Here.
Now a month after the fact, cosmologist and “skeptic” Lawrence Krauss has made another attempt at damage control in the wake of that wildly popular Christmas Day article by Eric Metaxas in the Wall Street Journal. The Metaxas essay, which went viral, argued that science increasingly makes the case for God. The first try by Dr. Krauss was obviously rushed, and wasn’t published by the WSJ, though the Richard Dawkins Foundation did post it on their website. His current and much more mature effort appears in The New Yorker (“No, Astrobiology Has Not Made the Case for God”).
To put Krauss’s comments in context, he has been a vociferous critic of any idea suggestive of intelligent design, and so his feigned surprise at the arguments in the Metaxas article isn’t very convincing. His own recent book, A Universe from Nothing, is interesting in that he ultimately equivocates on the meaning of “nothing,” settling on a definition that is not the kind of nothing from which theists posit that the universe came. In replying to Eric Metaxas, he adopts a tone of disdain and condescension, continuing to emphasize that Metaxas
Maybe Krauss owns the rights to that tone.
He tried it on me (O’Leary for News) back in 2009 in some place in Canada northlands here, and like, I am just your news writer:
For the record, Dr. Krauss brought up religion, not me. Curiously, his certainty about the assured end of the (definitely flat) universe and the end of science as part of the preceding Tribulation evoked fundamentalist Bible camps. Later, Dr. Krauss expanded on this “misunderstood, or mis-represented” theme elsewhere, whereupon the moderator replied, defending my reputation as a journalist. Golly, you don’t get many bouquets in this business. But when people slam you for hearing both sides, you are certainly headed in the right direction.
Guess a guy can’t be too zealous in defending his trademark.
But how much is the trademark worth?
And is this guy worth his fees any more? You decide.
See also: The Science Fictions series at your fingertips (cosmology).
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Krauss obfuscates incredibly by the story of the itinerary he presents. He conflates the necessary with the unimportant details ( he was in SF – not essential, he made a certain series of traffic lights -not essential, he was screened by a certain airport screener – not essential, he boarded a plane flown by a certain pilot – not essential. ) All these details are not essential, because his opinion that he was going to write could have been written in ANY city, in ANY location, in ANY airport, he could have been screened by ANY screener, flown by ANY pilot, and he would have written the SAME drivel. In other words the details he mentions of his particular journey are not essential to the output or to the phenomenon of his incredibly stupid argument.
This is a really stupid mistake.
Since a smart man is driven to make such a stupid mistake, I think he ends up supporting Metaxas instead of defeating him.
You asked why Larry is a celeb. Somebody once said that Paris Hilton was famous for being famous. This happens to scientists too. Somehow, when they start going on the speaking circuit, they stop doing science and become famous for talking about science. It happened to Carl Sagan, it happened to Paul Davies, it happened to (yes, even him) Richard Dawkins. All of these guys did something after their PhD that made them famous–they wrote a book, they fronted a controversial new theory, they made a prediction. But after this scientific fame gave them speaking fees, they stopped doing science.
Now this is different than, say, Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, or Roger Penrose. This group of fellows turned down most speaking engagements because they wanted to work on their science. Hawking finally gave up science because he can’t write a paragraph in less than a hour and can’t even doodle on a blackboard anymore, so he can only solve problems he can keep in his head. But this is a reluctant celeb, if such a thing exists.
Larry is in the Sagan camp of jubilant celebs, who enjoy the privilege of airtime to spout on all their favorite hobbies. As a result, he has reduced himself to the level of Paris Hilton, famous for being famous. And once on that Red Queen race toward fame, he has to spout increasingly greater and greater inanities to get that 15 minutes of press attention. Like James Watson, he will one day cross over the line of the ever-shifting media ROE and find the silence deafening.
That is a well thought out comment Robert Sheldon!
I have been wondering how to reply to comments in regards to a problem that I think can be summed up as the ID movement celebs not being helpful to those who are (or want to be) busy working on the science:
http://www.uncommondescent.com.....ent-545052
Reluctant celebs do exist. In the case of ID it’s like being forced to get good at repeating slogans that draw a religious audience to a “theory” that does not even have to exist for it to be a marketing success. As with the theory my name links to the science can take some 1000 hours of computer modeling time with your own models just to have experience with the basics. It’s easier to not bother with detail of what is now understood and can be experimented with or else it’s like something a teacher has to force them to study or they will never read it. The average leisure reader does not want a science book that can take them years to make sense of so fluff sells, for at least a little while. Thankfully though the only thing that stands the test of generations of time are the good ideas from those who stayed busy on their science work. The celebs are usually left showing how little their generation actually knew.
OT
Curtain falls on BICEP2 result
http://news.sciencemag.org/phy.....ang-result
The Daniel Bakken article was an excellent defence of Metaxas’s WSJ article:
Eric Metaxas originally got his, (understated), numbers from the over 30 years of research by astrophysicist Dr. Hugh Ross and his team:
Although Bakken’s, and others, articles were very good in their defense of Metaxas, my gripe against Eric Metaxas’s, and his defenders, science is not against the science, but that the science does not go deep enough. For example, in the Privileged Planet video,,,
In the Privileged Planet video, although they do focus on probabilities as Metaxas and most of his defenders did, the focus in the video is not so much on probabilities as it is on the fact that there is a ‘spooky’ correlation of habitability and observability
Indeed, since the Privileged Planet video came out, this thesis that the universe is ‘set up’ to be discovered by life like human life has only gotten stronger. Indeed the Copernican principle, (i.e. the idea that the earth has no privileged position in the universe since it is not center of the solar system), itself has been questioned:
And as Dr. Robin Collins recently discovered, even the Cosmic Background Radiation appears to be ‘set up’ to be discovered by life like human life:
And Dr. Michael Denton, who may rightly be called the father of the modern Intelligent Design movement, has recently pointed out that even the chemistry of the universe seems to be ‘set up’ to be of maximum benefit for life like human life:
Then there is the ‘anthropic inequality’ which also seems to indicate that the universe was ‘set up’ for humans:
Here is a quote of related interest in regards to how the Cosmic Background Radiation forms a sphere around the earth:
The following site is also very interesting to the topic of ‘centrality in the universe’;
The preceding interactive graph and video points out that the smallest scale visible to the human eye (as well as a human egg) is at 10^-4 meters, which ‘just so happens’ to be directly in the exponential center of all possible sizes of our physical reality. As far as the exponential graph itself is concerned, 10^-4 is, exponentially, right in the middle of 10^-35 meters, which is the smallest possible unit of length, which is Planck length, and 10^27 meters, which is the largest possible unit of ‘observable’ length since space-time was created in the Big Bang, which is the diameter of the universe. This is very interesting for, as far as I can tell, the limits to human vision (as well as the size of the human egg) could have, theoretically, been at very different positions than directly in the exponential middle.
Also of note, quantum mechanics tells us that ‘conscious observation’ is of primary importance in regards to physical reality, thus overturning the Copernican principle from an even deeper level of our understanding of physical reality:
Thus, while I certainly agree with the science that Eric Metaxas references in his WSJ article, and am pleased with the overall defence of Metaxas by ID proponents, I’m disappointed that the defences of Metaxas’s WSJ article, by people who know the evidence much better than Metaxas, did not include the much richer evidence we now have that now overturns the Copernican principle at a far deeper level than it had been previously. Of course it is hard to bring all this evidence out in short articles, but I still fell that this deeper evidence could have been hashed out a little better than it was.
Verse and Music:
Let’s see now, on questions of science am I going to give greater weight to the opinions of an “author, speaker, and TV host” or an eminent physicist with a distinguished track record of research in his field? Hmmm, difficult one. Not.
udat @ 4
Just to be clear – CMBR itself is proof of inflation. What was withdrawn is the discovery of gravitational wave, which was in doubt right from the beginning.
Me-Think, that’s right buddy, inflation, just like Darwinism, don’t need no stinking substantiating evidence!
Shoot, It doesn’t even matter to atheists that inflation predicts everything and therefore predicts nothing:
Moreover, CMBR is proof of creation not inflation:
Seversky, so when were you first enamored by Krauss’s genius?
When he redefined nothing?
Lawrence Krauss vs The Dictionary – video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iY0gC6ExG8k
Or when he said 2+2=5?
2+2=5? (Lawrence Krauss vs William Lane Craig) – video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOrlIOm6eGM
🙂
bornagain77 @ 10,
So now you are enamoured with Steinhardt’s Colliding barn Big Crunch theory ?!. Do you understand it is derived from String theory?
Me_Think, no, I’m pretty much as contemptuous of the non-falsifiability of string theory as I am of the non-falsifiablity of inflation (and Darwinism):
bornagain77 @ 13
So you are pretty much contemptuous of ‘God made the universe’ theory too, since it too is non-falsifiable?
Me_Think, actually if the universe were to have been discovered to be eternally existent as the atheists had postulated, instead of created as Theists had postulated, that would have falsified Theism. Moreover unlike these desperate attempts by atheists to ‘explain away’ the beginning of the universe, God has been, and still is, doing quite well as the explanation for why the universe was created:
Logic dictates ‘a decision’ must have been made in order to purposely create a temporal reality with highly specified (i.e. fine-tuned) laws, and irreducible complex parameters from a infinite set of possibilities.
bornagain77 @ 11
I think it was after I’d read The Physics of Star Trek
Since you seem to be interested in nothing you should try The Book of Nothing by John D Barrow
MMMM, Your link goes to this page.
and not to belittle Krauss too much (since he seems to do such a fine job himself), but he is philosophically lacking to put it mildly:
Not Understanding Nothing – A review of A Universe from Nothing – Edward Feser – June 2012
Excerpt: A critic might reasonably question the arguments for a divine first cause of the cosmos. But to ask “What caused God?” misses the whole reason classical philosophers thought his existence necessary in the first place. So when physicist Lawrence Krauss begins his new book by suggesting that to ask “Who created the creator?” suffices to dispatch traditional philosophical theology, we know it isn’t going to end well. ,,,
,,, But Krauss simply can’t see the “difference between arguing in favor of an eternally existing creator versus an eternally existing universe without one.” The difference, as the reader of Aristotle or Aquinas knows, is that the universe changes while the unmoved mover does not, or, as the Neoplatonist can tell you, that the universe is made up of parts while its source is absolutely one; or, as Leibniz could tell you, that the universe is contingent and God absolutely necessary. There is thus a principled reason for regarding God rather than the universe as the terminus of explanation.
http://www.firstthings.com/art.....ng-nothing
Seversky:
And we should care about your opinion because of what again? By the way, did you know that Stephen Hawking, one of your most admired cosmologists I’m sure, is a believer in time travel? ahahaha…AHAHAHA…ahahaha…
Well Mapou time travel is within the bounds of human imagination; God isn’t, s/he or it, is just too outrageous.
as to: “Well Mapou time travel is within the bounds of human imagination; God isn’t, s/he or it, is just too outrageous.”
Actually God is far more rational, and even ‘natural’, for human thinking than atheism is:
In fact Children have been shown to have a predisposition to believe in God:
Moreover, it is not that Atheists do not see purpose in nature, (in fact science is impossible without presupposing teleology/purpose on some level), it is that Atheists, for whatever severely misguided reason, live in denial of the purpose they see in nature.
Verse:
Richard Dawkins wants to fight Islamism with erotica. Celebrity atheism has lost it
A tweet from Richard Dawkins’ account suggests beaming porn all over the Middle East. And Stephen Fry is angry with God. Who cares anymore? – 31 Jan 2015
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/com.....st-it.html