What I said the other day about the Virgin Birth having more internal consistency as a narrative than some of the junk that is seriously discussed in cosmology, biology and just about all of the social sciences is nothing I'm going to walk back, never mind take back. Many of the many many-worlds schemes of mulitiverse theory violate everything that the traditional critics of divine creation of our one universe use against it and add to that hypocrisy blatant self-contradiction and fantastic, unexplained powers of entirely banal and human minds, if not others.
But, especially in regard to their objections to divine creation of the universe, they make it even more absurd in that the generation of new universes happens all the time, even by our intentional acts having no intention of creating a universe. I am not aware of whether or not bacteria or one-celled organisms generate universes every time they adjust the direction their flagella are flipping in their schemes though I'd have to ask why they wouldn't.
Many atheists who reject the idea that in the beginning God created the universe we're pretty sure we live in, nevertheless believe their own actions and ours generate jillions of universes all the time. Universes that can't be observed or demonstrated to exist but which some of them actually believe in. Considering the fact that the monotheistic religions describe God as being a heck of a lot more powerful than people, even physicists and cosmologists, that alone gives their entire scheme less internal consistency than one that asserts that the God who made all of the universe and the creatures in it could intervene once in the history of human beings to cause the birth of Jesus to a virgin. As compared to my having just caused a universe to pop into existence as I stretched my painful great toe in such atheist belief, for God to have caused the Virgin Birth in the universe and among the people created by God is far more internally consistent.
Yet those schemes and others, invented at what would seem to be no more than the convenience of the cosmologist are supposed to be serious science, though as those like George Ellis have pointed out, since they are safe from being tested against observation, they really can't be science. I'd say the are far more like some of the less grounded claims of second-rate theologians than like science, only that would be selling theology short. I do think it shows that atheism, contrary to its claimed intellectual superiority, is actually far more productive of decadence than of a view of reality. Hughes Everett, the inventor of the idea was certainly that, decadent. I strongly suspect that if we have a future, if we survive the results of science and technology in the hands of and in service to amoral people, that this period will be seen as one in which atheism was tested and found far worse than religion in just about every result. Its body count per year is vastly higher than any realistic body count attributed to religion. Its impeaching of human minds is the absolute ultimate in intellectual decadence, considering the power that the "many-worlds" people gives to our every observation, squaring that with the discrediting of, in the worst cases, even the existence of the mind renders the entire effort to be a self-contradictory mush of nonsense.
So I heard a snippet of a story on NPR about the origins of the universe and the Big Bang theory and what existed before that, and the "scientific" answer was that the BB was just part of a cycle of expansion/contraction. Or something. Maybe.
ReplyDeleteA first year theology student in the 13th century wouldn't have been so certain; or incoherent.
But the finest point was the scientist's quoted statement that the universe is not all there is (which would surprise the ancient Greeks whose word "cosmos" meant precisely that), but something "more."
"God," I thought; he's saying the universe is 'god.'" Like I say, a first year theology student would see through that. Probably a philosophy student, too.
Only some of the most eminent cosmologists discount the possibility of a fluctuating universe and the various schemes for those are full of contradictions. One of the ones I like the most is to ask that if the universe has existed into the infinite past why it didn't dissolve into a state of heat-death at some point in that infinite past.
DeleteI've read lots of the answers of the multiple-universe guys in answer to their cosmological critics and the sum of those seems to be that they have to insist that their multiverses, created with physics in our universe have to be exempted from virtually all of the very laws of physics they used to invent their multiple universes.
Compared to that the Cappadocians were severely rigorous logicians.
Though I think it's hilarious how the very atheists who attribute such creative powers to human minds will also assert that the mind is no more than a result of physical causation, both a creation of the banal physics in our brains and the source of such supernatural creative powers all depending on which part of the dismissal of God they're playing at the moment.