For some reason I don’t comprehend, my critique of Stephen Meyer’s Newsweek article, “Stephen Meyer in Newsweek: Three scientific discoveries point to God. As usual, his claims are misleading” prompted a fair number of emails and comments, some of which, like the submitted comment below, I didn’t deem fit to put in the comments section but did find worth a standalone post because of what it says about the thought process of some humans.
First, reader Coel corrected me when I said the Big Bang was the “beginning” of the Universe, and Coel was right. He also corrects Arno Penzias (a Nobel Laureate!), whom Meyer quoted with approbation:
Evidence for what scientists call the Big Bang has instead confirmed the expectations of traditional theists. 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.
Here’s a comment by Coel:
“If the Big Bang did occur, which seems likely since we have tons of evidence for it, then that shows only that the Universe began, not how it began.” {From my post]
The Big Bang doesn’t even establish that the universe “began”. Most cosmologists would say something along the lines that the observable universe came from a quantum-gravity fluctuation around the Planck time, where that fluctuation occurred within a pre-existing state.
Thus “our universe” only had a beginning if one uses the term to refer narrowly to the products of that quantum fluctuation, not to “everything”.
By the way, if one checks what that Penzias quote was actually about (see here), it wasn’t about the universe having an origin, it was about how many “universes” there are. But since the time of that quote, the best data today do favour an “eternal inflation” multiverse, and thus now dis-favour Penzias’s argument.
Lastly, the fine-tuning argument has to start with the axiom that there would be something wrong if the universe did not contain human-like life. The conclusion (that the universe started with human-like life in the form of a god) is thus entirely circular.
Okay, and that’s a good and substantial comment. But then someone called Aeiutuz responded to Coel, and here’s the unposted comment I’m highlighting:
Aeiutuz
In reply to Coel.
I’d go a step further. I think modern cosmology gives at least a 50% chance God exists. Nearly all cosmologists believe the big bang began after a period of cosmic inflation. We know absolutely nothing about what the universe was like before inflation. But we do know, it was incredibly hot. So hot that all of our laws of physics break. There existed a state of mass/energy we can’t describe. The mass/energy was imaginably large, possibly/probably infinite. Inflation could have been going on for an infinite amount of time. Or maybe not.
Modern cosmology tells use, before the big bang, there was an unimaginably large, possibly infinite state of mass/energy that we can’t describe. Some part of that mass/energy broke off creating the cosmic inflation and when the inflation ended, it created the big bang. There was no intelligence in that mass/energy.
Most western religions tell us that before the universe we know today began, there was God. A state of something, maybe mass/energy beyond our description that was unimaginably large. Probably infinite. With intelligence. Some part of the broke off to create the universe, perhaps in a big bang.
Modern cosmology says the universe began from a state of mass/energy that we can’t describe that was unimaginably large, possibly infinite. But there was no intelligence behind it.
Modern religion tells us the universe began from God, as state of spirit, or possibly mass/energy we can’t describe that was unimaginably large, probably infinite. But had intelligence.
The difference between cosmology and religion is this: before our universe began, was there intelligence in the mass/energy that existed before the big bang or not? Religion says yes. Cosmology says no. But if you have an infinitely large amount of energy, or an unimaginably large amount of energy almost indistinguishable from infinity, is it so hard to imagine there wasn’t intelligence behind it? I say the chance is at least 50-50.
Now the state of the universe before the Big Bang is above my pay grade, but not far enough that I can’t criticize a bizarre analogy between what physicists think and what “most Western religions tell us.” For example, I can’t find any hint of this in Genesis:
Most western religions tell us that before the universe we know today began, there was God. A state of something, maybe mass/energy beyond our description that was unimaginably large. Probably infinite. With intelligence. Some part of the broke off to create the universe, perhaps in a big bang.
God was “infinite”? In what sense? Was he also “incredibly hot”? (He must have been a looker!). And where does it say that “some part of God broke off to create the universe, perhaps in a big bang”? You have to have a pretty loose interpretation of Genesis to see that!
Further, where does modern religion tell us that God was either a “state of spirit” (whatever that is) or “possibly mass/energy that was large, probably infinite”? Again, Aeiutuz is tailoring his view of God to what physics says. (I doubt that this was his a priori conception of a deity.) He might as well just go the Einstein route and say that the laws of physics and history of the Universe are God, cutting out the anthropomorphic middleman.
The part I find weirdest, and somewhat humorous, is that after these labored analogies, Aeiutuz says that if we can’t determine if there is a God or not since his God comports with what physicists tell us, then the chance that there was a divine intelligence is “at least 50-50”.
Let’s leave the analogies aside: the real fallacy is this: “If we have two hypotheses and we can’t distinguish between them, then the chance of each being true is roughly 50%. Is there a name for this fallacy?
In fact, the chance that there’s an intelligence seems less than 50% since we’ve never seen any evidence for it, yet we have plenty of evidence that naturalistic physics, which ignores an idea of a Big Intelligence, still leads us to the truth about the Universe. You could obtain the same probability for any imaginary being, like leprechauns (after all, who makes the rainbows?)
Come to think of it, I think I saw this fallacy highlighted by my late Ph.D. advisor Dick Lewontin in a form like “If you have two explanations for something, that implies that the truth lies somewhere near the middle.” For lack of a formal name, I’ll call this The Centrist Fallacy.
There’s another fallacy here as well: “If we don’t understand a physical phenomenon, then God is one explanation worth considering.” The problem is that that hypothesis has been used for centuries, explaining things like the “design” of organisms, lightning, the Black Death, and so on, and one by one these unexplained phenomena got explained—not by invoking a god but by using the tools of science. You’d think that people would have become wary about equating “unexplained scientific question” with the assertion “God exists.”
But now my craw is full of these people and their weird arguments for God. I will stop and move on.
“I’m a fiddler crab! It’s fiddler crab season!”
Shoot me again is the beginning of perhaps my most favorite monologue in all of drama and comedy.
I love the 50% chance that God exists. LOL. What is that based on? The observed existence of gods from other religions?
We have done a survey of fifty different multiverses and half of them had gods in charge. We don’t know for sure about ours yet, but that is the simple math.
Still not convincing if there are a just-shy-of-infinite number of universes out there.
Besides, who filled out the questionnaire? Or whould I say, Who? And what were His/Her/Its credentials?
This painfully put me in mind of my young earth creationist parents blasting the Hubble pictures because their pastor delivered a sermon about it being fake
I am hearing (LOL) this too – oh, the telescope _reinforces_ that a guy made everything in his bakery. This quote illustrates this error nicely:
“I have concluded through careful empirical analysis and much thought that somebody is looking out for me, keeping track of what I think about things, forgiving me when I do less than I ought. Giving me strength to shoot for more than I think I’m capable of. I believe they know everything that I do and think, and they still love me, and I’ve concluded, after careful consideration, that this person keeping score is me.”
-Adam Savage, of Mythbusters fame
In a talk – I don’t have a firm source, but I saw it on a video.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7338484-i-have-concluded-through-careful-empirical-analysis-and-much-thought
Adam’s bio on FFRF :
https://ffrf.org/ftod-cr/item/14799-adam-savage
This seems like an argument from ignorance. We don’t know, therefore…
The successful theories we have do not apply at quantum gravity scales — their success is at lower energies. So we have to be careful when we say ‘laws of physics break’. We don’t have a theory within which the laws are formulated, just like classical mechanics in a quantum world.
Cosmology says no? I don’t think that question can be formulated in the language of cosmology. This is the problem with religious ideas. They are expressed in such loose language that one can make up almost anything. People put words together to form sentences, but concrete meaning is important too. It’s not ‘just semantics’; it’s semantics.
Well put. The laws of physics can’t break, or else they’re not laws. Our understanding of those laws is what gets modified with new evidence.
And cosmology doesn’t say no to anything, it just says we have no evidence to support that claim. As usual, it’s up to the claimant to provide evidence.
My cosmology friend would disagree with you.
Oops, I meant “cosmotologist”. Cosmotologist, cosmologist, cosmology- what’s the difference?
Cosmetologists know the face of god.
The only thing we know for sure is that the concept of a God, all 4000 of them, was made up by man.
“But if you have an infinitely large amount of energy, or an unimaginably large amount of energy almost indistinguishable from infinity, is it so hard to imagine there wasn’t intelligence behind it?.”
Just as Aeiutez says, it IS hard for Aeiutez to imagine an absence of intelligence. That’s the problem with religious folks, thay can’t simply accept that we don’t know yet and that proposing a creator doesn’t move us any closer at all to understanding anything.
Aeiutuz is starting from a wrong understanding of inflation. Cosmic inflation did not precede the Big Bang, but is theorized to have occurred very shortly afterward and lasted for a minute fraction of a second. So his statement that “Inflation could have been going on for an infinite amount of time” is completely wrong.
Once you correct his misunderstanding of inflation (deliberate or not), his entire argument crumbles, even if you otherwise give any credence to his/her ramblings.
“Once you correct his misunderstanding of inflation (deliberate or not), his entire argument crumbles, even if you otherwise give any credence to his/her ramblings.”
I would argue, once you take into account all the mistakes he’s made hitherto, and all the deliberate obfuscations and outright lies, then if I continue to give him any credence at all, that is my fault.
It’s an argument I’ve made in the past about TFG. Once you have really strong evidence that he is and has always been a liar, then there is nothing short of a moral obligation to stop listening. To say “Yeah, I know he lies, but he says some things that make sense” shows a strong streak of irrationality.
Got to be good-lookin’ ’cause He’s so hard to see.
OOH! Nice one!
Sublime
Relatedly, I can’t really blame creations for adducing evidence for God. The Big Invisible Guy can’t seem to do it for Himself.
Good one!
My thoughts went immediately to Fabio.
Coels 50-50 proposition between two choices is similar to the Bayesian approach of forming a uniform prior distribution in the absence of knowledge permitting something more specific: to distribute ones ignorance equally. However, a Bayesian uses the uniform prior as a starting point to calculate a posterior distribution by folding in new information. Theists have no new information, so folding in zero to a uniform prior yields exactly zero as a posterior distribution.
> If you have two explanations for something, that implies that the truth lies somewhere near the middle.
Yup. Science says the earth is a (near) sphere. Flat-earthers say it is flat. So let’s compromise: it’s a cylinder.
Seconding Chetiya, I see that arguments from ignorance abound among the Discoveroids and the Discoveroid-adjacent.
Jerry, what you have called the Centrist Fallacy sounds to me like what others call the Middle Ground Fallacy. https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/middle-ground
“The first principle is you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.”
Richard Feynman
1974 Caltech commencement address
https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman
Their god wouldn’t be much of a god if it were just a mindless natural force. What they mean by “god” is some kind of mind, with wants, intentions, thoughts, foresight, all that. And the odds of this existing before the “creation” of the universe are not 50-50, because as far as we can tell, and even as far as we can possibly imagine, minds only come from brains, and brains only come after an immensely long process of evolution. So from all available evidence, the probability of Aeiutuz’ “state of something, maybe mass/energy beyond our description that was unimaginably large. Probably infinite. With intelligence” are 0%!
There’s also some baggage smuggled in any time some says “it’s possible that…”. That’s an assertion, presented without evidence. How do you know it’s possible? Hitchens’ famous dictum comes to mind, “that which is asserted without evidence may be dismissed without evidence”.
Exactly. “Intelligence” involves the ability to learn from new information — the mental capacity of understanding. We can stretch the term metaphorically and apply it to a computer program or other inanimate process, but applying it to “an infinite state of mass/energy” is only inspired by a desire to find a place for God.
Patricia Smith Churchland’s observation concerning the hard problem of consciousness is likewise relevant in such contexts. When not much is known about a domain of phenomena, our inability to imagine a mechanism is a rather uninteresting psychological fact about us, not an interesting metaphysical fact about the world.
It is appropriate to put the chances at 50/50 in some cases. For example, if we’re given a coin and we know nothing more than it is two-sided, then it would be reasonable to think the chances of it falling heads or tails when tossed is 50/50.
Of course, the god/no-god choice is not at all like the coin-flipping situation. In fact, it seems about as far away from it as we can get. It is reasonable to assign zero probability to the existence of something when we have no evidence for.
Unfortunately, it really isn’t that simple. If I said that there exists in Mexico a species of dog that is unknown to science, but that I have no evidence, what’s the probability of that being true? Surely the probability isn’t zero. On the other hand, 50/50 doesn’t seem right either.
The bottom line is that the probabilities one should assign to these things depends on one’s knowledge and beliefs. I’m not sure that this eliminates the Centrist Fallacy but it seems that some conditions must be applied to it.
Wish I had an edit button. I see several poorly worded sentences in my comment. Arrgh!
And now Bayesian inference allows incorporation of observation in the calculation.
How probable, _given_the_observations_, is a hypothesis true?
… hmmm… another fallacy or the (presumed) Centrist Fallacy? Ancient games with dice and coins appeal to the 100% or 0% true or false intuitions – either true or false -, while by modern lights, Bayes Theorem lets us see everything in between. That’s actually somewhere in the center…
I need a rest…
Yeah, but Bayesian inference still depends on agreement on beliefs. It tells one how they should update their beliefs given new evidence. That process will still give different results for different people even when they are all given the same new evidence.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies
[ goes to read ]
“He might as well just go the Einstein route and say that the laws of physics and history of the Universe are God, cutting out the anthropomorphic middleman.”
This is, in fact, a fairly accurate definition of pantheism (not to be confused with panpsychism of Intelligent Design), the only form of creationism that makes any sense to me. In pantheism, God is another word for Nature—or more accurately for the one Spirit that animates all living things. God is universal consciousness and evolution, at any given moment, is God caught in the act of creating the universe.
In other words, everything that science can tell us about the mechanics of the universe is true—true, that is, in the context of the ongoing self-correcting process that is the hallmark of the natural sciences. Using Occam’s razor, of course, one could argue that there’s no need to bring God into the equation at all, and this is true. Similarly, one can, by exhaustive analysis, account for everything there is to know about a work of art without concerning oneself with who created the damn thing.
Are you positing the existence of something that you call ‘Spirit’? What is it? Can you make the meaning more concrete? If not, it seems like grammatically correct nonsense. If you can make it more concrete, what do you mean when you say ‘Spirit that animates all living things’? Is this idea born more of desire than reason? Of course one can remove the idea as unnecessary, but why have it in the first place? Because you like it?
The Razor can work at different levels. At one level, one can have a concrete, but unnecessary, device in a theory; on another level, one can say something like ‘Spacetime is a conscious spirit that supports the matter and energy that is necessary to sustain the universe.’ The first is concrete because it can be a term in a mathematical expression; for example, an extra term, with a sufficiently small coefficient, in an equation of motion. The second is nonsense.
And having started off with ‘God is another word for Nature’, you introduce ‘Spirit that animates all living things’ and ‘God is universal consciousness‘. I already asked you about the former, but what does the latter mean?
In ‘God caught in the act of creating the universe’, what does ‘act’ mean? Are you thinking of an agent in the act of creating something?
It looks like you are making stuff up. Those who posit other kinds of gods can make up arbitrary nonsense in defence of their gods too. They needn’t care that it does not make sense to you, nor should they worry if you think that their ideas are unnecessary. You may, of course, bring your razor to shave what you don’t like while keeping what you want.
“Lastly, the fine-tuning argument has to start with the axiom that there would be something wrong if the universe did not contain human-like life.” I’m not sure that I agree with Coel on this. I would have thought that the fine-tuning argument is linked with the anthropic principle, and therefore doesn’t need to include god at all. It’s not that there would be something wrong if the universe did not contain humanlike life, but rather the reverse, that it does contain humanlike life, and therefore necessarily possesses the conditions required to make that life possible, since there would definitely be something wrong (and a god would probably exist) if humanlike life existed in a universe where it was impossible.
I think there’s still a problem involving Fine Tuning’s choice of target. Why pick life? Why not elephant trunks or molecular particles or the infinite number of things that have not and never will exist? The FineTuning Argument has always reminded me of Doug Adam’s famous parable of the puddle and the hole. “This hole has been lovingly crafted to fit my exact shape when I could have been a puddle in a hole which doesn’t fit me at all! I’m so special.”
I understand the concept of Fine Tuning but what I don’t understand is why a Christian Theist would use it as an argument for the existence of God. By definition the Christian God is omnipotent; He not only creates but is responsible for the conditions under which creation is possible. So what need for Fine Tuning? Does God operate under constraints? Fine Tuning, including constraints, thresholds and ranges would seem more indicative of a naturalistic universe. Not enough radiation and life is impossible. Too much radiation and life is impossible. Isn’t this what you would expect as a result of natural processes?
Yes, all the physical evidence is what one would expect given the absence of intelligent design. I guess s/he did it that way to test our faith.
Oh wait… that argument has been used…
God of no evidence is a known source of WASTE energy IMO. Decomposing at a very slow rate that matches the minds of it’s adherents’ suffering ignorance.
I was just browsing the misconceptions on Wikipedia – check this out :
“The Big Bang model does not fully explain the origin of the universe. It does not describe how energy, time, and space were caused, but rather it describes the emergence of the present universe from an ultra-dense and high-temperature initial state.[372]”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions
Learn somethin’ new everday! Nice call, Coel! (I know Coel called it, this is just a .. I guess, sympathetic reply..)
^^^ adding to my comment for source 372 :
https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/seuforum/faq.htm#m12
Gotta read that Harvard astronomy FAQ – it spun me in circles – check this out :
“… But that primordial pellet of matter and energy was NOT surrounded by empty space… it was surrounded by more matter and energy (which today is beyond the region we can observe.) In fact, if the whole universe is infinitely large now, then it was always infinite, including during the Big Bang as well.”
It’s a great FAQ – I know NOTHING!
Source : https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/seuforum/faq.htm
Space is a difficult concept to wrap one’s head around. Space, the sort of thing whose only property is that it takes up space. One inch of space takes up one inch of space. Take away all the matter in the universe, and it would still be full of … emptiness.
Just like time- the sort of ongoing event whose only property is that it takes time to elapse.
And now I just thought, it is spacetime – after settling on time emerging.
Always a surprise!
Make up stuff (about the world/cosmos/ anything really) that’s not concerned about being factual – actually eschews physical evidence. Then, when an evidence based enquiry technique (science) identifies phenomena that it describes with the same common imprecise words, claim that this confirms your non-evidence-based imaginings. Crazy.
“One of the aspects of god
came to the EARTH, mind you.
And look at what’s out there
how can… It isn’t in proportion”
– Richard Feynman
https://medium.com/@clay.c.edgar/if-earth-was-a-grain-of-sand-22ea58f43d5e
“But if you have an infinitely large amount of energy, or an unimaginably large amount of energy almost indistinguishable from infinity…”
This person doesn’t really get the concept of infinity.
In his July 2022 AMA, Sean Carroll explains where the probabilities for the fine-tuned universe come from: “ Sorry about that, people who like these numbers. The way they get them is they take some parameter in the universe like, I don’t know, the fine structure constant or whatever, the ratio of the neutron mass to the proton mass, a million different numbers, the cosmological constant, not a million, but a larger number of numbers, and then they completely pull out of their butts some probability distribution for these numbers.”
First, it’s not right simply because Sean says it. Second, he seems to be confusing “fine-tuned” with “improbable”. The two concepts are distinct. While it is true that the interesting cases are improbable cases of fine-tuning, since they seem to require a non-obvious explanation, one has to understand that the two concepts are distinct. In particular, the “we don’t know the probability distribution” argument, which Sabine Hossenfelder makes, is wrong.
Why questions in science only come close to being answered by appealing to the theory of evolution. I don’t see how something as complicated and fine tuned as our universe could be exempt from the theory of evolution — the universe must be alive! I think the universe has a long genetic code and the big bang was a sex act of two universes becoming one and conceiving a large number of dark matter baby universes! The universe evolved to be a highly elaborate holodeck with conscious virtual homunculi with or even without an external body in order to make universes exceptionally good decision makers with libertarian free will and therefore more successful at reproduction — the goal of evolution!
In my science fiction story, I imagine Uni and Tin in the superuniverse (a universe of universes), our universe parents! They both have highly engineered artificial bodies that communicate with their dark supermatter universe particle by the EM super-homuncular code that evolved over a very large number of universe generations! They fell in love with each other and decided to journey down the very lengthy path of culturally approved universe marriage and then merge their universes and also simultaneously produce an enormous number of universe offspring!
After many elaborate marriage ceremonies thrown by friends and family where anybody that has the slightest reservations about the marriage are encouraged to speak up because the marriage will be such a long lasting (trillions of years!) union almost impossible to undo — they marry! When they are finally legally and culturally married, they seclude themselves in their mansion for a year (their honeyyear!) communicating with the outside world only with minimal text messages — they spend a whole year causing a big bang and consummating their marriage!
At the end of the year, they still have two separate artificial bodies and live in their mansion in the superuniverse, but their artificial bodies both communicate with only one dark supermatter universe particle using the EM super-homuncular code! Their two dark supermatter particles have rotated around each other for a full year before finally merging and causing a big bang in which an enormous number of dark matter baby universe homuncular particles are conceived which they will both be raising for trillions of years which can interface with an enormous variety of external bodies whether artificial or natural using the EM homuncular code!
Much later on, they could promote any dark matter homuncular particle of someone in their universe to be a dark supermatter particle and deliver that particle into the superuniverse! They will have given birth to a child, a baby superuniverse particle that can stay in their heavily protected black box in their mansion with their dark supermatter universe particle and communicate with an artificial body wirelessly — they will then have a child in the superuniverse in addition to the enormous number of offspring in their universe particle!
Modern inflationary hot big bang cosmology says nothing about a “before inflation”. All the observations we make stretch 10^-35 s into inflation, but what we can see is a low energy plateau of an absolutely cold vacuum which naturally leads to an eternal inflation creating different local universes. Nothing need to have happened before, we can describe the mass-energy – it most likely is a scalar field – and we don’t see that it needed to be large energies but the opposite looks to be the case.
Those different universes suffice to explain apparent finetuning, our existence may be coincidence.