Readers’ beefs of the day

October 30, 2014 • 11:55 am
Many people love Pope Francis and cannot stand him being criticized, as I did in my New Republic piece. (Note that I didn’t criticize the man, but his retrograde and unscientific views about evolution.) In fact, I’m starting to think that Francis-lovers are as easily offended as Muslims.  Because I’m perceived as criticizing His Holiness, I’ve received several emails like the following in the last day. They amuse me greatly, which is good because writing against religion requires a thick skin, and my epidermis is increasing in callosity.
*******
Profesor Coyne:
I strongly suggest that you brush up on some theological terms and points before you mouth off your objections.  A more insightful and nuanced thinker than yourself would realize that “creation” does not have to mean that a bearded old man in the sky who is just like us, only bigger and better, waves a wand and calls the universe into existence.  Of course Pope Francis does not share such an infantile conception of what is termed God, for lack of a better word.  Francis’s conception of God is far more sophisticated and intellectual.  He accepts God (whatever that may be) as the ground of being, i.e. what makes being as we know it possible but is totally beyond space and time.  This, of course, is a very difficult, if not impossible, concept for the frail human intellect.  Intelligent people know better than than to attempt any description of God because such an attempt is futile.  Francis was not addressing intellectuals with his comments but rather the majority of humans who possess a much less intellectual belief in a God — people intellectually unequipped to deal in abstract thought.  These are people who have only the old testament, anthropomorphic concept of God.  It would appear that you also fall within this category otherwise you wouldn’t be wasting so much time attempting to convince people that such a God does not exist.
Lou [Last name redacted]
Williamsburg, VA

I’m so glad that Lou has a pipeline to Francis’s thinking about God, but sad that he thinks that so many Catholics (or believers in any Abrahamic religion) are dead wrong. Of course we know that God is a ground of being!

The problem, however, is that Francis has no better conception of God than does the man in the street. He didn’t become Pope because his understanding of God was more accurate than those of his fellow cardinals; he became Pope because he won an election based on popularity, the image of the church, and his perceived ability to further Catholicism.

Or, if Lou thinks that Francis is right because there’s no evidence of an anthropomorphic god, then surely he thinks that the atheist, who, based on evidence, goes further than Francis, is even righter!

But that’s largely irrelevant, for where did Lou ever get the idea that Francis sees God as a Ground of Being? The evidence is in fact to the contrary. We know, for instance, that Francis believes in demons and is a fan of exorcism, and that he also believes in real guardian angels.  Francis also believes in heaven, or at least salvation through Jesus.

I love these Sophisticated Theologians™ who are so sure they know not only what God is like, but what people like Francis really believe. I wonder if Lou has ever met the Pope.

*******
Shortly after I heard from Lou, I got an email from reader “Troy”:
Does a professor of ecology feel that he must overstep his bounds into other realms?  Why must people like you think that anybody will take you seriously when you talk about anything other than your area of specialty, which is evolution?  Please tell me professor if what the probabilities are that humans were formed from stardust without the hand of an intelligent designer?  Are they less than or greater than the possibility that there’s a fully loaded Corvette look-alike floating in outer space, but formed by the stars instead of human hands?  If that sounds absurd, then how about an adjustable wrench, or even an allen wrench.  Do you think that out of the great explosion that just happened to create our solar system and our planet with polar magnetism  and an atmosphere that shields us from harmful radiation.  This atmosphere also gives us breath.  And lungs, also formed from stardust that breathe in air to feed an immensly complex grouping of systems that go far beyond anything humans could hope to design on their own for perhaps, ever.  Now maybe at some point we’ll be able to borrow the building blocks given to us to create something similar but don’t pretend that we could do such a thing on our own with no model to work from.  And we discuss these things armed with brains that have more connections than perhaps there are particles in the universe.  Yet you call it absurd to think that there’s some sort of intelligent being that created you and myself.  Well buddy, you’re just another arrogant atheist who knows far less than he thinks.  Stop deceiving yourself, and stop pretending like you’re smarter than you are, sitting in your little ivory tower, trying to convince people that there is no God.  Obviously at some point you were wounded in your soul and now you are lashing out at the God that created you.  Why don’t you stop being a fool and stick to what you know.  Understand that I’m not anti-science. I’m a skeptic by nature, but I recognize my own biases.  And at least try to understand those things on which my faith rests.  Btw – you have your own brand of faith that require giant leaps of logic. And btw – you should know that Francis Collins disagrees with you. Go ahead my friend – tell me how much smarter you are than him.

I wonder if Troy is a scientist. For if he isn’t, what gives him the right to “overstep his bounds” and suggest that intelligent design rather than evolution is a better explanation for life’s diversity?  Or is he a theologian? If not, what gives him the right to overstep his boundaries and say that the arguments for God are convincing? Or is he a psychologist? If not, how does he know that I have a “wound in my soul”? (I’ve examined my psyche quite carefully, and while it has the usual nicks, scars, and zits, I haven’t seen any wounds.)

Yes, of course Francis Collins disagrees with me.  But he also disagrees with Francis Crick, James Watson, Stephen Hawking, and Stephen Weinberg. Three of those four are Nobel Laureates, while Collins is not. And all four are atheists. Go on, Troy, tell me how much smarter Collins is than those guys!

I’ve told both emailers that I’ll be posting their emails on my website, so feel free to reply to them. When I told this to Lou, he said, “What, so all six readers can see them?”  I didn’t respond that I get nearly 30,000 views per day; it’ll be your responsibility to show him that N > 6!

201 thoughts on “Readers’ beefs of the day”

  1. Ha, good replies sir.

    Psychological zits, I love it!

    I have a psychological zit; and I’m going home to pop it with an excellent bottle of Rhone wine! 🙂

    2. I had the same thought. The ol’ wall-o-text seems to be near universal among the most ardent apologists (for just about anything).

      But perhaps that’s just my confirmation bias speaking.

  3. Oh, so THAT’S my problem with God. My version isn’t sophisticated and intellectual enough. If I were a more nuanced and insightful, I’d be able rationalize a knowledge gap into ‘God’ (for want of a better word) (whatever that may be).

    If you make your definition for something so obscure that nobody can disagree with it, is it still worth anything?

  4. Do Gounds of Being answer prayers? They want a ground of being God so they don’t sound “infantile”, but then they turn around and want a personal, loving God to be their BFF. And they don’t see that they’re trying to have it both ways!

    1. I’m less concerned about that conflict as I am by the conflict between the notion of God being “Ground of Being” and the whole Nicene theology of the Trinity with Jesus being divine.

      I grant that the Logos-philosophy of Philo was meant to explain how a Ground of Being God could also interact with creation, but once this gets extended to the tri-personal God and a divine Jesus than I really don’t know where we are.

      1. A little OT but when you mentioned the Nicene Creed, I had to mention that I watched an older Simpsons Halloween special last night & it was about the Grand Pumpkin (in reference to the Great Pumpkin of Charlie Brown fame). In it Milhouse recites the Great Pumpkin version of the Nicene Creed. I looked it up on Wikipedia & sure enough it was based on that! You got to love those delightful imps who write for The Simpsons!

        I believe in the Grand Pumpkin, almighty gourd, who was crustified over Pontius pie plate and ascended into oven. He will come again to judge the filling and the bread.

      2. No, no, no. You’ve got it all wrong. You put Ground Pistachios on the Philo, not Groung Being.

          2. Oops!. I don’t know what excuse to use. Which sounds better, my eyes are going or my mind is going?

          4. Your fingers are developing their own independent intelligences, but not having eyes of their own, haven’t yet learned how to spell.

    2. Do Gounds of Being answer prayers?

      I hear that they come out of their hole in the occasional springtime. If they see their shadow, it’s another 4,000 years of physics. If not, we get magic.

      1. They can only see their shadows through the medium of physics. So, it’s never going to be time for the rule of magic to start.

  5. Which is it, Catholics? Ground-of-Being or angels-and-demons? You don’t really get to have it both ways.

    1. Lou seems to think there are two kinds of Catholics: there’s “the majority of humans who possess a much less intellectual belief in a God- people intellectually unequipped to deal in abstract thought” and then there’s the “Intelligent people [who] know better than to attempt any description of God because such an attempt is futile”. So it would seem you can have it both ways if you see your church as consisting of two distinct groups: an elite cadre of sophisticated intellectuals plus a mob of ‘thicko’ simpletons for them to patronise.

      1. an elite cadre of sophisticated intellectuals plus a mob of ‘thicko’ simpletons for them to patronise.

        Shirley you mean “parasitise”?

    2. 3 of one, quarter dozen of the other…
      The evidence is all in the telling of the story.

      Everyone should know by now that it’s Ground Meatball and Pasta!

  6. You know what’s funny? In an atheist community I would only expect to share with the rest my lack of belief in god, but in a religious community everyone expects the rest to share most (if not all) their beliefs (at least in my experience). This may explain in part the kind of defenses the pius brandish, as you can see, everyone thinks they know what the others think or what they meant when they say something. Maybe they are too used to apologetics that it just sprungs naturally.

    1. Yes, it is very true that everyone thinks they know the minds of others, while they proceed to show that they most certainly don’t.
      I also am struck about how some people will defend bat-shit insane ideas while sounding so dang reasonable about it. Take Troys’ essay, for example. Cross out the stuff about things poofing into existence and the stuff about god. Replace those subjects with words about laws of physics and sound evolutionary principles. Now he pretty much sounds like one of us. Here is a person who thinks the universe was made for us, and that the cause of things stems from magic. And he strings that together in the same language of reasonableness and persuasion that we would use to describe why planets orbit the sun. Amazing.

      1. I disagree with you about Todd. When I read this non-sequitur sentence, “Do you think that out of the great explosion that just happened to create our solar system and our planet with polar magnetism and an atmosphere that shields us from harmful radiation.” I visualized Todd as a red-faced, spluttering individual, furiously typing while spitting all over his keyboard; not a reasonable being at all.

  7. Lou and Troy act like little children who were hurt by something said and then lash out with ridiculous and funny presumptions and conclusions.

  8. You should see the look of not surprised on my face – mr. god (pick one) believers can not only wax on poetically about the existence of an improbable magical being for which there is no demonstrable evidence and then also wax on describing specific attributes of this improbable being for which there is no demonstrable evidence.

      1. Incomprehensible _and_ beyond space and time. Hard to get more unknowable than that!

        Yet, believers know so much and what they know of their god – coincidentally – exactly matches their own opinions. Amazing!

    2. Evidence?!? They don’t need no stinking evidence! They is philosophizing’ and theologizin’!

  9. He (Francis) accepts God (whatever that may be) as the ground of being, i.e. what makes being as we know it possible but is totally beyond space and time…

    …who impregnated a Jewish virgin.

    1. In the Gospel of Luke there is a verse that states that an Angel of the Lord visited Mary and said “The Holy Spirit will come on you.”

      Well, that must have been quite a load.

    2. …so as to bring among us his only begotten Son, who was destined to come to a nasty end to atone for “sins” he didn’t commit, or…something.

    3. …only to rise on the third day along with a horde of other zombies all of whom had wild times in Jerusalem, but whose actions somehow went entirely unremarked upon by the people living there at the time.

  10. Atheists are arrogant? We’re not the ones saying the whole universe was created by a super being just for our benefit.

  11. “Intelligent people know better than than to attempt any description of God because such an attempt is futile.” says the guy that just explained that one description of God is infantile, while another one, just as easily picked out of the air, is sophisticated and intellectual.

    1. He probably should have worded it “Intelligent religious people know better than than to attempt any description of God because such an attempt is inconvenient.”

    2. To paraphrase Wittgenstein (loosely) — “If you don’t understand what you’re talking about then stop talking about it.”

    3. I noticed that, too. “God is like this ; but we can’t say what god is like.” Good god! Oh, I can’t say that, because we can’t say if god is good. Or if (as another commenter noted) he answers prayers, creates the universe, or blows his nose when he has a cold. Performs miracles? Nope. Raises the dead? Nope again.

      It is a well known issue in philosophy that if you make your god unknowable, you will make it impervious to evidence, but it can’t DO anything you need it to do; you can’t even talk about it. If you make your god knowable, you are now open to the question, how do we know that? And of course, there is no answer.

      “But maybe,” they say, “we can get it just right–porridge not too hot, not too cold, just right.” But Karen Armstrong or Toby or whoever calls themselves intellectual and sophisticated have never done this. (but it is fun to see them try! Maybe god made sophisticated theologians just to entertain us…wait, um. no.)

  12. “Intelligent people know better than to attempt a description of God…”

    So any description of God, including the Catholic Church’s list of her attributes, must be by unintelligent people? And we should this description because…

    2. I just made a comment to a previous post along this line. But you point out, as I did not, that there is no way the Catholic church can say that it doesn’t describe god! Jesus! That’s a great point! If ANYONE can’t have a “sophisticated god,” it’s the catholic church!

  13. Hi, Lou. I’m one of Jerry’s 30,000 daily readers (or people who look in to take a peek). I hope you’re reading these replies.

    If, as you say, there’s an “infantile conception” of God, how do you account for the billions of people who believe in this conception? Think of all the Catholics in the world who “pray” (religious lingo for “talking to yourself”). Who or what are they praying to? “God listens to your prayers,” it is said. Yeah? Does this Chardinesque “Ground of Being” have a listening apparatus of some kind that would not be mistaken for ears and a mind that can comprehend these prayers? Gee, it seems to me there’s a lot of anthropomorphising going on with you believers.

    As for you, Troy, I would suggest that YOU are deceiving yourself, by positing and assuming supernatural essences in the world based on zero evidence. Religious “thought” (to be generous) is generally gaseous blather that, in the end, always amounts to what you believe, not what you know. Yes, from the Big Bang to the dawn of life to how life replicates, it’s all fascinating and jaw-dropping and much remains a mystery (nobody knows what caused the Big Bang), but such mysteries don’t allow for anyone to shoehorn in baseless beliefs as explanations. Yes, it is absurd to believe there’s an Intelligent Being behind it all because there’s no evidence for such a Being.

    As for arrogance, sorry, but there’s no greater arrogance than the kind routinely displayed by religious believers. To wit (as it were): the universe exists for us. That, in a nutshell, is the underlying message of all religious beliefs, not just Catholicism. Earth exists in a ho-hum neighborhood of the Milky Way, which is one of at least a hundred billion galaxies. Tell me, does the story of Jesus apply as well to those who live on Urth, say, on the other side of our galaxy? In other words, if we are NOT alone in the universe, how does the inane story of Jesus apply to these other beings?

    I look forward to seeing your responses here in this thread.

    1. But the universe exists in order for us to learn humility! How could this be arrogant?

      I call it the Playpen Theory of Reality.

    2. What?? The evidence is all written down clearly for you to see. The Catholics collected it and sorted it and categorized it and codified it so we can all benefit.

      … but then, some guy in Oklahoma wrote some different stuff down, which, of course, is just as believable, and… and now I’m SOOO confused. Dang.

  14. “And at least try to understand those things on which my faith rests.”

    Uh, did he mention any?

  15. Just the other day I was working on a lecture on my laptop while waiting for one of my kids in a public lobby, when and a mother and daughter sat next to me. The daughter was looking through a rather ordinary fashion mag, but the mother continually tut-tutted the pictures, saying that ‘God does not want you to dress like that’. Later, the conversation was about a sick relative and how ‘God will see to it’, and ‘we will pray when we get home, but it is God’s plan’.
    Such differences have we in understanding how each present is continually pushed forward by the immediate past, through ongoing physical laws that we are pretty good at understanding. All it takes to shed millennia of ignorance is to crack open a book!
    Ironically, I was working on a lecture about the origin of life, showing how features of volcanic vent chemistry seem imprinted on metabolism of all life today. I was sort of hoping that the mother would notice this. I would of course be seen as not one of the lucky ones, but as one of the damned.
    Different worlds!

  16. Francis’s conception of God is far more sophisticated and intellectual

    Oh I bet that it is sophisticated. It is so sophisticated that nobody (including himself) understands what he is saying.

    He accepts God […] as the ground of being, […] but is totally beyond space and time

    Does not compute. What the hell is “the ground of being”? I’ve heard the phrase before but I have no idea what that is supposed to mean. And what does it mean to be beyond space and time? What are the properties of such beings? How does he know them? How does he know that this is even a coherent concept?

    He even admits himself that this view is so sophisticated that nobody can really understand it but the guy in the funny hat must be right. That sounds like a winning strategy…

    1. The Ground of Being is when you grind down the Abrahmic god to small bits of unrecognizable dust in the vain hope of rendering it unbreakable .

    2. “God is ‘necessary being’ not “a necessary being,” not because I forgot the “a” but because God is not “a being.” He is above the level of any particular being that participates in being, but exists on the level of the Being, the thing itself, apart from any particular beings. There is Being, and there is “the beings.” This is a crucial distinction, but it leaves one wondering what it means and how it could be.”

      I hope that clarifies it for you.

      It is really an abuse of philosophy that attempts to argue gawd as necessary by bald assertion hidden under a fuzzy cloud of bafflegab. To apologists, philosophy is an obfuscatory tool.

      1. I’m not well versed in ancient philosophy, but this sounds like Platonic forms. I can’t help wondering what other Universals may be attributed to God (which, of course I would lack enough suffistikashun to understand.

  17. Francis’s conception of God is far more sophisticated and intellectual. He accepts God (whatever that may be) as the ground of being, i.e. what makes being as we know it possible but is totally beyond space and time. This, of course, is a very difficult, if not impossible, concept for the frail human intellect. Intelligent people know better than than to attempt any description of God because such an attempt is futile.

    Somebody get my Irony Pills, I feel an ironygrain coming on.

    2. Notice the use of the word conception. Not his accurate view, not his observation, but his conception. My conception of God is that which is outside of space and time and grounds all nonbeing. He is what makes nonbeing possible. Since there are beings, obviously God is not the ground since a thing cannot both be and not be. Voila! My concept just made God unnecessary. It’s amazing what you can do with silly word games.

  18. Pope Francis is just old wine in a liberal bottle .His latest comments on evolution and big bang are more examples of his vacuousness . However the Vatican’s PR machinery is in full flow and the media just lap it up .

    I wish Pew or someone would do a poll to get the actual number of people who believe in a “Ground Glass” God . I’d say the number would not cross a few thousand in the whole world .

    Troy has managed to hit Bingo – ‘Your soul is wounded’ , ‘you are not an expert in religion’ , ‘random chance doesn’t make life’ , ‘Arrogant Atheist’ and finally ‘I’m not anti-science’ . LOL

  19. Ground of being? More like being ground, ground up so fine that this hoity toity concept of god becomes baby food. There, babies, I just gently tapped you on your back, hope the burp was satisfactory and lessened your discomfort. Next? Solid food! 🙂

  20. Do you think that out of the great explosion that just happened to create our solar system and our planet

    Troy,
    Please study some science. There was no great explosion taht created our solar system or planet. Also please consider the possibility that your understanding of evolution is on par with your understanding of how the solar system formed.

    1. Well, you could probably say that an explosion created our solar system if you take into account the fact that our sun formed from the remnants of a previous supernova. However, that doesn’t mean that the Troy has any real clue about the rest of what he bloviates about.

  21. I started chuckling when I read Lou’s email, thinking it was a brilliant send-up of the usual arguments for Sophisticated Theology(TM). Then it occurred to me that everyone was taking it seriously. Poe’s Law in action?

    1. Some subsequent emails I’ve had from Lou suggest to me that he’s deadly serious. His responses have been unpleasant. Now I suppose he could just be joking, but the person does exist, and I’ve just checked the New Republic comments on a hunch. Sure enough, Lou has posted there as “loucandell” a comment nearly identical to the email he sent me. That leads me to believe this is not a Poe, for why would he go over there and tout the Ground of Being? Who is he trying to fool?

      1. Oh noes, he tricked you into checking The New Republic comments! Maybe this was his dastardly plan all along! 😉

  22. Please tell me professor if what the probabilities are that humans were formed from stardust without the hand of an intelligent designer?

    Tell, me Troy, what the probabilities are that men were formed from dirt and women from a man’s rib. Oh, I know that’s not sophisticated enough.

    2. Well the probability is clearly 1, since we know it has happened; that is basic probability theory.

    3. What are the odds the last 52 weekly lottery drawings turned out as they did? 1 in a whole hell of a lot more than the number of atoms in the observable Universe. Obviously, these drawings couldn’t have occurred!

        1. Yes, I realized it. I too am being snarky with a rhetorical question to those IDers who can’t grasp that small odds are not equivalent to zero odds. Not to mention prior probablity versus posterior probability.

          It’s too bad snark/sarcasm tags for HTML never caught on…

          2. I once tried to use the tags but I think wordpress commented them out. Yes, they should become part of the HTML standard!

  23. Shorter Lou:
    God is beyond human understanding, yet I know that your understanding is wrong.

    Shorter Troy:
    I’ve examined the basis of my beliefs and they’re based on what I believe.

    3. The funny thing (perhaps “sad” works better) is that there are plenty of religious believers who would agree with your comment and wonder how it is supposed to reflect badly on them. Something like “no shit, this guy is stating the obvious.”

      1. loved the way the tights came in the those l’Eggs containers. I can’t resist Mel Brooks, even when he’s totally silly (maybe especially when).

        1. There is a great Comedians Driving in Cars and Getting Coffee where Jerry Seinfeld had dinner with Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner at Carl Reiner’s house. It was cool that those old guys are friends and eat dinner at Reiner’s house every night because Mel Brooks can still drive.

  24. “He accepts God (whatever that may be) as the ground of being, i.e. what makes being as we know it possible but is totally beyond space and time. This, of course, is a very difficult, if not impossible, concept for the frail human intellect.”

    I think this fits neatly into the theme of this panel from a while back.

    http://pictoraltheology.blogspot.com/2014/09/escape-and-evasion.html

    Whether god is a big sky daddy or a ground being has more to do with the context of thew argument than the nature of god.

    2. Ah, but they’ve made me feel better. I don’t exactly know why, but when Dr. Coyne posts these things I get a huge kick out of them.

  26. “Btw – you have your own brand of faith that require giant leaps of logic.”

    Giant leap of logic? Yeah – that’s your problem Prof, your arguments are just too damn logical.

  27. Wow, it’s like Lou had some sort of check list:

    * Jerry is not qualified to talk about religion because he’s a scientist
    * “insightful”, “nuanced”, “sophisticated”
    * God is a “ground of being”
    * the Little People
    * asserting things that the writer manifestly cannot know.

  28. Troy- arrogant atheist? Never met any, actually. I’ve met hundreds of arrogant religious folk though- many in my own family. Believing that the Creator of the Universe gives a shit about you during your infinitesimal amount of time on this planet is about the most arrogant presumption I can think of. It’s like a human loving and caring for (or damning if need be) a virus. Grow up, you’re not that special.

    Also stop with the argument from ignorance: “everything is so complex and I can’t understand it, so God did it.” It is a very tiresome and immature argument. Do you like cars, airplanes, computers, smart phones, grocery stores and modern medicine? What about your refrigerator, like that much? It’s a good thing people ask difficult questions that science can find answers to. It’s a good thing people who want to enrich the universe through understanding it don’t think like you, or we’d still be in the Dark Ages gleefully killing and torturing one another at God’s bidding.

    1. Well, I have met arrogant atheists, but most of the time they’re arrogant about other stuff.

      If someone’s being arrogant because of atheism then they’re a dick. Weeeeeirdly even those guys are weaksauce compared to the simply average believer.

    2. A religious person I knew, in the days after Sept 11, 2001 stated that she still hadn’t figured out what god was trying to say. She was certain that god was sending her some sign or omen by the event.

      After I picked my jaw off the floor, I said “You think god allowed thousands of people to die to send you personally a sign that he knew you would be unable to comprehend. What hubris.”

      Since then, I have completely failed to understand how atheists could be the arrogant ones. That is some mighty projection from Troy.

  29. If (big, big if) an intelligent designer is responsible for this Universe, why, oh, why, did they contract out the construction work to cowboy builders?

  30. Francis’s conception of God is far more sophisticated and intellectual. He accepts God (whatever that may be) as the ground of being, i.e. what makes being as we know it possible but is totally beyond space and time.

    Really, Lou? Could you point me to the speech where he revoked the Catholic Catechism, because I must have missed it. (Easily done – I don’t follow Vatican affairs that much, though I would have thought I’d have noticed this one.)

    Or perhaps you had forgotten, at the very heart of Catholic belief, the words “I believe in God the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth. I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord.” That’s pretty solidly anthropomorphic, isn’t it?

    And perhaps you would like to explain to us how precisely a ground of being forgives us our trespasses?

    1. Incidentally, by my count N=32 at present, which seems comfortably larger than 6. But I suppose in a theology where 3=1, 32 could be equal to 6.

  32. Troy,

    Imagine a glass vase in the shape of a star. Next, pour sand in the vase until it fills up. Now imagine two people coming the next day and observing the sand filled vase. They have two perspectives:

    Person 1: What are the chances the star-shaped sand just happened to find a matching star shaped vase to fill up!

    Person 2: The sand had no option to form any other shape, it is a product of the environment it fills.

    Our galaxy, our planet, people, all formed in the environment they found themselves in. The environment was not created with an existing entity’s needs in mind. Life is malleable, like the sand, and if the”fine-tuned” universe had been slightly different, then that doesn’t mean life wouldn’t have formed. It may just as well formed but in a different shape that would also seem “just so” perfect.

  33. “Intelligent people know better than than to attempt any description of God because such an attempt is futile.”

    Having established this point, let me now provide my description of God…

  34. 30,000 views a day! I’m crushed. I was of the firm belief that Ceiling Cat wrote only for me. That only I had the Great Purr.

    1. I was of the firm belief that Ceiling Cat wrote only for me.

      He does. There are 29999 lingerers though.

  35. Francis was not addressing intellectuals with his comments but rather the majority of humans who possess a much less intellectual belief in a God — people intellectually unequipped to deal in abstract thought. These are people who have only the old testament, anthropomorphic concept of God.

    I think people who reify abstractions are unequipped to deal in abstract thought. Atheists are the ones who consider God an abstraction — a concept or idea cobbled together from various sources. Theists take it literally.

    Calling God the “Ground of Being” simply imports a pure, idealized notion of Mind into ‘existence’ — and that’s still anthropomorphic. God resembles aspects of our own mental life: our values, our emotions, our thoughts, our goals. That isn’t so, so far above what we can comprehend. It’s intimately familiar. The handwaving of verbiage and appeals to mystery is supposed to distract from this central point.

    I’m getting tired of believers thinking that Ground of Being is so very different than the vulgar, common view of God. It’s less detailed, sure — but it’s pretty much the same thing. Yes, we get it. Reality starts out and/or is supported by and/or simply IS Pure Mentality. Sometimes this non-physical Mentality is more like consciousness and awareness, sometimes it’s more like love and beauty, sometimes it’s more like intention and creativity, sometimes it’s more like harmony and fairness, and sometimes believers flip around the whole damn panorama of mental qualities at once.

    This is not “abstract thinking.” It’s concrete thinking struggling with abstractions.

    1. +1

      It made me laugh to think that the idea of god as a purely mental abstraction will be ‘intimately familiar’ to people like the atheists I know who spend a lot of time inside their own heads, but will seem mysterious and incomprehensible to many believers.

    2. A good test of this is to throw them a secular version of the concept, like a physical singularity as Dawkins suggested. “Calling it God is at best confusing and at worst deeply misleading,” or something to that effect.

      Best part is watching them move on to human consciousness as a counterargument, deriding “materialism” or “naturalism” somewhere along the lines. Talk about revealing your true colours.

      1. Exactly. Remove any hint of anthropomorphic mind-like characteristics from the Ground of Being and only someone who is secretly hoping to pull a bait-n-switch later on is going to call it “God.”

        When New Agers wax on lyrically about “energy” they don’t mean any form of energy a physicist, engineer, or even an electrician would recognize. They infuse it with human qualities like life, love, or the compassionate desire to heal. The Ground of Being uses “being” in much the same way.

    3. I tend to see ‘ground of being’ arguments as nothing more than:

      “I will be a theist in church, but a deist at the debate”

  36. Surviving on the dissolving ice floe of belief requires desperate assertions from these “ground-up beings”.

    1. Okay. So, is it ground-up, or is it sky-down? I have so much trouble keeping track of all these new theories of God. I thought the physicists had figured out God was a particle. What next?

  37. I love when theists will claim that their god is unknowable to the frail, finite, flawed human mind (“Intelligent people know better than to attempt any description of God because such an attempt is futile”), and in the next breath go on to describe the qualities of that god (“God … the ground of being, i.e. what makes being as we know it possible but is totally beyond space and time.”).

  38. Stars, supernovas nucleosynthesis of elements, space chemistry, gravitational condensation of planetary systems, abiogenesis, RNA, DNA, cells, organisms, natural selection, phylogenies. Note that these are all points about which we have some scientific knowledge. Scientists connect the dots and arrive an explanatory sequence. The inferentially impaired like Troy postulate a never observed “creator” who intelligently designs and creates all sorts of stuff, apparently without a CNS, fingers, claws, or anything else that has ever been observed, and furthermore is decidedly not so intelligent a designer when it comes to organisms (check out WEIT, Chapt. 3). Then they call anyone “arrogant” who dares to point this out.

  39. Let’s see, if the evidence one has for one’s position is inversely related to the number of ad hominems one hurls in defense of that position, Williamsburg Lou is on very shaky ground. But maybe that’s not so bad. After all, his “Ground of Being” god doesn’t have any ground at all, existing as he does outside of time and space. He is ground without ground; there’s no there there. Ah, I’m beginning to get it: his god exists nowhere.

  40. “… the majority of humans … [are] intellectually unequipped to deal in abstract thought.” – Lou

    Really? Whew, I find this offensive.

  41. “Please tell me professor if what the probabilities are that humans were formed from stardust without the hand of an intelligent designer?”

    Answer- far higher than an omnipotent, omniscient super being just happening to exist out of nothing for no reason.

  42. “I wonder if Troy is a scientist. For if he isn’t, what gives him the right to “overstep his bounds” and suggest that intelligent design rather than evolution is a better explanation for life’s diversity?”

    Yes.

    As for Pope Whatisface I haven’t paid the slightest attention to him. Which hideous unthinkable crimes against humanity has the Catholic Church not committed during the last 100 years? The only thing I want to hear from that piece of #*%$§ is a very long list of apologies.

    1. Hey pope JP II apologized for the inquisition and to the muslims killed in the Crusades. A little late but an apology…lol

  43. Dear Lou and Troy,
    Many of us atheists have read the Bible cover to cover (rather than just the passages which are palatable and comforting), and in fact that is how many of us became atheists in the first place. Have you, in turn, read the actual evidence for evolution? Have you read, for example, Why Evolution is True, by Jerry Coyne?

  44. I must admit – I’m a firm believer in ground up coffee beans.

    Oh, that’s not what they’re talking about??

  45. What is so surprising is the confidence with which Lou spouts puerile nonsense, while simultaneously denigrating those who don’t accept his nonsense.

    For example:

    “He (Francis) accepts God (whatever that may be) as the ground of being, i.e. what makes being as we know it possible but is totally beyond space and time…”

    What exactly is the source of this information?
    What warrant is there for asserting that “reality” “existence” or “being” is not basic, that it somehow needs some sort of sub-stratum in order to exist or be.
    What could be the characteristics of that sub-stratum?
    Why is it asserted by theists that this hypothetical substratum would embody features of the human limbic system – eg emotions?

    Or is Lou just another condescending knucklehead who repeats his Theology-Lite soundbites without realising that they are entirely content-free word salad.

  46. I have no idea what this sentence means (my hunch is that “ground of being” is actually a meaningless term):

    “He accepts God (whatever that may be) as the ground of being, i.e. what makes being as we know it possible but is totally beyond space and time.”

    Incidentally, what makes a “ground of being” possible?

    2. I think it’s like this:
      Without God there is no grounds for existence. Kind of like if you’re not married, then there’s no grounds for divorce.

    5. Incidentally, what makes a “ground of being” possible?

      It IS something of a hidden circular argument. The claim is somewhat equivalent to saying “I assert that nothing could be an uncaused cause except God. Later on, I will conclude that God is the most rational choice of uncaused cause.” Well yeah – because you assumed your own conclusion going into it.

    6. It isn’t a meaningless term, it just has no referent. The basic (material!) things are self-existent, as we have suspected since Democritus and known since the 19th century at the latest.

  47. Don’t you just love it when they claim that god is above all knowledge and explanation… and then proceed to explain him to us?

  48. I think part of what Lou was saying was a form of ‘apophatic theology’, that is, defining god by what he is not. This has the advantage of being vague, of course, but it also allows the
    disputant to immediately reject any proposed attribute of god which might seem repugnant.
    As for Troy, he seems to be flirting with the subset of the fine-tuning argument which deals not with cosmic parameters but with local contingencies, like Earth’s magnetic field, or its large moon, which seem to have made this a safer haven for life than planets we could imagine which don’t have these things. As others have said, it is not clear how a Ground of Being arranged all these fortunate accidents.

    1. Imagine trying to define anything else by what it is not, you’d never get anywhere. “I want you to understand the concept of the blogglehop; it is not round or square, it is neither soft nor hard, it exists outside of the house …”

  49. “Francis’s conception of God is far more sophisticated and intellectual. He accepts God (whatever that may be) as the ground of being, i.e. what makes being as we know it possible but is totally beyond space and time. This, of course, is a very difficult, if not impossible, concept for the frail human intellect.”

    Wow. Not since reading about “Bully of Humility” Mr Bounderby from Hard Times have I seen this much hypocritical self-inflating puffery. Apparently, the sophisticated and intellectual but frail human intellect thinks creating an imaginary problem (“How can anything exist without something outside of time and space to support it; reality needs support, folks, right here in River City!”) and selling a ready-made solution to us (“The inscrutable God makes it possible!”) isn’t something we’ve seen a million times in daily advertising, much less in bog-standard religious apologetics.

    It’s neither sophisticated nor intellectual. There’s nothing difficult or clever in making stuff up and shoving it somewhere beyond current human knowledge. There’s nothing admirable or honest about pretending it’s anything but self-deluding fantasy.

    Fiction writers make stuff up for a living, but at least it’s sold to the public as fiction. Pope Francis is just another head in just another centuries-old confidence scam, with no more intellectual insight than a schizophrenic patient or a dodgy car salesman.

  50. Troy demonstrates why pop science on the internet is a mixed blessing.

    No Troy:

    1. the “big bang” was not an explosion;

    2. our solar system, on all the evidence was formed by the opposite of an explosion, ie the collapse of a dust cloud;

    3. “polar magnetism” is not really a thing, and the earth’s magnetic field was not generated by an explosion;

    4. your words “if what the probabilities are that humans were formed from stardust without the hand of an intelligent designer?” [sic] are gibberish (even assuming the possibility of a god having ‘hands’ which can manipulate organic molecules);

    5. whatever a “fully loaded Corvette” might be, it’s a meaningless thought experiment to imagine one “formed by stars” because it’s just too silly a concept, even coming from a god-botherer like you;

    6. the atmosphere is a mix of gases created by living organisms over billions of years – and the stuff you’re interested in, oxygen, was generated long after the earth formed – again, not by some explosion;

    7. the oxygen delivery system in mammals is, in fact, not “an immensly complex grouping of systems that go far beyond anything humans could hope to design on their own for perhaps, ever” [sic], rather it’s a complicated (but quite understandable) collection of organs, organelles and processes which shows every sign of haphazardly accreting over several billion years from simpler forms and which could have been far better designed from the outset: frankly, it’s not a system which is likely to win any design awards;

    8. if somebody wanted to create life in a laboratory using available raw materials, well yes, that person would obviously use living organisms as models, but that’s because that’s how you “model” things to create something similar;

    9. the University of Chicago has no inhabitable structures made from ivory, partly because it’s an unsatisfactory and expensive building material, and also because it would be unethical to slaughter the world’s remaining elephant population simply to provide physical embodiment to an absurd redneck cliché about the preferred built environment for academic workers;

    10. being a skeptic or an atheist does not require “a brand of faith that require giant leaps of logic”, unless, like many superstitious people too lazy to engage in hard rational enquiry, you consider that the acceptance of cogent evidence requires “blind faith” in facts.

    11. if Francis Collins disagrees with Jerry Coyne about religion, that does not imply that Jerry Coyne is cognitively impaired.

    Troy, you’re a lazy, opinionated, stupid person. Before you go on the internet trolling your betters with clichés larded with folk science you might reflect on the possibility that a world view based on factoids gleaned from internet talk-backs is an unsound basis for rational argument

  51. There are some people I refer to as “polymorons”- they have NO real knowledge in ANY particular area! In this case, Troy has definitely “overstepped his bounds”, as his area of expertise is that of being a fool.

  52. “Being & Ground-i-ness”

    So Our Pontiff is a homo-symp Deist — who knew?

    The numbers you hear in the background are the T-minus-10 countdown to Bill Donohue‘s head-‘splosion — which always seemed just about to happen during his debates with Christopher Hitchens (especially when the Hitch would bait the bate-gambit debate trap).

    Maybe now the U.S. Catholic laity can get back to the serious business of bingo, CYO football, and problem drinking…

  53. According to some monk way back in the day,he is suppose to be the last pope no.113.That is before Jesus returns.So will just have to wait and see.

  54. There has been some really good and funny comments on this one and Jerry Coyne should be thanked for randomly selecting these two winy believers for this entertainment tonight.

    Maybe it was not so random since Lou managed to use intellectual and God in the same sentence twice and Troy gave us the Arrogant Atheist. Boy those guys are good.

  55. ” but is totally beyond space and time…”
    so effectively not of this universe therefore, not knowable, fat lot of god that is!
    Pop Francis drags his moronic followers with him, who by all accounts will never understand what they don’t know because they are not capable of knowing what Pop Francis knows.
    If Lou is correct, it kind of makes it pointless does it not for all those followers.
    Trust me. Just kiss my ring (eh.. yuk) and do as I say.. after all, I do have a regally funny hat, a flowing robe, a pair of silk slippers and have you seen my digs, very classy. Privileged no less.
    When you love the illusion you will go to any lengths to unwittingly fool yourself.
    The powerful Muller-Lyer illusion is a visual example of why NOT to use reason and facts but to use ever other means to break it’s hold. I personally like jokes and satire as it has this proven effect of making one open up and as Leonard Cohen wrote “cracks are were the light gets in”
    Troy tries hard to see the illusion but doesn’t quite get there. I hope he reads this stuff here and learns to laugh with us, about us, about himself on this holy mess..

  56. “Please tell me professor if what the probabilities are that humans were formed from stardust without the hand of an intelligent designer?”

    There is a basic misconception embedded in that statement, which is that assuming a god or an intelligent designer who has the power to create universes (absent any verifiable evidence of its existence) somehow solves the problem of understanding this universe. It doesn’t, it only attempts to hide the problem.

    How can an incomprehensible being of unknown origin and unknown means of operation be a useful explanation of anything? To me, saying, “I don’t know how or why x happened,” is exactly the same as saying, “god did x” (or an “intelligent designer” did x).

    Another problem which I have with the statement, is that the people making such statements don’t understand either “intelligence” (i.e., how the brain works) or “design”. Having been a design engineer for 35 years, I see design as an evolutionary process involving a lot of trial and error and incremental improvements over time. Think of how, for example, automobiles and phones have evolved.

    Based on this experience, my guess is that intelligence (how the brain generates and analyses ideas) is also an evolutionary process. Hence our human history of making things is not evidence of magic at work which can be extrapolated into a god, but more evidence of how evolution accomplishes things – which can be extrapolated to a general principle of how complex things like stars and humans can be generated by random processes (with selection criteria to filter them and some form of memory to preserve the selected ones for subsequent generations).

    In summary, it’s all evolution, all the way down.

    1. I have a crazy Uncle, I mean that in the most affectionate way possible, who explores the ideas you have expressed, especially in your last paragraph, in great detail:

      http://www.universaldarwinism.com/

      Here’s a quote from his website:

      “Scientific law, in general, might be considered as those specific design details, discovered by Darwinian processes, which constrain low entropy systems from moving to states of higher entropy”.

  57. Well buddy, you’re just another arrogant atheist who knows far less than he thinks.

    Well at least somebody “knows” something. I’m so glad Troy “knows” so much.

  58. Francis was not addressing intellectuals with his comments but rather the majority of humans who possess a much less intellectual belief in a God — people intellectually unequipped to deal in abstract thought.

    Yeah those dumb people intellectually unequipped to deal in abstract thought. All a bunch a dummies I tells ya! Good thing we have a pope.

  60. Sophisticated Theologian: “I accept God (whatever that may be) as the Ground of Being. Our frail minds cannot contemplate such an infinite concept nor ever come to grips with it.”
    ***Proceeds to spend several more paragraphs expanding upon and giving specific traits to this concept that is intrinsically unknowable.***

    Atheist: “Your entire argument contradicts itself. You claim to know what you just stated cannot be known.”

    Sophisticated Theologian: “Arrogant atheist! You think you know everything!”

  61. What a pair of crybabies! Of course theres no mention of Francis having vastly overstepped his boundaries by talking about biology at all. Go on Mr Infallible Holiness, get back to your plush demons and dress up in drag and play Priest & Altarboy with the rest of your Senior-Male-Citizen-Club.

  62. I reside in South Africa. We have one of the most religious/spiritual/superstitious populations in the world. There are political, socio-economic, missionary, etc. reasons for this problem. However, I am flabbergasted as to why religion is so predominant in a WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic)country such as the US of A.

    Could an overdose of arrogance be an explanation for the acceptance of the decidedly weird beliefs of e.g. Catholicism?
    The prospect of death and annihilation is unacceptable for anyone as special as ‘me’. Therefore I will believe any old stuff if it purports to assure me of a post-mortem existence.

    1. I think in the case of religion here in the United States, it was far stranger that we have a large percentage of the population believing absolutely bizarre things that directly contradict empirical findings, as is the case with so many Protestants and indeed some Catholics.

      The Catholic Church (generally, but not always) describes transubstantiation using Aristotelian metaphysics about accidents and essence. E.g. a ball still has the essence of a ball if painted red even if it used to be red. But a ball cannot become an elephant. How in the world this comports with wheat becoming human and retaining the accidents of wheat (whereas a ball supposedly can’t have the essence of an elephant), I have no idea. In fact, neither does the Church, because it’s one of those things they like to call a Mystery-with-a-capital-M because Christ assured us it is true. How do they know this? Well, because he said so. Or at least someone wrote down in a book that Christ said so.

      In any case, a lot of official Church teachings can be attributed to bad philosophy and a misunderstanding of modern Physics (or they push the god-of-the-gaps argument to the time prior to the Big Bang), but many of them are well educated and accept a whole lot more science than their fundamentalist counterparts do. The Church isn’t immune to anti-scientific Young Earth Creationists either; as Jerry points out, there’s a decent sized minority of Catholics who reject the Big Bang and Evolution outright. As Michael Shermer points out, smart people are much better at inventing smart-sounding ways to fool themselves.

  63. Lou claims: “Francis was not addressing intellectuals with his comments”
    So he was apparently only addressing his ultra-credulous followers? Ok, got it.

    And more: “Francis’s conception of God is far more sophisticated and intellectual.”
    Lou keeps using those words, but they don’t mean what he imagines them to mean. “Sophisticated” superstition is still just superstition. The new “coat of many colors” paint does not even remotely hide the steaming excrement inside of it.

    Oh, I get it now, Lou imagines that someone who believes in angles, demons, exorcisms, and magic, usually termed “miracles” by obscurantist theologians (as if there were any other kind) is actually somehow “sophisticated”. Again, that word does not mean what Lou imagines.

    As far as “Intellectual” goes, how in the world would Lou have any even the remotest knowledge of what any intellectuals think,
    being that he is apparently confined to such a small opaque-walled cage by such a serious case of belief addiction?

    And Lou just can’t stop putting both feet into his mouth with this gem: “These are people who have only the old testament, anthropomorphic concept of God.”
    If the old testament is so unreliable, why is it a part of the christen bible? And why does the new testament keep referring back to the old testament, both as fulfilling phony old testament prophecies and as an authority about this imaginary god-thing? The new testament is just a factual as the old testament, given that the bizarre old testament writings were combined with pagan mythologies into one bigger ball of counter factual fantasy. In that regard the old and new testaments are actually just as reliable.

    Loony fables about a dead illegitimate pro-slavery flat-earth magician who fathers himself and then brings himself back to life as some kind of zombie are not exactly credible to rational scientific literate people. And what does that zombie even have to do with the god-thing that is supposed to be incomprehensible? If this god-thing is so incomprehensible just how did the religionists even comprehend that there was such a thing?

    Originally all of the gods lived in the rocks and trees. But enough people learned enough about the rocks and trees that the gods had to relocate to the sky. But they were not even safe there according to the tower of babble myth and people soon learned that the sky wasn’t a dome over the earth, so now they moved their gods outside of the universe. Being located safely outside of the universe all of these gods are obviously nothing to even remotely concern ourselves about. Likewise with what the superstitious pope has to say about literally anything. The new pope is the same as the old pope, but with a more “sophisticated” PR campaign.
    The largest organized religious group in the US is the catholic church. Ironically, the second largest religious group is composed of ex-catholics. This is why all of the pro-pope propaganda is coming out from the usual suspects.

    Lou says: “[the pope] accepts God (whatever that may be) as the ground of being”.
    Yeah, I heard about that accident – his god-thing should not have gotten that close to the running garbage disposal.

    The catholic church’s official stance on their god-thing is to define it as being incomprehensible so that they don’t have to even try answer the questions that they cannot ever answer without being called idiotic. Yet they never fail to describe this incomprehensible god-thing with lots of comprehensible and vastly overblown superlative words. In the end it all boils down to “faith”, which as Samuel Clemens writing as Mark Twain once pointed out: “Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.”

    Why are believers always so eager to demonstrate Dunning-Krueger in action? (Obviously a rhetorical question.) Every creationist that I have ever known (and that is a *lot*) has acted like this. People willfully ignorant, yet overflowing with absolute certainty.

    There are several very good reasons why theology and its even more bizarre obscurantism (apologetics) were expelled from science four centuries ago. The knowledge gains have been totally on the science side ever since getting out from under the yoke of religious irrationalism. Religionists are well aware of the eventual consequences, which is why some of them are so desperate to appear relevant. Others are simply doubling down on their abysmal stupidity in an effort to try to retain their most credulous (and all too often, demented) followers.

    It’s a wonderful scam; invent an imaginary disease (original sin) and claim that everyone has it, and only the “one true church” can save anyone from it. Of course a lot of money always happens to be involved, surely just a minor and very rare coincidence. If the credulous ever wake up from their priest and self induced hypnosis and quite sending money to the churches, organized religion would rather quickly divide into even more much smaller sects and could potentially even disappear (the latter case being rather unlikely given how quickly new religions pop up all of the time).

          1. No, neither one of you is right, and you should stop going off on tangents and traveling in the wrong circles.

    2. I’d guess that people thought the sun was a god before they ventured to thinking they lived in rocks and trees…

      If god is unknowable, beyond space and time, then why care about people’s sex lives?

  64. Of course that should be “scientifically literate” above. Overzealous autocorrect, human error, or was it just a miracle from something outside the universe? You decide.

  65. Great new drinking game. Put all these replies onto a single page, and take a sip of your favourite drink every time they mention the words:
    ‘insightful’, ‘disingenuous’, ‘nuanced’, ‘sophisticated’, ‘intellectual’, ‘dishonest’, ‘intellectually dishonest’, ‘intelligent people’, ‘arrogant atheist’, ‘your own brand of faith (or variant)’, ‘x smarter than you’, …add your own to the list!

  66. “Does a professor of ecology feel that he must overstep his bounds into other realms? Why must people like you think that anybody will take you seriously when you talk about anything other than your area of specialty, which is evolution? ”

    If only the religious would grant us that freedom of not intruding in our careers / lives / politics

    I’ll take a bet that “Troy” wouldn’t mind I.D. Being taught in public schools…

  67. Please tell me professor if what the probabilities are that humans were formed from stardust without the hand of an intelligent designer?

    The matter in my body is stardust and my development was seen to by my mother’s womb and my own genes. The probability is 1, because it has already happened that way, very many times. Duh!

    [I’m sure Troy wanted to be creationist in there somewhere, but he failed miserably.]

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