Nothing gets me more angry comments or emails than when I write about transgender women in women’s sports or take apart creationism or intelligent design. In the latter case, the faithful are out there in droves, and of course 81% of Americans believe in God. If you attack their arguments for God, they see it as you attacking both them and God Himself.
It’s not surprising, then, that when I critiqued the intelligent-design creationist Stephen Meyer in a recent post, “Stephen Meyer in Newsweek: Three scientific discoveries point to God. As usual, his claims are misleading.” the faithful came for me—this time in the comments. Here are three that you won’t see on the post but that I’m highlighting here. I’ll let the writers know that this post is up, and you can reply below if you wish. (But please be courteous.)
Oh, and remember that Meyer’s three arguments for God from science are not new; they are the old chestnuts of the Big Bang, the “fine-tuning” of the laws of physics, and “intelligently designed features of organisms”—the old Behe argument—whose appearance apparently requires a miracle to explain.
Misspellings, poor grammar, and so on are from the original emails and aren’t typos.
Comment #1 from “Mike Cohen”:
Hmm. I wonder what caused these atheists to find it a life ambition to argue against the existence of G-d against the absence of an explanation of what caused the Big Bang. When they can prove that it is not G-d that caused the Big Bang, I will take them more seriously.
I have a Ph.D. In science and engineering, mastered thermodynamics, theoretical physical and the depth of mathematics from tensors to matrixes, to abstract mathematics. I believe in a power that causes the Big Bang. We are still in the process of reaching an equilibrium and life as G-d has designed is a transient of the process. Even people like Albert Einstein who is much smarter and more intelligent than I am by orders of magnitude believed in G-d.
To the atheists, please donate to Tom Cruises nonsense, or maybe you do belong to his church pimping a young and attractive money grabber.
My response:
Dear Mr. Cohen,
You are exaggerating when you think that atheists make it a “life ambition to argue against God and about what caused the Big Bang”. Sure, I spend time arguing about that, but only because creationists like you try to delude people with bogus arguments. Turning your words back on you, I will take you more seriously when you prove that it is God (why are you leaving out the “o”?) who caused the Big Bang? And, you know, we don’t prove anything in science; we make the best inference that we can from the evidence. That’s in contrast to religious people like you, who think God is proven because somewhere along the line they were either taught it or find the idea of God irresistible. As for your Ph.D. and lists of your studies, that don’t impress me much; they make you no more credible as a witness for God.
As for Einstein, he believed in God as a metaphor for the laws of the universe. As I show in my book Faith Versus Fact, he didn’t believe in a personal god at all, and certainly not the Yahweh you are touting above. Einstein said as much. Do a bit of research!
Finally, Scientology. It’s just another form of unevidenced delusion, like Judaism. And the beliefs of Scientologists, from Xenu on down, are just as ludicrous as the claims of the Old Testament. I’m not sure what you mean by “pimping a young and attractive money grabber,” but it’s a gratuitous remark—even a rude one if you’re implying that any atheists here belong to the Church of Scientology. I sure don’t. I’m assuming you’re a Jew, and my belief is that your own religion’s tenets are no more credible than those of Scientology.
Yours,
Jerry Coyne
**********
Comment #2 from “Constance”:
I found the smug responses illogical. I’m not a churchgoer, but since science can’t explain where the anti-matter is (and it’s the scientists that insist it has to exist) that opens the door for alternative explanations. Waxing poetic about how Genisis (a book written by a bunch of guys a couple thousand years ago) doesn’t perfectly match the Big Bang as evidence of no God is beyond silly.. First, that asserts that God is Christianity or bust, second it assumes humans having any concept of God has to match what God really is.
Pro & Anti based on this kind of illogical tripe may win a published article, but serve no one.
My response:
Dear Constance,
The responses were not “illogical” (where are the violations of logic?); I simply gave alternative and plausible naturalistic explanations for observations that Meyer says are irrefutable evidence for God. The mistake you’re making is arguing that when scientists don’t understand something, our ignorance must be evidence for God. That’s not a good argument, for the history of science shows, starting with evolution, that many once-enigmatic phenomena or processes that were once seen as evidence for God were found to have plausible (and, in the case of evolution, true) scientific explanations. (Look at lightning, microbial infections like Black Death, and so on.) So I’m not particularly bothered by not knowing “where the dark matter is”. I trust that some day the physicists will figure it out.
As for the Designer being identified with the Abrahamic God or Christian God in particular, you obviously aren’t aware that I was responding to Meyer’s claim in his article that it’s not an “intelligent designer” but God himself who made the flagella spin and the blood clot. And Meyer, being a Christian, is clarly touting the Christian God. Further, As I noted in the post, Meyer mentions one scientist saying that the Big Bang and a “divine creation” matches the Bible as a whole:
Nobel laureate Arno Penzias, who helped make a key discovery supporting the Big Bang theory, has noted the obvious connection between its affirmation of a cosmic beginning and the concept of divine creation. “The best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted, had I nothing to go on but the five books of Moses…[and] the Bible as a whole,” writes Penzias.
Finally, you say we don’t know what God really is. You are correct, but I’d go further. We don’t have any evidence that God exists. Until we do, I prefer to group him with leprechauns and Santa Claus as appealing myths supported by—nothing. As Wittgenstein said, “Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.” Meyer can’t say anything about the nature of God, and he should have kept his gob shut in Newsweek. Because he didn’t, I replied to his fatuous arguments.
By the way, “Genesis” is spelled with one “i”, not two. Have you read your Bible lately?
Yours,
Jerry Coyne
**********
Comment #3 from “Lars”:
I am a fan of vigorous debate and I enjoyed reading the article. I am not a fan of name calling. When the author called the other side “wing nuts”, I truly thought that his name calling hurt his argument, as individuals from the other side would be alienated immediately by his words, and truly if the author is trying to make a point, one would hope he would try to convince the other side rather than insulting them.
My reply to Lars:
Dear Lars,
First of all, I did not call Meyer a wingnut. Here’s what I said:
Meyer has managed to con the right-wingnuts at Newsweek into publishing the article below. . .
I was referring to the editors at Newsweek who were conned, not to the “other side”, i.e., ID creationists. Can you read? Second, I made a number of arguments against Meyer’s claims, not calling him names at all. The people I was writing for are not those on “the other side,” as IDers and creationists don’t usually change their minds. I was writing for those on the fence, or those who need to know how Meyer’s arguments for God can be refuted by science. Those are the people for whom I wrote Why Evolution is True.
Finally, you’re clearly looking for any excuse to dismiss my article. Saying that I hurt my argument by calling the editors of Newsweek “right wing nuts” is a pathetic attempt to dismiss the many naturalistic arguments I advance in my post. People who say, “His argument is bad/worthless/loses force because of name calling” are people looking for an easy way to dismiss something. I am sorry I hurt your tender feelings by using a bit of sarcasm, but you got its object of that sarcasm wrong anyway. And does our withholding of sarcasm also include Donald Trump, too, when people are attacking his policies? If so, then nearly every liberal op-ed columnist in America should get a letter from you. Get busy writing them!
Yours,
Jerry Coyne
Jerry, just a slight quibble, you reply to Constance:
But Constance argued:
Constance seems to be raising a different issue from dark matter. The standard model of particle physics predicts that there would have been equal amounts of matter and anti-matter coming out of the Big Bang (which would have annihilated to no matter), which conficts with the fact that we see a matter but no anti-matter today. The origin of this imbalance is a genuine issue in particle physics — though the gist of your reply, that physics isn’t claimed to be complete and that there’s a lot we don’t know, but that that is not evidence for God, holds for this issue also.
Where is the anti-matter: scientists are working on it.
https://astronomy.com/news/2021/05/where-did-the-universes-antimatter-go-scientists-inch-closer-to-solving-the-mystery
Sorry, I flubbed up there. I’ll fix the text. Much appreciated!
I thought that they had decided that if there were a large amount of antimatter sequestered somewhere far away, but still part of the ‘observable universe’, that the microwave background value would be higher.
The disappearance of all the antimatter during the very early stages of the initial expansion was related, I thought, to the preference for handedness that is seen in some weak force interactions. Of course, that still leaves the question of why the universe has a preferred chirality.
One argument against Intelligent Design is the existence of pseudogenes, which are defunct genes that are no longer useful. Why would a Designer create useless genes, apparent relics? https://twitter.com/Geoff_Graham1/status/1653908022836748289?s=20
Oh boy. G-d and Einstein again?
Maybe Mr Cohen doesn’t know what G-d’s most useful creation: Google!
Gotta give you my firgun-of-the-day props, boss, for your equanimous responses to these intemperate comments.
It’s funny, I read the dictionary entry for “equanimity”. All great ideas, but in particular, guess where equanimity is made into a reinforcing idea? Religion :
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equanimity
Meaning I read it about four hours before your comment, is the thing.
Believers get upset about having their beliefs undermined because what you are actually doing is threatening their [imaginary] parental figure. Indeed they are (as I once was) stuck in a state of infancy, and to have their security blanket tugged at, or their pacifier removed is most unsettling. It was when I abandoned god belief that I truly “grew up”, and as I look back on myself as a believer, it is with great embarrassment.
As Freud said: “The idea of god was not a lie but a device of the unconscious which needed to be decoded by psychology. A personal god was nothing more than an exalted father-figure. Desire for such a deity sprang from infantile yearnings for a powerful, protective father; for justice and fairness and for life to go on forever. God is simply a projection of these desires, feared and worshipped by human beings out of an abiding sense of helplessness. Religion belonged to the infancy of the human race; it had been a necessary stage in the transition from childhood to maturity. It had promoted ethical values which were essential to society. Now that humanity had come of age, however, it should be left behind.”
…or as Twain said: “Man is a marvelous curiosity. He thinks he is the creator’s pet. He even believes the creator loves him; has a passion for him; sits up nights to admire him; yes, and watch over him and keep him out of trouble. He prays to him, and thinks he listens. Isn’t it a quaint idea?”
Those quotes are precious.
PCC(E) suffers for his art – now, it is our turn.
Based on his name, it is likely Mr. Cohen is Jewish. Among orthodox Jews (and I believe conservative ones), to fully write out the word “God” violates a religious rule. Hence, they insert a dash instead of the letter “O.”
I know that; I just wanted him to make it explicit.
Meyer is not a wingnut because he doesn’t have a wing; just the prayer part.
These complainants tend to have a common theme, which amounts to nothing more than how dare you suggest there is no god, when it’s perfectly clear to me that there has to be one, and it’s your job to prove otherwise.
No, it’s not our job. You’re the one making the proposition, so it’s up to you to back it up with evidence, or at least a logical argument, neither of which is ever forthcoming. We’re not saying with certainty that there is no divine creator, we’re simply saying that we don’t see evidence for such, and a mountain of evidence that contradicts all religious claims about the origin of the universe.
As for Meyer, his only argument is that since there was a Big Bang, there must be a god. That’s not an argument, that’s a leap lacking any substance.
The difference is, science keeps looking for more evidence of what happened, but the religious seem perfectly content with their unchanging God, who’s always there. And to not intercede or answer prayers, no matter what we seem do to each other. Or the planet.
Sometimes I wonder if the religious actually know anything of the history of their religions, tacking and turning, twisting and reversing to align their theologies to the politics of the day. Unchanging? You (or they, rather) couldn’t even sustain that claim in regard of their religion(s) in their own lifetimes, let alone across history.
Ah, sorry, I’m forgetting : where religion exists, ignorance is a desired outcome. (Except, of course, in the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, may sauce be upon her mighty meaty balls.)
I like to point out that the “Discovery Institute” has, to the best of my knowledge, never discovered anything.
Indeed
But I think they’re trying to discover – a la Vince Lombardi – The Only Thing.
Surely they have some creative accounting people, working to avoid or evade taxation in new, exciting ways every time there’s a revision to the tax regulations.
Oh, hang on, they’re HQ’d in America, aren’t they? So they’ve got a “get out of taxation free” card, at least for operations within America. Do they have the courage to operate in the rest of the world, where they’d be exposed to fiscal scrutiny?
Although the following statement by Thomas Kuhn in his 1962 book was meant to apply to ideas in science, the same sentiment probably applies here as well: “a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
Fortunately, young people are rejecting God and depopulating houses of worship. Eventually, rationality will prevail. You are doing your part in bringing this about, both in your own writings and in the commentary of those who participate on your web site. Time is on our side.
That happy outcome is questionable. It is easy to imagine that there will always be some people with strong proclivities toward faith, the supernatural, and Freud’s “yearnings for a powerful, protective father”. But, the hope is that there will be many fewer.
Cf. the belief in a gendered soul that is inborn, known by introspection, and unchanging, but also fluid and socially constructed.
There are probably other connections between Jerry’s two categories of posts that generate the most angry emails.
I’m not expecting a total abandonment of faith, but I do believe that the balance will be shifted more and more toward reason.
Once the god-afflicted falls significantly below the 50% mark, is there hope of getting the “get out of taxation free” card for churches rejected in legislation. That, surely would be a terrible blow to churches – as well as inevitably bringing a tsunami of theft and embezzlement as accountants have to start looking at the books.
If I could stand the stuff, I’d bring popcorn. That would be a hilarious few years.
At the moment all evidence is that Identity Politics has replaced religion, and that physical attributes like race, gender, etc. are now the source of a secular doctrine that is as irrational as any belief in a deity. Worse, in fact, because it is infecting our schools and media, at a time when few people
possess or use critical thinking of any kind. Wokeness is indeed a kind of religion, and its acolytes are today’s priests, rabbis and imams. Given the existence of white liberals guilty about one thing or another, this cult attracts otherwise secular nonbelievers, offering them absolution if they plead
guilty to one act or another.
Agreed completely.
The ultimate argument, be it against creationists or ID adepts (which are close anyway), is: where did this intelligence, this Creator come from? Who created the Creator? Is it an endless series of Russian dolls, or what?
It really makes little (well, none at all) sense to explain biological complexity -or even our cold and mostly empty universe- by a necessarily complex Creator or intelligence. That is kinda begging the complexity question.
Jerry, I commend you for going out of your way to seriously answer these posts in detail. It is said there are no stupid questions, but I guess an email is not really a question. Keep up the good works!
I’ve heard the response: “God is NOT complex–he’s simple!”
Alternatively: God is the terminus of explanation (the bottom turtle); he doesn’t need to be explained.
Both are ludicrous.
“God is NOT complex–he’s simple!”
Which is, of course, confusing ‘simplicity’ for the complete absence of explanatory details. One could just as well ‘explain’ the functioning of a complex computer by appeal to a ‘simple’ ghost.
Ludicrous indeed.
Note, there is no instance where the created is more complex than the creator. Only evolution can climb the improbable mountain of complexity, as far as we know.
I wouldn’t rely on that argument to hold up my trousers, without a belt or braces as backup.
A counter example : every new generation of computer chips since the late 1970s has been designed by computers running using previous generations of chips (often several generations previous) which themselves are considerably less complex than what is being designed for the future. Once the first chip-design programmes were written (mid-late 70s) no human could cope with the complexity of the full design – it had to be delegated to machines with more memory and a lower error rate than the humans they replaced.
You don’t get parts-per-trillion error rates with humans in the loop.
Absolutely you can create more complex things using less complex tools. Counter-examples are myriad.
As advocatus diaboli, I ask you to consider that a creator need not resemble its creation (even though our popular gods do clearly resemble their creators). If our universe does have a creator, the creator’s origin might not be a problem within the creator’s home “universe”. One area of speculation along these lines is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis . And there are other, even weirder, ideas out there.
That simulation speculation suffers from the same ‘infinite tower of turtles’ problem as the Creator or ID speculations.
Moreover, it violates Occam’s razor.
My main point is that the simulation hyp(e) is one way to avoid the usual infinite-regress problem. The creator of a simulated universe might arise thru biological evolution, for example.
Moreover, I’m not proposing simulation as the best or simplest explanation of anything, so Occam does not apply.
If the solution to understanding our universe is to invoke a simulation, then there is precisely nothing to prevent you explaining the simulator’s universe as also being a simulation – and you’re back to stacking turtles. Or, for that matter, wombats.
I remember my computing science lectures on recursive function definition. While recursion can be a quick and dirty fix while building an algorithm (and then coding it), it can always be removed without loss of function, and I haven’t heard of a single case where removing the recursion wasn’t more efficient in terms of both storage requirements and operations count.
The “simulation hypothesis” is just another solution in the class I think of (with reference to Einstein’s “God does not play dice with the universe”) as “throwing the dice where they can’t be seen, then declaring that you’ve won”.
Another member of the class, which comes up regularly for me with my interests in the origin(s) of life, is the concept of “panspermia”. Not impossible, but it just moves the problem from where we can get evidence about it, to where we can’t get evidence about it. A WOMBAT (Waste Of Money Brains And Time) in other words.
“…second it assumes humans having any concept of God has to match what God really is. Pro & Anti based on this kind of illogical tripe may win a published article, but serve no one.” – Constance
Speaking of illogic: If the sentence “God exists, but no human concept of God represents God’s essence/nature” were true, then we wouldn’t have any idea of what we’re talking about when we’re talking about God, such that saying that God exists would be no different from saying that X exists, with X being nothing but an undefined “something I know not what”.
I think Jerry was getting at that with his quote :
… which I’m going to have to file into my “quotations” file.
I was pleasantly struck by “Mike Cohen’s” use of “G-d”.
I think he is responding to Jerry’s use of “d*g” when speaking of our canine symbionts.
Even when I was a little boy I was struck how “dog” is “god” — just reversed.
Even the phonemes match!
Then, a bit later, I realized that only works in English.
Dang.
This was about the time — 11-or-so years old — that I was giving up on g*d.
Dang — g*d seems like such a wonderful idea.
Since then I have had many decades & many generations of dogs to ponder the meaning of our symbiosis.
Our anthropologists & philosophers & other thinkers can’t seem to lift the scales from their eyes.
That Russian fellow — Dmitry Belyaev [1917-85] — showed us how to create a dog out of a fox — in just 10-or-so generations!
How many times have humans created a new version of “the dog”?
To wit —
1] We got our first dogs when we were still Australopithecus back in the Pliocene/Pleistocene forest.
2] The African Wild Dog [Lycaon pictus] is likely the descendant of our first proto-dogs.
3] A major clue is the irregularly-spotted multicolored coat of this modern species.
4] Spotted coats are a common mark of domestication.
5] No other wild canine has such a spotted coat.
6] Evidence suggests that our ape-people ancestors back in the forest were the mega-scavengers of that time.
7] We don’t yet know why the proto-ape ancestors of the gorillas & chimps & bonobos got to stay in the forest.
8] Why don’t the australopithecines have fang-like CANINE teeth — just puny little things like are in your mouth?
9] We farmed those teeth out to our proto-dogs.
10] Why don’t we have a better sense of smell?
11] We farmed that expensive-to-maintain power out to our proto-dogs.
12] Why don’t we have better night vision?
13] We farmed that out to our proto-dogs as well.
14] Why don’t we have better night-courage?
15] Yep — We farmed that out to our proto-dogs.
16] How come our dogs eat many of the random poops they find?
17] Yes — even c*t poops!
18] Well, we likely got our first proto-dogs when they followed our camps to have … hot breakfasts.
19] Yep — totally disgusting; but they still follow us into the bathroom!
20] However, they likely kept our camps clean, & relatively free of germs & other nasty infections agents.
21] Also, they kept away the leopards & pythons that would snatch away our precious ape-people babies in the night.
22] And the dung beetles flew in immediately & took care of the dog poops!
23] I know some of this stuff because I do beetles, & I even have 3 species of dung beetles named for me.
24] You can find some of my 9 patronyms on their Wikipedia page — just type in “mcclevei”.
25] Anyway, we have out d*gs [& c*ts] — g*d bless em!
Umm. . . . this is a very strange comment.
I don’t see much here that aligns with our current understanding, but you do have curiosity and that is a valuable thing.
What a weird, but interesting, nay fascinating, hypothesis: the ‘outsourcing hypothesis’ of the d*g-human symbiosis.
It has the quality of not prima facie being incompatible with the ES.
I guess it needs a lot of work to confirm or reject though.
Note that the Eurasian wolf is considered the domestic dog’s closest relative, not the African wild dog.
I think the notion of evolutionary tree vs genetic tree can be used to investigate that part of the ‘outsourcing hypothesis’.
Jerry, your responses were perfect, logical, evidence based, clear and not at all insulting. If there is a reason you write WEIT other than those on the fence, that would be persons I fit in a category with.
Thanks Dude!
Mr. Cohen writes: “We are still in the process of reaching an equilibrium and life as G-d has designed is a transient of the process.”
Not only is this simply made-up bs about a made-up “creator”, it’s also extremely arrogant. Arrogance and god-belief so often go hand in hand.
Indeed, but not your typical, easily recognizable form of arrogance, but the strange, oblivious arrogance of religious humility.
Constance wrote:
As Oliver S. pointed out at #12, we’d have to have some idea of what “God” means or there’d be no way for us to distinguish God from Not-God. Presumably Constance isn’t prepared to call anti-matter, the Big Bang, or the Laws of Physics “God” unless there are elements which remove those scientific concepts from materialistic naturalism. Doing that would be a smug way of saying that atheists are wrong even if they’re right.
It seems to me that non-traditional, non-Western, and/or idiosyncratic views of God have something in common with the Christian version. All of them involve ideas of meaning and purpose which are familiar to agents with meaning and purpose. Perhaps God is a condition of positive possibility; perhaps God is a cycle of events sensitive to human beliefs about good and evil; perhaps God is Love, or Creativity, or the Oversoul from which all our most uplifting feelings and experiences are derived. So what would be the evidence against all these less-obviously-anthropomorphic embodiments of non corporeal spirituality?
The fact that they are still, at bottom, anthropomorphic. They all assume that human characteristics of mind are somehow basic, simple, and the sort of thing which doesn’t depend on anything else. Yet, as I think Richard Dawkins has said, mental things come at the end of a long process of evolution. They wouldn’t be there at the beginning. Love and intention and morals grew out of things which weren’t like any of those.
Or, to borrow from Daniel Dennett, they’re all cranes, not skyhooks. They don’t lift on their own, dangling from nothing. God’s most basic attributes arose from humble little successive steps which were clearly Not-God. And the Theory of Evolution is a universal acid. Like doesn’t come from like. That simple idea eats through even attempts to confine it in non-traditional forms of God which are never, ever as unfamiliar to us as a cosmos that’s fundamentally indifferent.
My response to the three of them would be that all of Meyer’s assertions (I refuse to call them arguments) are inconsistent with the available evidence.
All our evidence points to a wholly naturalistic interpretation of the visible universe. We can demonstrate in detail how this works. What evidence do Meyer and his groupies have?
(Actually, I feel they may need a tutorial on what ‘evidence’ is, and how to evaluate it).
Hi, Jerry. Just curious: does responding to these arguments from the faithful invigorate you, or do you find it to be a kind of wearying “goes with the territory” duty? Also, which Faithmonger would you regard as the most cogent and intellectually honest proponent? Thanks for all the stimulating posts.
It got me warmed up to write about science; the next post, which I knew was going to be long and hard. So answering these three was kind of fun.
I can’t pick one out as “most cogent and intellectually honest”!
JC: “I can’t pick one out as “most cogent and intellectually honest”!”
My opinion is that most religious clerics just miss these two intellectual properties.
I find it striking that many creationists turn out to be engineers. But it has a kind of logic that engineers would see the universe as engineering.
It’s called “the Salem Hypothesis,” named after an engineer-creationist on talk.origins.
Yes. The student Christianity cult at my university is named unironically “God & Reason” and is led by faculty members from the physics, economics, and math departments.
As I’ve read at least one engineer say to the effect, “I’m an engineer. I design. I know (intelligent) design when I see it.”
I perceive that engineers take scientific principles as practical certainties and, unlike scientists, are not inclined to view them as tentative and provisional. Accordingly, perhaps the former do not possess the epistemic humility of the latter.
So what?
Even if Einstein believed in the Christian God (which he probably did not), so what? A scientist believing something is not evidence of its existence. If it were, we wouldn’t need to test string theory 🙂 Newton and Maxwell believed in many things, yet we only take their scientific ideas, not their superstitions. Even within science, scientists make mistakes; they say things that are later disproved, or just don’t work. Then we either reject their ideas or seek to improve them.
Rejecting religion during the past centuries was generally not really good for your health.
He did not probably, but positively not believe in the Christian g*d, he was Jewish, after all. Morover, he made it clear he though that believing in a personal (Abrahamic) g*d was childish.
You have a LOT of patience to try and fight these fools, boss. Gotta hand it to you. I, however, have absolutely none. Fortunately I’ve never met (that I know of) evolution deniers.
I live a charmed life here in Manhattan – I don’t even know/see any MAGAs!
D.A.
NYC
Maybe it’s just me, but Mike Cohen’s comment “I have a Ph.D. In science and engineering, mastered thermodynamics, theoretical physical and the depth of mathematics from tensors to matrixes, to abstract mathematics.” does not sound like someone who has a PhD.
Yes, I thought that too.
I’m not an atheist, I’m secular and note there is no longer place for magic in the universe of modern cosmology. But I note on Mike Cohen that cosmologists are researching what caused the modern formulation of big bang.
[Pathways to Discovery in Astronomy and Astrophysics for the 2020s (2021), NAS]
Similarly, if Constance means anti-matter, we know “where [it] is”, it was almost entirely annihilated by matter and the remaining issue is how that worked. And if she means dark matter we also know where it is – and it explains many observations by its existence, see Wikipedia for a list – and the remaining issue is what it is.