Prager U: Does Science Argue For or Against God's Existence?

Buzzword

Buzzword

New member
I see no scientific credentials in Metaxas' bio.
So in what way is he qualified to ASK yet alone ANSWER this completely inadequate question?

Inadequate because science doesn't inherently argue about God one way or the other.
That certain scientists like Carl Sagan have taken an active antireligious stance doesn't change the fact that God, like all spiritual concepts, lies outside the domain of the scientific method.

There is no testable hypothesis regarding His existence or activities.

What is testable and verified through a large quantity of empirical data, is the paranoia of religious folk, which has escalated over the centuries as scientific research and experimentation disproved many of the church's established cosmological doctrines.

But that is only due to the church's mistake in taking the ancient Hebrew mythological cosmology as fact instead of poetic verse.

“Simply put, Christians are afraid that science will disprove or debunk what they believe. They secretly worry that the next scientific development will be the one that decisively shows that God doesn’t exist, that the gospel is a fraud. They think that the more people know about science, the less they will believe in God. Christians fear science because they think it either competes with faith or is actively engaged in destroying faith. They think that science leaves no room for God; if you let it get its foot in the door, science will take over the whole house. But God is not threatened by science. If creation is the handiwork of God, and science helps us see the exquisite and marvelous workings of creation, how can that do anything but magnify God for people of faith?”
-Adam Hamilton, When Christians Get It Wrong


And that doesn't even address Metaxas' use of Argument from Incredulity, Begging the Question, the been-moldy-for-decades "It takes more faith" cliche, and generally applying hindsight as if it were a separate form of evidence.

If incredulous people didn't have a preconceived cultural concept of a divine creator to reach for, all this data which Metaxas treats as evidence for God would have simply been viewed as more reason to rejoice in our own existence.

With a preconceived concept: "God did all this! Let's sing about it!"

Without a preconceived concept: "WE [humanity or carbon-based life, take your pick] beat the odds! Let's do something with this unique existence that improves our small corner of the universe and hopefully outlasts us as a species and/or as a planet!"
 
I

Interplanner

Well-known member
Buzzword said:
I see no scientific credentials in Metaxas' bio.
So in what way is he qualified to ASK yet alone ANSWER this completely inadequate question?

Inadequate because science doesn't inherently argue about God one way or the other.
That certain scientists like Carl Sagan have taken an active antireligious stance doesn't change the fact that God, like all spiritual concepts, lies outside the domain of the scientific method.

There is no testable hypothesis regarding His existence or activities.

What is testable and verified through a large quantity of empirical data, is the paranoia of religious folk, which has escalated over the centuries as scientific research and experimentation disproved many of the church's established cosmological doctrines.

But that is only due to the church's mistake in taking the ancient Hebrew mythological cosmology as fact instead of poetic verse.

“Simply put, Christians are afraid that science will disprove or debunk what they believe. They secretly worry that the next scientific development will be the one that decisively shows that God doesn’t exist, that the gospel is a fraud. They think that the more people know about science, the less they will believe in God. Christians fear science because they think it either competes with faith or is actively engaged in destroying faith. They think that science leaves no room for God; if you let it get its foot in the door, science will take over the whole house. But God is not threatened by science. If creation is the handiwork of God, and science helps us see the exquisite and marvelous workings of creation, how can that do anything but magnify God for people of faith?”
-Adam Hamilton, When Christians Get It Wrong


And that doesn't even address Metaxas' use of Argument from Incredulity, Begging the Question, the been-moldy-for-decades "It takes more faith" cliche, and generally applying hindsight as if it were a separate form of evidence.

If incredulous people didn't have a preconceived cultural concept of a divine creator to reach for, all this data which Metaxas treats as evidence for God would have simply been viewed as more reason to rejoice in our own existence.

With a preconceived concept: "God did all this! Let's sing about it!"

Without a preconceived concept: "WE [humanity or carbon-based life, take your pick] beat the odds! Let's do something with this unique existence that improves our small corner of the universe and hopefully outlasts us as a species and/or as a planet!"
Click to expand...



You're totally wrong about the intended affect on the Christian church. "We've got to hit it with the overwhelming force, Darwin. We've got to kill God--the vindictive bugger, and all his fancy priests all over." --T. Huxley in the bio pic CREATION. (You indicated your surprise that Christians were concerned about scientists).

So you must have been asleep during that scene.

The concern is that the animal view of naturalistic life will take over. It is even expressed by Darwin to his daughter before TH pushed him. "It's the end of us, of faith, of trust, of hope, of honor." "The church may be a feeble raft, but we know it floats. We don't know if this will float."

One thing is for sure: Gen 1-11 is not fantasy, Eastern religion or hallucinogenic. It may be primitive in its expressions, but it is reality- based. There may some things that need to be clarified; for ex., is the light of day 1 a primitive atom-split release? Is a firmament overhead? Is it just the sky? But the moment we find man, he is doing artwork, worship, records. Details matter in the narrative that identify a specific time and place, which pin it down. As we would expect from homo sapiens. There are flood records all over the earth, as many as 600 independent tribes. There is the confusion of language.

It is important to do things that improve the quality of life, and Christianity has done so; it is not fatalist. But the spectre of death is also something to answer. And there are many things about this life that are unfair, so there has to be a day of ultimate justice.

re outside scientific inquiry
OK...but as it touches on empirical things, it is true. No one I know of thinks it is "about science." But it touches on several topics that it is not "about." And when it does, it is true. I might be stars. It might shame. It might gold in Mesopotamia. It might be the location of Ararat. It might be the tension between male and female. It is true, but it is not completely about any of them.

As you may know, one of the first miracles Jesus did was a double. What happened was he first said something any charlatan could say: your sins are forgiven. But the rulers of Judaism took issue. OK, he said "So you can know (epistemology) that the Son of God has authority to forgive sins" and he turned to a paralyzed person, and said ''get up and walk.'' And he did. It was seen by hundreds, most importantly, by opposition who almost immediately planned to off him.

The Bible is unconsciously like that. Most other "sacred" literature you will read will annoying try to be doctrinaire/contemplative only or try to prove itself with miracles within miracles that are fantasy. "Make-believe?" snorted filmmaker Hitchcock, "The Bible is not make-believe; there's lies, murder, adultery, scandal almost every page."

"Let's celebrate our existence!" ??? You sound like you've seen a Rembrandt and are just excited about paint, or just about the fact that you were there at the museum. Myself, I'm praising the Artist.
 
I

Interplanner

Well-known member
What does the term 'necessary' mean in this context of the necessity of God as creator if it can't be used when the essential ingredients for life are 50 that have to be exactly combined?
 
I

Interplanner

Well-known member
Buzzword said:
I see no scientific credentials in Metaxas' bio.
So in what way is he qualified to ASK yet alone ANSWER this completely inadequate question?

Inadequate because science doesn't inherently argue about God one way or the other.
That certain scientists like Carl Sagan have taken an active antireligious stance doesn't change the fact that God, like all spiritual concepts, lies outside the domain of the scientific method.

There is no testable hypothesis regarding His existence or activities.

What is testable and verified through a large quantity of empirical data, is the paranoia of religious folk, which has escalated over the centuries as scientific research and experimentation disproved many of the church's established cosmological doctrines.

But that is only due to the church's mistake in taking the ancient Hebrew mythological cosmology as fact instead of poetic verse.

“Simply put, Christians are afraid that science will disprove or debunk what they believe. They secretly worry that the next scientific development will be the one that decisively shows that God doesn’t exist, that the gospel is a fraud. They think that the more people know about science, the less they will believe in God. Christians fear science because they think it either competes with faith or is actively engaged in destroying faith. They think that science leaves no room for God; if you let it get its foot in the door, science will take over the whole house. But God is not threatened by science. If creation is the handiwork of God, and science helps us see the exquisite and marvelous workings of creation, how can that do anything but magnify God for people of faith?”
-Adam Hamilton, When Christians Get It Wrong


And that doesn't even address Metaxas' use of Argument from Incredulity, Begging the Question, the been-moldy-for-decades "It takes more faith" cliche, and generally applying hindsight as if it were a separate form of evidence.

If incredulous people didn't have a preconceived cultural concept of a divine creator to reach for, all this data which Metaxas treats as evidence for God would have simply been viewed as more reason to rejoice in our own existence.

With a preconceived concept: "God did all this! Let's sing about it!"

Without a preconceived concept: "WE [humanity or carbon-based life, take your pick] beat the odds! Let's do something with this unique existence that improves our small corner of the universe and hopefully outlasts us as a species and/or as a planet!"
Click to expand...



As for your first question, everyone is entitled to ask. The more suspicious the better. When Lewis interviewed the biologist in "Religion and Nature" he realized the person was very unsuspicious, which did him no credit. Lee Stroebel is a recent well-known Christian author was a homicide investigator for years. He had made a career out of asking "dumb" questions. I'd rather hear him summarize a situation than someone who has been theorizing things from a million years ago over and over and over.

Metaxas is a clear communicator. He has had his doubts, too. But I think what you are realizing by hearing him is that the rarified thinking of scientists can get a bit foggy when compared to what the average intelligent person expects. Just read the nonsense of the opening sentence of the NYT this week about global warming. It is really hard to believe people can take a far-flung prediction seriously--and have it neatly halved in the last phrase, as though the person was jerking back from his own nonsense. Are those the people who believe in a 'closed system of natural causes and effects'?
 
S

Stuu

New member
Interplanner said:
One thing is for sure: Gen 1-11 is not fantasy, Eastern religion or hallucinogenic. It may be primitive in its expressions, but it is reality- based. There may some things that need to be clarified; for ex., is the light of day 1 a primitive atom-split release? Is a firmament overhead? Is it just the sky? But the moment we find man, he is doing artwork, worship, records. Details matter in the narrative that identify a specific time and place, which pin it down. As we would expect from homo sapiens. There are flood records all over the earth, as many as 600 independent tribes. There is the confusion of language.
Click to expand...
A sudden inflation of space-time, 13.7 billion years ago, brought the universe into existence. The matter and energy in the universe today comes from borrowed gravitational energy from the inflation of space-time. Overall the energy of the universe is zero.

After 380,000 years the universe had cooled sufficiently that hydrogen molecules were able to form and light was able to escape. The formation of the first stars is still under investigation but subsequent generations of star formed from hydrogen under gravitational collapse that caused the ignition of stellar nuclear fusion. With enough hydrogen a star would burn quickly then release heavy elements in a supernova event.

Our sun arose about 4.6 billion years ago from the material from previous generations of stars when a supernova induced a gravitational collapse in a cloud of dust and gas. The hydrogen began fusion in the star and material from the supernova formed a disc-shaped planetary nebula in orbit around the sun. Eventually (within something like 50 million years) the material in the nebula had accreted into planets.

Our proto-planet collided with another, and material was cast out in the collision that accreted into our moon. The moon has since tidally locked in its orbit around the earth.

Although there is no theory of abiogenesis, there is a great deal of chemistry that forms candidate explanations for how life arose about 3.7 billion years ago in the form of single-celled organisms. About 2.3 billion years ago cyanobacteria began producing oxygen. About 1.6 billion years ago plants and animals split from a common ancestor and began independent development.

550 million years ago marks the Cambrian explosion, an apparently sudden diversification in multi-cellular animals. 64 million years ago a mass extinction event marked the end of the dinosaurs and the ascent of mammals.

From a common ancestor with chimpanzees 6 million years ago through a time of our ancestor species sharing the planet with many other species of the same genus, homo sapiens has existed for about the past 185,000 years and is now the only species of the genus homo walking the planet today. If you took a child of 30,000 years ago and raised it in a modern household it would be just about impossible to tell the difference compared to a child of today.

Can you reconcile that factual account with Genesis?

Stuart
 
I

Interplanner

Well-known member
Stuu said:
A sudden inflation of space-time, 13.7 billion years ago, brought the universe into existence. The matter and energy in the universe today comes from borrowed gravitational energy from the inflation of space-time. Overall the energy of the universe is zero.

After 380,000 years the universe had cooled sufficiently that hydrogen molecules were able to form and light was able to escape. The formation of the first stars is still under investigation but subsequent generations of star formed from hydrogen under gravitational collapse that caused the ignition of stellar nuclear fusion. With enough hydrogen a star would burn quickly then release heavy elements in a supernova event.

Our sun arose about 4.6 billion years ago from the material from previous generations of stars when a supernova induced a gravitational collapse in a cloud of dust and gas. The hydrogen began fusion in the star and material from the supernova formed a disc-shaped planetary nebula in orbit around the sun. Eventually (within something like 50 million years) the material in the nebula had accreted into planets.

Our proto-planet collided with another, and material was cast out in the collision that accreted into our moon. The moon has since tidally locked in its orbit around the earth.

Although there is no theory of abiogenesis, there is a great deal of chemistry that forms candidate explanations for how life arose about 3.7 billion years ago in the form of single-celled organisms. About 2.3 billion years ago cyanobacteria began producing oxygen. About 1.6 billion years ago plants and animals split from a common ancestor and began independent development.

550 million years ago marks the Cambrian explosion, an apparently sudden diversification in multi-cellular animals. 64 million years ago a mass extinction event marked the end of the dinosaurs and the ascent of mammals.

From a common ancestor with chimpanzees 6 million years ago through a time of our ancestor species sharing the planet with many other species of the same genus, homo sapiens has existed for about the past 185,000 years and is now the only species of the genus homo walking the planet today. If you took a child of 30,000 years ago and raised it in a modern household it would be just about impossible to tell the difference compared to a child of today.

Can you reconcile that factual account with Genesis?

Stuart
Click to expand...


Myself, I don't mix earth geology with the heavens, because a deluge has been shown to result in things on earth that were otherwise "millions of years." As geologist S. Austin says, in spite of being advised against catastrophism in 1968 at the UW, most of his colleagues now operate on that basis. The revolution really occurred in the late 60s he says, but after 5 years of research of Mt St. Helens, so many uniformitarian theories were shot down, it was a field day.

Otherwise, there are some facts there "provided" there has been no "interference" (--Lewis "Religion and Science"). You know the math formula of rate x time. Well, you can't prove time by rate, which is what Lewis's analogy shows. OTOH, if you have an infinite Creator, your rate is, well, virtually infinite. You refuse to think outside your box about that. See the comment on "mature creation" below.

You last factoid about the child 30K ago is interesting because you are in the range that Dr. Schaeffer and Ross have for homo sapiens, but with an attendant belief that there was abrupt appearance of mankind as we now know him with worship, artwork and records. (I do not share a ordinary-day meaning with 6days because of the overlaps of 3 pairs of days or until I know more about the primitive light vs the solar system of day 1 and 4, and then the matter of 'formless and void' which I think goes an entirely different direction than him, and contains time. )

Ie, if a 'miracle' means the moving or relocating or speeding-up of certain laws of physics, and the ability to create 'ex nihilo,' then there is no reason not to view Gen 1's days as partly miracle--certain things there are as normal as today. Man's creation, for ex., is a 'miracle' but not 'ex nihilo' as ch 2 recounts it as being like an act of pottery--forming clay. Jesus once applied mud to a blind man's eyes and restored his sight. I mean, he bothered to use the mud. He didn't just speak it into restoration as in other cases.

So somethings you have said are not fact, and some facts are not in conflict as you may have thought.

We also get into the question of mature creation. We have every reason to say that the Genesis account is referring to a mature male and female when created. There is no reason, therefore, to doubt a mature earth when created. Other than its own steps or stages or phases in the narrative. That is a game changer. In rate x time = product, it means time means nothing. Rate is everything, and that means creation occurred not slow 'development.'
 
I

Interplanner

Well-known member
Stu,
all this to say I have only responded to facts as you see them here. I know why you would not want to engage God as a fact here, but I don't know that we can.
 
I

Interplanner

Well-known member
Arthur Brain said:
Why should he have to? Science doesn't deal with the existence or not of the supernatural.
Click to expand...



"Deal with..." But if a thing that is supernatural happens in space and time, and science deals with space and time, then there is an overlap of interests and realms. Like it or not, the 1st miracle Jesus did was specifically about this overlap. And epistemology. And it was seen by hundreds, and more important, it challenged his opposition, so that they began to figure out how to nail him from that point on. IOW, there is no extricating it from the gospels. It is as solid a piece in the account as is the census of Caesar in 4 AD or so.
 
S

Stuu

New member
Interplanner said:
"Deal with..." But if a thing that is supernatural happens in space and time, and science deals with space and time, then there is an overlap of interests and realms. Like it or not, the 1st miracle Jesus did was specifically about this overlap. And epistemology. And it was seen by hundreds, and more important, it challenged his opposition, so that they began to figure out how to nail him from that point on. IOW, there is no extricating it from the gospels. It is as solid a piece in the account as is the census of Caesar in 4 AD or so.
Click to expand...
The census of Quirinus took place in or after 6CE. The confusion between the reign of Herod and the census is one of the unresolved discrepancies in Matthew and Luke.

Stuart
 
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