Lawrence Krauss has nothing to talk about

Last Thursday I was very pleased to attend a lecture at Portsmouth Grammar School given by Professor Lawrence Krauss. His book A Universe from Nothing has caused a stir in both religious and scientific circles. Richard Dawkins has (somewhat hyperbolically) characterised its significance on a par with Darwin's Origin, while apologists such as the mathematician John Lennox have complained that the "nothing" that Krauss writes about is not a "real" nothing (non-tautologically speaking, if that's possible).

Krauss is an excellent speaker, and though his talk did get into some very abstruse concepts — which gave him a legitimate opportunity to suggest that a more expansive explanation is available in his book — he was engaging throughout.

I have the Kindle version of A Universe from Nothing, so could not get it signed by the author. But I also have a copy of Quantum Man, so my dad (who has his own copy) and I queued up after the lecture for the signing. Here's Dad with the Prof:

Jonathan Pearce posted a response to the lecture on his A Tippling Philosopher blog. I commented as follows:

It was great lecture and my dad and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

As for the question, “why is there something rather than nothing?” — I tend to the view that there was always something, and that the philosophical nothing is a concept only.

The way I see it there are four options:

1. There never was anything, and there never will be.

2. There was something, and then there wasn’t.

3. There always was something.

4. There was nothing (the philosophical nothing) and then there was something.

Clearly (1) is not the case, and (to us) is indistinguishable from (2) as both these positions are refuted by the existence of anything at all. (4) is contentious if one believes that a true philosophical nothing is incapable of spawning a something. Which leaves (3) — the eternal something (at least, eternal in the past — it may be possible for the sum total of all the somethings to self-annihilate and become a philosophical nothing).

If theists want to complain that Krauss’s nothing is not a philosophical nothing, that’s fine by me, but then I would ask them if their God is eternal. If God is eternal then the philosophical nothing is an impossibility, and they should stop asking how something can come from nothing.

Obscure reasons to believe

Two weeks ago it was the second Unbelievable? conference. Premier are now taking orders for the DVD set, for those who were unable to attend, or who did attend but want to hear the sessions they inevitably missed in a single-day, multi-track event.

Here's what Premier are saying is on the DVDs:

"God & Science: Cosmic Reasons For Christ"
"Whose worldview? C.L.E.A.R. reasons for Christianity"
"Gunning For God: Why the new atheists are missing the target"
"Evangelism remixed: new models for evangelism in the 21st Century"
"Evangelism in a sceptical world"
"Evangelism in a multifaith world"
"Confessions of a compulsive thinker"
"Confessions from the mission field"
"Confessions of a former atheist" 

I can't work up much enthusiasm for anything listed above, so I won't be sending an order. I bought last year's DVD set — for reasons I set out in the first of my three blogposts about it:
http://www.evilburnee.co.uk/2011/09/unbelievable-punishment.html
http://www.evilburnee.co.uk/2011/10/unbelievable-conference-disc-2.html
http://www.evilburnee.co.uk/2011/11/unbelievable-conference-big-questions.html

This year's conference was in association with "Reasons to Believe", and Hugh Ross — the President of Reasons to Believe — was a guest on Unbelievable? prior to the conference. He was also on Revelation TV opposite Malcolm Bowden, a Young Earth Creationist, which by comparison made Ross's views seem fairly conventional. But Ross, and Reasons to Believe, strike me as leaning further towards the fundamentalist side of Christianity than Premier — or at least Unbelievable? — have so far appeared to do.

As an atheist curious about the prevalence of religious belief, I've been interested to learn what makes religious people tick, but my investigations to date have been disappointing and inconclusive. As part of those investigations I read and reviewed a recommended book purporting to offer scores of arguments for faith, and I watched and reviewed the whole of last year's Unbelievable? conference DVDs. Both were underwhelming. That John Lennox was promoted as a star attraction at this year's conference leads me to conclude that it was more of the same — a notion reinforced by the inclusion of someone from the Alpha course.

The conference itself may have been inspiring and invigorating for its participants, but I imagine the vast majority of them were believers — and if they want to spend a day in the company of like-minded people and listen to Christian apologetics that's fine by me, but judging by last year's DVDs I'm not sure what influence the talks will have outside the conference and the circles of its attendees.

For the present, I tend to agree with former Unbelievable? (and recent Skepticule Extra) guest James Croft, when he says, "Apologetics is a waste of time."

In our universe, nothing beyond physics

This is from last month, the final episode in the current series of BBC Radio 4's Beyond Belief, with host Ernie Rea and three studio guests: John Lennox, Usama Hasan and Mark Vernon. The subject they're discussing is the origin of the universe, apparently triggered (the discussion, not the universe) by the success of Lawrence Krauss's new book, A Universe from Nothing. It's a shame they didn't get Krauss himself on the show, as he might have pointed out the elementary error Lennox commits in his very first comments. Here's the blurb from the BBC website:

When asked to defend their belief in a Creator God, people of faith often turn to the argument that there must be a First Cause - you can't create something out of nothing they say, therefore right at the beginning, someone must have been responsible for the first element from which sprang life.

A new book, "A Universe from Nothing", by the American theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss, turns this argument on its head. Not only can something arise out of nothing, but something will always arise out of nothing because physics tells us that nothingness is inherently unstable.

The book has made an enormous impact in the States, making the New York Times' best sellers list, and it prompted Richards Dawkins to observe that it was "Potentially the most important scientific book with implications for atheism since Darwin".

So does it knock the argument for God on the head? Are physics and God irreconcilable?

Joining Ernie to discuss whether modern physics leaves any room for God are Dr John Lennox, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, Dr Usama Hasan, Senior Lecturer at Middlesex University and a part time Imam, and Dr Mark Vernon, Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck College, London who has degrees in physics, theology and philosophy.

And Lennox's error?

"Having looked at Lawrence Krauss's book, I think the title from the start is very misleading, because the nothing he claims that is a nothing, is not actually a nothing."

Other theists have jumped on this bandwagon, despite Krauss being very clear precisely what kind of nothing he's discussing. The problem with Lennox's objection is that the nothing he thinks Krauss should be addressing — the total absence of anything whatever — is merely a philosophical construct with no possibility of being real in any sense that makes any sense. Lennox presumably believes that God exists, and is not nothing, and is eternal. If God — or indeed anything at all — is eternal, then Lennox's "nothing" is clearly an impossibility. Such being the case, it's disingenuous of him to complain that Krauss is studying some other kind of nothing.

Streaming audio of this episode of Beyond Belief is available here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b01gf5w7

Not for the first time Lennox comes across as a barely disguised old-earth creationist, while Mark Vernon's mild atheism is reasonable but diffident (maybe he's being careful to avoid being labelled as "gnu"). Usama Hasan claims atheists cannot say where the laws of physics come from, as if they ought be inscribed on stone tablets somewhere up a mountain. In the middle of the episode Ernie Rae plays an interview with Graham Swinerd, an agnostic astronautics engineer who found Christ as a result of the fine-tuning argument — though as he also credits attending an Alpha Course one might perhaps consider him as already on the brink.

As is usual at the end of an episode Rae asks all three of his guests one question; this time it's whether the universe has a purpose. Hasan claims it's to declare the glory of God and to produce conscious beings able to choose between good and evil. Vernon doubts that the universe has an overall purpose, except as a container for people who have their own purposes. Lennox, however, goes into eccentric preacher-mode:

"The Universe is a temporary home for human beings created in the image of God. He's conveyed on us that immense dignity, and ultimately, for me, the whole purpose of life in the universe is to enjoy the fellowship of the creator that invented the atom."

Unbelievable?: The Conference — Big Questions Stream

The Big Questions Stream is the last of three DVDs in this boxed set of Premier Christian Radio's one-day apologetics conference held in May this year. (I have already reviewed Disc 1 and Disc 2.)

Disc 3 begins with Mark Roques and his talk entitled: "Is Jesus the only way?"

It's a dynamic lecture, if a little unfocussed and with iffy sound. Roques claims that all people live by faith, giving as an example some rat-worshippers in India. He says there are four types of response to rat-worship, each conforming to a specific type. The first is that of, for example, James Bond, who would describe rat-worship as irrational. Roques claims this is a "modernist", secular worldview and what he describes is essentially a materialist worldview that denies the existence of anything supernatural. But as a first example it shows how ill-advised it is to use fictional examples to explain what you are claiming as fact. Religionists seem to do this a lot, as if they can't see how it's likely to be interpreted. By picking a fictional example you are essentially basing your factual claims on something that has been made up. If Bible-believers want to convince people that scripture is more than "made up" they should stop doing this.

The second example is the response of Paul Merton, who visited some rat-worshippers during a TV documentary. Merton apparently described rat-worship as "true for them" — which Roques says is a post-modernist worldview, in which everyone is entirely autonomous.

The rat-worshippers' response, however, is that rat-worship is "true" — which is Roques' example of the third type of response.

Roques' fourth type of response is exemplified by Christianity: "Don't worship rats, worship Christ."

He then goes on to list four views of salvation. The first is the "exclusivist" or "restrictivist" view, in which only those who have been called by God will go to eternity in heaven, while everyone else goes to eternal punishment. The second is an "inclusionist" but not "universalist" view, which allows even some people with no knowledge of Christ to be saved. The third is "theological pluralism", which holds that all religions can lead to God, and the fourth is the "universalist" view where everyone will be saved. Unsurprisingly there's disagreement on the matter, but as it's theology there's no way of conclusively resolving the issue — because theology is mostly fabrication. Incidentally Roques says he holds to the "inclusionist" view of salvation.

During a Christian apologetics conference there's bound to be a good deal of dissing of other religions, but some of those other religions have their own conferences, and what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Mark Roques is also guilty of conflation when he claims that for James Bond the god is science, and when later on in his talk he claims people have made "money" their god. Many religionists seem to do this, giving the impression that they are locked into a mindset in which it is impossible for anyone not to believe in a god of some kind. For such religionists, there's no such thing as a true atheist.

Roques is very big on story-telling (likening this to the parables of Jesus), but he needs to be clearer on the distinction between factual and fictional stories, otherwise people will be inevitably drawn to the idea that the whole of scripture and theology is just a series of stories. For myself I'm glad that in this lecture he used his faux "common" accent only once.

---

Next on Disc 3 is a two-hander with John Lennox and David Robertson on the question "Is there evidence for God?", and it has the assertions, the atheist-bashing, and what I can only describe as self-congratulatory smugness — coupled with attempts at mitigating false modesty — coming thick and fast. I found it difficult to keep up, abandoning my use of the pause button for note-taking purposes and just let the whole thing roll over me.

The usual canards are in abundance: atheists have no grounding for moral judgements, they are closed-minded to evidence by a priori assumptions, and they don't understand the meaning of faith. But throughout their discussion neither Lennox nor Robertson explain what precisely their subjective experience of God is. It's all a tacit admission of mysterious ineffability. They say much but convey little, and I found it frustrating waiting for either of them to deliver even one thing that might be a serious challenge to atheists — either "new atheists" or the plain vanilla variety.

Lennox makes a good point, however, about "nothing buttery" when decrying materialism, but I don't think he realises that he is actually validating the materialist view when he makes it.

So in response to the question "Is there evidence for God?" the answer must begin with "It depends what you mean by evidence." And if you're after compelling evidence, rather than just a subjective feeling, forget it.

---

Finally we have (again) Mark Roques, with "What about suffering?" beginning with the tale of Cornish Christian boy Thomas Pellow, captured by Turkish pirates and forced to be the slave of the Sultan. He converted to Islam (to save his own skin), and returned to his parents 30 years later. He was, we are told, sustained by his Christian faith.

Roques quotes David Hume's distillation of Epicurus's paradox — according to which an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God is an incoherent concept. Roques goes on to say, "I want to try and respond to this with some perhaps fresh material." This sounds promising but ultimately leaves us high and dry, as in delivering his talk he often seems to get diverted down side alleys, never returning to the place whence he came.

Asking the question, "Is it possible to be an atheist and also affirm the existence of evil?" Roques then examines materialism, quoting Richard Dawkins in River Out of Eden on the "blind, pitiless indifference" of the universe, as well as Dawkins' response to the 2006 Edge Annual Question — "What is your dangerous idea?"

Dawkins' contribution was "Let's all stop beating Basil's car" in which he floats the (not original) idea that just as Basil Fawlty's defective car is not to blame for its deficiencies, neither are we as material humans "at fault" for our own shortcomings. Given that these essays for the Edge were supposed to be radical and iconoclastic, it's disingenuous of Roques to point to Dawkins and claim that materialists deny that humans have any moral responsibility. The problem — as usual with debates of this kind — is that key terms haven't been properly defined. What does Roques mean by "evil" or "moral"? He's speaking to a largely Christian audience, so he may consider these terms don't need defining. But this is an apologetics conference and the audience will be going out to defend their faith. Without rigorous definition of terms, their efforts could well come across as unconvincing or even sloppy.

Here's an example of what I consider egregious sloppy thinking:

"Materialism declares that only physical things exist and so it is not possible to speak about purpose, goodness and wickedness. Evil is an illusion."

First off, we need to know what Roques means by purpose, goodness, wickedness and evil. By this measure we could claim that thoughts, being "non-physical", don't exist — when they clearly do.

"Evil does not exist. It is an illusion. A delusion. A toothfairy. This is what many atheists believe. It's their religion."

This is the worst kind of straw man fallacy, and teaching it at an apologetics conference is doing nobody any favours. Roques belabours his "no responsibility in materialism" point, but without saying what he means by responsibility. When we consider ideas of materialism and determinism in human action we must be careful what we dismiss. It is possible to hold to a materialist, determinist worldview in which free will does not depend on substance dualism, and still maintain that we are responsible for our actions. The question then becomes not what do we mean by "responsible"? but what do we mean by "we"? The entity — the human — held to be "responsible" comprises the sum total of who "we" are — our current thoughts and disposition, our memories, our experiences, our genetic make-up, our education, even our present environment. Such questions are way deeper and more subtle than Roques portrays in his talk.

Roques may even be going out on a limb relative to his religionist cohorts. He claims that Anselm and Aquinas were wrong about goodness, and that Plotinus — and Plato before him — were bad influences on early Christianity. He makes this challenge:

"If naturalism/materialism is true, then surely both goodness and evil are illusions. So where do you get your notions of evil and goodness from as you rail against God?"

See how disingenuous his approach is? "Rail against God?" This may be a reaction to Dawkins' deliberate caricature of the Old Testament God in The God Delusion, but such emotive language is inappropriate to an honest examination of the problem of evil.

Roques may be a dynamic speaker (despite seeming to lose his way several times in this talk), but the thrust of his argument is superficial. When pressed he is revealed — as far as I could see — to have nothing original or indeed useful to add to the morality debate. In the Q&A the first questioner asks why God allowed evil in the first place:

"There's a sense in which I don't know the answer to that deep question."

And as he offers nothing more of substance in response, there's a pronounced lack of any other sense in which he did know the answer.

---

So what did I get out of these three DVDs? I could have attended the conference itself, but I would still have needed the DVDs in order to see the parallel streams. The cost of the DVD set is comparable to the cost of the conference, but if I'd attended I would have needed to add the same again in travelling expenses. In any case I think I might have felt uncomfortable in an audience of mostly believers.

On the whole I found the talks as presented on the DVDs disappointing, but also — on another level — heartening. Much was made of equipping Christians for defending their faith in the wider world, but the armoury provided here appeared clumsy, outdated and ineffective. Not once did I find myself thinking, "Gosh, there's an argument I really must look into further." Maybe these evangelicals will be effective in converting teetering agnostics who are confused by recent new atheist literature — or maybe not. It's seems clear, however, that anyone who is happy to self-identify as an atheist on the basis of honest enquiry into the God-question will not find anything challenging on these DVDs.

Unbelievable punishment

Maybe I'm a glutton for punishment, but I had more than one motive for ordering the DVD set of the Unbelievable? Conference. I've attended a number of events where talks were recorded — video as well as audio-only — and I've been struck by the variable quality of the results. I've watched countless talks on-line that I didn't personally attend, and given the variable quality of those too, I considered how difficult making such recordings might be. I've had the opportunity to test that myself over the past few months, by recording (with permission) most of the talks given at Portsmouth Skeptics in the Pub. Four of these are now available as Skepticule Record episodes. One of them — the juggling and maths of Colin Wright — I recorded in video, but video is a far more demanding medium than audio only, and I have yet to get around to doing what's necessary to make that available.

I attended both TAM London 2009 and 2010, but only the first has been made available on DVD (which I have), and in the light of the above I was curious to see what sort of job Premier would make of recording their own conference. I was also interested to see and hear what Christian spokespersons say to their self-selecting audience on the matter of Christianity in Britain. I live in Britain but I'm not a Christian, and what I hear on Unbelievable? (and elsewhere) makes me concerned about religious influence in public life.

Unbelievable?: The Conference DVD 2011 consists of three discs, of which I've so far watched the first. The box, with the subtitle "Honest answers to Tough questions", lists the contributors but gives no information regarding duration (though I understand it's about ten hours), PAL/NTSC format or region coding. (I use a multi-region multi-format DVD player so this isn't a problem for me, but it could be an issue for some.)

Disc 1 (the only one I've watched so far) is the Apologetic Stream, with an introduction by Justin Brierley in the Big Brother chair (sorry, that's how it seemed to me — I haven't watched Big Brother for years, do they still have the chair?) followed by a keynote speech by John Lennox entitled "What are we apologising for?" in which he explains the common misconception about "apologetics" (and how it has nothing to do with apologising). He goes on to explain why apolegetics is necessary as a biblical imperative, and who should do it. He's an excellent speaker, and is talking here to an sympathetic audience, so his tacit assumptions about the truth of scripture are legitimate in such a context.

Lennox identifies two attacks from which Christianity needs defending — first the scientific argument espoused by Richard Dawkins and a "minority" of scientistic atheists, the "New Atheists" — and second the attack on the morality and ethics of scripture. He makes a good point about asking questions of people until they respond with questions of their own, and his anecdotes are amusing, but I'm wary of taking his anecdotes at face value given his misrepresentation of his debate with Dawkins.

Towards the end of his keynote address it seems to me Lennox shifts effortlessly into "preacher" mode, with what appears to be an evangelical strategy for countering fear by appeal to revelation.

---

John Lennox is also first up in the Apologetic Stream with "Has Science Buried God?" He begins by stating that most scientists of the past were believers. This isn't surprising, and doesn't support his case because almost everyone of the past would have been believers. He states that God is a person not a theory, and then attempts to knock down a straw man of an equation of God and Science. He also states that he's not a fan of Stephen Jay Gould's non-overlapping magisteria (NOMA), and that science itself arose out of the Christian worldview — but when science began, as I've pointed out above, the Christian worldview was pretty much the only one around.

Lennox claims the idea that science equals rationality is false, and "scientism" comes from a false concept of God. He posits the opposition of "God" on one hand and "mechanism" on the other as a false dichotomy. He then goes on to complain about Stephen Hawking's statement about gravity and creation from nothing — a complaint Lennox has apparently addressed in a whole book. I've yet to read Hawking's The Grand Design (it's on my Kindle), but I have suspicions that his poorly phrased statement may have been instigated by his literary publicist in an effort to court controversy (and book sales).

Richard Dawkins' argument about explanatory complexity (in The God Delusion) is then applied to the book itself. Lennox asks, what is the explanation for The God Delusion? It's Richard Dawkins, but Richard Dawkins is more complex than the book, so according to him he isn't an adequate explanation for his own book! This, frankly, is a fatuous argument. Dawkins isn't the ultimate explanation for his book, he's merely one level of a hierarchy of explanation. This matter of explanatory power is something I see throughout a whole spectrum of theistic attempts to explain things by appeal to God — from John Polkinghorne to Ray Comfort to, er... John Lennox. The way we attempt to explain things we don't currently understand is by appeal to things we do understand, and indeed John Lennox himself touches on this when he talks about reductionism. But any attempt to "explain" something by appeal to something that we don't understand is clearly not an explanation at all. (Incidentally this is exactly why "intelligent design" isn't science.)

Lennox next addresses the question, who created God? — claiming it's a trick question, because it assumes that God was created. But is he therefore claiming that the universe could not be uncreated? This argument (known as the Cosmological Argument) is, as we've seen before, an exercise in special pleading.

In the Q&A Lennox begins by writing down a whole series of questions from the audience and then proceeds to answer them en bloc. I found it heartening to hear him cite atheist scientists again and again — this shows that the Gnu Atheists are definitely making an impression, and that theists feel they are obliged to answer. To a question about determinism Lennox responds with the argument from morality, but in a typically shallow fashion that sneaks in the usual conflation of morality and absolute or objective morality. This, I feel, is where the battle lies.

There are also questions about the "multiverse", which leave me cold, as it's all unfalsifiable speculation and not an argument.

---

Next up in the Apologetic Stream is Jay Smith with "How do I respond to Islam?" Islam, apparently, is the greatest threat to Christianity today. Smith spends much time denigrating the Qur'an as full of incomplete, derivative stories — in contrast to the New Testament, which is "true". (The Old Testament is apparently not relevant to the modern world.) Smith's zealous delivery is fast and furious, reminding me of a fairground huckster or a salesman standing with a microphone in the back of a truck surrounded by dodgy consumables. He's preaching (to the converted, no doubt, here), and I can imagine what he's like at Speaker's Corner, where he's apparently a regular.

Time and again he compares the Qur'an to the New Testament, declaring one to be so much better than the other. He has an answer for everything, as he demonstrates in the Q&A, but he's so slick and so fast I can't help thinking that what he's saying is just too good to be true — just like a snake-oil salesman.

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Finally in the Apologetic Stream we have David Robertson with "How do I make the case for faith?" beginning with a clip from BBC Newsnight, in which Jeremy Paxman interviews Russell Brand (the clip isn't actually on the DVD, but I noted the link displayed on the screen and watched it via iPlayer).

Robertson's talk is mainly about making Jesus available to people (such as Brand) who are seeking him, which would seem to restrict his evangelism to those who are already susceptible to a religious way of thinking. Naturally he mentions his book The Dawkins Letters, and makes the claim that Dawkins wrote The God Delusion not as a result of 9/11 but because he was expecting religion to be dead by the beginning of the 21st century. It's an interesting but (at least here) unsubstantiated claim.

Another claim Robertson makes is that atheism is on the decline, which I think is only supportable by cherry-picking the data — just this month there's a report that it's religion that's on the decline: "All in all, these data point to a society in which religion is increasingly in retreat and nominal."

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This was a mammoth session and I was flagging a bit towards the end, but I've another two discs to go. Watch this space for more of my punishment.

Grill the world's foremost Christian apologist — Unbelievable?

Last Saturday's Unbelievable? radio programme was a departure from its regular format — which usually aims to get "...Christians and non-believers talking to each other." In advance of William Lane Craig's visit to the UK in October Justin Brierley had him responding to questions sent in by listeners. Peter May, one of the organisers of the Reasonable Faith Tour, was also on the programme.

I wasn't expecting much from this, as the last time Craig was on Unbelievable? he took the opportunity to bad-mouth Richard Dawkins in an unforgivable manner.

But there were some good questions. I've only heard the show once, but here are some thoughts that occurred to me while listening:

When asked by Justin what he thought of Dawkins' refusal to debate him, Craig said Dawkins might be afraid of being humiliated — as he was in his debate with John Lennox. This seems to me a very odd interpretation of events. Dawkins gave up debating theists one-on-one after his encounter with Lennox because Lennox misrepresented the debate afterwards:

http://youtu.be/24vWUeMnXBg


Small wonder that Dawkins refuses to debate Craig, when Craig himself echoes Lennox in misrepresenting what actually happened. (The whole of Dawkins' talk is available here: http://youtu.be/xbza-UtseE0 — well worth watching.)

Concerning Polly Toynbee's withdrawal from debating with him, Craig suggested that atheists seem to have got together and agreed to boycott "this type of event". It seems more likely that they got together and agreed not to debate William Lane Craig, as they know he's not interested in dialogue, only point-scoring.

Then Craig answered some listener questions. After some preliminary exposition of the Kalām Cosmological Argument he attempted to rebut Justin Schieber's excellent point about temporal causality — that one can't really say anything about cause and effect when time doesn't exist — and in doing so produced a real howler. He resorted to "simultaneity", claiming that intentions can be simultaneous with actions and therefore not temporal. But "simultaneous" means "at the same time". In what way is simultaneity non-temporal?

Fine-tuning was next up, and as usual Craig, like other theists, simply takes fine-tuning as a given. But look at the size of the universe. No, really, look at its SIZE.

"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is."¹

Intelligent life (that stuff the universe is supposedly fine-tuned to support) is as far as we know an infinitesimally insignificant part of the universe. One could characterise intelligent life as a "homeopathically tiny" concentration in the unfathomably vast cosmos. Statistically speaking, therefore, there is no intelligent life at all in the universe. How can the nominal non-existence of any such thing be described as the result of "fine tuning"?

A. C. Grayling's comment that he'd sooner debate the existence of leprechauns and fairies than the existence of God was described by Craig as "condescending". This is symptomatic of the false importance theists ascribe to their wacky beliefs. They complain they're not being taken seriously, yet cannot provide any reason why they should be. We have, of course, heard this before. During a debate in 2009 Richard Harries objected to Richard Dawkins' similar characterisation:

"You can't let Richard get away with that. That's a ridiculous remark. You cannot confuse the God of classical theism, which has animated the whole of western philosophy, with a leprechaun."²

But like Craig, Harries provided no sound reason not to.

Another question was about the moral argument for God, and as expected Craig trotted out his usual claim that it's logically impossible for God to be immoral because it's part of God's nature to be moral. But he merely asserts that this is so. The only justification for such an assertion is that God is defined to be moral. This isn't really a justification, it's nothing more than an arbitrary definition.

And this man is supposedly the world's foremost Christian apologist.

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1. Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy — the original radio scripts. London 1985, Pan Books.
2. Lord Richard Harries, during a debate at Wellington College, Crowthorne, on the motion "Atheism is the New Fundamentalism", November 2009.

Paul Davies and John Lennox discuss SETI on the Unbelievable? radio show

Here's the opening post of a thread I started in the Premier Community regarding the April 17 edition of Unbelievable? The mp3 of the programme is available here:
http://media.premier.org.uk/unbelievable/f4ca1408-1cd8-4aea-ab73-231910f8a76c.mp3

A remarkably civil discussion about SETI and its implications. Paul Davies isn't one of those nasty New Atheists^™ — rather, he could be classed as an accommodationist, and was indeed a recipient, in 1995, of the Templeton Prize.

Wearing his "philosopher's hat" Paul Davies thinks that the human ability to unravel and understand the workings of the universe is of fundamental cosmic significance. This to me seems like a version of the anthropic principle: we can understand the universe — therefore it was made to be understood (tacit subtext: "…by us"). He said you have to ask, "What is this big universe for?" No, you don't have to ask this. It's begging the question to assume the universe has a purpose before asking what that purpose is. The correct, prior, question is "Does the universe have a purpose?" Davies is imputing teleology without establishing that such teleology exists. We can understand the universe (to a degree) because we are intelligent products of the universe. It is an obvious fact that the universe is susceptible to rational analysis.

John Lennox asked why we might consider a stream of recognisable DNA sequences originating from space to have an intelligent source, yet the same sequences present in DNA itself are not thought to be from an intelligent source (except by intelligent design proponents). But the probability of random chance replicating a specific sequence is extremely low, and if we recognised such a sequence from a source other than DNA we would have to conclude that the source was likely to be intelligent. If you produce a genuinely random number of many digits' length, the chance of replicating that number by chance is practically zero. DNA sequences, however, are not produced by chance. I find it astonishing that a professor of mathematics seems not to appreciate this.

John Lennox presupposes mind/body dualism in order to argue that supernatural power can affect the natural world. (This isn't surprising — I'd hardly expect him to accept that he doesn't have a transcendent soul, but it's a bit cheeky of him to use such a presumption in his argument. Davies didn't pick him up on this — I wonder where Davies stands on the existence of souls.)

Davies asked Lennox, "What's God doing now?" Lennox replied, "God is upholding the universe." This is the height of meaningless obfuscation. Earlier Lennox objected to Davies' distaste for a god that "manipulates molecules", and yet "upholding the universe" isn't a comprehensible description of any kind of activity. (I'm assuming here that Lennox doesn't have in his mind's eye an image of Atlas supporting the celestial spheres on his shoulders.)

Interesting discussion, but hardly satisfying. 

Go to the Unbelievable? website to follow the online discussion.

What would it take to convince you that you're mistaken?

A critical test of anyone who appears to hold fundamental - or indeed fundamentalist - beliefs, is to ask the question, "What would it take to convince you that you're mistaken?" Someone who is convinced beyond reason that their beliefs are true will always reply to the effect that nothing would convince them. This is a sure sign of unreasonable fixed belief, and it's not worth anyone's time trying to argue them out of their position.

It's a question often asked of atheists, but Michael Shermer's flippant response, "A deposit of ten million dollars in a Swiss bank account under my name," doesn't count*.

For myself, the idea of a personal God who listens to your thoughts, answers your prayers, obsesses over what you do with your sexual organs and demands worship on pain of eternal banishment to some undefined unpleasantness, is absurd in the extreme and not worthy of consideration. I therefore find it hard to imagine anything that could convince me that such a God exists. Nevertheless, just because I can't imagine it, doesn't mean it's not a possibility, however remote. There's a chance I could be convinced of God's existence, but only if He convinced me Himself, in person, in a manner congruent with my reasonable standards for evidence. I will not, however, accept his petition from any third party.

The probability of such a petition is highly unlikely, I believe, but (as I've already indicated) not completely out of the question.

There is, however, an area where I would be more likely to accept the existence of some kind of intelligent creator - though this intelligence would bear little resemblance to the God of scripture.

If scientific analysis were to reveal that the Big Bang could not have been instigated by anything other than the creative will of some kind of intelligence, science might have to concede that the universe came about by other than natural processes. But speculation about what happened at, during, just before or just after the Big Bang appears to be mired in philosophy rather than science, with doubts about whether you can meaningfully say anything temporal or spacial about an event that brought both space and time into existence. (You might also question your definition of 'natural processes'.)

Similarly, if science were to show that the presence of information in DNA could not have originated naturally, the existence of some agency that inserted the information would have to be postulated. But we would have no reason to call that agent 'God'. Just because such an agent would likely be beyond our comprehension, we are not barred from speculating on its origins.

What applies to DNA also applies to the Big Bang. Calling the originator of the Big Bang 'God', or the originator of the information present in DNA 'God', simply stops all further speculation. It's an abdication of intellectual responsibility, not worthy of science, and should be deplored.

Science has yet to explain these things, but that doesn't mean the answer is "Goddidit."

There are many arguments for the existence of God, and the Argument from Design (also known as the teleological argument) is the least weak.

(*During a recent debate in Australia between John Lennox and Michael Shermer, the moderator asked Shermer, "What piece of evidence, formula, piece of reasoning, whatever ... what would cause you to believe in God?")