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Why is it almost certain that God does not exist - Richard Dawkins
America, founded in the midst of secularism as a beacon of enlightenment of the 18th century, is becoming a victim of religious politics - a condition that would have shocked its founders. The upward trend politics today assigns more value to embryonic cells that elderly people. She worries obsessively with gay marriage, to the detriment of genuinely important issues that really make a difference to the world. Conquest crucial electoral support from a religious constituency whose grip on reality is so tenuous that its members expect to be "loaded into ecstasy" to heaven, leaving their clothes as empty as their minds.
Its more radical exponents come to yearn for a world war, who identify as armagedon to be the harbinger of Christ's return to Earth. In his short new book "Letter to a Christian Nation" (Letter to a Christian Nation), Sam Harris, as usual, hits the target in full:
"It is no exaggeration therefore to say that if the city of New York were suddenly replaced by a fireball, a significant percentage of the American population would see a positive aspect in the subsequent atomic cloud, since this would suggest that these people would be by the best possible thing happen: the return of Christ. Imagine the consequences if a significant portion of the U.S. government actually believed that the world is about to end and that his end will be glorious. The fact that nearly half the American population apparently believes this, purely on the basis of religious dogma, should be seen as moral and intellectual emergency. "
My scientific colleagues have additional reasons to declare emergency rule. Ignorant and absolutist attacks on stem cell research represents only the tip of an iceberg. What we have here is nothing less than a global assault on rationality and the Enlightenment values that inspired the founding of this first and greatest of secular republics. The teaching of science - hence the whole future of science in this country - is under threat. Temporarily defeated in a Pennsylvania court, the "appalling inanity" (in the immortal words of Judge John Jones) intelligent design continually resurfaces in local forest fires [allusion to the judge in 2005 that banned a school from teaching intelligent design is unconstitutional because it] .
Delete these fires is a responsibility that is time consuming, but important, and scientists are finally being dragged from their complacency. For years they worked quietly with their science, lamentably underestimating the creationists who, being neither competent or interested in science, have dealt with the serious political work to subvert local boards of education. Scientists, and intellectuals generally, are now awakening to the threat posed by Taliban American.
The scientists are divided between two lines of thought on the best tactic with which to counter the threat. The school of "conciliation" of Neville Chamberlain focuses on the battle for evolution. Consequently, its members identify fundamentalism as the enemy and go to great lengths to reconcile religion with "moderate" or "sensible" (a task that is not difficult, inasmuch as bishops and theologians reject the fundamentalists as much as they do scientists).
Already scientists School Winston Churchill they see the fight for evolution as only one battle in a larger war: a war that is coming between supernaturalism and rationality. For them, bishops and theologians fall into the supernatural realm, side by side with the creationists, and you should not try to reconcile with them.
A recent article by Cornelia Dean in The New York Times quotes the astronomer Owen Gingerich as saying that, by simultaneously advocating evolution and atheism, "dr. Dawkins probably alone attracts more converts to intelligent design than any of the leading intelligent design theorists. " It is not the first nor the second or even third time that this argument appears exceedingly devoid of common sense (and more than a replica he quoted, with great convenience, Uncle Remus, "Please, Brother Fox, not throw me in that horrible thorny thicket ").
The followers of Chamberalain often cite the "NOMA" ("nonoverlapping magisteria"), the late Stephen Jay Gould. Gould claimed that science and true religion never come into conflict because they exist in completely separate dimensions of discourse:
"To speak on behalf of all my colleagues and the tenth-millionth time (from chat sessions handled by university scholars): science simply can not (by its legitimate methods) adjudicate the issue of possible superintendence of God over Nature. We neither affirm nor deny it, just as scientists can not comment on it. "
That sounds terrible, until you stop to think about the idea for a moment. Then you realize that the presence of a creative deity in the universe is clearly a scientific hypothesis. In fact, it would be hard to imagine a more momentous hypothesis in all of science. A universe with a god would be a totally different kind of universe from a universe without God, and the difference would be scientific. God could end up with doubt in his favor at any time, staging a spectacular demonstration of their strength, able to meet the exacting standards of science. Even the infamous Templeton Foundation recognized that God is a scientific hypothesis. Despite well-funded efforts, although there has been no evidence proving the existence of God.
To see the disingenuous hypocrisy of religious people who claim to be devotees of NOMA, imagine that forensic archeologists, due to some unlikely set of circumstances, discovered DNA evidence demonstrating that Jesus was born of a virgin mother and had no father. If NOMA enthusiasts were sincere, they should immediately dismiss the DNA found by archaeologists: "It's irrelevant. The scientific evidence are worthless to theological questions. It's the wrong magisterium. "
Does anyone seriously think that they would say anything remotely like this? You can bet what you want not just fundamentalists, but also all the bishops and all teachers of theology in the country boast the archaeological evidence to the skies.
Either Jesus had a father, or had not. The question is scientific, and scientific evidence would be used to solve it, if there was. The same applies to any miracle - and the deliberate and intentional creation of the universe could only have been the mother and the father of all miracles. Either it happened or not happened. It is a fact, one way or another, and in our state of uncertainty, we can assign it a probability - an estimate that may change as they are getting more information. The best estimate that mankind can do about the probability of divine creation is drastically reduced in 1859 when it was published "The Origin of Species," and has been declining steadily in subsequent decades, as the trend has been consolidating, plausible theory in the 19th century to established fact today.
The Chamberlain tactic of snuggling up with religion "sensible" in order to present a united front against the creationists (the proponents of intelligent design) is great if your main concern is the battle for evolution. This is a valid central concern, and I salute those who defend it, such as Eugenie Scott in Evolution versus Creationism "(evolution vs. creationism). But if you lean over the stupendous scientific question of whether or not the universe was created by a supernatural intelligence, the lines follow a completely different route. On this larger issue, fundamentalists are united with religion "moderate" in one of the fields, and I see myself on others.
Of course, all this presupposes that the God we're talking about is a personal intelligence such as Jehovah, Allah, Baal, Wotan, Zeus or Krishna. If, on "God," you refer to love, nature, goodness, the universe, the laws of physics, the spirit of humanity or Planck's constant, none of the above applies. An American student asked his teacher if he had formed an opinion about me. "Of course," replied the teacher. "He says that positive science is incompatible with religion, but speaks in a tone of ecstasy on the nature and the universe. To me, that is - religion. " Well, if that's what you choose to indicate when talking about religion, fine, that makes me a religious man. But if your God is a being who designs universes, listens to prayers, performs miracles, reads your thoughts, cares about their well being and makes you rebuild after death, it is unlikely that you will be satisfied. As I said the respected American physicist Steven Weinberg: "If you want to say that 'God is energy,' then you can find God in a lump of coal." But do not expect entire congregations Lotem his church.
When Einstein said "God had a choice in creating the universe?", He meant: "Could the universe have begun more than one way?". "God does not play dice 'was Einstein's poetic way found to cast doubt on the theory of indeterminacy of Heisenberg. Einstein became angry, in a case that became famous when theists misunderstood what he said, considering that he spoke of a personal God. But what does he expect? The headquarters of interpreting it wrongly should have been obvious to him. Physicists usually reveal supposedly religious be so only in the Einsteinian sense: they are atheists endowed with poetic disposition. I also am. But, given the very wide longing for that big mistake of interpretation, deliberately confuse Einsteinian pantheism with supernatural religion is an act of intellectual high treason.
Accepting, then, that the hypothesis of the existence of God is a valid scientific hypothesis whose truth or falsehood is hidden in the absence of evidence, what should be our best estimate of the probability that God exists, given the evidence available today? Quite low, in my opinion, and here's why.
For starters, many of the traditional arguments for the existence of God, Saint Thomas Aquinas on, are easy to demolish. Several of them, as the argument of first cause, work by creating an infinite regress, to be completed if God calls. But we never told why God is magically able to terminate the return without giving any explanation of himself. Of course we do need some kind of explanation of the origin of things. Physicists and cosmologists are hard at work on this problem. But whatever the answer - a random quantum fluctuation, or uniqueness of a Hawking / Penrose, that is what gave her name - it is simple. Complex, statistically improbable things, by definition, do not happen simply - they require an explanation. They are powerless to end returns, in a way that simple things are not. The first question may not have been an intelligence - let alone an intelligence that answers prayers and is happy to be worshiped. (cont)
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