Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Practice Non-Religion: An Atheist World View?

I have found this wonderful website called "Evidence for God in Science."  It's filled with the usual horse poop that one would expect from a website attempting to prove that God exists.

Here is an interesting problem that truly exemplifies the authors attempt to refute a definition he made up.  The auther attempts to provide a three step process that provides answers for atheists.  The problem is that he bases his argument on incorrect interpretations of what atheists actually believe.

He claims that atheists believe:
1) that all beliefs must be supported by observable evidence
2) that beliefs that contradict observable evidence cannot be tolerated

Talk about an over-simplified interpretation.  Beliefs don't need to be based on observable evidence, they need to be based on provable evidence supported by process of observation or appropriate theoretically supported speculation.  and when contradicted, yes, the theories must immediately be revisited and revised (not necessarily thrown out).

The author uses the example of the Big Bang.  He argues that since the universe has a beginning, atheists have no answer for what came before because it is unobservable.  Here, the author betrays his own bias, which is that he is overeager to give God credit for the unobservable.  The critical misinterpretation here is that atheists believe all things are observable and that religious people believe that all unobservable things must be God.  Both are seriously flawed because there are many things we cannot observe, but that we know exist.  For instance we know "dark matter" exists, but we can't see it.  We know that light exists as both a particle and a wave, but we cant necessarily explain it.  And just because I can't explain it or that scientists can't explain it, doesn't mean that there is no explanation.  It just means we haven't found it yet.  This is the fundamental self-centeredness of the religious mind, to believe that anything YOU don't understand cannot be understood.

Further on the big bang question is the notion that anything with a beginning cannot be infinite and thus must have had a creator.  This is not true because I have a beginning, but the molecules that make up my being are as old as time itself.  There are a number of theories (conveniently omitted from the authors argument) that claim the universe expands and contract on a cycle, meaning that it could in fact have existed for eternity, and the big bang was simply one of many expansions.  There is also the theory of multiverses, where our universe is one of many some older, some younger.  it shows a serious lack of imagination and a pretty substantial self-centeredness to assume that the currently (and perhaps permanently) unexplainable through human observation can only be explained by God.

Common Sense

1 comment:

  1. My dear friends in the atheist community continue to show their lack of understanding about what the “Nothing” means. When Big Bang Cosmology states that Space, Time, Matter, Energy and the Laws of Physics all came into being from liteally nothing at the Singularlity, they’ve described it as everything from “An intensely hot and dense speck” (They don’t say where the speck was), to yesterday when an atheist suggested that the Big Bang was a quantum event -that came out of “Nothing.” Ya, right.

    You too seem more than willing to latch on the hypothesis that have nothing by speculation holding them afloat.

    Atheists are caught in a true dilemma. We know from science that from literally nothing, everything came. But how? It appears that the only logical assumption is that something that existed outside of matter space and time had to be the Cause of the universe. But when we begin to define what that Cause must have been like we wind up with a Greatest Conceivable Being or what we call God. And that of course is just not allowed in the atheist mind-set even if it meets the criteria for where the evidence is pointing. So what’s an atheist to do?

    First, quantum mechanics is not going to save the atheist here. In QM, virtual particles come into being IN A VACUUM. The vacuum is not NOTHING. In fact it is a sea of fluctuating energy. The energy is endowed with a rich structure and subject to physical laws.

    Second, the vacuum is sparked BY A SCIENTIST. There is only one possible Being that could have existed prior to or outside of BB and it wasn’t a scientist.

    Third, The particles that exist in a Quantum Event do so for a period of time INVERSELY PROPORTIONAL TO THEIR MASS.

    Fourth, in the case of the big bang, there was no vacuum - THERE WAS NOTHING. No scientist, No particles - Nothing.

    Fifth, The universe is far too massive to last 14 billion years as a virtual particle.

    Sixth, while it’s well known that atheists as a group are easily confused, it is wrong to confuse causality with predictability. Just because the Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle describes our inability to predict the location and speed and subatomic particles, i.e., where an electron will appear, that is not a case of an electron appearing out of nothing. In fact quantum theorists acknowledge that our very attempts to “observe” the speed and location of these particles may make them even more unpredictable to trace.

    There is no QM model that involves a true origination ex nihilo.

    Finally, atheists will say that the big bang is speculative physics that could change at any moment. Reality is, the trend is in favor of an absolute beginning out of nothing.

    Atheist physicist Victor Stenger tells us that the Big Bang is looking more probable all the time, “We have to leave open the possibility that [the Big Bang] could be wrong, but every year that goes by, and more astronomical data comes in, it’s more and more consistent with the general Big Bang picture.”

    Cliff Walker, “An Interview with Particle Physicist Victor J. Stenger,” at http:www.positiveatheism.com/crt/stenger1.htm

    “The beginning seems to present insuperable difficulties unless we agree to look on it as frankly supernatural,”

    Atheist astronomer Arthur Eddington, “The Expanding Universe (New York: Macmillan), 178


    “It is said that an Argument is what convinces reasonable men, and a Proof is what it takes to convince an unreasonable man. With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe. There is no escape, they have to face the problem of the cosmic beginning.” Alex Vilenkin, “Many Worlds In One - The Search for Other Universes,” 11

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