The God Hypothesis

[The Duke of Vandals]

The following is from Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion:

http://edge.org/3rd_culture/dawkins06/d ... index.html

[center]---------------------------------[/center]

Stephen Jay Gould's 'NOMA' 'non-overlapping magisteria'. Gould claimed that science and true religion never come into conflict because they exist in completely separate dimensions of discourse:

To say it for all my colleagues and for the umpteenth millionth time (from college bull sessions to learned treatises): science simply cannot (by its legitimate methods) adjudicate the issue of God's possible superintendence of nature. We neither affirm nor deny it; we simply can't comment on it as scientists.

This sounds terrific, right up until you give it a moment's thought. You then realize that the presence of a creative deity in the universe is clearly a scientific hypothesis. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a more momentous hypothesis in all of science. A universe with a god would be a completely different kind of universe from one without, and it would be a scientific difference. God could clinch the matter in his favour at any moment by staging a spectacular demonstration of his powers, one that would satisfy the exacting standards of science. Even the infamous Templeton Foundation recognized that God is a scientific hypothesis by funding double-blind trials to test whether remote prayer would speed the recovery of heart patients. It didn't, of course, although a control group who knew they had been prayed for tended to get worse (how about a class action suit against the Templeton Foundation?) Despite such well-financed efforts, no evidence for God's existence has yet appeared.

To see the disingenuous hypocrisy of religious people who embrace NOMA, imagine that forensic archeologists, by some unlikely set of circumstances, discovered DNA evidence demonstrating that Jesus was born of a virgin mother and had no father. If NOMA enthusiasts were sincere, they should dismiss the archeologists' DNA out of hand: "Irrelevant. Scientific evidence has no bearing on theological questions. Wrong magisterium." Does anyone seriously imagine that they would say anything remotely like that? You can bet your boots that not just the fundamentalists but every professor of theology and every bishop in the land would trumpet the archeological evidence to the skies.

Either Jesus had a father or he didn't. The question is a scientific one, and scientific evidence, if any were available, would be used to settle it. The same is true of any miracle and the deliberate and intentional creation of the universe would have to have been the mother and father of all miracles. Either it happened or it didn't. It is a fact, one way or the other, and in our state of uncertainty we can put a probability on it an estimate that may change as more information comes in. Humanity's best estimate of the probability of divine creation dropped steeply in 1859 when The Origin of Species was published, and it has declined steadily during the subsequent decades, as evolution consolidated itself from plausible theory in the nineteenth century to established fact today.

....

Accepting, then, that the God Hypothesis is a proper scientific hypothesis whose truth or falsehood is hidden from us only by lack of evidence, what should be our best estimate of the probability that God exists, given the evidence now available? Pretty low I think, and here's why.

First, most of the traditional arguments for God's existence, from Aquinas on, are easily demolished. Several of them, such as the First Cause argument, work by setting up an infinite regress which God is wheeled out to terminate. But we are never told why God is magically able to terminate regresses while needing no explanation himself. To be sure, we do need some kind of explanation for the origin of all things. Physicists and cosmologists are hard at work on the problem. But whatever the answer a random quantum fluctuation or a Hawking/Penrose singularity or whatever we end up calling it it will be simple. Complex, statistically improbable things, by definition, don't just happen; they demand an explanation in their own right. They are impotent to terminate regresses, in a way that simple things are not. The first cause cannot have been an intelligence let alone an intelligence that answers prayers and enjoys being worshipped. Intelligent, creative, complex, statistically improbable things come late into the universe, as the product of evolution or some other process of gradual escalation from simple beginnings. They come late into the universe and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it.

Another of Aquinas' efforts, the Argument from Degree, is worth spelling out, for it epitomises the characteristic flabbiness of theological reasoning. We notice degrees of, say, goodness or temperature, and we measure them, Aquinas said, by reference to a maximum:

Now the maximum in any genus is the cause of all in that genus, as fire, which is the maximum of heat, is the cause of all hot things . . . Therefore, there must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection; and this we call God.

That's an argument? You might as well say that people vary in smelliness but we can make the judgment only by reference to a perfect maximum of conceivable smelliness. Therefore there must exist a pre-eminently peerless stinker, and we call him God. Or substitute any dimension of comparison you like, and derive an equivalently fatuous conclusion. That's theology.

The only one of the traditional arguments for God that is widely used today is the teleological argument, sometimes called the Argument from Design although since the name begs the question of its validity it should better be called the Argument for Design. It is the familiar 'watchmaker' argument, which is surely one of the most superficially plausible bad arguments ever discovered and it is rediscovered by just about everybody until they are taught the logical fallacy and Darwin's brilliant alternative.

In the familiar world of human artifacts, complicated things that look designed are designed. To nave observers, it seems to follow that similarly complicated things in the natural world that look designed things like eyes and hearts are designed too. It isn't just an argument by analogy. There is a semblance of statistical reasoning here too fallacious, but carrying an illusion of plausibility. If you randomly scramble the fragments of an eye or a leg or a heart a million times, you'd be lucky to hit even one combination that could see, walk or pump. This demonstrates that such devices could not have been put together by chance. And of course, no sensible scientist ever said they could. Lamentably, the scientific education of most British and American students omits all mention of Darwinism, and therefore the only alternative to chance that most people can imagine is design.

Even before Darwin's time, the illogicality was glaring: how could it ever have been a good idea to postulate, in explanation for the existence of improbable things, a designer who would have to be even more improbable? The entire argument is a logical non-starter, as David Hume realized before Darwin was born. What Hume didn't know was the supremely elegant alternative to both chance and design that Darwin was to give us. Natural selection is so stunningly powerful and elegant, it not only explains the whole of life, it raises our consciousness and boosts our confidence in science's future ability to explain everything else.

Natural selection is not just an alternative to chance. It is the only ultimate alternative ever suggested. Design is a workable explanation for organized complexity only in the short term. It is not an ultimate explanation, because designers themselves demand an explanation. If, as Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel once playfully speculated, life on this planet was deliberately seeded by a payload of bacteria in the nose cone of a rocket, we still need an explanation for the intelligent aliens who dispatched the rocket. Ultimately they must have evolved by gradual degrees from simpler beginnings. Only evolution, or some kind of gradualistic 'crane' (to use Daniel Dennett's neat term), is capable of terminating the regress. Natural selection is an anti-chance process, which gradually builds up complexity, step by tiny step. The end product of this ratcheting process is an eye, or a heart, or a brain a device whose improbable complexity is utterly baffling until you spot the gentle ramp that leads up to it.

Whether my conjecture is right that evolution is the only explanation for life in the universe, there is no doubt that it is the explanation for life on this planet. Evolution is a fact, and it is among the more secure facts known to science. But it had to get started somehow. Natural selection cannot work its wonders until certain minimal conditions are in place, of which the most important is an accurate system of replication DNA, or something that works like DNA.

The origin of life on this planet which means the origin of the first self-replicating molecule is hard to study, because it (probably) only happened once, 4 billion years ago and under very different conditions from those with which we are familiar. We may never know how it happened. Unlike the ordinary evolutionary events that followed, it must have been a genuinely very improbable in the sense of unpredictable event: too improbable, perhaps, for chemists to reproduce it in the laboratory or even devise a plausible theory for what happened. This weirdly paradoxical conclusion that a chemical account of the origin of life, in order to be plausible, has to be implausible would follow if it were the case that life is extremely rare in the universe. And indeed we have never encountered any hint of extraterrestrial life, not even by radio the circumstance that prompted Enrico Fermi's cry: "Where is everybody?"

Suppose life's origin on a planet took place through a hugely improbable stroke of luck, so improbable that it happens on only one in a billion planets. The National Science Foundation would laugh at any chemist whose proposed research had only a one in a hundred chance of succeeding, let alone one in a billion. Yet, given that there are at least a billion billion planets in the universe, even such absurdly low odds as these will yield life on a billion planets. And this is where the famous anthropic principle comes in Earth has to be one of them, because here we are.

If you set out in a spaceship to find the one planet in the galaxy that has life, the odds against your finding it would be so great that the task would be indistinguishable, in practice, from impossible. But if you are alive (as you manifestly are if you are about to step into a spaceship) you needn't bother to go looking for that one planet because, by definition, you are already standing on it. The anthropic principle really is rather elegant. By the way, I don't actually think the origin of life was as improbable as all that. I think the galaxy has plenty of islands of life dotted about, even if the islands are too spaced out for any one to hope for a meeting with any other. My point is only that, given the number of planets in the universe, the origin of life could in theory be as lucky as a blindfolded golfer scoring a hole in one. The beauty of the anthropic principle is that, even in the teeth of such stupefying odds against, it still gives us a perfectly satisfying explanation for life's presence on our own planet.

The anthropic principle is usually applied not to planets but to universes. Physicists have suggested that the laws and constants of physics are too good as if the universe were set up to favour our eventual evolution. It is as though there were, say, half a dozen dials representing the major constants of physics. Each of the dials could in principle be tuned to any of a wide range of values. Almost all of these knob-twiddlings would yield a universe in which life would be impossible. Some universes would fizzle out within the first picosecond. Others would contain no elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. In yet others, matter would never condense into stars (and you need stars in order to forge the elements of chemistry and hence life). You can estimate the very low odds against the six knobs all just happening to be correctly tuned, and conclude that a divine knob-twiddler must have been at work. But, as we have already seen, that explanation is vacuous because it begs the biggest question of all. The divine knob twiddler would himself have to have been at least as improbable as the settings of his knobs.

Again, the anthropic principle delivers its devastatingly neat solution. Physicists already have reason to suspect that our universe everything we can see is only one universe among perhaps billions. Some theorists postulate a multiverse of foam, where the universe we know is just one bubble. Each bubble has its own laws and constants. Our familiar laws of physics are parochial bylaws. Of all the universes in the foam, only a minority has what it takes to generate life. And, with anthropic hindsight, we obviously have to be sitting in a member of that minority, because, well, here we are, aren't we? As physicists have said, it is no accident that we see stars in our sky, for a universe without stars would also lack the chemical elements necessary for life. There may be universes whose skies have no stars: but they also have no inhabitants to notice the lack. Similarly, it is no accident that we see a rich diversity of living species: for an evolutionary process that is capable of yielding a species that can see things and reflect on them cannot help producing lots of other species at the same time. The reflective species must be surrounded by an ecosystem, as it must be surrounded by stars.

The anthropic principle entitles us to postulate a massive dose of luck in accounting for the existence of life on our planet. But there are limits. We are allowed one stroke of luck for the origin of evolution, and perhaps for a couple of other unique events like the origin of the eukaryotic cell and the origin of consciousness. But that's the end of our entitlement to large-scale luck. We emphatically cannot invoke major strokes of luck to account for the illusion of design that glows from each of the billion species of living creature that have ever lived on Earth. The evolution of life is a general and continuing process, producing essentially the same result in all species, however different the details.

Contrary to what is sometimes alleged, evolution is a predictive science. If you pick any hitherto unstudied species and subject it to minute scrutiny, any evolutionist will confidently predict that each individual will be observed to do everything in its power, in the particular way of the species plant, herbivore, carnivore, nectivore or whatever it is to survive and propagate the DNA that rides inside it. We won't be around long enough to test the prediction but we can say, with great confidence, that if a comet strikes Earth and wipes out the mammals, a new fauna will rise to fill their shoes, just as the mammals filled those of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. And the range of parts played by the new cast of life's drama will be similar in broad outline, though not in detail, to the roles played by the mammals, and the dinosaurs before them, and the mammal-like reptiles before the dinosaurs. The same rules are predictably being followed, in millions of species all over the globe, and for hundreds of millions of years. Such a general observation requires an entirely different explanatory principle from the anthropic principle that explains one-off events like the origin of life, or the origin of the universe, by luck. That entirely different principle is natural selection.

We explain our existence by a combination of the anthropic principle and Darwin's principle of natural selection. That combination provides a complete and deeply satisfying explanation for everything that we see and know. Not only is the god hypothesis unnecessary. It is spectacularly unparsimonious. Not only do we need no God to explain the universe and life. God stands out in the universe as the most glaring of all superfluous sore thumbs. We cannot, of course, disprove God, just as we can't disprove Thor, fairies, leprechauns and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. But, like those other fantasies that we can't disprove, we can say that God is very very improbable.[/indent]

[center]---------------------------------[/center]

Do you agree that the question of god'e existence is a scientific one? If not, how do you justify this? Do you support Dawkins' stance?

Discuss.

[achilles12604]

Well, think about person beginning to exist.

A baby is born. That baby was at one time a single cell. That single cell was once two gametes, an egg and a sperm. Those were generated in the parent's gonads. The nutrients required to generate those cells were ingested by the parents. The food containing those nutrients was grown or farmed. The plants grew because of the energy of the sun........I can go on and on and on, but the person doesn't have a 'first cause'.

Why must the existence of the universe have a cause? I'm not particularly well versed on universe theory, but I am aware that there is a line of thought whereby this universe is one in a long line of universes that expand, collapse, expand, collapse. Do they need a cause?

A baby is born. That baby was at one time a single cell. That single cell was once two gametes, an egg and a sperm. Those were generated in the parent's gonads. The nutrients required to generate those cells were ingested by the parents. The food containing those nutrients was grown or farmed. The plants grew because of the energy of the sun........I can go on and on and on, but the person doesn't have a 'first cause'.

First you need to define a person. Then define the start of the person.

then you can identify the cause of that start. What you have done is list a series of results of different causes. But each of these steps had a cause which allowed it to be so. Likewise each of these steps would not have occured except that something took place. Without that something, the step would not have occured.

Lets say (because I am personally against abortion) that a person exists after conception. Before conception it is not a person but rather two sets of genes.

The genes come together and combine DNA which begins the growth process.

Strictly speaking the combining of the DNA is what caused the person to exist.

Why must the existence of the universe have a cause? I'm not particularly well versed on universe theory, but I am aware that there is a line of thought whereby this universe is one in a long line of universes that expand, collapse, expand, collapse. Do they need a cause?

I am familiar with this theory. It is no longer accepted by scientists in every secular area of society (not to mention Christian).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady_state_theory

[WelshBoy]

First you need to define a person. Then define the start of the person.

Indeed! A field of thought fraught with difficulties. The problem with your definition is that a cell with a full set of chromosomes isn't comparable to a fully developed human. Each of my cells which aren't sperm cells (or a woman's eggs) have the full complement of chromosomes, but you'd never call each of them individually a person. A zygote (combined egg and sperm) isn't a person. It has the potential to become a person, but it's all a case of degrees, and I think you'd find it impossible to definitively say THIS is when a person begins to exist - or anything for that matter.

Perhaps we need to clarify our terminology, if I'm honest, I'm not sure what you mean by 'cause', what is your definition here?


As for the steady state theory, I've had a read through the wiki page and it's not what I was describing, but I can't say I have a better name for what I was describing. the steady state theory is the idea that there's no beginning and no end to THIS universe. What I was describing was an endless cycle of big bangs and big crunches - again, I'm not sure where I've got that from . An alternative is the wave function theory of the universe proposed by Hawkings...but I'm going to have to read up on that before I can explain it as a feasible alternative to a first cause, apologies.

[achilles12604]

First you need to define a person. Then define the start of the person.

Indeed! A field of thought fraught with difficulties. The problem with your definition is that a cell with a full set of chromosomes isn't comparable to a fully developed human. Each of my cells which aren't sperm cells (or a woman's eggs) have the full complement of chromosomes, but you'd never call each of them individually a person. A zygote (combined egg and sperm) isn't a person. It has the potential to become a person, but it's all a case of degrees, and I think you'd find it impossible to definitively say THIS is when a person begins to exist - or anything for that matter.

Perhaps we need to clarify our terminology, if I'm honest, I'm not sure what you mean by 'cause', what is your definition here?

Its all good. We can use any point you wish. I used conception simply because it was one place but we can use the actual birth as the starting point or we could even go by trimester.

In every case there is a cause for the effect. For birth, the cause is the contraction of muscles in the womans body which pushes the baby out. Interestingly this is a rather good analogy for the universe. If the woman never had contractions and never pushed out the baby, then there would never have been a birth and by your definition (i think) there would never have been a human. In this case the contractions caused the creation of the human.

What I mean by cause:

[center]a person or thing that acts, happens, or exists in such a way that some specific thing happens as a result; the producer of an effect:[/center]

You pick the point at which it is a human. I'll give you the cause which made it happen.

As for the steady state theory, I've had a read through the wiki page and it's not what I was describing, but I can't say I have a better name for what I was describing. the steady state theory is the idea that there's no beginning and no end to THIS universe. What I was describing was an endless cycle of big bangs and big crunches - again, I'm not sure where I've got that from . An alternative is the wave function theory of the universe proposed by Hawking...but I'm going to have to read up on that before I can explain it as a feasible alternative to a first cause, apologies.

Its all good.

Although I have great respect for Hawkins and I realize I would never meet with his level of intelligence, I am force to doubt the various theories of the universe which leave out the big bang simply because of all the evidence for such an event. I can even accept your theory on the continual big bangs within the confines of theology. Strictly they do not conflict. But any theory which does not include the big bang must account for the "fingerprints" of the big bang such as background radiation, red spectrum light, evaluated age of stars, etc.

If evidence for other theories would come to light I would be happy to evaluate them with my very limited mind. But so far, what is continually presented is a series of theories.

[WelshBoy]

Ok I see now, but perhaps what I mean to say is that there is no FIRST cause for the existence of that person. The muscles of the womb contract because of hormone release - oxytocin. The hormone is released because of distension of the uterus.

Maybe I should rephrase my challenge, I don't think you can describe a first cause for anything. And since there isn't any evidence for a first cause, there is no reason to assume there was one (the beginning of the universe from nothing).

[achilles12604]

Ok I see now, but perhaps what I mean to say is that there is no FIRST cause for the existence of that person. The muscles of the womb contract because of hormone release - oxytocin. The hormone is released because of distension of the uterus.

Maybe I should rephrase my challenge, I don't think you can describe a first cause for anything. And since there isn't any evidence for a first cause, there is no reason to assume there was one (the beginning of the universe from nothing).

Perhaps a good rephrase is there is no ULTIMATE cause for anything?

But this carries all the way back to by very first statements.

Perhaps you are asking me to prove once again that creation of the universe requires a cause, but then I refer you to the patterns observed where nothing happens in the physical universe without a cause preceding it.

Let me go back and see each step (not every step because that would take to long)


Ok lets take it from the birth of a human.

We trace that back to the meeting of egg and sperm. They egg and sperm meet for obvious and fun reasons. The egg and sperm are able to meet because they exist. They exist because they were created by the bodies. The bodies were able to create them because it absorbed the chemicals necessary from the earth. The chemicals were available because the earth is formed and nurtured by various natural forces, lets choose the sun as you did. the sun exists because it was formed when cosmic forces arranged in such a way to do so as we can observe in nebula far away. Those gasses were brought together by natural forces such as the force of gravity, inherent to all mass in the universe. All mass in the inverse exists because of . . . . . . the big bang (or other beginning universe theories, take your pick).


Each step has a cause all the way back to the formation of the universe. So we are back at the "first cause".

i am making one assumption. That the universe did have a cause. However I am making this assumption based on 100% of the observable data ever collected or witnessed by mankind since our existence. There has never been an occurrence which did not have a cause.


If the universe was uncaused, and yet began, then you must explain how nothing changed, and yet the universe changed. It is a logical impossibility. Either the universe (or something which became the universe) changed, or nothing happened. But we know something happened, so something changed. Changes require causes. And around we go.

[Cogitoergosum]

Ok lets go with your alien idea.

What caused the aliens to exist? What caused their universe to be created so they could create ours?

You must ultimately begin with a cause that is outside of ALL universes and ALL times.

So even if this universe was proven to have been caused by aliens, God's existence is still plausible based on the first cause argument.

What caused God to exist?
Or are you going to invent a special plea for GOD.

[Cogitoergosum]

Now if the universe began to exist and thus needed a cause, this cause had to meet certain criteria.

Criteria that you will invent to fit GOD.

Since the cause of the universe can not be dependent on the universe's existence, it must be space less.

If you go with that, it only means that god is outside OUR space (universe or multiverse) but not outside ANY space.

How am I doing so far?

Not too hot.

I argued that the cause of the universe had to be timeless because time directly relates to space.

Never heard that before. I thought time was a construct that only mattered to conscious beings who would feel time pass, who had a concept of time. There is always time.

without "things", time has no meaning. there would be nothing to define time. Therefore, time is also dependent on the universe's existence.

Without conscious beings that feel time, time doesn't matter, but it was always there. There was always time before anything that we know about, even if god existed, there was a time when he did not unless you want to make a special plea for him.

so if the first cause was both timeless and space less, it could not be the universe. Hence, I do not have to make an exception for the universe simply because God fit's the criteria which was necessary for the first cause of the universe.

If you start with a false premise you get to a false conclusion.

We learn about the attributes of God through theology and philosophy.

Theology and philosophy to learn about god? don't think so.

So there is no reason to assume that because the universe required a cause, God must therefore also require a cause.

Well since you started with the premise that everything needs a cause, then your god needs one too.

[Cogitoergosum]

If you can provide me with ANY example I promise to quit using this argument forever.

Electrons position on their orbits is very random in quantum physics

[The Duke of Vandals]

What caused God to exist?
Or are you going to invent a special plea for GOD.

Cogi has asked an important question one which Christians do create special pleas for.

For a page and a half, this thread became terribly concerned with what causes a person. Let's look at that in terms of the god hypothesis.

"The first human beings who lived in caves & used stone tools evolved this degree of sophistication with the assistance of digital computers."

We dismiss this hypothesis because it implies something very complicated existed at a time before such complicated things had come into existence. Furthermore, we do not need to know how humans came into existence to know this hypothesis is fatally flawed.

Whatever god is, he demands an explanation. Not the tremendous cop out that apologists present. God is a very "complex" thing and we know that complex things don't just happen.

This is why the god hypothesis is bunk.

[Caligar]

No, he's wrong. There is a God. But he should know science can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God. He should simply acknowledge that and let it go from there.

Read the book. He clearly states this many many many times. Infact, the title of one of the chapters is "why there almost certainly is no God".