Physicist Sean Carroll suggests that someday science can rule out God — revealing his philosophical agenda under the holy lab coat, yet again

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This morning, as I opened up my computer, the following Yahoo News headline leaped out:

Will Science Someday Rule Out the Possibility of God?

By Natalie Wolchover | LiveScience.com

Over the past few centuries, science can be said to have gradually chipped away at the traditional grounds for believing in God. Much of what once seemed mysterious — the existence of humanity, the life-bearing perfection of Earth, the workings of the universe — can now be explained by biology, astronomy, physics and other domains of science.

Although cosmic mysteries remain, Sean Carroll, a theoretical cosmologist at the California Institute of Technology, says there’s good reason to think science will ultimately arrive at a complete understanding of the universe that leaves no grounds for God whatsoever.

Carroll argues that God’s sphere of influence has shrunk drastically in modern times, as physics and cosmology have expanded in their ability to explain the origin and evolution of the universe. “As we learn more about the universe, there’s less and less need to look outside it for help,” he told Life’s Little Mysteries.

He thinks the sphere of supernatural influence will eventually shrink to nil.

This is the sort of set up and knock over a God-of-the-gaps strawman materialist ideological agenda tactic that so often does disservice to the genuine cause of seeking to study and understand the universe, humbly and provisionally in light of the pattern of the evidence.

This is of course an attempt to drag a red herring across the track of the mounting up pile of evidence pointing to the evident fine-tuning of the observed cosmos that sets it to an operating point that facilitates C-chemistry, aqueous medium, cell based life. The red herring is then led out to a convenient “God of the Gaps” strawman, duly set alight to the delight of the ideological atheists and their fellow travellers. (Cf. also here on building a sound worldview.)

It also brings to mind the classic blunders made by Lewontin in his declaration in the January 1997 NYRB, that:

. . . to put a correct view of the universe into people’s heads we must first get an incorrect view out . . . the problem is to get them to reject irrational and supernatural explanations of the world, the demons that exist only in their imaginations, and to accept a social and intellectual apparatus, Science, as the only begetter of truth [[–> NB: this is a knowledge claim about knowledge and its possible sources, i.e. it is a claim in philosophy not science; it is thus self-refuting]. . . . To Sagan, as to all but a few other scientists, it is self-evident [[–> actually, science and its knowledge claims are plainly not immediately and necessarily true on pain of absurdity, to one who understands them; this is another logical error, begging the question , confused for real self-evidence; whereby a claim shows itself not just true but true on pain of patent absurdity if one tries to deny it . . ] that the practices of science provide the surest method of putting us in contact with physical reality, and that, in contrast, the demon-haunted world rests on a set of beliefs and behaviors that fail every reasonable test [[–> i.e. an assertion that tellingly reveals a hostile mindset, not a warranted claim] . . . .

It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes [[–> another major begging of the question . . . ] to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute [[–> i.e. here we see the fallacious, indoctrinated, ideological, closed mind . . . ], for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. [NB: To save a side track, the linked more extensive cite deals with the distractive talking point usually trotted out about how this is alleged quote-mining. Accurate and inconvenient citation will always attract such objections form Darwinist zealots.]

I leave it as a warm-up exercise for commenters to identify and correct the basic fallacies in the reasoning of both. END