I used to run a blog on WordPress called "Like An Infidel In Mecca" and I used to post stuff on it regularly when living with my ex-girlfriend but I got bored and stopped. Now I wanted to see if I could do it again but I am very busy with work. As some of you who know me personally will attest I can get very outspoken however lately it's just become so tiring and as I said before I am just so busy with my new work project.
However, just today I was pointed to an article written by Christian apologist Robert Clifton Robinson on the Evidence For God. I doubt the two people reading this who maybe just maybe followed my old blog would expect me to engage however I am genuinely interested in ANY new argument for the existence of God and I've not engaged with an apologist in quite awhile.
I stopped mainly because there's nothing new under the sun. Apologists so often recycle arguments and atheists have plenty of rebuttals but an invitation was extended to me by Mr. Robinson so here I go. His site is at https://robertcliftonrobinson.com/evidence-for-god/ and I'm not going to copy his arguments over here for people to read because of space (except for one odd one) I'm just going to provide an honest rebuttal here.
Mr. Robinson opens up with the statement that evidence is not enough. Well for me it is. I'm a skeptic by nature, an engineer by degree and researcher by trade. I do not have any emotional feelings in regards to the existence of gods and feelings can often lead us to faulty conclusions. This is something I find strange about theistic arguments for God as often we atheists are asked to suspend our disbelief which for a skeptic is asking them to not be true to their nature. If we suspend our disbelief then we can let any argument slip past and most anything we would previously consider irrational becomes plausible. This is a barrier to being truly impartial and does no one any good. It cannot be said our heart has no desire for God if our mind must be sacrificed to entertain that which without logic is untenable.
Mr. Robinson then goes on about his personal history which is very different from mine as I was raised in a very devout family by parents who meant well that I love dearly. I just do not agree with their conclusions but I respect that they think differently. I harbor no ill will or animosity towards the faithful I just find their thinking odd.
The primary argument I addressed in a short conversation on Twitter with Mr. Robinson is on the matter of science being used as an argument for creation in regards to the contention that the universe was made for us or is somehow "fine-tuned for life". My background is in engineering but I have always had a fascination and love for astrophysics and I have heard the arguments from both Young Earth and Old Earth Creationists that the universe could not possibly have come from purely natural causes.
Mr. Robinson is an Old Earth Creationist which I am glad to see as Young Earth Creationists utterly frustrate me in their commitment to hold on to impossible belief in the face of such staggering evidence (which I am quite sure is how Mr. Robinson views atheists).
There are several arguments (actually quite a lot) that Mr. Robinson uses for his contention that the universe couldn't have manifested via natural causes and science proves this even though the underlying problem with such a contention is that science can only prove what happens in the natural world and makes no assertions into the supernatural world which can not be proved to exist. That's why it's supernatural.
This may take some time and I'll have to handle this in multiple posts so let's go with his first argument "How God Made The Universe".
1. Mr. Robinson uses a few Biblical verses here to point out that the Bible contains scientific facts about the creation of the universe. One of these is that in the beginning there was nothing and that science agrees there was nothing however that's not exactly what science says at all for even in a perfect vacuum you will find quantum fluctuations that hold for the potential manifestation of something from what seems to be nothing.
2. Time, space and matter he contends also came forth simultaneously. "Matter" is rather vague and I have heard creationists refer to quantum particles as matter. Time is relative to space. Before space there was no time. That's rather literal. There was no eternity and no means by which any moment could progress to the next. Stephen Hawking once stated that the idea that God created the earth seemed strange as there would be no time for God to perform an act of creation. Timelessness is hard concept to grasp as we are linear beings and we tend to think that a God could exist outside time and create the universe by sheer force of will but that is a linear action. Thought must become act and that cannot happen unless you have time for it to take place in.
3. Something about the number of stars which is not unique to Christianity.
4. The sun follows a circular path through the universe is a claim Mr. Robinson attributes to the Bible. The sun orbits the center of our galaxy in an elliptical orbit so it's more of an oval and our solar system tilts at about 63 degrees in that orbit around the center of our galaxy. However "through the universe" is not quite right as our galaxy doesn't orbit anything the galaxies are all moving away from each other in an every expanding cauldron of space however our galaxy and the Andromeda galaxy are held close by the gravity of the gas clouds they spawned from and are moving closer to each other and will in a few billion years collide.
5. The earth is a sphere...yes the Ancient Greeks and Egyptians knew this. There's a common misconception that ancient people thought the earth was flat and before Columbus people argued that if you went too far you'd sail over the edge. We now know that not only is the flat earth a myth but the belief in it by the ancients is also a myth. There are globes that date back to the Middle Ages and writings of people owning globes of the earth made of wood around 500 CE. The Greeks were the first to explain ways to determine the shape of the earth in the 4th century BCE.
6. Mr. Robinson also states that the Earth is suspended by gravity. Well kind of, gravity is simply the bending of space by the mass of objects so Earth creates it's own gravity as an object with mass it pulls on objects near it and they tug on it as well. We're suspended on our own mass and held in place by the tug and pull of the moon and the sun you can see this die to the equal force of the sun and the moon on earth's tides. The reason we have them is the pull of gravity by both the sun and the moon being fairly equal because of their relative mass and distance.
7. Finally in this list Mr. Robinson uses Hebrews 11:3 as proof of the Bible describing atoms. I'll leave this to his interpretation as I've heard other theists refer to this as just the unseen handiwork of God or unseen forces. I mean we can technically see atoms as you see them on a macroscopic scale every time you look at something.
He continues in his argument by asserting that God is necessary for the forces that shape the universe and that no natural forces are possible to create the universe. This sounds like an ontological argument which you can find out more about in this great video.
Mr. Robinson then talks about Dark Matter and Dark Energy being strong evidence of God and there is this link to another page full of quote mining on Mr. Robinson's blog about the classic blunder "A Scientific Dissent From Evolution" which is a list pretty much anyone can sign and was made light of by the great "Project Steve". The quote mining is a standard creationist tactic and as I go through this article that Mr. Robinson pretty much dared me to read I am finding that he is using the traditional Apologist Toolkit and that is an abundant use of logically fallacious arguments.
Now I'm down to the section that I really wanted to address and that is the argument that the universe is fine-tuned for life. I'm going to have to quote from his website now for perspective.
So he's referring here to the seven epochs of the Big Bang in which yes natural processes did indeed take the universe from a very hot state to form the fundamental forces that make up the universe today however as Neil DeGrasse Tyson said "The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you." Simply because you cannot yourself come to understand how physical forces alone could make the universe does not mean it's an impossibility because it can be explained by science. These things can be objectively known. That's the problem with claiming a supernatural force created all of this. That cannot be known it is based only on assertion now and there's no demonstrable way you can prove it true. Creationists only assert what they assume to be true knowing they can not prove it.
Creationists position forces as "How could they have will or sentience to knowingly do these things that they do?" but that's just it. They don't they simply react to one another based on their state of being. Also if they failed to do so we would not be here this universe would not exist but we have no other universe to compare ours to so we can see how things may have turned out differently. We just have this one.
Another canard used by creationists is applying science as it suits their needs. In one paragraph on Mr. Robinson's page he claims that there's only mathematical models of alternate universes and no scientific proof. I've bad news for you. There's only mathematical proof of Dark Matter and Dark Energy. That's why they're called dark because we don't quite know what they are and they're hypothetical.
However, I'm getting sidetracked on to the "Fine-tuned for life" argument. So here are the logical flaws I see in such an argument.
The universe is really indifferent to life and much of it is openly hostile to life. However, when we talk about life we often refer to life as we know it such as carbon-based life if you want a good example of how things can manifest themselves unguided look at carbon it can self assemble over two-thousand different compounds some of which are needed for humans to survive. This idea of searching only for carbon-based life is referred to in science as carbon-chauvinism.
The universe is massive and yes much of it is hostile to humans but it's massive. The logic in creating such as vast universe and being required to create the universe this way to fulfill what we now know of it and so that God could have us as his special "pets" creates problems. An all-powerful God would not be under such restraints to do so. Given we can only see and travel so far in the cosmos does not require a vast and expansive one as we can only see the observable universe there is still a universe beyond that which we know.
If one supposes that a universe is fine-tuned for life why does that even necessitate a designer? If one supposes that the universe is indeed fine-tuned without understanding all constants can they truly know the universe is fine-tuned? Are they simply viewing it as fine-tuned for life to satisfy a need to make life's existence more profound in an apathetic cosmos or to bolster their need for a God to exist? To perhaps make their own existence more "special"?
There's also the matter of it being too fine-tuned. Could life be overwhelmingly abundant in the universe to the point where our existence is rendered insignificant due to the abundance of life and that we're not as special as we think? Are their worlds with many gods or no gods?
I think that it is arrogant of religion to assume that there is an all-powerful being who bends the laws of nature and creates worlds only to seek praise from one species and at one time in the history of that species he lavishes praise only on one group in the species huddled together in the Middle East who also happened to be the same people who worshipped him after turning from polytheism.
Then again religion never really did make sense.
Next if I'm free a rebuttal to
However, just today I was pointed to an article written by Christian apologist Robert Clifton Robinson on the Evidence For God. I doubt the two people reading this who maybe just maybe followed my old blog would expect me to engage however I am genuinely interested in ANY new argument for the existence of God and I've not engaged with an apologist in quite awhile.
I stopped mainly because there's nothing new under the sun. Apologists so often recycle arguments and atheists have plenty of rebuttals but an invitation was extended to me by Mr. Robinson so here I go. His site is at https://robertcliftonrobinson.com/evidence-for-god/ and I'm not going to copy his arguments over here for people to read because of space (except for one odd one) I'm just going to provide an honest rebuttal here.
Mr. Robinson opens up with the statement that evidence is not enough. Well for me it is. I'm a skeptic by nature, an engineer by degree and researcher by trade. I do not have any emotional feelings in regards to the existence of gods and feelings can often lead us to faulty conclusions. This is something I find strange about theistic arguments for God as often we atheists are asked to suspend our disbelief which for a skeptic is asking them to not be true to their nature. If we suspend our disbelief then we can let any argument slip past and most anything we would previously consider irrational becomes plausible. This is a barrier to being truly impartial and does no one any good. It cannot be said our heart has no desire for God if our mind must be sacrificed to entertain that which without logic is untenable.
Mr. Robinson then goes on about his personal history which is very different from mine as I was raised in a very devout family by parents who meant well that I love dearly. I just do not agree with their conclusions but I respect that they think differently. I harbor no ill will or animosity towards the faithful I just find their thinking odd.
The primary argument I addressed in a short conversation on Twitter with Mr. Robinson is on the matter of science being used as an argument for creation in regards to the contention that the universe was made for us or is somehow "fine-tuned for life". My background is in engineering but I have always had a fascination and love for astrophysics and I have heard the arguments from both Young Earth and Old Earth Creationists that the universe could not possibly have come from purely natural causes.
Mr. Robinson is an Old Earth Creationist which I am glad to see as Young Earth Creationists utterly frustrate me in their commitment to hold on to impossible belief in the face of such staggering evidence (which I am quite sure is how Mr. Robinson views atheists).
There are several arguments (actually quite a lot) that Mr. Robinson uses for his contention that the universe couldn't have manifested via natural causes and science proves this even though the underlying problem with such a contention is that science can only prove what happens in the natural world and makes no assertions into the supernatural world which can not be proved to exist. That's why it's supernatural.
This may take some time and I'll have to handle this in multiple posts so let's go with his first argument "How God Made The Universe".
1. Mr. Robinson uses a few Biblical verses here to point out that the Bible contains scientific facts about the creation of the universe. One of these is that in the beginning there was nothing and that science agrees there was nothing however that's not exactly what science says at all for even in a perfect vacuum you will find quantum fluctuations that hold for the potential manifestation of something from what seems to be nothing.
2. Time, space and matter he contends also came forth simultaneously. "Matter" is rather vague and I have heard creationists refer to quantum particles as matter. Time is relative to space. Before space there was no time. That's rather literal. There was no eternity and no means by which any moment could progress to the next. Stephen Hawking once stated that the idea that God created the earth seemed strange as there would be no time for God to perform an act of creation. Timelessness is hard concept to grasp as we are linear beings and we tend to think that a God could exist outside time and create the universe by sheer force of will but that is a linear action. Thought must become act and that cannot happen unless you have time for it to take place in.
3. Something about the number of stars which is not unique to Christianity.
4. The sun follows a circular path through the universe is a claim Mr. Robinson attributes to the Bible. The sun orbits the center of our galaxy in an elliptical orbit so it's more of an oval and our solar system tilts at about 63 degrees in that orbit around the center of our galaxy. However "through the universe" is not quite right as our galaxy doesn't orbit anything the galaxies are all moving away from each other in an every expanding cauldron of space however our galaxy and the Andromeda galaxy are held close by the gravity of the gas clouds they spawned from and are moving closer to each other and will in a few billion years collide.
5. The earth is a sphere...yes the Ancient Greeks and Egyptians knew this. There's a common misconception that ancient people thought the earth was flat and before Columbus people argued that if you went too far you'd sail over the edge. We now know that not only is the flat earth a myth but the belief in it by the ancients is also a myth. There are globes that date back to the Middle Ages and writings of people owning globes of the earth made of wood around 500 CE. The Greeks were the first to explain ways to determine the shape of the earth in the 4th century BCE.
6. Mr. Robinson also states that the Earth is suspended by gravity. Well kind of, gravity is simply the bending of space by the mass of objects so Earth creates it's own gravity as an object with mass it pulls on objects near it and they tug on it as well. We're suspended on our own mass and held in place by the tug and pull of the moon and the sun you can see this die to the equal force of the sun and the moon on earth's tides. The reason we have them is the pull of gravity by both the sun and the moon being fairly equal because of their relative mass and distance.
7. Finally in this list Mr. Robinson uses Hebrews 11:3 as proof of the Bible describing atoms. I'll leave this to his interpretation as I've heard other theists refer to this as just the unseen handiwork of God or unseen forces. I mean we can technically see atoms as you see them on a macroscopic scale every time you look at something.
He continues in his argument by asserting that God is necessary for the forces that shape the universe and that no natural forces are possible to create the universe. This sounds like an ontological argument which you can find out more about in this great video.
Mr. Robinson then talks about Dark Matter and Dark Energy being strong evidence of God and there is this link to another page full of quote mining on Mr. Robinson's blog about the classic blunder "A Scientific Dissent From Evolution" which is a list pretty much anyone can sign and was made light of by the great "Project Steve". The quote mining is a standard creationist tactic and as I go through this article that Mr. Robinson pretty much dared me to read I am finding that he is using the traditional Apologist Toolkit and that is an abundant use of logically fallacious arguments.
Now I'm down to the section that I really wanted to address and that is the argument that the universe is fine-tuned for life. I'm going to have to quote from his website now for perspective.
Man looks at the universe and he does not see God. He sees a Cosmos that exists by its own creation. He sees that chance and random events created all that exists and we only think that a God made these things.When we examine the scientific facts that are known today about how the universe began, we quickly understand that the most crucial and necessary events, could not have taken place by themselves.In all the mass chaos of the universe at its conception, how did the incomparable heat of trillions of degrees and the massive chaos of an explosion of pure energy, facilitate events like gravity, an impossible low state of entropy, precise electromagnetism, and the creation of atoms, all in one millionth of one millionth, of one millionth of one millionth, of a second?All of these events are not possible by chance or any natural process—particularly in the presence of the greatest concentrated energy and heat ever to exist.
So he's referring here to the seven epochs of the Big Bang in which yes natural processes did indeed take the universe from a very hot state to form the fundamental forces that make up the universe today however as Neil DeGrasse Tyson said "The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you." Simply because you cannot yourself come to understand how physical forces alone could make the universe does not mean it's an impossibility because it can be explained by science. These things can be objectively known. That's the problem with claiming a supernatural force created all of this. That cannot be known it is based only on assertion now and there's no demonstrable way you can prove it true. Creationists only assert what they assume to be true knowing they can not prove it.
Creationists position forces as "How could they have will or sentience to knowingly do these things that they do?" but that's just it. They don't they simply react to one another based on their state of being. Also if they failed to do so we would not be here this universe would not exist but we have no other universe to compare ours to so we can see how things may have turned out differently. We just have this one.
Another canard used by creationists is applying science as it suits their needs. In one paragraph on Mr. Robinson's page he claims that there's only mathematical models of alternate universes and no scientific proof. I've bad news for you. There's only mathematical proof of Dark Matter and Dark Energy. That's why they're called dark because we don't quite know what they are and they're hypothetical.
However, I'm getting sidetracked on to the "Fine-tuned for life" argument. So here are the logical flaws I see in such an argument.
The universe is really indifferent to life and much of it is openly hostile to life. However, when we talk about life we often refer to life as we know it such as carbon-based life if you want a good example of how things can manifest themselves unguided look at carbon it can self assemble over two-thousand different compounds some of which are needed for humans to survive. This idea of searching only for carbon-based life is referred to in science as carbon-chauvinism.
The universe is massive and yes much of it is hostile to humans but it's massive. The logic in creating such as vast universe and being required to create the universe this way to fulfill what we now know of it and so that God could have us as his special "pets" creates problems. An all-powerful God would not be under such restraints to do so. Given we can only see and travel so far in the cosmos does not require a vast and expansive one as we can only see the observable universe there is still a universe beyond that which we know.
If one supposes that a universe is fine-tuned for life why does that even necessitate a designer? If one supposes that the universe is indeed fine-tuned without understanding all constants can they truly know the universe is fine-tuned? Are they simply viewing it as fine-tuned for life to satisfy a need to make life's existence more profound in an apathetic cosmos or to bolster their need for a God to exist? To perhaps make their own existence more "special"?
There's also the matter of it being too fine-tuned. Could life be overwhelmingly abundant in the universe to the point where our existence is rendered insignificant due to the abundance of life and that we're not as special as we think? Are their worlds with many gods or no gods?
I think that it is arrogant of religion to assume that there is an all-powerful being who bends the laws of nature and creates worlds only to seek praise from one species and at one time in the history of that species he lavishes praise only on one group in the species huddled together in the Middle East who also happened to be the same people who worshipped him after turning from polytheism.
Then again religion never really did make sense.
Next if I'm free a rebuttal to
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