Evangelical responses

As some of you may know, I also make Youtube videos from time to time – more in quantity recently than lately. I have been in a conversation with a Youtube user called Evangelical1, to which I posted the following in video format:

Firstly, an attempt at giving a reason does not constitute a valid and rational argument in and of itself – just as attempts to climb mount Everest are not the same as actually reaching the pinnicle. Merely presenting the argument does not justify its contents. On this I am sure we can agree.

Religions by definition have their basis in faith, which is the acceptance of an idea to spite any supporting evidence or, in many cases, in complete contridiction to the available evidence. In many scenarios God is essentially an undefined entity, so to have any meaningful conversation we should initially define what is meant by the word “god”. I have no valid definition of the word – perhaps you can enlighten me here? This position is known as ignostic and is one to which I am warming.

In most cases “god” is simply a label given to those things we have no knowledge of. For example, many people truly believed Zeus literally threw lightning bolts from above the clouds. Our scientific enquiry into the phenomenon did not reveal a deity. Instead we can now explain lightning by way of static electrical differentials between clouds, and their subsequent high voltage discharge. Although some maintain this is the process Zeus (God) uses to throw lightning bolts. This is merely shifting the goal posts to another gap in our knowledge – such as Ray Comfort attempting to excuse his pathetic banana attempt by saying “god gave us the knowledge to breed the domestic banana”.

Let’s cast our minds back. There was a time when every Christian was a fundamentalist. They literally believed the Heaven and the Earth were created in 6 days, man was specially created in God’s image, and the first man named all the animals. God, in his infinite wisdom, planted the seeds of sin in the perfect garden, then kills everything on Earth when it all goes pear shaped. In return we get a rainbow. Over the centuries, scientific enquiry has devastated the assumed truth of these statements, and now we reach a point where most theists are still claiming god is responsible for what we do not understand. Those fundies are on the lunitic fringe. In this context “God” is no more than a label for our ignorance.

In addition, attempts to rationalise a particular god fail utterly since every so-called logical argument for a first cause, prime mover, grand designer, or transcendental being equally applies to every god ever concieved. The Kalam argument equally applies to Apollo, Allah, and Yahweh. So if you can’t make it over the desit hump, then it’s pointless to entertain theistic positions, and I appreciate you have made this point.

Although it is sufficient to disprove any one of a logical arguments premise to debunk the entire argument, I would like to back up to premise one of the Kalam argument before proceeding to premise two.

To summarise the argument for those who are not familiar with The Kalam Cosmological Argument, it goes like this:

1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore the universe has a cause.
4. We label this first cause “God” (as if that makes our argument for god somehow more valid).

So in that spirit I humbly ask you to provide one example of something that began to exist, for as far as I can tell all things we experience are rearrangements of already existing matter. Nothing in our experience begins to exist ex nihlo in the manner you are aluding to.

For example: say you visit a factory and witness the production of a car. At which point do you say the car began to exist? When the chassis was manufactured? No – at this stage it’s not a car (if we define a car as a working piece of machinery). When the wheels are fastened? When the engines lowered in? When the seats are installed?

No, no, and no.

The creation of a car as a seperate identifyable entity is a slow progression from non existence to a fully formed and functioning car, however you define it. At no stage did the car magically spring into existence, except when the matter was arranged in such as fashion as we would define a car. Nevertheless, the matter was pre-existant. The same argument can be made for any identifyable object in our experience – it’s all a matter of rearranging existing matter. The big bang hypothesis that all matter was compressed into an extremely small space – potentially of zero dimensions with infinite mass. It does not say that this singularity sprang into existence from nothing at all, although many scientists use these words to explain it to the average man (I wish they wouldn’t).

Before I address Professor Stephen Hawking’s paper, I must point out something that I assume would be plainly obvious. Mathematical models can be pushed towards absolute zero or infinity, but there is no reason to suspect that reality adheres to such predictions. Only experimentation and observation verify our predictions. There seem to be natural limits which rudely impose on our mathematical tinkerings – forcing a revision or revolution of our understandings.

For example, based on current growth rates we might project the human population of the Earth to exceed 9 billion at some stage in the near future, however natural limits of food supply, waste disposal, are available space intrude on these pure mathematical projections. Maths has its limits.

In a similar manner, while we can push our maths to incredibly minute dimensions, our experimental observations to confirm the predictions regarding the big bang are currently limited to the Planck length. While this is an incredibly small size it is still literally and entire universe away from being nothing. There seem to be a few things you appear to either deliberatly overlook from Stephen’s paper. You correctly quote Professor Stephen Hawking with

“… the universe had a beginning, they didn’t say how it had begun”

and

“One would have to invoke an outside agency, which for convenience, one can call God, to determine how the universe began”

Plus the proposition that the singularity is like the South Pole from which the question “what is further south” makes no sense.

In a similar manner, the singularity is a point from which all time flows and nothing comes before. Professor Stephen Hawking is admitting in his presentation that where the singurality came from is unknown and people label it “God” for convenience.

It is also interesting to note Stephen’s jab at the Pope when they were asked not to investigate the moment of creation – the Pope simply asserted it was God’s work and out of bounds. Pity Stephen was presenting a paper on that exact topic, but he did not say anything for fear of persecution as Galileo Galilei felt. This is typical behaviour of the church – suppressing expansion of our knowledge to protect their superstitious beliefs.

Stephen’s paper is also interesting because it is aiming for the grand unifying theory of everything, which in no way determines the presence of a God or not – it merely ties Einstein’s general relativity with quantum mechanics for a more complete and accurate description of reality.

If the origins of the singularity (and by extension the big bang) turn out to be entirely natural (and there is no reason to suspect otherwise), where shall your God hide then? I n the next gap in your knowledge? You are still presenting a god of the gaps argument and with our daily increase in knowledge your god is becoming smaller and even more irrelevant.