Fire Back: Where the Readers Respond

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In which a Twitter exchange exposes the blind faith of an anti-theist.

Here’s a person I think we can reasonably assume is an anti-theist. Last month, he pinged me on Twitter with the following:

By “FT” he means fine-tuning. What followed was an exchange that was more coherent than the one I had with “OpenMind” (see here and here), but no less demonstrative of the main problem many non-scientist anti-theists have, which is blind faith in their beliefs and unquestioned assumptions.

Before we continue, note that the reasoning I described in my testimony doesn’t really fall under what’s called the fine-tuning argument. This argument says that the improbability of our universe having precisely the right values for the many parameters and constants that permit human life to exist — the strengths of the fundamental forces, the masses of subatomic particles, the number of physical dimensions, etc. — is so high as to strongly imply the universe was designed by a personal being. However, in my testimony, I explained that I logically inferred the existence of a rational, transcendental being (God) who created the universe based on the fact that the universe is comprehensible. Not the same thing as fine-tuning. But no matter, I was game to see how exactly the fine-tuning argument for God constituted faith over reason, so I asked.

I don’t know if Joe’s World (JW) thinks the many, many atheist scientists who’ve embraced the multiverse idea on this basis are fools or what, but I suspected he didn’t understand the implications of fine tuning, so I asked him why he made his assertion.

His response surprised me a little, because it differs from the common anti-theist argument that God is merely superfluous to the workings of the universe. JW, on the other hand, believes that order arises spontaneously only in a godless universe and that a God-created universe would be nonsensical. I pointed out to him that this is the opposite of what Christians and even most atheists believe.

There are a number of problems with his assertion, the first of which is the origin of a “clockwork” universe in which complexity just arises. He’s begging the question. The problem is underscored by his metaphorical comparison of the universe to a clock — most of us are reasonably certain that precision instruments like clocks don’t just spring into being on their own, but are rather carefully designed and deliberately constructed by conscious beings.

Another problem is that he presupposes that the God of the Bible is a capricious being who would not create a rational universe with unchangeable laws. Sure, a supernatural being could in principle create anything he wants, but that’s not what’s important here. Since JW is talking to a Christian (me), that means we’re talking specifically about the God of the Bible. It doesn’t matter what anyone personally thinks about the God of the Bible, what matters is what scripture says about God and whether that’s contradicted or corroborated by reason and evidence. When we read the Bible, we see that God is not at all a capricious being, but rather a rational being. We are told throughout the Bible that God didn’t just slap together a whimsical universe, but by wisdom created a lawful universe:

By the word of the Lord the heavens were made (Psalm 33:6)

The Lord by wisdom founded the earth;
by understanding he established the heavens;
(Proverbs 3:19)

Do you know the laws of the heavens? (Job 38:33)

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. (John 1:1)

Note that the Greek word translated in John 1:1 as “word” is logos, which also means logic, intellect, and wisdom. Putting all this together, Gerald Schroeder makes the argument that Genesis 1:1, properly translated, reads as follows: “With a first cause of wisdom, God created the universe.” (See Chapter Two of Schroeder’s book, God According to God.)

The heavens declare his righteousness (Psalm 50:6)

In other words, nature reveals the character of God. We see that nature operates according to knowable laws; God is not capricious.

As for corroboration, there’s a reason the Bible begins with Genesis. It first of all establishes the sovereignty of God as the creator of all things, but it also gives us a testable account of God’s creation. (See here for a discussion of Genesis 1 and modern science.)

What I found even more interesting than the backwards reasoning of JW was the tenacious way in which he clung to one particular belief in spite of the evidence, or rather the lack of it. I reminded him that there are only three options to explain why the universe is the way it is: necessity, luck, or God. I told him there’s no support for necessity, but he really, really wanted to believe it anyway.

It’s not difficult to define chance. The parameters, constants, all the things that make the universe fit for human life, can span a range of values. If there’s no physical theory requiring the universe to have three physical dimensions, the particular strengths of the various fundamental forces, the particular masses of subatomic particles, and so on, and no God to purposefully choose these values, then how did we end up with all of the “right” values? The answer is, a very, very lucky roll of the dice. In the multiverse, there is a mind-bogglingly huge number of universes, all with different parameters, and we just happen to inhabit one that hit the cosmic jackpot. (Incidentally, most physicists don’t seem to delight in this option. I get the impression most atheist physicists would prefer the necessity option, but as there’s no evidence for that, they grudgingly accept the multiverse.)

JW seemed to reject this notion, and he obviously wasn’t big on the God idea, so I challenged him, repeatedly, to show me which physical theories predict / require / necessitate the universe to be the way it is.

After a lot of back and forth, I finally got an answer out of him.

He admits he doesn’t know. The truth is, no one knows, and it’s deeply troubling to a lot of people, because it leaves as the only alternatives luck and God. Yet JW persists in his belief.

JW’s initial statement to me was that the fine-tuning argument was a triumph of faith over reason. But who’s exhibiting faith here? If you accept an explanation for why the universe is the way it is, then you must have evidence in favor of it or at least evidence ruling out the alternatives. Joe’s World has no scientific evidence, no physical theories predicting that the universe must be the way it is. Everything we know about the physical nature of the universe says that its various properties did not arise due to necessity. JW rejects God; I don’t know for certain if he rejects the multiverse, but I suspect he does. If so, then persisting in his belief in necessity is beyond faith — it’s blind faith.

Remember, having faith means holding onto a belief you once accepted through reason in spite of your transitory emotions. Blind faith means holding onto a belief without evidence or in spite of contradictory evidence. If you engage anti-theists long enough, you’ll find that a lot of them are the blind faithful. Christians, on the other hand, have good reasons to believe. If you’re a Christian, just make sure you can articulate what those reasons are.

Weekly Psalm 19: Jupiter

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Here is your weekly reminder of Psalm 19 — the planet Jupiter.

Anyone who has looked up at the night sky is acquainted with Jupiter. It’s the third-brightest object in our sky after the Sun and Venus. It’s also the largest planet in our solar system, a gaseous giant comprised almost entirely of hydrogen and helium. Interestingly, its size, in terms of orders of magnitude, places it exactly in the middle between the Earth and the Sun — it is almost exactly 10 times smaller than our Sun, but just over 10 times larger than the Earth.

This artist's impression shows Jupiter and its moon Europa using actual Jupiter and Europa images in visible light. The Hubble ultraviolet images showing the faint emission from the water vapour plumes have been superimposed, respecting the size but not the brightness of the plumes. Astronomers using Hubble have detected signs of water vapour being vented off this moon, creating variable plumes near its south pole — the first observational evidence of water vapour being ejected off the moon's surface.

An artist’s impression showing Jupiter and its moon Europa using actual Jupiter and Europa images in visible light with ultraviolet images of water vapor plumes superposed on Europa. Credit: NASA, ESA, and M. Kornmesser.

Some call Jupiter a failed star, but that’s an exaggeration. The defining characteristic of a star is that nuclear fusion is occurring in its core; however, Jupiter would need about 80 times more mass for this to occur, so it falls well short of the star limit. Still, it’s pretty massive as planets go, outweighing all of the other planets in our solar system combined by more than a factor of two.

Jupiter is a visual treat for the astronomer for a number of reasons: its colorful bands of clouds, its Galilean moons, and its Great Red Spot. The bands represent regions of rising and descending clouds. The Galilean moons — Callisto, Europa, Ganymede, and Io — were discovered by (you guessed it) Galileo in the 17th century, and are visible through even small amateur telescopes. The Great Red Spot is a turbulent storm that has been raging on Jupiter for hundreds of years. To give you some perspective on size, consider that two Earths could fit inside the Great Red Spot.

Great_Red_Spot_From_Voyager_1

The Great Red Spot as seen from Voyager 1. Credit: NASA.

In their own words — Max Planck

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Max_Planck_(Nobel_1918)

Max Planck in 1918. Credit: AB Lagrelius & Westphal.

Max Planck is the father of quantum theory, and is thus arguably the father of modern physics. He made an incredible leap in thinking to solve what seemed like an intractable problem in physics — the ultraviolet catastrophe — and thus the idea of the quantum was born. He won the Nobel Prize for this insight in 1918. Planck was also a deeply religious man who had plenty to say about God, religion, and science. He made the following remarks in Religion und Naturwissenschaft (1958), which are quite relevant in light of the recent posts on SFAs:

Under these conditions it is no wonder, that the movement of atheists, which declares religion to be just a deliberate illusion, invented by power-seeking priests, and which has for the pious belief in a higher Power nothing but words of mockery, eagerly makes use of progressive scientific knowledge and in a presumed unity with it, expands in an ever faster pace its disintegrating action on all nations of the earth and on all social levels. I do not need to explain in any more detail that after its victory not only all the most precious treasures of our culture would vanish, but – which is even worse – also any prospects at a better future.

Radio interviews

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“Mac” McKoy interviewed me earlier this week about science and Christianity on his show, “A View from a Pew.” Catch the show on YouTube here.

Kevin Collard of “A Soul Encountered” had me on his show to talk about my conversion from atheism to Christianity. You can listen here.

Weekly Psalm 19: The Helix Nebula

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Here is your weekly reminder of Psalm 19–the Helix Nebula, also known as the Eye of God.

The Helix Nebula. Credit: NASA, NOAO, ESA, the Hubble Helix Nebula Team, M. Meixner (STScI), and T.A. Rector (NRAO)

 

This is my favorite nebula. It’s a planetary nebula (PN), so-called because astronomers hundreds of years ago, looking through their not-so-good telescopes, thought these might have been planets. They were wrong, but the name stuck. A PN is actually the cast-off outer layers of a dying low-mass star like our Sun. (High-mass stars die in spectacular light-shows called supernovae.) In the very center of the Helix Nebula you can see the glowing core of the dead star in the process of becoming what’s called a white dwarf.

The Helix Nebula is one of the closest PNs to Earth, and if it were bright enough for you to see it with the naked eye, it would span a distance across the sky almost as big as a full Moon. It looks like a bubble from our vantage point, but that’s a bit of an illusion–we’re really looking at two disks oriented nearly perpendicular to each other.

Astronomers discovered mysterious “cometary knots” appearing to radiate from the center of the nebula in a spoke pattern, and later found these same knots in other PNs. To give you some perspective on the size of the Helix, each knot, excluding the tail, is about the size of our solar system.

Close up of Helix Nebula

“Close-Up of the Helix Nebula” by NASA, NOAO, ESA, the Hubble Helix Nebula Team, M. Meixner (STScI), and T.A. Rector (NRAO)

 

Backyard Astronomy: June 2015

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Here are some fun astronomical events you and your family can enjoy in the month of June. All you need is an inexpensive telescope or binoculars for most of these events, but some of them are viewable with the naked eye.

May 30 – June 4: International Space Station Observing Season. Believe it or not, it’s easy to see the ISS with the naked eye as it passes over the Earth. It’s got a fair amount of surface area that reflects sunlight, which means the best time for spotting it is when the sky is dark but the ISS is lit by the Sun — before sunrise or after sunset. Because of its highly inclined orbit, the ISS approaches full illumination as we near either of the solstices. During this period the ISS will be in permanent illumination, making it easy to spot. Universe Today explains how to prepare for ISS observing season. And here is a handy NASA website for predicting ISS sightings by location and date. By the way, you know how to distinguish it from airplanes, right? Unlike airplanes, the ISS has no blinking lights on it.

June 2: Full Strawberry Moon. A full Moon occurs when it’s on the opposite side of the Earth from the Sun, with the half that’s facing us fully illuminated. When it coincides with the peak of strawberry season, it’s known as a Full Strawberry Moon. Contrary to what you might think, this is not the best time to observe the Moon through a telescope. It’s not only too bright through most telescopes, but you don’t get to see the dramatic shadows on mountains and craters along the terminator (the line that separates the illuminated part from the shadowed part) that you do when the Moon is going through other phases. However, a full Moon can be enjoyed either with the naked eye or through a pair of binoculars. With a decent pair of binoculars, you should be able to see a lot of craters and some of the crater rays emanating from giant craters like Tycho and Copernicus (find them on this handy Moon atlas).

June 6: Venus at Greatest Eastern Elongation. What this means in plain language is that Venus will be at its greatest apparent distance (~45 degrees) from the Sun in the sky. It’s a great time to observe Venus, because it’ll be highest in the sky in the evening, just after sunset.

June 21: June Solstice. If you’re in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s the first day of summer. Enjoy the longest day of the year with a BBQ and a star party! If you’re in the Southern Hemisphere, it’s the first day of winter. You’ll have a longer observing night than the Northerners!

June 24: Mercury at Greatest Western Elongation. This means Mercury will be at its greatest apparent distance from the Sun in the sky (~22 degrees). Mercury is best observed in the morning just before sunrise.

Encounters with science-fetishist anti-theists

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This is the second part of the two-part article about a particular type of atheist I call the science-fetishist anti-theist (SFA). See here for the first part describing the primary and secondary traits of the SFA.

We’ll now go over actual encounters with SFAs to illustrate those traits.

The following examples are from a minor Twitter “debate” I had with someone who calls himself OpenMind. He initiated contact with me after I posted a Tweet about my testimony; more on that here. What ensued was a confusing morass of SFA talking points, most of which served to show without any doubt that I was dealing with a fairly pure example of a SFA. I tried to move the discussion to this blog, because OpenMind was so scattershot and slippery with his responses on Twitter, but to no avail. So instead I’ll categorize his responses in terms of the SFA traits (some fall into more than one category) and provide some commentary.

The stuff in boldface are the traits.

The stuff after the boldface in italics are the Tweets.

The stuff after that in regular font is my commentary.

Here we go…

Almost immediately refers to the supposed conflict between science and religion in any discussion of science and/or religion with a Christian

OpenMind ‏@MyOpenMind101
@sarahsalviander my view is that religion and science parted company as explanatory tools around the time of Galileo.

OpenMind ‏@MyOpenMind101
@sarahsalviander before them the two on most issues were almost indistinguishable.

OpenMind ‏@MyOpenMind101
@sarahsalviander since then science has provided the best explanation of the natural world and left religion, as a science, in its wake.

Science and religion have never been at odds. That’s an historical lie told by SFAs and other anti-theists to try to divorce Christians from science and science from Christianity. OpenMind does diverge from the SFA script a bit here when he says that science and religion were indistinguishable prior to Galileo, i.e. he seems to concede that they weren’t always at odds; but he frames it as though science was as repressed as religion prior to Galileo’s time, but heroically broke free and left religion “in its wake.” More on this below.

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If you beg to differ, brings up Galileo and/or Bruno

OpenMind ‏@MyOpenMind101
@sarahsalviander I think both Galileo and Giordano Bruno would disagree. Truth was suppressed as heresy. pic.twitter.com/vysIGXOV5K

Galileo and Bruno are just buzzwords for the SFA. Most likely he doesn’t really understand the history involved. More on this below.

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Denounces faith as anti-intellectual or anti-reason or anti-science

OpenMind ‏@MyOpenMind101
@sarahsalviander you don’t have knowledge, you have a #faith-based belief. #Faith is corrosive to the human mind….. pic.twitter.com/fK4mp2ESZw

This is the image he included.

blackmore_faith

I’d never heard of this person before, but she’s apparently an English atheist and psychologist. Notice how she redefines faith to suit her purpose — she asserts it’s believing something without reason or evidence. This is a secondary trait of the SFA. Whether it’s based on outright deception or ignorance is not always obvious, but my guess is neither this psychologist nor OpenMind have bothered to see what actual people of faith say faith means. C.S. Lewis, arguably the most well-known and respected modern Christian thinker, defined faith as (and I’m paraphrasing here) a belief you’ve accepted on the basis of reason and evidence in spite of your transitory emotions.

The fact is, Christianity is first and foremost a religion of reason and evidence. An atheist may not accept the reasons or the evidence as true, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t offered. If a person has read the Bible, he cannot possibly assert with honesty that Christians are required to believe without reason or evidence. The Bible is filled with reasons to believe, from the opening passages of Genesis to the resurrection of Jesus Christ. We are provided with arguments and evidence for every claim. Jesus Himself performed miracles with the authority of God before hundreds and hundreds of people as evidence for His claims. It’s ludicrous to assert that faith is belief without reason or evidence, but that’s the only way the SFA can position himself as superior to a person of faith.

OpenMind ‏@MyOpenMind101
@sarahsalviander to start with the conclusion in mind as all apologetics does is to force the mind to close, thus rewiring the brain.

Another absurd redefinition. The word apologetic comes from the Greek word apologia, meaning “to give reasons for belief,” not “conjuring up ex post facto reasons for a conclusion I already believe for no apparent reason.”

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Uses the word “science” a lot as a catch-all for responses to questions

OpenMind ‏@MyOpenMind101
@sarahsalviander since then science has provided the best explanation of the natural world and left religion, as a science, in its wake.

OpenMind ‏@MyOpenMind101
@sarahsalviander your presentation isn’t science.

OpenMind ‏@MyOpenMind101
@sarahsalviander your presentation on the other hand is not science. It is christian apologetics, the antithesis of science.

Blah blah blah science blah blah blah I hope you’re sufficiently dazzled blah blah science blah …

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Uses the word “science” in nonsensical ways

OpenMind ‏@MyOpenMind101
@sarahsalviander since then science has provided the best explanation of the natural world and left religion, as a science, in its wake.

This is a non-sequitur. Religion is not a science. OpenMind shows how SFAs seem to think that any method of knowing or revealing information is by definition “science,” and some sciences — like religion — are really terrible at science.

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Refers to any attempt to demonstrate that the Bible is not in conflict with science as “creationism”

OpenMind ‏@MyOpenMind101
@sarahsalviander wow, more creation nonsense. You’re basing this all on bad philosophy. WLC and other apologist try this trick all the time.

In another Tweet, OpenMind accused me of starting with a conclusion in mind, and then justifying it, but that’s essentially what the SFA does. He holds it as self-evident that the Bible is in conflict with science, therefore any attempts to reconcile the two are automatically “creationism” which is synonymous with “magic.”

“WLC” refers to William Lane Craig, a well known Christian apologist, philosopher, and theologian who debates atheists using robust philosophical arguments to demonstrate that there are very sound reasons for belief in God. Contrary to OpenMind’s assertion, these arguments are not “creation nonsense.”

Notice also how OpenMInd redefines an effective counter to atheist arguments as philosophical trickery. (Those nasty, tricksy Hobbitses!) This is the classic “heads, I win; tails, you lose” framing. If you don’t have an effective argument against an atheist’s claims, then you’re engaging in blind faith (belief without reason or evidence), but if you come up with convincing reasons or evidence, it’s trickery.

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Uses the word “superstition” in reference to your beliefs

OpenMind ‏@MyOpenMind101 May 18
@swiftfoxmark2 Our ancestors superstitions fascinate me.

@sarahsalviander @Spacebunnyday

It’s just a way to try to disqualify your beliefs from being taken seriously without taking the time to refute any particular claims.

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Despite displaying a near-reverence for science, does not actually know much about science

OpenMind ‏@MyOpenMind101
@sarahsalviander since then science has provided the best explanation of the natural world and left religion, as a science, in its wake.

Sarah Salviander ‏@sarahsalviander
.@MyOpenMind101 Religion was never a science. Modern science is a product of the Christian faith.

OpenMind ‏@MyOpenMind101
@sarahsalviander really? I think you’ll find science predates recorded history and our species….

http://m.rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/366/1567/1028.full.pdf …

Sarah Salviander ‏@sarahsalviander
.@MyOpenMind101 You’ll note I said modern science. And technology != science.

When I point out that modern science (that’s the term used for science that follows the Copernican Revolution) is a product of Christianity, he provides a link to an article about how prehistoric people had stone tool technology millions of years ago. I mean, it’s interesting and all, but even birds with their puny bird brains use technology. Would he claim they’re doing science?

Technology is not synonymous with science. Science and technology often inform each other or make the other one possible, but they are not equivalent. The practice of science involves using the scientific method. If you’re not following the scientific method, you’re not doing science.

Sandy Packer ‏@STPacker915
@MyOpenMind101 @sarahsalviander I have a question. If there was a nothing, then an explosion and life, what exploded? Hawking can’t answer.

OpenMind ‏@MyOpenMind101
@STPacker915 if you read about eternal inflation you might have a better clue. Do engineers still do physics? @sarahsalviander

Someone who appears to be an engineer stepped into the discussion with the above question, and OpenMind’s response was to throw something sciencey at him. (This is related to the frequent use of the word “science” as a catch-all for responses to questions.) Are you dazzled by OpenMind’s response to Sandy’s question? You shouldn’t be. With this response, OpenMind is showing that he is either unaware of or doesn’t care about the limitations of science.

One of the problems with this response is that it’s based on speculation. Inflation is an ingenious idea posited by physicist Alan Guth to explain some otherwise difficult-to-explain features of our universe, and involves a period of extremely rapid expansion just following the big bang. (Personally, I like the inflationary model, and believe that it’s correct, but it remains to be seen whether it stands up to testing.) Eternal inflation was proposed independently by physicists Paul Steinhardt and Alexander Vilenkin not long after Guth first proposed his inflation model, and posits that at least in some parts of the universe, this inflation occurs eternally in the past and the present, giving rise to bubble universes. So, the idea is, what we consider the universe could just be a bubble universe that formed out of another part of a bigger universe. The main problem, of course, is testability. It sounds impressive to answer one of the biggest questions about existence with “eternal inflation!” but we have to consider whether it really answers the question. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to bring the discussion off Twitter and onto this blog, so we could get into it more in depth. I would’ve asked OpenMind what the predictions of the model were and whether they have they been borne out by observation. The answer, by the way, is no, they have not. It’s really just a speculative idea that’s already possibly being ruled out by other cosmological models. The other problem is that it’s not an ultimate answer. Even if it turned out that evidence supported the idea of our universe being a bubble in a larger universe, it doesn’t answer the question of what caused that universe. (In fact, a lot of these atheist rebuttals to “where did the universe come from?” end up being “turtles all the way down.”)

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Is unaware of most of the history of science

OpenMind ‏@MyOpenMind101
@sarahsalviander since then science has provided the best explanation of the natural world and left religion, as a science, in its wake.

Sarah Salviander ‏@sarahsalviander
.@MyOpenMind101 Religion was never a science. Modern science is a product of the Christian faith.

OpenMind ‏@MyOpenMind101
@sarahsalviander really? I think you’ll find science predates recorded history and our species….

http://m.rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/366/1567/1028.full.pdf …

Sarah Salviander ‏@sarahsalviander
.@MyOpenMind101 You’ll note I said modern science. And technology != science.

OpenMind ‏@MyOpenMind101
@sarahsalviander Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Bacon, Harvey, Boyle, von Guericke among many others performed science as we would now recognise.

Sarah Salviander ‏@sarahsalviander
.@MyOpenMind101 You are not equipped to debate this topic. You do not even realize that “modern science” refers to science post-Copernicus.

OpenMind ‏@MyOpenMind101
@sarahsalviander and ALL the pioneers I mentioned were all performing “science” in the early post Copernican era, your claim is a #fallacy.

This guy has no clue. Modern science by definition refers to the era of science following the Copernican Revolution. It does not by any stretch include prehistorical caveman technology. When I point this out, OpenMind then responds in a way that is so incoherent that I’m not even sure what his point of confusion is. All of the people he listed were contributors to modern science, and all of them were Christians doing modern science in Christian Europe, which supports my claim.

OpenMind ‏@MyOpenMind101
@sarahsalviander I think both Galileo and Giordano Bruno would disagree. Truth was suppressed as heresy. pic.twitter.com/vysIGXOV5K

This is a SFA favorite, but it’s also very easy to refute. A little bit of research reveals that the modern mythologies that have sprung up around Galileo and Bruno are false.

The atheist version of the Galileo story is based on 19th century fabrications by John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White, and goes like this. Copernicus proposed that the Earth goes around the Sun, and when Galileo promoted this obviously-true belief, he was hauled before the Inquisition for heresy, forced to recant by threat of torture, and then jailed for the rest of his life for promoting a view that was in opposition to Church teachings. However, as Dinesh D’Souza points out in his book, What’s So Great About Christianity, the real story is more nuanced and complex than a simple narrative of the Church vs. Galileo. For one thing, the Church did not originate the idea of a geocentric, or earth-centered, universe, the Greeks did. The philosophy of the Church was largely rooted in Aristotelianism, and so there were efforts to make scripture consistent with it. Contrary to the mythology, the Church was not uniformly opposed to the notion that the Earth goes around the Sun, but was divided on it, in no small part due to the lack of evidence in support of it at the time. There is much more to this story (see here and here for succinct accounts), but the TL;DR version is this: Galileo was kind of a jerk who not only went back on an agreement he made with the Church not to promote heliocentrism, but gratuitously humiliated his friend the Pope in the process; there was not yet good evidence in favor of heliocentrism; he was never tortured or threatened with torture or mistreated in any way; the Church was very balanced in its approach to science at the time.

As for Bruno, who was burned at the stake, he was not, as popular myth has it, executed for his scientific views. Rather, his extreme and heretical views on Jesus (not the Son of God), Mary (not a Virgin), and Satan (destined to be redeemed by God) are what got him into hot water with the Church. But, like Galileo, he was turned into a scientific martyr by 19th century historians eager to give the impression that the Church has always been at war with science.

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Quotes Dawkins, Harris, Stenger, or any other number of anti-theist scientists at you

I can’t remember if OpenMind actually quoted one of these guys at me, but his Twitter feed is rife with quotes from guys like this. The quotes are usually pithy-sounding, but they invariably crumble under the least bit of scrutiny. Take this one for example

“I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.” Richard Dawkins

It’s a ludicrous claim, given that most of the greatest scientists of the Copernican and post-Copernican era were Christian. Consider this quote from Isaac Newton, a biography of the great scientist by Mitch Stokes:

According to metaphor, God has written two books—Scripture and Nature—and He is glorified by the study of either one. This view, this “belief in the sacral nature of science,” was prevalent among natural philosophers of the seventeenth century. As Frank Manuel, one of Newton’s most important twentieth-century biographers, says:

“The traditional use of science as a form of praise to the Father assumed new dimensions under the tutelage of Robert Boyle and his fellow-members of the Royal Society, and among the immediate disciples of Isaac Newton. … In the Christian Virtuoso, demonstrating that experimental philosophy [experimental science] assisted a man to be a good Christian, Boyle assured readers that God required not a slight survey, but a diligent and skilful scrutiny of His works.”

Although Newton’s intensity while pursuing his work ranges from humorous to alarming, it is put into a different light if we see it as a measure of his devotion to God. For Newton, “To be constantly engaged in studying and probing into God’s actions was true worship.” This idea defined the seventeenth-century scientist, and in many cases, the scientists doubled as theologians. [emphasis added]

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I hope this has demonstrated to my Christian readers that it’s quite easy to puncture the bubble of nonsense surrounding a SFA. Twitter is not a good venue in which to carry on a debate with a SFA. Arguing with a SFA on Twitter is like being asked to dance in a phone booth; I wanted to move the dance to a stage where we had more room to move around. When I asked OpenMind to come over here, he refused, citing my “ignorance.” He did ask me one question repeatedly that I was willing to answer, but only after he answered a question I posed to him first. For whatever reason, he refused to answer my question (typical avoidance), so I never responded to him on Twitter (that’s one of the first rules of arguing with a SFA: if you ask him a question, do not answer any of his questions until he answers yours first). Here is the question he asked me:

OpenMind ‏@MyOpenMind101 May 18
. @sarahsalviander if you’re [sic] claimed god were proved not to exist would you still want to believe?

OpenMind ‏@MyOpenMind101
@sarahsalviander if your claimed god did not exist would you still want to believe?

It’s obvious he’s trying to bait me into saying something he can dig into, which is why I had no intention of answering it as it was framed. There is a modified version of this question that’s more interesting, and I’ll answer that instead. (Let’s never mind that there is no conceivable disproof of God’s existence, and answer it anyway.) The original question, as framed, is like being asked, If it were proved that your mother didn’t love you, would you still want to believe she loved you? My answer to that would be no, I would not still want to believe that she loved me, because that would be a delusion, and I don’t want to persist in a delusion. But if I was asked, Would you still want your mother to love you? the answer, of course, would be yes. Who doesn’t want their mother to love them? So, the modified and more interesting version of OpenMind’s question is, If it were somehow proved that God didn’t exist, would you still wish he existed? The answer is yes, and I’ll expound on that in a later post.

The sleeping beauties of science

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The success of a researcher depends a lot on how influential his scientific papers are. This influence is usually determined by how many people cite a paper in their own papers within a few years of its publication. A professor of computing and informatics and his team went through millions of scientific papers to see just how long it takes after publication for a paper to reach a peak number of citations, and in the process, they uncovered what they call “sleeping beauties.” These are papers that fail to get much notice when they’re first published, only to be revived after decades, or even a century, of languishing. Included among these sleeping beauties is a paper Einstein co-authored with Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen concerning the eerie phenomenon of quantum entanglement. That paper went largely unnoticed for about 60 years until it was revived in 1994.

Nobody is quite certain why these particular papers get revived, but one interesting factor is that for many of them, the later citations come from other disciplines.

Weekly Psalm 19: Pillars of Creation

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Here is your weekly reminder of Psalm 19—the Pillars of Creation.

Pillars of Creation

The Pillars of Creation. Image credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

 

This is arguably NASA’s most famous image, first taken with detail in 1995 by two graduate students at Arizona State University.

The so-called Pillars of Creation are a huge conglomerate of interstellar gas and dust in the Eagle Nebula, some 6,500 light-years from Earth. “Creation” refers to the ongoing formation of stars in the pillars; although NASA has also referred to them as the Pillars of Destruction, since ultraviolet light from the newly-forming stars is gradually boiling off the cool gas in the clouds.

The longest pillar (on the left) is four light-years in height. To give you a sense of scale, that means you could fit over 3,000 solar systems end-to-end in that pillar.

NASA recently commemorated the 25th anniversary of the iconic image by releasing a high-def version (above) earlier this year.

The multiverse is not science

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RTB’s Jeff Zweerink explains why we should exercise caution when considering whether the multiverse is science. While there is a legitimate place for the multiverse in scientific discussion, we must always keep in mind that at the fundamental level the multiverse is not science. Zweerink quotes eminent theoretical cosmologist, George F. R. Ellis, who reminds us that the multiverse is really just “scientifically based philosophical speculation.” In other words, it’s just a science-flavored idea.