Thank you for zeroing in on the overarching weakness of his appeal (this despite the fact that “Ell’s training in law had educated him in how to construct cogent and considerate arguments”).
Ell said he was a nonbeliever but continually attended church with his family. He liked the people he met at church, but he was apparently “in conflict” because he didn’t adhere to their beliefs. I think what happened was: he just couldn’t stand the constant, massed, social pressure of all those people in the pews being in disagreement with himself. Something had to give. He did:
Finally, Ell accepted that Christianity must be true, and joined the
community of the church he attended in earnest.
It reminds me of the Asch conformity experiments in which a lone participant conforms to the group’s purported idea of the answer (an objectively and intentionally incorrect answer), even though on his own he will pick a different answer (the correct one).
This article (one of a series of “atheist converts to christianity”) are simply variants of vouching:
“Look, here’s a very smart person. He uses product X. Do you consider yourself as smart as him/her? Shouldn’t you use product X?”
The author, Joel Furches, is a graduate from a Tennessee christian college and a christian apologist who apparently makes a hobby of “collecting” atheists who return to christianity. I’m uncertain as to how his grasping apologetics qualify for this blog; they aren’t even partly wonderful.
As I understand it, very few possible universes would allow anything resembling the structures and organisation that we recognise as conducive to life. The tiniest variations end up producing static environments.
Now, that is as I understand it, and we are talking about stuff I remember reading on wired or something a while back, so make no mistake, I’m just shooting the shit here.
I think it’s a salient point though, I should probably read up on it and learn to argue it better!
ETA Yeah rereading my original post if I was going to be rigorous I’d fill it with qualifiers. But that wouldn’t be as engaging!
The point is not that this universe is awesomely agreeable to life.
Given enough space and time, it is reasonable to assume that even extraordinarily unlikely things will come to pass, such as consciousness coming to exist in a universe that is largely inhospitable to it.
The only thing that really irritates me about guys like this is that they reinforce the misconception of mathematicians and physicists as super-scientists by claiming expertise in ontology, evolutionary biology, cosmology and any other field a selective and superficial treatment of which can be contorted to support their desired conclusions. That scientists are entirely capable of wishful thinking doesn’t bother me. He and others like him have been trotting out these “proofs” of God since at least Aristotle and it’s pointless to loose sleep over the fact that they’ll keep flogging the same dead horse ad nauseam. But he and his ilk wrap our field in mysticism that I and others then must spend time debunking.
The core fallacy of arguments that organization imply design is that organization must be possible for a designer to exist. It’s a chicken and egg argument. Invoking God is the same as giving up on answering the question and just inserting an image of Man in place of scientific discovery, a comforting delusion to cover for a lack of knowledge.
Imagine my surprise to find someone using his training and intellect to find an excuse to believe in the particular religion he started out with a desire to rationalise.
It does remind me of what Lovecraftian horror is, the horror of educated people, especially white Americans, when confronted with the idea that they aren’t the centre of the universe after all. The denial of the fact that the universe does not care for us, that we are no better than bugs. It especially hurts if you spend your life looking at patterns to realise that the patterns are in the end not imbued with any meaning except that we as observers give it.
Theres a few clear claims that form the argument from design, and one of them is that given how unlikely life is to occur, the emergence of life implies design. Thats the argument I’m addressing.
Its a fallacy that is easily refuted mathematically, as long as the event is possible. If you can successfully argue that a universe that supports life is highly unlikely, you change that particular part of the argument substantially.
It only addresses a part of the argument though, I’m certainly no supporter of intelligent design.
Aside from what has been already pointed out… I’d say that the universe is either perfectly fine-tuned to operate as it does or requires constant “external” tinkering if evolution couldn’t have happened on its own.
The answer is that organization doesn’t require design, we don’t know how rare life actually is, and we don’t know if our local singularity (the Big Bang) was unique, though historically assumptions about the uniqueness of something in the universe haven’t panned out.
The biggest problem with arguing with ID proponents is their anthropocentric assumptions. We design, so they assume all organization requires design, despite clear an abundant evidence to the contrary in both mathematics and nature. Our minds are finite, so they assume nature must be finite, or that the only two possible categories are the two we know of, finite and infinite. We by definition must exist within a life-bearing region of spacetime, so they assume that’s the only kind. So forth and so on.
ID scientific arguments break down into three categories. One is a failure to understand probability theory which you already addressed, another complexity theory (the irreducible complexity fallacy), and the third evolutionary biology (the God of the gaps fallacy). The rest are non-empirical philosophical arguments about ontology that prove God the same way that Giorgio A. Tsoukalos proves the existence of aliens visiting ancient civilizations, i.e. they don’t but they pretend they do and just keep beating the drum of wishful thinking.
It’s of course your prerogative to say whatever you want, but without empirical evidence it’s not a scientific argument. If you have some new revolutionary knowledge about the inflationary epoch or the structure of spacetime that reconciles QM, GR and spontaneous symmetry breaking, or even if you’ve just discovered a way to observe the first fractions of a second of our or any actual (non-simulated) universe, I’ll be the first in line for your lecture series. Until then, simply observing that the physical constants of our spacetime fall within a narrow range that permits life as we know it proves nothing. It certainly doesn’t prove the existence of a tinkerer who would simply multiply the number of unexplained phenomenon without answering the question of how or where either the tinkerer or the universe you just assume is being tuned came from. Miracles don’t solve scientific questions, they replace unknowns with willful delusions.
ETA: Not trying to being a dick. Just pushing back on your hypotheses.
You misunderstand my meaning. I was trying to point out that the arguments of the mathematician in question contradict themselves.
He claims (according to the article) that at the same time the universe is so perfectly set up that this requires the explanation in the form of God and yet argues against an evolution that would take place in accordance with the set-up rules. So it really isn’t so perfectly created, is it?
In other words he’s saying: Universe is perfect for life, except life as we know it couldn’t happen without further ad hoc adjustments. Therefore Jesus.
As to reasoning about a creator but ignoring the Strong or Weak Anthropic Principle, Lee Smolin does a good job of explaining the tuning required for the universe to permit (our kind of) life in the Life of the Universe. He then goes on to suggest an infinite universe (the fecund universes theory) evolving from collapse to collapse or out of black holes. The universe is tuned to make black holes, which coincidentally makes it more likely to develop life. His theory may be out of date now with the new theories of dark energy, etc. Nevertheless it produced a few excellent science fiction novels based in the concept, Manifold Time by Stephen Baxter, and Learning the World by Ken McLoed.
Max Tegmark has written “Our Mathematical Universe” which suggests, given the latest theories in physics, that we may be in one of an infinite series of universes. Thus the unlikely probability of life, when you have infinite universes for it to occur in, is not so unlikely.
Heck, I believe in God and I doubt his existence. I also doubt his non-existence,
For the record, I have no objection the a belief in a deity or deities. I just marvel at the contortions and dissonance some people will put their mind and logic through in order to convince themselves or others that they’ve scientifically proven said beings’ existence. It’s almost as if they’re not really comfortable taking it on faith.
Pascal’s Wager strikes me as an especially backfiring piece of fuckery. If there was an all powerful being willing to sort people into eternal salvation and damnation on the basis of covering their own asses, that would actually be one of the worst higher powers I could imagine.
