½Sane ®

Here's a little something I copied years ago from a discussion. It's a long read but seems fitting.

Religion+Science

Ok first things first. The entire study of science is based on the idea of 'probability'. You can’t prove to me that if you drop a pencil now it will fall to the floor. How do you know that there won’t be an exception to the Law of Gravity? However, you can just use inductive logic to postulate that it probably will. Fancis Bacon, the father of modern science, stated "true knowledge is knowledge by causes", this is precisely what inductive logic is, knowledge by causes. We knew that pencils (or rather, quills) fell to the ground before we knew that gravity was the reason why. My point in this first section is that definite proof is a rare commodity in any area, one must use reason to bridge the gap and make a connection between probability and definitive fact. When one searches for evidence one should always search for evidence that can absolve all reasonable doubt - we have to look for something that is true beyond reasonable doubt.

Ok, so where is the evidence that can take us beyond reasonable doubt? Theologians and philosophers have placed the evidence in two main categories and a couple of sub-categories. I will cover a few of these.

1) Philosophical evidence

a. Moral

b. Ontological

2) Scientific

a) Cosmological

b) Teleological

I know you might say that this post was specifically about ‘scientific evidence’ for God. However, I believe that separating philosophy from science destroys its’ basis. Furthermore, many of the most easily grasped and comprehensive evidences for God are philosophical.

It is commonsense that science is not the only means by which we can discover truth. What evidence do I have to back up this statement? It’s simple; the idea that science is the only source of truth is an unscientific truth claim itself. No scientific method tested this assumption and therefore it must be false - according to itself! My point here is this, truth can be arrived at via philosophy (an example is the use of logic) as well as science (which itself requires philosophical assumptions in order to discover truth). Science can only discover truth if:
1. We assume that truth is knowable (incidentally, assuming the opposite is self-contradictory).
2. We assume various philosophical precepts such as (the Law of Causality, Logic etc)
Philosophical Evidence for God

Moral

Every single human society has operated on the notions of good and bad, right and wrong. While these various societies have not always believed exactly the same thing, what is important is that each did believe in some idea of moral duty. Where is the natural, atheistic explanation for this? Why ought I to behave in one way as opposed to another? Why is a beneficial thing preferable to a detrimental one? Why should I do the right thing and not the wrong thing? Why is there any distinction drawn between good and bad things? Where does the concept of value or worth come from if there isn’t really any objective meaning for anything?

I have read a number of books detailing the copy book atheistic answer to these questions so I am fully aware of the common response to my questions. What do you think are the reasons for, and perimeters constructing, the ideas of good and bad? Allow me to hazard a couple of guesses at what may be ticking through your head right now (if I am wrong correct me).
1. Good is that which advances natural selection and evolutionary process.
2. Good is that which our instinct tells us to do.
3. Good is what I want it to be.
Does this work though? I’ll go through each point individually.
1. If ‘good is that which advances natural selection and evolutionary process’ why is that? Why ought I to submit to the evolutionary process? The word ‘ought’ implies some moral imperative so what makes evolution good? Why is it better that creatures evolve than that they don’t? Darwinism declares that life is a cosmic accident, that it is meaningless and unintended. How then can evolution be anything other than a plain and simple mechanism, neither good nor bad?
2. If ‘Good is that which our instinct tells us to do’ how does our instinct know what is good? Why ought I to follow my instinct? What makes the demands of my instinct superior to the opposites of its claims?
3. If ‘Good is what I want it to be’ then why is the Holocaust an evil (or a good, if you think that way)? Hitler wanted the Jews to die why was this bad (or good)? There is no objective value to the existence of humanity so what does it matter if 6 million Jews die? Why ought I to do anything I don’t want to do? And finally, why ought I to do what I want?
There is no rational basis for morality in atheism. If we weren't the product of a personal, moral God why would we have any concept of good or bad. The logical end of atheism is Nihilism – a belief in the total absence of meaning, value, and worth in everything. However, I wonder if you have ever tried to think nihilistically? It doesn’t work. To ‘convert’ to nihilism one must have decided that nihilism is correct and therefore ‘better’ or ‘preferential’ to non-nihilism. That itself is a value based judgement. Furthermore, the only place to go from nihilism is insanity.
Ontological

This ontological argument for the existence of God goes like this.
1. Various things exist independently or in spite of what we see in the universe.
2. Therefore there must be another place where they are fulfilled and/or exist.
An example of this would be the concept of justice. I’m sure you would agree that the world has a lot of injustice, right? The problem for the atheist arises when one considers that there is no natural explanation for the human idea of (and obsession with) justice. If we have never seen true justice how do we know what it is? How do we know that the universe is unjust if we have no example of justice to judge it by? There must be some source for our objective standard of justice. The theist will say that God, who himself is eternally just, puts this conception into people – it is therefore a priori. Atheists have a very hard time counteracting this argument. Another form of the argument is called the Argument from Perfection. This argument states that in order for us to call things imperfect (a common example would be the universe – wasn’t that the main thrust of your ‘Trinity of Religious Contradiction’ thread?) we must have an idea of what perfect is. How can we call something less than perfect if we don’t know what perfect is? And if we do know what perfection is how exactly did we find out about it? We have never seen it but we daily make judgments that necessitate an understanding of it.

As C. S. Lewis stated, "Just how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust… Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too – for the argument depended on saying that the world really was unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my private fancies. Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist – in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless – I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality – namely my idea of justice – was full of sense. (Mere Christianity, 45,46).

What do you think the reason is for your conception of such abstract concepts as justice, perfection, beauty, infinity and eternity (more on this below)?


Scientific Evidence for God

Cosmological

The Cosmological argument argues that the universe must be the creation of a supernatural creator. I will briefly introduce a few laws and concepts that require the beginning of the universe before I venture into the science.
1. The Principle of Causality. The POC states that every effect must have a cause.
2. The Second Law of Thermodynamics. The SLT states that ‘In a closed, isolated system, the amount of useable energy is decreasing’.
3. The impossibility of an infinite series of events.
If nothing created the universe then the universe must have always existed (in one form or another anyway). If the universe is not the effect of something then it will have no cause, right? If the universe has no cause then it must be eternal, right? But, if the universe started at some point something must have started it, right? As they say, ‘out of nothing, nothing comes’. So, effectively, to disbelieve in God one must believe that there is a natural explanation for nature. One must believe that - at least in some form or another - the universe is eternal.

So, through the POC we know that all effects have a cause. And so, if the universe is eternal it must be causeless. The question is, is the universe causeless? In other words, is the universe eternal? This is where points B and C from above come into play. Points B and C prove that the idea of an eternal universe is rampant with flaws.

The SLT is also known as the Law of entropy. Entropy is the measure of disorder or unusable energy in a closed system. An example of entropy would be found in the burning of a log. Before the log is burnt it is a highly ordered collection of atoms (mostly carbon) which contain a measurable amount of energy (calculable through the famous E=mc2 equation). When the log is burnt it is transformed into heat, light, ash and smoke. The heat and light will dissipate never to be used again while the ashes and smoke will be in a disordered state that makes it hard for reuse (try burning ashes!). Likewise the universe, like a dying flashlight, is running out of useable energy. Therefore the universe must have started with a finite quantity of useable energy just as a flashlight’s batteries start of fully charged but not infinitely charged.

British Cosmologist Sir Arthur Eddington said of the SLT, "The Law that entropy increases – the Second Law of Thermodynamics – holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations – then so much for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation – well, these experiments do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the Second Law of Thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation. (Quoted in Paul Davies The Cosmic Blueprint).

The last point from above is point C – the impossibility of an infinite series. This point shows that the idea that this universe is infinite and eternal is fundamentally flawed. Why? Because it appears to be impossible to have anything eternal exist within a temporal dimension. In other words, the existence of time makes any notion of eternity within the bounds of this universe null and void. You might ask how I have arrived at this conclusion. Again, it’s simple; if the universe had existed for an infinite period of time then we would never have reached the present. This is a conclusion demonstrated by the following logical syllogism.
1. An infinite number of days will have no end.
2. However, today is the end of history (history being a collection of all days).
3. Therefore, there were not an infinite number of days before today (ie. time had a beginning).
So, what we know about the universe through the three points made above is this:
1. Anything that is not eternal must have a cause.
2. The universe is running out of useable energy (meaning it had a finite quantity in the past).
3. It is a fallacy to suppose that the universe could have existed forever due to the absurdity of an infinite series of events.
The universe cannot be eternal and must therefore have had a beginning and a cause.
Has science shown this to be true? Yes it has. The Big Bang is now the dominant cosmological theory about the origin of the universe. Many people know of the Big Bang but few know about it. What exactly is the Big Bang? The Physicists Victor Strenger summed it up adequately by say that the Big Bang is where "the universe exploded out of nothingness". In the Big Bang space, time and matter found its beginning. Before the Big Bang there wasn’t even an empty space for things to be in, there was truly nothing (Aristotles would say that before the Big Bang all there existed was what rocks dream about - nothing) . If you don’t believe me check it out. The Big Bang is now a well-established scientific fact. What is also a well-attested fact is the impossibility of any type of cyclic universe model. The idea of a Big Bang/Big Crunch is rampant with flaws (see Alan Gluth’s 1983 Nature article "The Impossibility of a bouncing universe"). In recent years the entire idea of a contracting-then-expanding universe has become even less feasible given the discovery of the Energy Density Effect. It appears that the universe has had one shot at vitality before it dies a heat death (a heat death is the state of something with very high entropy). What is the chance that the universe exploded out of ‘nothingness’ through a natural process? I can tell you it is very slim. As everything natural found its beginning in the Big Bang how can there be anything other than a supernatural explanation for the Big Bang? Perhaps you think that this is a big conclusion to jump to? Perhaps you cannot see the reason for a supernatural explanation?

Robert Jastrow, Astronomer and former head of the NASA Goddard Space Flight institute, said "Astronomers have now painted themselves into a corner because they have proven, by their own methods, that the world began abruptly in an act of creation to which you can trace the seeds of every star, every planet, every living thing in this cosmos and on earth. And they have found that all this happened as a product of forces they cannot hope to discover….. That there are what I or anyone would call supernatural forces at work is now, I think, a scientifically proven fact."

Eddington stated, "The beginning seems to present in superable difficulties unless we agree to look on it as frankly supernatural."


Teleological

All right, so an objective analysis of the facts indicates that the universe is not eternal and is caused by something supernatural. What is this supernatural thing though? What or who started the universe? Was it some supernatural law, some principle, something or someone? This is a major question. A rational person understands that there is no use claiming that a God exists because the universe was started by something supernatural. That type of belief requires further evidence before it becomes valid. This evidence can come from the teleological argument.

The Teleological argument is the argument from a design to a designer. It seeks to show that some things are too complicated to be produced by chance and as such must be the intended products of a creator.

The logic of the teleological argument runs like this:
1. Every Design has a designer.
2. The universe has a highly complicated design.
3. Therefore, the universe had a designer.
It makes sense to start at the beginning so let’s start with an overview of what scientists call the Anthropic Principle.

The Anthropic Principle is what scientists have named the apparent trend in nature to support the onset of life. It has recently been discovered that there are over 120 ‘constants’ that each contributes to the existence of human beings. Each constant is highly specific as well as highly unlikely. What does this mean? It means that while every combination of numbers is equally as unlikely, all the constants display numbers and ratios that are all highly specified to support life. If just one constant had not supported life none would have arisen.

As Stephen Hawking said "The laws of science, as we know them at present, contain many fundamental numbers, like the size of the electric charge of the electron and the ratio of the masses of the proton and electron…. The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been finely adjusted to make possible the development of life."

Below are ten out of over 120 such anthropic constants. There are no natural laws that require the universe to be this way; the atheist will have to believe that it is a freak accident. The chances involved for just one of these constants to occur is astronomical. Take, for example, the smoothness of the universe. If the universe were more smooth then stars and galaxies (and subsequently life) would not have formed, if less smooth then only super massive black holes would have formed (no life there either). Roger Penrose, the famous mathematician who developed the Singularity Theorem with Stephen Hawking, calculated the chances of the smoothness of the universe being that needed to sustain life as 1 in 10 to the 123rd power. Just to give you a little insight into this number; it is a bigger number than the number of particles in the universe!

1. The gravitational coupling constant. If slightly unbalanced, each star formed would be at least 1.4 times the size of the Sun. Such large stars are required to form heavier elements such as iron and beryllium (used in solar system formation) but, a large star burns too quickly and unevenly to sustain life. A star the size of our own is needed to make those conditions right.If the force were just a little weaker then stars would be too small and would never form the heavier elements essential for life and planetary systems.
2. If the strong nuclear force coupling constant that binds particles in the nucleus together were slightly weaker then more than one proton would not hold together in the nucleus and hydrogen would be the only element in the universe. If stronger then Hydrogen would be too rare in the universe and also a number of very heavy elements would not be present in large enough quantities to support life.
3. The weak nuclear force coupling constant and leptons. Leptons form the elementary particles like neutrinos, electrons and photons that have no place in strong nuclear reactions. A weak nuclear force interaction effect is beta decay radiation. ( neutron à proton + electron + neutrino)The amount of Helium produced in the first few minutes of the Big Bang is determined by the availability of Neutrons. If the weak nuclear force coupling constant were slightly larger then there would be fewer neutrons, as they would decay more rapidly. Without adequate amounts of helium none of the heavy elements necessary for life would form in the nuclear reactions of stars. If the force were smaller there would be so great an abundance of heavy elements that life would not form either.

Additionally, if the force were larger or smaller then neutrinos could not "blow" the heavy elements located at the core of a supernova out into the solar system. Once again, this would inhibit the development of life.
4. The electromagnetic coupling constant binds electrons to protons in atoms, if smaller electrons would not be held in orbit around the nuclei of atoms, if larger electrons could not be shared between other atoms. Either way, any type of molecule would be impossible. Try to imagine life without molecules.
5. The ratio between the masses of an electron and proton is 1:1836. If slightly different molecules, again, would not form.
6. If the expansion rate of the universe were slightly less by one part in a million million then the whole universe would have collapsed back onto itself just after the Big Bang. If larger by one part in a million stars would not have formed.
7. If the centrifugal force did not perfectly balance the force of gravity then solar systems and galaxies would not form.
8. If the resonance level of the Carbon 12 nucleus were slightly lower carbon would not form. Slightly higher level would instantly destroy it. Carbon, Oxygen, Nitrogen and the other heavy elements required for life need this.
9. If the entropy level of the universe were slightly larger or smaller then stars would not form.
10. The mass of the universe (mass + energy, since E = mc2) determines the nuclear burning after the big bang. If slightly more massive, too much deuterium (hydrogen atoms containing both a proton and a neutron in the nucleus) would form after the big bang. Deuterium is the catalyst for the ignition of stars. Extra deuterium would cause stars to burn too rapidly to sustain life on any planet. If the mass of the universe were slightly smaller, helium would not be generated at all during the aftermath of the big bang. Without helium, stars cannot produce the heavy elements necessary for life. Here is the reason for why the universe is as big as it is. If it were any smaller (or larger), no life would be possible.



Here are some quotes that many give you an understanding of the profundity of the scientific results achieved recently.

Sir Fred Hoyle, the British astrophysicist, was forced to concede that "A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this question almost beyond question."

Arno Penzias, co-discoverer of the microwave background radiation echo (MBRE) and 1978 Nobel prize recipient said, "The best data we have [concerning the Big Bang] are exactly what I would have predicted, had I nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms, the Bible as a whole."

When asked whether the evidence was indicative of a creator Robert Wilson, the other discoverer of the MBRE and co-winner of the 1978 Nobel prize, said, "Certainly there was something which set it [the universe] all off. If you are religious, I can’t think of a better theory of the origin of the universe to match with Genesis."

Stephen Hawking said, "Almost everyone now believes that the universe, and time itself, had a beginning at the Big Bang."

Robert Jastrow said, "For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries."

There are many more anthropic constants (just ask me if you want them). There is also the whole Intelligent Design argument about the origins of life. I’d be happy to elaborate on anything you think I have not covered adequately. It seems to me that atheism is quite unscientific.

Conclusion (For the time being anyway!)

Ok so,
1. The universe had a beginning caused by some supernatural thing.
2. This supernatural thing "fine tuned and adjusted" the universe to support life.
3. Human beings have a priori concepts and ideas that have no basis if there is no God (IE. morality and perfection).
This fits perfectly with Christianity. None of this fits with atheism. If we imagined that there was no need for a cause of the Big Bang then the chance that life would arise in the universe would be literally 1 in 10 ^100,000 at least. That is 10 followed by 100,000 zeros. How much chance are you going to give chance? I said at the beginning of this post that probability was the key to science. What is the probability that life arose by itself? Virtually none. What does the philosophical and scientific evidence point to? It points to a God who created the universe to hold human life. This human life was created with the potential to understand the universe and abstract ideas such as justice and perfection.