The (cosmological) Quranic argument for God

As I was browsing YouTube today, I decided to see if users had posted any new or interesting videos about the existence of God. Since I have addressed a great many arguments from Christian apologetics on this site since 2009, I thought I would check out some arguments for God from Islam. As anticipated, while Islam has its own particular slant on the god question and in some ways is actually more accepting of scientific principles than evangelical Christianity, Muslims by and large use many of the same stock arguments for God as Christians.

Take the following video from Hamza Tzortzis:

Indeed, close your eyes, take out the accent, the Arabic and references to Allah and the Quran, one might imagine watching a diatribe from William Lane Craig.

In this video, Tzortzis tells us that he is going to provide the “Quranic argument” for the existence of God, which is really just the old cosmological argument that has been restated and refuted for hundreds of years now. In any case, Tzortzis identifies four “logical possibilities” for the existence of the universe as follows:

  • The universe came from nothing.
  • The universe created itself.
  • The universe was created by something else created.
  • The universe was created by something uncreated.

As you can see, possibilities 2-4 all commit a fallacy by assuming a priori that the universe necessarily had to be created — it very well could have just always existed, and while that is hard for our mind to grasp, it is nonetheless another possibility — but after ruling out the first three as impossibilities, Tzortzis then hones in on the fourth option, which he calls the “best explanation” for the existence of the universe. He begins to get on the right track when he concedes the point that the “something uncreated” doesn’t necessarily have to be Allah or any other god in human history, but when he then says that by using the “Quranic approach,” we can draw conclusions about the universe’s origins, we know where he’s going to take the argument.

Here are his basic “conclusions,” which we will more accurately call assumptions:

  • Assumption 1: “This uncreated creator must be powerful.” — Notice what he did there. He went from calling the entity an “uncreated” entity to an “uncreated creator” and then bestowed it with a certain power that was, up to this point, not part of the argument. Also as part of this first point, he implied that the mere existence of billions of atoms in the universe and the subsequent release of energy that occurs when an atom is split is somehow suggestive of a powerful god, although splitting just one atom does not produce anything near an atomic explosion, nor does the existence of atoms suggest anything other than the existence of atoms.
  • harris-meme

  • Assumption 2: The creator must be “intelligent and all-knowing” because “it created laws in the universe like the law of gravity.” — Like many of his Christian apologist counterparts, Tzortzis, most likely is speaking to potential converts or people who may be amenable to accepting his brand of faith, uses some fast talking to blaze through these last points, apparently hoping that he can move quickly enough through the message before any sparks of logic creep into the listeners’ minds. But if we slow down and hear what he actually says, we can see that he is just begging the question and taking as an assumption that which he might hope to prove. Simply put, the existence of natural laws in the universe only prove the existence of the natural laws and does not imply a law giver, just like the existence of the universe does not imply by fiat a conscious creator. Attributing laws to the various attributes we observe in nature is just our way, as humans, to describe our world in a scientific way. Unlike God or the various characteristics commonly attributed to him, we can demonstrate these natural laws, which would exist whether we had ever evolved far enough to discover them or not.
  • Assumption 3: The creator must be “transcendent” and exist outside of space and time. — This is a common trope in apologetics and was presumably conjured to excuse God from being beholden and subject to the laws of nature. Thus, believers might say, if we just put God outside of the observable universe, we can say that he is a higher force than anything in this universe and that he is the progenitor of morals, of the natural laws and of life itself. Of course, by definition, we can’t experience anything that is outside of our space and time; indeed, there is nothing outside of space and time. To say otherwise is to just make unsubstantiated claims based on pure fantasy, not unlike fictional tales of unicorns, the Loch Ness monster and Flying Teapot making laps around Planet Earth.
  • Assumption 4: The creator must be eternal. — This is just an extension of the previous claim. Here again, Tzortzis just makes another assumption about an uncreated creator, with no basis in reality, other than, perhaps, a deep-seated desire for it to be true.
  • Assumption 5: The “uncreated creator” must have freewill. — By now, and based on the other points, we can pretty well take it for granted that Tzortzis thinks a transcendant, all-knowing creator pretty well has free reign over his own decisions, but Tzortzis spells it out for us, although Allah or Yahweh being browbeaten and lorded over by an even more powerful overlord is humorous to think about. One might wonder, though, if this uncreated creator was “intelligent” and “eternal,” why would he so freely and benevolently choose to create the universe if he knew beforehand that a good 50 percent of his creation would be doomed to suffer unspeakable torments for all eternity, unless, of course, he was also a sadist and sinisterly set this plot in motion. In fact, if we were to judge God or Allah on his success rate, that is, the number of people who were compelled to believe based on scripture or inspirational speaking or some kind of “revelation” versus those who were not convinced of any of it, a 50 percent rate of belief for the most powerful force in the universe has to be disappointing.
  • Assumption 6: Humans sense the nature of God as creator as part of their disposition, and God as the creator is the “best and most comprehensive explanation” for the existence of the universe. — The first part of this assumption is just an appeal to personal experience, and as any judge, attorney or psychologist will attest, personal testimony is a poor basis to substantiate truth claims. Millions of atheists in the world, some of whom have sincerely searched for a spiritual component, have precisely the opposite experience, having had no innate sense of something spiritual outside of themselves, while millions of Buddhists have no conception of a theistic creator at all.

The last few seconds of Tzortzis’ video — and this ties into the sixth assumption — seemed to take a swipe at the Christian concept of the trinity in suggesting that God is one, rather than three separate, autonomous beings as in the Christian godhead.

Interestingly and ironically, Tzortzis says this concept is “irrational because it creates far more questions than it solves,” which would, on the surface, seem like a tip of the hat to Occam’s razor, if he hadn’t just spent the last five minutes making arguments about God that, themselves, raise more questions than they answer.

While it is true that we do not have an answer for why the scientific laws exist as we observe them in the universe, there is no reason to think that the eventual explanation will spring from anything other than a natural cause, as has been the case with every other question about the universe we have answered from science in the last 250 years. Why some believers think that questions about our origin are somehow exempt from having to be explained by natural processes, when all of our other knowledge about the universe comes to us this way, escapes all comprehension.

In the end, suggesting that an all-powerful, highly complex deity who sits outside of space and time is responsible for everything that we see in nature is, number one, a cop-out for having to come up with any kind of real explanation, and number two, complicates questions about our origin exponentially. For more on this, see my post, Response to Apologetics III: Aquinas and Occam’s razor.

Debunking theistic evolution

A common misconception floating about among Christians is that scientists, freethinkers and others “believe” in evolution the same way they believe in God or divine providence, and sometimes we slip into the misleading language in this way to describe our perception that evolution is a real process. Of course, this misunderstanding is essentially based on skewed semantics, as the word, “believe,” can be used to mean both something that a person takes on faith and a disputed piece of information that a person chooses to accept against the alternatives. But as Keith Blanchard said here, evolution is not disputed:

Theistic-Evolution

Theistic evolution

Evolution is nothing more than a fairly simple way of understanding what is unquestionably happening. You don’t believe in it — you either understand it or you don’t. But pretending evolution is a matter of faith can be a clever way to hijack the conversation, and pit it in a false duality against religion. And that’s how we end up with people decrying evolution, even as they eat their strawberries and pet their dogs, because they’ve been led to believe faith can only be held in one or the other.

Thus, instead of saying we believe or even accept evolution, perhaps we should speak about it with as much certainty of fact as we do gravity and the planet’s rotation around the sun, for when believers decry evolution, they make themselves look as ridiculous as if they had suddenly claimed the world is flat. While I agree with Blanchard that a person can, and many do, recognize evolution as fact and simply reconcile it with their faith — notice how the reach of faith always, always recedes behind science — they must do so at the expense of the Bible’s validity. Liberal Christians, such as Francis Collins, reconcile evolution and the Bible by claiming that God was behind the whole plan of creation and guided evolution to ultimately culminate in human beings. Basically, since Genesis does not provide an exact time frame for the process of creation, a “day” in the Bible could be virtually any amount of time.

But there are at least two problems with this theory. OK, three. First, although the Bible attempts to provide years and time periods for “historical” people and events, no attempt, as I’ve said, is made to do this in the creation story. One would think that an important event like the creation of man would have warranted a basic timeline so the Bible’s later readers could know about when the species began. Certainly, providing this information in detail would not have been out of the purview of an all-knowing god.

Second, as the image above points out, evolution is riddled with “errors” in design (Here’s just a few). Presumably a god who was in control of the process would have been able and willing to streamline the process and “guide” evolution more efficiently without the flaws, which leads to the next point. More than 98 percent of all species that ever existed, including early humans, are now extinct. An all-loving God would have had to watch eons and eons of misery and death before our little blip of time came around. Sure, some Christians will argue that millions of years for God is nothing, but while God might be able to fluidly transport himself through space and time, he still orchestrated a plan that includes 98 percent more death and destruction than life. So although some Christians do regard the accepted science of evolution as true, they still have logical mountains to climb if they are to reconcile evolution with the notion of all-loving, all-powerful god.

Dawkins: Evolution ‘no comparison’ to Genesis

It really is an enormously exciting thought that we are cousins of all living creatures, that we have a history of 4 billion years of slow gradual, evolution — just think about 4 billions years — of slow gradual history. That’s not something that we can easily take on board, but the effort of doing so is well worth it. It’s such a beautiful thought that we are the heirs of 4 billion years — maybe 3.5 billion years of evolution — and that we are cousins of all living things. When you put that against the measly, piddling little ideas that are in Genesis, it’s just no comparison, and it’s a sad and diminishing deprivation of a child’s opportunities to be denied that knowledge.

Something from nothing?

I particularly enjoyed Lawrence Krauss’ introduction to answering this question. A common tactic Christians use when asking questions, whether consciously or not, is to begin the query with the word, “why,” which implies that there must be an underlying reason or purpose for our existence. To ask “why” something is the way it is assumes that some kind of conscious force or creator is lurking behind the curtains pulling all the strings. In nature, “how” questions are exponentially more useful and interesting than “why” questions.

Darwin Day and Ken Ham’s pseudoscience

Two hundred four years ago today, Charles Darwin, the man who would go on to introduce the concept of evolution by natural selection (although he didn’t call it that at the time), was born. Of course, here in the year 2013 when we know that evolution is the process on which everything else we know about biology is based.

Artwork by gremz, Deviant Art user

As such, it’s a sad and pathetic travesty that the parties of God, the Republican Party and some within the Democratic camp will probably prevent the nation from formally celebrating his contributions to, not just science, but one of the largest questions of life, that is, how did human life develop from less to more complex forms.

Ken Ham, for example, is not just a very enterprising young Earth creationist who raised more than $25 million to build the monstrosity known as the Creation Museum in Kentucky, is also also a danger to lovers of truth and to truth itself.

In his recent article for Slate, Mark Joseph Stern took one for the team and analyzed some of Ham’s books, which as he noted,

fall into two categories: colorful picture books designed to indoctrinate children, and pseudoscientific tracts aimed at persuading adults.

In one of Ham’s books for adults, “The Lie,” he claims that evolution is a “belief” — It’s not. It’s a scientific theory, or in other words, a fact as concrete as gravity — and is not backed by proof, or in his words, “All the evidence a scientist has exists only in the present.” That, of course, is simply not true.

Here is Stern:

This means we should disregard isotope dating, fossil records, genetic sequencing, geologic time, developmental biology, plate tectonics, disease resistance, and the rest of modern science because who can really know if they’re accurate?

“The Bible’s account of origins,” on the other hand, was written by “the Creator God” and contains all the “history we need to know to understand the present world.”

And that’s pretty much all Ham has. Blind faith in the Bible is superior to belief in evolution, because the former was written by God, while the latter is a myth perpetuated by sinful atheists. Science is a myth simply because it cannot be allowed to contradict the Bible. That’s Ham’s starting and ending point, his premise and his conclusion. Such unquestioning trust and circular logic pervades the pages of the book, presented with smug satisfaction.

There is hope that a formal Darwin Day may be established in the future, just not much of one. Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) proposed a resolution to name Feb. 12 Darwin Day, but it’ll most likely die on the vine. As Phil Plaits with Slate notes with some disappointment:

I have more than a suspicion he has an uphill battle ahead of him on this. Far too many members of Congress think the Earth is less than 10,000 years old, with far too many of them sitting on the House Science Committee. Of course, to be fair, having even one is one too many.

Indeed. Among them are members like Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA), for instance, who once offered these enlightening thoughts:

All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the Big Bang Theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell. And it’s lies to try to keep me and all the folks who were taught that from understanding that they need a savior. You see, there are a lot of scientific data that I’ve found out as a scientist that actually show that this is really a young Earth. I don’t believe that the Earth’s but about 9,000 years old. I believe it was created in six days as we know them. That’s what the Bible says.

Yes, this guy sits on a science committee in Washington. I’m not making this up. In my view, a person capable of uttering such idiotic nonsense is ill-equipped to lead anyone, much less represent us on a science panel. Then again, maybe this country doesn’t deserve to wave Darwin’s banner when so few people realize the importance of his contributions, cling to creation myths and worse, don’t even attempt to understand or learn about how our world works. I would laugh if not for the equal portions of frustration, anger, and yes, pity.

[Credit: Artwork by gremz, Deviant Art user]

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Vicarious redemption

Most of the following video you can skip if you like because the interviewer, Howard Conder, quizzes Richard Dawkins on some rather absurd questions about evolution, irreducible complexity, etc., that he would already known the answer to if he had bothered to read any of Dawkin’s books.

The best part runs from about 47:00-55:00, in which Conder and Dawkins talk about Christ, vicarious redemption and the need for a “perfect” sacrifice:

Conder seems to not be able to comprehend the point that Dawkins makes, that is, if Yahweh is all powerful and essentially sets the rules on how mankind will be redeemed after the fall of Adam and Eve, why does God require a “perfect” sacrifice, or even a sacrifice at all.

Here is Dawkins:

The idea that God could only forgive our sins by having his son tortured to death as a scapegoat, is surely from an objective point of view, a deeply unpleasant idea. If God wanted to forgive us our sins, why didn’t he just forgive them? Why did he have to have his son tortured?

Conder:

That’s a very good question.

Dawkins:

Well, what’s your answer?

Conder:

Genesis. (OK?)

Conder then recounts the Genesis narrative in which Adam “lost that perfection for us all” when he sinned in the Garden. He then explains why Christ was necessary:

Another perfect being of the same degree of perfection could only be the proper ransom for our redemption.

Dawkins presses, questioning why millions of human beings are responsible for the sin of one man and “have to be redeemed by the torturing of God’s own son?”

Conder in response:

Being the god that he is, allowing for us to have freewill, it wasn’t just scrumping an apple. There was more to it than that. Adam was plainly disobedient, and I think he even admits it himself in the fact that he hid from God that particular evening because there was a fellowship between man and God every day.

Dawkins:

So Adam was disobedient and that sin reverberated down the ages, is inherited by all humans. What kind of a doctrine is that? Inherited by all humans and had to be redeemed by the son of God being tortured to death. What kind of morality are you propagating there.

Conder:

That’s a very good question (Are you noticing a theme? Dawkins raises very good questions to which there are no answers).

Conder then reiterated the point that Christ’s life had to be perfect. In apparent frustration with this exchange, Dawkins agreed that they should move on. Before going to a question and answer part of the interview, Conder said:

Please Richard, see my heart, not my intellect because my heart is for mankind as well.

And with a tinge of sarcasm, Dawkins replies:

Oh I can see that.

OK, so if you didn’t view the whole video, that’s enough to get a general feel for how it went in the last few minutes. As I said, Conder seems unable to wrap his mind around the question that Dawkins posed time and again, that is, if God is all-powerful and all-loving, why the need for a sacrifice at all, much less a perfect sacrifice. At one point, Dawkins hints at the problem when he asks: “Why did God have to have his son tortured.”

Conder didn’t pick up on the subtly, but implicit in the question is if God “had” to do anything, if he is operating under a set of rules outside of himself or if he is constrained in his actions in any way, then he is not God. Essentially, he makes the rules, and the sacrifice that would redeem mankind had to be perfect, then some being or entity other than God is in control. Christ didn’t have to be killed to redeem mankind. Indeed, mankind didn’t have to redeemed by any physical action whatsoever. God could have just done it. He could have said:

OK, the gig is up. It’s been thousands of years now. I think you have toiled and suffered birth pains long enough now. You guys are off the hook. Eat, drink and be merry and enjoy your lives.

But no, believers would continue to have us believe that their God is so obsessed with the notion of vicarious redemption that nothing but a perfect sacrifice for redemption would do. Well, if that’s the case, God’s might, whatever it may be, is not omnipotent, and his love, whatever it might be, is not all-encompassing.

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Early human branching

Fascinating discovery:

Fossil by fossil, scientists over the last 40 years have suspected that their models for the more immediate human family tree — the single trunk, straight as a Ponderosa pine, up from Homo habilis to Homo erectus to Homo sapiens — were oversimplified. The day for that serious revision may be at hand.

Credit: Fred Spoor/The KNM-ER 1470 cranium, based on a computed tomography scan.

The discovery of three new fossil specimens, announced Wednesday, is the most compelling evidence yet for multiple lines of evolution in our own genus, Homo, scientists said. The fossils showed that there were at least two contemporary Homo species, in addition to Homo erectus, living in East Africa as early as two million years ago.

Uncovered from sandstone at Koobi Fora, badlands near Lake Turkana in Kenya, the specimens included a well-preserved skull of a late juvenile with a relatively large braincase and a long, flat face, which has been designated KNM-ER 62000 (62000 for short). It bears a striking resemblance to the enigmatic cranium known as 1470, the center of debate over multiple lineages since its discovery in the same area in 1972.

If the 62000 skull showed that 1470 was not a single odd individual, the other two specimens seemed to provide a vital piece of evidence that had been missing. The specimen 1470 had no mandible, or lower jaw. The new finds included an almost complete lower jaw (60000) — considered to be the most complete mandible of an early Homo yet found — and a part of another lower jaw (62000).

The fossils were collected between 2007 and 2009 by a team led by Meave and Louise Leakey, the mother-and-daughter paleoanthropologists of the Koobi Fora Research Project and members of the famous African fossil-hunting family. Dr. Meave Leakey is the wife of Richard Leakey, a son of Louis and Mary Leakey, who produced the early evidence supporting Africa’s central place in early human origins. Mr. Leakey divides his time between Stony Brook University on Long Island, where he is a professor of anthropology, and the Turkana Basin Institute in Kenya.

After looking “long and hard” for fossils to confirm the intriguing features of 1470’s face and show what its teeth and lower jaw were like, Dr. Meave Leakey said this week, “At last we have some answers.”

Read more here.

Our daily universe: commonality

Listening to 12 minutes of Neil deGrasse Tyson on a Sunday morning is at once more enlightening and more inspiring than anything I ever heard under the steeple:

Here’s how our composition breaks down compared with the rest of the universe:

Top five most populous elements in human beings (helium inert):

1. Hydrogen

2. Oxygen

3. Carbon

4. Nitrogen

Top five most populous elements in the cosmos:

1. Hydrogen

2. Helium

3. Oxygen

4. Carbon

5. Nitrogen

Be a Steve

As of May 30, 1,215 scientists named Steve have signed the following statement in support of evolution as part of the National Center for Science Education’s Project Steve.

Evolution is a vital, well-supported, unifying principle of the biological sciences, and the scientific evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of the idea that all living things share a common ancestry. Although there are legitimate debates about the patterns and processes of evolution, there is no serious scientific doubt that evolution occurred or that natural selection is a major mechanism in its occurrence. It is scientifically inappropriate and pedagogically irresponsible for creationist pseudoscience, including but not limited to “intelligent design,” to be introduced into the science curricula of our nation’s public schools.

The project, which is named in honor of Stephen Jay Gould, is kind of a tongue-in-cheek jab at a common practice of young earth creationists who often cite scientific “experts” to support their claims. This practice can be easily spotted in garbage literature from Answers in Genesis, Watchtower and others.

Here’s the updated list of Steves.

And if you’re interested, pick up this snazzy T-shirt: