Eliezer Yudkowsky, a skeptical blogger, addresses the question of whether religion is falsifiable in Religion's Claim to be Non-Disprovable:
The earliest account I know of a scientific experiment is, ironically, the story of Elijah and the priests of Baal.
The people of Israel are wavering between Jehovah and Baal, so Elijah announces that he will conduct an experiment to settle it – quite a novel concept in those days! The priests of Baal will place their bull on an altar, and Elijah will place Jehovah’s bull on an altar, but neither will be allowed to start the fire; whichever God is real will call down fire on His sacrifice. The priests of Baal serve as control group for Elijah – the same wooden fuel, the same bull, and the same priests making invocations, but to a false god. Then Elijah pours water on his altar… to signify deliberate acceptance of the burden of proof, like needing a 0.05 significance level. The fire comes down on Elijah’s altar, which is the experimental observation. The watching people of Israel shout “The Lord is God!” – peer review.
And then the people haul the 450 priests of Baal down to the river Kishon and slit their throats. This is stern, but necessary. You must firmly discard the falsified hypothesis, and do so swiftly, before it can generate excuses to protect itself. If the priests of Baal are allowed to survive, they will start babbling about how religion is a separate magisterium which can be neither proven nor disproven.
The story of Elijah and the priests of Baal presents a good framework for our discussion of what would falsify the resurrection, and consequently, Christianity. (Although, needless to say, I reached a different conclusion from Yudkowsky about whether Christianity has been falsified. He relied on his interpretation of tangential issues in the Old Testament--not on the resurrection.) Of course if something directly contradicts the claim that Jesus was raised from the dead, then the resurrection would be falsified. However, evidence that actually disproves a supernatural event is not easy to come by.
For example, this website addresses the claim of Joseph Smith that the angel Moroni appeared to him at night when he was a teenager. The author gives a photo of the Smith residence and says that his five brothers would have slept in the same small room, three to a bed, but none of them woke up and noticed the magnificent visitation or even their brother having a conversation (and a powerful spiritual experience) all night. This seems to at least falsify the idea that the angel was present in the room, as opposed to just in Smith's mind. It is consistent with a hallucination. However, it is also consistent with the event in Matthew 2:13, where an angel appears to Joseph, the father of Jesus, in a dream. So the visitation to Smith has not been disproven, but it is consistent with either a normal dream or a hallucination. This means that absent more compelling evidence for Smith's claims, we would be wise to exercise healthy skepticism. How do we then approach the question of falsification of the resurrection? This is where Yudkowsky's ingenious interpretation of Elijah and the priests of Baal is helpful. Just like God, through Elijah, raised the burden of proof by pouring water onto the wood on the altar and into the trench, it appears that God has raised the burden of proof for the resurrection by leaving no plausible naturalistic explanation for the evidence.
Since the death of Jesus, skeptics have tried to explain away the resurrection--starting with the claim that the disciples stole the body. Since then, they have put forth the swoon theory, the twin theory, the wrong tomb theory, conspiracy theories, and the hallucination theory, among others. All have major flaws and most have been discarded. Some skeptics, like David Hume and Bart Ehrman, have attempted to stay above the fray and simply dismiss the evidence by saying, essentially, that the supernatural is always the least likely. But this approach has been refuted using Bayes' Theorem. To say that the supernatural is the least likely, regardless of the evidence, is mathematically fallacious, as non-theistic philosopher of physics John Earman demonstrates in Hume's Abject Failure.
In 1 Kings 18:20-29, the priests of Baal frantically called on the name of Baal all day long without response, and Elijah began to taunt them: "Shout louder! Surely he is a god! Perhaps he is deep in thought, or busy, or traveling. Maybe he is sleeping and must be awakened." They shouted louder, leaping around the altar and slashing themselves with swords--to no avail.
This brings to mind the efforts to explain away the resurrection, in the context of Psalm 2:1-4. "Why do the nations conspire and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth take their stand and the rulers gather together against the LORD and against his Anointed One. 'Let us break their chains,' they say, 'and throw off their fetters.' The One enthroned in heaven laughs; the Lord scoffs at them."
In 1 Kings 18:33-39, Elijah prepared his sacrifice, asking God to reveal to the people that He is the God of Israel and that Elijah was His servant. Fire from heaven fell down on the altar and consumed the offering, the wood, the stones, the dust, and the water in the trench. God accepted Elijah's sacrifice.
Likewise, God accepted the sacrifice of Jesus for our sins and proved it by raising Him from the dead. The resurrection confirmed all the teachings of Jesus as being from God, including His claim to deity, and through it, God fulfilled the repeated prophecy of His Son that He would be delivered into the hands of sinners to die and be raised on the third day (Matthew 16:21, Matthew 17:22-23, Matthew 20:18-19, Mark 8:31, Mark 9:31, Mark 10:34, Luke 9:22, Luke 18:31-33, Luke 24:7).
As Paul said to the men of Athens: "God is now declaring to men that all people everywhere should repent, because He has fixed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness through a Man whom He has appointed, having furnished proof to all men by raising Him from the dead" (Acts 17:30-31).
219 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 219 of 219The cosmological argument states in part that everything that begins to exist must have a cause.
I have often wondered what the justification is for associating having a cause with beginning to exist.
Consider the following statements:
(1) All crows are black.
(2) All crows that have wings are black.
(3) All crows that are birds are black.
(4) All crows that are hatched from eggs are black.
Unless we have some empirical knowledge of non-black crows, we would have no basis for thinking that the blackness of crows has anything to do with their having wings, or being birds, or having been hatched from eggs. In effect, the last three statements mean nothing different than the first one because they add no useful information concerning the blackness of crows.
By the same token, unless we have some empirical or positive knowledge of things that exist without ever having begun to exist, we have no basis to assert that having a cause is correlated to having a beginning. In effect, “everything that begins to exist must have a cause” means nothing different than “everything that exists must have a cause.”
Nightvid:
If you want to end this discussion, you need to stop using bad physics. I am myself a physicist, so if you use fake physics made up by apologists to advance their case, don't expect to slip it by me.
"Suppose, for example, that the density one second after the Big Bang had been less than the critical density by one part in a million, then the elements of matter in the Universe would have flown apart too rapidly for galaxies, stars and planets to form. That means we would not be here today. Suppose, on the other hand, that the density of matter at that early time had been greater than the critical density by one part in a million; then the expanding Universe would have come to a halt and collapsed on itself too rapidly for life to evolve on any planets that formed. Again, we would not be here."
- Robert Jastrow, physicist
"Scientists are slowly waking up to an inconvenient truth - the universe looks suspiciously like a fix. The issue concerns the very laws of nature themselves. For 40 years, physicists and cosmologists have been quietly collecting examples of all too convenient "coincidences" and special features in the underlying laws of the universe that seem to be necessary in order for life, and hence conscious beings, to exist. Change any one of them and the consequences would be lethal. Fred Hoyle, the distinguished cosmologist, once said it was as if "a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics"."
- Paul Davies, physicist
"There may be good reasons for believing in a God, and if there are any I would expect them to come from, possibly, modern physics, from cosmology, from the observation that, some people claim, the laws and constants of the universe are too finely tuned to be an accident. That would not be a wholly disreputable reason for believing in some form of supernatural deity."
- Richard Dawkins, biologist and atheist apologist, in a YouTube video about Antony Flew's conversion to deism.
I would also highly recommend Just Six Numbers by physicist Martin Rees, which is about the apparent fine-tuning of the universe.
All of the above are either atheists or agnostics, and I'm not sure about Jastrow, but the others propose a possible multiverse as an explanation. However, Davies says about the multiverse hypothesis:
"The multiverse theory is increasingly popular, but it doesn’t so much explain the laws of physics as dodge the whole issue. There has to be a physical mechanism to make all those universes and bestow bylaws on them. This process will require its own laws, or meta-laws. Where do they come from? The problem has simply been shifted up a level from the laws of the universe to the meta-laws of the multiverse."
Victor Stenger is the only well-known physicist who disputes this, and physicist Luke Barnes says the following about Stenger:
"Here’s the abstract: Stenger attempts to show that our universe isn’t really fine-tuned by showing that long-lived stars are not unusual. He fails for five reasons. 1.) He gets his formula wrong, and in so doing ignores an important case of fine-tuning. 2.) He fails to consider the effect of altering the strength of gravity. 3.) He “cherry-picks” a very favourable fine-tuning example to suit his purposes. 4.) His probability claims are vacuous, following trivially from his unjustified hidden assumptions. 5.) He rightly exhorts us to consider varying multiple parameters at once, but commits the opposite mistake: he fails to consider multiple life-permitting criteria. Even if he were right about long-lived stars, it doesn’t follow that life-permitting universes do not need to be fine-tuned. I conclude that Stenger’s claims are worse than mistaken; they are misleading."
Physicist George Ellis says:
"To recapitulate the position: Stenger is making a double `existence' claim - life could exist with another physical base than organic chemistry, and life could also exist if the laws of physics were substantially different than they are. Normally a scientist making such a claim is expected to give some scientific reason why it should be believed. Stenger denies that he has any such obligation, justifying this by citing a new philosophical principle: he is making a more economical claim than those who do not accept his view, and therefore he has no need to provide supporting scientific evidence.I don't accept this philosophical principle. I also don't agree that he is making the more economical claim. And I don't think his overall argument takes the physical nature of life seriously.
"Firstly, as to the philosophical principle suggested: If a particle physicist or astrophysicist tried such a ploy in their professional fields, they would be laughed out of court by their colleagues. If you want to make an existence claim (a new class of stars, a new particle of some kind, gravitational waves) you are expected to give positive reasons as to why this is probable. To say `It must be so because I don't know any reason why it should not be true' will not suffice, if we are working in usual scientific discourse."
Vinny:
Thank you for giving me a chance to correct the way I stated the cosmological argument. It has been bothering me for a while, but there is no way of editing the comments with Blogger. The Kalam cosmological argument does not use the word "must." It states:
1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.
The evidence strongly indicates that time, space, and matter had a beginning. Since everything that begins to exist has a cause, most likely time, space, and matter had a cause as well, and the best explanation is a causeless, timeless, immaterial entity. God is such a causeless, timeless, immaterial entity.
Nightvid:
This is wrong. In quantum field theory, vacuum fluctuations exist without a cause . This has been experimentally demonstrated via the Casimir effect.
Scientist Al Moritz says:
"There appears to be some confusion, however, as to whether the findings from quantum mechanics suggest a loosening of the bond between cause and effect. Such a loosening does not really take place. Yet what does happen in the realm of quantum processes, is that a cause does not have a deterministic effect anymore, but a probabilistic effect. That the bond between cause and effect is unbroken is proven by the fact that the statistical distribution of the effects can be represented by exact mathematical formulas."
He then goes on to describe radioactive decay as an illustration. I won't quote all of that, but he says in part:
"The cause for the decay is the instability of the 32-P nucleus, and the effect is always this precisely determinable half-life. Thus, there is a clear correlation between cause and effect, a probabilistically determined correlation. Certainly, on the local level of the lowest imaginable quantities, statistics cease to work, but the correlation between cause and effect is still there."
Nightvid:
Clearly you don't understand Pastafarianism. Actually the FSM is immaterial.
Stop lying for the Flying Spaghetti Monster!
Haven't you seen the artistic depictions? It is clearly made of meatballs and pasta. In other words, it is a material entity, unlike God.
Anette,
The "must" really isn't relevant to my point which is that I do not believe that the formulation of the first premise is justified.
If everything within our knowledge and experience has a beginning, i.e., begins to exist, then we might reasonably conclude that everything has a beginning. If everything within our knowledge and experience has a cause, then we might reasonably conclude that everything has a cause. Me might even say with some justification that everything has a beginning and a cause.
However, when you say that everything that begins to exist has a cause, you are implying that you know something about things that don’t have a beginning such that you can identify a correlation between beginnings and causedness. I don't think knowledge and experience provide any such understanding, therefore, I don't think the first premise is warranted as written.
Vinny,
Of course there is a correlation between beginnings and causes, and the scientific method depends on this correlation. Things do not poof into existence--they have a cause--and scientists are always seeking to trace the chain of causation back.
Can you think of exceptions to premise 1?
I cannot think of any exceptions to the premise. I simply think that it contains a meaningless modifier.
The first premise should read “Everything has a cause.” That is in accord with knowledge and experience. There is no logical basis for making the more narrow statement “Everything that begins to exist has a cause. The more narrow statement implies that there are some things that don’t begin to exist, which we do not know. It also implies that those things of which we have no knowledge are somehow different in terms of whether they have causes, which we also do not know.
Adding the clause “that begins to exist” is simply intellectual sleight of hand. If you do not assume the existence of an uncaused eternal God a priori, you have no reason to add it. However, since the point of the argument is to establish the existence of God, the reasoning is inherently circular. The first premise assumes the conclusion.
However, since the point of the argument is to establish the existence of God, the reasoning is inherently circular. The first premise assumes the conclusion.
Actually, Vinny, your proposed modification to the first premise is inherently circular because your premise assumes the conclusion that an eternal God cannot exist. Premise 1 of the cosmological argument assumes nothing about God's existence.
Adding the clause “that begins to exist” is simply intellectual sleight of hand.
No, it is not. Premise 1 is simply limited to what we can empirically know and logically conclude. That which begins to exist has a cause of its existence. We can say nothing empirically about that which does not begin to exist, and logically it would not have a cause.
Both premises are logically and scientifically true, and since time, space, and matter would most likely have had a cause, the best explanation is that a timeless, transcendent, and immaterial entity caused it. This happens to be consistent with what the Bible says about God being eternal (Genesis 21:33, Deuteronomy 33:27, Psalm 90:2, 2 Timothy 1:9, Jude 1:25) and the universe having a beginning and being created ex nihilo (Hebrews 11:3).
Correction: Your premise assumes the conclusion that an eternal, causeless God cannot exist.
Nightvid,
Hopefully you've already figured this out, but I was joking when I said to stop lying for the Flying Spaghetti Monster. It was a take-off on Dawkins' lying for Jesus bit and not a reference to anything you've said about the FSM. (I know people sometimes don't get when something is a joke when they can't hear how it's said.)
Anette:
1. Your mention of cosmic expansion rate does not take the theory of inflation into account. You cite Robert Jastrow, mostly writing before the theory was developed.
2. The Paul Davies quote mentions no actual specific evidence. Catchy quotes do not prove your point.
3. You are taking the Dawkins quote out of context. For one, he is not a physicist. But also, he says that he considers himself to refute the argument in his book The God Delusion . You are quote mining and leaving out the "inconvenient" parts, quite dishonestly, I might add.
4. The Davies comment goes straight to the infinite regress problem and has no predictive power.
Anette:
Victor Stenger is the only well-known physicist who disputes this
This is false. Stephen Hawking and Steven Weinberg are other well-known physicists who at least at some point in their life did not consider the "fine tuning" argument to be worth the paper it can be written on.
The Luke Barnes quote contains points to which Stenger has responded. This is another case of selective quoting on your part.
And as to your George Ellis quote, it applies to God the same way as it does to a multiverse. If you're going to argue that "wild speculation" is "inadmissible" then you shouldn't believe in God with all the properties of the Abrahamic one, or you are using a double standard.
Anette:
The Kalam cosmological argument does not use the word "must."
But it is implicitly there, otherwise premise 1 is not justified.
And premise 2 assumes too much about quantum gravity. The Big Bang model as an empirical model fitting the data does not itself presume that the universe did not exist in any form before that. That is an interpretation of the theory. While I don't doubt you can hunt down a physicist quote that the universe began at the Big Bang , it is only based on classical general relativity or the GSL , which is not known to be valid beyond the Planck scale.
As to the rest of your comment, the ability to calculate probabilities of something does not mean that it has a cause. What Al Moritz means is that the probabilistic nature of QM does not mean that nothing has a cause. It plainly does not follow that everything that begins to exist must have a cause.
Anette:
Haven't you seen the artistic depictions? It is clearly made of meatballs and pasta. In other words, it is a material entity, unlike God.
So by this line of argument, Yahweh is also material because there are artistic depictions of him. He is clearly made of flesh and blood, with a long, white beard.
Double standards / special pleading aren't going to help you here.
Vinny:
However, since the point of the argument is to establish the existence of God, the reasoning is inherently circular. The first premise assumes the conclusion.
Circular reasoning means that one or more premises assume the conclusion. Not that one or more premises are formulated for the purpose of coming to the conclusion. These are not the same.
Of course I agree that the premise is not reasonable, but calling it "circular" when debating an apologist is asking for trouble. This is the exact type of error that William Lane Craig wins debates by pointing out, so be careful !
Nightvid:
You are taking the Dawkins quote out of context. For one, he is not a physicist. But also, he says that he considers himself to refute the argument in his book The God Delusion . You are quote mining and leaving out the "inconvenient" parts, quite dishonestly, I might add.
I'm not taking it out of context. Of course Dawkins made an attempt to refute the fine-tuning argument. That's not the point. The point is that, unlike Stenger, he accepts the science behind the argument.
If I had claimed that Dawkins was a deist or leaning toward deism, I would have dishonestly taken his words out of context. But I specifically mentioned that he is an atheist and I also said that he accepts the multiverse hypothesis as an explanation. So his point about thinking that he has refuted the fine-argument in The God Delusion is irrelevant.
This is false. Stephen Hawking and Steven Weinberg are other well-known physicists who at least at some point in their life did not consider the "fine tuning" argument to be worth the paper it can be written on.
Steven Weinberg accepts the fine-tuning of the cosmological constant: "In any case, there is one constant whose value does seem remarkably well adjusted in our favor. It is the energy density of empty space, also known as the cosmological constant."
And it is a major example of a fine-tuning coincidence. Stephen Hawking says in The Grand Design: "The most impressive fine-tuning coincidence involves the so-called cosmological constant in Einstein's equations of general relativity."
Physicist Stephen Barr says about the cosmological constant: "In discussing the size of the cosmological constant we shall use what are "natural units" for gravity, in which Newton's constant is exactly 1. It has long been known that the cosmological constant (when expressed in these natural units) is less than about 1E-120. In decimal form this would be written
0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000
00000000000000000000000000001."
Hawking most certainly accepts the science behind the fine-tuning argument. He says, "Our universe and its laws appear to have a design that both is tailor-made to support us and, if we are to exist, leaves little room for alteration. That is not easily explained, and raises the natural question of why it is that way."
Like Dawkins, Hawking accepts the apparent fine-tuning, but attempts to explain it with the multiverse hypothesis.
Where does Hawking dispute the science behind the fine-tuning argument?
And premise 2 assumes too much about quantum gravity. The Big Bang model as an empirical model fitting the data does not itself presume that the universe did not exist in any form before that. That is an interpretation of the theory. While I don't doubt you can hunt down a physicist quote that the universe began at the Big Bang , it is only based on classical general relativity or the GSL , which is not known to be valid beyond the Planck scale.
The evidence strongly indicates that the universe had a beginning. And the theory of quantum gravity is still under construction.
Also, according to the Kalam Cosmological Argument, premise 2 holds even without the scientific evidence because an infinite regress of causes is impossible.
As to the rest of your comment, the ability to calculate probabilities of something does not mean that it has a cause. What Al Moritz means is that the probabilistic nature of QM does not mean that nothing has a cause. It plainly does not follow that everything that begins to exist must have a cause.
You are misunderstanding Moritz. He specifically says that a probabilistic cause is still a cause.
So by this line of argument, Yahweh is also material because there are artistic depictions of him. He is clearly made of flesh and blood, with a long, white beard.
The creator of the FSM portrayed it as an entity made of spaghetti and meatballs.
On the other hand, the God of the Bible is immaterial, invisible, and timeless, Michelangelo's depiction notwithstanding. And I believe in the God of the Bible, not the God of the Sistine Chapel.
Hi, I stumbled across this post on Google and I have to say this is amongst the most civil serious theology debates I've ever seen on the Internet. You all get cookies.
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