Does Science Support Atheism?

[Nebogipfel]

I would be so bold as to assert Einstein was mistaken to say that a purely atheist and materialist view of the natural world robs it of its beauty.

Well, you wouldn’t be the first nor the last atheist to disagree with Einstein.

And that proves - what, exactly?

 

[Nebogipfel]

Right. So if someone handed you an essay written by an unknown Joe Sixpack who was, say, working in an obscure patent office in Switzerland, an essay which contained some unorthodox ideas about time, space and the speed of light, you would dismiss it out of hand, because it wasn’t written by a “great” scientific authority?

I wouldn’t dismiss it because I wouldn’t have had the foggiest notion what he was talking about. As hardly anybody else did either.It’s a tribute to his genius that it took everyone so long to grasp him. Did it ever take anyone very long at all to grasp Dawkins or Sagan?

Hmm. Appeal to obscurantism? That’s a new one…

I was trying to make the point that Einstein started life as a Joe Sixpack. Everybody does. If you think that that scientific ideas are taken seriously in proportion to how impenetrable they are and how well-known the author is then, again, you do not understand what science is.

But why should the fact that something is obscure and impenetrable be impressive? I find it just the opposite.
Consider this: many revolutionary scientific ideas are simple. Darwinian evolution is simple. Newton and Kepler’s laws of motion are simple. Just about every one of the equations that seem to describe, at a fundamental level, how the universe works, can be written down on the back of an envelope (although of course to understand what the equation means usually requires some study).

This is actually quite surprising; these equations might have been monsters going on for hundreds of pages with thousands of different parameters and variables (this is another Saganism ).

I can see the point that this simplicity could reflect the genius and elegance of a Divine Designer; or it could mean that the universe can manage itself quite happily without needing a Divine Designer.

 

[Nebogipfel]

I repeat, if anyone is going to look to the authority of Sagan and Dawkins for an opinion on science and God, anyone else has just as much right to go to Einstein and Darwin.

Come now, isn’t that so?

Absolutely. If you’re aruging from authority. If you were asking the question, have famous scientists believed in God? But, (for the nth time) I am not putting forward Sagan as an authority (I haven’t actually mentioned Dawkins at all). I am putting forward an argument that Sagan happened to make, an argument that you seem reluctant to engage with.

Then there’s no reason why that miracle cannot be studied scientifically, like any other of the things that we take for granted today…

Ah, not so at all. Why do you think a miracle would be subject to scientific study?

Ah, I spoke to soon. You are finally engaging with the arugments…
Why do you think a miracle would be subject to scientific study? That’s the point isn’t it. Why should it not be?

Do you think a miracle can be put on a petri dish or seen at the end of a telescope.

I have yet to hear a convincing argument for why it shouldn’t be.

A miracle is something that has already happened. By the time a scientist arrives all the conditions for discovery have passed … much as the birth of the universe has passed, and because a miracle, no scientist can prove anything one way or the other.

And yet the birth of the universe can be studied scientifically from the physical traces it left behind. The extinction of the dinosaurs has already passed, yet this can be investigated from the physical traces it left behind. There seem to be claims of miracles all over the place; weeping statues, visions, apparently impossible healings, the direction of hurricanes and forest fires to punish immoral behaviour…

Why are these things somehow immune to scientific study?

Simply saying that Einstein or Darwin believed in something like a God does not answer the question. Of course, you could have formulated the question somewhat more rigourously…

I thought I had formulated it rigorously enough. But I’ll try again. What knowledge has science produced that would lead us to believe there is no God? Zero knowledge in my opinion. What about yours?

Well, there’s the fact that none of the scientific models we have about the nature of the solar system or the origin of species break down in the absence of a guiding creative agency. The universe seems to whirr along quite happily on its own. In terms of being an explanation for how and why the universe is the way it is, the GOd hypothesis has just become increasingly unnecessary.

Science has not proved God does not exist. It has merely failed to find evidence that God does exist. That’s enough to reasonably argue that science tends to (note that qualification) support atheism rather than theism. You may argue that there are other ways of knowing about God apart from science - but that is a different question.

Well, since neither Schroeder nor Flew is a “great scientist” in the league of Darwin and Einstein, by your own argument, they have nothing of relevance to say on the subject.*

Non sequitur. I never said only great scientists have anything to say on on this subject. I said if you are going to use the authority of Sagan and Dawkins…

For the nth time, I am not using their authority. I am using their arguments. I can consider Einstein’s and Darwin’s arguments on the subject of whether God exists or not (I don’t find them compelling). The fact that it is Einstein making the argument has no bearing on the issue.

why do you discount the authority of Einstein and Darwin? Isn’t it because Dawkins and Sagan were atheists, and so are you?

Nope.

Perhaps the ten-ton log is in your eye, and you have no desire to get it out?

No, and no. (I mean, should there be a log in my eye, I would wish to get it out)

Both Dawkins and Sagan are respected and reputable scientists. You dismiss Dawkins as a mudslinger, and Sagan as a lightweight, make only a belated attempt to engage to the actual arguments that they put forward, while holding up Einstein who did not believe in anything like the Christian God as an “authority” on the existence of the Divine. It’s clear to me where the log lies.

As for myself, while I am disappointed that Darwin and Einstein never seemed to believe in a personal God, I am also satisfied that neither was an atheist, and both believed in Something resembling a creative genius. Their language is certainly too specific to put them in the atheist camp.

If you do read Flew’s book, remember if you will that Flew was adamantly atheistic for his entire life, until about three years ago. As he says in his book, his change of mind came largely through the gradual chipping away of his resistance to the idea of Deity as science produced more and more evidence of First Cause and Intelligent Design, whereas it has produced no evidence at all to encourage the atheist way of thinking.

If you really mean Intelligent Design, as in what the Dover trial was about - well, that is nothing more than sexed up creationism, debunked into little pieces. If Flew was convinced by that, it’s not a good sign.

 

[Nebogipfel]

Nebogipfil

*Absolutely not. The scientific method is “atheistic” in the sense that it makes no assumptions about the existance or otherwise of a divine agency. That is what the word athiestic actually means.

Put it another way, it does not make a positive a priori that no such agency exists - it simply does not make any assumption at all.*

On the contrary, atheism is the belief that there is no god. Look it up in your dictionary.

So what’s the term for someone who has no belief in God at all? That’s me. And I think science supports this position.

Agnostic is the way to describe the person who makes no assumptions either way.

I always regarded an agnostic as someone who says that we cannot know one way or the other. I would say that while we cannot know for sure one way or another, scientific investigation certainly points towards the athiestic side.

 

[The_Barbarian]

I always regarded an agnostic as someone who says that we cannot know one way or the other.

So science says that it can’t say one way or another. (Scientists can, of course)

I would say that while we cannot know for sure one way or another, scientific investigation certainly points towards the athiestic side.

From this, I can safely infer you’ve never actually done any scientific investigation.

 

[Nebogipfel]

So science says that it can’t say one way or another. (Scientists can, of course)

I refer you to the answers I have given earlier in this thread.

From this, I can safely infer you’ve never actually done any scientific investigation.

I have not worked as a professional scientist, no, although I have studied physics.
But, no, actually, I don’t think you can safely infer that at all.

 

[Charlemagne_II]

Son, you really need to get that darn log out of both eyes!

Both Dawkins and Sagan are respected and reputable scientists. You dismiss Dawkins as a mudslinger, and Sagan as a lightweight, make only a belated attempt to engage to the actual arguments that they put forward, while holding up Einstein who did not believe in anything like the Christian God as an “authority” on the existence of the Divine. It’s clear to me where the log lies.

Where did I present einstein as an authority on the divine? You must be specific here, or you are engaging in dishonest argument. I only said that Einstein could see in the harmony of the universe that some kind of God exists. At the very least, it’s apparent that science certainly did not provide Einstein with a case against some kind of God.

“In view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able to recognize, there are yet people who say there is no God. But what really makes me angry is that they quote me for support of such views.” Albert Einstein

 

[Charlemagne_II]

So what’s the term for someone who has no belief in God at all?

Don’t be tiresome! That would be an atheist.

 

[Charlemagne_II]

If you really mean Intelligent Design, as in what the Dover trial was about - well, that is nothing more than sexed up creationism, debunked into little pieces. If Flew was convinced by that, it’s not a good sign.

I wish you would stop being simplistic. In any debate the weight of all the collected evidence taken together is what sways one to one side or the other. Flew is looking at all the evidence (he’s had 85 years to do it and at one time favored your side). However, as more evidence has been produced in the last fifty years (including but certainly not restricted to the Big Bang) Flew has seen the scale tip the other way in favor of God. It is interesting not that he uses any arguments of the traditional type, which he still rejects, but that he has been won over by more recent research than was not available to atheists before 1940.

In other words, swallowing his atheism, he managed to get the logs out of his eye. Admittedly, he is no closer to a personal God than was Einstein, but you can never tell …

I don’t recall Flew mentioning “the Dover trial.” Where does he do that?

 

[Leela]

He fails to make a point because he doesn’t understand the argument of efficient causality. Your presenting Paulo’s work as your own not only demonstrates your fundamental lack of knowledge of the subject, but your willingness to engage in dishonest activities in order to further your agenda.

You can join the ever-present First Cause thread and continue to argue that anyone who doesn’t understand your proof of the existence of God must not understand it. Good luck with that.

If that argument were actually convincing, the existence of God would be part of our scientific understanding of the universe since science as a body of knowledge includes everything that we have good reason to believe. But I suppose you would simply repeat your claim that people are just not smart enough to understand First Cause.

Honesty is relevant to the discussion. You have said so (unless you plagiarized this too):

Really? Your attempts to paint me personally as a dishonest person are relevant to the relationship between science and atheism? You’re going to have to explain that. But I suspect you won’t even try since you seem to prefer to make personal attacks and claim that other people just don’t understand you. If you don’t start making meaningful contributions to the discussion I’ll feel the need to add you to my ignore list.

 

[Charlemagne_II]

Leela

*I can’t imagine what it could mean to ask about having faith in music or art since these are not beliefs. *

Perhaps I did not make myself as clear as I should have. My fault.

What I meant was that we should have faith in the idea that we can arrive at truth through the arts, which are not verifiable as good or bad, true or false, in the scientific methodology. A beautiful poem is true, or it is not beautiful. An ugly picture is not true because it arouses some kind of repulsion in us. Modern art (much of it) is ugly because it twists and distorts beyond recognition the world as we know it. The person who loves such art is also twisted and distorted as to the true and the beautiful. As Keats said, “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty.”

But no art can be decided as good or bad, true or false, based on any objective scientific method. Scientists are notoriously feeble-minded when it comes to explaining anything about what make a particular work of art true or false. But the average person, who is not twisted, knows instinctively (without his mind being warped by any bias of cerebral critical theory) what constitutes true or false art.

Moreover, if you think sacred music is beautiful, it’s only beautiful because it is true … and many an apostate Christian has found his way back to God led by the guiding hand of sacred music.

 

[1holycatholic]

You can join the ever-present First Cause thread and continue to argue that anyone who doesn’t understand your proof of the existence of God must not understand it. Good luck with that.

If that argument were actually convincing, the existence of God would be part of our scientific understanding of the universe since science as a body of knowledge includes everything that we have good reason to believe. But I suppose you would simply repeat your claim that people are just not smart enough to understand First Cause.

Either you don’t understand the argument, or you are deliberately misrepresenting it. I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt.

The bolded part - that’s scientism, lock, stock and barrel, and it’s wrong.

Really? Your attempts to paint me personally as a dishonest person are relevant to the relationship between science and atheism? You’re going to have to explain that. But I suspect you won’t even try since you seem to prefer to make personal attacks and claim that other people just don’t understand you. If you don’t start making meaningful contributions to the discussion I’ll feel the need to add you to my ignore list.

I haven’t painted you as a liar and a thief, you have done that yourself of your own free will. I’m asking you to stop.

Repent, and seek God’s forgiveness in the Sacrament of Reconciliation.

Science does not support atheism, which is not a philosophy but just the abence of a particular belief, it is just that more and more people have sought evidence in support of their beliefs and found that faith, belief that is not based on evidence, is not actually a virtue. They have adopted the virtue of intellectual honesty and rejected faith as a way of knowing.

 

[Charlemagne_II]

Nebogipfel

*Science has not proved God does not exist. It has merely failed to find evidence that God does exist. That’s enough to reasonably argue that science tends to (note that qualification) support atheism rather than theism. *

Non sequitur.

Failure to find evidence for God, if that were true, would not be to argue the opposite.

But it is not even true. You can be a scientist like Copernicus, Newton, Darwin, and Einstein and see the order in the universe that leads you to believe in some kind of Deity. That observation can come by just looking at the the world, as most people do, or it can come about by seeing that natural laws operate everywhere, as many great scientists have observed. Again, I’m not talking from authority here. I’m talking about observations of all of humanity for the most part … except those with the log in their eye.

 

[hecd2]

Not so. If the religious scientists involved in stem cell research were to come forward and out those that are pushing to do embryonic stem cell research, they would also be outing themselves as either being of a religious bent, or, at the least, as siding with those of the religious bent, which would have about the same consequences. There would be Big Trouble in Little China for those religious scientists. So, they do their own work and keep quiet.

And I say that is entirely a fantasy in your mind.First of all, as I said before, I have no ides what you mean by ‘outing’ scientists doing ESC work - they are doing so completely openly. Certainly in the UK, there has been a huge public debate leading up to the passing of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, and scientists working in ECS are licensed and their work is subject subject to ethical committe screening and oversight. You cannot “out” what is already out.

The question of the killing of embryos for no good reason is (or at least should be) a major cause of professional revolt away from those scientists who support ESC research. But, as strongly as the religious scientists may feel about it, there’s no outward expression of their displeasure with it. None. Why:

Fear of loss of respect in the science community;
Fear of the potential loss of ones job for political reasons;
Fear of exclusion; etc., etc.

Well, we didn’t have silence in the debate in the UK: the debate was forthright and robust. I don’t think that a scientist, working say in adult stem cell retrodifferentiation techniques, who expreassed opposition to ESC would find their careers at all threatened - at least not in the UK.

As for what I’d like them to do, first, go before government officials and tell the truth about what’s going on; second, go to any news media that hasn’t already bought the line from the ESC people and tell them there’s another story - the true story - that’s very different from the ones they’re getting from the ESC research people; and, third, get articles printed in journals. Yes, that’s what I’d like to see.

Well, I am sorry to say that I think your view about ESC is hopelessly naive. If you think that it’s being done because it is covert, because the government doesn’t understand it and the media are in the dark about it, you are mistaken. The decision to permit ESC under safeguards was made with full disclosure and evidence.

I repeat that being openly religious is not a factor that will damage one’s scientific career. There are many excellent religious scientists who are openly practising their science and their religion.

Alec
evolutionpages.com

 

[hecd2]

No claim was ever made that Einstein believed in a personal God. However, it is plain as can be that he was not an atheist, and by your own citation that he believed in Spinoza’s god.

Excellent - so we agree. Neither Einstein nor Darwin were theists - neither believed in a personal God. Neither were they atheists. They were, possibly, Deists. It’s good to find common ground.

Alec
evolutionpages.com

 

[warpspeedpetey]

When cornered you go into denial. Blather, rinse, repeat.

 

[Touchstone]

Nebogipfel

*Science has not proved God does not exist. It has merely failed to find evidence that God does exist. That’s enough to reasonably argue that science tends to (note that qualification) support atheism rather than theism. *

Non sequitur.

Failure to find evidence for God, if that were true, would not be to argue the opposite.

We can say this: to the extent that science is able to observe, measure, and test an entity that has plenary powers of the laws of nature, it has failed to do so. Now, it’s an open question as to why we might expect a god to interact with nature in such a way as to be observable and testable, but whatever one thinks of that, we are conspicuously missing natural evidence of such a being, at least in terms of objective contact.

If headlines went around the world that a man-like being had appeared in Picadilly Circus one day, and made some fantastic predictions and performed some incredible feats, reasonable minds would be dubious, and want some investigation. If it tuned out that “Mr. X”, claiming to be god of the universe declared that the earth would be transported across the universe in an instant at midnight GMT, and lo and behold, the next day, astronomers and scientists everywhere were send out press releases to the world’s news organizations about the “astonishing” relocation of the earth across the solar system from where it should be…

Well, you’d have a start.

If Mr.X gathered the masses on the Pall Mall and indicated he would now make the sun flicker on and off like a strobe light at one second intervals, or according to the Fibonacci sequence, tha would create quite an impact on everyone, including scientists, who would be armed with mountains of empirical data confirming that what was previously thought impossible was now supported by a wide array of instrumented evidence. And all of it conspicuously in agreement with predictions and announcements made beforehand by Mr. X…

Anyway, you add up a few dozen documented phenomena like that by Mr. X, and pretty soon you’d have the beginnings of a scientific basis for the existence of something that closely matches what we have historically called a “god”.

Of course, we have nothing like that kind of evidence or demonstration available, and the sheer ludicrousness of the scenario is a kind of reminder of the poverty of that idea in light of the evidence we do have – highly uniform dynamics of natural law.

But it is not even true. You can be a scientist like Copernicus, Newton, Darwin, and Einstein and see the order in the universe that leads you to believe in some kind of Deity.

We are animals that are highly tuned by evolution toward intentionality. That’s one of the reasons we as a species have survived and thrived across millions of years; we see the world around us in terms of concepts and dispositions we have ourselves – reasoning, planning, intention, teleology. When we hear a rustle in the bushes, we instinctively cycle through ideas about intentional threats – a predator or enemy lying in wait for us, for example. The downside of a “false positive” – fears that are unfounded – are tiny compared to the downsides of a undetected threat, just one of which gets you killed, and quick.

So we are optimized to see intention, design, teleology, even where it’s just the breeze or impersonal processes. Being heavily biased toward “design” works in our favor, in terms of survival. It makes a clear, unbiased view of the world around us a lot harder, but “unity gain” in that respect would be a problem in terms of fitness and survival. The “paranoid” survive best – the deer is always nervous, and the human always suspects a scheme.

That observation can come by just looking at the the world, as most people do, or it can come about by seeing that natural laws operate everywhere, as many great scientists have observed. Again, I’m not talking from authority here. I’m talking about observations of all of humanity for the most part … except those with the log in their eye.

Nature is not like us. Nature itself is not an animal. But we are anthropomorphs, and that is the lens we see everything through. We envision design, because we are designers, trained through ten thousand generations to make use of available resources and tools to aid our survival and goals. So we make arrowheads and plowshares and steam engines and MacBooks. And because we “make”, we see everything as “made”. It’s our built-in idiom for understanding the world around us.

But to leap to “God made this” is to confuse a metaphor for its object. We understand by thinking in “anthropic” terms, because that’s our disposition. But the disposition does not reform the reality; the lens doesn’t reshape the thing being viewed.

-Touchstone

 

[hecd2]

Right. So if someone handed you an essay written by an unknown Joe Sixpack who was, say, working in an obscure patent office in Switzerland, an essay which contained some unorthodox ideas about time, space and the speed of light, you would dismiss it out of hand, because it wasn’t written by a “great” scientific authority?

I wouldn’t dismiss it because I wouldn’t have had the foggiest notion what he was talking about.

Hats off to you - most people dismiss what they don’t understand.

As hardly anybody else did either.It’s a tribute to his genius that it took everyone so long to grasp him. Did it ever take anyone very long at all to grasp Dawkins or Sagan?

So, let me get this right. Your suggestion is that we can judge the merit of a hypothesis by its unintelligibility? Sure, some profound things are difficult to understand, but not all are; some are accessible, as is for example, Darwin’s idea of natural selection - accessible and one of the most profound and influential ideas ever - and it is certainly the case that most obscure and unintelligible ideas are complete baloney.

By the way, I should be surprised if you fully grasped the subtleties of Dawkins’s ideas about evolution. They are profoundly misunderstood by many.

I repeat, if anyone is going to look to the authority of Sagan and Dawkins for an opinion on science and God, anyone else has just as much right to go to Einstein and Darwin.

How many times do we need to tell you that we are not relying on authority for our views?

Alec
evolutionpages.com

 

[warpspeedpetey]

The “net” of the scientific method can - in principle - catch anything that has an effect on the physical world.

absolutely not, it can in fact only observe the physical components of any interactions, those which are non-physical, as in first cause are entirely unobservable as they have no physical qauilities, i.e. mass, dimension, position, etc.

there is no way for the scientific method to observe things without those qualities.

 

[warpspeedpetey]

Honesty is relevant to the discussion. You have said so (unless you plagiarized this too):