted long ago: “The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosophers as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.” Consider the so-called religiosity of many contemporary politicians, whose actions belie the claim that they really believe the precepts of the religions to which they supposedly ascribe. Individuals may also profess belief because it is socially unacceptable not to; they don’t want to be out of the mainstream or fear they will not be reelected or loved if they profess otherwise. So-called believers may not believe the truth of their claims; instead they may think that others are better off or more easily controlled if those others believe. Or perhaps they may just want to be socially accepted.

Third, when sophisticated thinkers claim to be religious, they often have something in mind unlike what the general populace believes. They may be process theologians who argue that god is not omnipotent, contains the world, and changes. They may identify god as an anti-entropic force pervading the universe leading it to higher levels of organization. They may be pantheists, panentheists, or death-of-god theologians. Yet these sophisticated varieties of religious belief bear little resemblance to popular religion. The masses would be astonished to discover how far such beliefs deviate from their theism.

But we shouldn’t be deceived. Although there are many educated religious believers, including some philosophers and scientists, religious belief declines with educational attainment, particularly with scientific education. Studies also show that religious belief declines among those with higher IQs. Hawking, Dennett and Dawkins are not outliers, and neither is Bill Gates or Warren Buffett.

Or consider this anecdotal evidence. Among the intelligentsia it is common and widespread to find individuals who lost childhood religious beliefs as their education in philosophy and the sciences advanced. By contrast, it is almost unheard of to find disbelievers in youth who came to belief as their education progressed. This asymmetry is significant; advancing education is detrimental to religious belief. This suggest another part of the explanation for religious belief—scientific illiteracy.

If we combine reasonable explanations of the origin of religious beliefs and the small amount of belief among the intelligentsia with the problematic nature of beliefs in gods, souls, afterlives or supernatural phenomena generally, we can conclude that (supernatural) religious beliefs are probably false. And we should remember that the burden of proof is not on the disbeliever to demonstrate there are no gods, but on believers to demonstrate that there are. Believers are not justified in affirming their belief on the basis of another’s inability to conclusively refute them, any more than a believer in invisible elephants can command my assent on the basis of my not being able to “disprove” the existence of the aforementioned elephants. If the believer can’t provide evidence for a god’s existence, then I have no reason to believe in gods.

In response to the difficulties with providing reasons to believe in things unseen, combined with the various explanations of belief, you might turn to faith. It is easy to believe something without good reasons if you are determined to do so—like the queen in “Alice and Wonderland” who “sometimes … believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” But there are problems with this approach. First, if you defend such beliefs by claiming that you have a right to your opinion, however unsupported by evidence it might be, you are referring to a political or legal right, not an epistemic one. You may have a legal right to say whatever you want, but you have epistemic justification only if there are good reasons and evidence to support your claim. If someone makes a claim without concern for reasons and evidence, we should conclude that they simply don’t care about what’s true. We shouldn’t conclude that their beliefs are true because they are fervently held.

Another problem is that fideism—basing one’s beliefs exclusively on faith—makes belief arbitrary, leaving no way to distinguish one religious belief from another. Fideism allows no reason to favor your preferred beliefs or superstitions over others. If I must accept your beliefs without evidence, then you must accept mine, no matter what absurdity I believe in. But is belief without reason and evidence worthy of rational beings? Doesn’t it perpetuate the cycle of superstition and ignorance that has historically enslaved us? I agree with W.K. Clifford. “It is wrong always, everywhere and for everyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.” Why? Because your beliefs affect other people, and your false beliefs may harm them.

The counter to Clifford’s evidentialism has been captured by thinkers like Blaise Pascal, William James, and Miguel de Unamuno. Pascal’s famous dictum expresses: “The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.” William James claimed that reason can’t resolve all issues and so we are sometimes justified believing ideas that work for us. Unamuno searched for answers to existential questions, counseling us to abandon rationalism and embrace faith. Such proposals are probably the best the religious can muster, but if reason can’t resolve our questions then agnosticism, not faith, is required.

Besides, faith without reason doesn’t satisfy most of us, hence our willingness to seek reasons to believe. If those reasons are not convincing, if you conclude that religious beliefs are untrue, then religious answers to life’s questions are worthless. You might comfort yourself by believing that little green dogs in the sky care for you but this is just nonsense, as are any answers attached to such nonsense. Religion may help us in the way that whisky helps a drunk, but we don’t want to go through life drunk. If religious beliefs are just vulgar superstitions, then we are basing our lives on delusions. And who would want to do that?

Why is all this important? Because human beings need their childhood to end; they need to face life with all its bleakness and beauty, its lust and its love, its war and its peace. They need to make the world better. No one else will.

John G. Messerly is the author of “The Meaning of Life: Religious, Philosophical, Scientific, and Transhumanist Perspectives.” He blogs these issues daily at reasonandmeaning.com. You can follow him on Twitter @hume1955.

http://www.salon.com/2014/12/21/religions_smart_people_problem_the_shaky_intellectual_foundations_of_absolute_faith/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=socialflow

 

Above long-winded salon drivel wall of text comes nowhere close to addressing the actual legitimate issue raised in the OP with respect to field theory... and I'm an atheist... at least to the extent I don't believe in personal relationships between a prime mover and individual human beings. "Needlessly Long Irrelevant Cutpaste of the Day after a 2 minute Google Session" Award goes to Dujac. Congratulations on that dubious achievement.

To the topic, design or no, I don't think the OP issue evidences some god who cares about humanity.

 

As ever, it's amusing to watch a theist take what scientists say (or allegedly say) as Gospel Truth when it can be spun to support a theistic position.

This piece is religious controversy hype designed to drive clicks and traffic. So much of what's published online these days is just that, because more visitors to a given news outlet's website pretty much automatically means more ad revenue for that outlet, thus we get headlines and content like this.

 

Has science decided which god is right one yet?

 

I don't see how god makes it any less complex.

 

how do you know there aren't millions of big bangs going on ever second. We are simply a product of ours nothing more. In another universe there could be no gravity, but there could be an equally useful law of nature that allows life and suits them just fine. Up until last century we thought the milky was it. It wasn't.
A better question is do religious people think there is life elsewhere in OUR universe? Id be interested in the no answers.

 

Who says they arent all the same. Or that there are many? /shrug

 

Hmmm... Funny thing, we have walked such a long way to stop being afraid of the lightning as the god's punishment, but still have this temptation to explain what we can't understand through some super power or super will, or supernatural...
How can we know for sure? It's just a guess, made from the modern point of the science development. But we still know too little about the Universe to be ready to explain or understand absolutely everything.
Before Einstein nobody could imagine that anything could be explained not through the Newton's physics. Now we have even more than Einstein discovered.
I bet in one hundred years there will be more data and absolutely different conclusions will be made.

 

In a hundred years there will still be things we don't know. And many will still ascribe unknowns to God and others will just say we don't know yet.

 

it shows that scientists aren't increasingly making a case for god

 

Who's to say both can't be 'right'? God enabling the Big Bang. I mean, the Big Bang would seem to fit perfectly with 'Let There Be Light' wouldn't it?

 

it fits the myth, but the point is that there's no scientific evidence for god enabling any big bang

 

http://www.apologeticspress.org/article/2106

Possibility 1: Spontaneous Generation of the Universe

Consider the entire physical Universe as a system consisting of all mass/matter/energy that exists in the Universe. Without a God, this Universe would have to be a closed system. Since our system encompasses the entire Universe, there is no more mass that can cross the system’s boundary, which necessitates our system being closed—without the existence of God. If mass, matter, and energy could enter and/or exit the system, the system would be an open system—which is the contention of a creationist. However, without a God, the entire physical Universe as a system logically would have to be a closed system. Atheists must so believe in order to explain the Universe without God.

The First Law of Thermodynamics states that in a closed system, the amount of energy present in that system is constant, though it transforms into other forms of energy, as in the case of the above compressor. So, if the Universe as a whole initially contained no mass/matter/energy (energy input is equal to zero), and then it spontaneously generated all of the mass/matter/energy in the Universe (energy output is unequal to zero), the First Law would be violated. Applying the earlier example of the compressor, this circumstance would be equivalent to saying that the sum total heat loss and compressor work is greater than the electrical input—which is impossible. Without intervention from an outside force, the amount of mass/matter/energy in the Universe would have remained constant (unchanged) at zero. As was mentioned earlier, there are no exceptions to laws, or else they would not be laws. The First Law of Thermodynamics has no known exceptions. As previously explained, the Law is accepted as fact by all scientists in general and utilized by engineers in particular. Therefore, the Universe, composed of all mass/matter/energy, could not have spontaneously generated (popped into existence on its own) without violating the exceptionless and highly respected First Law of Thermodynamics. The energy level of the Universe would not have been constant. Spontaneous generation would be the equivalent of a zero energy input to a system and a non-zero output (see Figure . The Universe could not have come into existence without the presence and intervention of a Force outside of the closed system of the entire physical Universe. The Universe therefore must be an open system that was created by a non-physical force (not composed of mass/matter/energy) outside of the physical boundary of this Universe (above nature, or supernatural) with the capability of bringing it into existence out of nothing. That Force can be none other than the supernatural God of the Bible. Scientifically speaking, the Universe could not and did not spontaneously generate

 

A closed mind considers only two options, a god or no god.


A "creator" isn't necessarily your idea of a "god". I was the creator of lunch, that doesn't mean I'm god.


AND, IF there IS a god, what difference would it make?

The earth is the earth, what happens happens...beliefs don't change a thing...

 

that's called speculation, not valid, science-based evidence for god

 

None of this is evidence of god.

What you have is the opinion of a couple of scientists and many other scientists completely disagree.

Either way it is not evidence of a god

 

Wrong. Physics is science...........


Physics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics
Wikipedia
Jump to Scientific method - Physics is also called "the fundamental science" because

 

Interesting theory, but the beseeming will to leap forward and conclude that this is evidence of some God is a bit desperate. All we know is that there is structure in many things around us. Why this comes to be...we don't know yet. It is simply that we observe structure in all things and do not know how it got there.

 

Point 1

This more or less. If you look at the number of stars in the known universe, and extrapolate roughly the number of planets circling those stars, and then extrapolate the probability of life (as we know it) sustaining worlds... while a staggering number is produced... it pales in comparison to the worlds incapable of sustaining life. Because our universe banged on all 8 does not mean that it was a miracle... a sign of divine intervention... indeed for observation to be through the event horizon of time these conditions are prerequisite... which brings me to point 2.

Dimensions. One of the troubling things about M theory is that it mandates (depending on how the math is done) a minimum of 7 extra dimensions where concepts like time, up, down, light, dark have no meaning. One of the fun things that is postulated from smashing photons up at the LHC at CERN about why they cannot predict where an electron will be is that due to that whole speed of light thing, time is essentially meaningless to photons re general relativity... they exist in a state in which time and space mean nothing... indeed they exist, it is postulated, at all points in time and space at once, and have "speed" (distance/time) only through this membrane of time as we perceive it. Really, all matter could exist at all points in time and space through dimensional entanglement... and our universe as we know it is just a set of conditions like the sun focused through a magnifying glass on a spot on the ground that focuses the forces to create the conditions we think of as the four primary forces in timespace.

In short, this is a god of the gaps argument... and the multiverse promises to be much "bigger" than can be comprehended. Time burst forth and with it calamity. Everything in existence as we know it exists within a sliver of dimensional convergence. Something happened outside of our concept existence prior to its existence, and if you stop thinking existence as we know it is so important for a minute... you might catch a glimpse of forces eternal. What if gravity is actually the strongest, not weakest of the four forces... but is simply a trickle... a leak from a crack in a dimension which caused existence to begin with? What if in all points in space and time gravity attaches itself to mass through this crack? In truth, we have no idea how gravity works. We like the graviton particle theory... but only because we need the math and that is an elegant concept. These dimensions could be like animation cells, lain over top of each other to give the grand illusion of existence...


Wow... what a bunch of drivel. I am rambling.

Point is... this is not evidence of a God, anymore than that garbage is evidence against.

 

While I am not sure whether there is a God or not, I know that if there really is one, he bears no resemblance to the iconography on the alter or the stained glass windows in the church I was raised in.

Nor did he inseminate a virgin and have a son.

God may be real, but religion is a man made institution, most of which has as much to dow with amassing political power and making money, and nothing really to do with God.

I may be wrong, but there's only one way to find out for sure.

 

The fact that physical laws are perfect for our universe to exist is not a proof for intelligent design. We don't even know what there was before the universe and the big bang... and how many realities could there be? Just one? We still know nothing... our laws of physics are perfect because they are part of our universe. They make part of it, they were not " made so that we could exist ". We are it, basically.... so the main problem still remains imho.

 

the physics in that article isn't evidence supporting the existence of god