Of the scientists who have debated Craig, Carroll holds up his end better than the others. I suspect he bothered to prepare, which some of the others clearly haven't. Carroll does get off topic, God and Cosmology: The Existence of God in Light of Contemporary Cosmology, on occasion, but as he is a cosmologist, he doesn't make a fool of himself as a couple of his colleagues in ideological atheism have.
He does, at times, veer into an attempted condescension to Craig, which is probably more just from the common habit of thought among big name scientists who, as their careers in research are ending, go into a retirement career as a professional atheist. How many humble atheists can you name, off hand? But I think he is smart enough to quickly realize that is a mistake with someone who has his own area of relevant expertise as one of the major philosophers who has written extensively on the question of time and who has, clearly, bothered to understand the arguments of his opponents far more than they've bothered to understand his.
It is truly remarkable how many of the big names in science clearly bring their atheism, or, more accurately, their hostility to religion, into their science. You would think that the rather hopeless quest to come up with a Theory of Everything, the holy grail of cosmology, when, as Carroll once admitted, they don't have a Theory of Everything about even one object within the universe*. Why is the question of God so important to these guys? What is it that so clearly bugs the hell out of them when other people believe in god? And why is their insertion of their ideological anti-religious obsession within science such a success when it has no proper place within it.
Another of Craig's specialties is his exposition of and extension of the Kalam cosmological argument for the existence of God (see some of his many lectures at the link). Which shouldn't be listened to as a proof, I believe as careful a philosopher as Craig wouldn't claim it as a proof but as a persuasive argument. I will say that even being somewhat resistant to that form of argument it can be persuasive. But the problems I find with it as an argument for the existence of God are the same as those I have with Carroll's and the other anti-religious cosmologists arguments using cosmology to argue against God.
As I said here recently, if in the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth, there is nothing about the universe that could disprove the existence of God the Creator, nothing Carroll comes up with is outside of that universe discussed in that famous sentence. Whatever comes after that by way of human understanding of that universe, it doesn't overturn that understanding of its beginning. Atheists in physics and cosmology have been twisting themselves in knots to try to avoid a beginning of the universe, of time, space, because they hate that, if the universe came from a nothing that is nothing, that has no material explanation that is susceptible to science. The extent to which those guys are willing to put science, logic, everything on their altar of materialism is the proof of how much their intention is ideological and not scientific. And they are willing to light the kindling and burn it up. And the extent to which other scientists allow them to do that, passing it off to the wider public as being a scientific pursuit is truly stunning.
No matter what you might think of Craig's arguments and his theological orientation, he is a very accomplished and careful philosopher and he wouldn't violate the rules of scientific discourse in the way that Carroll, Lawrence Krauss, a parade of minor figures in the social-sciences who have argued with him and most of the big name scientist-atheist polemicists do. It's really the same thing that the "creation scientists" do, just for a different religious orientation.
The fact is that no matter how much physics figures out it will never have a comprehensive knowledge of the universe and every theoretical beginning of it that avoids there being a real beginning merely moves the problem back. And, cosmology being what it is, I wouldn't bet a dime that anything Carroll and his generation comes up with will stand even twenty years. It won't work to kill off God, though it will come up with a lot of preposterous ideas that will be discredited. The Materialist's Creation Museum generates one creation fable after another after another, it has been for more than a century. Those rise, are inserted into the public discussion, are discredited and fall. There must be some kind of slow motion discrediting of the effort as some of the onlookers notice that what they were sold as science is shuffled off the stage in silence. The question for science is how long and at what public cost those discredited theories can pile up before it discredits science. Maybe that's something other scientists without an ideological obsession on this issue should start to press.
*You will have to forgive me for pointing out, yet once,, again, that I once got Sean Carroll to answer a question during a long argument about whether or not physics was on the verge of having a "theory of everything". It is something I'm rather proud of having gotten after many, many days of trying to get it.
I'll make a deal,if Sean will answer the question I put to him, I won't post another comment here. Is there a single object that physics knows comprehensively and exhaustively?
Sean Carroll said, Anthony @ 21: "No." Thanks for commenting.
Considering the context of the two brawls on his blog in which the question was posed, I'm not convinced his thanks were sincere. I believe at least two rather involved posts he wrote were in response to my question, including the one in which he gave me his one and only response.
I'll make a deal,if Sean will answer the question I put to him, I won't post another comment here. Is there a single object that physics knows comprehensively and exhaustively?
Sean Carroll said, Anthony @ 21: "No." Thanks for commenting.
Considering the context of the two brawls on his blog in which the question was posed, I'm not convinced his thanks were sincere. I believe at least two rather involved posts he wrote were in response to my question, including the one in which he gave me his one and only response.
Humble atheists? I'm one! And a Quaker, too!
ReplyDeleteI'm perfectly comfortable with a universe that just is and could be created ex nihilo. I'm perfectly comfortable with that universe being created by some Being that has always existed, too. Not something to kill over, but I see the fun in arguing about it online. I just prefer arguing about stuff like gun law and sci-fi tropes. :-)
Oh, I love to argue it, it's just that I haven't found the other side to be especially interested in argument but in derision and ignorant assertion, not to mention jr. high style bullying. It's what led me, after a lifetime of overlooking that kind of thing on principle and by inclination, to conclude that most peoples' atheism isn't much different from the most extreme of Biblical fundamentalism.
ReplyDeleteI have, even more so, come to the conclusion that materialism, or as Carroll would have it, "naturalism (can't shake the use of "naturalist" to mean nudist) is fatal to liberalism, in the traditional American sense of the word. As such, I think its adoption among the college educated population, contributes to the failure of the left.
A day or two ago I was listening to a program on the radio talking that mentioned how enthusiastic and vigorous evangelicals are in pursuing their political goals. If there is one thing that the secular left has not been it is enthusiastic and vigorous. The religious left that pushed through the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s was enthusiastic and vigorous and extremely brave. I think that religious belief was the difference. The Marxists and anarchists who had a comparable level of energy were almost exclusively motivated by their devotion to a cult within those ideologies and the methods they used in their futile attempts to gain political results were heavy on violence. Most Marxists and anarchists have been a lot more interested in their ridiculous internal wars using ideological purity as a weapon against each other than they have been in passing legislation that makes life better.
cont. There is no hugely profitable industry to power any part of the left such as that behind the gun industry, tapping into paranoia and the Hollywood created cult of manly violence. The closest thing to that on the left has been the publishing and media industry financing of "free speech-free press" absolutism. I maintain that the results of that liberalish-libertarian effort has far more favored the right than the liberal effort to make like less depraved and more equal. So I doubt that the billionaire financing of a "left" will produce a democracy protecting equal rights on the basis of civic morality.
DeleteI don't think I'd have come to these conclusions if I'd never gone online and was exposed to the thinking of thousands of materialists, unfiltered, unedited and put that together with what I'd learned by witnessing the decline of the left from its high point in the early 1960s. The few areas of success which we have seen then have been spotty and are insecurely resting in a generally reactionary culture that has destroyed much of the progress that was made in the past. I think the problem is the nature of secular thinking by people on the left, who never were under the obligation to keep their religious belief out of their politics, the wall of separation is between the church and the state, in the official expression of the state and it employees. It has been a disastrous disempowerment of liberalism to make that mistake. Atheists on the left have never had a right to the gagging of religious liberals and leftists. Not every atheist I've known has insisted on it but most have.
Liberalism can not succeed as an impartial program that is mostly interested in setting a "level playing field, " what I've called "process liberalism" in the past. Liberals have no right to waste its efforts in pretending that economic power that will use every weakness in The People to game things for their advantage. Liberals working to give them a "level playing field" enable them. I think that is as true of groups within the left who insist on other things out of some misguided sense of "fairness" but which will end up in harming the real goals of liberalism, equality, economic justice, education, peace, etc. But those claims for fairness are, at times, illegitimate and they have often had an effect on disempowering the left, alienating people who could be convinced to join the effort to make progress, and, in the case of materialism, it is basically destructive of the effort by claiming that free will, inherent rigthts, equality and the moral obligation to respect those are either delusional or that those things are the creation of social consensus. That last one is an empowerment of the majority which could choose to never "create rights" for people whose suppression and subjugation benefits them. It is a return to the worst of the past, the seeming lack of danger in the seeming harmlessness of contented university professors who preach materialism is a false front for the manifestation of their philosophy in history. Intellectual materialism is only a different view of the vulgar materialism that is the foundation of the political right.
I could go on but this will turn into one of my 4,000 word posts if I keep going on.
I'm glad to have you as a reader, NTodd.
I was (still am) perfectly comfortable with a universe created ex nihilo. It was in seminary I finally was taught, and understood, that God=Creator was a confessional statement, not a statement of empirical fact (nor need it be). It was an expression of God's relationship to all that can be known, of the intimacy and immanence and (yet, still) transcendence of God.
ReplyDeleteAnd so I don't care much for the combat over the idea or the "truth" (I have a different definition of "truth" than simply what can be established with the five senses and the instruments that feed information to those senses) of how the universe came to be. Whether it is explained by recourse to God as Cosmic Thunderer (most people think this is the God of the Hebrew Scriptures, betraying their ignorance of those books; and yes, all present company as of my comment here is excepted from "most people") or to multi-verses, I don't really care.
The dominant question, and the one we work very VERY hard to ignore (again, present company excepted) is the issue of justice, as discussed by Rev. Wright above.
Justice? Faith with works? How quaint.
DeleteI know. I'm hopelessly anachronistic.
DeleteIt's very sweet.
ReplyDelete