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I picked up a book by Dinesh D'Souza the other day. The title was "What's So Great About Christianity." The title didn't really attract me, I was just rumbling through different books out of boredom. I figured this would be a stupid book, but it caught my interest after reading the first chapter. I started flippng through other chapters and soon realized that the book had very little to do about detalng what was "so great" about Christianity, and more to do with responding to many of the atheist positions as expressed by the New Atheists. I found that he had been essentially arguing some of the same exact points I have tried to make over the past year regarding the doctrine of materialism and how it has pretty much helped pedetermine many scientific conclusions.

The part I liked the most was when he started showing how scientists had gone into teh field with a specific intent to attack religion, and he also showed how scientists from all over opposed the Big Bang solely on the basis that it opened the door to religion.

Anyway, what follows is chapter fourteen of his book - I transcribed it last night because the internet was down, I couldn't sleep, and I was bored. I knew I wouldn't be on the forum for another couple of weeks, so I decided you guys could mull over this and offer some feedback while I'm gone:

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The Methodological Atheism of Science

"There is no such thing as philosophy-free science" - Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea

It is time to highlight a serious problem with our understanding of modern science. The problem is not with modern science itself, but rather with a faulty view of science: the idea that science is a complete framework for understanding man and the universe, so unscientific claims should be automatically rejected. Although this way of approaching knowledge is put forward as the very epitome of rationality, I want to show that it is profoundly irrational. It would be like trying to understand a murder solely through the laws of physics and chemistry. However indispensible those laws in figuring out which gun was used, we have to look elsewhere to discover other crucial elements like why the killer did it. In this chapter we will see why the attempt to explain everything scientifically is inadequate and even unreasonable. Atheists who pursue this approach are ultimately an embarrassment to science.

Scientists like to think of themselves as reasonable people. They fancy themselves ready to follow the path of evidence no matter where it takes them. Indeed in no other field do people go around congratulating themselves so much on how rational they are, how strictly their conclusions conform to testing and experience, and how biases and prejudices are routinely removed through the process of empirical verification and peer criticism. Carl Sagan's boast is typical: "At the heart of science is... an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive." Such is the prestige of science in our culture that these claims are widely accepted.

Yet the actual behavior of some scientists can be manifestly unreasonable. Leading scientists will sometimes embrace a conclusion even when the evidence for it is weak. These savants become indignant when an unsupported conclusion is questioned, and they even accuse their critics of being enemies of science. On other occassions, scientists show their unwillingness to accept conclusions even when a great deal of evidence points to them. In fact, they denounce the reasonable position and prefer to align themselves with unreasonable alternatices that are clearly less plausible.

Several years ago eminent science writer John Maddox published an article in Nature titled "Down with the Big Bang." This is strange language for a scientist to use. Clearly the Big Bang happened, but Maddox gives the impression that he wishes it hadn't. He is not alone. Earlier I quoted astronomer Arthur Eddington's description of the Big Bang as "repugnant." Eddington confessed his desire to find "a genuine loophole" in order to "allow evolution an infinite time to get started." So one reason for resisting the Big Bang is to make room for the theory of evolution.

There are others. Physicist Stephen Hawking explains why a large number of scientists were attracted to the steady state theory of the origin of the universe: "There were therefore a number of attempts to avoid the conclusion that there had been a big bang...Many people do not like the idea that time has a beginning, probably because it smacks of divine intervention." The same point is made bt Steven Weinberg. Some cosmologists endorse theories because they "nicely avoid the problem of Genesis."

What exactly is this problem? Astronomer and physicist Lee Smolin writes that is the universe started at a point in time, this "leaves the door open for a return of religion." This prospect has Smolin aghast. "Must all of our scientific understanding of the world really come down to a mythological story in which nothing exists...save some disembodied intelligence, who, desiring to start a world, chooses the initial conditions and then wills matter into being?" Smolin adds, "It seems to me that the only possible name for such an observer is God, and that the theory is to be criticized as being unlikely on these grounds."

Here we have scientists who do not seem to be acting like scientists. Why is it necessary to object to findings in modern physics in order to give evolution time to get going? Why is it important to avoid the "problem of Genesis" or to shrink away from any theory that suggests a divine hand in the universe? If the evidence points in the direction of a creator, why not go with it?

Douglas Erwin, a paleobiologist at the Smithsonian Institution, gives part of the answer: "One of the rules of science is, no miracles allowed," he told the New York Times. "That's a fundamental presumption of what we do." Biologist Barry Palevitz makes the same point. "The supernatural," he writes, "is automatically off-limits as an explanation of the natural world."

Erwin and Palevitz are absolutely correct that there is a ban on miracles and the supernatural in modern scientific exploration of the universe. Yet their statements raise the deeper questions: why are miracles and the supernatural ruled out of bounds at the outset? If a space shuttle were to produce photographs of never-before-seen solar bodies that bore the sign YAHWEH MADE THIS, would the scientific community still refuse to acknowledge the existence of a supernatural
creator?

Yes, it would. And the reason is both simple and surprising: modern science was designed to exclude a designer. So dogmatic is modern science in its operating procedures that today all evidence of God is a priori rejected by science. Even empirical evidence of the kind normally admissible in science is refused a hearing. It doesn't matter how strong or reliable the evidence is; scientists, acting in their professional capacity, are obliged to ignore it. The position of modern science is not that no miracles are possible but rather that no miracles are allowed.

All of this may seem surprising, in view of how science developed out of the theological premises and institutions of Christianity. Copernicus, Kepler, Boyle and others all saw a deep compatibility between science and religion. In the past century and a half however, science seems to have cast aside its earlier resupposition that the universe reflects the rationality of God. Now scientists typically admit the orderliness of nature but refuse to consider the source of tht orderliness. One reason for teh shift is the increasing secularization of teh intelligentsia since the mid-nineteenth century, a process described by Christian Smith in his book The Secular Revolution.

Another is the discovery that unexplained mysteries of the universe, once attributed to God, can now be given scientific explanations. "the Darwinian revolution," Ernst Mayr writes, "was not merely the replacement of a worldview in which the supernatural was accepted as a normal and relevant explantory principle by a new worldview in which there was no room for supernatural forces." Consequently, science has become an entirely seculr enterprise, and this - oddly enough - creates problems for science. By narrowly focusing on a certain type of explanation, modern science is cutting itself from the truths not amenable to that type of explanation.

We have seen how some leading physicists refuse to admit strong evidence about the origins of the universe to avoid having to consider creator. Now let us consider how some distinguished biologists are willing to embrace weak evidence to corroborate evolution and eliminate the need for a divine being superintending the process. Biologist Frank Harold knows how complex are teh workings of even the simplest cells, because he wrote a book about it. He also knows evolution presumes the existence of fully formed cells with the power to replicate themselves. So what is teh origin of teh cell? "Life arose here on earth from inanimate matter, by some kind of evolutionary process." How does Harold know this? "This is not a statement of demosntrable fact," he concedes, "but an assumption." An assumption supported by what? Harold is not afraid to answer, "It is not supported by any direct evidence, nor s it likely to be, but it is consistent with what evidence we do have."

Actually, I've found someone who doesn't share Harold's assumption: Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA. Crick, like Harold, recognizes that the origin of life seems almost a miracle, given the intricate machinery of teh cell and given how quickly life appeared on the earth after the planet's formation. Crick cannot agree with Harold, Dawkins and others who blithely posit that some combination of chemicals must have proved the right one. So Crick offers a different theory: space aliens must have brought life to earth from another planet! This theory is seriously put forth in Crick's book Life Itself.

John Maddox recognizes that science knows little about the relationship between brain circuits and human consciousness. Yet he asserts, "An explanation of the mind, like that of the brain, must ultimately be an explanation in terms of the way that neurons functions. After all, there is nothing else on which to rest an explanation." Nicholas Humphrey goes even further: "Our startng assumption as scientists ought to be that on some level consciousness has to be an illusion." Most people might find this a remarkable conclusion, but not Humphrey; it is his "starting assumption."

Writing in The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins admits that there are significant gaps in the fossil record. Then his argument takes a strange turn. If we take Darwinian evolution seriously, "The gaps, far from being annoying imperfections or awkward embarrassments, turn out to be exactly what we should positively expect." In other words, the absense of evidence is itself proof that the theory is correct. This s so bizzare that it makes one wonder what the presence of evidence might do to this theory. Would a complete fossil record without gaps be evidence against Darwinian evolution, as we hear that Dawkins and his fellow biologists "exactly" and "positively" expect that such evidence should not be present?

Dawkins finally puts his cards on teh table by saying, "The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaning the existence of organized complexity. Even if the evidence did not favor it, it would still be the best theory available." This is a revealing admission. Steven Pinker makes pretty much the same point: "Because there are no alternatives, we would almost have to accept natural selection as the explanation of life on this plnet even if there were no evidence for it." My point is not to deny that there is good evidence for evolution. There is, but it is not as good as you would be led to believe by the champions of Darwinism, That's because the champions of Darwinism are completely blind to weaknesses in the theory. They cannot even imagine that it is not true.

This is a level of dogmatism that would embarrass any theist. Even the strongest religious believer can imagine the possibility that there is no God. So how can these self-styled champions of reason adopt an approach that is so utterly closed-minded? It is the product of a philosophical commitment many of them have without being aware that they have it. Dawkins and the others seem naïvely to think that they are apostles of reason who are merely following the evidence. The reason they are deluded about their philosophical commitment is that it is hidden inside the scientific approach itself.

Modern science seems to be based on an unwaivering commitment to naturalism and materialism. Naturalism is the doctrine that nture is all there is. According to naturalism, there are neither miracles nor supernatural forces. Therefore reports of the supernatural can only be interpreted naturalistically. Materialism is the belief that material reality is the only reality. There is no seperately existing mental or spiritual reality. Of course, people are conscious and have thoughts and perhaps even spiritul experiences, but this can be understood as only the workings of the neurons in their material brains. The mental and spiritual are presumed to be mere epiphenomena of the material.

Now these philosophical doctrines - naturalism and materialism - have never been proven. In fact, they cannot be proven because it s impossible to demonstrate that immaterial reality does not exist. Naturalism and materialism are not scientific conclusions; rather, they are scientific premises. They are not discovered in nature but imposed upon nature. In short, they are articles of faith. Here is Harvard Biologist Richard Lewontin:

We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment - a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori commitment to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

And you thought I was making this stuff up!

Is science, then, intrinsically atheistic? Here we must distinguish between two types of atheism. The first kind is procedural or methodological atheism. This means that scientists go about their official business by presuming that we live in a natural, material world. Within this domin, miracles are forbidden, not because they cannot happen, but because science is the search for natural explanations. So, too, the mind and the soul must be studied materially, not because they are purely material phenomenon, but because it is the job of science to examine only the material effects of immaterial things.

Science is indeed atheist in this procedural or narrow sense. And this is okay, because we don't want scientists who run into difficult problems to get out of them by saying, "You know, I'm not going to investigate this any longer. I'm just going to put it down as a miracle." History shows that the search for natural explanations can yield marvelous results. Physicist Paul Davies rightly notes that "however astonishing and inexplicable a particular occurrence may be, we can never be absolutely sure that at some distant time in the future a natural phenomenon will not be discovered to explain it." Of course there is no reason to believe anything based on the expectation of future scientific discoveries that have not yet occurred. Even so, there are very good operational benefits to letting the scientists do their jobs and examine the world in its ntural and material dimension.

There are many religious scientists who find no difficulty in working within this domain of procedural atheism and at the same time holding their religious beliefs. Biologist Francis Collins says that as a biologist he investigates natural explantions for teh origin of life while as a Christian he believs that there are also supernatural forces at work. "Science" he writes, "is not the only way of knowing." Astronomer Owen Gingerich writes, "Science works within a constrained framework in creating its brilliant picture of nature... This does not mean that the universe is actually godless, just that science within its own framework has no other way of working." Yet at the same time Gingerich believs that "reality goes much deeper" than the scinetific portrait of it. Gingerich argues that the theist view of " a universe where God can play an interactive role" is a valid perspective that goes "unnoticed by science" but at the same time is "not excluded by science."

Some people regard scientific and religious claims as nherently contradictory because they are unwitting captives to a second type of atheism, which we can call philosophical atheism. This s the dogma that material and natural reality is all that exists. Everything else must be illusory. Biologist Francis Crick admits that his commitment to materialism and his hostility to religion motivated him to enter his field. "I went into science because of these religious reasons, there's no doubt about that. I asked myself what were the things that appear inexplicable and are used to support religious beliefs." Then Crick sought to show that those things have a purely material foundation. In the same vein, physicist Steven Weinberg confesses that the hope of science will liberate people from religion, "is one of the things that in fact has driven me in my life."

The adversaries of religion, like Crick, Weinberg, Dawkins and Dennett, frequently conflate procedural atheism with philosophical atheism. They pretend that because God cannot be discovered through science, God cannot be discovered at all. Here s a classic statement from biologist WIll Provine: "Modern science directly implies that the world is organized strictly in accordance with deterministic principles or chance. There are no purposive principles whatsoever n nature. There are no gods and no designing forces rationally detectable." Provine makes it sound like this is one of modern science's great discoveries, wheras it is modern science's operating premise. Provine assumes without evidence that scientific knowledge is the only kind of knowledge, and that it gives us true and full access to reality.

Are these assumptions valid? I wil examine the second one in a subsequent chapter. But consider the first premise, that scientific knowledge is the only kind of knowledge. Physicist John Polkinghorne proides the following example. If you were to ask a scientist, "Why is that water boiling?" he or she would answer in terms of molecles and temperatures. But there is a second explanation: the water is boiling because I want a cup of tea. This secon explanation is a perfectly valid description of reality, yet it is ignored or avoided by the scientific account. The reason for this, mthematician Roger Penrose writes, is that science is incapable of answering questions about the nature or purpose of reality. Science merely tries to answer the question, "How does it behave?" So science does not even claim to be a full description of reality, only one aspect of reality.

Philosophical atheism is narrowly dogmatic because it closes itself off from knowledge that does not conform to materialism and naturalism. Only data that fit the theory are allowed into the theory. By contrast, the theist is much more open-minded and reasonable. The theist does not deny the validity of scientific reasoning. On the contrary, the theist is constantly reasoning in this way in work and life. The theist is entirely willing to acknolwedge material and ntural causes for events, but he also admits the possibility of other types of knowledge. Just because science cannot admit that the evidence of a Big Bang points to the existence of a creator doesn't mean that this is not a valid inference for us to make. Just because science cannot show that humn beings have a spiritual dimension that is not present in other living creatures doesn't mean that such a conclusion, derived from experience, is unreasonable or inadmissible.

Scientific truth is not the whole truth. It cannot make the case for naturalism or materialism, because it operates within naturalism and materialism. When we realize this, then philosophical atheism becomes much less plausible. They we can let science do its admirable job without worrying in the least that its procedural atheism provides any support for atheism generally.

Would you prefer that science admitted "magic" as an explanation for phenomena?

Science doesn't presume atheism. If there were overwhelming statistical evidence that groups of cancer patients who were prayed for were healthier than those which were not, science would pretty much be compelled to acknowledge the power of prayer. Unfortunately for kooks like you, though, neither this effect nor anything like it has been demonstrated.

Science does, however, presume mechanism -- that stuff happens because of other stuff, and in predictable ways. You want "God" to get involved, even though the God hypothesis doesn't explain anything -- and can't explain anything, unless and until believers ascribe testable characteristics to it. Without the assumption of mechanism, you couldn't do science. Period.

I would prefer a science that does not make dogmatic assertions for which there is no evidence. The arguments regarding evolution often seem to be focused on a lot of supposition and guesswork. When I studied evolutionary biology I would often get assertions in the text for which I could find no evidence or even promises that the evidence will be found with further study. That's fine but in few other branches of scientific study have I seen such an approach taken where so much is asserted without evidence.

In one of my other interests, physics, you get some guesses too but they are usually clearly labeled as such. In evolutionary biology, I don't find that humility.

This is also why I stopped reading about evolutionary biology. With physics each step is exciting and we turn on our machines to find out what happened. In evolutionary biology it seems that they have most of the conclusions and will make minor corrections if need be but the main mechanism is dogmatically held onto.

I don't want a miracle studied. They can't be. Their nature precludes it. They (if they exist) are an invasion of the natural world by a supernatural power. They can't be predicted, duplicated, or explained so why try?

The Nehor wrote:I would prefer a science that does not make dogmatic assertions for which there is no evidence. The arguments regarding evolution often seem to be focused on a lot of supposition and guesswork. When I studied evolutionary biology I would often get assertions in the text for which I could find no evidence or even promises that the evidence will be found with further study. That's fine but in few other branches of scientific study have I seen such an approach taken where so much is asserted without evidence.

In one of my other interests, physics, you get some guesses too but they are usually clearly labeled as such. In evolutionary biology, I don't find that humility.

Which biology textbooks have you read that have made dogmatic assertions without evidence? What were those assertions, specifically?

This is also why I stopped reading about evolutionary biology. With physics each step is exciting and we turn on our machines to find out what happened. In evolutionary biology it seems that they have most of the conclusions and will make minor corrections if need be but the main mechanism is dogmatically held onto.

The main mechanism leads to a logically valid conclusion of evolution, and based on our current understanding of genetics, we know it's sound as well.

I don't want a miracle studied. They can't be. Their nature precludes it. They (if they exist) are an invasion of the natural world by a supernatural power. They can't be predicted, duplicated, or explained so why try?

You put this a lot better than I did. Thank you.

JohnStuartMill wrote:Science does, however, presume mechanism -- that stuff happens because of other stuff, and in predictable ways.

So you don't believe in Quantum Mechanics?

Would you prefer that science admitted "magic" as an explanation for phenomena?

Absolutely not. I'm not sure why you're even asking this. Clearly you have not read the post. I don't think it was up long enough for anyone to read it in its entirety.

Science doesn't presume atheism

Modern science does, apparently. Read the statements by scientists above.

If there were overwhelming statistical evidence that groups of cancer patients who were prayed for were healthier than those which were not, science would pretty much be compelled to acknowledge the power of prayer.

This is two posts in a row where you utterly fail to comprehend what's been said. You're responses don't even make sense in light of what's been said.

Unfortunately for kooks like you, though, neither this effect nor anything like it has been demonstrated.

Nor can it be. You're still missing the point. Nobody is saying spiritual experiences should be tested, because they can't be. It is ridiculous to assume the experiment you just mentioned would yield any positive results because it misunderstands the purpose of prayer. No religious person really believes that prayer alone makes miracles.

Science does, however, presume mechanism -- that stuff happens because of other stuff, and in predictable ways. You want "God" to get involved, even though the God hypothesis doesn't explain anything

Actually it explains plenty, just not in a way that fits the very limited and narrow paradigm of modern science.
But I am not trying to get God involved in science. I accept that science cannot prove God, but I know God can be found if they knew where to look and how to look. But they begin with an anti-God premise and use a scientific method that is designed only for the material world. Yes, it is a proven fact that scientists bend over backwards to avoid conclusions that point to God. Which is funny when they then complain, as Dawkns does, that God hides himself if he exists. It isn't that science hasn't found him therefore he mustn't exist; it is that science is designed to reject him as a beginning premise.
Haven't you been paying attention? Scientists no less authoritative that Stephen Hawking make this point perfectly clear to those willing to listen. The reason so many scientists rejected the "science" of the Big Bang was because it gave strong evidence that God exists. It annoyed them to no end, and they were willing to spit in the face of science to see their own agenda served. But they could do that and not be attacked as science hating kooks, because at least they weren't religious. I mean if religious non-scientists reject science for their own purposes, well, who cares? At least they aren't scientists. So what's a scientists' excuse for doing the same thing?
Now regarding the mechanism, it is heading out the window as well. You simply do not understand the mountain of cosmological evidences supporting the God thesis. Here is something I posted a while back from a chapter of Patrick Glynn's book, God the Evidence. I'll post it again, and please read it all before commenting.
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A Not-So Random Universe

In the fall of 1973, the world's most eminent astronomers and physicists gathered in Poland to commemorate the 500th birthday of the father of modern astronomy, Nicolaus Copernicus. Assembles for the special two-week series of symposia were some of the most illustrious scientific minds of our time: Stephen W. Hawking, Roger Penrose, Robert Wagoner, Joseph Silk, and John Wheeler, to name only a few. The mood was festive. East-West detente was still in its heyday, and Poland's then-Communist government, bursting with pride at its favorite son Copernicus, rolled out the red carpet for its prestigious foreign guests. Participants were treated to a lavish reception and even a ballet. For the first half of September, scientists shuttled back and forth among Warsaw, Krakow, and Copernicus's birthplace of Torum, taking in the sights, listening to countless lectures, comparing notes on the latest astronomical discoveries, and airing their newest cosmological speculations.

Yet of the dozens of scientific lectures presented during the festivities, only one would be remembered decades later, echoing far beyond the hall in Krakow where it was delivered, indeed far beyond the field of astronomy or even science itself. Its author, Brandon Carter, was a well-established astrophysicist and cosmologist from Cambridge University, a close friend and sometime fellow graduate student of the (later) more famous Hawking. The title of the paper was technical sounding and the tone of the presentation highly tentative. "Large Number Coincidences and the Anthropic Principle in Cosmology," Carter called it. Yet there was nothing merely technical about the paper's implications. For the insights he presented, 500 years after Copernicus's birth, spelled nothing less than the philosophical overthrow of the Copernican revolution itself.

Carter called his notion the "anthropic principle," from the Greek word anthropos, "man." The name was a bit off-putting. And Carter's definition of the idea was highly technical. The anthropic principle consisted of the observation that "what we can expect to observe [in the universe] must be restricted by the conditions necessary for our presence as observers." In plainer English, the anthropic principle says that all the seemingly arbitrary and unrelated constants in physics have one strange thing in common - these are precisely the values you need if you want to have a universe capable of producing life. In essence, the anthropic principle came down to the observation that all the myriad laws of physics were fine-tuned from the very beginning of the universe for the creation of man - that the universe we inhabit appeared to be expressly designed for the emergence of human beings.

This discovery, already percolating among physicists in the early 1970's, came as something of a surprise, to put it mildly. For centuries, scientific exploration seemed to be taking us down precisely the opposite road - toward an ever more mechanistic, impersonal, and random view of the cosmos. Twentieth-century intellectuals had commonly spoken of the "random universe." The predominant view of modern philosophers and intellectuals was that human life had come about essentially by accident, the by-product of brute, material forces randomly churning over the eons. This conclusion seemed to follow naturally from the two great scientific revolutions of the modern era, the Copernican and the Darwinian. With the sun-centered model of the planetary system, Copernicus showed that humanity was not in any sense "central" to the universe. "Before the Copernican revolution, it was natural to suppose that God's purposes were specially concerned with the earth, but now this has become an implausible hypothesis," the atheistic scientist Bertrand Russell wrote in his 1935 classic, Religion and Science. Darwin, moreover, had demonstrated that the origins of life and even of the human species could be explained by blind mechanisms. In the wake of Copernicus and darwin, it no longer seemed plausible to regard the universe as created for humanity as a creature of God. "Man" should rather be understood, as Russell expressed it, as some kind of unfortunate accident or sideshow in the material universe - "a curious accident in a backwater."

The philosophical, cultural, and emotional impact of this conclusion could hardly be overstated. It explained the tone of despair and angst that came to characterize modern culture, the desperate feeling that humankind was alone and without moorings, and above all without God. It was this random universe cosmology that underpinned all the atheistic modern philosophies - from Russell's own positivism, to existentialism, Marxism, even Freudianism.

But then the unexpected occurred. Beginning in the 1960's, scientists began to notice a strange connection among the number of otherwise unexplained coincidences in physica. It turns out that many mysterious values and relationships in physics could be explained by one overriding fact: Such values had been necessary for the creation of life. The physicit Robert Dicke was the first to draw attention to this relationship. The scientist John Wheeler, one of the most prestigious practitioners of cosmology, became interested in the idea in the 1960's. Then, at Wheeler's urging, Carter presented the observation in full-blown form at the Copernican festivities.

A Scientific Embarrassment

The anthropic principle offered a kind of explanation for one of the most basic mysteries in physics - the values of the fundamental constants. Physicists had never been able to explain why the values of the so-called fundamental constants - for example, the values for the gravitational force or the electromagnetic force - were as they were. They were just "constant." One had to accept them. Moreover, there were certain mysterious mathematical relations among some of these constants. For example, the forces binding certain particles seemed to be mathematically related to the number for the age of the universe. Why should these forces be related to the age of the universe? In the past, physicists like Arthur Eddington and Paul Dirac had come up with some rather exotic theories to explain these coincidence.

But there was a simpler way of explaining them, as Carter pointed out in his lecture. If one examined closely the evolution of the universe, one would see that these precise values or ratios were necessary if the universe was tro be capable of prducing life. In a certain sense, this finding was no surprise: We would not expect to be observing a universe that had not produced us in the first place. Still, the number of strange "coincidences" that could be explained simply because they were necessary for producing life in the universe was surprisingly large.

That was where Coperniccus came in. People had interpreted Copernicus's theory to mean that humankind had no "privileged central" place in the universe, as Carter put it. But the explanation was not so simple. Too many values had seemingly been arranged around the central task of producing us. So, as Carter stated (in a somewhat hair-splitting fashion), even if our position in the universe was not "central," it was "inevitably privileged to some extent." Few people at the time seemed to be thinking deeply about the philosophical implications of this discovery. But they were nothing short of astounding. In effect, the "random universe" was out the window. There was nothing random at all about the arrangement of the cosmos - as phsyicists quickly began to see. The vast, fifteen-billion-year evolution of the universe had apparently been directed toward one goal: the creation of human life.

The anthropic principle raised fundamental questions not only about the modern interpretation of Copernicus, but ultimately about Darwinism as well. It certainly showed that Darwin's theory of "natural selection" could no longer be taken as an exhaustive explanation for the phenomenon of life. The notion that the whole process could be reduced to the workings of a single, simple "blind" mechanism was fundamentally flawed. The picture was vastly more complex than that.

The point is this: The "death of God" had been based on a fundamental misinterpretation of the nature of the universe, on a very partial and flawed picture that science had come up with by the late nineteenth century. Now that pictures was being replaced by a new one, vastly more complex - and decisively more compatible with the nation that the universe had been designed by an intelligent creator. Indeed, what twentieth-century cosmology had come up with was something of a scientific embarrassment: a universe with a definite beginning, expressly designed for life. Ironically, the picture of the universe bequeathed to us by the most advanced twentieth-century science is closer in spirit to the vision presented in the Book of Genesis than anything offered by science since Copernicus. The irony is deepened by the fact that modern cosmology is the result of extending the concept of "evolution" - an idea once viewed as deeply inimical to faith.

The Primeval Atom

What made the discovery of the anthropic principle possible was the advent of big bang cosmology. At the time Russell wrote Religion and Science, nobody knew in a scientific sense how the universe had begun, or whether it had a beginning. In the late 1920's the physicist George Lemaitre proposed that the universe had originated in a primeval atom, but this was a higly controversial idea. Then in 1945 came the explosion of the atomic bomb. Shortly thereafter the physicist George Gamow proposed that the universe had originated in a similar original cataclysm. The existence of the bomb - and the theories that went into understanding nuclear fusion - gave this notion of an initial explosion greater credibility. The Lamitre-Gamow model accounted for one important mystery, the "red shift." In 1927, the astronomer Edwin Hubble had discovered that other galaxies are rapdily rushing away from our (causing light from these galaxies to shift toward the red end of the color spectrum), that the universe is constantly expanding. The primeval atom theory - which envisioned the universe exploding out from an initial point - explained why that would be. But for roughly twenty years, scientists were divided between Gamow's theory and the so-called steady state universe, or the argument that the universe had always been there. It was Fred Hoyle, a leading proponent of the steady state theory, who coined the derisive term "big bang theory" to describe the position of his opponents. The label stuck.

Then in 1964, a couple of scientists at Bell Laboratories, Arno Penzias and Robert W. Wilson, stumbled on what was later known as the cosmic background radiation. Penzias and Wilson, who were working on communication satellited, were annoyed to find low-level "noise" emanation from every direction in the sky. Physicists quickly realized what this noise was- an echo of the big bang billions of years before. It became apparent that the big bang theory was almost certainly right. Even before the big bang looked like a sure thing, scientists had been making considerable progress reconstructing the evolution of the universe from its hypotehtical beginnings. By the 1970's, with big bang firmly established, physicists began to think about alternative scenarios for the universe's evolution. Say you tinkered with the value of gravity or altered very slightly the strength of the electromagnetic force - how would this affect the path of the universe's evolution? What they quickly found was that even the slightest tinkering with the values of physics derailed the whole process. SOmetimes you ended up with the wrong kind of stars. In other cases you ended up with no stars at all. No matter what alternative scenario you tried to cook up, the most miniscule change in the fundamental constants completely eliminated the possibility of life.

Carter presented some of these points in his 1973 lecture. Any tinkering with the gravitational constant in relation to electromagnetism, he pointed out, would have resulted in a universe with no middling stars like our sun, but oinly cooler "red" or "hotter" blue ones - incapable of sustaining life's evolution. Any weakening of the nuclear "strong" force would have resulted in a universe consisting of hydrogen and not a single other element. That would mean no oxygen, no water, nothing but hydrogen.

But these initial observations proved to be merely the tip of the iceberg. In the years following his lecture, Carter and other scientists would discover an increasingly daunting and improbable list of mysterious coincidences or "lucky accidents" in the universe - whose only common denominator seemed to be that they were necessary for our emergence. Even the most minor tinkering with the value of the fundamental forces of physics - gravity, electromagnetism, the nuclear strong force, of the nuclear weak force - would have resulted in an unrecognizable universe: a universe consisting entirely of helium, a universe without protons or atoms, a universe without stars, or a universe that collapsed back in upon itself before the first moments of its existence were up. Changing the precise ratios of the masses of subatomic particles in relation to one another would have similar effects. Even such basics of life as carbon and water depend upon uncanny "fine-tuning" at the subatomic level, strange coincidences in values for which phsyicists had no other explanation. To take just a few examples:

1. If the ratio between gravity and electromagnetism were changed even slightly, "stars would be a billion times less massive and would burn a million times faster."
2. Had the nuclear weak force been slightly weaker, all the hydrogen in the universe would have been turned to helium.
3. If the difference in mass between a proton and a neutron were not exactly as it is - roughly twice the mass of an electron- then all neutrons would have become protons or vice versa. Say goodbye to chemistry as we know it - and to life.
4. The very nature of water - so vital to life - is something of a mystery (a point noticed by one of the forerunners of anthropic reasoning in the nineteenth century, Harvard biologist Lawrence Henderson). Unique among the molecules, water is lighter in its solid than liquid form: Ice floats. It id did not, the oceans would freeze from the bottom up and earth would now be covered with solid ice. This property in turn is traceable to unique properties of the hydrogen atom.
5. The synthesis of carbon - the vital core of all organic molecules - on a significant scale involves what scientists view as "astonishing" coincidence in the ratio of the strong force to electromagnetism. This ratio makes it possible for carbon-12 to reach an excited state of exactly 7.65 MeV at the temperature typical of the center of stars, which creates a resonance involving helium-4, beryllium-8, and carbon-12 - allowing the necessary binding to take place during a tiny window of opportunity 10(17) seconds long.

The list goes on. A comprehensive compilation of these coincidences can be found in John Leslie's Universes. The depth of the mystery involved here has been captured best by astronomer Fred Hoyle, the former proponent of the steady state theory:

"All that we see in the universe of observation and fact, as opposed to the mental state of scenario and supposition, remains unexplained. And even in its supposedly first second the universe is acausal. That is to say, the universe has to know in advance what it is going to be before it knows how to start itself. For in accordance with the Big Bang Theory, for instance, at a time of 10 -43 seconds the universe has to know many types of neutrino there are going to be at a time of 1 second. This is so in order that starts off expanding at the right rate to fit the eventual number of neutrino types."

Hoyle's notion of the universe needing to "know in advance" later outcomes captures the depth of the mystery. The fine-tuning of seemingly heterogenous values and ratios necessary to get from thebig bang to life as we know it involves intricate coordination over vast differences in scale - from the galactic level down to the subatomic one - and across multi-billion-year tracts of time. Hoyle, who coined the term, "big bang," has questioned the very legitimacy of the metaphor of an initial explaosion. "An explosion in a junkyard does not lead to sundry bits of metal being assembled into a useful working machine," he writes. The more phsyicists have learned about the universe, the more it looks like a put-up job.

The Rise and Fall of the Mechanism

This has not been a particularly happy realization for the scientific community. Yes, in a sense you could say that the anthropic principle "explained" all these mysterious coincidences, but it was a very unscientific explanation - the kind of explanation that the old natural philosophers used to offer for things, before modern science came along. The word teleology comes from the Greek word telos meaning "end" or "goal." Aristotle thought it was a sufficient explanation of something to say that its end or goal caused it. He called this the "final cause." For example, an oak tree (or rather its essence or nature) is the final cause of the path of growth that begins with the acorn. The essence of the flower is the final cause of the process that begins with the seed. The essence or nature of the adult human being is the final cause of the process that begins with the fetus in the womb.

This form of thinking is now quite alien to us, since our view of the world is conditioned by modern science. We don't even use the word cause in this sense anymore. Modern science is not interested in the final cause. It looks rather for the efficient cause, the mechanism that actually brings things about. The anthropic principle harks back to the older style of thinking. In effect, the anthropic principle says that humanity is (apparently) the final cause of the universe/ The most basic explanation of the universe is that it seems to be a process orchestrated to acheive the end or goal of creating human beings. This explanation is not a scientific explanation in the modern sense of that term.

Modern science was born when human beings abandoned talk of final causes and began to look exclusively for "efficient causes," for the underlying mechanisms that explained "how" things "worked." The great transition to modern science occurred in the battle over Copernicus's theory - the Copernican revolution. Galileo was the hero of this great battle. He claimed that the observations of the heavens he had made with hsi new telescope vindicated Copernicus's theory: Contrary to what people had thought for centuries, the sun was fixed and the earth orbited around it and rotated on an axis. This novel idea was extremely annoying to the natural philosophers of Galileo's day, who were basically followers of Aristitle. Some of them actually conspired against Galileo to get the Church to silence him and ultimately convict him as a heretic. In so doing, of course, the Church forever discredited its doctrines in the minds of many thinking people. It sacrificed its claim that it had a monopoly on the truth.

Galileo was punished and his books officially banned. But his ideas triumphed, and with them came the end of Aristotelian science and the search for final causes. Modern science was the triumph of mechanism over teleology and remained so until this century. In time, scientists were able to elaborate more and more mechanisms to explain how the universe and everything we see around us worked. All the mysteries that human beings had once attributed to God or the gods turned out to have simple mechanistic explanations.

The rise of the mechanism went hand in hand with the decline of religious faith among the intellectual elite. One could see this happening even in the writings of the earliest theorists of science. As the mechanistic explanation expanded, it left increasingly little room for God. By the eighteenth century, theism had given way to deism - or the view that God is simply the "first cause" abd underlying principle of rationality in the universe. The most famous eighteenth century deist, Voltaire, openly attacked religion. Deism quickly deteriorated to atheism, or the belief in no God at all. Such was the position of David Hume and of the later generation of French philosophers, such as Baron d'Holbach abd Denis Diderot. The French thinkers were particularly open and aggressive in their attacks on religious belief - partly because of the still powerful role that the Catholic Church played in French politics.

pp 21-33

richardMdBorn wrote:

JohnStuartMill wrote:Science does, however, presume mechanism -- that stuff happens because of other stuff, and in predictable ways.

So you don't believe in Quantum Mechanics?

Quantum Mechanics exhibits causation and predictability at a certain scope of its inquiry. Within this scope, it's science. Outside of that, I'd think that even people who make their living off of the field would agree with me that it is not.

Are these assumptions valid? I wil examine the second one in a subsequent chapter. But consider the first premise, that scientific knowledge is the only kind of knowledge.

Don't blame the atheists. This principle was invented by a devout Lutheran named Immanuel Kant.

Funny. The next chapter discusses this in detail. It is titled, "The World Beyond our Senses: Kant and the Limits of Reason." Maybe I'll copy this while on the plane...

dartagnan wrote:

Would you prefer that science admitted "magic" as an explanation for phenomena?

Absolutely not. I'm not sure why you're even asking this. Clearly you have not read the post. I don't think it was up long enough for anyone to read it in its entirety.

I'm familiar with D'Souza's line of thinking. I might have seen the article before -- at the very least, I've read an article by D'Souza on this topic, even if it's not this one specifically.

Science doesn't presume atheism

Modern science does, apparently. Read the statements by scientists above.

Those scientists are confident that science will prove them right. If science indeed presumed atheism, then those scientists wouldn't care about using science to disprove religion, now would they, you stupid “F”?

If there were overwhelming statistical evidence that groups of cancer patients who were prayed for were healthier than those which were not, science would pretty much be compelled to acknowledge the power of prayer.

This is two posts in a row where you utterly fail to comprehend what's been said. You're responses don't even make sense in light of what's been said.

This makes perfect sense. You said that science precluded spirituality; I provided an example of how spirituality could be accommodated by science, if it existed. I showed that your dunderheaded assertion about science was wrong.

Nor can it be. You're still missing the point. Nobody is saying spiritual experiences should be tested, because they can't be. It is ridiculous to assume the experiment you just mentioned would yield any positive results because it misunderstands the purpose of prayer. No religious person really believes that prayer alone makes miracles.

Fine, then -- insert "prayer alone" wherever I said "prayer" above. Now do you get it? I'm not holding my breath.

Science does, however, presume mechanism -- that stuff happens because of other stuff, and in predictable ways. You want "God" to get involved, even though the God hypothesis doesn't explain anything

Actually it explains plenty, just not in a way that fits the very limited and narrow paradigm of modern science.

Wow, dartagnan gave an arrogant non-response! Holy crap, am I surprised.

What exactly does the God hypothesis explain, and why doesn't this explanation fit in the paradigm of modern science, idiot?

But I am not trying to get God involved in science. I accept that science cannot prove God, but I know God can be found if they knew where to look and how to look. But they begin with an anti-God premise and use a scientific method that is designed only for the material world.

No, they begin with an anti-stupidity premise, which I suspect is why you're having such a problem with it, you twit.

Haven't you been paying attention? Scientists no less authoritative that Stephen Hawking make this point perfectly clear to those willing to listen. The reason so many scientists rejected the "science" of the Big Bang was because it gave strong evidence that God exists.

That God exists? Which one? What characteristics does He possess that we can determine because of Big Bang research?

Now regarding the mechanism, it is heading out the window as well. You simply do not understand the mountain of cosmological evidences supporting the God thesis. Here is something I posted a while back from a chapter of Patrick Glynn's book, God the Evidence. I'll post it again, and please read it all before commenting.

Why is the God hypothesis superior to the null conclusion, that "We don't know"?

A Not-So Random Universe
<snip>
Carter called his notion the "anthropic principle," from the Greek word anthropos, "man." The name was a bit off-putting. And Carter's definition of the idea was highly technical. The anthropic principle consisted of the observation that "what we can expect to observe [in the universe] must be restricted by the conditions necessary for our presence as observers." In plainer English, the anthropic principle says that all the seemingly arbitrary and unrelated constants in physics have one strange thing in common - these are precisely the values you need if you want to have a universe capable of producing life. In essence, the anthropic principle came down to the observation that all the myriad laws of physics were fine-tuned from the very beginning of the universe for the creation of man - that the universe we inhabit appeared to be expressly designed for the emergence of human beings.

Of course, if there were no overarching purpose of the universe, and humans just happened to evolve into what we are today, then it would still really look as if the universe were designed for our existence, even though it was not. There's an old Douglas Adams quote that's relevant as hell:

Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’

Now, you're pretty stupid, and you probably won't understand why this is important, so I'll give you a hint: you're the puddle, bub.

But there was a simpler way of explaining them, as Carter pointed out in his lecture. If one examined closely the evolution of the universe, one would see that these precise values or ratios were necessary if the universe was tro be capable of prducing life. In a certain sense, this finding was no surprise: We would not expect to be observing a universe that had not produced us in the first place. Still, the number of strange "coincidences" that could be explained simply because they were necessary for producing life in the universe was surprisingly large.

Necessary for producing life as we know it, Cap'n, sure, but self-replicating entities altogether? The substrate-neutrality of the basic principles of natural selection suggests otherwise. Not that you'd understand what that means, shit-for-brains.