The other day, I wrote about how New Atheists are the same as the Old Atheists, and in particular, how all kinds of atheists are responding to the failure of all religion to answer basic questions about our existence. I could argue that religion is a font of bad ethics, bad philosophy, bad charity, etc., but because I’m a science guy I wrote about how badly it addresses questions of our origin and nature, and how the major premises of all religions are false.
This has roused the indignant jellyfish of the Discovery Institute, Michael Egnor, who has declared that atheism is a catastrophe for science. The most remarkable thing about his complaint is that I asked a number of questions about key premises of faith, like about the existence of a deity, an afterlife, and why we should believe your particular dogma over another, and he doesn’t answer any of them. He doesn’t even try. This isn’t even an argument.
I ask, “Why should I believe one religion over another?”
He harumphs back, Because Christianity is obviously true.
I could ask, “How do you know?”
Because it just is.
This is not a productive direction the discussion could take, but it’s what I expect from a Discovery Institute flunky. The details are not much different from my broad outline. So I bring up this basic question in my post:
Why should I believe in any god? We don’t need an intelligent authority to explain the universe…
His answer:
Of course we need an intelligent authority to explain the universe. The universe is shot through with intelligibility. Nature is governed by astonishingly complex and elegant physical laws, and the laws themselves are written in the language of abstract mathematics. In fact, theoretical physicists must often explore utterly new mathematical theories in order to explain the behavior of inanimate matter.
That’s not an answer. Nothing in that addresses the issue, and when he continues on to babble about the religious beliefs of scientists, claiming that many of them have believed in gods, he is mistaking personal quirks that are irrelevant to question for the facts that support his contention. I could argue that many scientists have been good musicians, but it would not imply that therefore my theory that the universe began with a note on a violin is true; an even more universal truth, that all scientists have possessed nostrils, is not support for my theory that the Big Bang was actually the Big Sneeze. And doesn’t Sandwalk’s list of atheist scientists immediately refute the idea that religiosity is a precondition for good science?
Egnor is simply making a fallacious assertion, and is begging the question. I will reply with a quote from Percy Shelley, published in 1814, which the Intelligent Design creationists will ignore, as they’ve been doing for two centuries.
Design must be proved before a designer can be inferred. The matter in controversy is the existence of design in the Universe, and it is not permitted to assume the contested premises and thence infer the matter in dispute. Insidiously to employ the words contrivance, design, and adaptation before these circumstances are made apparent in the Universe, thence justly inferring a contriver, is a popular sophism against which it behoves us to be watchful.
I don’t think that word means what he thinks it means.
The Great Green Arkleseizure be praised!
Go back to Viltvodle VI you damned Jatravartid!!!
Sometimes it seems that religion is, at its core, the failure to understand that things can happen without a person specifically intending for them to happen.
So the idea that you need to prove the existence of a designer rather than simply assuming one is nonsense to them— by definition, things only happen because people make them happen, so if the universe started existing then there must have been a person who caused it to start existing.
It’s also why they think the “first cause” argument is worth anything. Since they posit that a “cause” (of anything) must, necessarily, be a person, the argument is actually valid.
I may be wrong, but this illustrates one the major problems with the thought process Egnore, and creationists in general, deploy. Nature is not governed by “astonishingly complex and elegant physical laws”, nor are the “laws” actually “written in the language of abstract mathematics.” I think this is putting the cart before the horse, so to speak, as the reverse it more the case. Nature simply does what it does; we conceived those “astonishingly complex and elegant physical laws” in order to understand and explain how nature works, and fashioned the “language of abstract mathematics” so we could decipher what we see and predict what we should see in the future.
–correction by twasbrillig
Egnor, excuse me, mathematics is a language, invented by people, to describe more precisely the behavior of physical objects, in far more detail than verbal language provides.
To say mathematics is what the universe is written in and we occasionally discover bits and pieces of it is confusing cause and effect.
Mathematics is the language we developed to write the books describing the universe. It is not the language of rules defining the universe, which we discover.
We created mathematics to describe the universe. not the other way round.
Mathematics does not tell the universe how to behave. It is what we use to tell us how the universe behaves.
Since you got the very concept of mathematics wrong, bye bye go be Egnorant all by yourself.
@5 beat me to it, I was writing @6, while @5 was not yet there. I guess “great minds …” hooray!
“an even more universal truth, that all scientists have possessed nostrils”
I was going to suggest that you’d forgotten about Tyco Brahe. But it seems that he may have only lost part of his nose, and retained his nostrils.
slithey tove @ 7- The egotistical and self-absorbed basis creationists work from is usually pretty obvious, but that statement from Egnore is almost like a giant, flashing neon sign of someone with their head up their own ass and getting high off the fumes.
Still, it’s Friday, so I’ll take “great minds”!
Jeremy Shaffer @ 5,
The issue you identify is inherent in the metaphor of “laws”. Laws (in the legal sense) don’t exist in a natural state to be discovered–they are written by humans. So it can be hard to resist the conclusion that, by extension, if there are natural laws, there must be a natural Solon writing them. Even if intellectually we understand that that’s not the case, at some level we are drawn in that direction.
We would probably be better off talking about something like patterns or regularities in nature that, as you and slithey tove point out, are described by our mathematics.
Newton’s laws of motion were a refutation of the idea that there are angels pushing things around. The first one pretty much says that a rock at rest will stay at rest, and a rock in motion will just keep going until it hits something. Where is the god in that? Where is the math, for that matter? Where is the sophisticated elegance?
There is a simple elegance in how few laws there are, and how basic they are, and how much derives from their interactions. There is the wonder of the world.
You cannot fix stupid, or intellectual laziness.
-Another factoid the demographic of Michael Egnor is likely to ignore:
“Immigrants have little impact on native-born workers: study” http://phys.org/news/2016-09-immigrants-impact-native-born-workers.html
Predicted response. “That cannot be true because it contradicts what we know to be true”
Speaking of eejits — in this case, liars & bullshite — Ig Nobel prizes: trousers for rats and the truthfulness of liars:
There is also:
There is a Random Deepak Chopra Quote Generator — but I haven’t found an equivalent spout of nonsense for Dr Egnorance. The fruitcake does have an entry in the Encyclopeida of American Loons, and Orac has compared Egnor and Chopra.
This type of claim always baffles me. If the universe is “shot through with intelligibility” then that seems to imply not that it’s hard to understand, but that it’s very, very easy to understand. You wouldn’t need math, you wouldn’t need physics — at least, nothing more than the basics. Such a universe would be simple. A child would be able to figure out everything.
Earth, air, fire, and water. The sky is a firmament. The stars are shiny rocks. Everything was made by a Daddy long ago, before I was born, and He had to rest when he was done making it, He got so tired. The earth is at the center, so we can be watched better, and the sun is for making us warm. Laws are what things obey. Every question has an easy answer.
A universe shot through with intelligibility might indeed require an intelligent authority to explain a universe which is so surprisingly intelligible.
I mentioned this before, and I’ll say it again; there’s nothing obvious about Christian dogma. The bible is full of outlandish, bizzare fables and moral precepts that would be considered ridiculous in modern society if not for our culture passing belief in them down. It takes an extensive process of indoctrination and rationalization for anyone to see the stories of the bible as believable. This applies whether you were raised in a family that believed it or if you converted later. The only reason that it seems reasonable to believe anything the bible has to say is because we live in a culture that constantly pounds Christian messages into people’s heads and makes it seem normal to believe in miracles, immortal souls, and an afterlife.
exactly!
it is the ideas of a child, compounded with a more proficient and sophisticated use of language and supported by unquestioning tradition. At the very root it is a childish understanding of reality shoot through with imaginary magical beings and actions.
existence is astonishing as is how tenaciously we humans hold on to childish dreams and stories even when faced with irrefutable evidence that they are in fact just that artifice. They are creations of the childish mind that do have a certain emotional appeal though little reality to them.
the defense by the creationist only display their childishness, dangerous though they are but childish none the less.
uncle frogy
@13 blf – Say, that random ‘Deep Chops’ quote generator is better at it than he is.
@17 anchor;
I’ll say! Mine was “The web of life imparts reality to the door of observations”.
Like, wow, man. Spoken like the Master hisself.
“Knowledge meditates on new bliss”
#18-19– I had gotten “Infinity imparts reality to mortal destiny” and “A formless void unfolds into a jumble of brains” – and, by golly, I was convinced that Deepak was completely outclassed.
It must be disconcerting that something not-conscious so out-performs the allegedly conscious Real Thing.
Egnor’s biggest problem is at the God of Abraham, the God his jeebus believed in, is so wrong about how the universe was created that even if a god was necessary for creation it wasn’t YHWH who did it. YHWH, as gods go, is a fucking joke, and not even a good joke at that.
Because Christianity is obviously true.
See, that’s how it’s done.
“Because evolution is obviously true.”
“Because islam is obviously true.”
“Because Christianity is obviously true.”
Fine, but WHICH Christianity? Roman Catholic? Greek Orthodox? The Unitarian Universalist Association? Jehovah’s Witness? Assemblies of God? The Society of Friends? Southern Baptist? Christian Science? The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints? The Western Branch of American Reform Presbylutheranism?
Is Jesus fully God from eternity, was Jesus created by the Father, was Jesus a human adopted and thus deified by the Father, or was Jesus just a prophet? Does salvation come by faith alone, or are there necessary rituals? Or has humanity already been saved whether we believe or not? Is there any need for salvation in the first place? Is a historic continuity back to the apostles themselves a necessary element for the continuity of truth, or can anyone assume the mantle of bishop or apostle on the claim that God says so? Is the Bible the final word of God, or is revelation ongoing?
I could go on and on, but I’ll come to my point: There is no “Christianity,” and hasn’t been since Peter and Paul first argued. There are thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of different christianities, each with distinctive beliefs. If they cannot decide what is the One True Faith, how is anyone else supposed to decide?
Gregory in Seattle:
Heh.
Since you concede that each is a form of Christianity, and you’ve just granted arguendo that Christianity is true (“Fine, but […]”), it follows each must be true, else they wouldn’t be form of Christianity.
So, your point is that Christianity can’t be true because “There is no “Christianity,””.
(not exactly compelling)
Heh, Egnor’s “logic” reminds me of a time when I was a grad student, grading midterms for an undergraduate geology class. To the question “Why does Earth have an ozone layer?” a student answered “To protect us from harmful UV rays from the sun, and high-energy radiation from deep space.”
It’s not a direct analogy to which we can compare Egnor’s ignorance, but it is an example of teleological thinking, the idea that something has to be “for” something, and Egnor is SO guilty of this ALL the time. All creationists are making this error, because their Bible tells them that everything has a place and a purpose and the ultimate purpose of everything is that humans have to acknowledge the supreme whatever of their Godhead and also that humans somehow managed to kill their Godhead’s kid, who is the same as the Godhead, a predetermined event from the beginning of time, because humans have to have an innocent sacrifice for all of their sin (since a crazy great-times-infinity aunt of ours ate an apple) so that they aren’t themselves punished for it with an eternity of suffering after death. Which leads me to think in a seriously off-topic way, were the Romans, who were just playing their part in the cosmic play, also redeemed by the death of the guy they’d just killed? Or is literally killing a god an unforgivable sin, as it were?
How can ANYONE think that the Christian origin story is the best explanation for everything we now know to be true about the universe?
re 24:
when he argued:
I think he is using the word “Christianity” as a monolithic block. That Christianity is a general category of too many subsects that even keeping them classified as Christianity is troubling. Ask any denomination if a different denomination is ‘Christian’ and the answer will inevitably be “not really”.
FWIW
Troubling isn’t the same as nonexistent. The fact that Gregory in Seattle did offer many (extant) examples in the general category of Christianity flatly contradicts the claim that there is no such thing, and it’s questionable how “troublesome” it may be given how easy it apparently was to do that.
Anyway, if the original assertion is meant to be that some things about the whole category are “obviously true,” not necessarily those claims which are specific to a particular sect, then we’re back where we started.
It’s an assertion, and it’s false. Enough said, or at least a more substantive reply better not be obviously false.
I don’t know how to speak to a denomination, but in fact individual Christians don’t “inevitably” claim denominations other than their own (if they even have an identifiable one) are “not really Christian,” whatever that might mean. I’d be surprised if they did anything inevitably.
Not much.
@27
it is easy to come up with a vast list of “christian ” sects because they themselves make the claim that they are christians and often real true christians all others are false.. The point was I think that when taken as a whole they so contradict each other so much that about the only thing they have in common is the use of the words jesus christ some where in their liturgy on a regular basis there is no set of descriptions that otherwise describe who and what they are. There is a phenomena known collectively as christians that is some what distinct from other such phenomena is demonstrable but to take too much importance out of esoteric differences between all such faith phenomena seems pointless if not impossible and rather tiring.
When you look at how they tend to behave when in power and what out comes generally follow they are not very different from any other totalitarian authoritarian ideology you might name.
uncle frogy
The point I was making — apparently badly — is that there is no one, single Christianity. There are many, MANY different variations, quite a lot of which are mutually exclusive. They cannot all be true at the same time.
So which one is the Christianity that Egnor insists is obviously true? And why that one in particular out of the vast, widely diverse group that all describe themselves as Christian?
That’s the thing with rhetorical questions, Gregory — they have to work even when one addresses them on their own merits to be puissant.
And it’s common for people to make propositions in regard to Christianity, as you just have.
Presumably, whichever it is to which he personally subscribes, because otherwise he would not find it obviously true.
I don’t see the “obviously true” stuff at his site now. Did he really say that? Maybe even he realized that was crap.
n he continues on to babble about the religious beliefs of scientists, claiming that many of them have believed in godsSo was it the Hindus, Muslims or Seventh-Day Adventists who believed in the correct god?
” . . . my theory that the universe began with a note on a violin” – ah, reminds me of the Tolkien’s gorgeous creation scene, metaphorically making music out of the Universe. It’s way better than the Bible’s.
Of course, everyone knows the “Silmarillion” isn’t a true story. It’s too bad, one of those rings would be pretty handy.