In the face of declining belief in God in countries like the US and UK, believers are looking for any evidence that God exists. But there’s nothing new to support the existence of the supernatural, though as science finds out more truths about the Universe, and we think of more questions about things (e.g., what is “dark matter”), religionists continue to take unanswered scientific questions as the evidence for God they so desperately need. And so a new book simply reprises the “god of the gaps” argument, a shopworn argument that has been tried–and has failed–many times before, both philosophically and scientifically. First, recent data from the US and UK on declining belief in God.
Here are figures from a 2023 Church Times article showing waning belief in the UK since 1981, though belief in life after death has held steady (belief in God is the line at the top in orange).. Click to read article:
And a similar decline from a 2022 Gallup poll showing a decline of about belief in the US of about 18% since 1950.
In both cases the trends are unmistakable, and, with a few hiccups, inexorable. How do you keep your faith when all around you people are leaving it? You write a book decrying materialism, which of course, like all such books (as well as those recounting “visits to heaven”) become bestsellers due to the many believers desperate for “proof of God.”
This article appeared in today’s Sunday Times of London (h/t Pyers). Click headline to read, or find the article archived here.
The book that gives evidence that God “must” exist is God, the Science, the Evidence, by Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies, published by Palomar on October 14 at £22. It’s already sold more than 400,000 copies in non-English editions (it was published four years ago in France), and U.S. publishers have ordered a print run of 110,000 for the book, which will be published here in a week.
The two authors are both believers, of course (excerpts from the Times are indented):
These authors — like Dawkins and Hawking — consider themselves men of science. Bolloré, 79, from Brittany, is a computer engineer who has founded a series of successful heavy industry, engineering and mechanical firms; Bonnassies, 59, from Paris, studied science and maths before a career as an entrepreneur in the French media industry.
Both are also men of faith. Bolloré is a lifelong Catholic. Bonnassies, who did not find his Christian faith until his twenties, said he thought before his conversion that “believers were irrational people”, adding: “God, the Resurrection, the Virgin Mary — I found it crazy.” Yet it was logic, he said, that won him around: “The surprise was there were many rational reasons to believe in God.”
And here is the book’s argument summarized by the Sunday Times. It amounts to no more than this (this is my characterization.
We do not understand how the universe began or how life began. If everything occurs by materialistic processes, what caused the Big Bang, and how did life originate? The most “rational” solution is a creator.
And some excerpts from the laudatory review in the Times (why are they touting superstition?):
Science and religion have never been easy bedfellows. As Thomas Jefferson put it in 1820, priests “dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight”. Five centuries of scientific breakthroughs — from Galileo to Darwin to Crick and Watson — have eroded our belief in the divine.
But now, according to a new book, a “great reversal” is under way. Science, its authors argue over 580 pages, has come full circle and “forcefully put the question of the existence of a creator God back on the table”.
Good Lord: has the argument ever been off the table? William Lane Craig has been banging the drum about it for years. But I digress; here’s more:
In a striking challenge to the academic consensus, two French authors, Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies, argue that the latest scientific theories lead to only one logical conclusion: an all-powerful deity created the universe and all life within it.
. . . .Instead, the authors have written a critique of materialism — the theory that all reality, including our origins, thoughts and consciousness, can be explained solely by physical matter and physical processes.
The materialist narrative for the beginnings of the universe and life on earth is so full of holes, he and Bonnassies argue, that every modern scientific advance increases the strength of the case that a “creator” is the only rational explanation.
The authors insist that their book is not a religious one, or one touting the advantages of faith. No, it’s a critique of one of the underpinnings of science, materialism.
The authors’ ideas have received support from unexpected quarters. The renowned physicist Robert Wilson, who was jointly awarded the Nobel prize in physics for the discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation, agreed to write the foreword to the book. “Although the general thesis … that a higher mind could be at the origin of the universe does not provide a satisfying explanation for me, I can accept its coherence,” he wrote. “If the universe had a beginning, then we cannot avoid the question of creation.”
Yes, but if God exists, how did He/She/They/It come into existence? Why terminate the regress of causes at the creator God instead of going back even further. After all, God is not simple, as Dawkins has emphasized, so how do an immaterial being of such complexity and power come about?
Here are the two main arguments described in the Times (my headings, indented matter from article).
The Universe:
For the past century, for example, scientists have known the universe is expanding. If stars and galaxies are always moving further apart, logic dictates, the universe must have started at a single point, in a state of immense density. In 1931 the Belgian theoretical physicist Georges Lemaître termed this the “primeval atom”. We now call it the Big Bang.
But if all matter originates from that single explosion, and materialism dictates there is nothing outside of matter, what caused the bang?
Evolution:
According to the theory of evolution, this incredibly sophisticated data storage system — 40,000 billion times more dense than the most advanced computer today — emerged from the primordial soup quite by chance. The authors write: “While we still do not know how that gap was bridged, or a fortiori, how to replicate such an event, we do know enough to appreciate its infinite improbability.”=
Finally, I find this bit pathetic:
Bolloré acknowledged that the book does not present proof of God’s existence. “You cannot prove it,” he said. “You have evidence for one theory — the existence of God. And you have evidence for the other one, which is the non-existence of God. The best you can do is to compare the two sides of the scale.”
But he said that many areas of science require as big a leap of faith as that demanded by faith in God. “We are all believers,” he said. “Believers in God believe, with some evidence — and believers in materialism, they believe in plenty of things which are a little bit weird.”
Perhaps surprisingly, the biggest critics of the French edition of the book have not been scientists, but priests. “Some theologians say we don’t want evidence of God because it would reduce the merit of faith,” he said. “‘We don’t want proof’, they say. ‘Because proof would mean that we don’t have faith.’”
Here we see that the authors offer only two alternatives: God or not-God, but the alternative is really materialistic processes that we do not understand but might with more work. And faith in materialism or science is not at all the same thing as faith in religion, an argument I dispelled in Slate some years ago.
The rejection by believers of the need for evidence is what is most pathetic. Faith, some say, is based not on empirical evidence but on revelation or authority (priests, Bibles, epiphanies, etc.) alone. Yet when believers see something that looks like evidence, they glom onto it. That’s why books like this are always best-sellers, why two documented “miracles” are required for canonization of a saint, and why people flock to Lourdes to be cured. It’s all because unexplained. cures and miracles count as evidence for God. So do books like Heaven is for Real!
And so we get “evidence” from unexplained origins—of both life and the Universe. To the authors, both of these fit into to a combination of The Cosmological Argument (or “First Cause” argument) and the “God of the Gaps” argument. Readers should know the problems with both of these, and if you don’t, simply look at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy or the relevant sections of Wikipedia. Since we don’t know how the Universe came into being (i.e., what is the physics behind the Big Bang?), or how the first form of “life” originated, it’s foolish and impossible weigh ignorance against a belief in God—and not just God, but clearly the Abrahamic God— the god of both authors.
I have spent more than half my life dealing with these arguments, and will say just one more thing before I show a few of the Times readers’ comments. The existence of a creator God, especially of the Christian subspecies, should not be accepted simply because it’s hard at present for materialism to explain some things. Instead, look to the Universe itself for positive proof of God: do we see signs of a loving, omnipotent creator God in the universe?
Carl Sagan discussed what evidence could count in favor of not just God, but the Christian God, as I do as well in Faith Versus Fact. But we don’t have any of that evidence. Why did God create so much of the Universe that is inhospitable for life? Why do little kids get cancers that kill them? Why do tsunamis and earthquakes happen that kill thousands of innocent people? These things cannot be explained rationally by positing a beneficent and omnipotent creator God. In the absence of these explanations, and of positive evidence for God (e.g., Jesus coming back and doing real miracles documented extensively by film and newspapers, or, as Sagan noted, the stars arranging themselves to spell “I am that I am” in Hebrew), the best alternative is atheism, the view “there is no positive evidence for God.” Thus the “god” side of the scales becomes lighter over time, continuing the trend begun when one after another “unexplainable” miracle or phenomenon was been explained by materialism. And of course physicists haven’t given up trying to understand the Big Bang, nor have biologists given up trying to understand how life originated. Will the authors give up their thesis if one day, under early life conditions, scientists see a primitive form of life originating in the lab, or create a theory of how there could be cyclical universes or multiple Big Bangs creating multiple universes? I doubt it, for they are “men of faith”.
A few readers’ comments. The first one was upvoted the most:
And some more. (The readers are clearly smarter than the authors, though there are some believers in there, too.)
There are 1100 comments, so knock yourself out! As for the Sunday Times, well, they decided to present an argument for God without interviewing detractors.
[ GIF : Captain Picard, ‘facepalm’ ]
Yes, but they are not men of science like Dawkins and Hawking. Why is it that I am never surprised to see an engineer of some flavor in these arguments?
I am tempted to say that clergymen are against the search for evidence of god because they know that there isn’t any more out there, and that these arguments only serve to broadcast that fact. We will never prove god more true, because there is a limited, and apparently exhausted, amount of evidence for its existence. Materialism, however, keeps becoming truer and truer as the years go on, and it seems reasonable to assume that science will someday close the gaps.
Ditto to second paragraph. People who go for Woo are often in science-adjacent professions. Both Bol and Bon are entrepreneurs, so called, which means people who are madly conceited.
I knew an engineer who was also a creationist. Certainly a smart-guy, but his arguments made it clear he did not understand evolution at a high-school level.
Engineering is all about intelligently designing stuff. Does this make it harder for them to properly understand other sorts of processes?
That’s an interesting idea. From an engineering PoV, the notion that billions and billions of years of random hacking around was a key part of what built us is just too ugly to take seriously. No project planning committee would ever consider such a thing. And the budgetary implications are obviously unacceptable.
Engineers are VERY overrepresented in the terrorist community in the Islamosphere apparently. Always found that strange but there’s some data on it.
One theory (from memory) is that they tend to see things more in black and white (like autistic splitting perhaps?)
D.A.
NYC
Or maybe that artsy bomb-builders tend to quickly Darwin themselves out of the community. 🙂
Well now, my father the engineer did not believe in this religious faith-based stuff. And as I have pointed out before, my scientist father-in-law was deeply commited to Catholicism. I would rather see a well-done survey about the religious views or lack of about engineers than get carried away with anecdotes. Don’t forget that while engineers are not scientists, their scientific education is significant, certainly compared to the average person.
To an engineer, everything looks like a machine, I guess. And machines have creators.
Making sh^t up is not “rational.” It’s just making sh^t up! God does not exist, and neither does “Fod.”*
*Just having a little fun, playing off the typo in the first sentence of your post. 🙂
Oy, I need to fix that!
“Fod is freight!”
I find myself repeatedly asking myself, “How can Bolloré and Bonnassies possibly believe that they are adding anything even remotely new or interesting to this discussion?”
I agree this is a good question. I think one possible answer is, “They are impatient.” The answers to questions about origins will not come during their lifetimes (or mine). They want a conclusion, a happy ending, and are not willing to sit uncomfortably with “We just don’t know.”
Well, every generation needs to learn about these arguments, and that includes the evidence for evolution, which I resurrected as it had disappeared from the textbooks. Newer textbooks simply ASSUMED that people knew the evidence for evolution, but they don’t.
And the party dominating our current federal government is doing its damnedest to ensure that nobody learns about evolution at all, or about genuine history, or other facts that they don’t like.
Hear hear. Where have they been all their lives? Old hat does not even begin to cover it.
“How can Bolloré and Bonnassies possibly believe that they are adding anything even remotely new or interesting to this discussion?”
Good point. I have been following this debate for the last 40 years. (I am a biologist.) The Wedge strategy from the Discovery Institute had a great plan (around 1998) to replace materialistic evolution with some kind of God-driven development (evolution?) and the emergence of life.
I have read a lot of this from people who seem to be smart and intelligent. It boils down to: Naturalistic cosmology and evolution can’t explain every step in this process. Ergo, “God did it.”
Why are people still doing this? It’s like whipping a dead horse.
I read the article in The Sunday Times. Nothing new here. Of course: The author may be correct that there’s a god behind this development. The problem: Does this really explain anything, or rather just imply that “God” is a way to label our ignorance of all the steps in cosmic evolution? Move on.
Why do we have brains? Why is there a series of gradual steps between things without brains, things which have something like a brain, things which have primitive brains, and then on up the scale?
If God exists then everything we associate with brains – consciousness, choice, intention, desires, thoughts, morals, personhood – are fundamental to existence. God could not be God if it lacked every one of those qualities, so they’re not anchored to the physical or material in any way, nor did they develop. Like God, they just are.
So why the brain? Why the bother? Mind is purely mental.
Unless it’s not. Let’s look at the evidence on that and apply it to whether the Universe began that way.
“We do not understand how the universe began or how life began.”
Since the claim that reality “began” is a non-starter, I’d LOVE to hear your proof that it did.
Evolution is a fairy tale for adults. You don’t even have to believe in God or gods to question it, just be capable of critical thinking and able to research topics on your own. The evidence just isn’t there, it’s a massive leap of blind faith to go from variations within a kind to all life sharing a common ancestor and life coming from nonlife and everything coming from nothing exploding.
Anyway, I wanted to comment on another article but the comments were closed so I’ll just paste it here instead:
Cenk Uygur is a jihadist propagandist who literally named his show after the people who genocided Christians and is a long-time denier of the genocides of Christians perpetuated by Muslims.
He’s a Muslim Jihadist, just like his brat nephew Hasan Piker who’s never worked an honest day’s labor in his life and openly incites violence against Americans. You’d think it odd he’s allowed a platform on places like YouTube, but YouTube literally lets muslim activists defend and promote child rape and child marriage because their pedophile illiterate false prophet Mohammed raped a 9 year old (Aisha) after marrying her when she was 6. The Quran is also basically a delcaration of war against the entire non-Islamic world, just read it for yourself and see.
It’s the unholy alliance of leftists and jihadists, their goal is simple: overthrow the Constitutional Republic of the United States of America. How else does it makes sense for Hamas-sympathizers and LGBT-promoters to align in their protests? How does “queers for palestine” make sense? It doesn’t unless you realize their goal is destroying the Constitutional Republic of the USA.
OMG what a load of hooey. You clearly haven’t read my book, “Why Evolution is True”, which has several hundred pages of evidence. If you have read the evidence and reject it, you must be religious.
And we are not talking about Cenk. You are not at the right website as we are rational here and stay on topic. Bye!
Religion is a fairy tale for children. Rational people grow out of it.
Goodness Mr. Facts (for you are a man) – are you new here?
heheehe
You’re mainly right with your analysis of Islam and Cenk.
Anyway… when the boss gets here I’d like you to meet him.
all the best,
D.A.
NYC
My favorite God-is-real argument is from Vintage Science Fiction. Starting at the present, ‘Mankind’ progresses beyond our current imagining, finally gaining ultimate power and unity in a single all-encompassing mind. ‘Mankind’ (Manmind?) then realizes its potential, steps outside of Time or time-travels to the Ultimate Beginning, and says, ‘LET IT BE.’
It’s not a popular trope — where do you go from there? — but it has been used by Asimov, in a short story that’s almost a squib (or a stub, as Wikipedia would say), and it may be the point of Olaf Stapleton’s ‘Star Maker,’ which I have not read, and never will.
Why will you never read Starmaker? I’ve read that and Last and First Men by Stapledon. I liked the latter better and think that it is really good. Starmaker wasn’t bad, though. (I am not convinced that I should read anything else by him.)
Nancy Bellicec considers it “must reading” in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” 😛
Another Asimov favorite was about a super computer that was left to think while humanity died out and the universe slowly wound down. And after a great period of time in the darkness this computer came to a Decision, and after considerable more planning it committed to an Action, which was to say LET THERE BE LIGHT – and there was light. That short story apparently got quite a reaction in the sci-fi sphere of old.
Not having the book or a Sunday Times subscription I can’t check but: Do the authors define “God” in the book title? Is it Bolloré’s modern Catholic god? Or the old-school yahweh? Or just something imaginary that’s capable of causing the big bang? Those are all very different things for which one could find or not find evidence. Does anyone here know what the authors mean by “god?
[ah ha ha my browser autocorrected “big bang” to “big band” so maybe there is a god and maybe he looks like Cab Calloway…]
You’d think that if there actually was a god, then she would talk to the pope, chief rabbi or the boss of islam, or whichever religion she believes in, and tell them how to prove it.
Stephen Fry has gone woo, but his argument against a god still stands. Agree with him that if there is a god, then they are a maniac. His comment about the insects is reason enough for any sane person to have total contempt for any ‘god’.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-suvkwNYSQo
“… (e.g. what is “dark matter”) religionists continue to take unanswered scientific questions as the evidence for God they desperately need.”
I have noticed that laypeople often ascribe supernatural meaning to the adjective “dark” for the hypothetical dark matter or the “dark energy” of general relativity. They think it is like the “dark side of the Force” or something.
Nonsense. Dark just means we can’t see it, like we can’t see anything in a dark room. If fact dark matter is a stupid misleading name. “Transparent matter” would be more logical. If the proposed dark matter exists, light goes right through it. It doesn’t interact with the electromagnetic field.
And, of course, when it comes to misleading physics terminology that has wrong supernatural connotations to laypeople, don’t get me started on a rant about the moron who thought it would be cute to give the Higgs boson the nickname “the God particle”. On the other hand, it is nice to think that one day I may meet a quark with naked charm …
“And of course physicists haven’t given up trying to understand the Big Bang”
I think at some point physics must result in unanswerable questions. Physics can sometimes accurately describe WHAT happens, but the question “WHY does it happen” can only be explained in terms of other physics deemed more basic and fundamental.
For example someone could ask me why the sun shines. I could reply by speaking of visible light as a large part of the radiation emitted by the sun due to energy produced by fusion processes deep in the interior of the sun. The person could then ask me why fusion of hydrogen into helium occurs and why it releases energy. I would then have to speak of the strong nuclear force and nuclear potential barriers and such. To answer the follow-up questions I would have to explain quarks and gluons and the standard model as best as I understand it.
Ultimately we run out of explanations. Everything gets back to the fundamental physics of quarks and leptons and force mediating bosons, or rather their quantum fields, and the structure of spacetime. But then we have the question “Why is spacetime that way and why do quarks and leptons and bosons behave that way instead of some other logically possible way?” I think there is no answer other than “The universe happens to be that way.”
I think the Weak Anthropic Principle helps here. If the universe was any other way then we wouldn’t be around to see it.
Very nice to meet another WAP fan. We’re pretty thin on the ground, eh?
As the philosopher David Chalmers has pointed out, we don’t know what quarks, electrons etc. are other than phenomena in human consciousness that manifest their existence to us when using certain technologies.
I agree that we don’t know what quarks and leptons really are. But I vociferously disagree that they are only “phenomena in human consciousness” rather than real things that existed in the world long before there were humans to infer their existence. Is the moon also only a “phenomenon in human consciousness”?
As regards the question of what particles and quantum fields and spacetime actually are, I take to heart the following saying of the physicist/cosmologist Ralph Alpher:
“Our best mathematical understanding of physical reality resembles reality only as much as a good map of London resembles the city of London.”
I didn’t say “only”. Our conscious minds perceive the moon as an entity that exists independently of our consciousness and long before humans existed. I don’t doubt that that perception is accurate. As for quarks and electrons, things get murkier – the role of the conscious observer making a measurement at that scale is incorporated into quantum physics.
Great quote!
Understood.
PS A famous bit of Zen advice seems appropriate here:
“Don’t mistake the finger pointing to the moon for the moon itself.”
AIUI, current understanding of the Measurement Problem does not require an Observer with a mind, much less a conscious mind; what it does require is still a very open question.
Speaking as an atheist and an admirer of our host’s writing on these subjects, I have to concede one point based on observations. Several people who particularly impress me by their kindness and intelligent helpfulness toward my Down Syndrome son adhere to a religious faith; these individuals are either Jewish or Christian.
I don’t know what other religions might foster attitudes like theirs, but perhaps it varies. From second-to-third hand information, I rather doubt that outlooks like those of these Jewish/Christian individuals would be fostered by the pieties of, for example, the Delian League, the pagan Roman Empire, the first Islamic Caliphate, the Ottoman Caliphate, the Aztec Empire, or the Comanche Empire.
I have met good people of pretty much every religion (and no religion). To my mind that doesn’t have any bearing on whether their faith (or lack thereof) is true.
The issue I am addressing is not factual truth, but rather
the culture of empathy associated with belief systems. In Christianity, there are cultural implications of the sayings about the meek inheriting the earth, and so on. In Jewish culture, stories like Peretz’ haunting “Bointsche Schweig”.
Does every belief system have analogous associations?
I’m not sure what you’re “conceding”, then, because the original post is about proof of God.
As far as I’m aware all of the major religions include elements of kindness in their teachings – one of my Muslim friends told me a tenet of his faith is to extend hospitality to all, including non-believers. A religion that didn’t include such elements wouldn’t be suitable for the social functions that religion fulfils and probably wouldn’t last long.
There is a nasty side to all religions as well (Christianity and Judaism included), which is why I think the kindness and helpfulness you mention is a property of individuals, not the faith they profess.
But Islamic charity is only for other Muslims, whereas Christian charity is for anyone in need. The Koran also says that Muslims must never be friends with non-Muslims. Fortunately not all Muslims follow that edict.
I personally know some very nice Muslims – nice as long as certain topics aren’t discussed. But that is probably the case with many fundamentalist Christians too.
Mike writes “The Koran also says that Muslims must never be friends with non-Muslims.”
I’m not sure that is the correct interpretation of the Quran, 3.28, which says that “Believers are not to take disbelievers for friends instead of believers.” It is usually understood to mean that with a choice of friends, chose believers rather than “disbelievers,” but in other circumstances it is ok to have disbeliever friends.
For Barbara – from a Muslim theological site:
[5:52] O ye who believe! take not the Jews and the Christians for friends. They are friends one to another. And whoso among you takes them for friends is indeed one of them. Verily, Allah guides not the unjust people.
Mike: It’s actually 5:51, and refers only to Jews and Christians. As far as I know — working in Muslim dominated African countries for 50 years — Islam does not prohibit “friendship” with members of any of the vast array of other religions in the world. One can easily understand the historical context in which an emerging religious movement was in conflict with existing Abrahamic religions — Islam was even at war with itself with Sunnis and Shi’ites.
I think that this laudable characteristic is descended from watching out for each other among dwellers of the desert.
But another religious system that came out of the desert didn’t seem to give rise to the same sort of cultural outlook.
Or Bronze Age OT Judaism. The disabled were considered cursed. This even shows up in the NT.
As the foundational beliefs of the Western nations shift—both from organic causes and due to immigration—it will be interesting to see what other parts of the cultural heritage will be shucked off with the religious.
Commitments to free speech, rationality, objectivity, rule of law, tolerance, and other core attributes of Western civilization also seem to be in retreat. I am not suggesting a causal relationship between this and the demise of the religious. But it is apparent, at least to my feeble eyes, that there is a parallel decline as many countries of the West suffer a certain cultural exhaustion and an unwillingness to defend, let alone advance, the attributes of their civilization in which they once took pride.
Our culture made great strides with skeptics coexisting alongside those who grope for evidence of God. I’m fairly convinced it will fail to do so with elites who embrace pregnant men and Queers for Palestine—and then silence those who dissent to these and other oddities.
” …many countries of the West suffer a certain cultural exhaustion…” Perhaps the signs of psychic breakdown are
response to the beginning of Kunstler’s “long emergency”:
the run-up of industrial civilization against some planet limits. Kunstler stressed fossil fuel limitation, perhaps prematurely;
but other limitations—climate change, waste disposal, desertification, water depletion, etc., etc. are pressing in on the human species in this century.
That last commenter in the Sunday Times excerpts attributed the “I have no need of that hypotheses” quote to Pascal, but it was actually Laplace.
You are of course correct. I was cooking at the time and could remember the French but got the author muddled!
Then there is:
“Will the real god please stand up!”
I guess they all have in this a common theme, parochial leanings to a local god delusion (local, not so much in the 21st century) this whimsical peice is just a warm and fuzzy for £22.
We learn nothing from nothing… LOL!
Re evolution.
Most people (including myself) don’t intuitively grasp time in the billions of years. Start work, catch a plane, appointment time, clock aid3d is fairly easy but billions of years? not so much.
A billion seconds is 31 years. Huh!?? So we’re gonna have to have 3.5 billion seconds (roughly) to get a hundred years. Evolution has had billions of years to do a set up of incremental change go forth and multiply. The huge difference between religious dogma and evolution and what small brains lose sight of, one claims it did in 6 fucking days with a tea break on the 7th while evolution requires a time scale we can barely comprehend.
Want it all, poof! your answer on demand… in the other corner, eternal patience and wonder.
Most amusing to me are the priests who would like to forbid believers from trying to prove that god exists, as the true path to belief must be through faith alone. The most important guiding truth in their lives must be devoid of thinking and rationality. That strikes me as a terrible life philosophy.
” How do you keep your faith when all around you people are leaving it? You write a book decrying materialism”
To me the concept of materialism seems to be an outdated legacy from when we largely understood the universe in terms of Newtonian physics. I’m not a scientist but when I read lay articles about physics by physicists I don’t see them describing reality in terms of matter. Instead they speak of fields and forces, vacuum and space and time. This is the ground out of which life arises and not bits of matter bumping into each other according to Newtonian physics.
So when I see religionists claiming that scientists are material reductionists I think they’ve got it wrong. It is the religionists who are being reductive of science, not the scientists being reductive of reality. The battle isn’t materialism vs immaterialism. It’s evidence vs fantasy.
In regards to first cause: It is logically impossible for existence as a whole to have a cause. This is not evidence for God. Any logical regression must either end where there is no further cause or it must regress infinitely. If the regression does terminate at a first cause then that first cause must itself be without cause.
As Jerry points out above, positing God simply extends the regression. And if one is going to posit God as a solution to causlessness then one should follow the extension to its end. With or without God, it ends at the same place: causlessness. But religionists rarely if ever follow the regression. Instead they posit God and then terminate any further thought.
“‘We don’t want proof’, they say. ‘Because proof would mean that we don’t have faith.’”
Yes, that’s pretty pathetic. We have this magnificent brain in our head. Religionists believe that God made this brain. And what do they say we should do with this magnificent brain? Shut it down and accept things on blind faith. Blind faith provides no purchase upon which to discriminate between belief systems leaving believers usually stuck in whatever belief system they became habituated to as they grew up.
Some brains are evidently more magnificent than others. Just saying.
“Idealism” is the idea that the universe exists in the mind. “Materialism” is the idea that the universe exists outside the mind. Bolloré and Bonnassies would have people believe the conflict is the physical versus the spiritual (meaninglessness versus meaning), but since energy (often confused with spirituality) is part of materialism, their concentration on the physical seems little more than a ploy to avoid a discussion of mind. The review gave no indication that they critique mind. If they don’t, the book can be ignored.
The premise that there are only two alternatives (God or not-God) for how the universe and life began is wrong. There are least four: God (benevolent supernatural being), demon (malevolent supernatural being), alien being, materialistic processes. The least likely to be true is the existence of a benevolent God.
Or there could be multiple gods, some good, some bad. Like the ancient Roman reiigion. Time to go back to our roots!
Presumably Bolloré, as a Catholic, already believes in multiple gods — angels, saints, demons, etc.
And Dad, Junior, and HG.
Our Universe is consistent with – but does not imply – an intelligent Creator of some sort. The best supporting evidence would be the usual “God is a mathematician” type of evidence – deep mathematics revealed in the fundamental laws of nature. It’s not a proof, of course.
However, our universe is inconsistent with personal gods of the Judeo-Christian sort.
Michel Yves Bolloré is the brother of Vincent Bolloré a wannabe French Elon Musk/Rupert Murdoch. The Bolloré family is one of the richest french families. It owns the French FoxNews called (i french) CNews. The family has launched a massive effort to « get rid of the leftist woke domination in the french media and culture.
I read a science paper that said every human consists of 380 trillion viruses and 38 trillion bacteria,to the point that as humans we are nothing more than a parasite stuck in a viral/ bacterial soup. Goodbye Adam and Eve.
Fundamental research is HARD, because the easy stuff has been found. But finding the “easy stuff” when it was found was HARD, and it took singular geniuses to do it. As a retired aerospace engineer, I am in awe of the those geniuses who provided me the tools of my trade, which enabled me as a youngster to participate in the grand adventure of landing a man on the Moon.
God or no-god: 1) There is no point in a universe where God’s Presence is obvious. 2) The only meaningful universe is one in which God hides his Presence, and fills the universe with good and evil, tragedy and death. 3) That allows believers to say “I have studied the evidence and choose to believe in God (and that life has meaning.) 4) Conversely, atheists can say that “I have studied the evidence, and despite the anthropic principle, fine tuning, and intelligent-like design, I still confidently reject the possibility of God and insist that life is totally meaningless and random.”
I am sorry, but this comment is nuts. You are making a virtue of necessity, saying that the only meaningful universe just happens to be one in which God hides his presence, and then say that he did not hide it very well because of shopworn “evidence” that true believers could see. The anthropic principle? Fine tuning? Intelligent design? You clearly do not know the evidence AGAINST these issues as being evidence for a god, much less the Abrahamic God. So God hid evidence for his/her/their/its being, but god did not hide it very well, because there has to be JUST ENOUGH EVIDENCe to convince believers but not enough to convince nonbelievers. Do you see that you are begging the question here?
I also find it very amusing that you adduce “evidence” for God but neglect that evidence against the Abrahamic god, like the presence of physical evil.
In sum, your argument is that the paucity of evidence for God is exactly what we need to believe in God. This could serve in a philosophy class as a perfect illustration of using non-evidence as evidence. But if you had lived in the days of Jesus, when there was supposedly plenty of empirical evidence to convince believers (all those miracles, including the Resurrection, you would have NO TROUBLE saying that you believe because God made his presence dead obvious. Why all of a sudden did God make it more tricky to believe in him?
I suggest you go post on a theological website, because your arguments get no traction here.
So then G is omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, and omnidickish, right?