God did not create the universe, says Hawking

[Touchstone]

Touchstone

What would be the theory that has “God passing the scientific method”. This again, sounds like either some light humor, or crazy talk. Have I missed some theory that incorporates God or angels, here?

Carl Sagan said in Cosmos:

“Ten or twenty billion years ago, something happened – the Big Bang, the event that began our universe…. In that titanic cosmic explosion, the universe began an expansion which has never ceased…. As space stretched, the matter and energy in the universe expanded with it and rapidly cooled. The radiation of the cosmic fireball, which, then as now, filled the universe, moved through the spectrum – from gamma rays to X-rays to ultraviolet light; through the rainbow colors of the visible spectrum; into the infrared and radio regions. The remnants of that fireball, the cosmic background radiation, emanating from all parts of the sky can be detected by radio telescopes today. In the early universe, space was brilliantly illuminated.”

God said in Genesis:

“Let there be light.”

Is this God passing the science test, or is this science passing the God test?

As I’ve said before, the Big Bang was a big improvement in the case for God over previous cosmogonies (cf. Steady State universe). There’s still no God to be observed, detected or interacted with, but at least there is now at least a rough narrative match – a discrete beginning anyway(sort of – there’s a subtle but powerful idea to pursue that t=0 places the bang infinitely far back in the past, but that’s another subject).

It’s good here to quote the first few verses of Genesis as a reminder of the difficulty that remains in the text – there’s a lot more there than just “let there be light”:

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.

As soon as we move beyond a casual linkage between “let there be light” and the high energy radiation of the Big Bang’s first moments, things get tricky, awkward, uncomfortable for the Christian, though. Light (radiation) came first, and the possibility of water, earth, etc. wouldn’t obtain for at least 380,000 years, when the whole shebang cooled down enough that atoms might form (and water comes far later, but no matter).

I understand and anticipate the apologetic – that part, the “hovering over the surface of the deep” is somehow poetic, metaphoric, etc. The Bible isn’t a science textbook, etc.

Fine, but then it just looks like you are cherry picking, doesn’t it? Hey, this part seems consonant with the latest theory, let’s go with that! And the other parts, just… well they just kind of get swept under the rug.

Nevertheless, though, there’s no denying that the Big Bang is much more resonant with the Christian creation hymn in Genesis than ideas that were in place prior BBT. When so much of science ends up moving knowledge away from the Christian narrative (see, for example, the enormous difficulty of resolving a single “genetic Adam and Eve” as an actual root pair of humans with modern genetics), an advance is an advance. Score one for Lemaitre, and his God, there.

-TS

 

[AndyT_81]

Touchstone,

I think is wholly mistaken. What do you think a biologist, or biologists make of that? Are you aware of the reactions to this by people who study biology? If Dawkins is clumsy on his theology, and admittedly he is, at points, he’s a Doctor of the Church compared to Plantinga’s engagement with actual evolutionary theory.

Wholly mistaken? Ok, as I said I am no expert in biology, but what would precisely be the matter with the statement:

Brains are evolved under the combined process of natural selection (the driving force of which is the ability to survive to at least child bearing age) and “random” mutation.

? I realise “random” is fairly loaded, as the mutations obviously can’t be too drastic or ubrupt (hence the scare quotes). You are no doubt better versed in evolutionary theory than me, so what is the issue here?

OK, but it would have to be a separate thread. If you’re game I am, let me know and I’ll spin it up.

Maybe that would be appropriate, as I am sure this discussion could easily grow fairly large! In any case, I’ll proceed to respond in this thread for the time being.

Plantinga doubts the conjuction of N&E, that is that naturalistic evolution can be expected to provide veridical faculties. Evolutionary naturalism doesn’t predict, or require that all or even most beliefs are veridical, but rather that true beliefs, in areas which implicate survival and fecundity, tend to confer an advantage precisely because they are veridical – the fish that has a more acute sense of smell has a feeding advantage in that its model of the extra-mental world will outperfom models based on less accurate or robust information.

What do you consider to be a belief? The most common definition of belief is: a proposition that one holds to be true. To be able to have a belief under this definition, one has to be conscious of the proposition coupled with the self awareness that I consider this to be true. To say a fish has a belief in the “true-ness” of its sense of smell I think is a gross distortion of the common understanding of the word “belief”. A fish, which is using its sense of smell to find food, does not 'believe" that its sense of smell is picking up some smaller fish or what have you, rather, it unconsciously recieves certain stimuli, it’s brain processes said stimuli and it produces some sort of output behaviour.

Plantinga would agree that evolution needs to travel down a path of a brain’s improved fitness over time with respect to improved (name removed by moderator)ut-output processing abilities. These abilities must be provide “correct” responses to certain stimuli for survival, there is no doubt about that. What Plantinga is saying is that, when a brain becomes more complex and self-awareness arises, there is no necessary relationship between (name removed by moderator)ut-output behaviour which necessarily (given evolution) must cohere to reality as far as survival goes, and beliefs which somehow arise from the brain (epiphenominally or otherwise). As he shows in his examples, these beliefs need not be true in order to be involved in (in some way) surivival promoting behaviour.

You said yourself that evolutionary naturalism doesn’t require all beliefs to be necessarily true. Beliefs such as “naturalism is true” presumably don’t confer a survival advantage, and there is no necessary relationship between the accuracy of these sorts of higher order beliefs with survival behaviour. Therefore, if such is the case, one has no strong reason to think these sorts of beliefs are reliably true, if one is a naturalist and also believes in evolution. Therefore, the dual position is incoherent.

Information is power, and truth kills, when it comes to evolution.

“Truth” doesn’t kill if one is a naturalist. Poor (name removed by moderator)ut-output behaviour does.

(There’s little penalty, survival wise, in indulging fanciful beliefs about gods and demons, in contrast to visual acuity in hunting, or sonic imaging for a bat hunting for food. In fact, false beliefs may confer an evolutionary advantage of sorts with the disadvantages of misconception being outweighed by the “social cohesion” benefits that a collective commitment to such beliefs garner in the community. A false belief in Molech may still provide cultural and social benefits that give it an advantage to the “rationalist independents” down the river a ways…)

Exactly! This statement makes me doubt you understood Plantinga’s argument correctly. Plantinga would agree with you here 100%. If evolution is capable of producing a brain which holds such apparently erroneous beliefs of this higher order, what reason does a naturalist have for believing that his higher order cognitive faculties produce reliable beliefs? The argument is that he doesn’t have a good reason, and therefore the dual position of N&E is internally incoherent.

NOTE: This argument DOES NOT degrade to solipsism. Plantinga IS NOT saying we should doubt our beliefs about the world. Rather, he is arguing that a person who subscribes to N&E has a position which is incoherent.

 

[Mystic_Banana]

A rabbit skeleton in the Cambrian, perhaps? And that’s just the retail proxy for the manifold ways in which evolution is liable to falsification with every new bit of evidence uncovered. You can call a black swan “white”, but it remains what it is. Evolution stands liable on a whole slew of lines of testing to falsification. YEC admits of none, and is upfront about its unfalsifiability. To compare is just so much talkin’ smack.

I’ve seen more recognition of the dogma behind YEC from YECers than I’ve seen realised by Darwinists, including yourself, making them at least one level more reasonable…

Yes it remains what it is, but comparing the process of evolution/creation/whatever, post-diction on a colossal scale as it is farcical. Unless you’re talking about a black swan ‘obviously’ being black because what you’re assuming are the stains from it’s feathers half way up the mountain leave black marks, and you’re assuming the stories about the white swans in the area are myths, because you can’t make sense of the data that way, and can’t find any white stains… (etc. I could go on all day… )

No, that’s what we conclude, at length, from observing human behavior, anatomy, physiology and psychology. The evidence strongly supports the idea that ‘reality is real’ is a cognitive imperative, even (especially) at subliminal levels.

The point of the challenge to remove any need to assert dogma, or trust what I say at all. You can show yourself, in vivid and painful fashion, right there in your home. You need not accept any assertions from me. The pain in your hand and the reflex to yank your hand away will do all the convicting needed. I can just observe from afar.

And yet pain can, and often is, explained away as being essentially illusory itself, including (yes!) by scientists…

And he readily acknowledges as much. This is not a point of confusion for Hawking or anyone reading his book.

At which point, it is no longer science, but Science fiction - in it’s more pretentious role of speculative fiction, as it were

This is physics, not the National Enquirer. You wouldn’t except breathless reports of a a Calabi-Yau manifold seen running through the forest, or coming up for air in the Loch out back… This is to misunderstand what physicists study and how they study it.

It also seemingly ignores the stupendous success those physicists have in demonstrating their claims and knowledge, which your 'essentially justified" believers in Sasquatch conspicuously cannot begin to match.

I know, that all grooves on the reality-is-real meme, and that’s problematic. But there it is.

-TS

Stupendous success… how? Has someone come up with some actually substantive evidence that no-ones mentioned here yet? Crude argument: So far, the yeti still comes up tops, evidentially…we’ve dug up neanderthals, which look a bit like yeti, so yeti may well be neanderthals, for which we have fossil evidence of existing…

… the reality is real meme… I’m still trying to find anything in it to justify, well, anything, especially scientifically… it does just seem to be apriori reasoning re-applied (rather hypocritically, I’d say) by materialist-rationalists… can you send me a link to some summation of the argument which makes it seem, well, rational? Ta

 

[AntiTheist]

the reality is real meme… I’m still trying to find anything in it to justify, well, anything, especially scientifically

You know, if I believed in silly things like ghosts – as Mystic Banana admitted that he did in a public discussion with me – I too would probably want to discredit science and make believe that everything’s a dream.

After all, then I could reduce all those pesky people who actually have real knowledge to the same level of ignorance as the street corner hobo screaming about the aliens planning to land and take over earth. Once you go down this road, you have no grounds for saying that anyone knows anything more than anyone else, and suddenly all claims become equally likely to be true, and everyone becomes equally justified in believing any kind of stupid nonsense they want.

Score one for the “good guys,” eh?

In point of fact, “reality” is our word for the world we inhabit, whatever its metaphysical status and whether or not it’s the “Matrix.” While it might not be possible to “prove” that there’s a “reality outside our heads,” that quaint philosophical puzzle has nothing to do with the fact that we can – and do – use evidence to make determinations about reality.

For example, regardless of whether reality is the Matrix or not, we can use evidence to determine that someone who jumps off a high mountain is going to come to a bad end. Now that’s useful information.

Would you seriously entertain some buffoon who came along and said, “Well, I can’t see how we can justify anything – we can’t even prove that reality’s real – so I believe that if I jump off of this mountain, I’m going to fly under my own power!”?

And that’s where all these “reality isn’t real” clowns lose the argument: they all live as if reality were quite real and as if evidence and reason were the best ways to make determinations about it. They only ever question “reality” when it suits them, when they want to prop up claims that they want to believe in that they know won’t stand up to critical inquiry.

It’s a tired old facade, and the only people you ever find going along with it are the ghost-mongers and the people who want to live in a magical world because, hey, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a cool show and, you never know…the truth is out there!

It’s self-evidently ridiculous.

 

[Touchstone]

I’ve seen more recognition of the dogma behind YEC from YECers than I’ve seen realised by Darwinists, including yourself, making them at least one level more reasonable…

You must have ‘dogma’ confused with some other concept. By ‘dogma’ I mean “unquestionable, unassailable truth claims”. Science doubts all claims, it’s inherent in the method – that’s why objectivity and empiricism are primary values, because these are tools by which we overcome (or at least mitigate) our doubt.

Yes it remains what it is, but comparing the process of evolution/creation/whatever, post-diction on a colossal scale as it is farcical. Unless you’re talking about a black swan ‘obviously’ being black because what you’re assuming are the stains from it’s feathers half way up the mountain leave black marks, and you’re assuming the stories about the white swans in the area are myths, because you can’t make sense of the data that way, and can’t find any white stains… (etc. I could go on all day… )

Science is descriptive, “post-dictive”, proceeding from observations. Predictive implications of a hypothesis or theory are only validated after the fact, pronounced successful or not, after the evidence is reviewed.

This is anti-dogma. Reviews and assessments after real world trials. Liability to falsification.

And yet pain can, and often is, explained away as being essentially illusory itself, including (yes!) by scientists…

An amputee will often have “false pain” or other sensations from the missing limb, but even in such a case, while the limb is not there to cause the pain, the pain itself – the neurological phenomena is perfectly real and actual. A “mirage” from heat rising from the road is perfectly real, even if the “water on the road” does not exist.

Which highlights an aspect of your complaint you are apparently missing: to say “X is illusory” only defeats your campaign against the reality of reality. For such a claim presupposes the very thing you are working against. We can only say “pain is illusory” because we have a reality context from which to judge it (for this over here, is non-illusory, and by that we can judge that to be illusory…). Whoops.

At which point, it is no longer science, but Science fiction - in it’s more pretentious role of speculative fiction, as it were

How is this pretentious, at all, especially if it’s presented clearly as conjecture, as theoretical? I don’t see what would be pretentious about that, particularly when was is conjectured is the extension of physics models that perform inside our universe to contexts beyond/outside our universe (if any such context obtains). That’s as conservative and grounded as one might be in terms of conjecture, isn’t it?

That’s an odd criticism to receive from a Catholic, given to “theological fiction”, if we are to apply the principles you’ve deployed here.

Stupendous success… how? Has someone come up with some actually substantive evidence that no-ones mentioned here yet?

Are you familiar at all with evolutionary theory? What would you say your understanding is of the evidence for the theory? If you are just not aware, well, that’s quite a task, to cover all that ground here.

Crude argument: So far, the yeti still comes up tops, evidentially…we’ve dug up neanderthals, which look a bit like yeti, so yeti may well be neanderthals, for which we have fossil evidence of existing…

Sure, and the world might have been magically created Last Tuesday. That would fit all the available evidence. Look, we wouldn’t even know a “yeti” as a “yeti” if we found one, because it’s a folk legend. Even if some kind of hominin-like biped were discovered, we’d still be unable to attach it to “yeti”, because the claim isn’t substantive enough to test. It’s ‘not even wrong’ as an idea. Evolution is strong in that way, and has countless ways to be wrong, shown to be falsified by the evidence. It makes novel and specific predictions that we can test. “Yeti” doesn’t. That you’d take that up over the evidence for evolution indicates some fancy for the idea itself over evidence-based reasoning of the claims.

… the reality is real meme… I’m still trying to find anything in it to justify, well, anything, especially scientifically… it does just seem to be apriori reasoning re-applied (rather hypocritically, I’d say) by materialist-rationalists… can you send me a link to some summation of the argument which makes it seem, well, rational? Ta

You wouldn’t (and shouldn’t) accept any scientific justification for the reality of reality – science is powerless to speak to that question. It’s beyond its epistemology. We can review all manner of discovery and knowledge that perform empirically in the real world, things you rely on yourself everyday, including tools you use to read these words, but all of it can be trivially dismissed by denying it out right – it isn’t real. That’s why the hand-in-flame experiment is powerful for you, though. It will show you that you are wired to accept the reality of reality, and put paid to the folly of pretending otherwise. It’s not scientific justification (although it relies on the same resources as science – experience and observation), it’s a visceral way to make your folly clear and self-evident. When you pull your hand out of the flame, you will have a painful conviction that your philosophical doubts are directly in conflict with your biology, and that such solipsistic tendencies are blatant self-contradictions you’re entertaining.

-TS

 

[tonyrey]

It’s self-evidently ridiculous.

It’s self-evidently ridiculous to think the sole reality is “out there” when knowledge of reality is not “out there”…

 

[ContegoFides]

It’s self-evidently ridiculous to think the sole reality is “out there” when knowledge of reality is not “out there”…

Ultimately, so long as a person confines himself to the untestable and faith-based position that only things that are physical testable are worthy of belief, then that person will never be swayed from atheism. By definition, assuming you arrived at that belief, then any position other than atheism would not be rational because God is not physically testable.

So, that is where the core of the argument needs to be focused. Once a person moves from that position, that only physically testable things are worthy of belief, then reason may be applied to give the Holy Spirt an opening to reach that person’s heart.

Most often, the conversions from atheism I have observed (indirectly) have frequently been as a result with a personal encounter with someone who is closely connected to God. Padre Pio (who cooperated in the conversion of at least one outspoken and famous atheist) is an example, as are some of the other great saints.

The atheist is reached at the level of the heart, and then the rationality of faith in Jesus becomes clear to them. Before then, it’s blinders and anger. (You know, I don’t think I’ve met a single atheist who wasn’t - at a deep level - pretty angry; not necessarily raging at a time, but at least a smoldering ember of anger in their hearts.)

 

[djeter]

http://payingattentiontothesky.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/sacredgrove.jpg?w=417&h=477

Humans are wired to make such leaps, and musing that such leaps are not “reasonable” in the abstract is to simply ignore the core facts of human cognition. …

Why would some non-scientific pursuit of an answer be seen as having any good prospects at all? Science is not an oracle, and is quite limited, but what it can learn and demonstrate, it can demonstrate. Some theological investigation can’t hope to show anything at all. Why should we even suppose that such an effort could possibly bear fruit, never mind identifying cases where it has done so? If you don’t have a coherent model for what is an answer vs. a non-answer, it’s appropriate to ask if one is pursuing knowledge or answers at all.

---

Well it’s the “core facts of human cognition” that the article by Hoffman addresses. If you were to glance at it again (reading selections here) I think you would find that Hoffman is pretty much setting aside the notion of a science that deals with “objective reality.”

“Research in the cognitive and neural sciences has made clear that our visual systems are not simply passive recorders of objective reality, but instead are active constructors of the visual realities we perceive. Each of us has within us a reality engine, which takes the images at the eyes and constructs three-dimensional worlds of objects, colors, textures, motions, and depth. What we see with each glance is not the world as it is objectively and as it would be even if there were no observers. Instead what we see is entirely our own construction. Our process of construction proceeds so rapidly and confidently that we are misled by our own prowess into thinking that we are not constructing at all, but simply reporting what is there independent of us. In short, our belief that we see the world as it objectively is, unadorned, is an illusion made possible by the very brilliance and efficiency of our reality creating process.”

So the scientific pursuit isn’t all that it is cracked up to be, TS. Scientism simply doesn’t survive a sober understanding of the scope and limits of science, the nature of human perception (as shown above), and the modern theory of chance. All of that Dr. Hoffman takes up in his article “Dismissing God.”

"One stunning success of science is the discovery of dark energy and dark matter, which together constitute something like 96% of the energy and matter in the universe. The matter and energy we can perceive is a mere 4% of the total, the light frosting on the cake. We have no current way to discover any properties of this dark matter and energy. We can only postulate its existence because without it the behavior of the 4% we can see and measure would not make sense.

So our best science tells us that there are serious limits to how deeply our perceptual and cognitive endowments allow us to penetrate the nature of objective reality. …the story outlined above, in which science is systematically uncovering all the secrets of nature, and leaving less and less room for God to hide, is not only immodest, but a complete misunderstanding of the scientific enterprise."

So what about the “non-scientific pursuit of an answer” you ask. Science obviously isn’t going to take us anywhere. Works OK for our macro-physical world here (don’t get me wrong, I’m all for science) but what about the big metaphysical questions we all wonder about? Roger Scruton answers:

"A myth does not describe what happened in some obscure period before human reckoning, but what happens always and repeatedly. It does not explain the causal origins of our world but rehearses its permanent spiritual significance. Myth is a way of understanding deep processes of the human psyche, which cannot be easily described except through imaginative stories.

If you look at ancient religion in that way then inevitably your vision of the Judaeo-Christian canon will change. The Genesis story of the creation is easily refuted as an account of historical events: how can there be days without a sun, man without a woman, life without death? Read it as a myth, however, which recounts the concealed and repeatable meaning of events that we live through every day, and this naïve-seeming text reveals itself as a profound study of the human condition." More from Scruton here.

Your misfortune is that you have been taken captive by a scientism that seeks to discredit the religious, even though a New York Minute of thought should easily make you see someone is running a game on you. Did Stephen Gould have it right with his “non overlapping magisteria?”

Better yet realize that Religion is a praxis. The first disciples never asked “What is the meaning of life” 'or “Teach us how to meditate,” but “Where do you live?” Fr. Barron comments: "The Incarnation, is not something to be admired from the outside, but rather an energy in which to participate. … If we open our eyes and see the light, we too often stop at the point of admiration and worship, lost in wonder at the strange work that God has accomplished uniquely in Jesus of Nazareth… [T]he Gospels want us, not outside the energy of Christ, but in it, not wondering at it, but swimming in it.’

Scientism was never meant to be an alternative to Religion. Nor does it even begin to destroy the foundations of Religious wonder. Seen properly it is a complement to religious praxis. As long as you withhold yourself, Touchstone, you’re just never going to “get” it. Grab a glove, go field some grounders – you might fall in love with the game. In fact, that’s how the whole thing is set up to be.

Regards

dj

 

[AntiTheist]

Ultimately, so long as a person confines himself to the untestable and faith-based position that only things that are physical testable are worthy of belief, then that person will never be swayed from atheism.

You and I have been over this before. I don’t hold as a belief that “only things that are phsycial[ly] testable are worthy of belief.”

I base all of my beliefs on evidence, as all people do, but not all evidence is amenable to scientific investigation or “phsyical testing.” For example, my feelings can’t be investigated by science, but those feelings are the evidence that forms the basis of my beliefs about myself.

I also recognize that emotions and internal feelings can’t be used as evidence for claims about the world that apparently exists outside of my mind. For example, no matter how strongly I “feel” that I’m capable of flying under my own power, that feeling can’t serve as the basis of my beliefs about whether I really can fly under my own power. The evidence available to me suggests that if I jumped off a high mountain, I would not be able to fly under my own power – my precious feelings notwithstanding.

The atheist is reached at the level of the heart, and then the rationality of faith in Jesus becomes clear to them.

So you’re admitting that you need to fall back onto emotional appeals to sway people, rather than evidence and rational arguments.

Doesn’t that suggest to you the falsehood of your own position, the fact that reasonable people can only be convinced of your position by having their emotions manipulated?

Can you name one other true claim about the world outside of our heads that people can generally only be talked into accepting through emotional appeals?

 

[Liinus]

Actually Hawking said that it is God unnecessary to account for the existence of the universe.

There is an excellent critique of the Grand Design by William Lane Craig interviewed by Greg Koukl. Google " Critique of Grand Design " and you will find it. It is a You Tube interview in three sections. You should all view it as I believe it will be worth your while. What I got out of it personally was that the Grand Design was nothing but smoke and mirrors. A lot of groundless assumptions leading to the conclusion that God is not necessary to explain the universe. The bottom line is that even if there is an infinite number of universes their existence still has to be explained. You can’t fall back on a " balanced " gravity field in empty space because where did gravity come from? Gravity is something, it does exists, and is doing something, it is exercising some form of power or energy.It may be in a vaccum but that is not the same as nothing!!! So again, where did gravity come from!!! Why is it there!!! So God is necessary after all!!!

 

[Touchstone]

---

Well it’s the “core facts of human cognition” that the article by Hoffman addresses. If you were to glance at it again (reading selections here) I think you would find that Hoffman is pretty much setting aside the notion of a science that deals with “objective reality.”

“Research in the cognitive and neural sciences has made clear that our visual systems are not simply passive recorders of objective reality, but instead are active constructors of the visual realities we perceive. Each of us has within us a reality engine, which takes the images at the eyes and constructs three-dimensional worlds of objects, colors, textures, motions, and depth. What we see with each glance is not the world as it is objectively and as it would be even if there were no observers. Instead what we see is entirely our own construction. Our process of construction proceeds so rapidly and confidently that we are misled by our own prowess into thinking that we are not constructing at all, but simply reporting what is there independent of us. In short, our belief that we see the world as it objectively is, unadorned, is an illusion made possible by the very brilliance and efficiency of our reality creating process.”

It’s not entirely our own construction, as you’ve just shown with this paragraph. I’m well aware of the chunking and visual integration processes and all the extrapolation that goes on – as I think I’ve mentioned before one of the software projects I’ve worked on is visual pattern recognition, an applied exercise in having machines take in the same visual stimuli we do (light in the visual spectrum) and “making sense” of it. So it’s quite clear to me how much the brain fills in the gaps and connects the dots, and how useful and powerful that is.

But it’s interpretation of raw percepts that do vary with conditions of the environment. When we move from one room to another, or look at one face vs. another, our visual processes add value, but they are still rooted in the raw percepts that vary from room to room, from face to face, that vary with the objective reality around us.

So the scientific pursuit isn’t all that it is cracked up to be, TS. Scientism simply doesn’t survive a sober understanding of the scope and limits of science, the nature of human perception (as shown above), and the modern theory of chance. All of that Dr. Hoffman takes up in his article “Dismissing God.”

Behold the irony, though. You’ve just invoked science (see the beginning of that paragraph – “Research in the cognitive and neural sciences has made clear…”) to show me the limitations of science. And while I agree that science is an excellent way to understand our limitations, it takes science to “show” anything like that, which at the same time undercuts the very point you are trying to make. This is what is called as the “illusion paradox”; the identification of an illusion or misconception presupposes a superior context for judging an illusion. The fact that science can show how much our brain does to fortify our visual percepts into a processable, semantically laden “picture” shows that science is what it is cracked up to be. What does (non-scientific) philosophy “make clear” for us, here? Nothing. Theology? Nothing.

-TS

 

[Touchstone]

"One stunning success of science is the discovery of dark energy and dark matter, which together constitute something like 96% of the energy and matter in the universe. The matter and energy we can perceive is a mere 4% of the total, the light frosting on the cake. We have no current way to discover any properties of this dark matter and energy. We can only postulate its existence because without it the behavior of the 4% we can see and measure would not make sense.

So our best science tells us that there are serious limits to how deeply our perceptual and cognitive endowments allow us to penetrate the nature of objective reality. …the story outlined above, in which science is systematically uncovering all the secrets of nature, and leaving less and less room for God to hide, is not only immodest, but a complete misunderstanding of the scientific enterprise."

Again, the irony! Science is in principle unable to provide ultimate explanations. It’s just natural explanations for natural phenomena. There’s no way, as Hawking says in his book, to provide a scientific test for “what made our universe”. That’s beyond our epistemic limits. We can point to performative theories from this universe and note that, extrapolated theoretically – as a conjecture – it produces a model that “godlessly produces universes”. But science knows it’s limits, and acknowledges the conjectural nature of such a model, by it’s own rules.

That stands in stark contrast to theology which has no such self-awareness, and thus supposes it can construe its imaginations as ultimate knowledge. That is immodesty. That is hubris.

The Hawking book is a good example of this at work. It understands that God is unfalsfiable, in principle, and there’s no possible way, even in theory, to eliminate all places that God may hide. It can only speak to areas where it has demonstrable knowledge. Inside this universe, God just isn’t needed to explain physics in action. We can’t know what obtains “outside” the universe, if such a notion is anything more than nonsense, the ideas that work here in theory produce universes as a matter of (impersonal) course.

So what about the “non-scientific pursuit of an answer” you ask. Science obviously isn’t going to take us anywhere.

What? You just took us to two somewheres with science!

Works OK for our macro-physical world here (don’t get me wrong, I’m all for science) but what about the big metaphysical questions we all wonder about? Roger Scruton answers:

"A myth does not describe what happened in some obscure period before human reckoning, but what happens always and repeatedly. It does not explain the causal origins of our world but rehearses its permanent spiritual significance. Myth is a way of understanding deep processes of the human psyche, which cannot be easily described except through imaginative stories.

If you look at ancient religion in that way then inevitably your vision of the Judaeo-Christian canon will change. The Genesis story of the creation is easily refuted as an account of historical events: how can there be days without a sun, man without a woman, life without death? Read it as a myth, however, which recounts the concealed and repeatable meaning of events that we live through every day, and this naïve-seeming text reveals itself as a profound study of the human condition." More from Scruton here.

Yeah, I have a lot of sympathy for that perspective. As a theistic evolutionist for the last ten years of my time as a Christian, that was an important perspect to distill and digest. Even as an atheist, that view has a lot to offer as a view on human nature. It’s an “atheist-compatible” heuristic.

Your misfortune is that you have been taken captive by a scientism that seeks to discredit the religious, even though a New York Minute of thought should easily make you see someone is running a game on you. Did Stephen Gould have it right with his “non overlapping magisteria?”

No of course not. That would only possibly work if religion didn’t have anything to say about the natural world. I suppose one might concoct some framework that was entirely detached from beliefs about the real world, for practical religions, there will be some area of doxis that is subject to review and validation or discrediting by science.

That noted, though, I’m not clear what you suppose the “game” is here.

Better yet realize that Religion is a praxis. The first disciples never asked “What is the meaning of life” 'or “Teach us how to meditate,” but “Where do you live?” Fr. Barron comments: "The Incarnation, is not something to be admired from the outside, but rather an energy in which to participate. … If we open our eyes and see the light, we too often stop at the point of admiration and worship, lost in wonder at the strange work that God has accomplished uniquely in Jesus of Nazareth… [T]he Gospels want us, not outside the energy of Christ, but in it, not wondering at it, but swimming in it.’

Understood. This strikes a theme familiar to me from my decades as a Christian.

-TS

 

[Touchstone]

djeter:

Scientism was never meant to be an alternative to Religion.

I’m still not sure what scientism means – if you’re thinking scientism requires a belief that science provides answer to the ultimate questions, I definitely don’t qualify. But either way, science isn’t a replacement for religion. It’s an entirely diffrerent enterprise, a kind of formalized non-religiousness. It doesn’t seek ultimate.

Nor does it even begin to destroy the foundations of Religious wonder.

Hmmm. Oddly, that makes me rethink my response just above. I won’t say that the awe and wonder are of the same nature as religious wonder, but for me, at least, and others I know, it does seem to diminish the quality of numenous religious experiences. As Feynman said:
RP Feynman:

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?

That doesn’t overtly address religious awe, but I think it gets the point across.

Seen properly it is a complement to religious praxis. As long as you withhold yourself, Touchstone, you’re just never going to “get” it. Grab a glove, go field some grounders – you might fall in love with the game. In fact, that’s how the whole thing is set up to be.

Regards

dj

I grew up playing shortstop. Lived most of my adult life on the diamond, to apply the metaphor. I get the praxis part, or I got it. Baseball happens to be as close I come to religion anymore (and as religions go, it’s fairly sublime, I say), but in the end, I reached a point of conviction, that I was just pretending, playing a make-believe game.

-TS

 

[tonyrey]

Ultimately, so long as a person confines himself to the untestable and faith-based position that only things that are physical testable are worthy of belief, then that person will never be swayed from atheism. By definition, assuming you arrived at that belief, then any position other than atheism would not be rational because God is not physically testable.

So, that is where the core of the argument needs to be focused. Once a person moves from that position, that only physically testable things are worthy of belief, then reason may be applied to give the Holy Spirt an opening to reach that person’s heart.

Most often, the conversions from atheism I have observed (indirectly) have frequently been as a result with a personal encounter with someone who is closely connected to God. Padre Pio (who cooperated in the conversion of at least one outspoken and famous atheist) is an example, as are some of the other great saints.

The atheist is reached at the level of the heart, and then the rationality of faith in Jesus becomes clear to them. Before then, it’s blinders and anger. (You know, I don’t think I’ve met a single atheist who wasn’t - at a deep level - pretty angry; not necessarily raging at a time, but at least a smoldering ember of anger in their hearts.)

Indeed! The radical flaw of materialism is that it depersonalises persons! The self disappears in a purposeless welter of inanimate objects which lack reason and emotion…

 

[Mystic_Banana]

You know, if I believed in silly things like ghosts – as Mystic Banana admitted that he did in a public discussion with me – I too would probably want to discredit science and make believe that everything’s a dream.

After all, then I could reduce all those pesky people who actually have real knowledge to the same level of ignorance as the street corner hobo screaming about the aliens planning to land and take over earth. Once you go down this road, you have no grounds for saying that anyone knows anything more than anyone else, and suddenly all claims become equally likely to be true, and everyone becomes equally justified in believing any kind of stupid nonsense they want.

Score one for the “good guys,” eh?

In point of fact, “reality” is our word for the world we inhabit, whatever its metaphysical status and whether or not it’s the “Matrix.” While it might not be possible to “prove” that there’s a “reality outside our heads,” that quaint philosophical puzzle has nothing to do with the fact that we can – and do – use evidence to make determinations about reality.

For example, regardless of whether reality is the Matrix or not, we can use evidence to determine that someone who jumps off a high mountain is going to come to a bad end. Now that’s useful information.

Would you seriously entertain some buffoon who came along and said, “Well, I can’t see how we can justify anything – we can’t even prove that reality’s real – so I believe that if I jump off of this mountain, I’m going to fly under my own power!”?

And that’s where all these “reality isn’t real” clowns lose the argument: they all live as if reality were quite real and as if evidence and reason were the best ways to make determinations about it. They only ever question “reality” when it suits them, when they want to prop up claims that they want to believe in that they know won’t stand up to critical inquiry.

It’s a tired old facade, and the only people you ever find going along with it are the ghost-mongers and the people who want to live in a magical world because, hey, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a cool show and, you never know…the truth is out there!

It’s self-evidently ridiculous.

And ghosts are similarly regularly experienced… as opposed to, well, 95% of the self-congratulatory fantasy of Hawkings, which at this point is sheer

Science fiction

Which I’m sure won’t stop you considering them entirely far more seriously than things we actually have some experiential reason to believe exist! Thing is, materialists, such as yourself, are the first to proclaim “reality isn’t real”, when experience clashes with your ideology - as your diatribe highlights…

…which, I say again, displays nowt but the most obvious, fundamental superstition!

that lies at the heart of Scientism… and antitheism…

 

[Mystic_Banana]

How interesting to find someone, presumably representative of most Catholics posting here, putting down Hawking for proposing exactly the same fundamental belief— creation from nothing— upon which Catholic metaphysics and its consequent belief system is founded.

Do not Catholics believe that God created the universe from nothing?

Is it okay that God can create from nothing, but that there is no other possibility of creation from nothing by some other force?

Do you understand either gravity, or the other natural forces which define the universe, or even God?

It is no wonder that more and more intelligent people are giving up on religion, with ideas such as this still at the core of religious belief systems.

Finally, I propose that Hawking, and the Church, and anyone who proposes that anything can be created from nothing, is wrong. That notion is the most absurd, counterintuitive idea that humans have ever invented. It was apparently first proposed in a slightly different form by Hermes Trismigestus a few millennia back, and he got it wrong too.

Do you really want to be the pot, calling the kettle, “black,”?

There’s a difference. God creating something from nothing doesn’t mean everything comes from nothing. It comes from God. There is a source. I’m yet to see a reasonable alternative to the cosmological argument for God…

maybe I should have read your thesis! I suppose you did offer it some time ago…

 

[Mystic_Banana]

You must have ‘dogma’ confused with some other concept. By ‘dogma’ I mean “unquestionable, unassailable truth claims”. Science doubts all claims, it’s inherent in the method – that’s why objectivity and empiricism are primary values, because these are tools by which we overcome (or at least mitigate) our doubt.

If only we employed them honestly. Which I don’t think anyone does. And Dawkins et al. may as well be shouting “cast out the heretics!” for those who doubt his beliefs

Science is descriptive, “post-dictive”, proceeding from observations. Predictive implications of a hypothesis or theory are only validated after the fact, pronounced successful or not, after the evidence is reviewed.

This is anti-dogma. Reviews and assessments after real world trials. Liability to falsification.

It would be, if the desire (and bankability) for validation and recognition wouldn’t obscure objectivity… but I think, really, in my experience, it does.

An amputee will often have “false pain” or other sensations from the missing limb, but even in such a case, while the limb is not there to cause the pain, the pain itself – the neurological phenomena is perfectly real and actual. A “mirage” from heat rising from the road is perfectly real, even if the “water on the road” does not exist.

Which highlights an aspect of your complaint you are apparently missing: to say “X is illusory” only defeats your campaign against the reality of reality. For such a claim presupposes the very thing you are working against. We can only say “pain is illusory” because we have a reality context from which to judge it (for this over here, is non-illusory, and by that we can judge that to be illusory…). Whoops.

Except, we can so often primitively, superstitiously, assumecorrelation, without any reasonable grounds to do so. In the same way that people saw the sun move, and thought it a conscious entity, because a) man is conscious and b) moves, so c) the sun must be a conscious entity, and being big, must then d) be God! Of course, you say, we know so much more now, that was religious igonrancebut I disagrre…this is no different - blind assumption in the face of ignorance… in the name of

Science.

It is Science that often is superstition. Whoops…

How is this pretentious, at all, especially if it’s presented clearly as conjecture, as theoretical? I don’t see what would be pretentious about that, particularly when was is conjectured is the extension of physics models that perform inside our universe to contexts beyond/outside our universe (if any such context obtains). That’s as conservative and grounded as one might be in terms of conjecture, isn’t it?

That’s an odd criticism to receive from a Catholic, given to “theological fiction”, if we are to apply the principles you’ve deployed here.

Cobblers. It’s NEVER popularly presented as entirely “conjecture, theoretical”, or to be even more clear “ungrounded speculation”

There is an infinity of “conjecturable extensions of physics models” and no reason to pick this one, beyond the ideological…

I’ve already mentioned the experiential aspect of God… I think you *ASSUMED * it was a spelling mistake!

Look, we wouldn’t even know a “yeti” as a “yeti” if we found one, because it’s a folk legend. Even if some kind of hominin-like biped were discovered, we’d still be unable to attach it to “yeti”, because the claim isn’t substantive enough to test. It’s ‘not even wrong’ as an idea. Evolution is strong in that wayTS

This is the thing that makes me see the appeal and idiotic pretension of Darwinism most of all.

We have ‘folk tales’ of Dragons. We dig up dinosaurs.

We have ‘folk tales’ of trolls, Yetis, Goblins. We dig up hominids of considerable variety.

What do we do? Assume everyone who lived before about 1500 hallucinated constantly, and that fossil findings that cheerfully correlate to ‘myths’, legends in endless cultures all over the place have no actual relation to them whatsoever, since we’ve cheerfully (and doubtless, as we’ve satisfied ourselves) objectively guessed it’s all rooted in fear of snakes and other races, or whatever excuse is dreamt up this week. Meanwhile… that dinosaur slipping in the mud… can’t get it out of my mind…

Darwinistic evolution, as far as I can see, is a gargantuan exercise in Scientismic tautology in the face of a past invincible to truly honest validation due to extent of disintegration. An incredible modern conceit. “Evolution as fact?” Enforced Dogma!

As for the “world created last Tuesday”, well, Science textbooks themselves are generally rejected as cobblers after about 10 years or so… Scientifically, the latest version probably was invented last Tuesday, so your analogy works better for Science than religion, chum!

 

[greylorn]

There’s a difference. God creating something from nothing doesn’t mean everything comes from nothing. It comes from God. There is a source. I’m yet to see a reasonable alternative to the cosmological argument for God…

maybe I should have read your thesis! I suppose you did offer it some time ago…

I’ll let you know when my book is out. It presents my thesis about as clearly as anything. It offers a version of creation from something, and is designed to address all atheistic objections to the idea of a created universe. Of course it is not possible to attempt that without tweaking a few cherished, but unnecessary, Christian beliefs.

Of course my ideas are reasonable alternatives to both traditional and scientific beliefs, never mind that I seem to be the only one holding that high an opinion of them.

 

[budgie2]

(Reuters) - God did not create the universe and the “Big Bang” was an inevitable consequence of the laws of physics, the eminent British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking argues in a new book.

In “The Grand Design,” co-authored with U.S. physicist Leonard Mlodinow, Hawking says a new series of theories made a creator of the universe redundant, according to the Times newspaper which published extracts on Thursday.

“Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist,” Hawking writes.

“It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”

Hawking, 68, who won global recognition with his 1988 book “A Brief History of Time,” an account of the origins of the universe, is renowned for his work on black holes, cosmology and quantum gravity.

Since 1974, the scientist has worked on marrying the two cornerstones of modern physics – Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, which concerns gravity and large-scale phenomena, and quantum theory, which covers subatomic particles.

His latest comments suggest he has broken away from previous views he has expressed on religion. Previously, he wrote that the laws of physics meant it was simply not necessary to believe that God had intervened in the Big Bang.

Who is Hawking and why is his opinion important? The first on Earth will be last in heaven and the last on Earth will be first in heaven.

 

[Touchstone]

If only we employed them honestly. Which I don’t think anyone does. And Dawkins et al. may as well be shouting “cast out the heretics!” for those who doubt his beliefs

You know I just don’t see the basis fior either “cast out” or “heretics”. Those are religious notions, aren’t they? Which is not to say Dawkins doesn’t have heaping loads of criticism and ridicule for those who revile real knowledge and engage in denialism, (see his particular disaffection for young earth creationists), but after following him for years now, I’m quite sure he doesn’t wish to throw any one out, censor, or use official state powers to punish, but just for the foolish to be seen as such based on the merits of their follies. Dawkins is just an instrument of natural consequences in the free speech arena for naive credulity, denialism, and prevarication.

Doubting is good. Denialism in the face of evidence that shows the denialist to be incorrigible and intransigent is bad. And I’m not Dawkins, but for my part, just a “free speech” context where that can be clearly shown and articulated is plenty “punishment” enough for me; no need for anything further than that. Same as I would expect from people who think my ideas are bad, faulty, foolish.

It would be, if the desire (and bankability) for validation and recognition wouldn’t obscure objectivity… but I think, really, in my experience, it does.

Nihilism or fideism. Those are the options you are left with. Maybe a kind of existentialist blend of the two.

Except, we can so often primitively, superstitiously, assumecorrelation, without any reasonable grounds to do so.

Heh. Well, see my recent exchange with Betterave on this. You don’t need to “reasonably justify” a hypothesis. All you need to be able to do is test it. Then the reasoning pays its dividends as you test, analyze, evaluate your conjecture against the real world. We have lots of “unreasonable” intuitions, and that’s OK, reason is there as a tool to give us some bearings on their grounding and efficacy if we need.

In the same way that people saw the sun move, and thought it a conscious entity, because a) man is conscious and b) moves, so c) the sun must be a conscious entity, and being big, must then d) be God! Of course, you say, we know so much more now, that was religious igonrancebut I disagrre…this is no different - blind assumption in the face of ignorance… in the name of

Science.

I know it’s tempting to think that everything is relative, here, 2,000 years ago, 2,000 years hence. But there inflections points in the timeline. Modern science is fundamentally unlike that which came before it, epistemically. True, we may see a huge leap forward in the next century, or decade, or whatever, but our methods and heuristics today are fundamentally unlike what you are referring to back then, in terms of epistemology.

It’s not just that we know more now, it’s that we know a lot more about what “knowing” means and how it is established in practical, natural terms.

It is Science that often is superstition. Whoops…

Science thrives on superstition, intuition, imagination, even whimsy, but puts in on the “frond end” of the method, and subjects all that to a “back end discipline”. That’s what’s innovative across millenia, and new. The method. You can have any inspiration or “lightbulb moment” you want. If you can test it, the method and the results will render a real world verdict for you. One’s superstitions can be used to build knowledge, if they have merit. Or discredited, if they don’t.

Cobblers. It’s NEVER popularly presented as entirely “conjecture, theoretical”, or to be even more clear “ungrounded speculation”

I just read the Hawking book, through a second time. He repeatedly makes this clear. Quotes if you need, but it’s right there on the page from him, if you care to consult the facts.

-TS