What Becomes Of The Atheists' Non-God Then?

OK, here is the long paragraph I mentioned in yesterday's post

One difficulty is the idea of God as the "Creator" of heaven and earth.  Here we have to remember that the question about the final Whence of the world and human beings - the question of what there was before the Big Bang and before there was hydrogen, the great question of why there is something instead of nothing - is a fundamentally human question.   The scientist cannot supply the answer, because it lies beyond the horizon of experience.  But for that very reason, he cannot sweep the question aside as irrelevant or pointless either.  In trying to give an answer, it is important to remember that the creation accounts in the Bible do not intend to offer scientific information about the way the universe came into being.  What they do intend to show is what we have to call a testimony of faith about the ultimate Whence of the universe, a testimony which science can neither confirm nor refute;  at the beginning of the world is God.  And in saying this, these biblical testimonies are stressing that God is the origin of everything and everybody;  that he is not therefore in competition with any evil or demonic counter-principle;  that consequently the world, as a whole and in all its individual parts - matter, the human body and sexuality included - are in principle good;  indeed that human beings are the consummation of the creation process and the center of the cosmos, and that God's creation is already a sign of his gracious commitment to the world and to men and women - which means something of decisive importance for our lives, thoughts, and actions.  A second difficulty is the idea of God as the one who "guides" history.  How are we to understand this? If God exists, he certainly does not act in the world as someone or something that is finite and relative.  He acts as the Infinite in the finite and as the Absolute in the relative.  And I would add that God does not act on, or into , the world from above or outside as Unmoved Mover.  As the most real and dynamic of realities he works from the inside, in the world's evolutionary process, which he makes possible, rules over, and completes.  He does not act on the world externally;  he acts in the world itself, in and with human beings and things.  Does this mean he intervenes?  The answer is that he does not intervene in the way poeple have often thought.  He does not merely act in a few, specially important points or crises in the affairs of the world.  He is not a trouble-shooter.  No, he acts as the creative and complete fundamental sustainer and support.  He therefore guides the world as the one who is both immanent in the world and superior to it, omnipresent and omnipotent, with complete respect for the natural laws at whose point of origin he himself is.  He is the all-comprehending and all-pervading meaning and end of everything in the world and the whole process of world history.  He "throws dice" - but according to particular laws, as quantum mechanics and microbiology make clear.  His absolute liberty does not restrict the relative liberty of human beings, but makes that liberty possible, empowering and sustaining it. 

Quite a lot to consider, here.

First, I would say that I'm kind of wary about depending too heavily on the current state of cosmology because, that cosmology being dependent on the current state of physics which is not guaranteed to not change, drastically, if there are new discoveries in the huge chasm between what our current state of knowledge forces as the logical structure of the universe and complete final knowledge - all this tall talk about an ultimate theory of everything being rather jumping the gun - who knows what the future might bring?

The problem with contingency is that you don't know how final your final conclusions about even physics which seems solid lie.  And which, in its most attenuated reaches, lies the Big Bang and the various cosmological theories of the ultimate end of the physical universe lies.  That contingency can be seen in the lack of unanimity of attempts to come up with a final end and in the various attempts by atheist cosmologists to come up with different scenarios to avoid exactly the conclusion that Hans Kung draws from the cosmology of the Big Bang, that it is a reasonable conclusion that God, as the earliest lines of Genesis intuited, was the origin of the universe. 

I think I should point out before any atheists get snarky about what will happen to Kung's use of current physics being built on sand, that the argument of current sophisticated atheism are resting on that same sand and their use of it depends on even more attenuated and possibly non-existent arguments than Kung's.  Multiverse theory was motivated, rather explicitly in atheists desperation to get rid of that implication that not a few of the railed about in the Big Bang, an implication that Genesis got it right whereas many, perhaps most atheists got it wrong.  As late as the mid-20th century,  Bertrand Russell was breezily waving away God by claiming the universe was ever existing, something that the ideologically atheist editor of about the most prestigious journal of science, Nature magazine, was more frantically railing against the Big Bang over as the century ended.

Even the physics that so many an atheist concluded was the final picture of the universe in the 20th century produced that bad news for them, that the universe had an absolute beginning before which there was nothing that physics could address  

How indeed can you test what existed before the universe existed?  You can't.  George Ellis

In listening to debates between atheist cosmologists and physicists and religious philsophers and even, more rarely, religious or at least agnostic scientists, it's kind of shocking how desperate the atheists are in creating elaborate schemes to give even what their own field present as the ultimate beginning of the universe, even the beginning of time, a physical pre-existence that is in line with physics coming from later in the universe.  I've pointed out that one of those attempts, multiuniverse conjecture, contains schemes that violate what if a religious person violated them the very same physicists would claim were absolute laws of the universe.  I've yet to hear any of them say where the energy comes from to create new mulitiverses out of - in some schemes, something which happens continuously.  

Though I can't find the quote this morning, George Ellis, among the foremost of living physicists and cosmologists has said that even the speculations about what happened in the earliest universe grows hazy and unknowable the earlier you get because physics, the product of studying the universe as we experience it and extend that experience beyond where we can see, based on the physics of molecules, atoms, etc. that had not come about yet as the plasma hadn't yet cooled to allow that.  So the idea that we can determine what happened before even time came into being to the extent that we can call it the origin of the universe is ideological argument but it cannot be science if science has any coherent meaning.  

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While that paragraph of Kung has so many implication in it that could go in many directions - I'm most interested in the implications for egalitarian democracy, of course - but I'll limit myself to asking why his use of current cosmological belief is not as legitimate OR MORE LEGITIMATE than that of atheist-physicist-cosmological use of it.  

Kung has limited his use to the more reliably demonstrated aspects of science whereas the atheist use of it is absurdly stretched past the limits of what is reliably demonstrated, even beyond the limits of where physics and so science, can go.  

Both have ulterior motives, Kung's is to persuade people that the Creator, God, is worthy of our choice to believe, the atheists' is to dissuade people of that.  Modern physics has destroyed the atheists' previous favorite resort, the one Bertrand Russell depended on in his BBC debates with a Church of England bishop whose name I can't recall, of the steady-state universe, something even eminent physicists asserted as the Big Bang was first proposed and which some were still asserting as physical confirmation supporting the absolute beginning of the universe came in later in the century.  The current atheist-cosmological effort is to create some scheme to recreate that steady-state-state before the Big Bang, something which science cannot do.

I started by cautioning that physics and, even more so, cosmology is hardly a finished project - though it's possible the physical limits of testing theory will force an effective end to the human study of both, science and technology might also lead to our end even as those practical limits are reached.  

But what if it's true that the one and only universe that we know time, matter, energy, all of the things we know, had an absolute beginning sort of as described by our best efforts?  What happens to all those schemes of pre-beginning from before there was time?  Why, if that's true, the speculations asserted in their atheist polemics by Sean Carroll, Lawrence Krauss, Stephen Hawking and as depended on by the likes of Richard Dawkins and the comment thread atheists who depend on the scientist-polemicists  all of those multi-universes and universes fluctuating and bouncing in and out of existence are illusions, they don't exist, they never existed, they never were real.  They would be exactly what God is in their most cherished, most emotionally held wishes.   And then where would atheism be?   

Atheists should be careful or they'll do exactly those things they most despise as some of the rasher and more popular among them inevitably do when they practice philosophical speculations that aren't based in any legitimate scientific method.   Atheism is a religion.  And not a very reasonable one, it turns out.
 

*  Ellis goes on from that quote from a criticism he made of the new-atheist physicist-cosmologist Lawrence Krauss:

Thus what he is presenting is not tested science. It’s a philosophical speculation, which he apparently believes is so compelling he does not have to give any specification of evidence that would confirm it is true. Well, you can’t get any evidence about what existed before space and time came into being. Above all he believes that these mathematically based speculations solve thousand year old philosophical conundrums, without seriously engaging those philosophical issues. The belief that all of reality can be fully comprehended in terms of physics and the equations of physics is a fantasy. As pointed out so well by Eddington in his Gifford lectures, they are partial and incomplete representations of physical, biological, psychological, and social reality.

 And above all Krauss does not address why the laws of physics exist, why they have the form they have, or in what kind of manifestation they existed before the universe existed (which he must believe if he believes they brought the universe into existence). Who or what dreamt up symmetry principles, Lagrangians, specific symmetry groups, gauge theories, and so on? He does not begin to answer these questions. It’s very ironic when he says philosophy is bunk and then himself engages in this kind of attempt at philosophy.