One of the curious features of modern religious apologists is how they try to use the latest scientific research to argue for the existence of god. Of course, science makes the traditional idea of a personal god who intervenes in the world utterly preposterous and few religious intellectuals outside the evangelical community argue in favor of it. So sophisticated religious apologists have resorted to arguing for the existence of a highly abstract form of god that has no practical consequence whatsoever but for some reason seems to meet some sort of emotional or psychological need. But in order to make their case, they have to cherry-pick scientific research and hope that their audience is not aware of the full science.

The latest attempt is in the area of cosmology. The following very nice video (via Skepchick) exposes how some Christian and Muslim apologists try to use the latest cosmology research in selective ways to make their case.

If the latest developments in cosmology comprise the best arguments for god, then you might expect that cosmologists might be the most religious of all scientists. And yet, as the above video shows, even the scientists quoted by the religious apologists are nonbelievers, suggesting that the cosmological arguments for god are a distortion of the actual science. This paper by cosmologist Sean Carroll titled Why (Almost All) Cosmologists are Atheists explains why.

He first addresses what it would take to require a god hypothesis to be taken seriously.

There are several possible ways in which this could happen. Most direct would be straightforward observation of miraculous events that would be most easily explained by invoking God. Since such events seem hard to come by, we need to be more subtle. Yet there are still at least two ways in which a theist worldview could be judged more compelling than a materialist one. First, we could find that our best materialist conception was somehow incomplete — there was some aspect of the universe which could not possibly be explained within a completely formal framework. This would be like a ”God of the gaps,” if there were good reason to believe that a certain kind of ”gap” were truly inexplicable by formal rules alone. Second, we could find that invoking the workings of God actually worked to simplify the description, by providing explanations for some of the observed patterns. An example would be an argument from design, if we could establish convincingly that certain aspects of the universe were designed rather than assembled by chance. Let’s examine each of these possibilities in turn.

He examines both these possibilities and weighs their merits using the normal ways that scientists use to compare theories and finds the god hypothesis wanting, arriving at the following conclusion:

Given what we know about the universe, there seems to be no reason to invoke God as part of this description. In the various ways in which God might have been judged to be a helpful hypothesis — such as explaining the initial conditions for the universe, or the particular set of fields and couplings discovered by particle physics — there are alternative explanations which do not require anything outside a completely formal, materialist description. I am therefore led to conclude that adding God would just make things more complicated, and this hypothesis should be rejected by scientific standards. It’s a venerable conclusion, brought up to date by modern cosmology; but the dialogue between people who feel differently will undoubtedly last a good while longer.

I for one am glad that people religious apologists are advancing these sophisticated cosmological arguments for god. While they may think they are rescuing religion from science, they are the ones, not atheist scientists, who are going to ultimately destroy religion because in order to salvage the idea of god, they have made it so abstract and remote that it will not appeal in the least to most religious people who want a father figure who listens to them when they talk and who will answer their requests at least some of the time. The idea of god persists because children are indoctrinated at an early age with the idea of a Santa Claus-like figure who will both look after them and punish them if they are bad. That basic childlike idea is what gives god its appeal. The cosmological god is unlikely to have much appeal to a child.

If the cosmological view of god gains ground, it will become the sole preserve of a few intellectuals who will comfort themselves with the idea that a disengaged god exists somewhere out of reach of science. But such a god is a far cry from the warm and fuzzy invisible friend that can command mass appeal.

It looks like he hates his most devoted followers too.

God seems to go out of his way to do the opposite of whatever Rick Perry prays for.

British television had a series in 1997 called Secret Lives and one program was about L. Ron Hubbard, founder of the Church of Scientology. It is quite fascinating.

Some supporters of religion argue that the very fact that their religion has lasted so long and spread so widely must mean that there must be something to it. But if people now, with all the information at their disposal, can be suckered by an obvious conman like Hubbard into following his religion, it should not be surprising that people a couple of thousand years ago fell for it too. Joseph Smith and the Mormons is another good example of how modernity does not inoculate the gullible against hucksters.

(Thanks to Norm)

Jerry Coyne discusses some recent attempts to address a troubling problem for Christians: How do you treat those believers in other faiths who seem to be perfectly nice people or who existed in times and places that your brand of religion did not reach?

Consigning them to the fires of everlasting hell seems a tad unfair, no? But saying that all good people go to heaven removes the sense of being special in god’s eyes which is, after all, the main recruiting tool that religions have.

Coyne makes the point that all ‘solutions’ to this problem that tend to universalize salvation will appeal only to theologians and academics. Most religious believers will prefer to think that they are fortunate enough to believe in the one true god, and the rest will simply have to hope that their eventual fate is not too horrendous.

From reader John, I received a link to this interesting video combating the notion that atheists are ‘rejecting’ god.

NPR had a couple of interesting religious stories recently.

One of them was about how more and more evangelicals are deciding that the Genesis story of Adam and Eve simply cannot be true in the light of modern science and how this is tearing the community apart.

Dennis Venema, a biologist at Trinity Western University and a senior fellow at the BioLogos Foundation, and John Schneider who taught theology at Calvin College are just two evangelical Christians who say that “it’s time to face facts: There was no historical Adam and Eve, no serpent, no apple, no fall that toppled man from a state of innocence.”

This is viewed as heresy by the traditionalists who insist that those beliefs form an indispensable part of being Christian.
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This blog has had as one focus showing why belief in god makes no sense. In the interests of fairness, here is a video clip of twenty intellectuals (academics and theologians) explaining their beliefs. The contortions some of them get into are quite hilarious.

Via Jerry Coyne, who provides some commentary on each person’s arguments.

The short book Why we Believe in God(s) by J. Anderson Thomson with Clare Aukofer (2011) marshals the evidence that god is a creation of human beings.

In the book, the authors discuss the work of Robert Sapolsky, a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University, who has “extracted information showing that religious ideas actually can be shaped by geography and ecology. Historically, rain forest dwellers, with nature’s abundance all around, tended to be polytheists, believing in spirits based on nature and less likely to assume that gods intervene in their lives. Desert dwellers, living in a monotonous, harsh, and unforgiving environment, were more likely to believe in a single, sometimes harsh, misogynistic, interventionist god.” (p. 137)

Just our luck that the unpleasant desert version of god has become dominant.

This work supports the ideas of primatologist Frans de Waal that I discussed earlier.

It looks like Rick Perry was able to rustle up a decent crowd of 20,000-30,000 people for his prayerfest in Texas, though still well below the 71,000 stadium capacity. One other governor, Sam Brownback of Kansas, also showed up. The event “was Perry’s idea and was financed by the American Family Association, a Tupelo, Miss., group that opposes abortion and gay rights and believes that the First Amendment freedom of religion applies only to Christians.”

No doubt Perry will look for signs from god whether he should run for president. The fact that the crowd beat early expectations could be taken as a sign that god wants him to run. Or the less-than-capacity crowd might be a sign that god wants him to merely stick to praying. Religious people are good at finding signs from god that tell them to do what they had decided to do anyway.