In comments to my last post HeKS absolutely lays waste to two materialists who are trying to punch way above their weight. First, Pindi spews out the million-times-rebutted claim that there is “no evidence” for the existence of God.
Pindi: And its not that I don’t want to believe in something that is god-like and personal. I just don’t see any evidence for it.
HeKS responds (not placed in quote box; all that follows is his unless noted otherwise):
Oh God, it’s the “there just isn’t any evidence” canard again.
I don’t know how atheists can even make this claim with a straight face anymore.
Here is a sampling of a few lines of evidence strongly pointing to God’s existence:
– The origin of the universe (including its matter, energy, space and physical laws) in the finite past
– The fine-tuning of the physical laws and initial conditions of the universe in a way that allows for the existence of intelligent life
– The fine-tuning of the universe for discoverability
– The fine-tuning of our solar system and planet for both life and discoverability
– The origin of life, which is roughly the equivalent of the origin of biological information
– Various events in the history of life that seem to show a large-scale influx of biological information that cannot be accounted for by any proposed mechanism of biological evolution that we are aware of. (Best explained by reference to God when taken in light of preceding items)
– Various other events in history that seem best explained by divine intervention and that would not be expected on naturalism or materialism (such as evidence supporting the resurrection of Christ).
– The apparent existence of objective moral values and duties, which people can’t seem to avoid invoking even while denying their existence (i.e. sneaking it in the back door after booting it out the front door)
– Various aspects of the mind, including the apparent existence of free will, the apparent existence of a rational consciousness capable of accurately perceiving external events and reasoning on them in a reliable way, the ability to have subjective experiences, and the ability to have thoughts that are about things.
These facts, conditions and states of affairs make God’s existence more likely than it would otherwise be in their absence or if they were different than they are, thus they constitute evidence for God’s existence.
If you want to say you’re not personally convinced and wouldn’t be unless God performed some miracle in front of your eyes for the sake of personally convincing you, fine. You’re entitled to your selective hyperskepticism. But stop claiming that there just isn’t any evidence for God’s existence. If you don’t want to accept God’s existence then it’s time to put on your bib and gobble up the multiverse. Bon appetit.
[Barry: Then rvb8 weighs in:]
all of the things HeKS listed, except for the starting point of the universe have competing, and better theorised natural answers.
HeKS responds:
My claim was that there is evidence for God’s existence. My claim was not that there is absolute proof for God’s existence or that God is the only conceivable explanation for the things listed. As such, this comment from you would be completely irrelevant to my point even if it were true. But then, it’s not true. And, in fact, it’s untrue on both counts, in that not all of the items in my list have competing “theorized natural answers”, and where they do, those competing natural answers are typically worse, not better.
Consider the list again…
– The origin of the universe (including its matter, energy, space and physical laws) in the finite past
You didn’t try to assert that there was a better competing naturalistic theory for this, so I won’t spend time on it. Suffice it to say that Krauss’ idea of a universe from “nothing”, in which “nothing” is the quantum vacuum, assumes the prior existence of all the things to be explained and doesn’t answer the philosophical issues involved.
– The fine-tuning of the physical laws and initial conditions of the universe in a way that allows for the existence of intelligent life
– The fine-tuning of the universe for discoverability
– The fine-tuning of our solar system and planet for both life and discoverability
In response to these you said:
HeKS uses ‘fine tuning’ three times and roles his eyes at the ‘lack of evidence for God’argument.
Actually, these three list items mention fine-tuning four times, because they are referring to four different categories of fine-tuning.
The fine-tuning of the laws of physics and initial conditions of the universe are a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for life to be even possible anywhere in the universe.
The fine-tuning of our solar system and planet for the existence of intelligent life, which includes a few hundred factors, is also necessary, but would be useless and in many cases impossible without the fine-tuning of the universe itself.
The fine-tuning of the universe for discoverability refers to the fact that the values of the laws of physics fall into an even more narrow range than the already inconceivably narrow range necessary for life, but instead fit within the subset of that life-permitting range that also allows the universe to be scientifically discoverable to intelligent beings.
This, however, would be useless if our own planet and solar system were not also fine-tuned in terms of their position and composition so as to also be conducive to scientific discovery
Now, in order to account for the fine tuning of the laws of physics and initial conditions of the universe, some appeal to a staggeringly expansive multiverse birthing off child universes in which the values are randomly determined, which they try to derive from some undetermined hypothetical connection between the purely theoretical concept of chaotic inflation and the much-maligned string theory, which is also purely theoretical.
It would take an unimaginable number of universes with randomly determined values to have a 51% chance of getting a universe that falls into the life-permitting range of our universe. But that would just be the beginning, because then you have all the other factors needed to make intelligent life possible at the level of the planet and solar system, all of which the atheist requires to have occurred by chance. The number of additional universes required to also get all these factors at the right values would dwarf the already unimaginably large collection of universes that have to be postulated just to explain the fine-tuning of the universe itself. And what reason do we have to postulate such a massive collective? Only that we need the probabilistic resources to explain the seemingly designed qualities of the cosmos by reference to chance alone.
But in addition to all of the problems that could be raised with the multiverse idea, we have another problem that is presented by the fine-tuning of both the universe and our planet and solar system for discoverability, which is that the characteristic of discoverability is not necessary for life and so it cannot be accounted for by reference to an observer selection effect at either the cosmic or the planetary scale. Were we just a random member of a multiverse, we would have no reason to expect that in addition to being in an incredibly unlikely universe that is capable of sustaining intelligent life, we would also be in an even more unlikely universe that is conducive to scientific discovery. So the multiverse doesn’t offer an alternative naturalistic explanation for this fine-tuning, unless we just want to throw our hands up and say that the multiverse explains literally every conceivable state of affairs as being the product of chance alone, destroying the foundation of science in the process.
Furthermore, as an explanation for the fine-tuning of the universe, the multiverse is highly ad hoc. Even Andrei Linde, who is responsible for the Chaotic Inflation theory that is sometimes appealed to as a possible means of getting many universes with different physics readily admits that any aspect of the theory leading to universes that have laws and constants with different values is purely speculative and that it’s the fine-tuning itself that gives us any reason to accept the speculation as possibly true.
So the competing naturalistic explanation for fine-tuning is ad hoc and explains either too little to match the explanatory scope of the God Hypothesis, or else it explains too much and undercuts science and rationality. And this in addition to the various other problems with it that have been raised (e.g. Boltzmann Brains, need for the multiverse itself to be fine-tuned, etc.)
– The origin of life, which is roughly the equivalent of the origin of biological information
There’s a better, viable, naturalistic theory in existence? Nope. Uh-uh. I don’t think so. No naturalistic OOL theory seems viable so far. If they’ve made any progress on OOL it is in finding out how much more unlikely it is on naturalism that was initially thought. Might they come up with something viable in the distant future? Perhaps, but as an argument, that’s a cheque that nobody has to cash, and this is a discussion about the actual current state of the evidence and our knowledge, not about undated naturalistic promissory notes.
– Various events in the history of life that seem to show a large-scale influx of biological information that cannot be accounted for by any proposed mechanism of biological evolution that we are aware of. (Best explained by reference to God when taken in light of preceding items)
I’m not even going to bother discussing this one since it gets talked about here all the time.
– Various other events in history that seem best explained by divine intervention and that would not be expected on naturalism or materialism (such as evidence supporting the resurrection of Christ).
The primary competing naturalistic theory is that hundreds of people had shared group visual and auditory hallucinations. That can only be considered a better explanation to someone who has an a priori and unwavering commitment to the non-existence of God and the impossibility of what, to us, appears miraculous.
– The apparent existence of objective moral values and duties, which people can’t seem to avoid invoking even while denying their existence (i.e. sneaking it in the back door after booting it out the front door)
The competing naturalistic theory is that objective moral values and duties do not exist. Verbally denying the existence of something while being unable to personally live as though that thing didn’t exist does not count as offering an alternative explanation for its existence. No viable alternative to God has been found for grounding objective moral values and duties, and yet countless atheists believe and live as though they exist.
– Various aspects of the mind, including the apparent existence of free will, the apparent existence of a rational consciousness capable of accurately perceiving external events and reasoning on them in a reliable way, the ability to have subjective experiences, and the ability to have thoughts that are about things.
And again, the competing naturalistic theory is that these things do not exist. Claiming that we don’t have free will, that there is no subjective observer, and that we cannot have thoughts that are about things and so can’t have rational consciousness capable or accurately perceiving reality or rationally deliberating on evidence is not an alternate naturalistic explanation for any of these things at all, much less a better explanation for their existence than God.
The God creation belief, equally raises the problem of ultimate origins, as does the Big Bang. Your ultimate cause, very sorry, needs a cause. Your ’causeless cause’ tedium is just that unsupported faith.
And yet, prior to the realization that the universe had an absolute beginning in the finite past, atheists were perfectly fine accepting, as a brute fact, the existence of the universe as an uncaused entity that had existedtemporally into an infinite past … and they are constantly trying to return to that view. This is not just the atheistic equivalent of the theist’s uncaused God. It is actually much worse, because even the theist doesn’t posit God as existing temporally through an infinite past.
Fine tuning, is a poor way to describe the natural constants that govern our universe, and if they are so fine tuned why didn’t God make the constants nice round numbers? Was He constrained by something? His own creation perhaps?
What a bizarre argument. The values aren’t fine-tuned because they are astronomically more precise than simple whole numbers? You know, do you, that a super-intellect would only use “nice round numbers”? It’s strange that you think the universe ought to be mathematically describable at all on naturalism.
Also, of course God was constrained by his own creation. It is a simple fact of physical instantiation that starting points constrain end points, that pathways constrain outputs, that present choices constrain downstream options, that functional coherence constrains the relationship between parts. I’m not sure why you would find any of this surprising.
Barry again: Well done HeKS.