Godless Business

…believe us or go to hell.

Posts Tagged Science

The Burden of Proof

Mar 1

Posted by askegg in Blog | 47 Comments

Time and time again I have had conversations with people who completely misunderstand the burden of proof, so I though I might state it as clearly as I can here, once and for all.

Imagine, if you will, that there are two people in a room.  At first no one is speaking to the other.  No one has made a claim which they need to back up with a logical argument, or (shock/horror) even evidence.  No one at this stage bears the burden of proof.  Then one of them pipes up:

“This table is made of wood.”

Not a massive claim, I know, but a claim none the less.  A claim which is easily verified by the other person observing the table and concluding it is indeed made from wood.  There is evidence to support the gentleman’s claim and the claim is accepted.  Now let’s suppose he adds:

“The wood came from Noah’s Ark.”

Now this is a hell of a claim, with many ramifications for it presupposes Noah’s existence and a global flood.  Notwithstanding, should we accept his claim on face value, or request the evidence that leads inescapably to this conclusion?  If no evidence or even a logical argument can be presented to support this claim, why accept it as truth?

Same goes for a God.

If you claim there is a mystical invisible entity residing outside of space and time, then please provide evidence this is actually the case.  If you further claim that this entity took human form and killed himself to wash away something called “sin” with his blood – well you certainly have your work cut out for you.

Keep in mind it is NOT up to the sceptic to disprove your claims.  Take, for example, this conversation:

You: “There are no diamonds in the trunk of my car”

Me: “OK”

That’s it.  Why should anyone investigate the claim any further?  Do it make any difference to anyone if there really are not diamond in your car?  Do I have any reason to suspect otherwise?  In a recent conversation the response to this question was:

“What if you were a thief and believed I did have diamonds in the truck of my car?  Then you might get mad and assault me.”

What the author of this comment failed to realise is that the thief holds a belief for which there is no evidence.  He is in error and acts upon his illogical and unsupported beliefs with horrible results.  To anyone familiar with religions, this should sound very familiar.

So why do so many theistic arguments go along these lines?

Me: “I can see no evidence of god”

Theist: “You’re not looking had enough”

Theist Logic

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Protein chains are impossible

Nov 7

Posted by askegg in Blog, Videos | No Comments

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The science of homeopathy

Oct 27

Posted by askegg in Videos | 4 Comments

It’s rare to come across someone who can so clearly explain the science behind homeopathy.
Oh dear gods – what is she babbling about?


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Evangelical responses

Sep 22

Posted by askegg in Blog | No Comments

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).

Stephen Hawking

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.


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Refuting Dr. Ross (part 3) – Useless Stars

Jul 17

Posted by askegg in Blog | No Comments

Dr. Hugh Ross cites Stephen Hawking’s book “A brief history of time” as the source for the first refutation of his argument from design:

It’s incorrect to refer to Stephen Hawking as an atheist. He’s not. He’s a deist. He concedes that you need a God to get the beauty, and the elegance, and the mathematics. But he insists that it’s not the God of the Bible. Why? Because he says “the God of the Bible was a God that does not waste miracles and therefore God would not create one hundred billion trillion useless stars. He would simply make one star, one planet, the moon, oh yeah you need the four gas giants, you need some asteroids and comets, ah but the rest of it’s useless.” he claims.

Dr. Ross’s “refutation” (I kid you not) is that:

“… Stephen Hawking himself proves (in his own research) that it takes that many stars to make one planet possible given the laws of physics in the universe. You can’t have an Earth unless the universe has a mass equivalent of one hundred billion trillion stars. If the mass of the universe were different by one part in quadrillion quadrillion quadrillion quadrillion. So those stars are not useless. They are all critical, an necessary in order to make possible the existence of one planet on which life could exist.”

Naturally, Dr. Ross completely ignores his knob twiddling God for his refutation to stand. He assumes the cosmological constants cannot be changed, not even by an omniscient, omnipotent being who can create the splendour of the universe ex nihilo, and breath life into a pile of dust, and fashion a women from a rib.  Why is Dr. Ross’s God limited in this way?

Surely it would be trivial for his deity to twiddle up new values which supported a universe consisting of one planet, and one star.   Hell, we could even have the star spin round the planet just as the Biblical authors assumed – a position which was vehemently defended by the church for centuries.

It’s interesting to note that only after centuries under the crushing weight of evidence and scientific advancement did the Catholic Church finally and officially concede that Galileo was right – on the 31 October 1992, some 350 years after he died.

So it seems Stephen Hawking’s assertion that “God does not waste miracles” still stands, unless Dr. Ross cares to admit that the universe must have been this way to achieve some higher, ultimately unknowable, purpose. I sure would like him to provide evidence for that!


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Refuting Dr. Hugh Ross (part 2)

Jul 17

Posted by askegg in Blog | No Comments

I posted the other day about Dr. Hugh Ross’s lecture titles “Astrophysics Points to the God of the Bible” and promised I would refute his three rebuttals to his argument.

First, I must point out that Dr. Ross makes the following claim in his lecture:

“None of the rebuttals are scientific in nature. When you see your sceptical audience abandon a scientific refutation with a philosophical refutation, that means you’ve really won the debate.”

It seems to allude Dr. Ross that his entire argument has been philosophical in nature. Sure, during the lecture he has presented a great deal of hard proved scientific fact (which no one disputes), but to conjure a knob twiddling God to explain the cosmological constants is a philosophical point.  In scientific terms it’s an hypothesis for which he has no data to support.  In layman’s terms, it’s bullshit.

Reality is just the way it is. Science is our way of trying to understand it, and mathematical models are just that – models. They do not dictate how the universe works, they describe how it works. That’s why rational people leave these “laws” open to change, for it’s entirely possible that our current models of the universe are totally wrong. Since the “laws” of the universe just describe reality, then where does the impetuous for an author of these laws come from?  If anything, we authored them.

Dr. Ross would have you believe that God (more specifically the God of the Bible) authored these physical laws and set the cosmological constants to their current values. Again, in this lecture he simply asserts this without granted us the reasoning behind why all the other contender Gods are discounted.

Of course, this line of reasoning simply begs the question. If you are going to explain the attributes of the universe are due to a divine being, then why does this divine being have the attributes and qualities it does? Why does it have these values and not others? Why does God care about us, rather than not? Why is God all knowing? Why is he omnipotent? Why does God have a personal interest in the lives of his favourite animals (who were created in his image) and not the others? Why is God so vain that he requires constant worship?

Dr. Ross goes on to say:

“Stephen Hawking does not realise when he has abandoned science and become a philosopher.”

Really Hugh? Really? On what exactly are you basing that statement? It seems to me that whenever someone states a position equally probable but counter to your own you simply label it’s “philosophy not science” and claim victory. I see this as the height of hypocrisy since the final point of your argument toward God is philosophical. Perhaps Dr. Ross doesn’t actually know that philosophy is the highest form of mathematics?


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Compelled to choose freely

Jul 8

Posted by askegg in Blog | No Comments

I am in the midst of a discussion regarding the truth (or otherwise) of Christianity with @mmcelhaney on Twitter (his blog can be found here). Of course, it is a difficult task to distil complex notions about existence, philosophy, science, and theology into 140 characters of less. As a consequence may points span multiple tweets, spawning multiple threads in reply, which inevitably bring up new topics and a raft of new points to discuss and refute.

One of these points which we have been hitting back and forth is the conflict between free will and omniscience. Marcus’s latest explanation is this (starting at this tweet):

You are right billions of people are going to hell. But billions of people are also going to heaven and God knows who is going where.

Instead of asking why you got to go to hell, you are missing the fundamental question: Why do people go to hell?

People don’t go because God doe not go against their free will or that they chose the wrong religion. Everyone has failed to meet the standard for holiness that God has set. By definition, every human being capable of choosing to to disobey God deserves hell. Even those of us who are saved deserve hell. The only difference is that God has chosen to save some of humanity through faith in Christ – Ephesians 2.

Yes, God knows who will go to hell, and He could force every single person to repent. But he does not. Why? For reasons known only to Him. No one comes to Christ against their own will. Everyone who rejects him does so willingly.

If you interviews anyone in hell and tell them that all they have to do is serve God and they can get out of hell, they will refuse and walk right back into hell. Think I’m wrong? Well, you are making the same stupid decision today if you reject Jesus.

What a jumbled mess of theology and poor logic this is, but let’s see if we can unravel some of Marcus’s ahhh… misunderstandings.

The “fact” billions might be destined for Heaven has zero bearing on the “fact” that billions are also destined for Hell. There is a dichotomy in Marcus’s head. On one hand he has an all loving God who is willingly to kill his own son in order to save us from this fiery fate (not himself mind you, unless you want to delve into the murky depths of the trinity). Marcus wishes to ignore the terrible fate of those who “choose” to spend eternity in Hell to keep his precious image of Heaven intact. Marcus – will you have a good view from Heaven where you can witness the damned being tortured?

The second part of that sentence is very telling: “and God knows who is going where”. This is classic cognitive dissonance in action, and has been my point throughout the discussion.

Marcus, imagine a time before creation. God could have created any one of an infinite number of possible universes. Being omniscient he would have known out each would play out and how their eventual destruction would come about. He would have known the intricate details of every molecule, dust speck, and living organism within each possible universe before he lifted his transcendental finger. He would have foreseen the creation of multiple religions and the false Gods that millions would bow down to. He knew which universes would contain billions of people who would end up “choosing” to reject his divinely invisible love and point themselves towards the burning gates of Hell. Yet to spite all of this he went ahead and created this universe – one in which billions do fall for the lies of “false religions”, following “false Gods” or no god at all, and wind up having the flesh burnt from their writhing bodies for all eternity. On this basis alone I would reject such a monstrosity of a being is such a thing existed (luckily there is no evidence for such a beast).

According to the theology of Christianity, God took human form as his own son so that he could pay the price of sin. Naturally, no one has been able to sufficiently answer why death is the price of sin, or why God, in his all loving mercy, could not adjust the price of sin to something less severe. You see, an all loving being would do anything and everything within his power to prevent harm from coming to those he loves, yet this is exactly what we do not see in the world. God routinely ignores prayer, sits idly by as thousands starve to death everyday, and allows his perfectly designed bacteria to infest, overcome, maim, and kill his beloved children. This is not a God I would be interested in worshipping.

Anyway, back to Marcus’s tweets:

“Everyone has failed to meet the standard for holiness that God has set.”

So why did God set the standard so high – surely he knew the organisms in this universe were not capable of attaining such lofty heights of morality without the mandated shedding of animal sacrifice, reaching its crescendo with the most perfect of all human sacrifices in the murder of Jesus himself? Oh, I am forgetting “free will” again, aren’t I?

The only difference is that God has chosen to save some of humanity through faith in Christ.

Wait a minute, I thought we had free will to choose to between eternal bliss, or complete agony? If God has already chosen who to save through “faith in Christ” then what can I do to change the ultimate outcome? Especially when God selected this particular universe from an infinite number of alternatives. This universe, where I would reach the inevitable and logical conclusion that such a being is impossible, not to mention terrifying.

God knows who will go to hell, and He could force every single person to repent. But he does not. Why? For reasons known only to Him.

So God chooses not to save those people in Hell because that would somehow interfere with free will, to spite the “fact” he is omniscient and knows every decision anyone has or will make until the end of time.

No one comes to Christ against their own will. Everyone who rejects him does so willingly.

Read those two sentences above again. Now again. Let it sink in. So is it only those people who know about Christ and willingly rejecting him who are destined for Hell? What about those billions who have never even heard the name of Jesus, or the millions of babies who die before being giving the chance to accept Jesus into their hearts, or have in thrust upon them in a baptism? How is this fair to those of us who have honestly evaluated the evidence for Christ (or any other prophet) and found it lacking? My head just exploded, but I suppose I should become familiar with that sensation now given where I am headed according to Marcus.

If you interviews anyone in hell and tell them that all they have to do is serve God and they can get out of hell, they will refuse and walk right back into hell. Think I’m wrong?

Hell yes! Who wants to have white hot pokers shoved into their eyes and their intestines gnawed by rats? This really shits me – how can you have a just and perfect loving god who allows such things?

Let me give you a quick parallel: I have two beautiful daughters who want to play on the busy road outside. Now I love my kids, but I cannot interfere with their free will. I know playing on the road is dangerous and there is a good chance they will be badly injured or killed if they go out there, but what can I do? Is it their fault when they are struck by a truck and spread all over the bitumen?

Well, you are making the same stupid decision today if you reject Jesus.

There are many religions in the world today (not to mention now dead religions) which threaten eternal damnation for those who are foolish enough to reject their doctrines. The two most prevalent modern examples are Christianity and Islam, but it’s by no means limited to these two. If I am to avoid timeless suffering I must be sure of the faith I select, since both renditions of God are quite intolerant of disbelief.

Without substantiating your claim that Jesus is the only way to attain access to Heaven, then I can simple assert that you are making the same stupid decision if you reject the teachings of the final prophet of Allah. Your empty threats mean nothing without proving your case first. The scare tactics you have demonstrated here may have worked in the dark ages, but the church and your antiquated theology can no longer stand the education and rational thinking modern society has attained – fighting religion at every stage.

You silly religion will be thrown on the scrape heap of history, like all those that came before it.

UPDATE: Marcus has responded here.

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