When A Smattering Of Ignorance Is All That Is Available To The Cosmologists Why Should The Ignorant Be Slammed For Their Ignorance

Someone likes to tell me when I'm getting dissed on certain other blogs, which I've gotten a number of posts from and I expect I will in the future.   Deciding to try for something different, I won't go into what was said about me in response to this comment by "Billy B" but will just deal with what the comment says.

Kirk Cameron on Steven Hawking:
Cameron tells us, “Professor Hawking is heralded as ‘the genius of Britain,’ yet he believes in the scientific impossibility that nothing created everything and that life sprang from non-life.”
He adds, “Why should anyone believe Mr. Hawking’s writings if he cannot provide evidence for his unscientific belief that out of nothing, everything came?”
… “[Hawking] says he knows there is no Heaven. John Lennon wasn’t sure. He said to pretend there’s no Heaven. That’s easy if you try. Then he said he hoped that someday we would join him. Such wishful thinking reveals John and Stephen’s religious beliefs, not good science.”
Kirk Cameron's IQ is lower than that of Steven Hawkings' dandruff.

Longtime readers of this blog will probably know that the dissing of me hinged, not on Hawking but on Lennon.  But I won't go into that, yet again (you can search my blog at the top bar if you're interested).

I don't believe I'd ever heard of Kirk Cameron before opening the e-mail and had to look him up.   He's some child TV actor who was on a sit com I never watched and don't remember hearing of, who has developed into a religious fundamentalist, apparently.  If I'm wrong about that, I would expect to hear about my ignorance.   I don't know that he's especially stupid though it wouldn't surprise me if he isn't one of the vast majority of people who isn't as clever as Steven Hawking, who is decidedly intelligent.   Though, especially when they are speaking outside of their specialty, even the most brilliant person is quite capable of being a complete idiot.  I could make a list of eminent scientists who say stupid things outside of their tiny specialty but that would be a bit more specialized than I want to be in this post.

Whatever else you can say about Billy B's point, he stayed safely off of the question and stayed on the topic of the intelligence of Cameron as opposed to Hawking, but neither he nor the response to him that I was sent addressed the question.

 “Why should anyone believe Mr. Hawking’s writings [ I guess on the topic of whether or not there is a God, a heaven, etc.] if he cannot provide evidence for his unscientific belief that out of nothing, everything came?”

Whether or not Cameron is as stupid as a mud fence is reputed to be ugly, that's not a stupid question, in fact, the issue of how atheists can come up with everything out of nothing is something that I've yet to hear even the smartest among them begin to address.  There is a long and involved debate between the cosmologist Sean Carroll and the philosopher-theologian William Lane Craig on that issue and it's 1. extremely hard going just understanding what they're discussing, 2. the farthest thing from a settled question, 3. fraught with some of the hardest and most impenetrable questions of the philosophical bases of how we can even begin to address ultimate questions, never mind the issues of advanced physics that can only be theoretical because they go past the point where it can even be confidently asserted that physics is relevant.

William Lane Craig* is someone who a lot of online idiots who are atheists dismiss but he is a major and respected philosopher with a specialty in the subject of time and I've seen him mop the floor with eminent physicists who have debated him.   He routinely comes to those debates far better prepared to discuss the issues and the arguments of his opponents than any of them have yet bothered to prepare to debate him.   As I've pointed out here before, someone as accomplished as Lawrence Krauss was reduced to sputtering inanities and insults during one of those debates.   Another prominent atheist who was wise enough to admit Craig's brilliance was Christopher Hitchens, who didn't make the mistake of relying on a a position within the upper hierarchy of science instead of actually preparing to debate him.  Of course, Richard Dawkins famously chickened out of debating him at all.

And even other massively intelligent and brilliant physicists and mathematicians have been extremely critical of Hawking, especially his more recent stuff.  Peter Woit is the one whose criticism is what I'm most familiar with.  Though he is hardly the only one whose criticisms of Hawking's speculations entirely past where there is any possibility of evidence to support his contentions.  What I can understand of that carries the quite disturbing demand by Hawking that his branch of speculation get to be science without any possibility of verification in physical evidence at all.  Something which isn't that far removed in terms of intellectual dishonesty from the evolutionary psychology of Dawkins, which, also cannot be verified through the impossibility of observing the evidence he would need to support his speculations.

But that's a far remove from the world of blog commentators who only know whose side is whose and accept or reject statements about how everything came from nothing based, not on the first bit of knowledge about the issues and arguments - there is actually no evidence of how that could happen so logical gymnastics are all you can use in the arguments.

The issue of a universe coming from a "nothing" that is an actual "nothing" and not some thing that an atheist ideologue wants to call "nothing" so they can claim to have done what they haven't done (Lawrence Krauss, for one) is entirely important to atheists who want to argue that they've disposed of the need for The Creator of the universe.  It's also the motive for multi-universes, especially the most absurd one in which there are jillions of universes being created with every letter I type and with every character I redact, so they can pretend that the truly interesting and suggestive "fine-tuning" argument is irrelevant, since they can't seem to dispose of the incredibly fine-tuned one universe we actually have some evidence of.

I am hardly a specialist in this area but I have tried to understand those few issues in these arguments that are within my limited grasp.  I'd never pretend that I have any idea of wow everything could come from nothing or even judge which side has the better arguments in that issue.   One of the points which Craig has made was that if the universe came spontaneously from the "nothings" that various atheist apologists have asserted, on the basis of whatever, why doesn't other stuff just spontaneously and continually come out of that same "nothing".  Which strikes me as only one of the good questions he has asked in those debates.

You can't pretend to have dismissed a question by asserting that the question is stupid.  If someone wanted to criticize Kirk Cameron for presuming to have a scientific answer to the question of how the universe came into being, whether it came out of real nothing or one of the somethings that atheists like Krauss and, I supect, Carroll, insist that they, by virtue of their greater and authoritative sciencyness get to call "nothing"**or how any of the various schemes that atheists and even non-atheist cosmologists come up with so they can ignore that they can't answer those questions stackes up to reality, that criticism of Cameron's question is absolutely legitimate.  I'll point out that it is as legitimate when it is an eminent cosmologist-atheist ideologue who pretends to be able to answer those questions.  If, on the other hand, you want to dismiss questioning of those cosmologists on the basis that someone who brings up the question is a stupid-head with cooties, no, that's not a serious basis for intellectual conduct.



*  Craig is a major target of some of the more ridiculous atheist libel and slander that you can find online.  I have major disagreements with him on religion and, I would expect, politics, but he is a brilliant debater and a very respectable philosopher and thinker.

**  They can't deal with a real nothing because there is nothing in a real nothing for the universe to have spontaneously come from.  Related to that is the very good point that Craig makes that if there is an eternal past for the universe to have come from the entire ensemble of "universes" that those cosmologists posit would have had to have wound down in the infinite past before now due to that second law of thermodynamics that the same cosmologists don't want to do without.   I have no idea how that could either be true or false but if they want to include that in their scheme of things, it would seem to be a valid and impossible to overcome problem with it.  

Now I've got to get back to work.

Update:   For RMJ

The lame excuse that Richard Dawkins gave for refusing to debate William Lane Craig, for which he was critisized for his cowardice by his fellow atheist Daniel Came, Lecturer in Philosophy at Oxford and other universities.  There were other prominent atheists who slammed Dawkins for his cowardice.   Here's the event where Lane would have debated Dawkins.