Discussion on question by user80226: If the universe clearly suggests a designer, why do so few physicists and biologists believe in God?

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02:54

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Q: If the universe clearly suggests a designer, why do so few physicists and biologists believe in God?

A tenet defended by many advocates of classical theism, intelligent design, and natural theology is that the universe provides crystal-clear evidence of design, leaving everyone without excuse, as Christians commonly assert by quoting passages such as Romans 1 or Psalm 19. However, statistics sug...

GratefulDisciple

Without digging into the specifics of the study, the (important) question that comes to mind is this: what's the comparison with the general population of similar level of education and socio-economic background? If that turns out to be about the same, then it's not because they are scientists but because of some other factors, such as the predominant "spirit of the age" or the materialistic culture we are immersed in. Secondly, scientist work methodology is in the details (looks down to data in nature), not in cosmology (looks up to God). So the work doesn't promote religious reflection.

Mike Borden

Ultimately, it's because they don't want to. Why they don't want to is another, personal, question. There is nothing about science that prevents faith.

Ray Butterworth

"physicists … and biologists … largely fail to believe" — Are you asking that "largely" relative to chemists and geoscientists, or largely relative to all scientists, or largely relative to the general population? ¶ Whatever the case, is it really "largely" when 51% of all scientists do believe in a higher power?

user80226

@RayButterworth Largely relative to the percentage that believes in God (I'm not counting universal spirit or higher power because that's quite vague). If the evidence for design were so crystal clear, you would expect huge percentages for theism in physics and biology, percentages easily above 80-90%, but we don't see that.

Ray Butterworth

@user80226 says "If the evidence for design were so crystal clear, you would expect huge percentages for …". Obviously, just as when one continually sees the more than crystal clear effects of smoking; quitting is the almost certain result. The reality is different however: "Conclusion: Prevalence of smoking among physicians is high, around 21%. Family practitioners and medical students have the highest percentage of smokers.".

user80226

02:54

@RayButterworth Belief and practice are completely different things. Most people who smoke are well aware of the fact that smoking leads to cancer. You can believe that smoking leads to cancer and yet behave inconsistently with that belief. The polls were not asking if they behaved consistently with the belief that God exists, the polls asked them if they believed in God. Those are two different things.

Ray Butterworth

@user80226 says "Most people who smoke are well aware of the fact that smoking leads to cancer." — right, and people that have an understanding of the fine details of the universe are well aware that it isn't simply random happenstance, but are unwilling to accept a supernatural explanation for it.

user80226

@RayButterworth How would you rebut this answer then?

Matthew

Coincidentally(?), AiG just posted this video which seems to speak almost directly to this Question.

Ray Butterworth

@user80226, if I daily see people with cancer, rotting lungs, amputated legs, etc., and they almost all smoke, I will have to accept that there is a significant chance that I will be similarly affected. Yet I still choose to believe that it won't happen to me. There may be a much much smaller chance that the universe is happenstance, yet I will still choose to believe in a non-supernatural explanation. It really doesn't matter where we draw the line between improbable and impossible, because we willingly accept the probable as impossible.

Matthew

Re: that answer, it assumes wrongly that IDers (of which Creationists are something of a subset, but it isn't just Creationists that reject Common Descent) don't consider minimum viable organisms, and also assumes (without evidence) that "near enough" intermediate forms exist. It's basically circular reasoning; "there is no Designer, so a path from A to B must exist. Since a path from A to B must exist, no Designer is needed." I don't have space here for a comprehensive discussion, but in short, all it amounts to is hand-waving.

user80226

02:54

@RayButterworth What do you think about Leonard Susskind on God: youtu.be/0p-Sqo83GX0?

Ray Butterworth

@user80226 asks "What do you think about Leonard Susskind on God" — I think that watching several ads in order to find out that it will take another 7 minutes to hear what Susskind has to say isn't worth anyone's time, certainly not mine.

user80226

@RayButterworth You should use adblockers in your web browser then, I personally use uBlock Origin on Google Chrome.

Ray Butterworth

@user80226, that doesn't help with the 7 minute video as compared with scanning through a text document (or a transcript of the video) in a few seconds. YouTube is for entertainment, or visual demonstrations, not for discussions about God (or any other topic).

user80226

@Raytterworth You can read the transcript of the video, YouTube comes with that feature, it's at the bottom of the video's description section.

@RayButterworth "YouTube is for entertainment, or visual demonstrations, not for discussions about God (or any other topic)." - You are clearly not aware of many counterexamples that falsify this claim (one counterexample here)

Ray Butterworth

@user80226 says "YouTube comes with [a] transcript of the video" — And it begins incomprehensibly with: "0:00 Leonard many people look at the world 0:02 and they uh they see evidence of 0:05 something beyond the physical people put 0:09 different names on it God or whatever 0:11 but uh people sense that even many 0:14 scientists do uh you've called the 0:18 remarkable coincidences that we see that 0:21 we need to live you you call it an 0:23 illusion of intelligent design uh 0:28 why why 0:30 um it looks to me like the way the world …". As I said, it isn't worth anyone's time.

@user80226 says "You are clearly not aware of many counterexamples that falsify this claim (one counterexample here)". Are you being ironic? That video is 12 hours long.

user80226

02:54

@RayButterworth Precisely, 12 hours falsifying your claim (read your claim again if you missed the point). Anyways, feel free to ignore everything and do whatever you want with your life.

Peter Rankin

12:23

@user80226 Regarding Sidkend, here are a couple of my thoughts:

(1) He seems to think of prayer as a kind of natural law or something, that is testable and repeatable, but in reality, it's asking a Person (God) for a request.

We can't always predict what our own family members will decide, let alone God, Who has access to all kinds of info that we don't. :) God doesn't typically answer requests that are meant to "prove" Him, either (e.g., Matthew 4:6-7). I do think He can heal cancer, and sometimes does, but it's His decision case by case.

(2) He seems to "ignore?" the idea of God because it raises more questions than it answers, in his view. But don't most exciting fields do that? :) We can learn a lot about God by studying nature with that end in mind, but there's also the Bible and getting to know Him.

And if God could be fully understood in terms of science, would He even be God at all? It strikes me as Sidkend not really wanting to go down that road, and wanting rather to keep strictly to microscopes and quantum theory for instance. To me that's really sad, though, and not a good reason.

user80226

12:53

@PeterRankin He thinks questions about God are unanswerable, watch this, any thoughts?

Leonard Susskind - Arguments for Agnosticism?

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Peter Rankin

16:04

@user80226 His main point seems to be that as the line of science advances, fewer and fewer things lie "behind the curtain" of our understanding for religion to explain; and so perhaps science can explain everything, if not in practice per our limits, then at least in theory. (Feel free to correct me if I'm misunderstanding.).

(1) First, this seems to be faulty extrapolation. It reminds me of the reasoning Rab-shakeh used in 2 Kings 19:12, 17-18. He destroyed a lot of gods, and now he comes to Israel and thinks, "What's one more god?" King Hezekiah prays to God and says, in effect, "Yeah, he's destroyed so many gods, but that's because they were false to begin with."

So I'd grant that science is at war with false religion, and has done quite well against much of it. But it would be wrong for a scientist to think, "We can dismantle Christianity, just as we've dismantled the notion of the world sitting on the back of a giant turtle, etc. etc. etc." That's incorrectly presuming that Christianity is just one more such result of human imagination.

(2) Second, this seems like a conflation of immediate mechanistic explanation with more ultimate explanation. I like the illustration I read on SE recently (paraphrasing): "Why did the chicken cross the road? Because he wanted to get to the other side."

Science "swoops in to the rescue" and says, "No, no; why did the chicken cross the road? Because he put one foot in front of the other." Both are true, actually. He put one foot in front of the other because he wanted to get to the other side!

Often, science claims to have stolen ground from "religion," when in reality, it has merely given an immediate mechanistic explanation. But that doesn't negate deeper explanations.

For instance, the Bible maintains that God can often work through weather (Job 38:35). Do explanations of how lightning works negate that? No, not any more than explaining how a gun works negates the deeper explanation of human motive in the soldier who fires it.

Comparing meteorologists' best guess at the future confirms that they often have no clue what will happen, at least not in details. :) And that's just in the immediate future. The point is, why do scientists think they can show that God isn't behind certain events of weather? It seems arrogant, even in that oft-cited example, to suppose that science has "taken over" that ground.

(3) Third, it's the stuff before the curtain, that we clearly do see, which indicate a Creator. The more we learn, the clearer that becomes (e.g., molecular biology).

For him to hold out hope that some yet-unknown naturalistic explanation exists seems a great leap of faith on his part, I would say. Especially given the odds of the most basic calculations! I.e., it's not that we don't understand enough, it's what we do understand that's so amazing here.

I also don't understand his point that if we can't mechanistically explain how God creates, it's an unsatisfying explanation. But why? We can see clear evidence that it was designed, without being able to explain the details of how it happened.

I.e., wouldn't God have to be supernatural do create the universe and life anyway? And if so, He won't have a naturalistic explanation by definition, because He transcends the world. Yet the world can bear strong evidence of a Creator all the same. To me that sounds like an excuse for Siskend to defend a priori naturalism.

user80226

16:42

@PeterRankin I'm not Susskind, but this is a brief attempt to play devil's advocate on his behalf: I'm not sure if you have actually addressed his main point for agnosticism. His agnosticism stems from the fact that he doesn't see any way to understand or make progress with any hypothesis of a God that he's aware of. Since he doesn't see any feasible path to do research on/investigate God, God, if he exists, is a mystery behind the curtain.

In other words, for Susskind there is no known practical way to "open the curtain" and investigate God hypotheses (if some God hypothesis turns out to be true). Suppose, for the sake of argument, that Spinoza's God that Einstein believed in is real. How do you scientifically investigate that?

Since Susskind doesn't see any viable method to investigate hypotheses like that, he doesn't know a method to either confirm or reject such hypotheses, and therefore the default position is to remain agnostic on the matter of God hypotheses.

@PeterRankin In order to undermine Susskind's agnosticism, you would need to offer a counterexample, that is, you would need to put forward a method for investigating God-hypotheses in order to gain knowledge about them. Maybe you can put forward a concrete God-hypothesis (presumably the Christian God) and a method to gain reliable knowledge about him, and somehow figure out a way to convince Susskind that your method is indeed reliable and works.

@PeterRankin Speaking of Einstein's beliefs:

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Q: Can Einstein's reasons for believing in Spinoza's God be structured as a deductive or syllogistic argument?

I'll start with a few quotes from Religious and philosophical views of Albert Einstein - Wikipedia: Albert Einstein's religious views have been widely studied and often misunderstood. Albert Einstein stated "I believe in Spinoza's God". He did not believe in a personal God who concerns himself w...

philosophy-of-religion argumentation existence-of-god spinoza intelligent-design

Peter Rankin

16:58

@user80226 Is the question regarding the scientific evidences for establishing the existence of God as the Creator, or whether someone can explore God Himself as a Person, in a scientific way? Thanks for the link, I'm not too familiar with Einstein's belief in that way, I'll take a look.

user80226

@PeterRankin I think all of them. Of course you need to establish existence first (existence of what), and then study the properties of it, etc. Susskind is profoundly curious, so he will be interested in all sorts of "research questions" about God, how God interacts with the physical realm, etc.

user80226

17:27

@PeterRankin

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Q: Are there Christian responses to Leonard Susskind's agnosticism, which is based on his view of God as a mystery hidden behind a "curtain"?

Leonard Susskind - Wikipedia: Leonard Susskind (/ˈsʌskɪnd/; born June 16, 1940) is an American theoretical physicist, Professor of theoretical physics at Stanford University and founding director of the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics. His research interests are string theory, quantum...

science epistemology doubt existence-of-god knowledge

Peter Rankin

@user80226 Maybe I'm a little confused as to what Siskend is expecting. As for scientific exploration into evidences that a Creator God exists, many Christian scientists are very fulfilled in studying this; e.g., there's a book, Discovery of Design by DeYoung/Hobbs which goes through many examples in nature. Stephen Meyer goes into a high level of detail regarding molecular biology. Enough to keep a curious mind busy for years, I'm sure! But I'm not sure that's what Siskend means?

When it comes to exploring the nature of God through creation, there are also scientists like Water James Remine who wrote The Biotic Message which explores some of the "message" of nature from God to us through creation (i.e., he argues that nature is evidence of monotheism vs. polytheism, creation vs. evolution, for instance, by studying the structure of life). There's quite a bit there too for the investigating for a curious mind, I would say.

When it comes to explaining how God interacts with the world, I guess I don't see what he would want in that regard. At some point, the interaction of the supernatural with the natural, the immaterial with the material, must reach the limits of material science, by definition. Perhaps this "dead end" bothers him? But we can approach God in spirit (e.g. John 4:24).

I.e., suppose I were a detective who specialized in woodland tracking. We follow the trail of bank robbers who made it to a rail line; we follow the rail line to an abandoned rail car at a remote dead end; we follow some nearby footprints in the mud, and into the woods, and eventually into a remote clearing on the top of a hill, where all trace stops.

We conclude that a helicopter likely picked them up, and here our investigation with our expertise must end. We must use other means for any further exploration.

Similarly, I'd say that science can clearly point to the conclusion that a supernatural Creator made the world. It can investigate certain aspects of His character in the nature of His creation. It can study effects; but at some point, science must acknowledge its limits per its dealing only with the material realm; and any further investigation must, of necessity, be spiritual.

That's how I'm hearing Siskend, and how I'd reply. But perhaps I'm missing his main point.

Thanks for the link, I'll check it out.

user80226

18:27

@PeterRankin If you were to say to Susskind that he must approach God in spirit, I suppose he would immediately ask you many questions such as: what is spirit? do spirits obey the laws of quantum mechanics? how do spirits interact with matter? how can you manipulate this "spirit" substance (or whatever it is ontologically) to "approach" God? how do you detect God through "spirit"? what kind of response can you expect to get from God? is there a theory that explains all of these interactions?

By the way, it's Susskind, not Siskend.

Peter Rankin

22:16

@user80226 Oops, thanks for the spelling correction! I think I would approach this in a couple of ways. First, I would encourage a clear distinction between: (1) His agnosticism regarding the exitence of God; versus (2) His uncertainty about how to approach God. I think he's conflating the two. I.e., it's not logically incoherent to say, "The science points strongly to a transcendent Creator God of the universe; but Who is He, and how does one approach Him?"

Regarding the first, it is clear enough to discuss scientifically. Regarding the second, it is a spiritual question, which the Bible speaks to as well. I.e., I Corinthians 2:11-12 talks about how it takes a spirit to understand spiritual matters. Even, for example, when we truly connect with other human beings on a genuine level of friendship, we are interacting spiritually. We know that we are not interacting with mindless robots; it is a deeply spiritual thing.

But how exactly does that all work? I really don't know! I doubt any of us does. But we do not need to know all the mechanics to enjoy something; quite the opposite! A child may have no clue what programming is or how electricity works, but he has no trouble plugging in his Pacman arcade game and getting it going. In fact, biblically, it is a virtue to understand our limits here:

Proverbs 30:19: "There be three things which are too wonderful for me, yea, four which I know not: the way of an eagle in the air; the way of a serpent upon a rock; the way of a ship in the midst of the sea; and the way of a man with a maid." And Psalm 131:1 says, "Lord, my heart is not haughty, nor mine eyes lofty: neither do I exercise myself in great matters, or in things too high for me."

Or as another example Jesus gave (John 3), we may have no idea where the wind came from or where it's going, but you can see its effect on the leaves and feel its gentle blow on our face. Jesus compares the wind to the working of the Spirit in a person's life. Anyway, those are some thoughts I might have in regard to what I think is Susskind's position in that video.

user80226

23:19

@PeterRankin do you happen to know the answer to this question?

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Q: What is a list of legitimate unsolved challenges that the ID movement has raised against the theory of evolution?

The Intelligent Design (ID) movement is often harshly criticized and dismissed outright, largely due to past political and legal controversies (see Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District) and its ties to creationism and evangelicalism among some of its prominent advocates, casting doubts on the...

evolution literature intelligence

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