The eternal truths of religion are having a moment. Church pews are filling up with newcomers. Gen Z is earnestly discussing demons and sedevacantism on social media. This might, therefore, seem like a good time to publish a book which purports to lay out a positive empirical case for the existence of a supreme being.
God, the Science, the Evidence by Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies, out this week in English, is already a best-seller in Europe. It comes with endorsements from various luminaries, including a Nobel Prize winner in physics. Reading it hasn’t affected my religious tendencies either way, but it has definitely undermined my faith in science.
Leibniz once asked: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Bolloré and Bonnassie’s answer is that God originally decreed “let there be something”; and they think that 20th-century developments in physics, biology, and history support this hypothesis. Their basic strategy in the book is to keep asking “What are the chances of that?” in a skeptical tone, concluding that only the truth of Christianity can explain otherwise unlikely natural circumstances.
Not every argument in the book takes this form, but most do. The first section focuses on the Big Bang theory, and its implication that the universe must have had a beginning, and will have an end; in which case, the authors think, the existence of a supernatural first cause is deductively implied. But the next section, focusing on “fine-tuning arguments”, puts us squarely in the territory of induction not deduction, and what philosophers like to call “inference to the best explanation” — treating the physical universe as if it were a murder scene, with you as Hercule Poirot, trying to work out whodunnit from the clues.
[su_unherd_related fttitle=”More from this author” author=”Kathleen Stock”]https://unherd-wpml-test.go-vip.net/2025/08/the-return-retributive-justice/[/su_unherd_related]
Fine-tuning arguments are already familiar to many — not least from earlier popular science books like Paul Davies’ The Goldilocks Enigma — and Bolloré and Bonnassies make a reasonable job of introducing them to those not in the know. Put simply, the claim is that the universe is sensitively calibrated for life in a way that cannot be coincidental. It’s intelligent design. Physical laws and constants are balanced excruciatingly delicately. “For some of these numbers, a very slight deviation by even a distant decimal point would have yielded an unrecognizable Universe, and we would not be here to talk about it.”
Had the mass of a proton been slightly bigger than that of a neutron, there would be nothing in the universe but neutronium. Had the beryllium 8 in stars not formed chemical bonds at a very precise resonance, there wouldn’t have been enough carbon in the universe for the beginning of life. Had the electromagnetic force binding electrons to nuclei been only a few percentage points different, you wouldn’t be reading this now. Counterfactual after counterfactual underlines just how lucky we are to be alive — so lucky, in fact, that perhaps luck has nothing to do with it.
And it is not just in the realm of physics that Bolloré and Bonnassies find natural phenomena too improbable to be accidental. In biology, the complexity of a single cell organism and the stunning efficiency of the double helix are among the structures they think only an intelligent being could account for. But it’s when our co-authors get to the last third of their book, and take on the supposed improbability of historical events involving Jesus, the Jewish race, and miracles such as the one at Fatima, that the true extent of their detective skills comes to the fore: less Hercule Poirot and more Inspector Clouseau. This part of the book is so clumsily argued, it would cause the Pope himself to have doubts.
Consider their story about why the existence of the Old Testament counts as good historical evidence for God’s invisible hand. They argue that it offers readers proto-scientific truths, such as “mankind comes from matter”, and “the world was not created all at once but developed in stages”, that absolutely could not have been revealed to the Ancient Hebrews at the time without divine instruction. (Never mind that much earlier pre-Socratic Greeks like Anaximenes and Anaximander made statements like this too.) At this, you might reasonably protest that the Bible also gets quite a lot wrong, perhaps suggesting that occasional empirical accuracy is more due to luck than judgment. For instance, the Book of Genesis says that heaven and earth were created in six days, not 13.8 billion years. But a bit like loyal press officers working to cover the ramblings of an unreliable leader, Bolloré and Bonnassies retort that nobody back then had the concept of a billion (though couldn’t God have given it to them?); and anyway, the “precise” age of the Earth “is of no interest at all, from either a metaphysical or physical point of view”.
[su_unherd_related fttitle=”Suggested reading” author=”Sarah Ditum”]https://unherd-wpml-test.go-vip.net/2025/04/confessions-of-a-recovering-atheist/[/su_unherd_related]
Or take the authors’ argument that the historical Jesus must have been the Messiah, by attempting to rule out more prosaic rival explanations. Jesus can’t have been just another wise sage wandering round the Levant, they suggest, because he sometimes said crazy things. Equally, though, he can’t have been a crazy man, because he sometimes said wise things. The possibility that both sages and madmen sometimes have days off seems not to have occurred. The next chapter is of similar argumentative quality: could the Jewish race have lasted so long, been so intensely persecuted, yet achieved so much — including producing “the most sold book in history” and achieving “many unexpected and spectacular military victories” — had God not been intervening on their behalf all along?
By the time you get to the book’s treatment of the Fatima “sun miracle” — not to mention the authors’ insinuation that God instigated it in order to precipitate the Soviet Union — images of Richard Dawkins leaping around with glee and punching the air become irresistible. As chance would have it, only this week Scott Alexander published his own, much more rigorous, exploration of the Fatima sun miracle than the one offered by Bolloré and Bonnassies in their chapter. I recommend that they take this as a sign from God, and give up the explanation game forthwith.
Fine-tuning arguments remain interesting, though. Ultimately, they don’t work to rationally justify Christianity, or indeed any other kind of concrete theology, because of the large gaps they leave. One big problem is about how to calculate the probabilities of physical laws being as they are; for on many secular views of the laws of nature, their being different from the way they are is, precisely, physically impossible. But even leaving aside that technical issue, God’s intentions in designing the universe still look worryingly vague: what was He calibrating the background physical laws for, exactly? Was it just to bring carbon into the universe; or carbon-based life forms, generally; or humans, specifically; or even just one human in particular — Liz Truss, say, or Craig from Strictly? Why did He adopt so painfully indirect and slow a manner of implementation, and not just magic up the Garden of Eden in a trice instead, like a pop-up at the Chelsea Flower Show? The nature of God also looks pretty vague, defined only as whoever it was that came up with the floorplans: are we talking just one cosmic architect, or a committee?
[su_pullquote]”Why did He not just magic up the Garden of Eden in a trice, like a pop-up at the Chelsea Flower Show?”[/su_pullquote]
Effectively, then, though fine-tuning arguments empty nature of mystery, treating it like a piece of machinery we might one day fully understand, they return all the obscurity to God. This is explicit in God, the Science, the Evidence: at one point the authors write that “the human body is just an intelligent machine”. Only the soul, if it exists, is of a different nature.” Inside nature, we might one day understand everything; on the outside, there is no time, no space, no real hooks for our subjective minds to catch on. Every earthbound image we come up with is inadequate.
But materialist accounts don’t do much better in banishing cosmological mystery; for arguably, saying we came from absolutely nothing is the most mysterious stance of all. So puzzling is this proposal, attempts to explain the origins of the universe in terms of prior nothingness often inadvertently smuggle something in. A portion of space pulsating with energy is still something; a quantum field is still something. We can still always ask: yes, but what caused the existence of it? And there’s also the metaphysically irritating fact that, if you don’t want to countenance a birth and a death for the universe, you have to posit the existence of an actual infinity; no less bizarre for the average mind, acquainted only with finitude, than its religious alternative.
Perhaps, then, we are at an impasse: two mutually incompatible explanations of how we got here, each with its own measure of confusion and darkness. We could just stipulate that a creationist God, by definition, gets all the glamorous mystery, while the material world gets rational comprehensibility; He is whatever started things off, but that which we cannot otherwise hope to know. Or perhaps — and this would be my preference — we could give up flat-footed quests to prove the existence of the supernatural by rational means; we could start becoming alert to immanence, rather than simply hypothesizing transcendence. That is: we could stop treating the natural world as if it were an Agatha Christie novel, where the only real mystery is how exactly the body got into the library.
”Was it just to bring carbon into the universe; or carbon-based life forms, generally; or humans, specifically; or even just one human in particular — Liz Truss, say, or Craig from Strictly? Why did He adopt so painfully indirect and slow a manner of implementation, and not just magic up the Garden of Eden in a trice instead, like a pop-up at the Chelsea Flower Show”
a bit of flippancy reveals intent, which is to belittle an argument, and so we get the drift not being to just say —> yes, it is statistically unlikely creation just arose by sheer chance, but that still proves nothing as it could well have – but to give a little bit more personal spin to rebutting.
Or magicking up Kate the Philosopher and her thoughts in a trice and not having her troubled with her slow reasoning across this piece, or her life. Why not pop it all into her’s and our heads in a trice.
As to Job, God might ask Kate where she was when He laid out the heavens. What an omission not to have her there as an advisor of Wisdom. “Look, your divine majesty, here’s a better way to do it”.
Why allow Kate all that slow time to appreciate her daughter growing from birth through all the stages of the beauty of her many iterations. That compendium of treasured memories only possible because of the slow unfolding of time – her eternity in each moment of time.
The picture of all those happy conversations and acts of love and friendship, all the thousands of them, mounting up in Kate’s mind until they are like looking down from a high hill on to a rich, lovely plain full of woods and waters and cornfields, which stretch away and away, slowly merging into a warm, summer haze laying sleepily in repose at the distant closing of the day.
As the Good Book says, a thousand years are to God as yesterday when it is passed.
Whether Prof. Stock believes in God is not the point of the article. The point lies in the failure of attempts to prove by science what is provable only by faith. The best that might be provable by science alone is a god that lit the blue touch paper and maybe retired, maybe did not. Science is not capable of being informative about that god. Indeed, were science able to prove a fully comprehensible god, would that be a god worth troubling ourselves with?
Science can illuminate aspects of creation which incline us to believe in God, although it cannot provide conclusive proof. It is only by faith that we can know that God exists, proving the otherwise unproveable. But it does remain possible for non-believers to assert the general weakness of faith as a method of proof, and to support their argument with the many daft things that some people do believe in.
And does Prof. Stock believe in God? God knows.
I have always found the question “Why should there be something rather than nothing?” a curious one, and wonder why . What is “nothing”? It is, in fact, unimaginable. Why should it be assumed that “nothing” is somehow the default position — that “nothing” is somehow more likely than “something”? “Why should there be “nothing” rather than “something”?
Great article. There’s not a single argument to be had for the existence of a creator; and KS rightly points out there’s no argument against, which then takes us directly to the meaning of words, to language.
The only plausible explanation is that our minds have evolved in a way which doesn’t allow us to understand, and therefore there’s a tendency to create explanations rather than none.
It’s a question of our human.psychology. I’m really not sure why religionists get so aerated when this is pointed out. I take great spiritual sustenance just from being here, and bearing witness; it’s beautiful. Introducing a creator just seems ludicrous, and unnecessary; worse: divisive.
The only plausible explanation is God created everything.
Denying a creator just seems ludicrous, and unnecessary; worse: divisive.
Devoid of any real insight, you’ve now defaulted to quoting me. It was inevitable.
haha….
Many moons ago, when one of my grandchildren was staring at a concrete Dinosaur in a London Park asked “What was God doing when Dinosaurs were around “ I could only answer “ not much”. Was I wrong?
I always wondered why God would go to the hassle of creating everything in the universe, when the vast, vast majority of it is completely uninhabitable. Doesn’t seem a particularly productive use of his or her time to me. Likewise with the dinosaurs why bother making them in the first place just to wipe them out. Perhaps he or she just got bored of them and wanted a new plaything
Once I showed them those photos of the so called ‘Pillars of Creation’ in the Eagle Nebula they ‘got it’.
10:04.BST.
The ones in Crystal Palace Park?
Strange.
If anything the bizarre proportions and incredible postures of those ‘Terrible Lizards’ (aren’t their names preposterous when you know a little Greek?) were probably the first thing to seriously disquiet me about the more, shall we say, expansive claims of speculative paleontology. They were presented with such an imprimature of authority when they were first conceived. But they now look ridiculous.
They brought home to me the very Victorian-ness of it all.
So much of what we call the ‘natural sciences’ was birthed in that same bogus spirit of Comtean positivism and carries it’s parentage with it still.
An ideological inability to humbly admit that we don’t really know very much at all. At least Christianity, in my experience of it, makes a virtue and an opportunity for humility, out of doubt.
Interestingly Richard Owen, the man who coined the term Dinosaur, went to his grave an ardent ‘creationist’, so called. In particular he was convinced that the human hippocampus minor could not have evolved.
Yes, the very same. They are of their time (1854) but still very impressive for young children, before the dawn of reason comes.
.“Preposterous” as their names maybe today, at the time Ancient Greek carried a certain cachet which I am sure you will admit? Even today I would argue that Megalosaurus sounds so much better than Giant Lizard.
As you say the tragedy of Owen was that he recanted, otherwise he could have been as famous as Darwin, but instead remains almost unknown. However at least we can thank him for the Natural History Museum.
11:10. BST.
Indeed, the Greek is certainly euphonious and awesome but more to the point, we are now assured that the ‘terrible lizards’ were more closely related to birds than to ‘lizards’ of any kind.
With full commendation for admitted error it does bring the spotlight to bear on the rather dubious hypothesising that still passes for ‘science’ – in the popular understanding a least.
However Owen’s original work did somewhat challenge James Ussher’s* calculations, that placed the age of the earth at around 6,000 years.
*A 17th century Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of Ireland.
HERR CENSOR THIS HAS BEEN WAITING FOR MORE THAN THREE HOURS NOW, THUS STIFLING ANY DISCUSSION.
He was readying Noah’s Ark but forgot to include space for them too.
Come off it!
That’s a bit lazy to say the least. I would have thought “don’t know and don’t care” would be a better summary, and certainly far less confrontational.
There are plenty of things worth fighting for in this life, but God isn’t one of them.
HERR CENSOR, THIS HAS BEEN WAITING FOR OVER AN HOUR NOW.
The tell me, who or what created the creator of God?
ask a goldfish to explain a piano – he can’t do it, and neither can I explain the origin of God.
Were it not for faith in God, it would be just as plausible that a god created everything. Creation by itself does not explain a god who is interested in individual human beings, let alone God in three persons.
Humans created god. It’s a glitch in our mammalian brains.
Except that our minds have evolved in a way which actually makes it possible to understand. Modern science is based on the intelligibility of the universe, and that the truths and secrets of the universe open up to the tools of scientific enquiry. That’s why science emerged within a society and culture that believed in God. I should know better than respond to someone who thinks all religious faith is ludicrous however and to point out that history is full of ludicrous and at worse divisive atheists.
You should know better, since you’ve simply not understood my comment about the use of language and the psychology which you’re not able to encompass.
The appreciation of the beauty of immanence – or of a sunset – can only be reached by the use of imagination and intuition, as William Blake liked to point out. Blake would have hated this book because it uses the same sort of analysis of the world as Newton did.
And the sustenance of beauty is possible because one has a full stomach, satisfying work, and is not domiciled in a war zone. Not only that but the spiritual satisfaction comes from the relief of not having to be bothered by an immanent God.
Furthermore, this satisfaction of ‘just being here’ comes from the Newtonian idea that you are a cog in a machine. You whirr away until you are replaced. Your washing machine is untroubled by having to find a meaning for washing the laundry or identifying a creator. It is not troubled by a creator making a judgement on its performance – though, unbeknown to it, there is one.
Note that Kate the Philosopher archly positions herself above both sides, the religious and scientific. In recommending that we attribute the glory of mystery to a deist God and rational comprehensibility to the material world, she even resorts, without realising it, to giving to God what is God’s and to Caesar what is Caesar’s.
Hers is a dualism worthy of C S Lewis’s That Hideous Strength; and the mischievous Lewis would have delighted in writing Kate the Philosopher into it. Just as there is a sceptic in both of the camps in his story – the religious camp and the materialist camp, so there would be a philosopher.
In cold air you feel cold. In warm air you feel warm. In the Divine air you feel astringent fire or cool light. One to fear and one to love. That ‘song before the Throne’ you ‘bear witness’ to now.
As KS points out, both belief and unbelief are on one level ‘ludicrous’. And to fall into one camp or the other is by its nature ‘divisive’. I think the only intellectually honest approach is one of agnosticism, since that acknowledges the limitations of our comprehension. However I allow for the possibility that there are wiser and holier people than me who might be able to offer a better insight. So I’m open to faith – a reluctant agnostic you might say, or a devout sceptic.
A spirited and challenging sally as always.
But what evidence can you provide of the ‘evolution of the mind’?
Where do you locate the ‘mind’? What is its mass, its weight, its chemical signature?
You have a tendency to load words like ‘mind’, ‘spirit’, ‘beauty’ and ‘reason’ with a numinous reality which seems to bely your strictly materialist claims to theoretical parsimony.
I wonder if that ever gives you pause for thought?
I disagree with your suggestion that our minds have evolved in a way which doesn’t allow us to understand. On the contrary, if that was the case you and I would likely not be here today.
As I say elsewhere, cave men didn’t understand the wheel until they did. Science didn’t solve the problems of deadly diseases until it was necessary to – and then it did.
The human mind has the capacity to understand anything once it realises that something exists. If it came to be that there is evidence God really does exist, then I’m confident humans would be able to work out how and why. Until there is such evidence, science doesn’t need to ponder it.
Creating explanations is called faith.
There is either science or there is faith. We choose as we wish to.
I’ve got a problem with this sentence – ” Science didn’t solve the problems of deadly diseases until it was necessary to”. Science couldn’t solve the problems of infectious diseases until the necessary scientific understanding had been developed. A lot of scientific progress was made despite the opposition of organised religion.
Yes, fair point, thanks.
I’m not going near your last sentence!
Indeed. There must presumably have been a time when humans ( or proto-humans) didn’t believe in a god (do chimpanzees ?) and some period over which this belief gained traction. Presumably because it filled a useful need at the time. Then around the later 1800s, the process went into reverse and the prevalence of belief declined. Presumably because alternative explanations and beliefs met the need better for many people.
The Devil discovered TV, you put it at the 1800s – try 1960s
Religious belief declined as scientific understanding grew. Biologicial evolution and speciation demonstrate that no god is necessary to explain the variety of life. The Miller-Urey experiment demonstrated that the fundamental building blocks of life, amino acids, can be created by entirely natural mechanisms in a lifeless primordial atmosphere. Quantum physics showed that the universe is not deterministic and therefore an omniscient deity is simply not possible, and so on. Genetics shows how life works and illustrates that, in principle, mankind can create novel forms of life from inert chemicals.
And so lengthily on.
The upshot was that there was ever less that could not be explained by entirely materialistic science.
Occam’s razor?
I think success theory could be applied to explain the universe.
As to god, a being outside of human understanding? Would be out of my understanding as I am human.
I don’t need a god to help people I meet on my path. Nor do I need heaven and hell to moderate my behaviour. And I have no inclination to tell people what they should think.
I have met a lot of nice people at church and the best man I know was a catholic priest.
You do know Ocam’s razor is just some cliche and has no proof or argument on any specific situation.
Ocam’s razor says the odds of your DNA evolving, and then falling in the sequence it did, and then you ending growing to be the one you are is so quadrillion quadrillion to one unlikely that we must accept the ‘fact’ that you do in fact, not exist. But it does not say that, because it is just a fun cliche.
You haven’t understood the logical function of Occam’s Razor which says of two or more explanations of a phenomenon the simpler one is to be preferred. It’s logically incoherent to claim that it does what you say it does. It’s a logical tool, not an infallible guide to the truth.
Occam’s razor allows you to avoid conspiracy theory paranoia for at least a few seconds. And no, Occam’s razor says nothing about dna. DNA would be success theory.
Meaning it’s that way because that’s the only way possible for it to be. It’s like winning the lottery a year ago and wondering how you got your numbers. Or looking at the weather channel and seeing there is a 1% chance of rain. When you go outside and it’s raining it becomes 100%.
“we could start becoming alert to immanence”
That, for me, is the most important part of this article. I have a deep sense of something other that acts through our lives. I’m reluctant to call it God because that term comes freighted with immense historical and ideological baggage. I was raised Roman Catholic but the dogma of the Church doesn’t resonate with me. Only the insights of the mystics speak to me.
But if I try to pin down this sense of another moving through my life, I can’t. I’m not finally convinced of the immanence of God’s presence, or the Other’s presence, in my life; God’s sudden, unexpected eruption into the everyday world.
When you stare across the Pacific at a fiery sunset, is the sense of sublime beauty really God speaking to you or simply an emotional response to beauty, to a pleasing combination of color and light? If you have a serious disease and serendipitously stumble across a report of a groundbreaking cure, is that God guiding you back to health, or your brain subconsciously searching for any scrap of information that might help you?
Ultimately, I choose to believe in something rather than nothing, partly because belief in a higher power appears to be a universal characteristic of all human societies (especially those, such as communist USSR, where belief was actively suppressed). Belief appears to be a profound fact of the human psyche and, for that reason alone, should not be glibly rejected.
As for my remaining doubts, I suppose that’s where faith comes in.
Christianity as a whole did not speak to me. Even as a young child I perceived so many critical incongruities not only of reason but of morality that I could not find a way to God therein. First was the liturgy of deicide against the Jews when obviously the dirty was done by the Romans. How can the concept of ‘occupation’ (by the Romans) be understood today (any ‘apartheid’ ) and not understood in 72 AD ? Second, this exact bearing of false witness is forbidden in the Ten Commandments. Third, is the truth that salvation was impossible in this story without Jesus’s death so why blame the Jews? Why not understand the God’s-hand miracle of history itself ? Fourth, Jesus was a Jew who knew nothing of Christianity so how could this new movement be anything but a Jewish movement ? Fifth, the resurrection is totally unscientific. Christians, it’s time to cross the bridge of history and come into Jacob’s tent. Some of us come to synagogue to talk to God and others come to talk to one another. Being Jewish is expansive, soulful, intellectual and kind. The Hebrew Bible is the history of the Jewish people. Can you co-opt someone else’s history ? Can you co-opt someone’s moral and ethical code? Perhaps, but if you f*** it up, then that’s on you.
The Holocaust was still being taught in high school in the 70’s and when I learned of this event, I could not sit in church, especially on Easter Sunday, without thinking about it and becoming angry at the church rather than disaffected. I converted to Judaism and raised four Jewish children. Somehow, even as a teenager I got the message of history. Now it’s time for the adults in the room to also get the message of history.
While the Holocaust was about spilling the blood of Jews, October 7, after spilling even more Jewish blood, this time by Muslims, has become about forcing Jewish nation to kill Gazans in a bloody horrendous fashion to recover its own children, parents and grandparents. Golda Meir said she could forgive the Arabs for killing a Jew but never forgive the Arabs for forcing Jews to kill Arabs, especially children. So yes, this is worse than the Holocaust because it has made us into killers.
And then there is the extermination of Jews in the Holocaust. Wasn’t it even more ‘blood of the lamb of God’ than the crucifixion of Christ himself ? The author asks a question – how could the Hebrews occur without Divine instruction ? Well, they could not have occurred without it. But Christianity does not naturally and of necessity follow. Jesus’s life was a Jewish project and Christians are wanna-bes without doing the work or truly understanding the Christian roots of their faith. In fact they failed so miserably to effectuate God’s word that they allowed the Holocaust to happen. They can do better. Many ARE doing better. Only the Christians in America and Europe can help Israel in the long run.
If today’s youth are saying that the papacy is vacant since Pope Paul 6 this can only mean one thing. It is a rejection of Nostra Aetate. This does not bode well for Jews OR Christians. Listen to MTG, Candace Owens or Tucker Carlson. They are smart people but they are, together, very much in moral crisis.
The Romans killed Christ but the Jews put them up to it. Read all about it in the New Testament.
I have, thank you. The Sanhedrin was not accustomed to convene at Caiphus home at night for trials. There was a building for that purpose and trials were in the normal course of business. As I said, Judea was under occupation; what do you not understand ? Furthermore, Jesus never claimed to be a king. He did not foment revolt, although some were disappointed by this. And yes, he did go against the grain of Jewish power, but this would not have been a problem had Judea not been a tinderbox under the Roman thumb.
It’s interesting how the rules and observations of politics apply to all but this particular event in history. Think you have something of a prejudice ?
The Jewish priestly establishment saw the carpenter as an outsider and heretic who must be silenced. Like Saul they couldn’t imagine what would happen next.
As a theological system, Christianity was created by St Paul, a radical Jewish thinker and revolutionary within the Jewish faith.
True. Saul, as was his name at the time, violated Jewish norms by evangelizing. And this was damaging to the Jewish community as a whole. But he was not the first to teach the precepts that he taught. The House of Shammai and the House of Hillel were in competition, if you will, much like the secular Jews and Orthodox Jews today.
Jesus’s teachings were core Judaism and Jewish ethics. There were rabbis before him who also taught the same belief system. Yet … YET …. if you look up anything about his teaching such as the Sermon on the Mount, these precepts are described as Christian. Jesus had no intention of starting a new religion. Early Jews drifted from the core teachings as they took on converts with little understanding of the Tanakh. They began to feel superior to their roots thus some of the core teachings began to take on supersessionist leanings such as the New Covenant replacing the Jews’ Covenant with God. Teaching became shallow, intellectually dishonest. This is how you derive the impression that the Jews killed Jesus. And don’t say this didn’t happen. I sat in many churches on Easter and heard the same false accusation. Why would Nostra Aetate have been published if not for this fact ? Similarly, if salvation came through his death, why hate the Jews ?
If you ask me, I find it opportunistic of Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens to ride on the back of Charlie Kirk’s death to use it as yet another cudgel to bash Jews. I only wonder when MTG will chime in. She went to lengths to protect here rights to accuse the Jews of killing Christ. She is no friend to Jews, or Israel, for sure.
Wake up Christians and do the work.
Christians, it’s time to cross the bridge of history and come into Jacob’s tent.
Poor Kate the Philosopher never imagined when she penned her piece that history was a bridge or that anyone should be invited to cross it. She recommends an unbridgeable gulf between knowledge in science and the mystery of divinity.
Didn’t Christianity occur as a result of the disputations between those who thought Jesus of Nazareth had come to preach an easier or different way to salvation other than the Law and those who thought he had come to fulfil the Law?
We are already in Jacob’s tent.
The Resurrection is, indeed, unscientific.
But if it happened, and I believe the Testimony of the eyewitnesses and their subsequent willingness to die, then Jesus is, indeed Lord.
The parting of ways between Christians and Jews is a great sadness to me, as their prayers and festivals were also those of the Lord and should be honoured.
Most people who refer to Tucker clearly don’t actually listen to him. He has actually bent strongly religious and clearly is a believer
A whole fleet of philosophical omnibuses could be driven through that JB.
Yes, you could. But why would you? JB is not articulating an argument, but is raising questions and expressing doubts.
I too am a Catholic but do believe in the supernatural for which I highly recommend to any doubter Professor Carlos Eire’s book “They Flew a history of the impossible” . This recounts with unimpeachable evidence levitations of for example St Theresa of Avila, St. Joseph of Cupertino, the Venerable María de Ágreda, and three disgraced nuns.
The questions he explores–such as why and how “impossibility” is determined by cultural contexts, and whether there is more to reality than meets the eye or can be observed by science–have resonance and lessons for our time.
People don’t like things they can’t explain. This leads to some spending their lives trying to solve the various mysteries (science) and others to choose to believe that it’s some master plan of somebody more powerful (religion)
Few people can explain anything. If I asked someone to explain the processes of an internal combustion engine, the parts and process – few could and that is as basic as it gets.
95% of people have no interest in anything but their job, friends, food and drink, holiday and what is on their phone and Netflix.
So says the man’s who didn’t understand Occam’s Razor in his earlier comment …
This does feel like an extraordinarily patronising generalisation to me. And one of the reasons that mainstream political parties and media have become so unpopular – by assuming we know what they all think and it’s largely reducible to direct materialistic factors.
Or course I understand ochams razor – I said that it only is useful in generalizations as complexity is possible over the simple
here it is as you do not get it
”is the problem-solving principle that recommends searching for explanations constructed with the smallest possible set of elements. It is also known as the principle of parsimony”
Belatedly looking up what Occam’s Razor is and quoting it back to the guy who corrected you on it is no sort of rebuttal, GM.
“We could start becoming alert to immanence, rather than simply hypothesising transcendence.” These two require each other. As CS Lewis pointed out: ‘If you aim for heaven you get earth thrown in. Aim at earth you get neither.’
I always liked CS Lewis.He did a lot of work. His quote sounds very kabbalistic. Today one can discuss DNA and also sound very kabbalistic.
I would quarrel with one phrase – “an intelligent being”. Better I think just to say “intelligent being” – that is, that the whole of creation, all the way down, is intelligent, has a telos, and has spent the last however many billions of years exploring the possibilities, evolving into something where life, order, complexity and self awareness are possible.
Which veers close to panpsychism.
How intelligent are we anyway really? And if some are to be believed AI – the creation of science and technology – will very soon be outsmarting us. That concept alone raises other ethical and practical questions.
Excellent comment! Or to put it another way – why did this ‘creator’ give us such a weirdly incomplete view of reality and leave us to sink or swim? And why did he need uneducated intermediaries to get this inadequate story across to us – why not snap his fingers and let us know everything, all at once? Oh yes, because he doesn’t exist.
I am forced to believe that God created Kate the Philosopher to keep the religionists from worshipping the false god of science.
Increasingly I fall back to Peter Hitchens take on the matter: as the existence of God can neither be conclusively proven nor disproven it is therefore a matter of opinion and thus a matter of choice.
For myself, I incline towards belief in God.
That’s exactly what I did. I read once below the line (Spectator I think) that faith is a gift; ask for it and you’ll get it. I did, and I did and my life has been better for it.
But it was also a choice, I wouldn’t have wanted or asked for faith had I not made some kind of choice. I came across one of those stupid ‘iron age superstitions, dude’ comments and I thought what an ignorant and hackneyed and just plain rude mindset. I didn’t want to be associated with new atheism.
I will not look at this book.
No disrespect at all, but you cannot possibly know that your life has ‘been better for it’ since you took one fork in the road and cannot possibly know what would have happened had you taken the other fork. I am glad for you that you are happy with your choice.
No disrespect here either, but I think that’s the point – you choose faith generally, and then as part of the choice take comfort in believing you’re “the better for it.” It’s hard to know what to think about folks who constantly question their core tenets and flounder about looking for greener grass. For some, the searching and questioning become all-consuming, never providing reassurance, closure, happiness, satisfaction, meaning or whatever they’re striving to find.
Off topic, yes, but similar discontentment seems to reside with gender dysphorics who feel they might be better off as the other sex or as a blend of both. There is no comfort in rejecting the most basic element of self identity and being uncomfortable in your own skin.
At some basic point, we are who we are – the way God or whatever greater power made us. And we have to get on with our lives the best way we can.
The issue here surely is that by not choosing to believe in a god one is more or less agnostic in respect of how the universe was originally created; waiting only for any further scientific discoveries. A choice to believe that the universe was created by a god seems always to include a lot of other beliefs: That this God inspired the bible – or maybe all the different religious texts, just to confuse us [which seem to me so obviously written by humans]; that God is interested in the daily lives of every human; that God has some active involvement in ‘saving’ some lives and not others; that this God requires some reverence and adoration, etc etc. Because without all these accompanying beliefs, what difference does it make what or who created the universe? What a belief in a god really does, it seems to me, is to offer the comfort that ‘it will be all right in the end’. Rather than ‘one day, just like every other life form on this planet, we’ll just be dead’.
Totally agree. If one wishes to hypothesise a supernatural entity as the creative force behind the universe, there is no definitive argument against that. Although it just moves the problem one stage back. How was this entity created? If it is self-created, why could not the universe be self-created? It no more of a logical leap….
But to go from the position of a supernatural creator to a belief in a human-centric deity such as the Christians, Jews or Muslims believe in seems a blatant comfort blanket woven by those same humans. Afraid of the dark and afraid that death means the extinction of their identity.
I can sympathise with those fears, but can’t admire spinning castles in the air to assuage them. Especially when so many believers get irate with those who disbelieve, or even believe in a different version of the same deity.
Then come to church or synagogue to discuss the writings and to talk to other congregants. However you can’t put Muslims in this category. They submit. They never argue with God like Noah did. When Abraham obeyed God and went to sacrifice Isaac, he showed his faith. But in the end he also listened to God when the angels “stayed his hand.” There is so much wisdom in the stories about the behavior of our fathers. Don’t separate yourself from the community.
A shallow thoughtless comment from a shallow thoughtless man.
PH will always have big-brother envy.
Most of the globe believes in the supernatural. Are the billions simple – minded – compared to a few atheists?
Many believers are very intelligent and capable of sophisticated thinking. But they are also searching for meaning and probably terrified of the idea that when they die, they just die. End of.
Organised religion is very sophisticated. It has to be, to deal with the range of human behaviour it seeks to regulate, and to attempt to explain the complexity of the universe over which it claims authorship.
Faith is for the living.
When the herd takes off in one direction, what do you do?
UnHerd is for people who dare to think for themselves.
Chacun a….
Then you will be one to go to church or synagogue to talk to God while other congregants who are not inclined to God will come to talk to you and other congregants. Whichever camp you are in, believer, nonbeliever or agnostic, just don’t separate yourself from the community.
I felt similarly, and needed a fit between the intellectual and the spiritual. After reading Victor Frankl and searching, I came to Judaism.
After reading Frank I came to the understanding that having meaning for your life means to choose your own purpose.
Imagine talking to a couple who have just won the lottery, a sum of £43,865,239. Let’s call them Bert and Doris. What are the chances that a couple called Bert and Doris from Scunthorpe would end up winning £43,865,239? Vanishingly small, you would think; but they did. Must be fine tuning! There’s a god!
Time is the key. KS should think about Time.
Time of the Gaps! The atheist companion to God of the Gaps.
A poets response.
How does Time apply to the fine-tuning argument? It works for arguing in favour of evolution on earth: single cell organisms became men walking on the moon because of Time. Billions of mutations are cul-de-sacs but the adaptive ones prosper and are replicated.
But evolution doesn’t apply to the composition of the universe. There is only one universe, not branch universes with different characteristics. Unless, that is, you believe in infinite parallel universes, each having slightly different compositions, and we find ourselves living on the one which allows life to exist. But the multiverse theory is just as much as a leap of faith as Deism.
The existence of a multiverse could eventually be proven or disproven in the same way that planets orbiting around other stars has been.
Any true deity can only exist as a product of faith however. Proof of existence immediately from deity to merely just another, albeit more advanced and of different form, lifeform.
Do you mean that God, if He revealed Himself to us, would invite the question “who created you?”
I think God must be supernatural, e.g. outside of the laws of physics because if He was bound by the laws of nature He couldn’t have created these laws.
So the question, “who created you?” might not make sense in that supernatural realm.
Classic!
I see what you mean but no.
God/god/any random deity cannot “exist” in the current physical world (whether that be in primordial times or millions if not billions of years into the future.)
By the simple act of intervention into our world they take on an identity.
The second we prove that identity exists then they are no longer gods/deities but ourselves magnified. Whether through evolution, genetics, or cyber tech.
The supernatural isn’t some special place, it’s simply somewhere we currently don’t understand.
Life depends on the role of DNA in assembling proteins. That positions it at a certain scale in the laws of physics between the quantum scale and the cosmological scale. A scale where three othogonal spatial dimensions and a flow of time can account very accurately for everything around us. To us they appear infinite, backwards and forwards. Einstein explained why the spacial dimensions are not orthogonal at a cosmological scale and therefore not infinite. Someone will in due course explain why time is not infinite.
Not quite. Somebody wins the lottery every time. There is no guarantee that our fine tuned universe had to exist.
Arguing faith sounds almost paradoxical. Sells books though.
Such arguments usually include tautologies and retroactive probabilities, such as what’s the probability of having all the right conditions on Earth. The probability is 100%, as it’s already happened!
Or God exists, because it says so in the Bible, which was inspired by God, so must be true.
Finally, any discussion of the origins of the universe and where it’s heading is pretty empty without including entropy in it.
Too right. How about this rewrite of Genesis, ch 1:
Day Zero, God said “let entropy be”. Day 1 God said “oops, better fix that”. Days 2-6 busy fixing it. Day 7 et seq God takes his eye off the ball, entropy back in driving seat.
Elizabeth Ann
Said to her Nan:
“Please will you tell me how God began?
Somebody must have made Him. So
Who could it be, ‘cos I want to know?”
So wrote AA Milne, taking a rest from Winnie the Pooh
If there was a point at which time and space came into being, then their creator exists beyond them… outside of them, and as a result, Elizabeth Ann’s question becomes redundant because there is no ‘before’ in the Creator’s dimension, and so there is no beginning. The Creator, God, simply ‘is’ – rather like his response to Moses’ request for his name: “I am who I am”.
That is a definition, not an argument.
You are arguing “YOUR solution fails because you cannot name a cause, but MY solution wins because I don’t need a cause.” See how that’s silly?
Keep your definition if you want, but you cannot pretend it is logical.
So the universe can’t have existed forever, but God can?
Turtles. I think the answer has something to do with turtles. Lots of ’em.
All the way down….
Science is one small tool of one small species on one small planet. The blind faith – and it is blind and it is faith – it can understand or “prove” everything relating to the Universe or Galaxy is a preposterous starting point.
“A dog might as well try and understand the mind of Newton” as Darwin remarked.
I see us living in a position akin to Matryoshka dolls, that is an infinite series of energy/mass states where we can only see very few of the ‘dolls’ around us. We inherit euphemisms, such as God, from times when there was less scientific understanding. Which isn’t to say that we have much better understanding now. As someone else has ventured, many rely on faith as a comfort of our current state.
Comfort? Not really – Faith is hard work. I think atheism is comfort as it means nothing matters and there is no payment due after you leave the table.
I haven’t read the book so can only comment on the author’s review. And IMO in no way should it undermine her faith in science. On the contrary. For example:-
1) The Goldilocks theory is back to front. The universe is perfectly calibrated for us BECAUSE we exist in it. It is the only form of universe where life as we know it can. If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t, but some other form of life might well be able to.
2) Everything seems too complex to understand (so there must be a God) until it isn’t. Once upon a time, not long ago in geological terms, humans didn’t understand the wheel – and then one day they did. None of those who walked on the moon, nor those that put them there, understood digital – then one day they did. Today, no one understands quantum – but one day they will. And so on for so long as humans exist.
3) You can’t criticise science for not yet understanding everything. That is like criticising doctors because they can’t yet cure all cancers. They will, eventually, and so eventually will science get there. The impasse the author talks about only exists because science hasn’t yet done so.
4) I believe that people search for a God because they want to believe there’s more than just, well… just this. I can understand that. But I caution against saying there must be a God because it’s the only explanation. That’s dancing on a ever-reducing pin head.
There is no evidence of immanence. Faith, which I respect, is believing in immanence regardless, but that doesn’t sink science.
I think 2. is rather described in Genesis by the Trees of Life and Knowledge. By eating from the Tree of Knowledge the human race has the possibility of knowing everything that the putative god does. Infinite knowledge. By not having eaten from the Tree of Life we are not immortal and hence no one individual can live long enough to learn or discover everything.
It’s a very simple allegory but somehow a perfect description of the human state.
Then again, God does rather seem to be a Soros precursor – Know nothing and you’ll be happy.
Down vote but no rebuttal.
Surely if you disagree then it would seem that you would wish to explain why you disagree. That’s the basis of a discussion or argument.
See Monty Python if you don’t understand the concept .
Impressive statements of faith
Indeed. But based on a growing foundation of evidence. Unlike immanence, I would argue.
They will eventually…
How do you know?
I think there is an intrinsic misapprehension.
She has faith in science.
Science has nothing to do with faith.
This understanding is key so when she says her faith in science is challenged, I just naturally assume that is the right way of thinking about science.
Any scientific proposition should always be challenged until proved or disproved. And so they are. Ruthlessly. But that doesn’t mean you lose faith in science as a whole if something is disproved. Quite the opposite, in fact.
I read this article as if the author was saying more than that – that her whole belief in science in general was being challenged by this book.
No you don’t (lose faith in science). Science is the gradual process of gaining an ever better understanding of the world through trial and error, testing against reality at each new stage. It is normal and expected that older explanations are supplanted by newer, better ones. “Faith” is irrelevant to any of this and none of it challenges the scientific process.
Yes, sorry, mega typo by me. ‘Doesn’t’ not ‘does’!
Corrected, thanks.
It was a joke…
5) Today, no one understands God – but one day, maybe they will.
Why do you believe that you must choose science over God, just because you understand a bit about one and nothing about the other? Perhaps they’re not mutually exclusive?
With respect, you have no idea how much I understand about science or religion.
Perhaps there is a God. Perhaps science and God are not mutually exclusive. I didn’t say they were.
I’m rebutting some of the statements in this book; I’m stating that I take the scientific view of the universe, and suggesting that those who take the God view can’t rely on the ‘there’s no other explanation’ argument because the range for that is getting smaller every day.
By the way, what if we’re all wrong?!
I’m afraid you’ve taken my comments personally. They were not meant that way.
Mankind’s understanding of science started at zero and has been progressing upwards. I think it’s fair to say that no one has more than “a bit” of understanding about science.
As for God, we’re all clueless. I’m reminded of the dyslexic flea that doesn’t believe in the existence of Dog.
PS. There is absolutely no doubt that we are all wrong!
Thanks.
It may seem unlikely that the physics is just right to create the universe the way it is but how much more likely is it for the physics to create the fabulous intelligence required to design it that way?
There are thought to be trillions of galaxies in the universe, so perhaps quadrillions of stars and quintillions of planets in their orbits. However tiny the probability of the masses and forces being just right so that we exist to observe and wonder, the universe may be real without a superhuman creator. How it came to be (from nothing?) is probably beyond our theorising. Just a thought.
A current hypothesis is that there is never ‘nothing’, since a probability field can be present without anything since it is a mathematical construct. As such it can have an infinite number of permutations, each one giving rise to a set of ‘universal constants’. One of these just happens to have produced the universe we inhabit. Sounds weird, but all our fundamental observations are probabilistic; at the macroscopic scale we experience the ‘average’ of these.
“but some other form of life might well be able to”
Actually, to an overwhelming extent, no it wouldn’t. You’d just have chaos, void, or some form of mono-matter. Nothing of the complexity needed to sustain anything that could be called life. See Lewis & Barnes A Fortunate Universe – Life in a Finely Tuned Cosmos for elaboration.
I find it simple:
1/of course God exists, you can’t make anything from nothing
2/of course Christianity is good, it stops us acting like pagans
3/of course Anglicanism is the only religion for an Englishman
4/of course the old ways are better than the new so I stick to the 1662 Book of Common Prayer.
It doesn’t pay to overthink these things.
Only serial 3 really matters, particularly as they have baptised ALL of my dogs.
That’s the spirit!
I imagine that was satire, but given how believers often express themselves I can’t be sure. If it was, it was very good.
I loved #1 especially. Of course, that’s what the religious insist did happen.
I’m not sure science can prove the existence nor otherwise of a deity. it can say that the biblical account concurs with the current understanding of science.
I would point out to Professor Stock that a fine reading of Genesis would lead her to understand that it does not say the universe was created in six days but at that the end of each stage it says “it was evening and and it was morning a 2nd/3rd/4th/5th day”. The Hebrew does not suggest continuous six 24 hour periods.
Whatever. Surely the point is that it claims it all happened in a very short time frame and we now know this is incorrect.
This reads like you’re just quibbling about the magnitude of the error when it’s off by over 10^6.
I’ve always regarded the Genesis account as a poetic device, an extended metaphor
It always amazes me how people can take the passages of the bible that they like utterly literally, whilst they can also dismiss the more contradictory or problematic ones as being poetic licence and not to be taken seriously
Maybe that’s because you’re treating the Bible as if it were a single text written by one hand in a single sitting, rather than a compendium of many writers and narratives and styles put together over time. I take all of it seriously, but not all of it literally.
As I say, it just feels slightly too convenient.
“I like this bit so I’ll follow it exactly how it was written, I don’t like this but so I’ll interpret it how I please to make it more palatable!”
Claiming that “God did it” just moves back the existential question one step further. Where did the creator come from? To say that he is Almighty and Unending is no better than any current scientific explanation.
The trouble with both these approaches / explanations is that neither takes account of time, especially in terms of billions of years. I have argued elsewhere that human beings are basically incapable of comprehending the long run passage of time, and that religion in particular cannot explain it.
If you have enough understanding of time and randomness, everything makes more sense than Bishop Ussher’s futile attempt to put near-term dates on the Bible.
The best scientific statement is of course “we don’t know”; very little is certain.
But religion’s statement that “we do know” is unsupportable both in logic and evidence.
It is well to be alert to our unconscious bias – would I prefer that there was no creator of the universe (and I am therefore a free agent), or that such a being exists (and my have some views about me)? If the former, we will approach the question asking “Do i have to believe this?”, in which case the arguments for have to be utterly overwhelming. If we prefer a universe with a creator, we will ask “Can I believe this?”, in which case we wil be satisfied with a level of supporting evidence. The world is full of things that we accept as true but could not prove scientifically, and the existence of a creator is one of those.
It is sometimes argued that the existence of God can be proven from the principle of sufficient reason: that for everything which is, there is a sufficient reason that it is how and what it is. This principle, while not self-evidently true, nonetheless does seem to be a way of articulating what rationality takes for granted, so I suppose the argument is that to deny it is self-defeating for anyone who seeks to ground their beliefs in reason. No-one who does is likely to be impressed by the idea that some things exist for no reason whatever: not only for no humanly ascertainable reason, but for none at all. And no-one who does not is likely to be impressed by any argument at all.
It has been object that it is a logical fallacy to move from the principle that everything which exists has some sufficient reason for its existence, to the conclusion that here is some sufficient reason for the existence of everything altogether. (That one is illegitimately moving from “for all x there exists y such that” to “there exists y such that for all x…”) But here the question is whether ‘everything altogether’ is itself to count as an existent thing. It is difficult to see why not. It is certainly (pretty much, by stipulation) existent. Why not a thing?
The idea that our species (which has only been around for a mere two hundred thousand years on a tiny planet in a mind bogglingly massive Universe that is 14 billion years old) is God made and furthermore made in his ( her?) image, seems very small minded and extremely egotistical to me. My tiny brain struggles to cope with infinity but nevertheless, the idea of an infinite existence after my short life seems preposterous, and if true , would be terrifying . My conscious life is a fluke and I cannot believe there will be a second helping. Carpe Diem – and as we are a social species, try to be kind and responsible towards others.
Well said.
Two seemingly profound points are really rather silly.
To ask “how do you get something out of nothing” betrays an incomplete grasp of the Cosmos. How are YOU getting “nothing” out of “something”? We KNOW that there is something. But we do not know whether there was ever nothing. The universe could be eternally expanding, or eternally contracting/expanding – we don’t know yet, largely because the church has suppressed science for centuries.
And the fine-tuning argument is also weak-minded. If protons were different then atoms would be different, and molecules would be different, and life would be different (based on silicon? happened billions of years ago?). To say there must be a Designer because the laws of physics allow life is like gasping in awe at how rivers in the US magically decide to flow along state borders. The borders follow the rivers and would be different if the rivers were different, and life followed physics and would be different if physics were different.
The problem with both arguments is that they fall apart easily if you challenge them, but folks don’t want to challenge an argument if they like the conclusion. Humans are afraid to die, so they make up stories and then look for half-baked arguments to make the stories sound smart.
An omiscient ominpotent being created us sinful, commanded us not to be sinful, and for an instruction manual on how not to be sinful he gave us a 2000+ year old book in Hebrew and Greek full of contradictions, and to interpret it for us a church that gave us wars, inquisitions, crusades, sale of indulgences, rampant sexism, and molestation of children on an industrial scale; 2000 years later only 25% of humans get the Good News. “WHAT ARE THE CHANCES OF THAT?” Quantum mechanics and Darwinian evolution are far better explanations.
The best comment I’ve so far read.
Yes. Saying there was once nothing is a very big assumption.
Whether there was something or nothing, it still means something was around that did not have a beginning, something intelligent, that we call God.
“Humans are afraid to die”
Why are we afraid to die?
Why do we have this desire for immortality?
As a philosopher said, the fact that we are hungry proves that there is food.
The fact that we get thirsty shows that there is water.
So the desire to live forever shows that there is something after death, an afterlife, God.
No. I’m a mammal programmed to keep myself alive.
We are afraid to die because we have a survival instinct. Are amoeba afraid to die? They don’t have the capacity for fear but have evolved to continue existing and reproducing, just like us.
” largely because the church has suppressed science for centuries.”
Actually many of the earliest and best scientists were Christian.
According to the Bible we were not created sinful but with free will to sin or not. Without free will we would merely be puppets.
I think it was JB Priestly (no pun intended) who said ‘trying to prove God exists scientifically, is like trying to prove the world is round musically’. Inconsistent paradigms and all that.
It may be possible to prove the world is round musically.
Off you go then … should be fascinating.
I always read articles by Kathleen Stock and am generally impressed and glad of the reading. But I find this piece weak and poorly reasoned compared to the rest of her work. One gets the feeling she’s just not really interested in the topic and is just taking a quick stroll through it. I speak as one philosopher (an amateur though qualified) to another philosopher (a professional and better qualified).
Perhaps because she is a lapsed Catholic?
Seems to be nothing more than a strawman argument.
Whose argument? Professor Stock’s or the authors of the book she is reviewing? Because she is reviewing a book and pointing out its logical flaws, not making her own argument.
Interesting.
Dawkins destroyed the “what are the chances of that happening” argument in The Blind Watchmaker decades ago.
The wisdom writer Ecclesiastes summarises the problem neatly in 3: 11. ‘I have seen the burden God puts on men. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity into the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom out what God has done from beginning to end.’ That was about 2500 years ago.
“there must be a beginning and therefore an end”. Why, that is limited by our flawed perception. If the universe is infinite as is time, then we cannot state that there must be a beginning.
How would a dog explain a car ? It is all to do with smell obviously. The car farts out something that propels it. Humans are less than an amoeba compared to a God person. It’s all to do with physics obviously. Don’t be silly.
Kathleen, basically I’m a huge admirer of your work, but you should avoid biblical texts if you don’t understand literary genre theory. For example, re. creation within a week, it’s best understood as broad metaphor. We are still within the “six days”. (See Jürgen Moltmann.)
The “days” of Genesis have been understood in various ways, as has the precision of those daily events.
But she is criticising the authors of this book because they are NOT using metaphor or ‘literary genre theory’ whatever that might be.
They are trying to prove the existence of a God, and specifically a Christian God, using science. Maybe you should avoid Professor Stock’s work when she addresses religious themes…
Yup. Agree.
How with your intelligence do you read something and come away with half-understandings and none of the wisdom that normal people gain?
For example, you *really* think the Bible is trying to communicate that existence came about in 6 earth-solar days… Like that is the point being said? When in that cycle described, the sun doesn’t exist until half way though? Like the communicator isn’t aware of what they are saying?
In this example, you might appreciate the clarity that you gain when you realize what you are reading is a story about making a “home” and not a “house”. Read the literature when you find something you don’t understand, start with a scholar who already might have the answers for goodness sake, like John Walton in this case.
Why write about big things that you don’t take seriously?
I assume she dislikes God and Christianity, that is part of Feminism, which is her profession, so this gives her a crack at jeering at it.
Her profession is Philosophy, which is probably the reason she dislikes God and religion in general.
I might as well say that you are a dedicated anti-feminist, which is why you dislike a feminist’s opinion on anything, especially if it is a negative one regarding your own particular system of beliefs.
If there is a meaningful question here it most certainly cannot be expressed in language so best of luck. Read Wittgenstein.
Good point because no one understand what he says, but one assumes it is deep.
Reading, and discussing, the stories in the Bible as metaphors or allegories can be much more insightful and spiritually satisfying than trying to read, and defend, them as facts.
God will never give us concrete proof He and heaven exists along with an afterlife it’s far too risky a strategy. He gave us Jesus and the bible to make the best of and to guide our lives by. Why? Because if we knew for sure it was all true every time we had an annoyingly bad day (that includes everyone on the planet) we’d just kill ourself taking our entire family and friends and the dog along with us off to a much better one! God proving Himself would be a very dangerous and silly move IMO.
I’ll stick with my faith right or wrong thank you very much – it helps me cope remarkably well with life and the associated angst included in the full package.
If I’m wrong I’m wrong but what if, what just if…I’m right….?
That concludes today’s sermon from me so, God bless you all and peace be with you!
Your ‘God’ might never give us concrete proof, but he might have made a better job, after 14 Billion years to think about it, with the Big Reveal – Here I am! And here’s my Message! Let’s face it, 1, 2, or 3 attempts – take your pick- have not exactly been a roaring success.
The anthropic principle, as your “fine tuning argument” is called, is not new. A counter to it has also long been around for some time, and it is that life simply evolved to fit the laws of a pre-existing universe.
The idea that the universe and our earth, human life, were created by chance – That’s like sayng if you give a bug or worm enough time it will create a car or a refrigerator or a city.
In the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.
For me that simple sentence sums it up.
Another “God of the gaps” book. The infinite universes theory pops the endless coincidences argument. More death and suffering has been wrought in the name of religion than pretty much any other ideology; not a great prospectus.
I somehow doubt that religions caused more suffering and deaths then communism.
Socialism (broader than just communism) ~ 148m deaths 1900-1987. Religion ~ 210m deaths 0AD to 2008
This is one of those reviews that tell you more about the reviewer than the reviewed. Humans are born with two eyes – one of which surveys the world about us, the immanent, the material, the natural. But we all also see with another eye – which gives depth to that view, showing the transcendent, the immaterial, the supernatural. And yet, we have a single terminology that fluidly moves between both perspectives, creating a sort of ambiguity that many find welcome and others find terribly upsetting. Most of the apparent confusions and incoherences in this review (and perhaps in the underlying book, I don’t know) are the result of misunderstanding this.
I wonder about the big bang…just because we have a beginning and end why should the universe? Perhaps it has been there for eternity…all of the above and the comments below feel like an intrepid explorer with a small candle that keeps blowing out exploring some vast structure with thousands of doors, windows and stairs…
Try this. Plus one, minus 1 equals nothing. A particle and an anti-particle ‘annihilate’ to nothing. Anything and its ‘anti-thing’ total nothing. Turn that around, and ‘nothing’ has the potential to be anything and its anti-thing: infinite potential. A universe and its anti-verse. An infinity of universes and their ‘antis’. Our universe may be just one ‘realisation’ of potential. And our ‘anti verse’? Perhaps we glimpse it when we observe quantum effects. ( No half-rrrsd theory is complete without ‘quantum’ something). So ‘nothing’ is the potential to be everything and everywhere for ever (though in this context these terms are completely meaningless), and our universe just a small facet of it.
Actually, no. The particles and antiparticles annihilate each other, and the product is energy. A LOT of energy. About 1,000 times as much energy as you can get from nuclear fission.
In some reactions, matter-antimatter pairs are also produced. These can of course also annihilate to release energy.
Matter (and anti-matter) are in principle simply condensed energy. You can’t destroy energy, only change its form.
Children ask the best questions. Tell them God created the universe and they will say “ where did god come from?”. And round and round we go.
If God’s existence could be proven, what would be the merit of faith? Also, unlike another commenter here, I do not think you can “choose” to believe, no more that you can “choose” to fall in love. It happens, or it doesn’t. I’m atheist because that’s the way my parents brought me up and that no event made me have faith in a supernatural being or power.
I’m an atheist despite the way I was brought up, and only really became one at university.
I think you can choose to belive or not, although the choice may be heavily affected by your external circumstances.
I grant you that choosing to fall in love is less likely, although I think you can choose to try to fall OUT of love if you really want to.
‘Eternal truths’? Really? They are no more ‘eternal’ than Tengriism or Orphism, and contain no more ‘truth’.
The religious point of view appears to be “life exists, therefore the universe must have been designed to support life because if any fundamental constant were even in the slightest different life could not exist”.
The non-religious, and more accurate, view is “the universe is constructed in a certain way, likely through nothing more than chance, and as it happens that permits complex chemistry which is the source of life, and we know this because we are here to observe it”.
Either view engenders a sort of wonder. The universe is so far as we know around fourteen thousand million light years across and, again so far as we know, this is the only planet which harbours life. Assuming there is no life elsewhere*, this engenders further wonder at the rarity of our circumstances (in the scientific view) or the extravagant wastefulness of the creator (in the religious view).
To my mind, the key objection to the divine creator idea is why did he/she/it/they make the place so vast? In our small galaxy alone there are around a hundred billion stars, and there are estimated to be some hundred billion galaxies. All that for one little planet of squabbling apes? I don’t think so.
The universe may expand indefinitely and suffer heat death, where there is no energy differential between any two points. Or it may collapse on itself and go through another Big Bang to create a quite different universe, possibly one in which life is impossible. Academic for humanity, though, since Earth will cease to exist in aronud five billion years when the sun becomes a red giant. Life on Earth will be impossible long before that, since the oceans will have long since evaporated, the atmosphere blown into space, and the rocks melted.
As for time, it is a consequence of space and matter. There is no meaningful “before” the Big Bang / Creation since time did not then exist because space did not exist. Equally, there is no meaningful “after” either heat death or “Big Crunch”.
We are here. We will not be here for ever. Enjoy it while it lasts, howsoever it came to be. If you take a religious view of it, up to you. If not, ditto. No-one can say you’re right or wrong either way.
*There almost certainly is much more life elsewhere, and very probably even within our solar system. Life is only chemistry, made up of compounds known to be available in vast abundance throughout the universe and it needs only a certain amount of energy input and a few millions years of stability to arise. If there is no other inhabited planet anywhere amongst the millions of billions that undoubtedly exist then that would be incomparably more astonishing than finding alien life.
Thanks for the recommendation. Just purchased and can’t wait to read it. If your disappointment was a subtle nod to these the book, it worked.
An interesting book review, but the headline is quite misleading.
Never forget that you are an animal, one that evolved a mind that feels a god is real for – wait for it – evolutionary reasons; we evolved the capacity for thoughts that help us survive and prosper enough to see our genes on their mindless way into the future. The Universe just is; it doesn’t need to be explained by humans, try to keep in mind that there are billions of galaxies, every last one so big that you literally can’t use your ‘mind’s eye’ to conceive of their actual size and age. Now try to put the sky god of these animals at the centre of your creation story. Religious talk is human solipsism run wild.
Immanence, transcendence-two sides of the same coin. If the existence of God could be proved He would not be God. What is evident is that human societies are not sustainable on a purely material basis. European society post “enlightenment”, scientist, Marxism, individualism and capitalism has tried this out and it is falling apart. There needs to be an appeal to the transcendent. How the transcendent is visualised and explained is a second order issue. But New Testament Christianity, properly practised, to my mind provides the best basis on which society can function, which of course is not to say it is anywhere near perfect. That’s because nature is red in tooth and claw and people are animals of the natural world.
Like J. Bryant 15 hours ago, I welcome Kathleen’s suggestion to become alert to immanence. I sense something acting through our lives worthy to respect even though, I do not need an explanation for it. I do hope writers and scientists will use again religious or mystical terms in their work. Immanence is a good one. Though I won’t read – God, the Science, the Evidence- I enjoyed very much Kathleen’s review and analysis.
Judging by this ham-fisted piece from Stock (as well as many of the comments BTL), I’m inclined to stick with the old hypothesis that God is too impenetrable of a concept for mankind.
It does sound like bad apologetics from this article’s description.
Personally, I think the best apologetic for theism was not written as such, and may even have been written by an atheist: Eugene Wigner’s essay “The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences.” (I have no idea of Wigner’s views on theology.) The strange fact that the creations of the purest, most abstract form of human thought, mathematics, done without regard of any application to anything, simply chasing beautiful ideas, repeatedly supply the natural sciences with off-the-shelf tools that very precisely describe the real world is very hard to account for if our reasoning ability is a computational system developed to optimally solve survival problem in the African veldt, but fairly easy to account for if there is some likeness between our minds and the ground-of-being, the sort of thing that might be described to the ancient Hebrews poetically in “come let Us make Man in Our image and likeness.”
Mathematics is the language of God.
It is certainly the language of science. The most complex of scientific theories (Einstein, Feynman) can be proved by mathematics.
The entire universe is mathematics in action.
Science is a mere tiny subset based on our meagre understanding.
The multiverse is theorised to contain 10^10^10^7 universes. A part of one of those universes – the Observable Universe – is estimated to consist of more than 100 billion galaxies. One of those is the Milky Way Galaxy, which is thought to be composed of somewhere between 200 billion and 400 billion stars.
One of those stars – the Sun – anchors a Solar System consisting of five (as of now) known dwarf planets, four outer planets, and four inner planets. Of those four inner planets, one – the Earth – is home to 8 billion (and counting) human beings.
And we have the arrogance to think we have a clue?
As regards your last sentence, I would push back and answer that, on the scientific side of this debate, yes.
Don’t be put off by the size of things. We know a lot about Human Beings, the Earth, the Planets, the Sun, and much about the Milky Way. It is reasonable to assume that all the other Galaxies are governed by the same physical rules as ours, so we might argue we know something of them. We have telescopes that can see and photograph back to the beginning of space/time (in our Universe, anyway)! That’s not a bad start from a base of virtually zero five thousand years ago.
I don’t see any such progress on the God side. The opposite in fact.
It depends on what is meant by the “God side”.
If it’s the bearded guy up in the clouds that follows our every move and decides whether we get cancer or not, I’m with you.
If it’s the energy force (for lack of a better term) that infuses everything in all of those universes and galaxies, that’s a different story.
I’d like to think that the more we understand about science, the closer we’ll get to having some sort of a clue about God.
But maybe I’m just deluded?
In John Updike’s novel Roger’s Version, published in the late 80s, a Christian mathematician very loudly proclaims the ‘fine tuning’ argument, delightedly pointing out how much the scientific community would love to deny it but can’t. A theologian who works at the same university is offended that Faith should be reduced to the level of mere fact and sets about destroying the mathematician’s trust, as opposed to faith, in the reality of God.
God the Creator is unfathomable, simple as that. We’re allowed free will to work our way into His good graces if we are of a mind. Many are not, as history shows so powerfully. On another subject, everybody knows alien beings are in all those UFOs so many people have seen zipping around or hovering. My wife and I and hundreds of others on the freeway near SFO one afternoon saw two of them dawdling overhead on their way west to the Pacific Ocean. It was clear they meant to be seen. A small item appeared in the newspaper the next day. Congress has spent a fortune studying the subject since the 1950s but won’t say what was found in the heavily redacted reports that appear from time to time. Airplane pilots galore and naval officers at sea have made many reports of flying objects which do not obey the laws of physics we espouse. One object described as big as a football field was observed traveling underwater at a speed estimated at 200 knots. They appear to be partial to the ocean deeps — miles deep — on their time off or maybe that’s where their bases are if they even need them. Probably not, they’re aliens. And also part of God’s plan, but I hope it’s not what is forecast in Revelation.
The Deists were, and are, right. It is reasonable to posit a Supreme Being, while also admitting that “revealed” religion is an incoherent load of nonsense. That works for me anyway.
Are you saying it is not possible to know God or anything about God?
The question is where does our yearning for eternal life, immortality, come from?
Why do we even have that want?
Why are we even thinking about the existence of God?
Where did that come from?
That books sounds idiotic. No wonder it is so popular
I think the fine-tuning argument is ironclad. Physicists from Hoyle to Hawking recognise(d) it, and from what I understand there are only two possible explanations. 1) The universe is intelligently designed by [some intelligent entity], or 2) there is a multiverse and we happen to be in that one-in-a-quadrillion universe where everything is just right. The trouble with the latter is it is such an unfalsifiable, zero-evidenced, inflationary notion that defies common sense and parsimony that it is difficult for me to take seriously. Thus I find myself irresistibly drawn to a logical acceptance of ID in a kind of Holmesian way.
These people are always putting the cart before the horse. Why does it not occur to them that existence evolved from the pre-existing conditions. Had those conditions been different, existence would have evolved differently.
A very Christian project then.
One question that could be posed is: Does nothing exist, did it exist, and can it exist again?
Perhaps nothing is not necessarily contingent on the presupposition of something. But it does imply that something always was.
Wow! What response to an article. In my short time as a member of UnHerd I have not seen such a reaction (noting that I don’t read every piece). In number and prolixity this is the most vigorous comments section.
The most surprising thing is that the article is about religion; not about politics, race, political correctness, war or other deep concerns of the chaterati.
There must be a void in most peoples lives.
For my own part I don’t believe that the existance of God can be inferred by either observation (Science) or by thought (Theology). Further comment is unnecessary; make your own minds up in the dark of the night when facing mortality.
Professor Stock is a very, very good commentator.
Science v Religion. The ultimate debate.
This author excels in triggering us lesser mortals.
No, it’s not. Science and Religion are two separate things that can coexist and do not need to be pitted against each other.
. . or think about Pascal’s wager!
I’m a believing Christian. I do believe in a creator God, and I think it’s the best explanation for the Universe. Aquinas (Five Proofs) is quite persuasive, and I’m currently re-reading Ward on Why there Almost Certainly is a God. Multiverse is just turtles in my view. They’re still contingent, and imagining an infinity of multiverses to explain why some at least have intelligent life will require at least one with a creator God. And if there is a God in one, He is actual, timeless and necessarily exists in all universes. You can’t run away or avoid the fact that the Universe is actually not eternal, which makes it contingent. Where did it come from? But if you didn’t have an experience I’m not sure that an intellectual proof is sufficient to make you a believer.
I’m not convinced about the surety of the steps from there is an unchanging timeless creator God to that makes the creation story in the Bible literally true.
Such a clear response!
Why is one flower blue, but not all of them, it must have been designed that way, there must have been a being who decided, “now is the time to create a universe.”
But how big, and who should inhabit just a tiny planet within it, and what should the timescale be, should I just allow the inhabitants to develop from a basic life form, and separate the species on it, making one the servant of the other, and its food source,
Believing in a God,
As Oscar Wilde,said, Is like a blind man in a black room looking for a black cat, that isn’t there, and finding it,
This might be a rare case where Upton Sinclair’s adage: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” applies to the Pope.
The puddle just cannot understand how its size and shape are exactly right to contain it.
In our short and tiny lives we fail to understand the amount of time and the enormity of the universe.
The origin of the universe is answered to my satisfaction by nuclear physics. The question of “why” and “how” are said unanswerable theological questions that I feel no need to ask. I’m a mammal programmed to survive guided by a behavioural code.
Kathleen’s excellent article made me laugh out loud. But it was also thoughtful enough to set me going back over internal conversations long ago written off up as impenetrable. Mankind has reached out for simplistic, comic book explanations for our Universe and the existence of life ever since he gained consciousnesses, and in due course some individuals realised the power to be gained in pretending to be one of a chosen few who knew the answers. Shamans, priests, mystics, etc can’t produce empirical evidence for the existence of matter and Man (not least because there isn’t any as yet) so they rely on the contrivance of a higher power, for whom they alone are conduits. Where the holes in the logic are so gaping as to be unbridgeable, Faith fills in – don’t ask that because it’s a deep “Mystery” – just believe.
Freed from (often lethal) religious cancelling over the last few centuries, secularists say there is an answer to such questions out there, but either science hasn’t discovered it yet, or intellectually we aren’t yet capable of seeing it even if it’s right in front of us. However, my interest has recently been peaked by the “virtual reality” notion – that we live as a temporarily individual, conscious entity within a simulation that for example makes objects (like tables) feel solid even though they consist almost entirely of energy, not matter. Afterwards perhaps we lose individual identity and rejoin a pool of cosmic consciousness. It’s an interesting hypothesis – no more than that though, and a little too spooky for me.
When it comes to the important question about why the Universe’s four elemental forces – gravity, electromagnetism, and the weak and strong nuclear, are so finely balanced, some people immediately attribute it to a hidden hand – it must be God QED. But most of these don’t take time to consider that there could be a fifth organizing force involved that isn’t God. If gravity is needed to keep apples from drifting out to space, another force is needed to balance and bind the elemental forces in such a way that they function as they do, and allow the apple to exist at all. No point in gravity, in other words, unless other forces combine to give it meaning.
Of course, if it’s all a simulation then these forces and their inter-relationship is merely a matter of programming, and there need be no explanation other than that.
Yeah, but you still need to answer the question…. Who is the programmer?
“Infinite and finite, complex and simple, He is nature above nature, being above being. Maker of all, he is made in all, Unmoving, he enters the world, Timeless in time, unlimited in limited space, And he who is no thing becomes all things.” Eriugena, medieval theologian.
“Freedom and God are objects of faith, not of knowledge; in other words, freedom and God are infinite abysses whose bottoms cannot be sounded by knowledge.” Simone Weil. French Christian mystic. 1909-1943
In terms of a creator of material existence then infinity is present whether in terms of the infinite regression of what created the creator or the infinite existence of a creator with no cause proceeding it.
A cosmic isolated system can explain infinite regression in terms of a system that is intelligently designed to recycle energy and matter but obviously falls into the same problem of what created the cosmic isolated system in the first place. This creator god is transcendant with nothing in the known cosmos being able to replicate a self perpetuating isolated system. However the infinite regression of a creator god or the infinite existence of god question is still left unresolved.
A cosmic closed system implies interdependence with another energy system in the same way Earth is reliant on the Sun to maintain life. The creator god in this instance has energetic immanence which can be described as the Holy Spirit but has no matter immanence so rejects the idea of a Son of God in the form of Jesus. This closed system allows Holy Spirit to tweak the system and so allows a certain amount of godly intervention. This is the Islamic position on the Abrahamic monotheistic god. A cosmic closed system still cannot resolve the infinite regression of a creator god or the infinite existence of god question.
A cosmic open system implies both energetic and matter immanence and is more aligned to the Christian faith with the creator god being able to make energetic and matter interventions whilst existing within our Earthly midst. This raises the problem of why there is so much evil in the world with the retort being the basis of free will. Of course the infinite regression of a creator god or the infinite existence of god question is still left unresolved.
So whilst we can deduce that different thermodynamic systems forms the basis of different religious beliefs with each type of system inferring determinism (isolated), compatibilism (closed) and free will (open). However the mystery of the infinite regression of a creator god or the infinite existence of god question is still left unresolved since it is clearly impossible that our energetic and matter existence came from absolutely nothing unless energy and matter infinitely exists.
So ultimately we are left with a creator god with its own existence a mystery in terms of whether it is an infinite isolated system, an infinite closed system or an infinite open system with each system determining whether the system is governed by determinism, compatibilism or free will.
Since humans and arguably the cosmos is inherently competitive, then that points towards determinism or compatibilism. That is an isolated system or a closed system. So either the creator god is transcendent or energetically immanent but not immanent in terms of both energy and matter.
Since we can, to some extent determine how we express inherent competition, this points towards compatibilism and energetic immanence and therefore a closed system which means the infinite regression of a creator god or the infinite existence of god question is largely an energetic question which the quantum realm might provide answers to.
Compatibilism, energetic immanence and a closed system also suggests that a kind of immanent psychic field permeates the cosmos which of course is the basis of mysticism and universal consciousness with psychic communication an energetic reality whether between the creator god and biotic creation or within biotic creation itself in the form of thought communication between different biotic lifeforms. If universal consciousness is not a quantum reality, then it is back to an isolated system and hard determinism with inherent competition a fundamental natural law with choice an after the fact reflexive illusion. This would make the creator god only transcendent.
So the transcendent/immanent question rests on whether we are governed by determinism or compatibilism with the question probably being resolved mathematically within the quantum realm.
Pascal’s Wager is still the best odds out there—
Trade a mostly moral life (weekends optional) for eternity? Where do I sign?
The idea that the universe and our earth, human life, were all created by chance, by luck – That’s like sayng if you give an insect or worm enough time it will create a car or a refrigerator or a city.
Well yes, that is exactly what happened. The “enough time” bit though was 4.5Billion years or so, i.e. the insect or worm had to develop larger brains and bodies capable of building such thing. They did.
Cf. Kant, Immanuel, The Critique of Pure Reason. “I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.” The greatest epistemologist in the history of mankind, after almost 1,000 pages of detailed analytical probing trying to find a scientific basis for the existence of God, concluded that mere science could not prove the existence of God. Science that is based on observation and metaphysics are completely separate realms of knowledge, and nothing in the intervening two hundred years has changed that.
To make that statement with any authority you should have completed a profound and extensive study of what has happened in science and metaphysics since Kant. It is clear to me that you have not.
The more I alert myself to immanence, the more it seems to shine with an inscrutable transcendence.
Science makes observations & deductions from the observable universe so it can say nothing about the transcendent. But reasoned arguments to prove God’s existence don’t work either, they rarely persuade the sceptical. But the existence of God cannot be disproved either. What’s left? Faith and good will, an open heart to mystery.
Kathleen, thank you for this wonderful piece, both alerting me to an interesting book as well as sharing your own two cents. I am a Christian, and I find your wrestling with the merits of our rationality both strong and humble. I think your musings here are model, given both our infinitesimal size in the universe and our beautiful uniqueness. I think arguments for God are good in just the way you describe: to point at vaguely the transcendent but admit our profound inability to pin it down. So my two cents here is just this: what if this transcendent has spoken to us personally, to reveal his absolute personality in terms that are explicate to us yet necessarily reductive? Where some suggest God cannot be known, I think it reasonable to see the immensity of the heavens declaring the glory of their Creator. If he wanted to reveal himself to something Other than himself, why shouldn’t he and what if he did? That to me clears the way for the possibility of noticing his revelation, but it also lays the foundation for our scientific endeavors to understand the finite things that are made.
“What are the chances of that?”… Is often a way of mixing up cause and effect. Isn’t funny how our legs are just long enough to reach the ground!
The Big Bang overthrew the Steady State theory and now the Big Bang may be replaced by something of a pre-Big Bang theory. It’s not exactly settled science, because that is stuck two-billionths of a second from the Bang.
It’s also worth pointing out that the book is not arguing for Christianity, or any other religious doctrine. It’s suggesting that there is an x in the equation for universe creation and calling it God is as handy a label as any.
Astonishingly I think Ms Stock has missed the point of the argument. We are at a point where those of us who have spent decades having atheists argue their point from a purely materialist basis are now in a position to cite the inarguable parameters of the fine-tuned universe and point out that their beloved materialism now requires them to believe in a host of insanely unlikely chances to hold their ground. Now those who would have it that the universe and life evolved out of random chance, no creator required, find themselves clinging to propositions so wildly unlikely as to be laughable.
Not that I expect any change among my atheist friends. When I have tried to outline the case for an engineered universe they have virtually all stuck their fingers in their ears and shouted ‘Not listening!!’ I am one of very few people I know capable of changing their mind about anything in their seventh or eighth decade of life. It’s dreary being this old, remembering my coevals as bright young souls eagerly embracing new ideas, now seeing them fully fossilised.
What are the odds of a god creator being real? Vanishingly small in a Universe well understood to be so vast and so ancient. But let’s concede that. What are the odds of such a Creator needing a pre-enlightenment Jewish tribal elder to tell us all about it? Let’s not be silly.
Jesus role was not to tell the world about god as creator. He was the saviour/redeemer promised to Abraham.
I heaven is perfect, I’d spoil it if I went as I am! I need someone to exchange perfection for my nature!
Our existence is not preposterous or wildly unlikely. In the infinite arena, we are inevitable. Nothing and everything are equally possible. If God engineered us, he may have started equally with nothing or everything and what brought God into existence?
I’ve always believed our consciousness explains God. The material world may be able to be all explained with science and probability, but how do you explain our awareness of it? We’re not mindless machines or inanimate objects. We are conscious and have a need for purpose. We have a sense of right and wrong. We ask God for help in crisis, almost naturally. I don’t think we have teach to anyone about God… all cultures throughout time have had the recognition of ‘something’ greater than themselves. It’s part of the human condition. Our minds are seeded to know God, he put that in us. It’s inherit to who we are. It’s not a function of evolution or of material objects, it has to be divine.
“A portion of space pulsating with energy is still something; a quantum field is still something. …but what caused the existence of it? “
My hunch is that asking this sort of question is the equivalent of a Zen monk asking “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” ‘Nothing’ is not graspable for a mind like ours. As is infinity; as hard to grasp as its logical opposite. Quantum Theory famously insists on stuff we can’t begin to digest – things being in different ‘spaces’ simultaneously, for example – but can experimentally ‘detect’. Speaking as a disgracefully badly educated half-wit I would suggest that the place to discuss such notions is in the pub with a skinful of Guinness.
Test
In the infinity of possibilities, our universe and existence is more probable that not.
In the infinity of possibilities, our universe and existence is more probable that not.
We view our universe from a point in one of the infinite universes where all the improbabilities aligned. There are an infinite number of universes where we don’t exist and infinite universes to whom our existence is but for a fleeting moment and yet infinite more who existed in our fleeting second.
Hmmm, time for Kathleen to read some gnostic material