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

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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]

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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]

Yes, I can

Read up on the double slit quantum mechancies experiment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment

As for the radioactive decay, that does not show when any specific atom will decay.. liek I said, it is probablistic rather than deterministic.

I will certainly read up on your wiki site.

As for decay, not knowing when something occurs is not the same thing as not knowing WHY or HOW something occurs. WHY something occurs deals with cause. When something occurs does not.

There are variations of QM that state that when an individual atom decays is spontaneous, unpredictable and uncaused.

There also is the creation of virtual particles.

With regard to nuclear decay, feel free to ignore the websites I posted which clearly outline the cause for the decay.

With regard to virtual particles, is it, or is it not true that they are a theoretical and untested hypothesis?

Now this next part is important to read correctly. While I can very easily accept the existence of virtual particles, dispite thier lack of study, I can not accept that you or anyone else here can be sure that these particles are in fact uncaused. You are suggesting a theory as a fact without any experimental data to back up this claim because thus far we are unsure of virtual particles existence, much less their characteristics.

Your claim is unfalsifiable. Therefore neither I, nor you can depend on it as fact, and this is even more pronounced as this "fact" you keep putting forth contradicts every other recorded examination of this principle.

I am sure you will always claim that 'something might bef caused' However, like I said, a number of the various QM theories specifically say it is uncaused.

You can't show a cause either.. so at worst we are at a stale mate.

ON the other hand, here is an article that explains things better.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpreta ... _mechanics

If it is a stale mate, then you admit your position is un-falsifiable. If your position is un-falsifiable, then why are you using it as evidence?

This is the same as me saying since you can not disprove God's existence scientifically, he must therefore exist.

I question your evidence. If it isn't sound, then neither is your conclusion.

And here is a much better source on quantum mechanics.

[Goat]

Yes, I can

Read up on the double slit quantum mechancies experiment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment

As for the radioactive decay, that does not show when any specific atom will decay.. liek I said, it is probablistic rather than deterministic.

I will certainly read up on your wiki site.

As for decay, not knowing when something occurs is not the same thing as not knowing WHY or HOW something occurs. WHY something occurs deals with cause. When something occurs does not.

There are variations of QM that state that when an individual atom decays is spontaneous, unpredictable and uncaused.

There also is the creation of virtual particles.

With regard to nuclear decay, feel free to ignore the websites I posted which clearly outline the cause for the decay.

With regard to virtual particles, is it, or is it not true that they are a theoretical and untested hypothesis?

Now this next part is important to read correctly. While I can very easily accept the existence of virtual particles, dispite thier lack of study, I can not accept that you or anyone else here can be sure that these particles are in fact uncaused. You are suggesting a theory as a fact without any experimental data to back up this claim because thus far we are unsure of virtual particles existence, much less their characteristics.

Your claim is unfalsifiable. Therefore neither I, nor you can depend on it as fact, and this is even more pronounced as this "fact" you keep putting forth contradicts every other recorded examination of this principle.

I am sure you will always claim that 'something might bef caused' However, like I said, a number of the various QM theories specifically say it is uncaused.

You can't show a cause either.. so at worst we are at a stale mate.

ON the other hand, here is an article that explains things better.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpreta ... _mechanics

If it is a stale mate, then you admit your position is un-falsifiable. If your position is un-falsifiable, then why are you using it as evidence?

This is the same as me saying since you can not disprove God's existence scientifically, he must therefore exist.

I question your evidence. If it isn't sound, then neither is your conclusion.

And here is a much better source on quantum mechanics.

I didn't say it was unfalsifiable at all. I said it is currently being argued about. There is a difference.

[achilles12604]

Yes, I can

Read up on the double slit quantum mechancies experiment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment

As for the radioactive decay, that does not show when any specific atom will decay.. liek I said, it is probablistic rather than deterministic.

I will certainly read up on your wiki site.

As for decay, not knowing when something occurs is not the same thing as not knowing WHY or HOW something occurs. WHY something occurs deals with cause. When something occurs does not.

There are variations of QM that state that when an individual atom decays is spontaneous, unpredictable and uncaused.

There also is the creation of virtual particles.

With regard to nuclear decay, feel free to ignore the websites I posted which clearly outline the cause for the decay.

With regard to virtual particles, is it, or is it not true that they are a theoretical and untested hypothesis?

Now this next part is important to read correctly. While I can very easily accept the existence of virtual particles, dispite thier lack of study, I can not accept that you or anyone else here can be sure that these particles are in fact uncaused. You are suggesting a theory as a fact without any experimental data to back up this claim because thus far we are unsure of virtual particles existence, much less their characteristics.

Your claim is unfalsifiable. Therefore neither I, nor you can depend on it as fact, and this is even more pronounced as this "fact" you keep putting forth contradicts every other recorded examination of this principle.

I am sure you will always claim that 'something might bef caused' However, like I said, a number of the various QM theories specifically say it is uncaused.

You can't show a cause either.. so at worst we are at a stale mate.

ON the other hand, here is an article that explains things better.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpreta ... _mechanics

If it is a stale mate, then you admit your position is un-falsifiable. If your position is un-falsifiable, then why are you using it as evidence?

This is the same as me saying since you can not disprove God's existence scientifically, he must therefore exist.

I question your evidence. If it isn't sound, then neither is your conclusion.

And here is a much better source on quantum mechanics.

I didn't say it was unfalsifiable at all. I said it is currently being argued about. There is a difference.

We were debating the necessity for a cause for the universe. You put forth that not everything requires a cause. This viewpoint directly contradicts the general observations of science and the unvierse we live in, thus I requested an example of this type of violation.

The example you gave was virtual particles citing this as your evidence that not all things require causes.

However, your "evidence" was based on a non-falsifiable claim which is totally unproven and is thus far unable to be examined due to the newness of the field.

So basically you are suggesting that the well known and accepted principle of causuality does not hold true universally based on assumptions made about a non-falsifiable claim regarding a brand new branch of science. Am I wrong?

[Goat]

Yes, I can

Read up on the double slit quantum mechancies experiment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment

As for the radioactive decay, that does not show when any specific atom will decay.. liek I said, it is probablistic rather than deterministic.

I will certainly read up on your wiki site.

As for decay, not knowing when something occurs is not the same thing as not knowing WHY or HOW something occurs. WHY something occurs deals with cause. When something occurs does not.

There are variations of QM that state that when an individual atom decays is spontaneous, unpredictable and uncaused.

There also is the creation of virtual particles.

With regard to nuclear decay, feel free to ignore the websites I posted which clearly outline the cause for the decay.

With regard to virtual particles, is it, or is it not true that they are a theoretical and untested hypothesis?

Now this next part is important to read correctly. While I can very easily accept the existence of virtual particles, dispite thier lack of study, I can not accept that you or anyone else here can be sure that these particles are in fact uncaused. You are suggesting a theory as a fact without any experimental data to back up this claim because thus far we are unsure of virtual particles existence, much less their characteristics.

Your claim is unfalsifiable. Therefore neither I, nor you can depend on it as fact, and this is even more pronounced as this "fact" you keep putting forth contradicts every other recorded examination of this principle.

I am sure you will always claim that 'something might bef caused' However, like I said, a number of the various QM theories specifically say it is uncaused.

You can't show a cause either.. so at worst we are at a stale mate.

ON the other hand, here is an article that explains things better.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpreta ... _mechanics

If it is a stale mate, then you admit your position is un-falsifiable. If your position is un-falsifiable, then why are you using it as evidence?

This is the same as me saying since you can not disprove God's existence scientifically, he must therefore exist.

I question your evidence. If it isn't sound, then neither is your conclusion.

And here is a much better source on quantum mechanics.

I didn't say it was unfalsifiable at all. I said it is currently being argued about. There is a difference.

We were debating the necessity for a cause for the universe. You put forth that not everything requires a cause. This viewpoint directly contradicts the general observations of science and the unvierse we live in, thus I requested an example of this type of violation.

The example you gave was virtual particles citing this as your evidence that not all things require causes.

However, your "evidence" was based on a non-falsifiable claim which is totally unproven and is thus far unable to be examined due to the newness of the field.

So basically you are suggesting that the well known and accepted principle of causuality does not hold true universally based on assumptions made about a non-falsifiable claim regarding a brand new branch of science. Am I wrong?

I am pointing out that one of the assumptiopns, .. everything has a cause, is strongly opposed by a number of the various qm theories. According to at least
half of the various varieties of QM, it is not determinitstic, and therefore has uncaused events.

[achilles12604]

I am pointing out that one of the assumptiopns, .. everything has a cause, is strongly opposed by a number of the various qm theories. According to at least
half of the various varieties of QM, it is not determinitstic, and therefore has uncaused events.

Dispite reading through your sources, I still can not find anywhere where it suggests that these things happen without a cause. In fact I can not find an area where it even addresses this subject, for or against.

Could you hold my hand a little an pull out a quote concerning this particular subject?

Not wikipedia please.

[Goat]

I am pointing out that one of the assumptiopns, .. everything has a cause, is strongly opposed by a number of the various qm theories. According to at least
half of the various varieties of QM, it is not determinitstic, and therefore has uncaused events.

Dispite reading through your sources, I still can not find anywhere where it suggests that these things happen without a cause. In fact I can not find an area where it even addresses this subject, for or against.

Could you hold my hand a little an pull out a quote concerning this particular subject?

Not wikipedia please.

Why not wikipedia. ON this subject, this is a good article.

The main part was the table that showed a bunch of the different things about the various QM theories. The biggest difference between many of them is 'non-determinitic' vs 'Hidden variables'.

[achilles12604]

I am pointing out that one of the assumptiopns, .. everything has a cause, is strongly opposed by a number of the various qm theories. According to at least
half of the various varieties of QM, it is not determinitstic, and therefore has uncaused events.

Dispite reading through your sources, I still can not find anywhere where it suggests that these things happen without a cause. In fact I can not find an area where it even addresses this subject, for or against.

Could you hold my hand a little an pull out a quote concerning this particular subject?

Not wikipedia please.

Why not wikipedia. ON this subject, this is a good article.

The main part was the table that showed a bunch of the different things about the various QM theories. The biggest difference between many of them is 'non-determinitic' vs 'Hidden variables'.

why not Wiki? Besides the fact that I could go in right now and alter any of their pages to say what I wanted you mean?

Here how about an example


From Wiki:

Virtual particles exhibit some of the phenomena that real particles do such as obedience to the conservation laws.

A single virtual particle cannot be detected because that would result in it becoming real.

From the Scientific American Magazine:

Quantum mechanics allows, and indeed requires, temporary violations of conservation of energy, so one particle can become a pair of heavier particles (the so-called virtual particles),

Thus virtual particles are indeed real and have observable effects that physicists have devised ways of measuring.

Do you see any problems with trusting Wikipedia?

[Goat]

I am pointing out that one of the assumptiopns, .. everything has a cause, is strongly opposed by a number of the various qm theories. According to at least
half of the various varieties of QM, it is not determinitstic, and therefore has uncaused events.

Dispite reading through your sources, I still can not find anywhere where it suggests that these things happen without a cause. In fact I can not find an area where it even addresses this subject, for or against.

Could you hold my hand a little an pull out a quote concerning this particular subject?

Not wikipedia please.

Why not wikipedia. ON this subject, this is a good article.

The main part was the table that showed a bunch of the different things about the various QM theories. The biggest difference between many of them is 'non-determinitic' vs 'Hidden variables'.

why not Wiki? Besides the fact that I could go in right now and alter any of their pages to say what I wanted you mean?

Here how about an example


From Wiki:

Virtual particles exhibit some of the phenomena that real particles do such as obedience to the conservation laws.

A single virtual particle cannot be detected because that would result in it becoming real.

From the Scientific American Magazine:

Quantum mechanics allows, and indeed requires, temporary violations of conservation of energy, so one particle can become a pair of heavier particles (the so-called virtual particles),

Thus virtual particles are indeed real and have observable effects that physicists have devised ways of measuring.

Do you see any problems with trusting Wikipedia?

And, your point is??

Just because you don't understand it .