Why disbelief in God is irrational, and philosophical naturalism a failed hypothesis
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2472-why-disbelief-in-god-is-irrational-and-philosophical-naturalism-a-failed-hypothesis
- Absolutely nothing can not produce something like physical laws, finely tuned universes, stars, life-permitting planets, life and biodiversity
- The vacuum that supposedly gave birth to quantum fluctuations, and virtual particles, would also require a cause
- Matter cannot predate consciousness.
- The Laws of Physics cannot pop-up out of nothing.
- The universe or a supposed multiverse cannot be past eternal.
- The Balance of the Big Bang and its expansion could not be finely tuned randomly. The odds are too big ( the cosmological constant is finely tuned to a precision of 10^123 )
- The odds to tune the fundamental forces, the galaxy, the solar - planetary system, the earth, the atmosphere, etc. are far too big, too.
- The number of electrons (in the universe) is equivalent to the number of protons to an accuracy of one part in 10 to the 37th power. If it were not so, galaxies, stars, and planets would never form (because electromagnetic forces would so overwhelm gravitational forces).
- Life can not emerge from non-life and produce biological living cells that equal to factory plants, full of interdependent factories, each full of irreducibly complex machines, production lines, and all processes driven by preprogrammed information and signalling pathways
- Random, unguided, lucky events cannot produce codes, ciphers, blueprints, and complex instructional information observed in biological cells and stored in genes and epigenetic ways.
- Evolution explains speciation, small adaptations, and micro-evolution. Common ancestry and macro-evolution are failed hypotheses. Body plans and cell shape, size, and type, and development are directed by preprogrammed codified complex information and signal networks.
- Objective moral values cannot be explained rationally without a prescribing entity.
- Only a creator explains the intrinsic value of human life, reason, logic, language, intelligence, and consciousness.
- and mystical experiences answers to prayers, and special divine revelations confirmed and testified by millions of all ages, around the globe.
- there is no real alternative mechanism to an intelligent agency as a causal mechanism of origins. Once, God is cancelled out, nothing remains
These are not arguments from incredulity, ignorance, gaps of knowledge. They describe the real situation.
Matter cannot predate consciousness 7
Quantum mechanics favours the view that conscience predates matter. The notion that random molecular movement and “emergence” from this can explain subjective experience is a bankrupt theory. The word “emergence” is used when the mechanism is not understood. 2
The Laws of Physics cannot pop-up out of nothing 6
Atheists have no good reasons to believe that absolutely nothing can magically cause a Big Bang and life-supporting universe and create the physical laws simultaneously.
"The naive view implies that the universe suddenly came into existence and found a complete system of physical laws waiting to be obeyed. Actually, it seems more natural to suppose that the physical universe and the laws of physics are interdependent." —*WH. McCrea, "Cosmology after Half a Century," Science, Vol. 160, June 1968, p. 1297.
A universe cannot emerge from absolutely anything
Krauss et all argue that the universe is flat. The implication is that the net energy is zero. When I have us$100,00 assets, and us$100,00 debts, my net wealth is zero, since both cancel each other out. Ok, but obviously there had to be a previous cause for my financial situation. And the assets exist. So, applied to the origin of the net zero energy at the Big Bang: what caused the positive and negative energy? There is another problem with Krauss " arguments ": the universe has net positive energy that's overcoming the negative energy of gravity in order to expand.
The Balance of the Big Bang could not be finely tuned randomly : 1
In order for life to be possible in the universe, the explosive power of the Big Bang needed to be extremely closely matched to the amount of mass and balanced with the force of gravity, so that the expansion speed is very precise. This very exact expansion speed of the universe is called the "Cosmological Constant." If the force of the bang was slightly too weak, the expanding matter would have collapsed back in on itself before any planets suitable for life (or stars) had a chance to form, ---but if the bang was slightly too strong, the resultant matter would have been only hydrogen gas that was so diffuse and expanding so fast, that no stars or planets could have formed at all.
Science writer Gregg Easterbrook explains the required explosive power-balance of the Big Bang, saying that, "Researchers have calculated that, if the ratio of matter and energy to the volume of space ...had not been within about one quadrillionth of one percent of ideal at the moment of the Big Bang, the incipient universe would have collapsed back on itself or suffered runaway relativity effects" (My emphasis.) (ref. G.Easterbrook, "Science Sees the Light", The New Republic, Oct.12, 1998, p.26).
The universe cannot be past eternal 4
The universe cannot be eternal in any kind of form, like a multiverse, oscillating universe etc. , without a beginning; we cannot reach the present and now from the eternal past, and overcome the second law of thermodynamics; that is the fact that useful energy in the universe winds down, and becomes less and less useful energy for work. Since it winds down, if the universe would exist from eternity, we would have reached maximum entropy, and the universe would be in a state of heat death. Philosophical reasons refute the claim as well. If we add one event after the other starting now, whenever we stop, the time-lapse will always be a defined timespan. How can we then reach now from ( past ) eternity by adding one event after the other? we would never reach the present moment.
Life can not emerge from non-life and produce biological living cells 5
The cell is an interdependent functional city. We state, “The cell is the most detailed and concentrated organizational structure known to humanity. It is a lively microcosmic city, with factories for making building supplies, packaging centers for transporting the supplies, trucks that move the materials along highways, communication devices, hospitals for repairing injuries, a massive library of information, power stations providing usable energy, garbage removal, walls for protection and city gates for allowing certain materials to come and go from the cell.” The notion of the theoretical first cell arising by natural causes is a perfect example of irreducible complexity. Life cannot exist without many numerous interdependent complex systems, each irreducibly complex on their own, working together to bring about a grand pageant for life to exist.
It's unlikely to the extreme, to the point that we can affirm with certainty that it's impossible that cells could emerge through unguided, accidental random events, and luck would have been able to create the storage device of information in DNA, transcription and translation machinery inside cells , invent a optimal genetic code, better and less error-prone than one million alternatives, a translation system ( a genetic cipher, that equals to translation from English to Chinese ) , and incalculable amount of precise instructions to create the first self-replicating cell with a minimal number of precisely dimensioned and fitting parts, precise energy supply where needed for various chemical reactions, a error check and repair system all along the cellular processes.
Biodiversity is cannot be explained through evolution 8
Millions of amazingly diverse species have the ability to evolve and adapt to the environment. There is no evidence at any level of biological organization that natural selection is a directional force encouraging complexity. 9 Epigenetic information in embryonic cells refute the sufficiency of the neo-Darwinian m10echanism. 9 Both body-plan formation during embryological development and major morphological innovations during the history of life depend upon a specificity of arrangement at a much higher level of the organizational hierarchy, a level that DNA alone does not determine. A whole body of evidence refutes the claim of common ancestry Cuttlefish and chamaeleon use the same hunting technique - a lightning fast tongue, and chromophores in their skin for hiding from other animals. And cuttlefish use a advanced camera eye similar to humans. That is convergent evolution, which falsified Darwins theory, since, as Stephen J. Gould said: “…No finale can be specified at the start, none would ever occur a second time in the same way, because any pathway proceeds through thousands of improbable stages. Alter any early event, ever so slightly, and without apparent importance at the time, and evolution cascades into a radically different channel.1
Objective moral values cannot be explained rationally without a prescribing entity 10
Its not justified by any means to torture, rape and kill little babies for fun. That means, absolute, objective moral values exist. Since they are prescriptive, we would have to grant the existence of a moral giver or moral code prescriber above us.
Objection: Above are all arguments from incredulity
Answer: "Incredulous" basically means "I don't believe it". Well, there's a big difference between "not believing" that an actual animal, plant, phenomenon etc. *exists*, versus believing a certain "just so" story about HOW it came to exist.That is the THING that we are incredulous about - a *certain scenario* (Neo-Darwinism and abiogenesis , and that irreducibly complex biological systems, and coded, instructed or specified complex information could emerge naturally ) that's only *imagined* about how various amazing abilities of animals and plants happened all by themselves, defying known and reasonable principles of the limited range of chance, physical necessity, mutations and Natural Selection. The proponent of naturalism is "incredulous" that an intelligent creator/designer could exist, beyond and behind our entire space-time continuum, who is our Creator. But there is nothing ridiculous about that - especially if you can't personally examine reality to that depth - how do you know nature is all that exists? What IS ridiculous (IMO) is trying to imagine a *naturalistic origin* of these things. ORIGIN is not the same as OPERATION. To study how biology works today is entirely different from giving a *plausible* account of how it came about to be in the first place.
Objection: Above are arguments from ignorance
Answer: The design revolution, Dembski writes on page 220:
Eliminative inductions argue for the truth of a proposition by arguing that competitors to that proposition are false. ( Contrast this with Popperian falsification, where propositions are corroborated to the degree that they successfully withstand attempts to falsify them ) Provided the proposition, together with its competitors, form a mutually exclusive and exhaustive class, eliminating all the competitors entails that the proposition is true. As Sherlock Holmes famous dictum says : when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improable, must be the truth. This is the ideal case, in which elininative inductions in fact become deductions. The problem is that in practice we don't have a neat ordering of competitors that can then all be knocked down with a few straigthforward and judicious blows.
Objection: Above are God of the gaps arguments
Answer: God of the gaps is a comfortable way to try to criticize and reject a argument and avoid to address actually the issues raised. Oponents of ID resort to it all the time, even when a robust case is made, with clear and detailed science based observation, prediction, experiment, and and logical inference and conclusion. The evidence for intelligent design has not been shrinking in the last two decades. It’s been growing, while the barriers to explain origins through naturalism have grown. This is obvious in regard of all relevant issues : the origin and fine tuning of the universe, of life, and biodiversity.
1. https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1885-fine-tuning-of-the-cosmological-constant
2. https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1380-what-comes-first-mind-or-matter?highlight=mind
3. https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1336-laws-of-physics-where-did-they-come-from?highlight=laws
4. https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2049-you-will-not-live-an-eternity
5. https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1279-abiogenesis-is-impossible
6. https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1336-laws-of-physics-where-did-they-come-from
7. https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1380-what-comes-first-mind-or-matter]http://reasonandscience.heavenforum.org/t1380-what-comes-first-mind-or-matter
8. https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2458-is-there-evidence-for-natural-selection
9. http://www.pnas.org/content/104/suppl_1/8597.full
10. https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2239-the-tree-of-life-common-descent-common-ancestry-a-failed-hypothesis
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2472-why-disbelief-in-god-is-irrational-and-philosophical-naturalism-a-failed-hypothesis
- Absolutely nothing can not produce something like physical laws, finely tuned universes, stars, life-permitting planets, life and biodiversity
- The vacuum that supposedly gave birth to quantum fluctuations, and virtual particles, would also require a cause
- Matter cannot predate consciousness.
- The Laws of Physics cannot pop-up out of nothing.
- The universe or a supposed multiverse cannot be past eternal.
- The Balance of the Big Bang and its expansion could not be finely tuned randomly. The odds are too big ( the cosmological constant is finely tuned to a precision of 10^123 )
- The odds to tune the fundamental forces, the galaxy, the solar - planetary system, the earth, the atmosphere, etc. are far too big, too.
- The number of electrons (in the universe) is equivalent to the number of protons to an accuracy of one part in 10 to the 37th power. If it were not so, galaxies, stars, and planets would never form (because electromagnetic forces would so overwhelm gravitational forces).
- Life can not emerge from non-life and produce biological living cells that equal to factory plants, full of interdependent factories, each full of irreducibly complex machines, production lines, and all processes driven by preprogrammed information and signalling pathways
- Random, unguided, lucky events cannot produce codes, ciphers, blueprints, and complex instructional information observed in biological cells and stored in genes and epigenetic ways.
- Evolution explains speciation, small adaptations, and micro-evolution. Common ancestry and macro-evolution are failed hypotheses. Body plans and cell shape, size, and type, and development are directed by preprogrammed codified complex information and signal networks.
- Objective moral values cannot be explained rationally without a prescribing entity.
- Only a creator explains the intrinsic value of human life, reason, logic, language, intelligence, and consciousness.
- and mystical experiences answers to prayers, and special divine revelations confirmed and testified by millions of all ages, around the globe.
- there is no real alternative mechanism to an intelligent agency as a causal mechanism of origins. Once, God is cancelled out, nothing remains
These are not arguments from incredulity, ignorance, gaps of knowledge. They describe the real situation.
Matter cannot predate consciousness 7
Quantum mechanics favours the view that conscience predates matter. The notion that random molecular movement and “emergence” from this can explain subjective experience is a bankrupt theory. The word “emergence” is used when the mechanism is not understood. 2
The Laws of Physics cannot pop-up out of nothing 6
Atheists have no good reasons to believe that absolutely nothing can magically cause a Big Bang and life-supporting universe and create the physical laws simultaneously.
"The naive view implies that the universe suddenly came into existence and found a complete system of physical laws waiting to be obeyed. Actually, it seems more natural to suppose that the physical universe and the laws of physics are interdependent." —*WH. McCrea, "Cosmology after Half a Century," Science, Vol. 160, June 1968, p. 1297.
A universe cannot emerge from absolutely anything
Krauss et all argue that the universe is flat. The implication is that the net energy is zero. When I have us$100,00 assets, and us$100,00 debts, my net wealth is zero, since both cancel each other out. Ok, but obviously there had to be a previous cause for my financial situation. And the assets exist. So, applied to the origin of the net zero energy at the Big Bang: what caused the positive and negative energy? There is another problem with Krauss " arguments ": the universe has net positive energy that's overcoming the negative energy of gravity in order to expand.
The Balance of the Big Bang could not be finely tuned randomly : 1
In order for life to be possible in the universe, the explosive power of the Big Bang needed to be extremely closely matched to the amount of mass and balanced with the force of gravity, so that the expansion speed is very precise. This very exact expansion speed of the universe is called the "Cosmological Constant." If the force of the bang was slightly too weak, the expanding matter would have collapsed back in on itself before any planets suitable for life (or stars) had a chance to form, ---but if the bang was slightly too strong, the resultant matter would have been only hydrogen gas that was so diffuse and expanding so fast, that no stars or planets could have formed at all.
Science writer Gregg Easterbrook explains the required explosive power-balance of the Big Bang, saying that, "Researchers have calculated that, if the ratio of matter and energy to the volume of space ...had not been within about one quadrillionth of one percent of ideal at the moment of the Big Bang, the incipient universe would have collapsed back on itself or suffered runaway relativity effects" (My emphasis.) (ref. G.Easterbrook, "Science Sees the Light", The New Republic, Oct.12, 1998, p.26).
The universe cannot be past eternal 4
The universe cannot be eternal in any kind of form, like a multiverse, oscillating universe etc. , without a beginning; we cannot reach the present and now from the eternal past, and overcome the second law of thermodynamics; that is the fact that useful energy in the universe winds down, and becomes less and less useful energy for work. Since it winds down, if the universe would exist from eternity, we would have reached maximum entropy, and the universe would be in a state of heat death. Philosophical reasons refute the claim as well. If we add one event after the other starting now, whenever we stop, the time-lapse will always be a defined timespan. How can we then reach now from ( past ) eternity by adding one event after the other? we would never reach the present moment.
Life can not emerge from non-life and produce biological living cells 5
The cell is an interdependent functional city. We state, “The cell is the most detailed and concentrated organizational structure known to humanity. It is a lively microcosmic city, with factories for making building supplies, packaging centers for transporting the supplies, trucks that move the materials along highways, communication devices, hospitals for repairing injuries, a massive library of information, power stations providing usable energy, garbage removal, walls for protection and city gates for allowing certain materials to come and go from the cell.” The notion of the theoretical first cell arising by natural causes is a perfect example of irreducible complexity. Life cannot exist without many numerous interdependent complex systems, each irreducibly complex on their own, working together to bring about a grand pageant for life to exist.
It's unlikely to the extreme, to the point that we can affirm with certainty that it's impossible that cells could emerge through unguided, accidental random events, and luck would have been able to create the storage device of information in DNA, transcription and translation machinery inside cells , invent a optimal genetic code, better and less error-prone than one million alternatives, a translation system ( a genetic cipher, that equals to translation from English to Chinese ) , and incalculable amount of precise instructions to create the first self-replicating cell with a minimal number of precisely dimensioned and fitting parts, precise energy supply where needed for various chemical reactions, a error check and repair system all along the cellular processes.
Biodiversity is cannot be explained through evolution 8
Millions of amazingly diverse species have the ability to evolve and adapt to the environment. There is no evidence at any level of biological organization that natural selection is a directional force encouraging complexity. 9 Epigenetic information in embryonic cells refute the sufficiency of the neo-Darwinian m10echanism. 9 Both body-plan formation during embryological development and major morphological innovations during the history of life depend upon a specificity of arrangement at a much higher level of the organizational hierarchy, a level that DNA alone does not determine. A whole body of evidence refutes the claim of common ancestry Cuttlefish and chamaeleon use the same hunting technique - a lightning fast tongue, and chromophores in their skin for hiding from other animals. And cuttlefish use a advanced camera eye similar to humans. That is convergent evolution, which falsified Darwins theory, since, as Stephen J. Gould said: “…No finale can be specified at the start, none would ever occur a second time in the same way, because any pathway proceeds through thousands of improbable stages. Alter any early event, ever so slightly, and without apparent importance at the time, and evolution cascades into a radically different channel.1
Objective moral values cannot be explained rationally without a prescribing entity 10
Its not justified by any means to torture, rape and kill little babies for fun. That means, absolute, objective moral values exist. Since they are prescriptive, we would have to grant the existence of a moral giver or moral code prescriber above us.
Objection: Above are all arguments from incredulity
Answer: "Incredulous" basically means "I don't believe it". Well, there's a big difference between "not believing" that an actual animal, plant, phenomenon etc. *exists*, versus believing a certain "just so" story about HOW it came to exist.That is the THING that we are incredulous about - a *certain scenario* (Neo-Darwinism and abiogenesis , and that irreducibly complex biological systems, and coded, instructed or specified complex information could emerge naturally ) that's only *imagined* about how various amazing abilities of animals and plants happened all by themselves, defying known and reasonable principles of the limited range of chance, physical necessity, mutations and Natural Selection. The proponent of naturalism is "incredulous" that an intelligent creator/designer could exist, beyond and behind our entire space-time continuum, who is our Creator. But there is nothing ridiculous about that - especially if you can't personally examine reality to that depth - how do you know nature is all that exists? What IS ridiculous (IMO) is trying to imagine a *naturalistic origin* of these things. ORIGIN is not the same as OPERATION. To study how biology works today is entirely different from giving a *plausible* account of how it came about to be in the first place.
Objection: Above are arguments from ignorance
Answer: The design revolution, Dembski writes on page 220:
Eliminative inductions argue for the truth of a proposition by arguing that competitors to that proposition are false. ( Contrast this with Popperian falsification, where propositions are corroborated to the degree that they successfully withstand attempts to falsify them ) Provided the proposition, together with its competitors, form a mutually exclusive and exhaustive class, eliminating all the competitors entails that the proposition is true. As Sherlock Holmes famous dictum says : when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improable, must be the truth. This is the ideal case, in which elininative inductions in fact become deductions. The problem is that in practice we don't have a neat ordering of competitors that can then all be knocked down with a few straigthforward and judicious blows.
Objection: Above are God of the gaps arguments
Answer: God of the gaps is a comfortable way to try to criticize and reject a argument and avoid to address actually the issues raised. Oponents of ID resort to it all the time, even when a robust case is made, with clear and detailed science based observation, prediction, experiment, and and logical inference and conclusion. The evidence for intelligent design has not been shrinking in the last two decades. It’s been growing, while the barriers to explain origins through naturalism have grown. This is obvious in regard of all relevant issues : the origin and fine tuning of the universe, of life, and biodiversity.
1. https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1885-fine-tuning-of-the-cosmological-constant
2. https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1380-what-comes-first-mind-or-matter?highlight=mind
3. https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1336-laws-of-physics-where-did-they-come-from?highlight=laws
4. https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2049-you-will-not-live-an-eternity
5. https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1279-abiogenesis-is-impossible
6. https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1336-laws-of-physics-where-did-they-come-from
7. https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1380-what-comes-first-mind-or-matter]http://reasonandscience.heavenforum.org/t1380-what-comes-first-mind-or-matter
8. https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2458-is-there-evidence-for-natural-selection
9. http://www.pnas.org/content/104/suppl_1/8597.full
10. https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2239-the-tree-of-life-common-descent-common-ancestry-a-failed-hypothesis
