ARGUMENTS ABOUT RELIGION

Religion, science and philosophy

New Atheists

Agnostics Christian theists

Democritus

EpicurusLucretius

Plato, AristotleStoic, sceptic Philosophers

EgyptiansBabyloniansSumeriansPersiansJewsIndiansArabs…

Christianity

Connections

One Lineage

Aristotle

Aristobulus

Aquinas

Anscombe

Philosophy: logic, ethics, theory of knowledge, theory of reality

Science: biology, cosmology, physics

Changes

Question

Christianity (and other religions) have had to adapt to cope with new scientific understandings.

There are Christians (and people of other religious faiths) working in every scientific field.

What reasons can scientists have to reject religious belief?

Who is it?

Human life was miserable, eyes fixed on the ground, crushed by the weight of religion, whose head loomed hideously over mortals from the skies above.

The first person to raise mortal eyes against it, the first person to resist it was......

Stories of gods did not restrain him, nor thunderbolts nor the threatening growls of heaven. In fact they just stirred his keen mind to courage and roused his desire to shatter the narrow confines of the gateway to the natural world…

He passed far beyond the flaming walls of the world in mind and spirit and wandered across all immeasurable space, and he brings back the spoils of victory…

Now religion is trampled underfoot in its turn and his conquest raises us to the skies.

Epicurus

Another lineage

DemocritusEpicurusLucretiusAtoms,

evolutionChance,

infinity

Isaiah: mockery of the idols

Genesis 1: a universe created, not divine

God beyond physical reality, beyond human words or concepts

Plato andSceptical

Philosophy

What is it reasonable to believe?

What do we have good reason to believe and what do we need to believe in order to explain the world?

Don’t invent more entities for your explanations than you strictly need. (William of Ockham, 14th Century Franciscan friar)

Three classical ways of showing that it is reasonable to believe God exists

1. Everything has a cause, but unless there is a real infinity of things, there must be a first cause of everything which is itself uncaused.

2. God is a necessary being (the sort of being that cannot not exist), a necessary being (by definition) must exist, therefore God exists.

3. The universe looks designed. Whatever is designed has a designer, therefore the universe has a designer.

The flip side of explanations

They provide three classical reasons for supposing that it is not reasonable to believe that God exists.

All we have to do is come up with an alternative explanation.

E.g…..

Who caused the big bang?

Big bang life of the universe end of the universe

Arrow of Time

Spatial dimensions of the universe

But what if…

Time has two dimensions? Real time and imaginary time.

Then what looks like a beginning and an end in real time are just two points on the surface of a ‘timeless’ time-sphere

We don’t need a first cause. The universe itself is the uncaused causer.

William Paley – a thought experiment c 1800

Suppose I have never seen a watch before and find one.

I examine its mechanism, see how its parts fit together purposefully to make it work…

As with the watch

So with animals and their parts – when we see the intricacy, complexity and purposiveness of their structures, the only explanation that really explains this is that they have a designer.

Paley’s Universe

The animals had always existed in their kinds.

This is the biological universe of Aristotle, stable and unchanging.

The biological forms are passed on generation to generation by reproduction.

An Old Friend

H H

H C C OH

H H

An even older friend

H OH

HN C C

H O

Other stuff

An alternative explanation

Complex molecules formed by chance according to the laws of the universe.

Some complex molecules (replicators) had the capacity to cause other, similar molecules to form.

Such molecules were the ancestors of DNA

DNA Deoxyribonucleic Acid,

common to all organisms on this planet, has four bases that can be structured in indefinitely many ways to ‘communicate’ within body cells and ‘encode’ different characteristics in a living organism.

Dawkin’s ‘Blind Watchmaker’ argument

All complex characteristics in animals and plants that ‘serve a purpose’ emerged out of something simpler.

A random variation in DNA that produces a useful characteristic in an organism will be passed on more abundantly to the next generation.

The eye emerged in its different variations across species, because at one point in evolutionary history, a random variation in DNA gave an organism a light-sensitive patch and this light-sensitive patch helped it live longer and reproduce more. Further variations led to the emergence of different forms of eye in different animals.

But aren’t the chances of the eye forming incredibly

small – isn’t it hugely improbable?

Probabilities

No coding coding for light coding for coding for proto-eye eye

1/4 1/4

1/4

1/4

1/4

1/4

1/64

Different sorts of eye

Photosensitive patches

Completely different sort of eye

Evolutionary pathway that died out

Sonar sensitive patches

Improbable? Yes and no

The evolutionary pathway that leads to this eye is improbable. But there are lots more evolutionary pathways that lead to something like an eye.

In general: it is always improbable that a particular kind of animal should exist, but once you have replicating molecules, it will always be probable that some kind of animal should exist.

A story of life based on biochemistry

Complex carbon first replicating dna based self-conscious Art recorded historyMolecules on earth Molecules life forms life (???)

6 – 4 billion years ago 3.5 billion years ago

2 million – 200 000 years ago

5000 years70000Years

We can suppose that the probability of replicating molecules emerging on the surface of the earth is tiny, but in a vast universe with billions of earth-like planets the probability of it emerging somewhere is substantial

Human consciousness may seem special and different, but it is just another byproduct of evolution. It is the capacity to process useful information. This is no more magical than the information processing of our computers.

What is it reasonable to believe?

Good science says we should adopt the explanation which sufficiently explains the evidence in the simplest terms.

The explanations of biochemistry rely on the simple known laws of nature and nothing more and give a sufficient explanation of the evidence.

Explanations of life which invoke God introduce a more complex being to explain simpler ones.

Therefore we should reject arguments for the existence of God based on biology.

The origin of this world

For sure none of the fundamental objects (the atoms) arranged themselves of their own accord or wearied of what motions they should perform as if they had some wise plan. But because they are many, constantly changing, and driven by the collisions through the endless void from infinity, [because of this] they experience every possible movement and mode of connection and in the end arrive at the very arrangements in which our world order consists – which has been preserved now for many long years.

No plan – just chance

As soon this world-order was thrown into the right motions, it caused rivers to fill the eager sea with the generous waters of their stream, and made the earth, warmed by the fire of the sun, produce new offspring. It made the race of living creatures that the earth brought forth flourish, and made the fires of the turning heavens live.

Lucretius On the nature of things I 1021 - 1035

What is it reasonable to believe?

Good science says we should adopt the explanation which sufficiently explains the evidence in the simplest terms.

The explanations of biochemistry rely on the simple known laws of nature and nothing more and give a sufficient explanation of the evidence.

Explanations of life which invoke God introduce a more complex being to explain simpler ones.

Therefore we should reject arguments for the existence of God based on biology.

Questions 1

Dawkins has argued that a good scientist should not include God in the explanation of biological complexity and purposiveness. Biochemistry and evolutionary theory are sufficient.

Is this a proof that God does not exist?

Questions 2

Let us suppose there is a 10-9 (one in 1 billion) probability of life emerging on a planet like ours.

Let us now suppose that there are 1 billion earth-like planets in the universe.

Does this mean that life was bound to emerge in the universe?

Does this explain why or how life emerged? What was the statistical basis for our initial

estimate of probability? How useful are arguments from probability in

explaining the emergence of biological complexity?

Questions 3

Let us accept that it was always likely that life would emerge somewhere in our universe – obviously that is the only part of the universe we could know.

But there are many different ways that a universe could be structured, with many different laws of nature.

How do we explain that the one universe we know has just the laws and structures needed to permit the evolution of life-forms that can understand it?

Questions 4: Memes

Dawkins suggests that there are ‘ideas’ in our minds (memes) which take on a life of their own and replicate – like physical viruses or like computer viruses, even when they are harmful.

He suggests that belief in God is just such an idea.

If all our beliefs are self-replicating ‘memes’, what is the difference between believing in God and not believing in God?

If some of our beliefs are not memes, but are about truth and reality, how do we make sense of that with just a biochemical understanding of the human self?

The case for design in the world

Human consciousness/selfhood – Challenged by Dennett

Widespread religious belief - Challenged by Boyer

Religious experience - Challenged by Freud and others

Widespread common ethical codes – (evolutionary ethics)

Altruistic behaviour (from bees to human beings) (Dawkins)

The structures of the universe – the laws and constants. (Hawking)

The complexity and purposiveness of the biological realm. (Dawkins)