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God would be an atheist...
A rational look at religion, morality, politics and daily life |
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HOME / This Week About GWBAA WEEKLY COLUMNS Previous Print column Why subscribe? Schedule Terms & Rates Subscribe Online column Subscribe BASICS Definitions Atheism Faith God Religion etc Analysis The meaning of life Morality etc NEXT STEPS Buy Discuss Join Read REVIEWS CONTACT Link to this site All Rights Reserved World Copyright © Martin Foreman PREVIOUSLY... Others might see inconsistency, but I was proud of these changes. At school I had learnt that if I was intellectually honest, my perspective on the world would change as new information shed light on the old. The swing of the pendulum People whose primary motives are altruistic - driven by outside needs - tend to seek out new information and change their attitudes and opinions accordingly. People who are primarily driven by internal needs tend to seek out information that corroborates their pre-existing beliefs. This has nothing to do with political perspective - both liberals and conservatives can be open or rigid in their thinking. Ann Coulter doesn't bother me If I am lucky, I will spend the next fifty years avoiding disease and disaster and spend my last days with a companion and a few friends in a small town far from violence and relatively untouched by environmental degradation. The world may be falling into chaos around me, but as the Brits once put it, “I’m all right, Jack”. Blood circulates in the body, the earth’s atmosphere protects us from harmful radiation, neutrons and electrons exist, DNA is passed from to parent to child, the earth is billions of years old and gravity exists. We know these things not because a few individuals proclaim them, but because thousands of men and women over several generations have theorized and researched and tested each idea until there is no doubt that they are true. The evolution of science |
Column 103 Ignorance is not evidence of God Debating God's existence (iii) By © Martin Foreman Word Count: 799 words Publication date: April 15, 2007 Print publications wishing to syndicate the column should click here. Individual subscribers wishing to receive columns by e-mail should click here. Last week I pointed out that believers defending their faith give five primary reasons for claiming that God exists. We saw that three of these reasons – personal experience of God, the existence of miracles and the First Cause argument (“something must have created the universe”) were false. That leaves two - the apparent impossibility of evolution and the stability of the universe – to be examined. Evolution-is-impossible breaks down into two very similar arguments. One is that God created the world with all the species we see today in the form that they now exist. The other is that many aspects of evolution occurred as depicted in scientific texts, but God either started the whole process or interfered at certain moments. The first argument comes from Creationism and the Young Earth Theory – the idea that the world is less than 10,000 years old. The second arguments is closely aligned with Intelligent Design. The debate between Creationists and Intelligent Designers is like two groups of Trekkies arguing obscure points in Klingon history and cosmology. It’s great fun and can be intellectually challenging for those participating, but no-one should kid themselves that the discussion has anything to do with reality. We should not be distracted by the many secondary arguments put forward by either side to support their belief, To demolish their position, we need focus only on the key point which they both adhere to – some, if not all, elements of evolution cannot be explained by current scientific knowledge; ergo the universe must have been created by a supernatural force: God. There is a two-staged response to that claim. The first is that the evidence for most evolution does exist, but Creationists and ID’ers fail to understand it – and often they do not even try to understand. Take the bacterial flagellum – a means of propulsion that C & ID’ers claim can only be the result of intelligent design. But, as arch ID’er Michael Behe’s testimony in the 2005 Dover Area School District trial reluctantly conceded, the flagellum can be shown to be the result of natural evolution. (Read the relevant portion of the trial transcript at www.aclupa.org/downloads/Day12AM.pdf, page 81 onwards.) The details vary, but the same principle applies throughout biology – even the most complex systems can be shown to derive from simpler precedents. The C & ID argument is down, but not yet out; their last argument is both relevant and accurate – there are processes, including the development of life itself – where there is still uncertainty as to how they occurred. Surprise, surprise! Human knowledge is incomplete and we do not yet understand all aspects of evolution! But the fact that we do not understand a phenomenon does not mean that the phenomenon is proof that God exists. Ignorance is not evidence of God, it is only evidence of ignorance itself. Creationists and ID’ers are like impatient children who want the answer to everything now. If science cannot tell them they rush to the conclusion that God’s hand is at work. In that they are the modern equivalent of our credulous ancestors who stared at the sky and insisted that the sun was borne across the sky by an invisible chariot. In short, honest scientists – and the best scientists – admit their ignorance and strive over years, generations and centuries to resolve it. Less capable and less honest scientists say that God did it. Believers are left with one argument for God’s existence – the stability of the universe. The basic argument here is that if certain physical laws, such as the gravitational constant, differed even minimally from their current state, the universe could not have come into existence. The chances of the various physical laws combining in this fashion are so minimal that the universe cannot have come into existence by chance; ergo it was created; ergo there is a God. Again, any ten year old with reasonable intelligence and a good education should spot the fallacy in this argument. Improbability is not impossibility. The odds of a particular structure surviving a severe earthquake are small, but some structures still survive. The odds of winning a multi-state lottery are also tiny, but someone still wins. We exist in this universe. There was a very small chance of this universe coming into existence. We struck lucky. The laws of chance, not God, explain our existence. End of story. None of these arguments – experience of God is not proof of God’s existence; miracles do not exist; the First Cause argument is false; evolution is a fact; the stability of the universe is unlikely but not impossible – will change the mind of most believers. That should not surprise us. The more interesting question – which we will look at next week – is why, despite all the evidence, believers continue to cling to faith rather than reason.
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If God existed, he would... If God existed, he would be an atheist. An earlier GWBAA column encouraged British readers to sign an online petition demanding an end to government funding of faith schools. It appears that a similar petition has gathered significantly more signatures. British citizens and residents who want to sign this second petition can find it at http://petitions. pm.gov.uk/faithschools/. The petition also has its own website: www.banfaithschools. org.uk. The current volume of signatories stands at over 12,800, making it the fifteenth most popular petition at the site. This would be great news but a pro-faith schools petition (with 16,715 signatories) is the eleventh most popular petition at the site. Information from the Brights: www.the-brights.net 
God: The Failed Hypothesis How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist "Physicist Victor Stenger has just served up a second course of delectable arguments for the non-existence of God. In his latest book God: The Failed Hypothesis, Stenger runs through the standard rational and biological arguments against any sort of meaningful deity, but he does much more. In plain, easily understood language, Stenger lays out the evidence from cosmology, particle physics and quantum mechanics showing that the universe appears exactly as it should if there is no creator." from the Skeptics Society; read more at www.skeptic.com So that's all right. We can all breathe a sigh of relief. Alternately, we can ask ourselves about the assumptions underlying such a statement, particularly concerning the place of sexual orientation in human values, the ethics of specific medical interventions and the role of a mythical being in determining those values and ethics. Read more at the online edition of the Christian Index or Google "Mohler fetus orientation". |
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