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Permalink Reply by Trevor on November 12, 2011 at 7:03am

Hi Dave, thanks for your reply.

 

I don't think I misunderstand the teapot issue, I was trying to show how its just not a very good argument.  In terms of science, I would disagree about the spirit of science.  New scientific endeavours are usually sought when current ones are incapable of doing the job.  Quantum mechanics might be a good example.  Your post is interesting though and highlights something of the contradiction that I think that exists in naturlaistic atheism.

 

Taking the teapot idea, for example, we know that the universe had a beginning, time space and matter.  Now this causes a problem as it points to a supernatural cause.  So what is the atheist, with a prior commitment to naturalism, to do?  Hold that thought as we're going to kill two birds with one stone.

 

The fine tuning of the universe shows that we exist with razor blade precision that allows life.  This can only be due to necessity, chance or design.  Its obviously not necessity as the big bang could have happened differently.  So what about chance.  Well, this is the razor blade problem.  Scientists like Stephen Hawking etc and mathemeticians (all of them!) say that the odds of our universe being as it is for life have the kind of probabilities of:

a.  Shooting a bullet from here to the other side of the universe and hitting a one inch target.

 

b.  Having a lottery wheel with a trillion black balls in it and one white ball, and then them getting mixed up - then pulling out the white ball by chance 100 times in a row. 

 

c.  A very reductionist example.  A 100 marksmen aiming at one person at close range and all of them missing by chance.

 

d.    A card player dealing himself 4 aces 100 times in a row.  Again reductionist but just an example.

 

Hawking, an athiest, says it appears miraculous - which I don't think any serious scientist would argue with.

 

So chance looks so incredibly impossible that it would on any other subject be ruled out as ridiculous.  The universe has a very strong appearence of design which is the third option.

 

So all scientific evidence points to a supernatural cause of the universe who was also its designer.  So back to what the athiest with a prior commitment to naturalism is to do?  Drum roll -  the multiverse.   A possibly infinite number of universes so that the odds are pulled back a bit towards it being possible that atleast one universe could have life. 

 

Of course the multiverse is a backhanded complement to design.  So now I invoke your teapot.  What evidence is there for a multiverse?  Not a scrap, no-thing, there is no signs of it, its not observable, testable, mathematically provable...  The only evidence is a prior commitment to naturalism that has at its starting point a no god theory.  Thats not science its blind faith and wishful thinking.  Ocahm's razor would rightly shave off the multiverse, which of course does not solve the problem of the beginning of the universe, just moves it back one step.  The multiple universes would have the same laws of nature that we have and so entropy and the other pointers require a beginning.  All versions of the steady state theory are long dead.

 

So, if we abandoned our prior commitment to naturalism then its more reasonable to say that that the lottery was fixed, that the marksmen conspired together to miss, and the bullet flying across the universe was guided to its one inch target.  And the guy pulling out 4 aces was cheating.  Of course all of those things can theoretically happen by chance and so design is logically avoidable, if your desperate.  But the evidence is clear in its direction.

 

So scientific evidence point to a supernatural cause of the universe who was also its designer.  So the vast majority of the 7 billion people currently alive who believe that there is a god (however they grapple with its nature), have good cause to believe so - just from cosmology, without even looking at irreducible complexity in nature.  And for myself, I have every reason to beleive that my own personal experience of God is not a delusion.  As the Bible says 'the heavens declare the glory of God'  -  sorry I know its inflamatory to quote the bible here.

 

Talking of delusions though, its worth noting that Hawkings in his latest book does in fact deny reality.  He is an anti-realitist and comes up with extraudinary ideas where everyones perception of reality are equally valid.  Strange guy,

 

Teapot analagies should not be aimed at theists, quite the reverse.  Inside the teapot is the multiverse, and with it every atheists hopes that God does not in fact exist.  Hopefully science will catch up with reality and boldly go where no materialist has been before! (Sorry, im a treky).

 

I wont comment on you not knowing of Antony Flew as I could not do so without semming to question how much you read etc.  But agian, moving away form God, one of the reasons Flew changed his mind was what he saw as evidence for a soul in near death experiences.  I think you write things off as nonsense too quickly because it doesn't fit your prior commitment to naturalism.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Permalink Reply by Unseen on November 12, 2011 at 12:34pm

Way too much to comment on here, so I'll leave most of it to others who might have a little more time today (I'm moving). However...

"Taking the teapot idea, for example, we know that the universe had a beginning, time space and matter.  Now this causes a problem as it points to a supernatural cause." No, it points to an extranatural cause, counting the physical science we know as applying only to the "nature" of this universe. There is apparently a larger reality, but a larger reality does not imply a God or even a creator. Most Christians describe God as eternal, but if anything can be eternal, it seems the the larger reality containing our universe could be eternal and is a much neater explanation (re: Occam's Razor) than that there is some all-powerful, all-knowing, eternal man-like (Theistic) being responsible for it all.

As for the so-called out-of-body-experience, this appears to be about as real as the deja vu experience. In other words, an experience that has no reality attached to it. I'm not counting the real deja vu experiences where you finally figure out that you were in an identical or very similar situation before, but the ones where it's literally not possible for the experience to have been a repetition of a prior experience.

I once read about a researcher who got permission from a hospital to put cards on a ledge above the beds in the rooms. The cards had easily read and easily remembered expressions on them which weren't visible from floor level. Occasionally, patients would report out-of-body experiences, but strangely (or perhaps not so strangely) none of them reported seeing the cards at all, much less knowing what the cards said.

But stop to think about it: how can you see anything without having eyeballs, a nervous system, and a brain anyway?

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Permalink Reply by Dave G on November 12, 2011 at 5:11pm

I don't think I misunderstand the teapot issue, I was trying to show how its just not a very good argument.  In terms of science, I would disagree about the spirit of science.  New scientific endeavours are usually sought when current ones are incapable of doing the job.  Quantum mechanics might be a good example.  Your post is interesting though and highlights something of the contradiction that I think that exists in naturlaistic atheism.

No, I think you still fail to grasp the point of Russell's Teapot. Do you honestly think that "You can't prove it isn't true" is a good argument for something's existence? It's a painfully bad argument used almost exclusively in an attempt to shift the burden of proof.

What, precisely, to you disagree with in regard to the spirit of science? That it confines itself to methodological naturalism? That it seeks out new knowledge? Quantum mechanics would be a good example of what? You are being very vague and obscure in your responses.

Science is constantly seeking to expand and refine humanity's knowledge. Quantum mechanics came about because of observations which could not be explained by existing theories. This is how science advances, incrementally, one step at a time. As Issac Asimov said, "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it) but 'That's funny...'"
 

Taking the teapot idea, for example, we know that the universe had a beginning, time space and matter.  Now this causes a problem as it points to a supernatural cause.  So what is the atheist, with a prior commitment to naturalism, to do?  Hold that thought as we're going to kill two birds with one stone.

Incorrect. We are fairly sure that the universe had a beginning (time, space), but we do not know for certain. Our current understanding of physics is such that we cannot reliably determine what occurred before Planck Time (1x10 to the negative 43 seconds), we do not know enough about how gravity works on a quantum level for that. There is a small (but still statistically significant) possibility that the hot,dense collection of matter that existed at Planck Time did not begin, but rather had simply existed.

Furthermore, even given that our current universe did have a beginning (the more likely probability), this does not mean that the beginning was supernatural in origin. (Unless, as I mentioned in another post, you are defining 'natural' as being of this universe and 'supernatural' as everything outside of this universe, in which case you are defining supernatural in a way separate from its common understanding)

It would simply point to an extra-universal cause and perhaps provide evidence that what we have considered reality to be a bit bigger than we had thought. This is certainly not the first time our comprehension of reality has had to expand. From a single solar system, to a galaxy, to a cluster of galaxies, to trillions of galaxies just in the small percentage of the universe that we can observe, as we learn more our sense of scale has had to expand.
 

The fine tuning of the universe shows that we exist with razor blade precision that allows life. 

Hardly razor edge precision. In fact, if the cosmological constant was smaller than it currently is, the universe would be more likely to produce stars, planets, and therefore life. Seems that fine tuning isn't so fine-tuned after all.

This can only be due to necessity, chance or design.  Its obviously not necessity as the big bang could have happened differently. 

Assumption. We think that the various values our universe has could be different, but it's not like we have been able to test this. This particular topic is one of intense research in the string theory community and as yet no consensus has been reached.

So what about chance.  Well, this is the razor blade problem.  Scientists like Stephen Hawking etc and mathemeticians (all of them!) say that the odds of our universe being as it is for life have the kind of probabilities of:

a.  Shooting a bullet from here to the other side of the universe and hitting a one inch target.


b.  Having a lottery wheel with a trillion black balls in it and one white ball, and then them getting mixed up - then pulling out the white ball by chance 100 times in a row.


c.  A very reductionist example.  A 100 marksmen aiming at one person at close range and all of them missing by chance.

 

d.    A card player dealing himself 4 aces 100 times in a row.  Again reductionist but just an example.

 

Hawking, an athiest, says it appears miraculous - which I don't think any serious scientist would argue with.


Hawking also says that there is no need for a deity to create the universe. (Read his latest book) Plus, why are you referencing Hawkins when it was Robin Collins (Professor of Philosophy) that made the arguments you are quoting? (In an article published by the Discovery Institute, no less) I also cannot find any quote by Hawking saying that it appears miraculous. Plenty of quotes by apologists attributing that term to the universe in reference to Hawking's latest book, though.
 

So chance looks so incredibly impossible that it would on any other subject be ruled out as ridiculous.  The universe has a very strong appearence of design which is the third option.

So all scientific evidence points to a supernatural cause of the universe who was also its designer.  So back to what the athiest with a prior commitment to naturalism is to do?  Drum roll -  the multiverse.   A possibly infinite number of universes so that the odds are pulled back a bit towards it being possible that atleast one universe could have life.


Hardly. You're falling prey to the fallacy of large numbers. Just because the odds of something specific happening are large, this does not mean that it will not happen. As an example, using your lottery wheel, if you spun the wheel ten trillion and ten times, you'd expect to pick out the white ball 10 times. Multiversal hypothesis (which arose out of mathematical calculations, not out of a "We have to disprove God!" attitude as you assume) predicts that many, many universes would be initiated, but only those which have the right properties would survive to reach inflation state and grow. With trillions on trillions of attempts, we'd expect a few to have the properties friendly to the formation of stars, planets and life. Furthermore, this explanation does not contradict any existing evidence and the math for it works. Adding a creator for which we have no evidence is extraneous and, using Occam's Razor, should be cut off.

Note that this does not mean that a deistic god (created the universe, never interacted with it again) does not or can not exist. Just that there is no reason to presume that one does. An interventionist deity, however, has additional problems which make its existence even less likely.
 
 

Of course the multiverse is a backhanded complement to design.  So now I invoke your teapot.  What evidence is there for a multiverse?  Not a scrap, no-thing, there is no signs of it, its not observable, testable, mathematically provable...  The only evidence is a prior commitment to naturalism that has at its starting point a no god theory.  Thats not science its blind faith and wishful thinking.  Ocahm's razor would rightly shave off the multiverse, which of course does not solve the problem of the beginning of the universe, just moves it back one step.  The multiple universes would have the same laws of nature that we have and so entropy and the other pointers require a beginning.  All versions of the steady state theory are long dead.

The math for a multiverse works. It makes predictions and can be tested. The problem we have at the moment is that our technology is not up to the task of performing many of these tests. Some tests, however, are currently being performed at the Large Hadron Collider. A couple hypotheses have been discarded, others have had their parameters refined by the additional data. This is science. We come up with a hypothesis based on the evidence that we do have, identify ways in which the hypothesis can be supported and rejected, and then do experiments to see if our predictions were correct.

I find it amusing that you are attempting to denigrate science by claiming it is just like religion. Claiming that blind faith and wishful thinking is not a valid way to determine the truth, a viewpoint that I completely agree with, just ends up with religion being thrown out with the trash as an invalid way to determine the truth. After all, all religion has is blind faith and wishful thinking.
 

So, if we abandoned our prior commitment to naturalism then its more reasonable to say that that the lottery was fixed, that the marksmen conspired together to miss, and the bullet flying across the universe was guided to its one inch target.  And the guy pulling out 4 aces was cheating.  Of course all of those things can theoretically happen by chance and so design is logically avoidable, if your desperate.  But the evidence is clear in its direction.

Your commitment to a deity prevents you from seeing the fourth and only completely honest answer to the question of the beginning of the universe. "We don't know". That's it. We do not know. We have ideas, and in the case of science those ideas are being tested. In the case of religious ideas, however, just the claim to know is usually considered good enough.
 

So scientific evidence point to a supernatural cause of the universe who was also its designer.

No. Your faulty understanding of science does, however.

So the vast majority of the 7 billion people currently alive who believe that there is a god (however they grapple with its nature),

Argument from popularity. Logical fallacy.

have good cause to believe so - just from cosmology, without even looking at irreducible complexity in nature.

Argument from complexity, logical fallacy.

And for myself, I have every reason to beleive that my own personal experience of God is not a delusion.

Argument from personal experience. Not evidence. Or do you accept that the people with personal knowledge of Ganesh count as evidence for the Hindu religion being true?

As the Bible says 'the heavens declare the glory of God'  -  sorry I know its inflamatory to quote the bible here.

Not so much inflammatory as much as as pointless as quoting Mother Goose, Aesop's Fables or the Quran. Besides, what is that supposed to mean, anyhow? That the sky is pretty at night? A phrase that can be taken dozens of ways, many contradictory, is useless as evidence.

Talking of delusions though, its worth noting that Hawkings in his latest book does in fact deny reality.  He is an anti-realitist and comes up with extraudinary ideas where everyones perception of reality are equally valid.  Strange guy,

Incorrect. I recommend re-reading the book (if you have actually read it rather than just reading reviews of it) and paying particularly close attention when he is talking about quantum pathing. It is quite interesting, if not at all what you were talking about.

Teapot analagies should not be aimed at theists, quite the reverse.  Inside the teapot is the multiverse, and with it every atheists hopes that God does not in fact exist.  Hopefully science will catch up with reality and boldly go where no materialist has been before! (Sorry, im a treky).

The teapot analogy is for anyone who makes a claim while simultaneously claiming that their claim is beyond examination. Another good example is Issac Asimov's Dragon in the Garage.

I wont comment on you not knowing of Antony Flew as I could not do so without semming to question how much you read etc.  But agian, moving away form God, one of the reasons Flew changed his mind was what he saw as evidence for a soul in near death experiences.  I think you write things off as nonsense too quickly because it doesn't fit your prior commitment to naturalism.

Flew was particularly big in the 70s and 80s, before I started doing much reading on the subject. Thus, my first real exposure to him was when he switched to a form of deism. Incidentally, you misrepresented his views. Out of body experiences and life-after-death had nothing whatsoever to do with Flew's decision. His switch to deism was solely based upon his view of abiogenesis, specifically that he did not see how DNA could form from non-living elements. If fact, he categorically rejected the concept of an afterlife.

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Permalink Reply by Simon Paynton on November 12, 2011 at 6:46pm

So scientific evidence point to a supernatural cause of the universe who was also its designer.

 

No it doesn't.  It says we don't know. 

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Permalink Reply by Simon Paynton on November 12, 2011 at 6:51pm

And for myself, I have every reason to beleive that my own personal experience of God is not a delusion.

 

Trevor - why have you every reason to believe that?   

I accept that it can have a purely personal validity, and as such, I can accept that it can be seen as a wonderful thing, for many reasons. 

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Permalink Reply by Simon Paynton on November 12, 2011 at 6:55pm

one of the reasons Flew changed his mind was what he saw as evidence for a soul in near death experiences. 

 

I believe in life after death and a soul, and I don't believe in God.  I see them as ordinary parts of nature. 

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Permalink Reply by Simon Paynton on November 11, 2011 at 2:08pm

Yes, as an atheist I think it is foolish and limiting to say that reality has to fit inside the framework consistent with current scientific knowledge.  That means, stay inside your little box.  I believe that whatever exists has a reality (rather a tautology) and it is the job of science to uncover, describe and try to explain reality.  I believe that there MUST be aspects of reality which science doesn't yet have a clue about.  If we dismiss, say, ghosts (my hobby-horse) on the grounds that current science can't explain them - that argument is junk, and blatantly unscientific.  It is also ironic that scientists nearly always reject whatever decent evidence is offered, out of pure prejudice.  Again, blatantly unscientific.  Frankly, I agree with Trevor - strict materialists are scientific free-thinkers only when it suits them. 

Trevor is right that there are certain basic questions that science will probably never be able to answer.  I also agree that most science types are completely adrift in any other arena, to the point of dismissing it out of hand and refusing to engage with it on its own terms.  D.u.m.b.

I refuse to limit my ideas to what science currently knows.  Am I a human being, or a pocket calculator?  A superman, or a specky nerd?  (no comment.)  I've never had a reason to doubt my atheism, but I suppose I would if I had to.

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Permalink Reply by Trevor on November 12, 2011 at 10:41am

Hi Simon

 

You might be interested in this BBC documentary about near death experiences, very interesing and also makes the point about pushing the bounds of science.

 

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/day-i-died/

 

Trevor

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Permalink Reply by Simon Paynton on November 12, 2011 at 1:35pm

A mulitverse explanation sounds reasonable.  If there are 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 different universes, or whatever, then one of them is likely to be like ours.  A supernatural creator, on this evidence alone, also seems reasonable.  However, looking at our universe now, I don't see any need for God.  It's all explainable without Him.  And the things He is supposed to do, He doesn't seem to do consistently.  Instead, He wipes out innocent people in earthquakes, etc. 

At the same time, there's more going on in the universe than science wants to admit.  I have found that it's possible to earn yourself a lucky break, in some circumstances.  Once where I worked there was a disabled woman who was being bullied.  So I told her I would get her a new Virago book which had just come out, about work-place bullying.  So after work I set out to go up town to buy it.  But I had no money for the book - I thought I would try anyway and see what turned up.  Sure enough - in the doorway of Clarkes shoe shop was a £10 note.  The exact cost of the book.  By the time I did this, I was well-acquainted with the principle, and confident that it would work. 

Certainly that looks like the hand of God.  If it turns out I'm wrong about atheism, I'll eat my head.  Really I think scientists should relax and stop being so up themselves.  It's true what Trevor says - in certain areas, either explanation will fit the picture.  I don't see the need for a big battle between science and religion.  Does Richard Dawkins seriously want to exterminate all Christianity?  What's the point of even trying?  Does he have a viable alternative?  No he doesn't, because he is rubbish at philosophy and spirituality.  He is under the wilful delusion that everything religious is evil.  Funny how his dispassionate scientific observation breaks down at this point.  Pretty tragic from a world leader in atheism.  Not to say childish.  It would be far more profitable to admit that Christianity (at least) does a large amount of good in the world.  If religious people are encouraged to do evil by their religion, then tackle that.  Don't try and bring down the entire religion, because to stop good people doing good things is, in itself, evil. 

Out of Body Experiences:  I once heard a BBC Radio 4 documentary, about 5 years ago, where OBE's were tested in the laboratory in the same way - putting cards with random numbers / letters on a high shelf above the bed - and the subjects DID give the correct answer in the morning.  Time after time.  It was a normal, perfectly acceptable scientific experiment.  How can this happen without actual physical eyeballs?  I don't know, and don't need to.  Evidence speaks for itself. 

Near Death Experiences:  I believe in life after death anyway, and see no need for God in the picture.  But thanks for the link Trevor, I'll give it a listen.

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