Science Increasingly Makes the Case for God

[Offensive Threat]

For some reason everyone seems to equate any life with intelligent life. Our planet has had oceans for 4 1/2 billion years. It has had single cellular life for 3.8 billion years, It took over a billion more years for multi cellular organisms to exist. We have only had intelligent life for 200,000 years(homo sapiens evolved). Barely a fly spec of time compared to the planet. Chances of an alien race getting the timing right to find us instead of just a planet with nothing or a few fish and mollusks is exceedingly rare. Unless our radio signals and other chatter lead them to us.

We may find a hundred or a thousand planets with life before we ever find one with intelligent life. IF we ever find one with intelligent life.

This in no way proves the existence of God. "Intelligent design" is just a catchphrase for what we havent figured out yet.

[Heretic]

I am familiar with the Paradox - I think it's way too early in human civilization to invoke it though. If our culture is still around a million years from now and we still haven't seen any evidence then maybe.

What about the "cultures" that have been around already for millions and millions of years?

Our planet is young compared to some in our galaxy alone. That's the point I see - that life should have existed and if intelligent, conquered this galaxy a long long time ago - in which case it should be full of intelligent life.

[Buddhas Hand]

Chris Matyszczyk is a satirical writer for a gadget review website. I don't think his articles are contribute much to the discussion.

I posted that particular article because it was light hearted. The point of the article was that the worlds most famous and probably greatest scientist does not believe in god.

“When people ask me if a god created the universe, I tell them that the question itself makes no sense. Time didn’t exist before the big bang, so there is no time for god to make the universe in. It’s like asking directions to the edge of the earth; The Earth is a sphere; it doesn’t have an edge; so looking for it is a futile exercise. We are each free to believe what we want, and it’s my view that the simplest explanation is; there is no god. No one created our universe,and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization; There is probably no heaven, and no afterlife either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe, and for that I am extremely grateful.”

Stephen Hawking.

Please change the title of the thread RR , Science is not increasly making a case for god

[cripplereh]

first time we heard the word "God" was refering to an alien.So yes there are gods out there and not the way the bible says at all!The bible is the third time the story was told,meaning "greatest story ever told as it is refered as!

[babych]

What about the "cultures" that have been around already for millions and millions of years?

Our planet is young compared to some in our galaxy alone. That's the point I see - that life should have existed and if intelligent, conquered this galaxy a long long time ago - in which case it should be full of intelligent life.

There's a lot holes in that argument: maybe our solar system wasn't worth colonizing, maybe intelligent life visits regularly but b/c of the long periods involved they're not due to come back for some time, maybe intelligent life is waiting for us to develop to a certain level before making contact.

It's also possible that life is very rare but not unique.

[Buddhas Hand]

For some reason everyone seems to equate any life with intelligent life. Our planet has had oceans for 4 1/2 billion years. It has had single cellular life for 3.8 billion years, It took over a billion more years for multi cellular organisms to exist. We have only had intelligent life for 200,000 years(homo sapiens evolved). Barely a fly spec of time compared to the planet. Chances of an alien race getting the timing right to find us instead of just a planet with nothing or a few fish and mollusks is exceedingly rare. Unless our radio signals and other chatter lead them to us.

We may find a hundred or a thousand planets with life before we ever find one with intelligent life. IF we ever find one with intelligent life.

This in no way proves the existence of God. "Intelligent design" is just a catchphrase for what we havent figured out yet.

And so many seem to think it will be carbon based as we are.

It may be silicon based or something that is totally unknown to us.

As you have pointed out life was single celled for the majority of our planets history and we are not certain when multi-celled life first appeared or what caused single-celled organisms to evolve into multic-celled ones.

[Heretic]

I posted that particular article because it was light hearted. The point of the article was that the worlds most famous and probably greatest scientist does not believe in god.

“When people ask me if a god created the universe, I tell them that the question itself makes no sense. Time didn’t exist before the big bang, so there is no time for god to make the universe in. It’s like asking directions to the edge of the earth; The Earth is a sphere; it doesn’t have an edge; so looking for it is a futile exercise. We are each free to believe what we want, and it’s my view that the simplest explanation is; there is no god. No one created our universe,and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization; There is probably no heaven, and no afterlife either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe, and for that I am extremely grateful.”

Stephen Hawking.

Please change the title of the thread RR , Science is not increasly making a case for god

That's the title of the "Article".

BTW, here's a "real" person that debunks this article:

Oh, and btw, he's Christian.

Sorry Wall Street Journal, Modern Science Does Not Prove God Exists

AUTHOR: RYAN DENSON DECEMBER 29, 2014 10:45 PM

Authors note: I am a Christian. I am a Catholic who believes in God. This article is not meant to “debunk” God or to make his significance, if that’s what you believe, any less prevalent. I am simply trying to distinguish between faith and science. Many progressive Christians, such as the Christian Left, believe in both God and real science. We do not want to see legitimate science be perverted by pseudo creationist sciences.

Writing a Christmas day opinion article (that explains a lot) titled Science Increasingly Makes the Case for God, Christian author Eric Metaxas,who has no scientific background, exalts:

“The odds of the life existing on another planet are growing. Intelligent design, anyone?”

But from where does Metaxas get this idea from? An idea that has been debunked many, many times in the past. The “Fine Tuning” argument. You may have heard about it. According to Common Sense Atheism, there are three generalizations of it:

1. The apparent fine-tuning of the universe for life is explained by naturalistic design, naturalistic non-design, supernatural design, supernatural non-design, or some combination of those factors.

2.The apparent fine-tuning of the universe for life is not explained by naturalistic design, naturalistic non-design, supernatural non-design, or a combination of factors.

3. Therefore, the apparent fine-tuning of the universe for life is explained by supernatural design.

In other words, such values of unexplained natural occurrences must equal a creator who made it all possible.

In his piece, Metaxas says:

Today there are more than 200 known parameters necessary for a planet to support life—every single one of which must be perfectly met, or the whole thing falls apart. Without a massive planet like Jupiter nearby, whose gravity will draw away asteroids, a thousand times as many would hit Earth’s surface. The odds against life in the universe are simply astonishing.

Yet here we are, not only existing, but talking about existing. What can account for it?

Never mind that Victor Stenger, an American particle physicist, wrote a 350-page book completely tearing into the ridiculous “argument,’ but his book was also peer reviewed, meaning his colleagues also disagree with the “fine tuning” argument. Richard Dawkins, an atheist and world famous ethologist and evolutionary biologist, praised it as a “splendid book” that “I learned an enormous amount from.”

In an excerpt from Stenger’s book, God and the Multiverse: Humanity’s Expanding Views of the Cosmos:

In recent years, many theologians and Christian apologists have convinced themselves and their followers that they have a knockdown, drag-out scientific argument for the existence of God. They claim that the parameters of physics are so finely tuned that if any one of these parameters were just slightly different in value, life — and especially human life — would have not been possible anywhere in the universe.

Of course, like all design arguments this is a God-of-the-gaps argument that they cannot win in principle because they can never prove conclusively that the values of these parameters cannot be natural. But they keep trying.

Not surprisingly, Metaxas misunderstood a quote by English astronomer Fred Hoyle (noted primarily for the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis):

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

Certainly this sounds like Hoyle is making the case for a divine creator, right? Wrong. Hoyle did not, in any sense of the word, intend to cause debate in the favor of divine intervention as an acceptable, scientific answer. The scientific explanation is the fact of carbon’s development being readily accessible which offers no insight as to why fundamental forces cooperated to produce an unusual energy match up at precise values. Hoyle’s remark should be understood as an acknowledgement of how startling it is that the universe has the exact properties that enable the existence of life. It is another mystery in science which needs to be solved. It should not be blindly attributed to a creator.

To back up further claims which would debunk Mr. metaxas absurd misrepresentation of the th facts, take Alister McGrath, a Northern Irish theologian, priest, intellectual historian, scientist, and Christian apologist:

“[The entire biological] evolutionary process depends upon the unusual chemistry of carbon, which allows it to bond to itself, as well as other elements, creating highly complex molecules that are stable over prevailing terrestrial temperatures, and are capable of conveying genetic information (especially DNA). […] Whereas it might be argued that nature creates its own fine-tuning, this can only be done if the primordial constituents of the universe are such that an evolutionary process can be initiated. The unique chemistry of carbon is the ultimate foundation of the capacity of nature to tune itself.

In other words, the “fine-tuning” of carbon is responsible for nature’s ability to tune itself to any degree, not necessarily a creator. This is coming from a priest.

In an excerpt from G.M Jackson’s book Debunking Darwin’s God: A Case Against BioLogos and Theistic Evolution:

“According to the anthropic principle proponents, if the universal constants (e.g. gravitation, the strong force, etc.) were just a nose-hair off, the universe as we know it would not exist; stars wouldn’t form and there would be no life and no us. That supposedly makes our universe truly special. To demonstrate just how ridiculous this fine-tuning argument is, consider the fact that no measurement in physics is perfect. All of them are approximations and have margins of error. That means the universal constants, that make our universe what it is, have some wiggle room. Within that wiggle room are an infinite quantity of real numbers. Each of those real numbers could represent constants that could make a universe like ours. Since there are an infinite number of potential constants within that wiggle room, there are an infinite number of potential universes, like ours, that could have existed in lieu of ours. Thus, there is really nothing special about our universe.”

It is very dangerous for the Wall Street Journal to publish such shoddy work which can easily be debunked. Certainly Mr. Metaxas has the right to his opinion and to have his opinion published. But a news source like the Journal should reach a little deeper into what is fact and what is, in most cases, science fiction.

http://www.addictinginfo.org/2014/12/29/debunking-wall-street-journal-god-article/

[ken kaniff]

I love how people assume they know anything about the universe. Our knowledge about the universe is constantly changing. Literally nothing is proven at this point. we know very little so acting as if you know anything is stupid. Hawking is a genius but still lacks knowledge and facts to prove any of his theories.

[Heretic]

There's a lot holes in that argument: maybe our solar system wasn't worth colonizing, maybe intelligent life visits regularly but b/c of the long periods involved they're not due to come back for some time, maybe intelligent life is waiting for us to develop to a certain level before making contact.

It's also possible that life is very rare but not unique.

True, but the irony is, the exact same reasons people use to say that intelligent life must be out there can also be used that God must be out there.

"Just because we haven't seen them does't mean they don't exist" etc type of arguments.

[Heretic]

I love how people assume they know anything about the universe. Our knowledge about the universe is constantly changing. Literally nothing is proven at this point. we know very little so acting as if you know anything is stupid. Hawking is a genius but still lacks knowledge and facts to prove any of his theories.

Agreed, but it sure is fun to speculate.

[babych]

True, but the irony is, the exact same reasons people use to say that intelligent life must be out there can also be used that God must be out there.

"Just because we haven't seen them does't mean they don't exist" etc type of arguments.

Good point!

[Offensive Threat]

Another thing is we dont know how life is created. We assume life is common throughout the universe. Thats a bold assumption considering that we dont know how it begins. We cant make life out of its inorganic compounds. All determined efforts to create life in a lab have failed. We can take and egg and sperm and mix them but they are already alive. We can take a seed and split it to make 2 seeds but we cant make a seed from scratch. We can create amino acids and other building blocks of life but they are not themselves alive.

IF life began in earths primordial ooze it should be possible to do it in a lab. it should be easy. But we cant. Theres the "life began due to a unknown natural mechanism that no longer exists" Theory but thats just a cover for our ignorance.

If life came to Earth on an asteroid then its origins are completely unknown, and not of this earth.

Until we have an understanding of a completely natural way life is created the question of whether there is a "God" or not will have weight.

P.S. if the theory that there is a natural law that "Over time things naturally become more complex" is proven true that will help a lot.

[jdatb]

I posted that particular article because it was light hearted. The point of the article was that the worlds most famous and probably greatest scientist does not believe in god.

“When people ask me if a god created the universe, I tell them that the question itself makes no sense. Time didn’t exist before the big bang, so there is no time for god to make the universe in. It’s like asking directions to the edge of the earth; The Earth is a sphere; it doesn’t have an edge; so looking for it is a futile exercise. We are each free to believe what we want, and it’s my view that the simplest explanation is; there is no god. No one created our universe,and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization; There is probably no heaven, and no afterlife either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe, and for that I am extremely grateful.”

Stephen Hawking.

Please change the title of the thread RR , Science is not increasly making a case for god

Greater scientists believed in God.

[Buddhas Hand]

That's the title of the "Article".

BTW, here's a "real" person that debunks this article:

Oh, and btw, he's Christian.

Sorry Wall Street Journal, Modern Science Does Not Prove God Exists

AUTHOR: RYAN DENSON DECEMBER 29, 2014 10:45 PM

Authors note: I am a Christian. I am a Catholic who believes in God. This article is not meant to “debunk” God or to make his significance, if that’s what you believe, any less prevalent. I am simply trying to distinguish between faith and science. Many progressive Christians, such as the Christian Left, believe in both God and real science. We do not want to see legitimate science be perverted by pseudo creationist sciences.

Writing a Christmas day opinion article (that explains a lot) titled Science Increasingly Makes the Case for God, Christian author Eric Metaxas,who has no scientific background, exalts:

“The odds of the life existing on another planet are growing. Intelligent design, anyone?”

But from where does Metaxas get this idea from? An idea that has been debunked many, many times in the past. The “Fine Tuning” argument. You may have heard about it. According to Common Sense Atheism, there are three generalizations of it:

1. The apparent fine-tuning of the universe for life is explained by naturalistic design, naturalistic non-design, supernatural design, supernatural non-design, or some combination of those factors.

2.The apparent fine-tuning of the universe for life is not explained by naturalistic design, naturalistic non-design, supernatural non-design, or a combination of factors.

3. Therefore, the apparent fine-tuning of the universe for life is explained by supernatural design.

In other words, such values of unexplained natural occurrences must equal a creator who made it all possible.

In his piece, Metaxas says:

Today there are more than 200 known parameters necessary for a planet to support life—every single one of which must be perfectly met, or the whole thing falls apart. Without a massive planet like Jupiter nearby, whose gravity will draw away asteroids, a thousand times as many would hit Earth’s surface. The odds against life in the universe are simply astonishing.

Yet here we are, not only existing, but talking about existing. What can account for it?

Never mind that Victor Stenger, an American particle physicist, wrote a 350-page book completely tearing into the ridiculous “argument,’ but his book was also peer reviewed, meaning his colleagues also disagree with the “fine tuning” argument. Richard Dawkins, an atheist and world famous ethologist and evolutionary biologist, praised it as a “splendid book” that “I learned an enormous amount from.”

In an excerpt from Stenger’s book, God and the Multiverse: Humanity’s Expanding Views of the Cosmos:

In recent years, many theologians and Christian apologists have convinced themselves and their followers that they have a knockdown, drag-out scientific argument for the existence of God. They claim that the parameters of physics are so finely tuned that if any one of these parameters were just slightly different in value, life — and especially human life — would have not been possible anywhere in the universe.

Of course, like all design arguments this is a God-of-the-gaps argument that they cannot win in principle because they can never prove conclusively that the values of these parameters cannot be natural. But they keep trying.

Not surprisingly, Metaxas misunderstood a quote by English astronomer Fred Hoyle (noted primarily for the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis):

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

Certainly this sounds like Hoyle is making the case for a divine creator, right? Wrong. Hoyle did not, in any sense of the word, intend to cause debate in the favor of divine intervention as an acceptable, scientific answer. The scientific explanation is the fact of carbon’s development being readily accessible which offers no insight as to why fundamental forces cooperated to produce an unusual energy match up at precise values. Hoyle’s remark should be understood as an acknowledgement of how startling it is that the universe has the exact properties that enable the existence of life. It is another mystery in science which needs to be solved. It should not be blindly attributed to a creator.

To back up further claims which would debunk Mr. metaxas absurd misrepresentation of the th facts, take Alister McGrath, a Northern Irish theologian, priest, intellectual historian, scientist, and Christian apologist:

“[The entire biological] evolutionary process depends upon the unusual chemistry of carbon, which allows it to bond to itself, as well as other elements, creating highly complex molecules that are stable over prevailing terrestrial temperatures, and are capable of conveying genetic information (especially DNA). […] Whereas it might be argued that nature creates its own fine-tuning, this can only be done if the primordial constituents of the universe are such that an evolutionary process can be initiated. The unique chemistry of carbon is the ultimate foundation of the capacity of nature to tune itself.

In other words, the “fine-tuning” of carbon is responsible for nature’s ability to tune itself to any degree, not necessarily a creator. This is coming from a priest.

In an excerpt from G.M Jackson’s book Debunking Darwin’s God: A Case Against BioLogos and Theistic Evolution:

“According to the anthropic principle proponents, if the universal constants (e.g. gravitation, the strong force, etc.) were just a nose-hair off, the universe as we know it would not exist; stars wouldn’t form and there would be no life and no us. That supposedly makes our universe truly special. To demonstrate just how ridiculous this fine-tuning argument is, consider the fact that no measurement in physics is perfect. All of them are approximations and have margins of error. That means the universal constants, that make our universe what it is, have some wiggle room. Within that wiggle room are an infinite quantity of real numbers. Each of those real numbers could represent constants that could make a universe like ours. Since there are an infinite number of potential constants within that wiggle room, there are an infinite number of potential universes, like ours, that could have existed in lieu of ours. Thus, there is really nothing special about our universe.”

It is very dangerous for the Wall Street Journal to publish such shoddy work which can easily be debunked. Certainly Mr. Metaxas has the right to his opinion and to have his opinion published. But a news source like the Journal should reach a little deeper into what is fact and what is, in most cases, science fiction.

http://www.addictinginfo.org/2014/12/29/debunking-wall-street-journal-god-article/

Are you having A crisis of faith mate

Happy new year Heretic , hope it's a good one for you and yours

[Buddhas Hand]

Greater scientists believed in God.

Who are these " greater scientists " ?

[Heretic]

Are you having A crisis of faith mate

Happy new year Heretic , hope it's a good one for you and yours

Only crisis I have is if I have enough beers for tonight.

Happy New Year to you as well.

[Junkyard Dog]

I believe in reincarnation.

In my next life I plan to be Godzilla and protect the earth from giant monsters that bring about danger to our world.

[Master Mind]

He's suggesting it, not jamming it down your throat. And it's numbers and facts here...just take a moment and look at the odds, conditions, parameters, needed...it's pretty much impossible to just happen on it's own imo.

That's kind of how I feel about it too. It's really interesting to see the things science is discovering, and to me it further shows how a creator was needed to make it all happen. Too much of a coincidence otherwise IMO.

[Mr.DirtyDangles]

This planet is so far out in the galactic "boonies" why the hell would any beings waste the fuel to come and see us ? We are infants crawling around looking for our bottle. The earth is hypothesized to be 4.5 billion years old. Mans sheer ignorance that this is the pinnacle of human society right now is the biggest joke of all.

Steel will breakdown and return to it's base elements in only a few thousand years. Plastics, polymers pretty much most artifacts will have been disintegrated by the environment over time.

Carbon dating is proving to be quite inaccurate as well. WE have never had a clue and we are faaaaaaaaar from deducing anything form any morsel of clues that is left form the past 4.5 billion years.

Religion is a faded memory of mans attempt at explaining the unexplainable. Now that science is catching up with our current postulations we may actually start to figure some things out.

[Offensive Threat]

And so many seem to think it will be carbon based as we are.

It may be silicon based or something that is totally unknown to us.

As you have pointed out life was single celled for the majority of our planets history and we are not certain when multi-celled life first appeared or what caused single-celled organisms to evolve into multic-celled ones.

I read an article from someone at NASA a long time ago titled "Life as we dont know it" about the potential problems of our first contact with intelligent life to be a species we cant identify as even being alive let alone intelligent. What if they look, and act, just like regular rocks? What if they converse by releasing and inhaling complex mixtures of scents? The potential is infinite. What if communication is impossible? What if common ground cannot be reached? Many questions with few answers.

Human history points to a dark path of us taking whatever we want from them if we can but I hope our future selves are a lot more peaceful/charitable.