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]

Everything that begins to exist needs a cause. Nothing comes from nothing. Without a cause, nothing happens.

The universe began to exist. Therefore the universe needs a cause.

Your arguments are vacuous, merely assuming that they must be true because an apologist told them to you.

Prove that the universe began to exist. Go on, prove it. We can't move forward until you do.

Prove that god did not begin to exist. Go on, prove that. We can't move forward until you do.

DanZ

Ok one point at a time.

Prove that the universe began to exist. Go on, prove it. We can't move forward until you do.

Do I really have to do this? There are dozens of reasons why the universe had a beginning. Tell you what. Instead of me taking time and effort to prove something which is accepted by every single scientists I know, have read, or have heard speak, how about you offer an alternative and ANYTHING (I'll even remove the demand of "evidence" for you) supporting this alternative.

I move that the court accept the scientifically accepted fact that the universe had a beginning. Any objections?

Prove that god did not begin to exist. Go on, prove that. We can't move forward until you do.

If this court of my peers is willing to accept that the universe we currently are living in did in fact have a beginning, then we can move on to this part.

If the universe did begin, it must have had a cause. Nothing comes from nothing. If nothing happened or existed, then nothing would be the result. Obviously something happened because we are here. So something changed. Changes require causes.

This cause had to have certain requirements.

1) It must have been spaceless or at the very least outside of the confines of this universe.

2) It must have been timeless. Time it is shown by Einstein and others after him directly interacts with matter and space inside this universe. It is a factor which exists inside this universe. If there was no universe then there would be nothing to interact with. Hence the cause of the universe must be timeless.

These two things point to something outside of both space and time. But if something is outside of space and time, it must be undetectable to science (sorry, soap box).

Now we have determined using that whatever caused the universe to occur, it did so with exactly the correct specifications to foster life inside this universe.

This could have occurred in a couple different ways. Now we are comparing theories like the multiverse, and others with the God theory.

Because both of these theories are beyond the limits of science to examine, they will remain theories unless the God theory is true AND "god" decides to interact with his creation.

The Multiverse theory would be an impersonal phenomenon and we can safely assume that this theory is un-testable. Even in the argument put forth but QED,

http://debatingchristianity.com/forum/v ... highlight=

I was unable to discover the scientists method for testing this hypothesis within the confines of our limitations. This link is not actually evidence that the Multiverse theory can be tested as QED claims. It is actually a very lengthy description of problems with the Anthrophic Principle. It does have one place which specifically addresses the potential of testing the Multiverse theory.

It is possible to derive falsifiable predictions from a multiverse theory, if the following conditions are satisfied: 1) The ensemble of universes generated must differ from a random ensemble, constructed from an unbiased measure. 2) Almost all members of the ensemble must have a property "W" that is not a consequence of either the known laws of physics or a requirement for the existence of life. 3) It must be possible to establish wether "W" is true or not in our universe by a doable experiment.

Well since a falsifiable prediction requires the ability to test other universes, I once again point out that the multiverse theory can not be tested within the limitations of science.

So we are left with the multiverse as an un-testable option. We also have the "god" theory which is un-testable from our limitations. However, if God interjects himself into his creation, THEN and only at that moment in time, can we test this theory. I submit that one such time was about 2000 years ago in the form of Jesus of Nazareth.

This was a time when the "god" theory allowed itself to be tested within the confines of this universe. But this is besides the point. I am beginning to digress here. Sorry.

Back to God not beginning to exist. The cause of the universe must meet the standards I set out (1 and 2). I would submit that because this universe seems to have been specially tuned for life that one of two things is true. God did it, to borrow the phrase, or a multiverse or string theory or other theory is possible. Since neither of these theories can be tested we are unable to scientifically prove or disprove God's existence before the creation of the universe. We are also unable to scientifically prove that God doesn't exist. Therefore we are left with philosophy, history and other "sciences" to answer this question. I would submit that history would indicate a all encompassing being encountering this universe in a variety of ways. So I submit that since we have something (even if it as weak as almost nothing at all) supporting "god" and nothing supporting the alternate theory, that the more likely solution (for NOW, not forever) is God.

[achilles12604]

So after all this critique of Dawkins, I ask you...

What is Dawkins' agenda?

A. To forward mankind, and the scientific community.

B. To attack religion, and prove God's non-existence.

C. To make money selling his books.

Yes.

[Cathar1950]

If God did not come about spontaneously, then where did the first thing / cause come from? Dawkins is unable to answer this without resorting to unproven, hypothetical reaches. Until he can offer up something better than what he has, his conclusions are specious at best, and an exercise in GREAT FAITH at worst - something he accuses the religious community of indulging in without reason.

No foundation.

Dawkins is an arrogant, condescending, spiritually-challeged nincompoop.

I agree that he is an "arrogant, condescending" thinker but I have to disagree with him being a "spiritually-challenged nincompoop". He is hardly a nincompoop. As for his spiritually challenged status, it all depends on what you mean by spiritual.
I can see you being accused of being an "arrogant, condescending" Nationalistic, myopic, bible-believer Christian. I would never suggest such a notion.

I remember one episode of "South Park" that made me laugh when they were talking about Dawkins in the far future. It seems he showed it was not enough to show there was no God but that it was important to be an a**hole about it.
Also Otters were atheist and would kill the enemy by crushing them on their bellies like a clam.

[juliod]

Do I really have to do this?

Yup.

There are dozens of reasons why the universe had a beginning.

Ok. Give me three.

Instead of me taking time and effort to prove something which is accepted by every single scientists I know, have read, or have heard speak, how about you offer an alternative and ANYTHING (I'll even remove the demand of "evidence" for you) supporting this alternative.

That's called Shifting the Burden of Proof, a well-known logical fallacy.

It's your argument. You have a premise of "The universe began to exist". Prove it or realize that your argument is fallacious.

I move that the court accept the scientifically accepted fact that the universe had a beginning. Any objections?

Yes. There is no such scientific fact.

If the universe began to exist, there must have been a time t when it did not exist, and a time t+1 when it did. But, if according to current thinking, time itself "began" at the Big Bang, then there was no such time t. Therefore the universe did not "begin to exist". I expect that nearly 100% of scientists would accept this line of reasoning.

If the universe did begin, it must have had a cause.

This is another premise that you need to prove is true.

This cause had to have certain requirements.

Here you are just assuming your conclusions by picking your properties of "god" to define him into existance. The specific question was to prove that god did not beging to exist. I don't see you even trying to prove that.

So now we have come up with at least three premises that are not proven but which you need to establish before we can consider your argument.

As Dawkins says, this "god hypothesis" only creates additional problems. You have not solved any problems, theological, philosophical or scientific, and you are not even moving in that direction. As you try to develop your argument you will only accumulate additional unproven premises (such as the meaning of things like "spaceless" and "timeless"), putting more and more roadblocks in your way.

DanZ

[achilles12604]

Do I really have to do this?

Yup.

There are dozens of reasons why the universe had a beginning.

Ok. Give me three.

Instead of me taking time and effort to prove something which is accepted by every single scientists I know, have read, or have heard speak, how about you offer an alternative and ANYTHING (I'll even remove the demand of "evidence" for you) supporting this alternative.

That's called Shifting the Burden of Proof, a well-known logical fallacy.

It's your argument. You have a premise of "The universe began to exist". Prove it or realize that your argument is fallacious.

I move that the court accept the scientifically accepted fact that the universe had a beginning. Any objections?

Yes. There is no such scientific fact.

If the universe began to exist, there must have been a time t when it did not exist, and a time t+1 when it did. But, if according to current thinking, time itself "began" at the Big Bang, then there was no such time t. Therefore the universe did not "begin to exist". I expect that nearly 100% of scientists would accept this line of reasoning.

If the universe did begin, it must have had a cause.

This is another premise that you need to prove is true.

This cause had to have certain requirements.

Here you are just assuming your conclusions by picking your properties of "god" to define him into existance. The specific question was to prove that god did not beging to exist. I don't see you even trying to prove that.

So now we have come up with at least three premises that are not proven but which you need to establish before we can consider your argument.

As Dawkins says, this "god hypothesis" only creates additional problems. You have not solved any problems, theological, philosophical or scientific, and you are not even moving in that direction. As you try to develop your argument you will only accumulate additional unproven premises (such as the meaning of things like "spaceless" and "timeless"), putting more and more roadblocks in your way.

DanZ

Ok you ahead and deny science. I don't feel the need to go over in detail the red light, background radiation, plutonium dating of materials, or any of the other reasons why scientists feel the universe had a beginning.


I have to admit. You are the first non-theist that I can compare to YEC in their understanding and regard for science. Of course they too have people with Ph'ds supporting their cause so maybe we are in fact all wrong. Oh well.

http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/academy/un ... _bang.html
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/hawking/html/home.html
http://www.pbs.org/safarchive/4_class/4 ... verse.html
http://www.umich.edu/~gs265/bigbang.htm
http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/age.html
http://www.positiveatheism.org/mail/eml9838.htm
http://www.closertotruth.com/topics/uni ... cript.html
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v3 ... 482b0.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang
http://www.reversecosmology.com/
http://ssscott.tripod.com/BigBang.html


Just a few sites to look over about various theories of the creation of the universe. I submit YOU are the one shifting the burden of proof, juliod. Not me.

[juliod]

I submit YOU are the one shifting the burden of proof, juliod. Not me.

Nope. You are the one who posted an article with a premise that the universe began to exist. I take it from your post that you admit that you cannot support that premise.

DanZ

[QED]

I was unable to discover the scientists method for testing this hypothesis within the confines of our limitations. This link is not actually evidence that the Multiverse theory can be tested as QED claims. It is actually a very lengthy description of problems with the Anthrophic Principle. It does have one place which specifically addresses the potential of testing the Multiverse theory.

It is possible to derive falsifiable predictions from a multiverse theory, if the following conditions are satisfied: 1) The ensemble of universes generated must differ from a random ensemble, constructed from an unbiased measure. 2) Almost all members of the ensemble must have a property "W" that is not a consequence of either the known laws of physics or a requirement for the existence of life. 3) It must be possible to establish wether "W" is true or not in our universe by a doable experiment.

Well since a falsifiable prediction requires the ability to test other universes, I once again point out that the multiverse theory can not be tested within the limitations of science.

Not true on a number of accounts. For example, Particle Physicists are expecting to retrieve data some time in the next decade or so that could support the existence of "parallel worlds" - or universes "outside" our own. In short, the energies required for particular unifications would be different depending on the presence or absence of such company. Also there still stands Lee Smolin's testable hypothesis of Cosmological Natural Selection.

I must point out again that our intuition is often poor at estimating those things that must forever remain unknown:

Never, by any means, shall we be able to study the chemical composition or mineralogical structure of the stars.

Even before this was written, the German physicist Joseph von Fraunhofer had observed absorption lines in the spectrum of light emitted by the Sun. These Fraunhofer lines are as good as a bar-code labelling the precise ingredients of the Sun. Nature isn't particularly geared-up to keep her secrets that we know of. I could be that we only get this impression because some things take us longer to figure out.

So we are left with the multiverse as an un-testable option.

Nope.

We also have the "god" theory which is un-testable from our limitations. However, if God interjects himself into his creation, THEN and only at that moment in time, can we test this theory. I submit that one such time was about 2000 years ago in the form of Jesus of Nazareth.

But aren't the apologists constantly telling us how our minds would be corrupted/blown/whatever if God interjected himself like this?

This was a time when the "god" theory allowed itself to be tested within the confines of this universe. But this is besides the point. I am beginning to digress here. Sorry.

Back to God not beginning to exist. The cause of the universe must meet the standards I set out (1 and 2). I would submit that because this universe seems to have been specially tuned for life that one of two things is true. God did it, to borrow the phrase, or a multiverse or string theory or other theory is possible. Since neither of these theories can be tested we are unable to scientifically prove or disprove God's existence before the creation of the universe.

Either way, we might say at this point that it's ambiguous?

We are also unable to scientifically prove that God doesn't exist. Therefore we are left with philosophy, history and other "sciences" to answer this question. I would submit that history would indicate a all encompassing being encountering this universe in a variety of ways. So I submit that since we have something (even if it as weak as almost nothing at all) supporting "god" and nothing supporting the alternate theory, that the more likely solution (for NOW, not forever) is God.

I'm sorry, but I think your prejudices are showing through now. The History you speak of is mostly built on heuristics - human intuitions that are good on familiar things and not so good on others. The ambiguity cuts right down the middle of all that history so I can't go along with your conclusion so lightly.

[The Duke of Vandals]

A few key issues I see going on here...

First is the accusation that Dawkins is arrogant. While I can see where the more thin-skinned theist may take umbrage with his assertions, arrogance isn't the correct descriptor for Dawkins. Arrogance would imply exaggeration of his own worth which we don't see in his writings. He doesn't employ the word "I" (the hallmark of the arrogant) nearly enough. It was Dawkins who coined the term meme which offers us another option beyond "theists are stupid / atheists are stubborn".

Dawkins, in an earlier chapter of the book, describes how religion is given an "off-limits" status in our society. We can argue about politics, the weather, sports, current events or the hairstyles (or lack there of...) of white trash celebrities... but when the topic of god comes up, debate is stamped out under the auspice of not wanting to hurt someone's feelings (or what have you). Dawkins challenges this strange habit. WHY is it bad or wrong to talk about religion? Why is it wrong to challenge it or hold it to the same scrutiny we would give to the actions of a political party?

Second, I see a lot of misconceptions about the stance of theists and atheists. Let us look at an analogy now: Instead of "How did the universe form?" let's draw a parallel to "how did that heavy statue get onto that high ledge on the side of that rock wall?"

Sally the atheist and Jim the theist are going rock climbing in the wilderness. They arrive at their destination in the middle of nowhere and find a massive statue at the top of theor rock ledge. They agree the statue must weigh a few tons. They're both baffled as to how it could have arrived where it is.

Sally, as an atheist, suggests it was lifted by a crane. Cranes are understood, have parts which allow them to raise heavy loads and adequately explain how the object could have been lifted without requiring further explanations.

Jim, as a theist, suggest the statue was lifted by a skyhook. A skyhook is something Jim invented which has attributes that allow it to account for the unknown they now face. It hangs in the sky supported by nothing and magically lifts heavy objects onto high places.

Jim's explanation is fatally flawed because we have no evidence that skyhooks are possible. Things don't magically hang in the sky and without evidence it's clear that Jim has simply invented something to explain what he doesn't understand. Worse, his invention requires a tremendous amount of explanation. HOW does a skyhook hang in the sky? Who made it? What powers it? Where did it come from and where is it now?

Because of these flaws in his argument, Jim's explanation is no different from saying "The statue magically lifted up to where it is now."

Getting back to our question of how the universe was created, it's easy to see that god is the ultimate skyhook. So, it is theists (Christians) who hold the stance that something can come from nothing. Not atheists.

Finally, I've seen a few times individuals ask (directly or indirectly) "If not god, then what?" To them, I would point out that we don't need a valid hypothesis to reject an invalid hypothesis. Consider our analogy above carefully: if Sally cannot point to a crane nearby, does that in any way validate Jim's skyhook? Certainly not. Another debator chose to term their response in a courtroom fashion. In criminal investigation, we don't need to know how a crime was committed to scrap bad leads.

What we're left with is a clear understanding of the god hypothesis: it's an inadequate explanation for how the universe is formed. Dawkins points out that god is irreducably complex and requires further evidence that theists cannot produce.

[McCulloch]

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.

Here Dawkins begins to build a base for his arguments. He is using the premise that if God existed, he would SHOW himself for all to see.

Well to this I would simply ask Mr. Dawkins if this event would cause him to become a theist. If he said yes, then he has proven that his free will was violated. If he said no, then good for him. However, I would question his sanity at this point.

Small nit pick: Dawkins is not using the premise that if God existed, he would show himself, but the if God existed he could show himself.

If, as you seem to claim, that every appearance of God to the unfaithful is a violation of our free will, then you must be arguing that God wants people to follow him based on insufficient evidence and irrational arguments. Is every appearance of God (including the appearances of God the Son) an automatic violation of the free will of those who see Him?

As I have pointed out, and been misunderstood by numerous people so far, God's sudden appearance would cause individuals to change their beliefs solely out of his appearance. If God's intention was to have a group of people who CHOSE to be with him and sought after him, then he would have ultimately caused his creation to fail, simply by appearing.

How does anyone choose to believe something? I cannot and I doubt that you can. Each belief we hold has been caused.

[Cathar1950]

You have hit on a good point Mack.
It is interesting that we have Christian types that claim God revealed himself and has a book out including all the supposed proofs such as the bible being history and fact yet they insist if God were clear it violates our free will and we might believe and prevent ourselves from going to hell for all the wrong reasons.

It is not so much that they believe in God but that they believe certain things about God.
Any of the beliefs are questionable at best.