Objectivity

Five weeks ago, I resumed musing about the term "objective moral values", especially as they are used as an argument for the existence of God. The weeks go by, my focus fuzzes and then sharpens, and we are here.

My problem with the term "objective" is that it assumes there is some way of stepping outside your subjective self to see or experience the thing you are considering to be objective. This is always a problem.

When I think of objectivity, I think of entities, behaviors or events that are verifiably the same for all people. The dictionary sense - “of, relating to, or being an object, phenomenon, or condition in the realm of sensible experience independent of individual thought and perceptible by all observers“ - is what I'm referring to. It's real for you, me and the next person, and is not subject to different interpretations. Seems like a good definition.

Taking objects, for example, if I have a party, and twenty people come over, we can all observe that my coffee table is in my family room. It is objectively there, in spite of any claims otherwise. Anyone that ignores the simple fact of my coffee table being in my family room could end up with bloody shins if they think they can navigate through a crowd of 20 in the family room containing the coffee table. When someone makes a claim like "my coffee table is in my family room", anyone can verify that the claim is true. We can say that we have identified an objective fact.

Now this objective fact will remain a fact for only a limited time. As long as I want the table in the family room, or as long as I own the house (and want the table in the family room), or as long as someone else wants to maintain the table in the family room after I die, it is a fact, but not forever. For a long time, in human terms, the coffee table being in my family room will be a fact, but the world will change, and someday vanish as a recognizable entity. So, there are limits on what we can consider an objective fact when discussing objects and their existence. The status of their existence, or their relationship to other objects in existence, change over time. In this sense, objectivity is limited to some period of time. We can be objective about my coffee table in my family room from the time both are in existence and the table is within the boundaries of the room, but not before and after.

So ... What is objective again?

(to be continued)

Something versus Nothing

Somewhere, I thought that I had made the statement that the answer to the question "Why is there something rather than nothing" was "because there are more ways for something to exist". An example would be that the number of elementary particles in the universe could be more than they are in our universe, or less, or configured differently, etc. But I can't find the actual post. Regardless, Richard Carrier makes the same case in more detail at his FTB blog from March 2011 - somehow I missed this.

Scroll to the section "Getting Everything from Nothing".

Bookmark.

Enjoy!

Never stop learning

If you stop learning, then you'll never find out about cool stuff like this: Helium-burning binary stars give us a new tape measure for the Universe

Presupposing that a Christian God exists

Before I stumbled across Deacon Duncan's review of the debate between Russell Glasser and Pastor Stephen Feinstein, I'd started reading the debate (my prior comments are here and here), and was planning a more elaborate review. Since Duncan is doing this already, I'm relieved of that motivation, and can record my take-away for handy recall, should I ever need it. To re-establish the context of the Glasser-Feinstein debate, Glasser is an atheist, Feinstein is a presuppositionalist apologist, and the topic - which I never saw declared, but which I infer from Feinstein's opening post - is that a Christian worldview is correct.

Pastor Stephen Feinstein asserts that without the Christian God, intelligibility is not possible, thus atheism is impossible. By this last phrase, I believe he means that the lack of belief in a personal god - atheism - cannot be true. His words:

I affirm that the Christian worldview is the only worldview that is possible given the preconditions of intelligibility

In a nutshell, Feinstein's argument reduces to an unsupported assertion that the Christian God exists.

My summary - which draws on my own thoughts as well as Duncan's - is this:

Reality must present itself in a way that's capable of being comprehended by hypothetical observers if it is to be understood - it must be "self-consistent". Its features, their attributes, behaviors and relationships must be repeatable under repeatable conditions in order to be understood. From observations that we actual observers make, we can then make inferences about their attributes, behaviors and relationships that might pertain under varying conditions. From those inferences, we then can derive fundamental conventions ("laws" or "axioms") upon which other knowledge items are constructed. Introducing unobserved features into this framework makes the framework inconsistent and thus unintelligible. A god is just such an unobserved feature.

A god or other unobservable feature is not logically ruled out in this scheme, but is instead made unnecessary due to the principle of parsimony ("Occam's Razor"). All other things being equal, the simpler scheme is to be preferred.

It's that simple.

Read the Bible from start to finish

Read the Bible from start to finish.

I mean it.

Start at Genesis, chapter 1, verse 1 "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." and slog your way verse-by-verse through the Hebrew Bible to Malachi 4:6 "And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.", and on through Matthew in the New Testament "The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham." to Revelations 22:21 "The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ [be] with you all. Amen."

If you're feeling studious, write a note or two on each chapter. Regardless, you will probably not get far before you say to yourself "there's something wrong with this".

You might even stop at Gen 1:1 and ask yourself "who is this 'God' and where does he get this heaven and earth-creating power?". It's conceivable that you could get a bit pickier and ask "what beginning, what heaven?". Then, you'll write a note to yourself to see if this God guy is explained, where he came from, how he got his powers. Maybe a few clearer definitions will be offered, so that you get a sense of whether this guy is worthy of further attention.

By the end of Genesis 1, you'll no doubt have noticed how backward God works ... Or how backwards the author got it. He's creating earth and grass before he creates the sun and moon; he creates man "in our image" - even tho' no one can explain why God needs a peepee or a vajayjay ... Let alone why man and woman would be in their (or his) image in the first place. Extra credit: look for the chapter in the Bible that explains why he refers to himself as "in our image" - as if he's a group. Alternatively, how do male and female both come from his image? Did he have male and female junk?

Then he makes man (and woman) again in Chapter 2.

My favorite stuff is in chapters 6 through 9 - Noah's Ark. Try to figure out how that worked ... You'll have fun.

It goes on and on and on like this.

I dare you to read it.

Is God as magnificent as Reality?

It occurred to me that folks that assert the existence of God - specifically the Christian God - without providing evidence or sound rational justification, may be playing to a pretty uncritical audience.

If the consumer of this proclamation is uncritical or ambivalent, then the assertion that "God is real" may simply satisfy the general feeling that there is something greater than we are at work in the universe. This general story, that there's a personal agent spinning the dials of existence, has been passed down for millennia to this very day. Depending on when and where you were born, the story is slightly different.

These stories are obsolete. They ignore the observable and magnificent reality that we live in - that each of us is unique, that all of us together are alone (so far as we can tell) in an enormous universe, that we humans have a duty to cherish each other and preserve each other for as long as we can so that we can explore this life, this universe, and someday travel to the stars and insure the survival of our descendants until the stars no longer shine.

Why don't the religious have their own LHC project?

I'm just starting to read Sean Carroll's much-anticipated book "The Particle at the End of the Universe" (I just realized that the title was a nod to Douglass Adams!) In the prologue, Carroll notes the thousands of theorists, engineers, experimenters, the billions of dollars and the decades spent to find what appears to be the Higgs Boson - that "goddamn particle".

I wonder why the religious, the theologists and the apologists for God don't mount a similar effort if they are so sure of God's existence.

Any ideas why?

A former debater shares his expertise

While reviewing and commenting on the 1995 Craig-Pigliucci debate (here and elsewhere), I ran across a nice explanation on debating by UncredibleHallq commenter jimfoster, who summarizes debate tactics for the uninitiated:

"I debated in high school. Craig debated in high school and/or college. His presentation style comes across as holdover from that training: Look good. Stand tall & straight. Speak clearly, neither too fast nor too slow. Be the incarnation of confidence and scholarly appearance. Be well organized with arguments streamlined in advance. Keep arguments few, simple and crystal clear. Real evidence and real logic are acceptable but you can let them play second fiddle to persuasion. Invoke authority. Use "most experts agree". Don’t give anything up. Most counter arguments may be ignored. Tell the audience what you are going to tell them; then tell them; then tell them what you told them. The point is to win the debate. If you also happen to be right that’s OK, too. Student debate clubs are not hot beds of critical thinking. Craig curls my toes."

With this in mind, it might worth my while to spend less time micro-analyzing the style and tactics of the two debate participants, and focus more on

1. "are the arguments good or bad, and why?"
   
2. "do the counter-arguments refute the arguments, why or why not?"
   
3. "are there any egregious errors, omissions or ethical transgressions that would affect the persuasiveness, validity and - hopefully - truth of the arguments and the conclusion they support?"

I think I've determined that Dr. Craig runs through his prepared material without a hitch, appears to have somewhat anticipated the objections, and has prepared responses for them. Dr. Pigliucci, while representing a position I agree with, appears, even in writing, to be less direct, his presentation doesn't flow as well, and he gives the impression of being too conciliatory of Dr. Craig, even conceding a tangential point or two that he didn't need to. This last bit is more of an opinion from me, as I can understand not wanting to offend believers. In light of the exhortation above to "Don’t give anything up", in retrospect, it's probably a mistake to do this.

Dr. Craig concludes his First Rebuttal

I'm whizzing through Dr. William Lane Craig's first rebuttal in the 1995 Dr. William Lane Craig - Dr. Massimo Pigliucci debate on "Does God Exist?". I happened to have a couple of unpublished posts backed up, so let's flush 'em out of our system!

Previous reviews of this same debate can be found starting here through Dr. Craig continues his first rebuttal

Dr. Craig:

First Question

Now what about my arguments to show that God does exist? Dr. Pigliucci uses a general argument against this to say that God is not explanatory. But notice he fails to understand the structure of my arguments. My arguments are deductive arguments, that is to say, if the premises are true, then by the laws of logic the conclusion follows inescapably. Whether you like the conclusion, whether you think it's explanatory, is irrelevant: as long as the premises are true, it follows by deductive logic that the conclusion is true.

Craig's rebuttal that Dr. P does not understand the structure of Dr. C's arguments is some technical mumbo-jumbo that only debate practitioners, logicians and philosophers will "get" easily. The rest of us will drool.

Via The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: "A deductive argument is an argument in which it is thought that the premises provide a guarantee of the truth of the conclusion." This is as Craig says it is. What Craig is slipping by the unsuspecting audience is that his premisses are not necessarily true. In the next paragraph, Dr. Craig concludes that "A transcendent cause of the universe exists." . He keeps asserting that transcendent cause without an ounce of evidence or rational support. It would be correct to say that if premisses 1 & 2 are true, then "A cause of the universe exists", but he does not say this. I can even quibble over whether either premiss 1 or premiss 2 is true, but that would divert us too much from the structure and style of this debate. You may refer back to my discussion of Uncredible Hallq commenter MNbo's criticisms of my article on Craig's cosmological argument - or see the Wikipedia page on The Big Bang - the section Speculative Physics Beyond the Big Bang to see other ideas related to the Big Bang that make the idea of "a beginning" irrelevant.

More Dr. Craig:

First Argument

So what he is going to deny? In my first argument I argued: (1) Whatever begins to exist has a cause. Will he deny that? (2) The universe began to exist.According to Steven Hawking in his book The Nature of Space and Time (1996), "Almost everyone now believes that the universe, and time itself, had a beginning at the Big Bang."{2} Will he deny that, the paradigm held by most cosmologists today? If he will not deny either of those two premises, then he cannot deny the conclusion, that A transcendent cause of the universe exists.

He says, but where did God come from? Very easily I can answer this question. The argument proves that there cannot be an infinite regress of causes. Therefore, there must be a first cause which never came into being. Whatever begins to exist has to have a cause; but a being which exists timelessly, spacelessly, and necessarily is uncaused. This is what the atheist has always said the universe is. But that is now untenable in light of the philosophical arguments I gave and the cosmological evidence for the beginning of the universe.

In other words, neither of my two premises of my first argument were refuted by Dr. Pigliucci, and therefore I think we have good grounds for thinking a transcendent Creator exists.

Notice that Craig cites Stephen Hawking saying "Almost everyone now believes ..." as a warrant for his assertion that the universe began at the Big Bang. At the risk of being really really really repetitive, the Big Bang Model holds that the universe was once in an incredibly small hot dense state - and nothing else. Hawking is saying "(people) believe", and Craig weaves the two together in (probably) his usual authoritative fashion. But Hawking saying "Almost everyone now believes ..." is not the same as "It is established that ...". And since the Big Bang does not posit a beginning in the literal sense, then Craig's argument is entirely empty.

Second Argument

My second argument was based on the complex order of the universe. And here he had three objections.

(1) You cannot look for a Creator from what we don't know. I am not arguing on the basis of what we don't know. What I'm suggesting is that we do know that the initial conditions of the universe cannot be explained by law because they are initial conditions. They cannot be explained by chance because it is just too fantastically improbable. And therefore being neither explicable by chance nor by law, design is the only alternative. What is his answer? I would like to know.

(2) He says, "Well, your argument doesn't work because there's only one universe." Let me explain the theory of probability behind this. Imagine a blue dot on a piece of a paper, and let that be our universe. Slightly alter some of these constants and quantities. That makes a new universe. If it's life-permitting, make another blue dot. If it's life- prohibiting, make a red dot. Then do it again, and then again, and again, and again. What you wind up with is a sea of red with only a few pinpoints of blue here and there. That's what I mean when I say that life-permitting universes are incalculably improbable.

(3) He says, "But the probability of all these people being here tonight, these specific people, is highly improbable, and yet we are here!" That's a failure to understand the argument. Any universe you pick is equally probable, yes, but it is highly, highly improbable that the universe you pick will be life-permitting. That's the point. It's like a lottery in which there's a billion, billion, billion black marbles and one white marble. Any marble you pick is equally improbable, but the probability that the marble you do pick will be black is vastly more probable than that it will be white. Similarly, given the improbability of the initial conditions of the universe, the universe ought to be dead; there shouldn't be any life in the universe. The fact that it cannot be explained on the basis of chance or law leaves us with design as the best explanation for why the universe is finely tuned for our existence.

In point (1), Dr. Craig says that the parameters of the universe are too fantastically improbable to believe they are that way by chance. This is 1) a bare assertion, an argument from ignorance, a false choice, and privileging the hypothesis.

In point (2), Dr. Craig constructs a vague probability argument, while ignoring the overwhelming fact that we are here. The a priori probability is now irrelevant because it is now a fact (probability 1) that we are here.

In point (3), he doubles down on the probability chip, continuing to ignore that we are in fact here.

Third Argument

What about objective moral values? He agrees there are no objective moral values, but he says values are things that work or society will collapse. That is not at all true. Look at Nazi Germany. In his book,Morality after Auschwitz, Peter Haas asks how an entire society who have existed in which the mass extermination of Jews and Gypsies went on for a decade with hardly a protest being offered. He says the reason is because a new ethic was in place in Germany which did not define the holocaust as evil, but as good. And he points out that that ethic cannot be criticized from within because it was internally consistent. It can only be criticized if you have a transcendent vantage point and anchor for moral values. On Dr. Pigliucci's view rape, child abuse, torture, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, the killing fields of Cambodia are all morally indifferent because there is no objective right and wrong. And I submit that is simply untenable. Objective moral values do exist, from which it follows logically that God exists.

I hoped to get my other arguments on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus in the rebuttal; but I'm out of time, so I shall quit.

Dr. Craig takes one of his weaker arguments and bolsters it with appeals to emotion. Yes, we all abhor "rape, child abuse, torture, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, the killing fields of Cambodia". What we object to is the warrant that this sense of abhorrence signals Objective Morals, and that this somehow is proof of God. Dr. Craig didn't make his case in his opening statement, and continues to not make the case here.

All in all, this is becoming tiresome. I started out as a grudging admirer of his, and am now convinced that he's an unscrupulous douche hydrant.

Dr. Craig continues his first rebuttal

Continuing Dr. William Lane Craig's first rebuttal in the 1995 Dr. William Lane Craig - Dr. Massimo Pigliucci debate on "Does God Exist?".

Previous reviews of this same debate can be found starting here through Dr. Craig's first rebuttal

Dr. Craig:

The Regression Argument

(2) What about the regression argument, that the more we know the less we think God intervenes in the universe? Well, notice that that argument doesn't prove that God doesn't exist. It doesn't even prove that God doesn't often intervene in the universe. All that follows from that argument is the sociological factor that we don't think God often intervenes in the universe. And that conclusion is perfectly compatible with the idea that God often in fact does intervene in the universe. But, moreover, even if it were true that God doesn't often intervene in the universe in miraculous ways, that's not incompatible with Christianity. After all, miracles by their nature are relatively rare, and I don't think that God does frequently go around intervening in the universe in miraculous ways. So the argument is simply inconclusive.

Dr. Craig serves up a world-class vacuity: "notice that that argument doesn't prove that God doesn't exist". Ummm ... haven't we established a number of times that the burden of proof is on the claimant, and Dr. Craig - taking the affirmative position on the question "Does God Exist" - has that burden? And aren't we still waiting to hear rational argument that the affirmative position is superior to the negative one? And shouldn't we expect that the negative position won't waste any time on trying to prove a negative? The answers are yes, yes, yes and yes. Dr. Craig is not living up to his responsibility in the debate so far.

Pragmatic Argument for Naturalism

(3) What about the argument that naturalism works? Not at all! What works are scientific hypotheses. But those do not test naturalism because on the hypothesis that there is a Creator God who has designed the universe to operate according to certain natural laws, that could also work. So the fact that scientific theories work is in no sense a proof of naturalism.

What would you call this - a "Me Too" argument? Dr. Craig makes it sound as if naturalism is unproven, except if it is, couldn't it also be that God made it that way, thus proving the existence of God.

If Dr. Craig were interested in proving the existence of God, he would come up with at least one hypothesis that can be tested and whose only explanation would be the existence of God. Throughout human history, such a thing has never been done. It ***could*** be done, but isn't. The universe of possible answers to the question "why hasn't an attempt to prove the existence of God been made" ever been performed has many possible alternatives, including "it can't be done", "there's too much money to be made" and "we need to keep the unwashed masses guessing so that we can retain power". Other answers are possible as well, but these come to mind at the drop of a hat.

By the way, I don't know what tactic Dr. Craig is pursuing in his Me Too argument, but it speaks to believers because they already assume that God is behind it all. Never mind that the point of the debate is "Does God Exist?", and that using God as a term in a premiss is circular, thus invalid. Oh well.

Problem of Evil

(4) He says, "What about the problem of evil?" Well, let me make two responses here.
First, no atheist has ever been able to show a logical inconsistency between the propositions "God exists" and "Evil exists." They tried, but no one has ever been able to show that those two are contradictory. In fact, you can actually show that they are consistent by adding a third proposition, namely, "God has morally sufficient reasons to permit evil." As long as that third proposition is even possibly true, it shows that God's existence and evil's existence are logically compatible. The atheist seems to assume that if God has morally sufficient reasons for permitting evil, we have to be privy to them. But there's absolutely no reason to think that that is true.
In fact, secondly, evil is actually proof that God exists. My argument would go like this:
1. If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist. (Dr. Pigliucci agrees.)
2. Evil exists.
3. Therefore, objective values exist. (Some things are really evil.)
4. Therefore, God exists.
And thus evil only calls into question God's existence on a superficial level. On a deeper philosophical level evil actually demonstrates the existence of God because evil as such could not exist without God.

Dr. Craigs first "refutation" of the argument from evil puts him in the position of arguing for a God that permits evil. This is strange, since Christianity makes a big deal about God's goodness. Maybe God can't do anything about it. Maybe he doesn't want to. Maybe he's evil. Maybe he doesn't exist. The possibilities are endless. If God exists and evil exists, why worship the fucker?

Notwithstanding my bad attitude about religion, arguing that the coexistence of God and Evil is not inconsistent is no argument for a Christian God. The negative position should press this, as all we get out of this particular argument is a God that humans would be distrustful of.

Noah's Ark

(5) The fifth argument he raised was the problem of Noah's Ark. I would simply just dismiss this by saying: First, it doesn't disprove the existence of God. Secondly, I would take Noah's flood to be a local flood, not a universal flood, in any case.
So all of these arguments, I think, are either invalid or based on false premises and hardly present any good reason to think that atheism is true.

Noah's Ark is a physical impossibility, and Dr. Craig knows it - he squirms his way out of the discussion without providing a rejoinder. A strong point for the non-theist position.

These rebuttals reviewed today are pretty shallow. Both the Problem of Evil and the Noah's Ark interlude raise the question of Bible inerrancy. Obviously Noah's Ark is easy to attack, but so are Yahweh's incompetence, petulance and immoral behavior. Add to that the inconsistencies that abound, and a Christian God becomes an obvious implausibility.

Dr. Craig's First Rebuttal

Today, I'll start on Dr. william Lane Craig's first rebuttal in the 1995 Dr. William Lane Craig - Dr. Massimo Pigliucci debate on "Does God Exist?". The first thing I noticed is - as others have pointed out - Dr. Craig is frequently dishonest. That he continues this dishonesty, and is revered for it in the fundamentalist community, drives non-believers crazy. Incidentally, Luke Muehlhauser at the now-inactive website Common Sense Atheism ranked this debate as "ugly" - meaning that Dr. C's opponent got hammered. So I'll bet Dr. Pigliucci doesn't call him out on this.

Previous reviews of this same debate can be found starting here through Dr. P concludes his opening remarks

Dr. Craig begins his first rebuttal:

Second Question
Now Dr. Pigliucci presents in my count about five arguments that he thinks would falsify the hypothesis that God exists. Let's look at each of these and see if they're persuasive arguments.

I have to stop right here and point out that immediately Dr. Craig says something that is not true. He says "Dr. Pigliucci presents in my count about five arguments that he thinks would falsify the hypothesis that God exists". Dr. Pigliucci clearly stated that he would not and can not falsify the existence of God - so he's explicitly not refuting it.

It's worth reiterating here that in both organized debate and in science, the burden of proof falls to the claimant. Dr. Craig, in claimimg that atheists have not been able to falsify the existence of God, is ignoring conventions that are fundamental to intellectual and scientific progress. It is wholly unproductive to allow charlatans to make unsubstantiated claims and waste the time of the public, but this is one of Dr. Craig's favorite tactics.

In everyday life, You would call this "a lie".

Argument from Imperfections
(1) He says the universe is not perfect. For example, squids have better eyes than human beings. I don't think that this argument in any way disproves God's existence. Let me mention three reasons.

First, that objection assumes a static theory of creation--that God created each individual creature, which never changes. But even creationists typically hold to a dynamic theory of creation which allows micro-evolutionary change within certain types, so that God could create a certain primal type of being and then there would be micro-evolutionary change within that type, and you might look at these sorts of imperfections (as he calls them) as by-products of micro-evolutionary pressures which gradually emerge.

"Dynamic theory of creation"? Really? Google this, and you get a bunch of creationist references. Citing fringe theories that the claimants have never lifted a finger to test is hardly compelling.

At this stage of the debate, we can't know what Dr. P will say in response, or whether he even cares to address this. Regardless, Dr. Pigliucci is not creationist. He clearly asserted principles of evolution, which don't require "static" or "dynamic" theories of creation - it doesn't require "creation" (in Dr. Craig's sense) at all. Dr. Craig is thus putting words into Pigliucci's mouth - lying.

Secondly, the objection presumes to know what God would do if He were to design something, that we know that God would create the eye in a certain way if He existed or He would create the digestive system in this way if He existed. And I personally think that's simply presumptuous. We have no idea how to speculate about what God would create if He were to exist. Maybe it's not important to God that we be able to have eyes to see in exactly a certain way, maybe there are other off-setting reasons why God permits systems designed in this way to exist. In other words, the argument is enormously presumptuous in thinking that we know what God would create if He were to exist.

This argument is enormously vacuous, to turn a phrase. Dr. Craig is defending a so-far-imaginary being by attacking Dr. P's observation that the human eye is less capable than other eyes. If this debate is about whether God exists, then neither participant can really make claims based on what God might prefer, because the question of God isn't resolved. So Dr. P's criticism is warranted, and Dr. C's defense is not..

And thirdly, perfection is a relative term, after all. These supposedly imperfect organs like the human eye function extraordinarily well. I mean, think of what the human eye has done in terms of art, literature, architecture, and so forth! This is hardly persuasive evidence, I think, that it could not be the product of an intelligent designer.

...sigh... Dr. Craig is making a blatant argument for intelligent design. ...sigh... Teleological arguments rely on the claimant being unwilling or unable to 1) reason about other possible explanations; 2)reason about the plausibility of their preferred explanation. There are several logical errors here: 1) it's a false choice; 2) it privileges the hypothesis (after Chris Hallquist); 3) it's argumentum ad ignorantium

Do I need to mention that Dr. Craig attributes art, literature and architecture to the eye? Did he leave anything out? A brain, maybe. And hands, we need hands!

In fact, that leads me to his other argument, concerning biological evolution. And I'm going to suggest that the idea that evolution could have occurred without an intelligent Designer is so improbable as to be fantastic. This has been demonstrated by Barrowand Tipler in their book The Anthropic Cosmological Principle. In this book, they list ten steps in the course of human evolution, each of which is so improbable that before it would have occurred the sun would have ceased to be a main sequence star and would have burned up the earth. They estimate the odds of the evolution of the human genome by chance to be on the order of 4-360 (110,000), a number which is so huge that to call it astronomical would be a wild understatement. In other words, if evolution did occur, it would have been a miracle, so that evolution is actually evidence for the existence of God! And here the Christian can be much more open to where the evidence leads. He could say, "Well, God could have used evolution; He could have used special creation. I'm open to the evidence." But, you see, for the naturalist evolution is the only game in town! No matter how fantastic the odds, no matter how improbable the evidence, he's stuck with it because he hasn't got an intelligent Designer. So it seems to me that the Christian can be far more objective on this point. After all, if you were to find watch lying on the ground, and, say, it didn't function exactly perfectly, it lost one minute per hour, would you therefore conclude that the watch was not designed properly?

The Barrow and Tippler book has been around since the mid-eighties, and made a splash in the Intelligent Design community, but that appears to be it. A blanket rejection of general Anthropic Principle variations is "we must fit the universe, the universe doesn't care". There are many objections to the many anthropic principle variations - see the Anthropic Principle Wikipedia page for a survey of them. A concise one-line summary from that page is: "According to Jürgen Schmidhuber, the anthropic principle essentially just says that the conditional probability of finding yourself in a universe compatible with your existence is always 1."

Dr. Pigliucci's Opening Statement

Today we start a review of Dr. Massimo Pigliucci's opening statement from the 1995 debate with Dr. William Lane Craig on "Does God Exist?" I've previously discussed Dr. Craig's opening statement starting here through here.

As always, my "analyses" are that of an amateur, biased skeptic. Also as always, I recognize that this debate is 17 years old, but I wanted this precise topic, and I wanted a written transcript. This one provides both.

Dr. Pigliucci:

Thank you. First of all, let me thank a few people: the Issues Committee for inviting me here to carry out this enviable task, and the Rationalists of East Tennessee which are scattered around the room and over there at one of the tables, providing me with great support, and, of course, Dr. Craig, who has offered very valuable arguments on his count, and to all of you for coming. I realize that this is a minority position that I will explain in the next few minutes. I hope that my statements tonight and my suggestions will help you in your personal intellectual journey a little as they helped me in the past.

Let me start first of all with a disclaimer of some sort. This is a disclaimer by a philosopher named Baruch Spinoza; he used to say: "I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them." This is my position tonight. I'm not here to make fun of anybody. I'm not here to ridicule anybody. I'm simply here to state what I think is a logically self-consistent and incredibly enlightening position. I would like also to make clear tonight that my positions are actually provisional. I'm not married to any particular faith. I'm going to be married in a couple of months to a wonderful woman, but that's a different matter!

Nice opening - non-controversial - conversational - the reference to his personal life is a nice touch. Dr. Pigliucci is in front of an audience that is largely Christian, so the personal, conversational tone is probably an effective strategy. You'll notice that I'm commenting on style as well as substance. That's really the point here, since Dr. Craig's substance is non-existent, he wins debates by rhetorical tricks and, as far as I can tell, playing pretty loose with citations of scientific facts and by scientists.

Clarification of the Term "God"

So let me start by clarifying what is it that we are actually talking about tonight and what my position is, and therefore we need to talk about the ways of science and its limits. About the limits of science: science cannot investigate negative statements, and you cannot prove negative statements, so no matter what whoever will tell you. There is no way you can prove the inexistence of something, unless you define that something by positive statements. So, for example, you can't ask me to come up with a proof of the inexistence of God without clarifying what you mean by God--it's completely impossible. That is why the atheistic position is not a position--the extreme atheistic position if you want--it's not the position that I am supporting . If you read the program, I'm defined here as a non-theistic naturalist, which, I hope , it will be clear in a minute what that means.

Here's my first criticism - he didn't address Dr. Craig's "2nd Question" by name, even though that's exactly what he's doing. I wish he would have said something like "Dr. Craig says 'What evidence is there that serves to falsify this hypothesis?'. That's a nice rhetorical question, but not a substantive one. Science doesn't answer rhetorical questions, it answers questions that are anchored in reality by observation". That would have made the connection unmistakeable.

He continues:

So what kind of God can we talk about? First of all, there are three kinds of Gods I can think of. There is a metaphysical kind of God. That's the kind of God that doesn't have any attributes, that doesn't interfere with the regular everyday life of the world. He may have created the world, but then after that he retired. That kind of God is completely unfalsifiable; science doesn't have anything to do with it, and rationalism doesn't have anything to do with it. There is no way to deny that kind of God. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that not many people here actually believe in that kind God because it's not particularly satisfying. It doesn't do anything for us.
A second kind of God is called the imperfect anthropomorphic God. He is a God that has human attributes, or human-like attributes, but is he imperfect; he makes mistakes. The ancient Greeks were the first ones to describe this kind of God, and they even didn't believe that much about this kind of entity, simply because again if he is fallible, then he is not much better than a human being. You can think of him as a very powerful human being, but he is still a person. So we will set aside that kind of God also.

What we are talking about tonight is what we call a perfect anthropomorphic God, that is, a God that does have something to do with the everyday working of the universe, but he is perfect, he doesn't make mistakes, he's always good, he's all over the place. That is the kind of God that I think can in fact be falsified to some extent. In other words, if you believe in that kind of God, you are making positive statements about what should happen in the universe; and if you make positive statements about what could happen in the universe, then science and rational thinking can have something say about it.

This was a little chatty - he could have stuck to specifying the third kind of god only, and made the point. It might have been useful in pointing out how man has these different conceptions over the millennia, but he didn't do that. I'd look for something like "Dr. Craig claims that there is a supernatural omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, omnibenevolent creator of the universe and observer or supervisor of all events here and in the afterlife for all eternity, and that this being is the Christian God. Not the Jewish God Yahweh, but the Christian God Yahweh as seen through Dr. Craig's own belief in Jesus". That would have: put him in clear juxtaposition with Dr. Craig, implied the implausibility of Dr. Craig's formulation; and left him free to focus on that implausible formulation.

Overall, Dr. Pigliucci's first few opening paragraphs begin well. He's on solid, if unspectacular ground so far. If I can get a video or audio of this, I'll have to listen, because I'd love to compare his verbal and physical presentation to Dr. Craig's .

Next time, Dr. Pigliucci takes on Dr. Craig's Argument from Design.

Intermission Time

As a brief intermission between my "analysis" of the opening statements of Dr. William Lane Craig and Dr. Massimo Pigliucci (the first one here and the most recent one (so far) here), I thought I'd point out where others have piled on ... errrrr ... offered thoughtful criticism of Dr. Craig's arguments and tactics. These are not isolated cases, the web is full of this stuff, but I read both of these blogs frequently, thus their significance to me.

The Uncredible Hallq - Chris Hallquist at FreeThought Blogs has a couple of things that caught my eye:

First, a gentle chiding of another blogger that (Hallquist thinks) is over-complicating why Dr. Craig arrives at a misunderstanding of the idea that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. It's always worth hearing criticisms from differing viewpoints.

Second, today he posts a link to his review of Dr. Craig's book "Reasonable Faith"

The original is posted at The Secular Web (Infidels.org), and is lengthy, as is most of the stuff at Infidels. That's why it's good reading - a little more depth than you get in the average blog post - Richard Carrier not withstanding. I haven't read Hallquists' review yet, but hope to in the next day or two.

Third, the blogger A is for Atheist has a post at Debunking Christianity that dissects the kalam and moral arguments for god. Since that's what I just did a few posts ago, I'm interested in the different take.

Good times!

Poke it with a stick - Dr. Craig's Fine-Tuning Argument

This is the third in a number of posts reviewing, line-by-line, the 1995 debate on "Does God Exist" between Dr. William Lane Craig and Massimo Pigliucci, held at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

The prior post covered Dr. Craig's "argument from first cause". This post focuses on "The complex order in the universe" ... a "fine-tuning argument".

Two notes:

1) In case you wondered why I didn't pick a more recent debate of Dr. Craig's, there are several reasons. A) I wanted to find one that addressed the "Does God Exist?" resolution and that had Dr. Craig speak first. The reason was that I wanted to put together another imaginary debate between he and I, where I get to respond to arguments that he's made in a real debate. I got sidetracked into this review, because, frankly it's interesting, and will be good preparation. B) The Craig-Pigliucci debate was the first one that I found that had a written transcript; C) I didn't feel that the age of the debate makes much difference in the arguments that Dr. Craig makes. He himself declared in 2010 that he's been making "the same five arguments ... for 20 years".

2) I know I'm not the first to point this out, but Dr. Craig can present his arguments quickly because his audience - most of the actual audience members - already "know in their hearts" that god exists, so his more technical-sounding arguments can omit rational and evidentiary support. His target audience never misses them because reason and evidence are not part of the world view that arrives at the "goddidit" conclusion. Opponents such as Massimo Pigliucci likely have more technical and unfortunately lengthier arguments to make when developing a positive case for non-belief. Pointing out the logical fallacies that Dr. Craig employs will satisfy a qualified debate judge, but may be over the head of, or simply uninteresting to, a lay audience. I've not seen a debate in which he's appeared that used judges.

Second Argument

2. The complex order in the universe. During the last 30 years, scientists have discovered that the existence of intelligent life depends upon a complex and delicate balance of initial conditions given in the Big Bang itself. We now know that life-prohibiting universes are vastly more probable than any life-permitting universe like ours. How much more probable?

As I said, this is a "fine-tuning" argument - a version of the well-known teleological argument - or "argument from design". There are LOTS of sober, clear counterarguments against this (see the appendix at the end of this post), not the least of which is that the universe is preposterously hostile to us. Human beings are unable to exist on 70% of the Earth's surface because it's water, and the other 30% contains deserts and mountains in which life is not ideal. Add that there are approximately 410 nonillion cubic light years in the universe, and we occupy less than 394 septillionths of a single cubic light year. I believe that says we occupy less than one in 1.6 x 10^59th part of the universe. Please check my math! If the universe was truly fine tuned for our existence, we'd just require one patch of land, and the all knowing all-loving creator could feed and clothe us via god mail or carry-out. We'd hardly expect that at least a septillion stars spread out over at least 410 nonillion cubic light years was required so that we - god's creation - could exist. The big guy wasted 162 octodecillion times more space than he needed to. Evidence of design? Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad design maybe. Or maybe bad planning - could be either.

Also - did you catch that Dr. Craig posits "universes" (plural)? "We now know that life-prohibiting universes are vastly more probable...". If he's copping to the possibility of multiple occurrences of universes, this implies that the possibility for occurrences to be realized are endless. Endless occurrences in which to realize a specific combination of parameters having a non-zero probability means there are endless occurrences of life-permitting universes. Surely he doesn't want to go down that road.

The answer is that the chances that the universe should be life-permitting are so infinitesimal as to be incomprehensible and incalculable. For example, Stephen Hawking has estimated that if the rate of the universe's expansion one second after the Big Bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, the universe would have re-collapsed into a hot fireball.{5} P. C. W. Davies has calculated that the odds against the initial conditions being suitable for later star formation (without which planets could not exist) is one followed by a thousand billion billion zeroes, at least.{6} John Barrow and Frank Tipler estimate that a change in the strength of gravity or of the weak force by only one part in 10100 would have prevented a life-permitting universe.{7} There are around 50 such quantities and constants present in the Big Bang which must be fine-tuned in this way if the universe is to permit life. And it's not just each quantity which must be exquisitely fine-tuned; their ratios to one another must be also finely-tuned. So improbability is multiplied by improbability by improbability until our minds are reeling in incomprehensible numbers.

Honestly, I believe he's just thinking backward here. Even if we accept his numbers - and we have no idea whether he knows what he's talking about - the facts that we can determine are 1) we are here; 2) any a priori probability he throws out is irrelevant once we affirm that we are, indeed, here. He might as well argue that we're not here.

If it was physically impossible that we exist in the universe, and yet we did, then positing the existence of "something else" that makes life possible would be understandable. It still does not indicate that his formulation of that first cause - God - is required, because God is even more improbable than we are. The Christian God layers more improbability on top of improbability until our minds are reeling in incomprehensible numbers. Sorry for making fun of you Dr. Craig! :-D

Since Dr. Craig himself does not claim that we are an impossible occurrence, it is not impossible that we exist. That we do exist just indicates that we are the realization of that non-zero probability.

Duh!

There is no physical reason why these constants and quantities should possess the values they do. The one-time agnostic physicist Paul Davies comments, "Through my scientific work I have come to believe more and more strongly that the physical universe is put together with an ingenuity so astonishing that I cannot accept it merely as a brute fact."{8} Similarly, Fred Hoyle remarks, "A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics."{9} Robert Jastrow, the head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, calls this the most powerful evidence for the existence of God ever to come out of science.{10}

This deft quote-mining doesn't yield anything that says "Davies, Hoyle and Jastrow all provide undeniable evidence of the existence of god". Not one quote says, "this is the smoking gun". The first guy "believes", the second guy claims a common sense interpretation but gives us no clue as to whether he thinks it is a correct interpretation, and the third guy (Jastrow) gives you a relative value without telling us what "best" means in absolute terms. If previous evidence of god was non-existent, then even the most trivial but plausible tidbit can be claimed to be "best". If this is truly "the most powerful evidence for the existence of God ever to come out of science" - then we can go home and enjoy a Pete's Wicked Ale right now, comfortable in the knowledge that apologists have no more evidence now then they had 2 and 3 thousand years ago.

So once again, the view that Christian theists have always held, that there is an intelligent Designer of the universe, seems to make much more sense than the atheistic view that the universe, when it popped into being uncaused out of nothing, just happened to be by chance fine-tuned to an incomprehensible precision for the existence of intelligent life.

The paragraph above is one of my favorites - Dr. Craig applies some "so, the universe just popped out of nothing" ridicule to non-believers, and substitutes it with some "the universe popped out of nothing because god did it" jujitsu.

I mean absolutely no disrespect when I say: "sometimes you just gotta say 'What the Fuck?' "

We can summarize our reasoning as follows:
1. The fine-tuning of the initial conditions of the universe is due to either law, chance, or design.
2. It is not due to either law or chance.
3. Therefore, it is due to design.

What you see here is:
1. The first premiss is technically incomplete, thus a False Choice. To be complete, we can include evolution of the universe (on the conjecture that the universe evolves like biological life evolves); we can include the idea that the universe is cycling through all combinations of parameters that have non-zero probabilities in a natural manner; and as long as we're positing the supernatural, we can include any supernatural entity performing anything that might result in a universe. The Great GoogaMooga's kid Skippy could have been tweaking dad's etch-a-universe, and had an accident.
2. The second premiss is a bare assertion - there is no reason why this is so. Dr. Craig hasn't argued that, until now.
3. The conclusion is false because premisses 1 & 2 are fallacious.

This concludes his second argument - I'm stunned that it's so full of holes so far.

Appendix

---

Here are some links that I ran across and used during my analysis of the fine-tuning argument:

• Wikipedia: The Fined Tuned Universe
  
• Infidels (Theodore Drange) - Fine Tuning
  
• Strong Atheism.net - the Problems in Fine Tuning
  
• Skeptico - Fine Tuning Arguments
  
• A technical discussion from Neil Manson at Ole Miss
  
• Iron Chariots - a VERY thorough discussion of Fine Tuning - I really like this one!
  

...and here's a discussion of Time that affects Dr. Craig's Cosmological Argument from previously: Infidels - the Intractable Problem of Time

Poke it with a stick - Dr. Craig's Cosmological Argument

This is the second in a number of posts reviewing, line-by-line, the 1995 debate on "Does God Exist" between Dr. William Lane Craig and Massimo Pigliucci, held at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

The initial post covered just the first three paragraphs of Dr. Craig's opening statement. This longer post will address his famous "argument from first cause".

A note that I should have added last time: since the transcript of the debate is from Leadership University, I leave the outline headings from there in place here. For example, you will see that "Second Question" and "First Question" appear as distinct sections.

Another note: I linked previously to Common Sense Atheism's post William Lane Craig on Debating Atheists. There, Dr. Craig claims to have the better arguments, with which Luke (the principle blogger there) agrees. Luke goes on to state:

Dr. Craig is correct. Craig’s dominance in debating technique is not the only reason he wins nearly all his debates.

Dr. Craig also wins his debates because Dr. Craig gives better arguments.

Let me explain what I mean. It might be the case that, for example, none of Craig’s arguments are as ‘good’ as an argument from evil or an argument from reasonable nonbelief, two popular atheistic arguments. However, Dr. Craig’s arguments are almost always stronger than the atheist’s arguments as presented in these debates.

It's important to note that debates are contests in which the opponents are judged on the strength of their arguments. It is not a court of law, and it is not a community of scientists trying to understand how the world works. It is much nearer to a popularity contest in this setting when compared to even the more traditional Lincoln-Douglas debates held scholastically. Dr. Craig uses his formidable knowledge of philosophy and theology, sprinkles in just enough cosmology, mathematics and other current hard sciences, then applies the mix in a predictable and disciplined manner to WIN THE DEBATE. That's what he does. Whether we non-believers like it or not, he wins. That doesn't mean that he has evidence that God exists - he clearly has never presented it. We wouldn't have debates about the existence of God if God could take time out from his busy schedule to put a stop to all this horsing around. So let's keep our eyes open and see what Dr. Craig does to win this debate.

A final note for the day. Dr. Craig uses the term "logic" in his Opening Speech. For the record, there is a distinction between sound and unsound logic that we will point out where ever we see it. I found a succinct explanation at Lander.edu that's worth noting:

1. truth: a property of statements, i.e., that they are the case.
2. validity: a property of arguments, i.e., that they have a good structure.
(The premisses and conclusion are so related that it is absolutely impossible for the premisses to be true unless the conclusion is true also.)
3. soundness: a property of both arguments and the statements in them, i.e., the argument is valid and all the statement are true.

Dr. Craig may have valid arguments (the structure is good), but does he have sound ones (are they structured correctly and the conclusion is true)? I'll be keeping that in mind as we progress.

Let's hear his Second Question:

Second Question

Now with respect to the second question, I'll leave it up to Dr. Pigliucci to present the reasons why he thinks that this hypothesis is false. Atheists have tried for centuries to disprove the existence of God, but no one has ever been able to come up with a successful argument. Dr. Pigliucci, on the other hand, in his article "God as a Falsifiable Hypothesis," says, "My position is that belief in God can be falsified" on the basis of the evidence.{1} So rather than attack straw men at this point, I'll just wait to hear Dr. Pigliucci's answer to the following question: What good evidence is there to show that God does not exist?

Through this point in the debate, Dr. Craig has only spoken for a minute or so of his 20 minute allotment, and throws down a challenge that can't be met - to falsify the hypothesis that God exists. It's a winner for Dr Craig two ways - 1) the non-believer must address it and expend valuable time explaining to the audience how science works and how "God" is not a testable hypothesis. Addressing this steals time from either making a positive case for non-belief, or rebutting claims that are weak. 2) the non-believer can ignore the challenge, but Craig can then claim that they "dropped" it, and impress on the audience that he wins this point by default because the non-believer can't or won't answer the challenge. He doesn't have to lie, cheat or steal, he just wins by default. Honestly, this is brilliant! Now, Pigliucci says "belief in God can be falsified", so it will indeed be interesting to see how he delivers that argument in a reasonable time, and how WLC attacks (or drops) it.

The "you can't disprove that God exists" gambit above is a common tactic you may have encountered if you've ever discussed theology. I mentioned last time that "falsifiability" is an intended characteristic of any hypothesis that seeks to be accepted as an explanation for a phenomenon. Dr. Craig surely knows this, and even more surely knows that most people don't know that this is the case, so it will sound to the audience as if the non-believer has failed to make the case for non-belief if they fail to address this.

Dr. Craig continues:

First Question

Let's look, then, at the first question: What evidence is there that serves to verify God's existence? Tonight I'm going to present five reasons in support of the specific hypothesis that a personal Creator and Designer of the universe exists, who is the locus of absolute value and who has revealed Himself in Christ. Whole books have been written on each one of these, so all I can present here is a brief sketch of each argument and then go into more detail as Dr. Pigliucci responds to them.

What impresses me here is just how specifically he describes God. It's been said many times, an argument for an omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, omnibenevolent creator is not an argument for a specific religion's favored representation of that, so I expect that he'll have trouble justifying the claim.

He get's to the real meat:

First Argument

1. The origin of the universe. Have you ever asked yourself where the universe came from? Why everything exists instead of just nothing? Typically atheists have said the universe is just eternal and uncaused. But surely this is unreasonable. Just think about it a minute. If the universe is eternal and never had a beginning, that means that the number of past events in the history of the universe is infinite. But mathematicians recognize that the idea of an actually infinite number of things leads to self-contradictions. For example, what is infinity minus infinity? Well, mathematically, you get self-contradictory answers. This shows that infinity is just an idea in your mind, not something that exists in reality. David Hilbert, perhaps the greatest mathematician of this century, states, "The infinite is nowhere to be found in reality. It neither exists in nature nor provides a legitimate basis for rational thought. The role that remains for the infinite to play is solely that of an idea."{2} But that entails that since past events are not just ideas, but are real, the number of past events must be finite. Therefore, the series of past events can't go back forever; rather the universe must have begun to exist.

In this introductory paragraph to Dr. Craig's Argument from First Cause, we observe a number of maneuvers that further frame the debate in his favor. He says "Typically atheists have said the universe is just eternal and uncaused." This straw man is an oversimplification in at least three ways: 1) atheists, while a convenient "other" that serves to focus the argument in the eyes of believers on an adversary that they already despise, distrust and/or fear, are not the only people that don't agree with the Christian God that Dr. Craig's specifically arguing for. Seventy percent of the world doesn't believe in Yahweh; 2) the generalization that "the universe is just eternal and uncaused" is a bit of detail that Dr. Craig doesn't provide evidence for. It may be that non-believers hold that the Big Bang Theory ("BBT") really implies that space-time began at that moment. It may be that they believe there is a cyclic universe (still uncaused, but naturally generated as "everything" cycles between matter and antimatter over quadrillions of years. It could be some "many worlds" conception. It may be one of Buddha's belches that brought the world into existence. It may be any other supreme non-yahweh figure. All he's doing is clarifying the battle lines and preparing for a "first cause' argument through the use of a false dilemma.

Dr. Craig moves on to argue that an actual infinite is impossible - but he uses citations out of context. David Hilbert would have been correct in saying that an "actual infinite" is never found in nature, but that just speaks to the limits on what we can observe and the amount of space, matter and energy that we can detect within the observable universe. S0 far, we can only estimate a finite amount of space, matter and energy. Dr. Craig is on solid ground with the average lay audience, because we instinctively say "yes, no matter how big the numbers get, they're still not truly infinite". The more scientifically inclined may say "it's too early to tell", but I'll bet that they're in the minority in most theology debates. See the discussion on "Craig's mistakes re infinite hotels". It's too much to refute in a twenty minute debate segment, but points out why Dr. Craig's argument misses the mark.

Let's move on to his next paragraph before winter returns:

This conclusion has been confirmed by remarkable discoveries in astronomy and astrophysics. The astrophysical evidence indicates that the universe began to exist in a great explosion called the "Big Bang" 15 billion years ago. Physical space and time were created in that event, as well as all the matter and energy in the universe. Therefore, as Cambridge astronomer Fred Hoyle points out, the Big Bang theory requires the creation of the universe from nothing. This is because, as you go back in time, you reach a point at which, in Hoyle's words, the universe was "shrunk down to nothing at all."{3} Thus, what the Big Bang model requires is that the universe began to exist and was created out of nothing.

I love - LOVE - Dr. Craig's use of current science - regardless of whether he's portraying it accurately. It gives a sense that this is a man that's done his homework! The use of BBT to "confirm" that the universe had a definite beginning from nothing is one of his most effective pieces of rhetoric.

Before I cut into it further, it must be said that this debate is 16 or 17 years old, and the research has advanced somewhat, so I won't get into Hawking's and Krauss's explanations on how "from nothing" is possible. Instead, given that state of knowledge in 1995, Dr. Craig still misused what BBT did actually say. It says that the universe once existed in a smaller, dense, hotter state approximately 13.7 billions years ago. It most specifically did not say that the universe arose from nothing. In fact, in the small hot dense state that scientists can measure (and/or calculate) the laws of quantum physics break down, and given the limitation at present, nothing further can be known. Dr. Craig is smart to use the lay persons natural inclination to assume that this small hot dense mass, when extrapolated back further, would be a single point, and would further be infinitesimal or nothing if extrapolated to it's extreme. Science does not make that claim. It couldn't be considered a "law" until there was sufficient evidence and testing down to rule out other competing theories. We are tens, hundreds, even thousands of years away from that day.

More Dr. Craig:

Now this tends to be very awkward for the atheist. For as Anthony Kenny of Oxford University urges, "A proponent of the big bang theory, at least if he is an atheist, must believe that the . . . universe came from nothing and by nothing."{4} But surely that doesn't make sense! Out of nothing, nothing comes. So why does the universe exist instead of just nothing? Where did it come from? There must have been a cause which brought the universe into being.

Here Dr. Craig doubles down on the "universe from nothing" gambit by citing Dr. Kenny saying that "...an atheist, must believe that the . . . universe came from nothing and by nothing". Now, why do we give a rat's patootie what Anthony Kenny of Oxford University says? First, I had to Google him to see that he's a philosopher and not a dishwasher. Second, is Dr. Kenny reliable? We have no way of knowing. Third, is Dr. Kenny espousing the consensus view? We have now way of knowing. We can be sure that Dr. Craig chose the citation to bolster the argument that believing something came from nothing is absurd, but he hasn't yet given us that valid and true argument that closes the deal.

He summarizes:

We can summarize our argument thus far as follows:
1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.

This is the traditional formulation of the argument from first cause, and is uncontroversial as stated, in spite of having presented no evidence that the universe didn't previously exist in some way. Notice that this formulation of the argument says nothing about the nature of the first cause.

He fills in the blanks next:

Now from the very nature of the case, as the cause of space and time, this cause must be an uncaused, changeless, timeless, and immaterial being of unimaginable power which created the universe. Moreover, I would argue, it must also be personal. For how else could a timeless cause give rise to atemporal effect like the universe? If the cause were an impersonal set of necessary and sufficient conditions, then the cause could never exist without the effect. If the cause were timelessly present, then the effect would be timelessly present as well. The only way for the cause to be timeless and the effect to begin in time is for the cause to be a personal agent who freely chooses to create an effect in time without any prior determining conditions. Thus, we are brought, not merely to a transcendent cause of the universe, but to its Personal Creator.

Here's where WLC goes off the rails completely.

By claiming "this cause must be an uncaused, changeless, timeless, and immaterial being of unimaginable power which created the universe. Moreover, I would argue, it must also be personal." - he is making a specific claim as to the characteristics and behavior that he hasn't lifted a finger to justify. A non-technical term for this is called "pulling it out of your ass". There is not a shred of supporting argument or evidence that will bolster this claim. Depending on what direction you look at this, one or all of these fallacies are committed in this brief paragraph:

• a bare assertion - making a claim without supporting argument or evidence
  
• a false dilemma - asserting that if not A, the only answer is B.
  
• argument from ignorance - "I can't think of a conclusion, therefore my preferred (unsupported) conclusion is the only possible answer"

Breathtaking!

Dr. Craig concludes his argument from first cause:

Isn't it incredible that the Big Bang theory thus fits in with what the Christian theist has always believed: that in the beginning God created the universe? Now I put it to you: which makes more sense: that the theist is right or that the universe popped into being uncaused out of nothing? I, at least, have no trouble assessing these alternatives!

To a theist audience, this probably sounds like "game, set, match" - but it's clearly not. That final paragraph introduces what - to the critically minded - should be an unnecessary complication in Dr. Craig's argument. The appearance of the universe out of nothing - still unproven by science - would still be infinitely simpler that a universe that appears as an effect from a cause by another unexplained entity. He's ignored that the believer believes the same thing as the non-believer, except has to insert the eternal all-powerful being to make it all happen, and then claims that this eternal all-powerful being needs no explanation. This is also known as "special pleading". The non-believer would be right to counter with "if God is eternal, then that proves something can be eternal, thus the universe could be eternal, eliminating the necessity for God. Occam's Razor tells us this is the simpler and more likely answer". Game. Set. Match.

My impression so far, after having read the transcript a few times, and having written out this analysis, is that the argument from first cause to prove the existence of Yahweh flat doesn't work. You can argue that there is an uncaused cause effectively, but that's all. It doesn't have to have a specific set of characteristics as Dr. Craig claims, and his argument was not good in this regard. The volume or argument and evidence required to make Dr. Craig's scheme work make this line of "reasoning" fall way short of conjectural ... it's really just making stuff up.

What you miss when you read a transcript as opposed to viewing the video is the even, calm pace with which Dr. Craig delivers his arguments - he's professorial, good natured, and reasonably likeable. He also speaks clearly and almost completely without affectation - no "ummm" nor "uhhh" - no hesitation nor backtracking. I've not watched all his debates, but I'd venture to say that his demeanor and fluidity are always better than his opponent.

Next time - Dr. Craig's second argument - the complex order in the universe.

Argument for evidence

Since I am intrigued by Christian apologetics and the counter-apologetics that we skeptics employ, I tend to get drawn in deeply, and forget one simple fact.

Argument is a way of reaching logical conclusions. It does not establish facts, and may not reflect the physical state of the world, depending on the conclusions made.

When we watch a debate - William Lane Craig versus any poor atheist or skeptic you wish to name, for example - remember that the debaters are judged on some formal or informal criteria that is a) either established beforehand and usually scored by capable judges - as in competitive debates; or b) assumed to be left in the hands of the audience members - each responsible for concluding whether Debater A or Debater B made the more compelling argument.

This exercise never makes a whit of difference to the physical world. Whether we think that God exists is irrelevant to whether God can be reliably detected. People say they see the hand of God at work in the world, but they never provide evidence. There is nothing that has been observed that cannot be explained by nature. Even things that can't be seen, but can be conjectured (the origin of life, the origin of the universe) are more elegantly explained by natural processes than by the supernatural.

We (as a species) can't say definitely how life began - we would have to create life in order to observe its creation and put to rest the intellectually lazy presumption that it can't be explained. The parts and processes are all there, we just haven't seen the tipping point where non-life becomes life, but that gap gets ever smaller.

We (as a species) can't say definitely how the universe began - we would have to create a universe in order to observe its creation and put to rest the intellectually lazy presumption that it can't be explained. We may always be consigned to a lack of physical evidence due to the energy and/or technology required to perform such a test, but we may be able to "prove" mathematically and experimentally that a universe can arise from the stuff that we have to work with.

The evidence that we have so far for these and other mysteries point to natural causes, and do not even hint that a supernatural realm exists.

Argumentation can change minds, but does not change the state of the world.

Sunday Inspiration

It's been a good week for me to occupy my head with tidbits from the world of research, intellectual thought and skepticism ... although the "intellectual" tag is something only I might apply to thoughts that i have.

Exhibit A -
Researchers in South Africa found what may have been an "art studio" where early man accumulated and mixed materials that could be loosely termed "paint". This site is approximately 100,000 years old. Quoting directly from the article:

the find represents an important benchmark in the evolution of complex human mental processes

I suppose that articles like this fill my heart with joy, awe and wonder much like my religious brethren claim when they consider their favorite major or minor deity.

Exhibit B -
@theealex tweeted a link to the reliably thought-provoking Talk Origins site about the existence of Geologic Columns around the world that provide evidence on how the earth has changed over the eons ... and puts the lie to Creationist claims that the "Geologic Column is an idea, but nowhere to be found in nature". Ummmm ... except that it's found in at least 25 places around the world. Creationism is fun!

Exhibits C through Z -
Almost any tweet with the hashtag #skeptic #atheist or #atheism has the potential to be insightful or downright funny. A couple that caught my eye:

via @godisreundant - "The biggest advantage to believing in God is you don't have to understand anything...I wanted to understand." Dr. James Watson

via @maximosis - "If God Made us in his image then why aren't we invisible too?" - #Random Bathroom Graffiti #atheism lockerz.com/s/147687213

via @hemantmehta - God Has a Challenger bit.ly/q5FBYI

via @Monicks - Don't confuse your religious beliefs with knowledge, better gain vast knowledge of your beliefs, you'd most likely stop believing. #atheism

...and a most heart-rending one...

via @GodlesBlkFemale - #atheist #christian #YouhaveSomeExplainingToDo #Jesustweeter lockerz.com/s/146635485

That last one cuts to the heart of the matter: that a supposed god would be kicking back in his supposed heaven in his favorite easy chair, sipping his favorite beverage, while innocent children starve to death.

It reminds us thinking, caring, un-delusional human beings that our friends, neighbors, fellow citizens, and the innocents born around the world are in need of help - and that those of us that can help, should help.

Myths and Legends and Science

While reading a lengthy blog post about atheist/theist arguments that science can't explain everything - thus religion had the answer - I wondered what may be most helpful to a non-believer - critical reasoning or science. While I believe they're both essential, I reflected on science first, and before I knew it, this blog post was complete.

Science is relevant to people and organizations of people when they identify things that they need to or want to understand. The motive might be pure knowledge - to answer questions like "what are those points of light in the sky?" or "where did we come from?". The motive might be to overcome a problem, such as designing a building so that it bears the weight of its own structure and withstands wind forces. The motive might be financial, such as designing smaller mobile appliances. The motive may be to benefit mankind - as the ongoing effort to cure cancer is (with the appropriate financial compensation, of course). At every step of the way, something that we didn't know is revealed to us ... and large mysteries are eliminated.

We know what lightning is. We know what hurricanes are. We know what earthquakes are. We know what tsunamis are. We also know what cause these things. In the distant past, we didn't know what these things were ... thousands of years ago, when a flood happened, or a drought happened, or wildfires, pestilence, lightning, earthquakes, eclipses, rainbows happened - these things were scary, awesome, beautiful, mysterious ... and our ancestors tried to explain them. They didn't know about plate tectonics or weather or the buildup and discharge of electricity in the atmosphere or how the moon orbits the earth or any number of other things that grade school kids know today - so they made up explanations.

They knew that they were smarter than other animals. They were self aware and able to plan and execute their plans. They had emotions. They put all of these facets of their being together and imagined that bigger, more powerful, more awesome versions of themselves were behind floods and droughts and earthquakes and the like. For thousands of years, there was no way to discover the underlying reasons for natural phenomena - so these stories were refined and repeated and the good ones persisted and the bad ones dropped by the way side.

Soon, man developed writing, and began to record these wondrous tales. The many myths and legends that may have been originated by and perpetuated by clans and tribes were assimilated into or discarded from fewer and fewer tales that had resonance with people. If the people survived, their tales survived. In some cases, the tales were strengthened when a powerful leader took the tales for his own - leading to further clearing of the mythological landscape.

When man began to gather into larger and larger groups - when villages and towns and cities arose, there was a need for keeping people aligned with each other and the intentions of the powerful ... and these now-maturing myths and legends acted as a way to keep the people aligned, and incidentally, to keep the powerful in power.

Two, three thousand years ago, the rituals and beliefs and organizations and ethics that were built upon these myths and legends were augmented by governments and academicians as civilization advanced. There has been tension ever since, as the religions that had primacy early in history were overtaken, then overtook, then were overtaken again, by the pursuit of equitable ways of building societies and academic pursuits that attempt to explain and master the world.

So religion is in tension with government and the pursuit of knowledge. In America, religion has done well to co-opt government somewhat, while the pursuit of knowledge tends to diminish the foundations upon which religion was originally built.

Today, we know to be skeptical of claims of the supernatural. There has never been an elf or leprechaun sighting that could be independently, objectively verified by parties that did not have a stake in the potential veracity of the claim. The same is true of dragons, angels, demons, ghosts and gods. There has never been a prophecy of true significance made that could be verified. No magic has ever been performed. No resurrections have occurred. No one has been swept up into the sky in flaming chariots.

Most everything that man ascribed to gods and demons and angels and spirits two, three and four thousand years ago has been explained, and the few really thorny questions that remain are within reach. The question of how life began may be answered in our lifetimes. The question of how the universe "began" - or more correctly, what happened at the earliest possible instant we can observe, may take several lifetimes, but the frontier of knowledge is pushed further toward the beginnings of observable existence every year. Gods, angels, demons, spirits, elves and leprechauns have no place in the world anymore.

I started this post thinking that it would be about how you don't need science to be a non-believer. But you do need knowledge. And knowledge comes from academics and science and industry and society and the sum total of our experiences and observations. So ... somewhere, out front or behind the scenes, science is at work pushing forward the frontier of what can be known, and eliminating the ground upon which superstition and the supernatural once flourished.

It will always be so.

Bagging on science

I will bag on religion and weird beliefs enough over the years - but it's fair to turn the tables and bag on science for a moment. Let's look at Creation.

Religions almost always have a creation myth - Judaism and Christianity have Genesis ... the Vikings had Yggdrasil, the Greeks had Eurynome and Ophion. Science currently has the Big Bang. Now, the Big Bang is not technically a myth, but a theory. Labeling it "theoretical" gives the un-scientifically inclined an excuse to dismiss it. Just as Creationists will say that Evolution is "only a theory", so could they say "the Big Bang is only a theory". Okay. But wait, there's more.

Think about it, as a layman, as a mechanic, carpenter, plumber, caregiver, homemaker, shopkeeper. What are the things that you can reason about our world, without having the special knowledge and theoretical backgrounds that cosmologists currently have? Well ... the world sure looks like it's been here forever. A second observation - there are fossils in the ground. This is something that you'll have observed if you had the kind of childhood that I had, where you could walk in the woods and dig around in the ground and crack open rocks. There is evidence of older life forms. So, a little special knowledge tells you that the fossils have been there for a while - generally thousands of years, possibly millions of years. Then, when you look into it, you are presented with information that illustrates the gradual growth, elaboration and radiation of plant and animal types over millions and billions of years. So if you believe this, then the earth is millions and billions of years old. If you don't, then a creator put all of the evidence in the ground to make it look that way.

Look up in the night sky - you see stars. The light from those stars arrives at your retina after a journey of tens of thousands of years - the light that you can see, that is. The issue then becomes, do you accept astronomer's claims that some stars and galaxies are millions and even billions of light-years away? If you do, then the universe must be that old for that to have happened - or a creator put the light in motion to your eyeballs at the moment of creation. Which do you believe?

Getting back to the Big Bang - if you accept that the universe is expanding in all directions now, then you can mentally reverse the movie and imagine that the expansion becomes a contraction to a single point. A Big Bang.

So, what is my criticism of the Big Bang? It's not much of a criticism - it's just that the theory requires the reader to apply the logic that we just applied, given the evidence that neither the reader, nor I, has personal experience of. That's the criticism. So when a science writer is able to present evidence in an accessible and logical way, the reader can understand and hopefully, accept it. If not, then it's easy to reject. That's the problem.

Life Ascending - initial reaction

One of my favorite rebuttals against Intelligent Design comes from The Talk Origins Archive, and is titled Lies, Damned Lies, Statistics, and Probability of Abiogenesis Calculations. You often see in print, or hear in conversation, how improbable life seems. This article does all of us a favor by pointing out some argumentative sleight-of-hand that is used by the ID crowd to reinforce this perception, and also shows how the "improbability" should really be considered.

Fast forward to this weekend, when I started reading Life Ascending by Nick Lane. It's already a fascinating read - but focuses on a more recent understanding of abiogenesis, initially the view that simple life forms (primarily bacteria) would be formed near deep sea thermal vents. This book is some good stuff - I'm already recommending it - and I'm only a quarter of the way through it!