50 Famous Academics & Scientists Talk About God

Jonathan Parara­jas­ing­ham has pulled togeth­er a mon­tage of 50 renowned aca­d­e­mics, most­ly all sci­en­tists, talk­ing about their thoughts on the exis­tence of God. The list includes includes 16 Nobel prize win­ners, and a bun­dle of rec­og­niz­able names, includ­ing Richard Feyn­man, Steven Pinker, Oliv­er Sacks, Bertrand Rus­sell, Stephen Hawk­ing, and Leonard Susskind. The full list appears below the jump. (Click “more.”) Click here to find anoth­er 50 Aca­d­e­mics Talk­ing About God and 30 renowned writ­ers doing the same.


1. Lawrence Krauss, World-Renowned Physi­cist
2. Robert Cole­man Richard­son, Nobel Lau­re­ate in Physics
3. Richard Feyn­man, World-Renowned Physi­cist, Nobel Lau­re­ate in Physics
4. Simon Black­burn, Cam­bridge Pro­fes­sor of Phi­los­o­phy
5. Col­in Blake­more, World-Renowned Oxford Pro­fes­sor of Neu­ro­science
6. Steven Pinker, World-Renowned Har­vard Pro­fes­sor of Psy­chol­o­gy
7. Alan Guth, World-Renowned MIT Pro­fes­sor of Physics
8. Noam Chom­sky, World-Renowned MIT Pro­fes­sor of Lin­guis­tics
9. Nico­laas Bloem­ber­gen, Nobel Lau­re­ate in Physics
10. Peter Atkins, World-Renowned Oxford Pro­fes­sor of Chem­istry
11. Oliv­er Sacks, World-Renowned Neu­rol­o­gist, Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty
12. Lord Mar­tin Rees, Astronomer Roy­al
13. Sir John Gur­don, Pio­neer­ing Devel­op­men­tal Biol­o­gist, Cam­bridge
14. Sir Bertrand Rus­sell, World-Renowned Philoso­pher, Nobel Lau­re­ate
15. Stephen Hawk­ing, World-Renowned Cam­bridge The­o­ret­i­cal Physi­cist
16. Ric­car­do Giac­coni, Nobel Lau­re­ate in Physics
17. Ned Block, NYU Pro­fes­sor of Phi­los­o­phy
18. Ger­ard ‘t Hooft, Nobel Lau­re­ate in Physics
19. Mar­cus du Sautoy, Oxford Pro­fes­sor of Math­e­mat­ics
20. James Wat­son, Co-dis­cov­er­er of DNA, Nobel Lau­re­ate
21. Col­in McGinn, Pro­fes­sor of Phi­los­o­phy, Mia­mi Uni­ver­si­ty
22. Sir Patrick Bate­son, Cam­bridge Pro­fes­sor of Ethol­o­gy
23. Sir David Atten­bor­ough, World-Renowned Broad­cast­er and Nat­u­ral­ist
24. Mar­t­i­nus Velt­man, Nobel Lau­re­ate in Physics
25. Pas­cal Boy­er, Pro­fes­sor of Anthro­pol­o­gy
26. Partha Das­gup­ta, Cam­bridge Pro­fes­sor of Eco­nom­ics
27. AC Grayling, Birk­beck Pro­fes­sor of Phi­los­o­phy
28. Ivar Giaev­er, Nobel Lau­re­ate in Physics
29. John Sear­le, Berke­ley Pro­fes­sor of Phi­los­o­phy
30. Bri­an Cox, Par­ti­cle Physi­cist (Large Hadron Col­lid­er, CERN)
31. Her­bert Kroe­mer, Nobel Lau­re­ate in Physics
32. Rebec­ca Gold­stein, Pro­fes­sor of Phi­los­o­phy
33. Michael Too­ley, Pro­fes­sor of Phi­los­o­phy, Col­orado
34. Sir Harold Kro­to, Nobel Lau­re­ate in Chem­istry
35. Leonard Susskind, Stan­ford Pro­fes­sor of The­o­ret­i­cal Physics
36. Quentin Skin­ner, Pro­fes­sor of His­to­ry (Cam­bridge)
37. Theodor W. Hän­sch, Nobel Lau­re­ate in Physics
38. Mark Bal­a­guer, CSU Pro­fes­sor of Phi­los­o­phy
39. Richard Ernst, Nobel Lau­re­ate in Chem­istry
40. Alan Mac­far­lane, Cam­bridge Pro­fes­sor of Anthro­pol­o­gy
41. Pro­fes­sor Neil deGrasse Tyson, Prince­ton Research Sci­en­tist
42. Dou­glas Osheroff, Nobel Lau­re­ate in Physics
43. Hubert Drey­fus, Berke­ley Pro­fes­sor of Phi­los­o­phy
44. Lord Col­in Ren­frew, World-Renowned Archae­ol­o­gist, Cam­bridge
45. Carl Sagan, World-Renowned Astronomer
46. Peter Singer, World-Renowned Bioethi­cist, Prince­ton
47. Rudolph Mar­cus, Nobel Lau­re­ate in Chem­istry
48. Robert Foley, Cam­bridge Pro­fes­sor of Human Evo­lu­tion
49. Daniel Den­nett, Tufts Pro­fes­sor of Phi­los­o­phy
50. Steven Wein­berg, Nobel Lau­re­ate in Physics


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  • José Porcher says:

    Excel­lent post!

    A note: Rus­sell did win a Nobel, so it’s a lit­tle redun­dant to say that ‘The list includes includes 16 Nobel prize win­ners, and a bun­dle of rec­og­niz­able names, includ­ing … Bertrand Rus­sell’ :)

  • Andrew says:

    I won­der if his next video on Chris­tians sci­en­tists giv­ing their views on the divine will be post­ed to this site. As it is, this video is pret­ty bla­tant­ly sided towards the side of the spec­trum of belief in a divine over­sight as fol­ly. I came expect­ing thought­ful dis­course between oppos­ing view­points, but instead was left with a col­lec­tion of snip­pets all assert­ing the exact same view­point.

    Con­sid­er­ing the top­ic, I won­der why Fran­cis Collins (the head of the genet­ic human Genome project) or Ray­mond Vahan Dama­di­an (inven­tor of the MIR) or per­haps the dozens of oth­er Nobel Prize win­ners in sci­ence who open­ly pro­fess to be Chris­t­ian, let alone oth­er reli­gions. Charles Hard Townes, Ian Bar­bour, Free­man Dyson, Antoni­no Zichichi, John Polk­ing­horne, Owen Gin­gerich, John T. Houghton, R. J. Berry, Michał Heller, Ghil­lean Prance, Don­ald Knuth, Eric Priest, Christo­pher Isham, Hen­ry F. Schae­fer, III, Robert T. Bakker, Ken­neth R. Miller, Fran­cis Collins, Simon C. Mor­ris, John D. Bar­row, Denis Alexan­der, Stephen Barr, Mar­tin Nowak, John Lennox, and Jen­nifer Wise­man. Just to name a few con­tem­po­rary bril­liant­ly and inter­na­tion­al­ly rec­og­nized sci­en­tists who all pro­fess explic­it­ly to be fol­low­ers of Christ.

  • Lucien says:

    It is sim­ple, we all see the same world around us — Nobel lau­re­ate or not — but, what we see is still a small ref­er­ence of what God has in full view? I want some of these bril­liant minds to prove to me that there Isn’t a God!?

  • Fred says:

    Since God is not a sci­en­tif­ic hypoth­e­sis, how does being a world class sci­en­tist give one any more exper­tise that the any­one else?

  • The Outlaw Philosopher says:

    Oh dear.
    Andrew: The views of most of the the­is­tic sci­en­tists you men­tion are pret­ty well pub­li­cized, since either they or the Tem­ple­ton foun­da­tion have cho­sen to make an issue of it. Gen­er­al­ly (not uni­ver­sal­ly), non­the­ist aca­d­e­mics are qui­eter about these things. I sup­pose the pur­pose of the video was to high­light the thoughts of some of these fig­ures (I notice Dawkins is absent, too.) Fur­ther­more, some of the peo­ple you list are much more the­olo­gian than sci­en­tist. That isn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly a com­plaint, but we prob­a­bly can guess what the opin­ion of a the­olo­gian will be on God’s exis­tence. That said, Free­man Dyson, who you name, does have a gen­uine­ly inter­est­ing, though per­haps some­what, ah, hereti­cal, per­spec­tive on reli­gion. He would be worth lis­ten­ing to [though, I sub­mit, utter­ly wrong], as might be some of the oth­ers.

    Lucien: Prov­ing there isn’t a God is pret­ty hard. Of course, prov­ing the nonex­is­tence of any­thing is pret­ty hard unless it involves a log­i­cal con­tra­dic­tion. Prove there are no uni­corns. Of course, you’re prob­a­bly sat­is­fied that there are no uni­corns on the basis that nobody has ever seen one, and they are not need­ed to explain any empir­i­cal phe­nom­e­non. It’s not a proof, per se, but it’s a good (and sci­en­tif­ic) argu­ment against them. The same applies, mutatis mutan­dis, to god.

    Fred: Well, it depends what you mean by God. Cer­tain­ly the god of the philoso­phers isn’t a sci­en­tif­ic hypoth­e­sis, though it seems to me that AC Grayling, say, would be qual­i­fied to com­ment on it. The god of the Apos­tles’ Creed, though, who is tri­une and imma­nent and wreaks mir­a­cles on earth, is cer­tain­ly a sci­en­tif­ic propo­si­tion.

  • Sean says:

    Andrew.

    It is inter­est­ing that you ask if the pro­duc­er’s next video will be on Chris­t­ian Sci­en­tists to present their thoughts on the divine. This, of course, presents a false dichoto­my. You seem to imag­ine that only Chris­tians can rep­re­sent the divine. Why not Mus­lims or Hin­dus, or Bud­dhists or Mor­mons, or Ani­mists or Catholics, or take your pick from a hun­dred thou­sand dif­fer­ent sects, reli­gions and beliefs? Each one mutu­al­ly exclu­sive in some way and each one with no idea how to dis­cern any true posi­tion from the oth­er nine­ty-nine thou­sand nine hun­dred and nine­ty-nine, oth­er than “Faith”.

    This is the major prob­lem with hypoth­e­sis­ing super­nat­ur­al enti­ties or pos­tu­lat­ing thoughts on the “divine”: there is no avail­able or demon­stra­ble real­i­ty to test them against.

    You may as well ask peo­ple to state how many angels can dance on a pin­head or what mag­ic spells Har­ry Pot­ter will have learned by the time he is 30.

  • Sean says:

    Lucien — Put for­ward a testable claim about your “God” and I expect sci­en­tists would be hap­py to see if it is cor­rect. Would you accept their find­ings?

    Oth­er­wise, can you prove to me there is no invis­i­ble non-cor­po­re­al drag­on that emits non-heat­ing fire, cur­rent­ly sus­pend­ed in my garage? (Apolo­gies to Carl Sagan)

    Fred — If your ver­sion of a god is not a sci­en­tif­ic hypoth­e­sis then it mat­ters not what you believe about it because it is there­fore untestable.

  • Sinjin Smythe says:

    Lucien says … prove to me that there Isn’t a God!?

    Since it is the reli­gion­ist that is assert­ing that God exists, does­n’t the bur­den of proof fall upon him?

    No one asks the anti-San­ta Clau­sian to prove San­ta does­n’t exists do they?

    No, the bur­den of proof is yours Lucien. Until you or any­one else can prove God exists ratio­nal peo­ple will need to depend on as fact that such enti­ty does not exist.

    To do oth­er­wise is irra­tional.

  • Ray says:

    Den­nett makes an excel­lent point.

  • Theophylact says:

    A small quib­ble: James D. Wat­son (and Fran­cis Crick) did­n’t dis­cov­er DNA; they worked out its struc­ture.

  • Matt says:

    Andrew,

    Please allow me to pro­pos­es a wager… You iden­ti­fy an amputee, then pro­ceed to pray their miss­ing limb regrows itself. This is some­thing med­ical sci­ence can­not do (yet) so the result would be unam­bigu­ous. Any amount you wish to wager is fine. When you are ready to admit defeat, I’ll post a pay­pal link.

    We both know the odds of you win­ning, but let’s play along any­ways. If you win I will either pay you, or a char­i­ty of your choice. I include the car­i­ty option so your god does­n’t think you accept­ed the wager for mate­ri­al­is­tic rea­sons. My pref­er­ence is a char­i­ty for vic­tims of church abuse, but real­ly, its your choice.

    One last thing, it must be a human amputee. Starfish limbs or lizard tails don’t count. Those species have evolved the abil­i­ty to regen­er­ate, so they don’t have to rely on a god.

    Deal?

  • Matt says:

    Sor­ry, meant to address that post to Lucien

  • Hanoch says:

    It is remark­able and amus­ing to see how des­per­ate athe­ists are to “prove” the truth of their brand of faith.

    The open­ing the­sis of this polemic states that the more “sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly lit­er­ate” and “intel­lec­tu­al­ly hon­est” a per­son, the more like­ly they will “dis­be­lieve in any­thing super­nat­ur­al.” The irony here is rich because only the most intel­lec­tu­al­ly dis­hon­est per­son could buy into such non­sense.

    First, there are many very promi­nent sci­en­tists who are believ­ers or agnos­tic. In order to accept the film’s the­sis, there­fore, one must assume that all believ­ing of these dis­sent­ing sci­en­tists are sim­ply biased and/or intel­lec­tu­al­ly defi­cient.

    Sec­ond, sci­ence only deals with what can be observed by human beings in the nat­ur­al world. Thus, if there were super­nat­ur­al phe­nom­e­na, by def­i­n­i­tion, they would not be sub­ject to inquiry by the sci­en­tif­ic method. Giv­en the lim­i­ta­tions on sci­ence, the athe­ist must assume that any­thing that is not ulti­mate­ly observ­able by the sens­es of the human being can­not pos­si­bly exist. This is obvi­ous­ly quite a leap of faith.

    Third, sci­ence rec­og­nizes that effects have caus­es. Thus, the nat­ur­al world must have had some ori­gin and cause. The athe­ists are at a loss, how­ev­er, when they deal with this prob­lem and they turn to very “unsci­en­tif­ic” notions (i.e., the uni­verse had no cause). Rather than con­cede with “intel­lec­tu­al hon­esty” that the nat­ur­al world may have been cre­at­ed through some force out­side the nat­ur­al world (i.e., a “super­nat­ur­al” cause), they are con­tent to fall back on their faith that if human beings can­not detect it, it can­not exist.

  • Telmo says:

    Athe­ism is no brand of faith. Believ­ing in ancient gods and books is absurd at this time and age. Maybe the uni­verse does have a cause (which would need a cause or sev­er­al caus­es itself) but obvi­ous­ly it is not the god of the Bible or any oth­er man’s con­ceived super­sti­tion. Stop com­plain­ing and grow up.

  • San Ban says:

    “In order to accept the film’s the­sis, there­fore, one must assume that all believ­ing of these dis­sent­ing sci­en­tists are sim­ply biased and/or intel­lec­tu­al­ly defi­cient.

    Any sci­en­tist that asserts there is any evi­dence for the exis­tence of the super­nat­ur­al would swift­ly be chal­lenged to present it, and have their god hypoth­e­sis test­ed. We all remem­ber what hap­pened to the cold fusion guys. How­ev­er, human beings may hold all man­ner of illog­i­cal and con­tra­dic­to­ry beliefs, simul­ta­ne­ous­ly or seri­al­ly, with­out being mad or bad. Frances Collins is a notable exam­ple as are such lumi­nar­ies as Sir Isaac New­ton and Free­man Dysaon.

  • Harry Kroto says:

    Dear Andrew
    Of course one can find some emi­nent sci­en­tists who do pro­fess belief in soem sort of mys­ti­cal enti­ty. How­ev­er, for what it is worth, two sur­veys of US Nation­al Acad­e­my of Sci­ences mem­bers and one of UK Roy­al Soci­ety Fel­lows (Note — only 25% respond­ed) indi­cate that 92% of both organ­i­sa­tions are fee­thinkers, athe­ists or agnos­tics. In inter­views with Nobel Lau­re­ates it is ca 9:1. So this ratio should be fold­ed into your request for equal time. Basi­cal­ly you have a list but the list of non-believ­ing emi­nent sci­eitists is 10 times longer — for what it is worth!

  • Winter says:

    Hanoch -

    Con­cern­ing your first objec­tion, there is a cer­tain ethos in most of the nat­ur­al sci­ences, which most­ly per­tains to mak­ing claims of ver­i­fi­able nature. It’s not hard to make a case of sci­en­tists dis­sent­ing from this ethos being intel­lec­tu­al­ly dis­hon­est.

    Con­cern­ing your sec­ond objec­tion, one may claim this of any super­nat­ur­al enti­ty. If one accepts that super­nat­ur­al enti­ties are beyond nat­u­ral­ist rea­son­ing, one must remain silent about their qual­i­ties, thus silenc­ing all the­ists.

    Con­cern­ing your third objec­tion, the same argu­ment holds. Even if I were to accept the neces­si­ty of a design­er, we could derive no infor­ma­tion about him. Besides, there are a num­ber of alter­nate expla­na­tions.
    Also, con­sid­er­ing the sin­gu­lar­i­ty of space and time giv­en at the begin­ning of the uni­verse, “before” is not a well-defined term. In this sense, no cre­ator could have exist­ed pri­or to the uni­verse.

  • Roger Scott says:

    James Wat­son was not the co-dis­cov­er­er of DNA, he was the co-dis­cov­er­er of the struc­ture of DNA.

  • Andrew says:

    Sean,

    The only rea­son I specif­i­cal­ly men­tioned Chris­tian­i­ty over oth­er reli­gions is because the author of the video men­tioned he was plan­ning on doing one on Chris­tian­i­ty.

    Har­ry Kro­to,

    I am aware that sci­en­tists who pro­fess to belong to an orga­nized reli­gion are in an extreme minor­i­ty. This is due, as the Krauss men­tions, to the fact sci­en­tists give very lit­tle thought to the divine. But since the top­ic of the video was about their thought on the divine, I would have sus­pect­ed that it would include at least a few peo­ple who actu­al­ly had dis­sent­ing opin­ions on the divine.

    Based on the video title I had sus­pect­ed a thought­ful dis­course between sci­en­tists of oppos­ing views on the divine would be giv­ing their rea­son­ing behind what they believe. Instead it is mere­ly a com­pi­la­tion of 33 sci­en­tists and 17 oth­er aca­d­e­mics cit­ing almost exact­ly the same thing.

    It was hard­ly enlight­en­ing or any­thing that has­n’t been heard hun­dreds of times before.

  • Fred says:

    I always find it kind of fun­ny to hear athe­ists talk about belief in God. They sound so sil­ly most of the time. As an ortho­dox Jew, I can safe­ly say that the God the a athe­ists don’t believe in, I don’t believe in either.

  • Rich R says:

    @Fred
    It’s a com­mon com­plaint that is sim­i­lar to the “no true Scots­man” fal­la­cy, to hear “I don’t believe in that god either”. Excuse us for not know­ing your exact fla­vor of the­ol­o­gy. It’s hard­ly our fault that no two god believ­ers have iden­ti­cal thoughts about the same deity. I think it’s explain­able why this is, how­ev­er.

    What you are miss­ing, as well as the per­son above who tried to clum­si­ly shift the bur­den of proof, is that until you pro­vide suf­fi­cient rea­son to the non-believ­er, the cor­rect posi­tion is to not believe in your god either. You are the one mak­ing the claim of exis­tence. So when you get around to explain­ing your god, remem­ber to include your suf­fi­cient rea­sons.

  • Sean says:

    @Fred

    “As an ortho­dox Jew, I can safe­ly say that the God the a athe­ists don’t believe in, I don’t believe in either.”

    And as an athe­ist I can safe­ly say that the gods you don’t believe in, I don’t believe in either. I just go one more and include yours — unless of course you have some evi­dence…?

  • Sean says:

    @Andrew

    I was not aware that the pro­duc­er was plan­ning a “Chris­t­ian” response, so apolo­gies.

  • Fred says:

    I think you are miss­ing the point. Belief in God is more akin to belief in democ­ra­cy, or human rights, ethics, opti­mism, free­dom, free enter­prise, etc.

    Can Repub­li­cans (or Democ­rats) PROVE their beliefs and alle­giances? Do they need to? Belief in God is an expres­sion of an atti­tude to life, a way of liv­ing. If athe­ists choose not to see the world the way believ­ers do, all the bet­ter for them.

  • Saeed says:

    If any sci­en­tist can clar­i­fy which phys­i­cal phe­nom­e­non makes a cell alive, I would say there isn’t any God!
    Nobody can cre­ate a liv­ing cell with only nat­ur­al ele­ments, nei­ther can God!

  • Chinmay says:

    @Saeed,

    If god comes down to my house and shows me how exact­ly he made the first liv­ing cell, or the uni­verse, i will believe in god.

  • Winter says:

    Fred,

    Polit­i­cal views are typ­i­cal­ly derived val­ues. First and fore­most, I am util­i­tar­i­an. From this, if I believe that the Health­care sys­tem ben­e­fits most peo­ple, I may derive it’s a good thing. If I believe the mon­ey is bet­ter spent else­where, then I will derive it’s a bad thing. The sum of these deriv­a­tive val­ues will make me either a repub­li­can or a demo­c­rat.

    Oth­er exam­ples you give, like opti­mism, aren’t even nec­es­sar­i­ly choic­es, but mere­ly a mat­ter of con­di­tion­ing and dis­po­si­tion.

    Of course, I have to assume some­thing. I’ve cho­sen a util­i­tar­i­an approach, right at the begin­ning. The one premise I need to get opin­ions on all the oth­er top­ics is “hap­pi­ness is good”.

    How­ev­er, there is no way in the uni­verse I’m going to derive god. He’s always axiomat­ic, and he’s always at the begin­ning of these log­i­cal chains. He’s always the premise.

    Let me just fin­ish by say­ing I’m sin­cere­ly hap­py for you if your beliefs aren’t as archa­ic as those of some of your fel­low believ­ers.

  • Fred says:

    So your premise is that hap­pi­ness is good. My premise is that life has mean­ing. We all make choic­es how we view the world. What I can­not take is these glib pro­nounce­ments by athe­ists about what believ­ers actu­al­ly believe and even worse the impli­ca­tion that reli­gious beliefs are nec­es­sar­i­ly pre­mi­tive.

  • Matt says:

    Hanoch,

    Your own descrip­tion of the the­sis is that there is a trend (“more like­ly”) towards non-beleif. Yet, the con­clu­sion of your first point is based on an absolute that isn’t part of the the­sis. It’s a straw­man that does­n’t work.

    Your sec­ond point claims, “ulit­mate­ly observ­able by the sens­es”. Sci­en­tists use tools and exper­i­men­ta­tion to prove the exis­tence of thing our sens­es can­not detect. Atoms are a good exam­ple. You’ll find a lot of athe­ists who base their non-belief of a deity based on a lack of evi­dence. So, if you claim a god exists, show some real proof, and you’ll get a lot of con­verts.

    As for super­nat­ur­al phe­nom­e­non, let’s sep­a­rate the super­nat­ur­al for a moment. Some­thing like the after­life sim­ply isn’t observ­able, so no, sci­en­tists are unlike­ly to study it because the can­not find it. Find any evi­dence of an after­life, and you have some­thing observ­able. Now you can do a sci­en­tif­ic study. The oth­er side is the super­nat­ur­al caus­ing real-world effects. If you pray for a cure, and you get one, that’s an observ­able effect of a super­nat­ur­al cause. A sci­en­tist would study if there is a dif­fer­ence between which god you pray to and if there is a change in the rate of cures. Tem­ple­ton fund­ed such stud­ies with embar­rass­ing results–no proof of super­nat­ur­al inter­ven­tion.

    Your third point is the cos­mo­log­i­cal argu­ment. This has been through­ly debunked. The best argu­ments the­ol­o­gists have is “you haven’t read enough books.” They can­not suc­cinct­ly refute the argu­ments against, so they rely on obfus­ca­tion, obscu­ri­ty and author­i­ty to force their claims.

    Sci­ence, on the oth­er hand does­n’t rely on truths being hand­ed down from on high. Truths from sci­ence come from dif­fer­ent peo­ple, repeat­ing the same exper­i­ments, and count­less vari­a­tions of those exper­i­ments. They make pre­dic­tions about what the results will be, and when they come true, it val­i­dates the truths. And when some­one proves oth­er­wise, they move on. When a sci­en­tist “believes” in a sci­en­tif­ic truth, it’s only because over­whelm­ing evi­dence has con­vinced a high­ly curi­ous and skep­ti­cal mind.

  • Winter says:

    Fred,

    even with the premise of mean­ing, deriv­ing god is high­ly non­triv­ial, espe­cial­ly if you want him to have spe­cif­ic qual­i­ties. A lot of premis­es are nec­es­sary if you want to derive any of the monothe­is­tic gods with their list of com­mand­ments. Again, this is why they are usu­al­ly the premise, not the con­se­quence. I con­sid­er this sort of belief sys­tem to be inher­ent­ly unso­phis­ti­cat­ed.

    Matt,

    while I agree with most of the things you write, most peo­ple, even sci­en­tists, don’t believe in most of sci­ence because they’ve seen it for them­selves. My knowl­edge of biol­o­gy is rather lim­it­ed. Even in my areas of exper­tise, it’s impos­si­ble to know every­thing.

    The rea­son I believe the sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ty is because they share the ethos I’m devot­ed to — mak­ing ver­i­fi­able claims and back­ing them up.

  • Matt says:

    Win­ter,

    Yeah, I’m with you. I did­nt mean to imply that every sci­en­tist knows every sci­en­tif­ic fact. It’s the com­mu­ni­ty and the process that sep­a­rates ideas from hypoth­e­sis from the­o­ries from laws, and over time it’s worked quite well. A big part of that ethos is self-polic­ing. Take cold fusion, or more
    recent­ly, arsenic-based life. When a the­o­ry does­n’t hold water, it won’t stand the test of time.

  • Rich R says:

    @Fred,

    What you have just claimed is that your god is a thought or human defined con­cept or “feel­ing” and not an inde­pen­dant enti­ty that can inter­act or man­i­fest in any way. Per­son­al­ly I’m fine with that. But I think you’ll get some flak from oth­er the­ists.

    How could “a belief in democ­ra­cy” cre­ate the uni­verse? C’mon now, all of those things you men­tioned are depen­dant upon humans and/or defined or cre­at­ed by by humans. If you are say­ing your god is this way also, I would agree.

    Belief in god is an expres­sion of belief in some­thing that has insuf­fi­cient evi­dence. All those oth­er things are not inde­pen­dant­ly exist­ing enti­ties. No one denies that peo­ple “belief in god”, what we are deny­ing is evi­dence of god him­self. You’re obs­fus­cat­ing.

  • Lucien says:

    Sean, Matt, etc…

    Hap­py to take some wagers but first, maybe a counter offer. A chal­lenge to watch a few of Ravi Zacharias videos on YouTube, espe­cial­ly the chap­ters cov­er­ing com­men­tary on Stephen Hawk­ings’ claims. Would you do it?

  • Fred says:

    @Rich
    “What you have just claimed is that your god is a thought or human defined con­cept or “feel­ing” and not an inde­pen­dent enti­ty”

    Not at all. It’s the belief that is a feel­ing. This belief caus­es us to act in a cer­tain way, to do cer­tain actions, desist from oth­ers, and so on. God, by def­i­n­i­tion, is not a “thing” His exis­tence, being the Cre­ator, is beyond our com­mon expe­ri­ence. As I said before, He is not a sci­en­tif­ic con­cept. It is His cre­ation which makes the whole sci­en­tif­ic enter­prise pos­si­ble in the first place. Sci­ence is sim­ply the wrong tool to prove or dis­prove Him.

    “Belief in god is an expres­sion of belief in some­thing that has insuf­fi­cient evi­dence”

    Well clear­ly, then so is belief in many oth­er con­cepts about which human­i­ty dis­agrees. How­ev­er, that does not stop peo­ple act­ing accord­ing to their beliefs.

  • Rich R says:

    @Fred
    So your belief is summed up by a “feel­ing”? On the one hand, I think I could very hap­pi­ly get along with some­one who feels this way. But there are some big prob­lems. First­ly, it could be indi­ges­tion (sor­ry, stolen joke, but the point is appro­pri­ate).

    I don’t see how your “feel­ing” could point you to a spe­cif­ic god. How do you know it’s the abra­ham­ic god, which you’ve claimed to believe in? Now you’re get­ting in to a real­ly weird “feel­ing”. When your feel­ing is point­ing you to a spe­cif­ic deity that actu­al­ly is said to have done things and pos­si­bly still does, you need to start explain­ing this feel­ing a lit­tle more. You are try­ing to smug­gle too much mean­ing in with some vague imagery. In all seri­ous­ness, I can appre­ci­ate, on a human lev­el, that you have won­der and awe and a “feel­ing” that there is more out there. But that is where the inves­ti­ga­tion should start. It should make you start to look for answers. A “feel­ing” that gives answers instead of ques­tions is poor crit­i­cal think­ing. It is not the path to truth or real­i­ty. It is indis­tin­guish­able from your imag­i­na­tion.

  • Fred says:

    Rich. A reli­gion is some­thing to be expe­ri­enced. It’s like expelling to a blind per­son what col­ors are. A per­spec­tive on life is what gives one mean­ing, hope, etc. If you think it’s only about answers you are mis­tak­en. All I can say is that you keep prov­ing my point. Just like reli­gious fun­da­men­tal­ists sound sil­ly talk­ing when they try and refute evo­lu­tion, athe­ists sound sil­ly when they talk about the­ol­o­gy and the reli­gious life.

  • Winter says:

    Fred,

    do you real­ly believe that you, or most peo­ple, would be of the same reli­gion if you were brought up dif­fer­ent­ly? And if the choice of reli­gion is so very depen­dent on social con­text, isn’t that a good indi­ca­tion that reli­gion is most­ly a social con­struc­tion, and not a divine one?

    Put dif­fer­ent­ly: Giv­en the local­i­ty of reli­gious phe­nom­e­na, isn’t con­di­tion­ing a more prob­a­ble expla­na­tion than the exis­tence of a god?

    You are, of course, free to believe what you will. I just believe that the case for reli­gious beliefs, espe­cial­ly con­cern­ing the exis­tence of spe­cif­ic deities, is a lot worse than the case for polit­i­cal ide­olo­gies. Both ques­tions being argued over does­n’t make the ques­tions equiv­a­lent.

  • Dis­cus­sion about God is as long as the reli­gion itself, but in this thou­sands year long con­tro­ver­sy there was not a sin­gle evi­dence of its exis­tence. All the books that claim to be the words of God were man­u­fac­tured by indi­vid­u­als or group of indi­vid­u­als and the spread of the “word of God” were in all case with the help of the tip of a sword and not per­sua­sions with argu­ments of evi­dence. The only argu­ment of believ­ers is that we do not know answers to some ques­tions, such as “Life, Uni­verse and Every­thing”, but one should be aware that sci­en­tif­ic meth­ods are only hun­dred or two years old. What do we expect, to have answers to such ques­tions as putting a coin in a cof­fee machine and there it comes out and answer? Sci­ence is a ran­dom walk that with every wrong direc­tion opens up new ones that, and as the rule, leads to new knowl­edge. Reli­gion is crip­pled in this respect and that why it is false, because no new direc­tion in sci­ence arrows in the direc­tion of its claims, on the con­trary the arrow points in the oppo­site.

    And why some sci­en­tists are believ­ers, not nec­es­sar­i­ly in the Chris­t­ian God? Well, one should ask them, togeth­er with what is their con­cept of God. I can­not speak for them, very like­ly it is a frame of mind that stops them accept­ing evi­dence as the argu­ment on which one can base sen­si­ble dis­cus­sion. How­ev­er, those that I know to them God is more of abstrac­tion that per­son­i­fies Omni Good or Omni Beau­ty rather than Omni Potent or Omni Cre­ation. It is inter­est­ing that some of them, e.g. abstract the­o­ret­i­cal physi­cists (string the­o­rists), con­sid­er God as a log­i­cal struc­ture, rather like for math­e­mati­cians who define pos­tu­lates and derive con­se­quences. There is no dif­fer­ence between them, but as in math­e­mat­ics the pos­tu­lates do not have mean­ing in real phys­i­cal world so the God does not have it. In con­clu­sion, when one asks some­body (talk­ing about sci­en­tists) if they are believ­ers one should ask to describe the con­cept of their God. One should find inter­est­ing results.

  • Sylvain says:

    Sci­en­tists believ­ing in gods in Socrates days (400BC)?
    Close to 100%…

    Sci­en­tists believ­ing in gods in Galileo’s days (1500)
    The vast major­i­ty, out of fear as much as faith.

    Sci­en­tists believ­ing in gods after “les Lumières”(Voltaires, Descartes, etc)
    Not many…

    Sci­en­tists believ­ing in gods in 2011 (Quan­tu­um physics, human genome, etc.)
    A few hyp­ocrites…

  • Matt says:

    Lucien,

    Start­ed to watch the YouTube videos you men­tioned, buy the con­tent seems to be the same as John Lennox’s debate piece on dailymail.co.uk.

    Wow, so many mis­char­ac­ter­i­za­tions, I can only scratch the sur­face here. Take the claim that sci­ence fits per­fect­ly with the Chris­t­ian nar­ra­tive. Real­ly? why are we hav­ing this debate then? Why is Dar­win so hat­ed by the­olo­gians? Dar­win set out to prove God’s design in nature, but the evi­dence lead him to nat­ur­al selec­tion. The­ol­o­gists still argue Dar­win, but mod­ern sci­en­tists have moved on to new­er fields, genet­ics, mol­e­c­u­lar biol­o­gy, bio­geog­ra­phy, advances in embry­ol­o­gy (embry­ol­o­gy was stud­ied before Dar­win, and was already cre­at­ing dif­fi­cult ques­tions for the­olo­gians). All those fields stand alone, and rein­force each oth­er.

    Lennox claims the big bang is sup­port­ed by the Bible. Again, real­ly? God spoke and cre­at­ed a tril­lion of galax­ies with near­ly a tril­lion stars each, just to put on one hum­ble plan­et. To shed light on us, which won’t reach us for bil­lions of years, and we can­not see it with our own sens­es.

    It’s still the cos­mo­log­i­cal argu­ment. The CA fails to explain where God came from, instead the­olo­gians wave their hands and say it just does apply to God. They claim God is sim­ple, yet the cre­ation of inan­i­mate objects require a more com­plex cre­ator than the cre­ation.

    That’s all I have time for now, but I hope my choice of medi­um fits the spir­it of your chal­lenge.

  • Rich R says:

    Fred,
    We’ve all heard the “explain­ing col­ors” anal­o­gy, but I reject it. You could dis­play to a blind per­son that you were actu­al­ly doing some­thing. You could repeat­ed­ly pick a blue item that he had iden­ti­fied from an assort­ment of sim­i­lar items. You could pick the blue one every time. You may not be able to explain the details of what the expe­ri­ence is like, but you could prove you were talk­ing about some­thing real. Your “feel­ing” is entire­ly indis­tin­guish­able from fan­ta­sy or imag­i­na­tion. I have no way to test that what you are expe­ri­enc­ing is any dif­fer­ent from some­one in an asy­lum.

    You seem deter­mined to use the most vague ref­er­ences pos­si­ble, yet you have men­tioned a spe­cif­ic god. How do you get from one to the oth­er? Done your way, you would need to decide some­thing is real, then expe­ri­ence it after already believ­ing. But there was no way to deter­mine which expe­ri­ence is cor­rect or real even if you sam­pled feel­ings and expe­ri­ences from 10 dif­fer­ent reli­gions. I’m sure you have expe­ri­ences at your syn­a­gogue (or wherever)that are very mov­ing. Any human can relate to that to some extent. But how do you deter­mine the expe­ri­ences you have are any dif­fer­ent or refer to some­thing more true than the expe­ri­ences in a mosque or cathe­dral, etc? If the truth does­n’t mat­ter to you as long as you get this feel­ing, that’s your right.

    If you can not explain your belief in a spe­cif­ic god any bet­ter than you have done so far, I would have to con­clude that you believe for entire­ly insuf­fi­cient rea­sons. This whole con­ver­sa­tion start­ed because you claim that athe­ists don’t under­stand the god you believe in, yet it seems you don’t either. A feel­ing that can not be described in any oth­er way but innacu­rate analo­gies is not a good rea­son to believe in a mag­i­cal enti­ty.

    Please how does this “feel­ing” relate to a per­son­al god? Just say­ing that I have to believe first and then I’d under­stand is not pos­si­ble. I can not make myself believe some­thing only because I may then get a feel­ing it’s true. I love that most jews don’t pros­e­ly­tize like many chris­tians, so you aren’t skilled in con­vert­ing. But I think this is a fair ques­tion and one you should con­sid­er. Which came first, the belief or the rea­son for belief?

  • All 50, not to men­tion his­to­ry, are far wide of the mark! The first whol­ly new inter­pre­ta­tion for two thou­sand years of the moral teach­ing of Christ is on the web.

    Rad­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent from any­thing else we know of from his­to­ry, this new ‘claim’ is pred­i­cat­ed upon a pre­cise and pre­de­fined expe­ri­ence, a direct indi­vid­ual inter­ven­tion into the nat­ur­al world by omnipo­tent pow­er to con­firm divine will. “cor­rect­ing human nature by a change in nat­ur­al law, alter­ing biol­o­gy, con­scious­ness and human eth­i­cal per­cep­tion beyond all nat­ur­al evo­lu­tion­ary bound­aries.” Like it of no, a new reli­gious claim testable by faith, meet­ing all Enlight­en­ment cri­te­ria now exists. A reli­gious rev­o­lu­tion may be under­way? More info at http://soulgineering.com/2011/05/22/the-final-freedoms/

  • Muralidhar says:

    I find the video and the fol­low­ing debate way above the realms of my intel­lect.
    To me how­ev­er, life of a man called William Mar­rion Bran­ham proves beyond all doubt that the God of The Bible is indeed God, in the sense that He is Omnipo­tent, Omnipresent, Omni­scient, and real­ly Super­nat­ur­al. How else can you explain the heal­ing of Con­gress­man William David Upshaw (remem­ber, we are talk­ing of a man whose ill­ness is known to the world for 66 years pri­or to the mirac­u­lous heal­ing), who was in wheel­chair for 66 before years before attend­ing a Bran­ham heal­ing cam­paign?
    Or, how would any­one explain the res­ur­rec­tion of Finnish boy, Kari Hol­ma?
    Of course, if I try to be ratio­nal, the next ques­tion would be, why don’t you see such mir­a­cles today? The answer is “lack of faith”. Faith is see­ing the intan­gi­ble, not ques­tion­ing it! But an exper­i­ment is an inves­ti­ga­tion– a series of ques­tions aimed at Nature to see how it responds under the set con­straints. But the “exper­i­ment” of FAITH is to do away with the con­scious­ness of “exper­i­ment”. You are not exper­i­ment­ing, you just believe it. Then God comes on scene! Friends, He is not going to clown for any­body. He is sov­er­eign, and it’s always His Supreme Will that He exe­cutes, not what a mor­tal demands/requests/commands of Him, in his igno­rance.

  • Matt says:

    Muralid­har,

    From what I’ve read of Con­gress­man Upshaw, he was able to use crutch­es too. Its plau­si­ble he would have had some strength in his legs, and some sem­blance of bal­ance. Maybe he was walk­ing in pri­vate, I don’t know, but can you guar­an­tee he was­n’t? Maybe the “heal­ing” pro­vid­ed the moti­va­tion he need­ed, but that’s far from a mir­a­cle. Once the pub­lic knew about the “heal­ing”, that would be tremen­dous pres­sure to keep walk­ing. Hehe, he was a con­gress­man after all. I can­not say that’s what hap­pened, but it is a plau­si­ble sce­nario.

    It’s hard to claim “mir­a­cle” when plau­si­ble sce­nar­ios abound. That’s why my chal­lenge of heal­ing an amputee is such an impor­tant ques­tion. There is no nat­ur­al way or med­ical way to date. Only a super­nat­ur­al way.

    Mir­a­cle cur­ings of say can­cer, it’s much more plau­si­ble there was a mis­di­ag­no­sis. Can­cer is not always black and white. So when a doc­tor puts some­one through months of chemo or radi­a­tion, and sud­den­ly the can­cer is gone, good chance the doc­tor would rather let the patient beleive there was a mir­a­cle than say, “oops I goofed. Any­one could have made that mis­take. hope we are still friends”

    But of course he won’t do what’s asked of him beyond chance. It’s fun­ny how he only gets cred­it for the good things. Even bad things become good through tor­tured log­ic. No won­der some peo­ple think he’s per­fect.

  • Matt says:

    Muralid­har,

    Read­ing up on Kari Hol­ma, an eye wit­ness, Vil­ho Soini­nen, tells that Broth­er Bran­ham was the one who could­n’t find the boy’s pulse and thought him to be dead. Bran­ham prayed and the boy opened his eyes. All this took place in about 5 min­utes, and before they reached the hos­pi­tal. Does­n’t it seem the least bit sus­pi­cious that the “mir­a­cle heal­er” is the one who declared him dead, and not a doc­tor?

  • Muralidhar says:

    Matt,

    Broth­er Bran­ham fore­saw a boy being raised from the dead at least 2 years before the Kuo­pio inci­dent. He described the scene of the car acci­dent, the dress on the boy hit in the acci­dent etc. in detail in detail to a large no. of audi­ence in the US and Cana­da 2 years before the boy was raised.
    How did he know every­thing in such detail well in advance. One argu­ment is that the whole episode is pre-planned. But a half-illit­er­ate Ken­tuck­ian with few con­nec­tions exe­cut­ing such a plan to the dot has as big a chance as a coin turn­ing up heads in a mil­lion tri­als.
    Yet, I ‘d con­cede you the advan­tage of doubt in Kari Hol­ma’s case. What is your answer to William Upshaw’s?
    And remem­ber, these and many more mir­a­cles hap­pen­ing in the same man’s min­istry with proofs sur­viv­ing to this day, plus the man’s life being so much in tune with the lead­ing char­ac­ters in The Bible (which pre­cedes Bro. Bran­ham by at least 1900 years) lends cre­dence to not only to the man, but to The Bible itself.

  • Muralidhar says:

    Matt,
    I apol­o­gize for respond­ing with­out read­ing your first reply.
    Even if we assume that Upshaw had strength in his legs, the strength “dis­play­ing itself” at age 84 is some­thing that needs atten­tion. And that hap­pen­ing in a Bran­ham meet­ing, who was com­mis­sioned of an Angel to bring a gift of heal­ing to the peo­ple can­not be mere coin­ci­dence. And Bro. Bran­ham was told that kings and poten­tates would be healed in his min­istry. It just is not serendip­i­ty.
    Bro. Bran­ham’s min­istry has records of amputee’s feet grow­ing to full size in the sight of large audi­ence. It is not impos­si­ble to find enough evi­dence of count­less mir­a­cles if you can so much as read/hear his ser­mons.
    In spite of all this, as I said before, faith does not lend itself to the test of exper­i­ment. If it does, it is not faith any­more! The exper­i­menter needs to refine his tech­nique to ver­i­fy faith. He “must” trust (that is have faith).

  • Matt says:

    Muralid­har,

    A few more com­ments on Bran­ham, and I think I’ve said my peace on him.

    Let’s sup­pose he real­ly did all those mir­a­cles. I would assume that would make him a can­di­date for saint­hood, or at least beau­ti­fi­ca­tion. Search­ing around I found a lot of reli­gious peo­ple’s web­sites filled with “proof” that Bran­ham was a false prof­it. If he were true, why do so many believ­ers in God doubt him. Sure­ly some­one in the Vat­i­can would say he’s the real deal, God wants us to rec­og­nize this.

    More inter­est­ing to me were the eye wit­ness accounts of Alfred Pohl con­firm­ing that a lot of the “heal­ings” were peo­ple feel­ing good about being “healed” of their can­cers and oth­er dis­eases for a few hours, then still being sick.

    Bran­ham also made a lot of pre­dic­tions that did­n’t come true. Cal­i­for­nia slid­ing into the ocean; Jesus return­ing in 1977. Starts to sound more like chance, than divine­ly inspired mes­sages.

    Giv­en the doubts I raised so far, it becomes plau­si­ble he was using cold read­ing tech­niques and plants to reveal some of the oth­er infor­ma­tion about audi­ence mem­bers. Ever read a horo­scope, they use very spe­cif­ic sound­ing words, but are real­ly very vague. (I for­get the prop­er term for that.) Good chance many in the audi­ence played along even if he was wrong, they’ve come all this way to get healed and they don’t want to be the one who says, “no, that’s not quite true”.

    Regrow­ing a foot, I would assume some­one got an 8mm video of that (I believe that was the pop­u­lar video for­mat in the 50’s) . That would make a nice youtube video for us skep­tics. If Bran­ham’s min­istry has those records, sure­ly they would­n’t keep them to them­selves would they?

  • Muralidhar says:

    Matt,
    When I said records, I meant peo­ple who wit­nessed events, I know there is no video of that. But if you want a “phys­i­cal evi­dence”, there is a pho­to­graph of “The Pil­lar of Fire” (the same Super­nat­ur­al Being referred to in The Bible) over his head, authen­ti­cat­ed by one of FBI’s best inves­ti­ga­tors of that time(George J. Lacy). As to Bran­ham being labeled a false prophet, that’s because he was against the “busi­ness hous­es” that peo­ple built around the Name of Jesus Christ (of course, they go by the name of church­es). If you would at least con­cede that there was a real Man called Jesus, that was pre­cise­ly the rea­son they cru­ci­fied Him.
    Cal­i­for­nia slid­ing into the ocean will come true one of these days, but would you then believe? He only “pre­dict­ed” (which was only a per­son­al guessti­mate) that Jesus would come before 1977, he did­n’t prophe­cy. Every time he spoke of 1977, he clear­ly men­tioned that it was his per­son­al view, and not a rev­e­la­tion from God.
    King George of Eng­land being healed of mul­ti­ple scle­ro­sis, dead baby in Mex­i­co being brought to life… too many to be dis­missed as mere chance. If that were all fake, why did­n’t any­one expose him in his life­time (Alfred Pohl would be a good can­di­date)? He is either a prophet of God or the sec­ond great­est deceiv­er to have walked on earth (first would be the Man he claimed his God, Jesus!).
    Now, a deceiv­er would not lay down His life for naught. And then 11 of his dis­ci­ples would not fol­low His foot­steps to their graves with the same courage, ful­ly aware that there is no mate­r­i­al, emo­tion­al or social advan­tage in liv­ing That Life. I am not assum­ing, I ‘m human, and I know the price I would put upon my life. If not cer­tain of what they had in store for them, Jesus, His dis­ci­ples, and even Bran­ham would­n’t have renounced the world­ly acco­lades that they could “earn” by com­pro­mis­ing on the Gospel they had in them.
    I am aware that this is not what you asked for a “proof”. Wait until Los Ange­les goes one mile deep into the ocean, till Rus­sia bombs the Vat­i­can, till a beau­ti­ful and cru­el woman starts rul­ing the US, and till US is so utter­ly burnt down that there will only be embers to be seen all over that coun­try (each one of them is a prophe­cy, not a pre­dic­tion like “1977”). Would you then believe? You might get that oppor­tu­ni­ty in this life time.

  • Matt says:

    Muralid­har,

    I’m con­fused why Bran­ham would go out on a limb with per­son­al guess­es, if he is get­ting rev­e­la­tions from God. Why make so many mis­takes when all he has to do is wait for a true sign. Would­n’t that be a per­fect tes­ta­ment to God instead of leav­ing lot’s of doubts for skep­tics to chip away at?

    As for your prophe­cies, LA one mile deep: Plate tec­ton­ics could do that, but it would prob­a­bly take a mil­lion years. Large earth­quakes can move large amounts of land by 10’s of feet, so it would take hun­dreds of large earth­quakes, and cen­turies to com­plete if not longer. Nat­ur­al process­es.

    Rus­sia bomb­ing the Vat­i­can. Most like­ly sce­nario there is some extrem­ist Catholics doing what extrem­ist Mus­lims do, and Rus­sia get­ting even. That would be a man-made self-full­fill­ing prophe­cy.

    A woman get­ting elect­ed as Pres­i­dent. That’s a lit­tle too vague, even say­ing a good look­ing one. I’m not sure if you intend­ed that as a stand-alone proph­esy, or com­bined with the scorched earth proph­esy.

    Noth­ing but embers. That’s pret­ty close to an end of the world prophe­cy. 100% end of the world prophe­cies have failed to come true, and we’ve been wait­ing a few thou­sand years. I feel pret­ty safe it won’t hap­pen in my life­time, or my chil­dren’s, or grand­chil­dren’s. Although we do have empir­i­cal evi­dence that the sun will even­tu­al­ly swell and destroy the earth, but that’s a nat­ur­al process that won’t hap­pen for a few bil­lion years.

  • Brian J. Mahan says:

    Well, I guess the word is out about us Chris­tians. We should prob­a­bly just give up and con­fess what we already knew, but have tried to hide: when we were called, not many of us were wise by human stan­dards; not many were influ­en­tial; not many were of noble birth. But we are thank­ful for the few bril­liant ones we have among us and cel­e­brate their will­ing­ness to be embar­rassed by the com­pa­ny they keep. Still, we have hope that our sim­plic­i­ty and love, when we love well, may ulti­mate­ly con­tribute some­thing to the world.

  • David says:

    I have to laugh at all the Christo­facists post­ing mes­sages here, like Andrew and Bri­an and oth­ers.

    The beliefs (or lack of beliefs) or a non-the­ist are just as plau­si­ble and believ­able as your beliefs. You’re not right, and they aren’t either. You’re wrong, but so are they.

    Get over it.

  • Brian J. Mahan says:

    David,

    I’m glad you had a good laugh. But, if you don’t mind, let me laugh with you. I in fact agree with you that assum­ing my beliefs to be true while oth­ers are false is both epis­te­mo­log­i­cal­ly sus­pect and unsport­ing. “Let a thou­sand flow­ers bloom,” as William James once sug­gest­ed, athe­ist, the­ist, indif­fer­en­tist and all the rest. Let us all live our lives not in the delu­sion that our visions of life and the rest are already true, but in a com­mit­ment that by our effort, patience, authen­tic­i­ty and open­ness to oth­er ways of con­stru­ing things, we may over time, help them to become truer. My com­mit­ment to Chris­tian­i­ty, though many of my co-reli­gion­ists would demur from my opin­ion, is of this kind. So, any­way, David, I chal­lenge you to live out your com­mit­ments and delu­sions as I live out mine, com­par­ing notes as we go. Good luck and keep on laugh­ing.

  • Marius Potgieter says:

    The “non-believ­ers list” is only 50 long so far. With very lit­tle effort it can prob­a­bly be expand­ed to quite a few thou­sand. Would that “prove” that the remain­ing ten mil­lion (or what­ev­er) sci­en­tists in the world believe in God? Are sci­en­tists real­ly the best qual­i­fied to com­ment on the­o­log­i­cal mat­ters? True, faith-filled sci­en­tists also reg­u­lar­ly com­ment on their world view, but that’s a reli­gious opin­ion. Sci­ence and reli­gion are not in con­flict. It is peo­ple who fight these sil­ly wars, not reli­gion or sci­ence.
    As an anal­o­gy, I some­times think of a brush, a can­vass and a tube of oil paint sit­ting togeth­er, feel­ing very pleased with them­selves for hav­ing “cre­at­ed” such a beau­ti­ful pic­ture. What a waste of time and ener­gy to con­sis­tent­ly search for irrefutable “evi­dence” of God’s exis­tence/non-exis­tence!
    As a Chris­t­ian my world­view can­not be altered by sci­en­tif­ic research results, because I admire advances in sci­ence too much – pro­vid­ing it is not dog­mat­ic rub­bish (Like Dawkins com­par­ing the shape of but­ter­fly wings to thorns on a shrub, argu­ing that “the but­ter­fly evolved such trick­ery to pro­tect them from preda­tors, because they “saw” the pro­tec­tion that thorns pro­vid­ed plants against attacks from her­bi­vores”). It’s this kind of non­sense that con­tains no knowl­edge-val­ue and only serves to widen the divide between peo­ple with dif­fer­ing opin­ions.
    I have not seen a shred of sci­en­tif­ic evi­dence for “life” orig­i­nat­ing in “pri­mor­dial soup” and water-liv­ing crea­tures assum­ing land-based fea­tures, some even­tu­al­ly devel­op­ing feath­ers and light-weight skele­tons to reduce their weight so that they can take to the air, while oth­ers even­tu­al­ly “became” lizards and oth­er ani­mals. How gills “changed into book-lungs” even­tu­al­ly (“giv­en enough time, nat­ur­al selec­tion and neces­si­ty will see to it hap­pen­ing”), as well as all the oth­er fea­tures, includ­ing oth­er crit­i­cal organs, that con­sti­tute dif­fer­ent species, is sim­ply not ade­quate­ly explained by exist­ing sci­en­tif­ic the­o­ry. We still have a long way to go before it will become clear­er. When we get there, all ratio­nal peo­ple will embrace such new knowl­edge (if the sci­en­tif­ic method is fol­lowed), some view­ing it as God’s infi­nite wis­dom and oth­ers as nature tak­ing care of itself. Just as all peo­ple will nev­er unan­i­mous­ly agree on God’s exis­tence, you will nev­er find that every per­son on earth will sud­den­ly become athe­ists.
    A recent Gallup Poll claims that 92% of Amer­i­cans believe in God. My view of the human con­di­tion is that not many take God seri­ous­ly, though. Be that as it may – would such a poll then “prove” any­thing use­ful? One must be care­ful when using sta­tis­tics as proof of any­thing.
    Let’s rather mod­el integri­ty and dili­gent­ly pur­sue tol­er­ance and respect for each oth­er in the mean time.

  • Clarke says:

    This piece would have been bet­ter with more gen­der diver­si­ty. Where are the women?

  • Matt says:

    Mar­ius Pot­gi­eter,

    I am curi­ous, what is the source of your Dawkins quote? Is that an exact quote, or are you para­phras­ing?

    Thanks in advance.

  • Matt says:

    Lucien,

    I got curi­ous why Zacharias and Lennox were so worked up over Hawk­ings state­ment, “phi­los­o­phy is dead,” so i read Grand Design. I have to con­clude because it hits them square between the eyes. They try to phi­los­o­phize their way out, obvi­ous­ly miss­ing Hawk­ings point.

    Hawk­ings premise is that we’ve reached a point in his­to­ry where empira­cal evi­dence is the gold stan­dard of knowl­edge. He backs up his state­ment by trac­ing impor­tant sci­en­tif­ic dis­cov­er­ies through­out his­to­ry. He backs up his state­ment with the cur­rent sci­en­tif­ic mod­els. He open­ly dis­cuss­es the cur­rent lim­its of knowl­edge.

    Here is my sum­ma­ry of what Hawk­ing has to say about the cre­ation of the uni­verse. Trace time back­wards and the uni­verse com­pacts to such a small size, that the laws of Quan­tum Mechan­ics apply. Quan­tum mechan­ics make no sense based clas­si­cal physics, but sci­en­tists have fair­ly com­plete mod­els of Quan­tum mechan­ics. Those mod­els match quan­tum behav­iors quite well. Many pre­dic­tions of those mod­els have been con­firmed through exper­i­men­ta­tion. Oth­er pre­dic­tions we don’t have the means to test yet. But the evi­dence still heav­i­ly favors the mod­els.

    Impor­tant­ly, the mod­els are com­plete enough to pre­dict spon­ta­neous cre­ation of the uni­verse. The mod­els have been proven right so far in oth­er areas, so spon­ta­neous cre­ation as pre­dict­ed becomes the most likey cause of the Uni­verse. Zacharias and Lennox can phi­los­o­phize all they want, but until they come up with evi­dence that the mod­els are wrong, they are stuck using meth­ods of past cen­turies.

    Inter­est­ing­ly, Hawk­ing says that any mod­el that accu­rate­ly pre­dicts behav­iors is a valid mod­el (at least with­in the lim­its if that mod­el). He says that some­one could make a mod­el of the uni­verse with the Earth at the cen­ter, and the Sun and stars all orbit around us. If it accu­rate­ly pre­dicts orbits, then it’s a valid mod­el. Of course the math would be hor­ren­dous, but that just might make some the­olo­gians very hap­py.

    The book is very read­able until he gets to the nit­ty-grit­ty of quan­tum mechan­ics. I sug­gest you read it.

  • BrianO says:

    I found it inter­est­ing that each sci­en­tist (though 1/3rd of the “experts” are out­side the realm of phys­i­cal sci­ences) had “jump­ing off points” that left their area of exper­tise “hang­ing”. Things like “we don’t know where the Laws of Physics came from, but we know they are there”…“we don’t know where the first mol­e­cules came from, but we know they appeared”…“we don’t know how the Big Bang hap­pened, but we know its effects”…“we don’t know how non­liv­ing mat­ter became liv­ing mat­ter, but we know it did”…“we don’t know how some­thing came from noth­ing, but we know it did”. I am sor­ry, but those “jump­ing off points” are rather non­ra­tional and unsci­en­tif­ic. Real­ly, to pass off those non-answers so casu­al­ly, leaves one want­i­ng. Those unsolved ques­tions should rack the brain of any seri­ous sci­en­tist. To dis­count the con­cept of God as sil­ly and myth, yet embrace these non-answers as sci­en­tif­ic, under­mines the inquiry. It seems rather sil­ly to “jump off at those point”, seems a rather con­vient way to avoid the hard ques­tions sci­ence can’t (yet) answer.

  • Matt says:

    Bri­anO,

    Our col­lec­tive igno­rance does­n’t prove the exis­tence of a deity.

    At least sci­en­tists admit the lim­its of their knowl­ege. And as their knowl­edge advances, the­ol­o­gists are forced to backpedal. It a clear and unre­lent­ing pat­tern through his­to­ry. Some­time it takes them cen­turies to catch up.

    so how was God cre­at­ed?

  • Dagwood says:

    Fred, on July 27, said “Belief in God is an expres­sion of an atti­tude to life, a way of liv­ing.” Rather than a belief relat­ed to an empir­i­cal claim, I assume. So, then, what atti­tude to life or way of liv­ing is it? I think we’d find many atti­tudes and ways of life that peo­ple say is relat­ed to their belief in God (or in no-God), with noth­ing much in com­mon. We don’t need God to believe in humil­i­ty or human puni­ness or fol­ly, nor to instill a sense of grat­i­tude or awe. Nor do we need God as a jus­ti­fi­ca­tion of our moral code(s). So the ques­tion remains…why believe?

  • Dagwood says:

    I would add that the plea for “both sides” to get a plat­form is also a stretch. The “main­stream” is pro-God, if not explic­it­ly pro-Chris­t­ian. How many athe­ist can­di­dates for pub­lic office are there? So just as the bur­den for proof is all on the believ­ers, there is a need for the athe­ists and agnos­tics as well to have a pub­lic plat­form. If you real­ly want “fair and bal­anced” then you have to favor an enor­mous increase in voic­ing athe­ist and agnos­tic opin­ions pub­licly.

  • Mary says:

    Sci­ence describes the mech­a­nism by which divine things hap­pen. The opin­ions of sci­en­tists on the sub­ject of God’s exis­tence car­ry no more weight than a non-sci­en­tist’s; indeed, they may be more biased (by a tem­pera­ment drawn to study sci­ence, and by the invest­ment of their time in the study of sci­ence) toward non-belief. Take care what you take up: what you do is what you become. Humil­i­ty is miss­ing here.

  • Fred says:

    @Dagwood “So the ques­tion remains…why believe?”

    Prob­a­bly as many rea­sons as there are believ­ers. So what?

  • bukem says:

    “There is no evi­denice that we need any­thing oth­er then the laws of physics” — what??
    Its quite sad how close mind­ed some luma­nary sci­en­tists become.
    I most cer­tain­ly want to believe in a world with more then just the laws of physics. A uni­verse of infi­nite amount of ideas.
    I love it when a sci­en­tist breaks through the com­plete­ly shifts the par­a­digm , from new­ton to maxwell to tes­la. Evi­di­ence is rel­a­tive and com­plete­ly uncer­tain.

    I like to believe in a uni­verse of every pos­si­bil­i­ty (even the pos­si­bil­i­ty that there is not an infi­nite amount of pos­si­bil­i­ties) In lay­ers of worlds we are yet to see because the sci­ence does not yet exist.

    You would think work­ing in a field where you are explain­ing the com­plex­i­ty of nature that the oth­er­ness to all of this would be so clear.

    but any­way .. each to his own. Please just dont fight about it. I can under­stand the igno­rance mass­es being com­plete­ly raged by the fact that some­one does not believe what they believe but .. come on .. we all just want to explore dont we and fight­ing stops that.

    peace!

  • Matt says:

    Sev­er­al com­menters asked why are sci­en­tists qual­i­fied to talk about God. When reli­gious peo­ple make testable claims about God, then it puts God right into the sci­en­tif­ic realm.

    Are you a young earth cre­ation­ist… There is a moun­tain of sci­en­tif­ic evi­dence that crush­es that myth.

    How about Adam and Eve as lit­er­al peo­ple. If the sto­ry is true, then genet­ics would show the entire human race fil­ter­ing down to one cou­ple. It does­n’t, the small­est pop­u­la­tion iden­ti­fi­able as mod­ern humans was about 10,000.

    Noah’s Ark did­n’t hap­pen. None of the testable claims have brought forth any evi­dence.

    Trace back the his­to­ry of your God, does he change as our knowl­edge and tech­nolo­gies advance. Did he cre­ate a flat earth at one time? Or could he cure dis­eases by ban­ish­ing evil spir­its? would­n’t you rather go to a doc­tor now-a-days?

    Is your under­stand­ing of God inter­nal­ly con­sis­tent? For exam­ple, if he is omni­scient, then he knows every­thing that will ever hap­pen. He could nev­er change his mind from the pre­de­ter­mined course, because at that point, the future would change and he would­n’t have known it. So omnipo­tence goes out the win­dow if he can­not change the future and remain omni­scient.

    Anoth­er exam­ple: Do you believe in the God of the Bible, and con­sid­er him a lov­ing God? Count how many peo­ple God killed accord­ing to the Bible, a strict tal­ly is over 2 mil­lion. And the Dev­il only killed 7 (or was it 10). Hmmm…

    But that strict tal­ly does­n’t include times when he killed entire pop­u­la­tions that did­n’t have a num­ber. Back to Noah’s Ark, the Bible just says God killed every­body except Noah and his fam­i­ly. Add a few mil­lion or bil­lion to the total for times like this. Ok, that’s just a fig­u­ra­tive sto­ry, but it’s a pop­u­lar sto­ry from the Bible some­how prov­ing the glo­ry of God. It’s often told as a chil­dren’s sto­ry too. Why in the world do peo­ple teach chil­dren that a lov­ing God drowned all the kit­tens and lady­bugs and ham­sters and…

  • clouds says:

    Moss­es had a stick that what made us touched it even touched him I am like that but more I have the root of David in my body which which is in-pow­er­ing me to be like moss­es only 10000 times as dan­ger­ous he had to rely on his stick where I do not I am is seed­ing me to become like his son CHRIST who was the lamb of god I Am not him nor will I ever say I am him but I am like him threw what­ev­er made us that’s evolv­ing me to become the first angel that graced our world! to make things bet­ter for a time times a time and a half a time and who­ev­er stands in my way will be brought to there knees! If I can­not help sci­ence fix things I will tear sci­ence apart! And in the end when I am fin­ished and every avenue is exhaust­ed i will be mur­dered and you will all know I was him! And you will all wish you lis­tened to this gen­tile that Paul said would form to a man! The tree of life is around me and all you want to do is kill it just like you killed Christ than your trou­ble will be out of my hands and god will release the dev­il on you all! I wish I could tell you more I wish I could be allowed to make things bet­ter but if I am sees I am fail­ing just like the movie the day the earth stood still you will all pay a price for my destruc­tion if I can­not be allowed to make things bet­ter than I will make them worse!
    Amen

  • Leandro says:

    Inter­est­ing, yet super­fi­cial. Incred­i­bly annoy­ing back­ground music. What´s that for?

  • Ashish Tewari says:

    I find it total­ly intrigu­ing that a renowned sci­en­tist like Hawk­ing can make a state­ment such as: “There is no evi­dence that we need any­thing oth­er then the laws of physics”.

    Where did the laws of physics come from, Dr. Hawk­ing? Even a stu­pid per­son would know that mak­ing a law (any law) requires intel­li­gent thought, wiegh­ing of pros and cons, and judge­ment. The best sci­en­tif­ic proof/evidence for the exis­tence of God is that the vast uni­verse is gov­erned by uni­form and unchang­ing phys­i­cal laws (that’s why it is called “the uni­verse”). Any intel­lec­tu­al­ly hon­est and obser­vant per­son (let alone a sci­en­tist) would log­i­cal­ly come to this con­clu­sion.

    But Stephen Hawk­ing would rather believe in the hypoth­e­sis of invis­i­ble and untestable 11-dimen­sion­al superstrings/membranes gov­ern­ing the uni­verse than in the exis­tence of an intel­li­gent Cre­ator. It says a lot about the arro­gance and sci­en­tif­ic dou­ble stan­dards of the man.

  • Rathindranath says:

    All these debate is use­less! Those who do not want to believe let them not believe. Let them fol­low the path of knowledge.Let the oth­ers believe ‚preach and prac­tice as they under­stand. All are seek­ing the truth fol­low­ing dif­fer­ent path like 5 blind peo­ple try­ing to under­stand an ele­phant in his own way. The some total is the truth.So why waste your time! I am doing that pre­cise­ly but could not over­come the temp­ta­tion to put in my vies. Such is the human fail­ings. We do not under­stand our own soci­ety why talk about the whole uni­verse? As the mas­ters say :going to a man­go plan­ta­tion do you count man­goes? You just enjoy the fruits!Life is short and trien­sient so have fun lov­ing the nature all liv­ing and non­liv­ing with out car­ing whether he exists or not.

  • Ashish Tewari says:

    Stephen Hawk­ing, while not a believ­er, has no qualms about sell­ing his books using God’s name. A cou­ple of years back, I ordered Hawk­ing’s book titled “God Cre­at­ed the Inte­gers”. It turned out to be a col­lec­tion of biogra­phies of some famous math­e­mati­cians edit­ed by Hawk­ing. No men­tion of God any­where except on the cov­er!

  • Matt says:

    Ashish Tewari,

    The fact that phys­i­cal con­stants do not change is exact­ly what one would expect if there were no omnipo­tent being in charge. If you believe a lit­er­al account of Noah’s Flood, then God would have had to change the phys­i­cal prop­er­ties of water to cre­ate rain­bows. And if he’s in the busi­ness of chang­ing phys­i­cal prop­er­ties, then we would expect to find oth­er prop­er­ties chang­ing occa­sion­al­ly too. So far, none.

    Why do you assume that laws (as they are called by sci­en­tists) would require intel­li­gence to come about? That is (hope­ful­ly) true of the laws gov­ern­ing soci­ety, but you’ve applied a human attribute to the phys­i­cal realm.

    If you argue that all things require a cre­ator with intel­li­gence, then who cre­at­ed God? And who cre­at­ed the cre­ator of God? How did God gain the abil­i­ty to cre­ate phys­i­cal laws, and all the mat­ter that makes up a tril­lion galax­ies?

    And why do you think String The­o­ry isn’t testable? Sim­i­lar to Ein­stein and his the­o­ries on rel­a­tiv­i­ty. Ein­stein dis­cov­ered a mod­el of the uni­verse that pre­dicts the bend­ing of space-time. From that mod­el, he pre­dict­ed grav­i­ta­tion­al lens­ing, and grav­i­ty waves. Sci­en­tists have now observed grav­i­ta­tion­al lens­ing. Exper­i­ments are being designed to detect grav­i­ty waves. Ver­i­fy­ing pre­dic­tions based on a mod­el are a pow­er­ful val­i­da­tion of that mod­el. The same holds true for String the­o­ry. Sci­en­tists say if it’s true, then they expect to see one thing, and if it’s false they should see some­thing else.

    When sci­en­tists find prob­lems with a hypoth­e­sis or the­o­ry, they either mod­i­fy it or toss it out. They go where the evi­dence leads them. That’s a far cry from arro­gance.

  • Matt says:

    Rathin­dranath,

    The rea­son I wor­ry about it this pithy say­ing, “sci­ence builds planes, reli­gion flies them into build­ings.”

    The five blind guys anal­o­gy may apply to reli­gious study. There are no short­age of cre­ation sto­ries, how “the after­life” works, and so on–and they often tell con­flict­ing sto­ries.

    But if a sixth guy–a scientist–joins in the con­ver­sa­tion should change. He would ask ques­tions like, how do you know it’s a rope? If it’s a rope, can every­body tie a knot in it? Have you smelled it? Have you weighed it? Has every­body touched the entire thing?

    Then after inves­ti­gat­ing all those ques­tions and prob­a­bly more, the sixth guys starts to think it’s an ele­phant. He says, “if it’s an ele­phant, it should sound like an ele­phant.” the ele­phant trum­pets and con­firms his pre­dic­tion.

    But the oth­er five fail to accept the evi­dence, and remain uncon­vinced of the ele­phant in the room.

  • Ashish Tewari says:

    Matt,

    Human arro­gance is in full dis­play when man claims that he is the only one capa­ble of “cre­at­ing” things, mak­ing laws, and oth­er deci­sions of life. He finds “no evi­dence” that there can be any rea­son or pur­pose behind the vast uni­verse. He can explain every­thing by some the­o­ry or anoth­er, and if that fails, he places eter­nal faith in the capac­i­ty of human civ­i­liza­tion to come up with such a the­o­ry “some­time in the future”.

    The real­i­ty, how­ev­er, is that man is not in con­trol of his own des­tiny, let alone the uni­verse. He can hard­ly “explain” even five per­cent of the uni­verse, the remain­ing 95% falling into the unknown (dark mat­ter, dark ener­gy). In order to avoid acknowl­edg­ing God, man invents such arti­fices as eleven-dimen­sion­al strings and/or mul­ti­ple-uni­vers­es, none of which have ever been observed or even inferred by indi­rect mea­sure­ment. Is this a “sci­en­tif­ic” method?

    The incred­i­ble order and bal­ance pre­vail­ing in the uni­verse at every lev­el — order that enables intel­li­gent life to exist — can hard­ly have come by acci­dent or chance. Thus, there is design in the uni­verse, which unfail­ing­ly points to a Design­er.

    By ask­ing such ques­tions as “who cre­at­ed God”, we are drag­ging God down to our own lev­el. If we right­ly rec­og­nize God as the Cre­ator of the uni­verse then He, by def­i­n­i­tion, must exist out­side the realm of space and time that are lim­it­ed to the uni­verse. And a phe­nom­e­non exist­ing out­side space and time is not bound by the prin­ci­ple of cause and effect. There­fore, “who cre­at­ed God” is a mean­ing­less ques­tion.

  • Matt says:

    Ashish Tewari,

    it is a straw­man to state that we claim that humans are the only one’s capa­ble of cre­at­ing things. No, there are nat­ur­al process­es that cre­ate things. “Chance” and “acci­dent” also build a straw­man because no sci­en­tists use those words. They say were are the result of undi­rect­ed nat­ur­al process­es. And they have a lot of evi­dence on their side.

    And again, we are not cre­at­ing any phys­i­cal laws. We study them, we mod­el them, we make pre­dic­tions about future dis­cov­er­ies based on a foun­da­tion of knowl­edge built by sci­en­tists. Although we do not have all the answers, we have enough that it’s time to require evi­dence or claim we don’t know. (Yet, or maybe nev­er)

    That’s an inter­est­ing claim that time, space, cause and effect do not apply to God. So if cause and effect do not apply, then it’s pos­si­ble that God cre­at­ed him­self. Oh, and time does­n’t apply, so it’s pos­si­ble he has­n’t even cre­at­ed him­self yet, it might hap­pen in the future. Sounds pret­ty absurd does­n’t it?

    Before you claim I just made a straw­man argu­ment, those are infer­ences based on the state­ment you made. Claim­ing that *any­thing* can exist out­side of cause and effect is pret­ty extra­or­di­nary. You’ll need evi­dence that is even pos­si­ble.

    Ask­ing a ques­tion is not evi­dence. Our col­lec­tive igno­rance is not evi­dence. The lim­i­ta­tions of our tech­nol­o­gy to explore the uni­verse is not evi­dence. You expect evi­dence out of sci­en­tists, so hold your­self to the same stan­dard. Please pro­vide some­thing testable.

    Back to string the­o­ry. How do you know the inten­tions of the sci­en­tists who cre­at­ed that mod­el? Real­ly, they did it to deny the exis­tence of God? I’d tend to believe they devel­oped that mod­el try­ing to explain some phe­nom­e­non they did­n’t under­stand. Is string the­o­ry right? maybe, but when they’ve con­duct­ed tests that con­firm or refute pre­dic­tions based on the mod­el, then we’ll have our evi­dence.

    As for “incred­i­ble order and bal­ance pre­vail­ing in the uni­verse” We only have one data point. We real­ly do not know the range of con­di­tions that allows for life. We do know that life can exist in the sear­ing heat of hydrother­mal vents, down to worms that live in freez­ing ice. Good chance, those aren’t the lim­its.

    As for “faith in some the­o­ry in the future”, well it’s got­ten us out of pre­his­toric times, the mid­dle ages, and into the 21st cen­tu­ry. The sto­ries of gods, deities and oth­er mytho­log­i­cal beings in charge have slow­ly fad­ed into the past. You don’t believe in Zeus do you? Why not? it was a firm­ly held believe for many peo­ple at one point.

  • Ashish Tewari says:

    Matt,

    You are look­ing for God in the wrong place. I nev­er said we need the ancient mytho­log­i­cal and super­sti­tious beliefs for faith in God. I said that sci­ence is the best tool for dis­cov­er­ing God. God’s hand (sig­na­ture) can be clear­ly seen in His cre­ation, pro­vid­ed one is hon­est and not blind­ed by an athe­is­tic bias.

    I wish you all suc­cess with the string “the­o­ry”. Per­haps some­day one can real­ly visu­al­ize eleven dimen­sions. Until then how­ev­er would’nt it be nice to con­cede that we don’t real­ly have a “nat­ur­al” expla­na­tion for the exis­tence of the uni­verse?

    Best wish­es.

  • Matt says:

    Ashish Tewari

    Iron­i­cal­ly, the path that lead me to athe­ism start­ed by read­ing Michael Behe, Lee Sro­bel, and the Bible.

    Cheers!

  • Matt says:

    Ashish Tewari,

    Cheers again, I could­n’t leave your last ques­tion unan­swered. The answer is, there is a nat­ur­al expla­na­tion and there is evi­dence sup­port­ing it.

    It is pre­dict­ed by quan­tum the­o­ry (I for­get which one exact­ly). The uni­verse was small enough (briefly) that it exist­ed com­plete­ly in the quan­tum realm. The same quan­tum the­o­ry the pre­dicts the spon­ta­neous cre­ation of the uni­verse has been high­ly suc­cess­ful at mak­ing oth­er ver­i­fied pre­dic­tions, so it’s quite plau­si­ble that is a cor­rect pre­dic­tion. Hawk­ings explains it bet­ter than I can, and in much more detail in The Grand Design.

    Can we test spon­ta­neous cre­ation of the uni­verse? Prob­a­bly nev­er, but we can test spon­ta­neous cre­ation of quan­tum par­ti­cles. There is a laser exper­i­ment being built right now to cap­ture such par­ti­cles long enough to be stud­ied. It’s called the Extreme Light Infra­struc­ture Ultra-High Field Facil­i­ty. And yes it’s pos­si­ble that it might ver­i­fy the exis­tence of oth­er dimen­sions.

    You don’t have to “visu­al­ize” extra dimen­sions to know they are there. Imag­ine liv­ing in a two-dimen­tion­al world. If you could con­struct a tri­an­gle where each cor­ner is 90 degrees, then you’ve proven your space-time isn’t flat, but warped in anoth­er dimen­sion that isn’t imme­di­ate­ly vis­i­ble to you. Try that with a globe as your mod­el of a 2‑dimentional world, you can eas­i­ly draw such a tri­an­gle.

    I find it iron­ic that, on one hand, “sci­ence is the best tool for dis­cov­er­ing God”, but on the oth­er hand, you find it hard to believe what the sci­en­tists are say­ing. Sup­pose that laser does find evi­dence of oth­er dimen­sions, will you then say, “Oh, of course, God designed it that way.”? But for now, I think you are say­ing that God did­n’t design it that way.

    I would guess you aren’t get­ting your sci­ence direct­ly from sci­en­tists. I guess your knowl­edge of sci­ence is com­ing from the­ol­o­gists who have a vest­ed inter­est in dis­tort­ing what sci­en­tists say, oth­er­wise they loose their grip on pow­er. Talk about arro­gance, the more their reli­gious sto­ries erode, the more adamant the reli­gious lead­ers become that only they know “the truth”. Through­out his­to­ry, human beings have believed in thou­sands of dif­fer­ent deities. Now we are only down to a hand­ful. Would­n’t it be nice to con­cede that the trend is clear, that we should­n’t have to make up sto­ries to cov­er knowl­edge we haven’t gained yet?

  • Ashish Tewari says:

    Matt,

    It is good to end on a point of agree­ment: All reli­gions are fake, man-made scams designed to fool peo­ple into blind and super­sti­tious beliefs. They have caused the great­est dam­age to ratio­nal and log­i­cal analy­sis in the his­to­ry of mankind (as well as mur­der and may­hem in the name of false gods).
    The reli­gions of the world are the sole rea­son why most log­i­cal and sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly trained minds turn into athe­ists. I don’t blame the sci­en­tists for dis­miss­ing reli­gious beliefs and dog­ma. But it is anoth­er mat­ter to reject the the­o­ry of intel­li­gent cre­ation based upon sci­en­tif­ic rea­son­ing (or lack there­of).

    Three cheers to you too, and have one on me!

  • Ashish Tewari says:

    Matt,

    Even Dawkins (‘God Delu­sion’) con­cedes that the same kind of rea­son­ing can be applied to the God hypoth­e­sis as to any oth­er sci­en­tif­ic ques­tion. Now, most sci­en­tif­ic ques­tions are set­tled by infer­ence, i.e., proof by prob­a­bil­i­ty rather than cer­tain­ty of an event. By the same log­ic, exis­tence of God is proved by an infer­en­tial argu­ment. There­fore, sci­en­tists ought to say “prob­a­bly God exists” rather than “there is no evi­dence of a God”.

  • Matt says:

    Ashish Tewari,

    The God Delu­sion does exact­ly that… uses sci­en­tif­ic rea­son­ing to look at the (so-called) evi­dence for God. And arrives at the con­clu­sion that there is no (valid) evi­dence.

    Dawkins dis­cuss­es the Cos­mo­log­i­cal Argu­ment, which is basi­cal­ly what you are argu­ing, and comes up with no evi­dence.

    Dawkins dis­cuss­es the God-of-gaps the­o­ry, which you’ve also cit­ed. Still no evi­dence.

    It’s a bit disin­gen­u­ous to say he “con­cedes” that God can be eval­u­at­ed sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly when that’s a main point in the book.

    Sure, there are times when answers aren’t 100% (maybe even 100% of the time haha) but you have to be close. Jump­ing from 0% to 100%, isn’t an infer­ence, nor a proof.

    We’ve gone back and forth on this point sev­er­al times now. I will try to move it for­ward with a ques­tion to you. Tell me more about what the God you believe in can do and does do. He cre­at­ed the uni­verse… then what?

  • Ashish Tewari says:

    Matt,

    The God I believe in is the Cre­ator and Sus­tain­er of the Uni­verse we live in.

    By the way, your own “gods” (Ein­stein, Hawk­ing, et al) are cur­rent­ly look­ing like fools with the lat­est find­ings at CERN and LHC. Bet­ter check out the good ol’ “laws of physics” once again!

    Ta ta for now!

  • Matt says:

    Can you expand­ed on how God sus­tains the uni­verse?

    I nev­er attrib­uted super­nat­ur­al pow­ers to any sci­en­tists, so call­ing them “my Gods” is false.

    I assume you are refer­ring to the super­lu­mi­nal neu­tri­nos… At the moment, that’s an unex­plained result. Noth­ing has come crash­ing down. The results haven’t even been dupli­cat­ed yet. Even if it were pos­si­ble that some­thing trav­els faster than light, it does­nt nec­es­sar­i­ly mean that Ein­stein was made a fool of. It most like­ly means a lim­i­ta­tion to an oth­er­wise sol­id mod­el. That’s pret­ty stan­dard in sci­ence to know where a mod­el applies. New­ton­ian physics don’t work in the quan­tum world, and quan­tum physics don’t work in the new­ton­ian realm. That does­n’t inval­i­date either mod­el, and you got a long ways to go to inval­i­date Ein­stein the­o­ries.

  • Ashish says:

    Matt,

    You say “noth­ing has come crash­ing down” due to neu­tri­nos mov­ing faster than light. Real­ly? Either you don’t under­stand spe­cial rel­a­tiv­i­ty, or you are being less than hon­est.

    Any­how, noth­ing would come crash­ing down either if I choose to “prove” math­e­mat­i­cal­ly that the uni­verse is actu­al­ly sup­port­ed on the horns of a gigan­tic cow, or if some­body proves me wrong. Even Stephen Hawk­ing says he could “prove” that the Earth was at the cen­ter of the uni­verse, but the math would be messy. So I guess that’s why he chose eleven-dimen­sion­al strings instead. Per­haps the math was a lit­tle less messy. I don’t know where his M‑theory stands now, after both the speed of light and CP sym­me­try hypothe­ses have been vio­lat­ed.

    So the moral of the sto­ry is : any­body can “prove” any­thing, and some­body can come up with an exper­i­ment to prove him/her wrong. Nobody how­ev­er can dis­prove the exis­tence of God or that He sus­tains the uni­verse. If you can, kind­ly show me how.

  • Matt says:

    Ashish,

    Maybe I should have put a “yet” at the end of that par­tic­u­lar sen­tence, maybe. But in the con­text of the pri­or sen­tence, which starts “At the moment”; and the fol­low­ing sen­tence which ends, “… been dupli­cat­ed yet.” I think the point was clear, and there was noth­ing dis­hon­est about it.

    Just in case it was­n’t clear (my mis­take if it was­n’t), then allow me to restate it in a dif­fer­ent way… Give the orig­i­nal sci­en­tists and addi­tion­al sci­en­tists time to: review all the data; review the set­up and exper­i­ment; repeat the exper­i­ments; con­duct vari­a­tions on the exper­i­ments; rule out errors in the sys­tem; under­stand why oth­er obser­va­tions of neu­tri­nos failed to detect FTL prop­er­ties; and oth­er­wise ver­i­fy the evi­dence for faster-than-light neu­tri­nos. Only then will they start to get a ver­i­fied under­stand­ing of the impli­ca­tions. The impli­ca­tions may com­plete­ly turn around rel­a­tiv­i­ty; or may be a spe­cial case that requires a small adjust­ment to the the­o­ry. Either way, it’s pre­ma­ture to say they’ve made a fool of Ein­stein.

    There is a dif­fer­ence between prov­ing the non-exis­tence of some­thing and say­ing there is lack of evi­dence. I say there is lack of evi­dence. You say God sus­tains the uni­verse. So I’m curi­ous, how exact­ly does God sus­tain the uni­verse? Do you care to pro­vide details?

  • Ashish says:

    Matt,

    Have you ever won­dered what are the odds of life aris­ing by chance? And what are the odds of sim­ple life­forms evolv­ing by them­selves into intel­li­gent beings who can ask the ques­tion: “Is there a God?”
    Why did­n’t a mil­lion things hap­pen (as they should have if it were all by chance) to pre­vent life from evolv­ing into you and me writ­ing these posts?

    If you give some thought to these ques­tions, you will real­ize that God sus­tains the pre­car­i­ous con­di­tions for the evo­lu­tion and sur­vival of human beings on this plan­et. You will not get these answers from any­body but through your own analy­sis. The only thing required is an open and unbi­ased atti­tude.

    The com­plex­i­ty and rar­i­ty of life in the uni­verse is the clear­est hint of God’s hand at work. I hope that one day you would come to this real­iza­tion.

    This is going to be my last post on this top­ic. Have a nice day!

  • Matt says:

    Ashish,

    Thank you for pro­vid­ing details. One minor seman­tic point, then I’ll pro­ceed…

    When you said “sus­tains”, that sounds to me like there is some decay hap­pen­ing in the uni­verse, and God steps in to patch things up. What you described sounds more like direct­ing the course of the uni­verse to bring us here.

    I have won­dered about the odds, and I’ve read a lot about it. Actu­al­ly stat­ed with Dar­win’s Black Box. Behe describes a math­e­mat­i­cal mod­el of chance assem­bly of mol­e­cules into organ­ic mol­e­cules. The odds (as he sees it) are astro­nom­i­cal. That chap­ter imme­di­ate­ly fol­lows the chap­ter where Behe states that math­e­mat­i­cal mod­el­ing ins’t sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly valid. The hypocrisy is breath tak­ing, and he mod­eled “chance”, not the nat­ur­al process­es that short­cut chance.

    I stat­ed ear­li­er that life isn’t by chance, it’s the result of undi­rect­ed nat­ur­al process­es. A brief com­ment on chance ver­sus process­es… The odds of me win­ning the lot­tery are so low, that if I actu­al­ly won, it would be by chance. Yet some­one wins most of the time, not by chance, but by the process of mil­lions of tick­ets being sold. Yet, I could make a process of even­tu­al­ly win­ning by either buy­ing mil­lions of tick­ets every game, or play­ing mil­lions of games (well, hypo­thet­i­cal­ly speak­ing). Increas­ing time or space increas­es the odds to the point of hav­ing a real expec­ta­tion of a win. The odds of life may be quite small, but the uni­verse is quite large and has been around a long time. A tril­lion galax­ies for 13 bil­lion years. There have been plen­ty of oppor­tu­ni­ties for life to arise from a col­lec­tion of nat­ur­al process­es. We only know of one, but then we don’t have the tech­nol­o­gy yet to detect far-off life forms.

    What are those process­es? we have a pret­ty good idea, and we see evi­dence. We see clouds of gas con­dens­ing into stars. The stars form heavy ele­ments and re-dis­perse them through enor­mous explo­sions. The heavy ele­ments are nec­es­sary to form rocky plan­ets (where we know life can exists). As Miller-Urey dis­cov­ered, it’s pos­si­ble that a com­bi­na­tion of ele­ments and an acti­va­tion ener­gy can form organ­ic mol­e­cules nec­es­sary for life as we know it. Maybe their com­bi­na­tion of ele­ments was­n’t the right com­bi­na­tion present on pri­mor­dial Earth, but there have been 30–50 dif­fer­ent vari­a­tions on their exper­i­ment with sim­i­lar results (prob­a­bly more since I’ve read about them). Acti­va­tion ener­gies could be light­ning, hydrother­mal, tidal and so on.

    With organ­ic mol­e­cules present, it only takes some form of cat­a­lyst to form more com­plex mol­e­cules. Even­tu­al­ly enough of the right com­pounds form and begin self-repli­ca­tion. From there, evo­lu­tion takes over.

    I rec­om­mend Why Evo­lu­tion Is True by Jer­ry Coyne for a bet­ter under­stand­ing of why evo­lu­tion is a nat­ur­al process. A briefly as I can describe it, it occurs the way one would expect an unguid­ed nat­ur­al process to go. We see how RNA and DNA repli­cates, how genes get dupli­cat­ed and their func­tions diverge (in oth­er words how new genes show up) We see how form and func­tion inter­twine and change over time to cre­ate new abil­i­ties.

    But wait, the lot­tery is designed to pro­duce a win­ner every game or so, does­n’t that mean the Uni­verse is designed too? Short answer: no. The ‘bal­ance’ that’s required isn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly as frag­ile as some would have you believe. In The Case for the Cre­ator, Lee Stro­bel claims that chang­ing grav­i­ty by a bil­lionth of a bil­lionth per­cent would cause the Uni­verse to col­lapse (He might have had more “bil­lionths” in there). Stro­bel’s tol­er­ance is much tighter that’s what claimed by any the­o­ret­i­cal physi­cist. Stro­bel goes on to claim that, with that change in grav­i­ty, ani­mals would have to have enor­mous legs or be crushed by the weight of their own body. That’s a bald-face lie. Look up grav­i­ty anom­aly… it’s much larg­er that Stro­bels hypo­thet­i­cal grav­i­ty change. Cen­trifu­gal force of the Earths rota­tion counter-acts grav­i­ty much more than Stro­bels grav­i­ty change too. Yet birds are able to fly from hemi­sphere to hemi­sphere with­out huge legs and with­out being crushed.

    So if the uni­verse is being direct­ed, why does it look like it’s not? Solar sys­tems form in an order­ly and pre­dictable manor. Evo­lu­tion forms in a pre­dictable manor too. Well, we don’t know exact­ly where it will take us, but the pat­terns are pre­dictable. some exam­ples: Embryos all start to form alike, then diverge as the embryo grows (this we known before On The Ori­gin of the Species). The far­ther species are sep­a­rat­ed in time, the far­ther their genet­ic sep­a­ra­tion. We see birds and oth­er species capa­ble of air trav­el (think seeds dis­persed by wind or in the feath­ers of birds, etc.) pop­u­lat­ing islands, but land­locked species are seen to have diverged around the time the island sep­a­rat­ed from the main land. Vol­canic islands are all “fly­able” species (well, at least indige­nous species) We see fos­sil evi­dence of the ances­tors of whales hav­ing legs. We see species like the lung fish capa­ble of breath­ing in water and on the land, and with fins strong enough to limp along on land–exactly the kind of inter­me­di­ary we would expect to find if fish crawled out of the sea.

    If it was direct­ed, then there is a lot of waste for one hum­ble lit­tle plan­et.

    There’s a lot more if you are will­ing to chal­lenge your beliefs. I’ve done it, and it brought me to far dif­fer­ent con­clu­sions than I’ve had in the past.

    Since you may not be back, allow me to say that I enjoy a good debate, and you did­n’t dis­ap­point. Cheers!

  • John miller says:

    Man made God. That’s where God came from.Period

  • MichaelL says:

    Lucien, the onus in not on the unbe­liev­er to prove that there is no god, but upon the believ­er to prove that there is a god. So far, such evi­dence has been lack­ing.

  • Cathy says:

    Matt, I was raised in a home, church, and school that all taught a lit­er­al, ratio­nal approach to believ­ing in God based on his­tor­i­cal evi­dences (such as the extra-Bib­li­cal sup­port of his­tor­i­cal events like the Cen­sus at the time of Christ’s birth or wor­ship of a res­ur­rect­ed Christ with­in a short time frame of his death) and log­i­cal argu­ments (such as the cos­mo­log­i­cal that you men­tioned). Iron­i­cal­ly, the intel­lec­tu­al hon­esty and desire for truth my par­ents and teach­ers instilled has me ques­tion­ing some long-trust­ed argu­ments that they taught me.

    At 35, I’m final­ly feel­ing brave enough to direct­ly face the nag­ging qualms I have about some of the log­ic maps I’ve long accept­ed.

    I believe it’s impos­si­ble not to have some kind of bias on the sub­ject, and I’ve been won­der­ing where to look for some con­trast­ing opin­ions to those I’ve always heard. I don’t want to just read The Case for Christ or Evi­dence That Demands a Ver­dict with­out giv­ing the oth­er side a chance to present its case, but I haven’t had a clear idea what to read in coun­ter­point while I think all this through.

    Thanks to your well-rea­soned dis­cus­sion here, I now have a few books to read and a sol­id place to start ques­tion­ing. Thank you!

  • Matt says:

    Cathy,

    You’re wel­come! I’m so glad that I’ve helped (I got goose­bumps read­ing your post!).

    Con­grat­u­la­tions on your new jour­ney. We only have this world, so we have to make it count. If you nev­er stop ques­tion­ing, you’ll nev­er stop learn­ing.

    But beware, there are still social stig­mas with becom­ing an athe­ist. You’ll meet a lot of resis­tance because reli­gion gets ingrained at an emo­tion­al lev­el from a ear­ly age. OTOH, a lot of peo­ple have doubts about reli­gion, but keep qui­et about them. As they are exposed to stronger argue­ments, their minds will start to change too. Pick your bat­tles care­ful­ly :-)

    If I may, here are more things to read: The God Delu­tion, it’s a great start­ing point. As you read the book, notice how care­ful Dawkins is not to be offen­sive to any­one. Yet his oppo­si­tion calls him “mil­i­tant”. Why is that…

    There are a lot of great blogs to fol­low. Search for Jer­ry Coyne, Eric Mac­Don­ald (for­mer priest), Sam Har­ris, (the late) Christo­pher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins. Com­menters on those sites show a lot of depth of knowl­ege, so read them all.

    I’ve read Case For The Cre­ator. Stro­bell makes so many Sci­ence 101 errors that it’s obvi­ous he nev­er talked to any real sci­en­tists. He uses so many emo­tion­al pleas, that it’s clear­ly not a well rea­soned argue­ment, but more like a defense attor­ney try­ing to sway a jury when the facts are weak. (Stro­bell is an attor­ney) Re-read a cou­ple chap­tesr not­ing the style and ask why he would need to do that.

    Have you read the Bible? That alone is enough for some peo­ple. I found it inter­est­ing that Phar­roah was ready to release the Isre­alites after the third plague, but God “hard­ened his heart”; which ulti­mate­ly lead to God killing thou­sands of chil­dren (accord­ing to the Bible). And the faith­ful call him a lov­ing god. Death toll by God is actu­al­ly in the mil­lions in the Bible! Dev­il: sev­en.

    Search for Bible con­tra­dic­tions to find a lot more. SkepticsAnnotatedBible.com is a good source. They even have links to oth­er sites that attempt rebut­tals.

    Last­ly, the cen­sus you men­tioned nev­er hap­pened. The Bible is the only record­ing of it, there is no oth­er records of it (nor a record of King Har­rod hav­ing all the chil­dren killed.) In fact, Jesus was missed by the Roman “jour­nal­ists.” That is very sig­nif­i­cant because the Romans were fanat­i­cal record keep­ers. Their jour­nal­ists were pro­lif­ic, and fas­ci­nat­ed with the super­nat­ur­al and with expos­ing cor­rup­tion of their lead­ers. The crowds Jesus (alleged­ly) drew would have attract­ed the jour­nal­ists atten­tion.

    Cheers!

  • Bikram Nayak says:

    I lis­tened the nobel lauer­ate Dr R Ernst nobel seminar.but he left VMAT2 gene and how this gene 50% influ­ence spiritualty.if we could con­trol mono amine lev­el , then we could stop the war based on dif­fer­ent reli­gions.

  • Bikram Nayak says:

    If we could able acti­vate neu­ropsy­chic mus­cle by TELEKINESIA, we might reach a posi­tion just near to GOD.
    Even we could heal dis­eases locat­ed at high­ly del­i­cate organs.…means heal­ing with­out heal­ing…
    request­ing sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ty to kind­ly include me in any sim­i­lar project…

  • Rahim says:

    Bias sci­en­tists! Do do jus­tice to their own occu­pa­tion, they should not talk in this way!

  • Sam says:

    @Rahim
    In what way is that?

    This video is a col­lec­tion of answers to ques­tions ask­ing for the inter­vie­wee’s opin­ions (and at times their rea­sons for those opin­ions). You would­n’t expect some­one’s opin­ions to be free of opin­ion would you?

    Or do you say that their opin­ions are only arrived at by a line of rea­son­ing built on an unsup­port­able premise? Which under­ly­ing premise is it that you are iden­ti­fy­ing here as being unsup­port­ed and yet used with­out expla­na­tion by the inter­vie­wees in the video?

  • Matt says:

    @Muralidhar,

    I doubt you still vis­it here, but just in case, I found an inter­est­ing tid­bit about Bran­ham.

    He died 40-some days before East­er. His fol­low­ers were so con­vinced of his divine con­nec­tion they thought he would rise from the dead. (I have to spec­u­late that maybe Bran­ham put that idea in their heads.)

    So they wait­ed to bury him. 40-some days until after East­er. No res­ur­rec­tion ever hap­pened, well, that’s not a sur­prise to some of us.

  • Bill Moen says:

    As Moses said to the burn­ing bush;
    “You want us to “cut off” our WHAT?!

  • Swami says:

    I would have liked to have seen more dis­cus­sion on the nature of con­scious­ness. Do you believe that con­scious­ness is super­nat­ur­al? This would have beeb a more inter­est­ing ques­tion to ask. No doubt most if not all would have said “no.” But it can be a much more nuanced dis­cus­sion when the expe­ri­ence of mys­tics is dis­cussed in rela­tion to sci­ence than when belief in God is dis­cussed.

  • Matt says:

    Ashish Tewari,

    Have you seen the lat­est news from CERN? Sor­ry, but nobody has been made a fool. Maybe those sci­en­tists look fool­ish to some, but they did what they had to do. They had a result they did­n’t under­stand, so they asked for help. An arro­gant sci­en­tist would­n’t have used that approach. Grant­ed they don’t have they lev­el of proof they real­ly want, but it’s prob­a­bly safe to assume that is forth­com­ing.

  • Jane Ryan says:

    Is this a site for just men? You only have ONE woman on this list? Seri­ous­ly? And you expect me to LISTEN to this? Wow!

  • Gale Stanford says:

    Read my book, “God Speaks to Sci­en­tists, Too! (Avail­able at Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble.com

  • DBurch says:

    I believe. I talk to God. He talks to me. I love Him. He loves me. He fills my heart with joy. He is unex­plain­able to the learned. He is suf­fi­cient for all. You can’t hold a ray of sun­shine in your hand but you can feel it and know it is there.

  • Philip says:

    So the believ­er says to the non-believ­er, “God is real and infi­nite and I under­stand God with my finite brain.”
    The non-believ­er snorts and says, “Nuh-uh. The uni­verse is infi­nite and I have scoured the whole thing with my very lim­it­ed resources and found noth­ing.”
    An ambiva­lent per­son, who believes in the sci­en­tif­ic mod­el, over­hears their argu­ing and says, “I have a the­o­ry, and it informs my behav­ior, but as there is no pos­si­ble way for me to know I’m hedg­ing my bets.”
    Which one do we trust?

  • Matt says:

    Philip,

    As a non-believ­er, I can­not say I’ve looked every­where. But I have looked every­where the believ­ers say we should find God. If we can­not find him in those places, why look every­where.

    As for hedg­ing your bets, which god do you choose? Over 2600 gods have been doc­u­ment­ed by humans at some point in his­to­ry. The god of the Bible gets furi­ous­ly angry if you choose the wrong one. If the oth­er gods have the same anger issues, you bet­ter hope you get lucky and choose the right one.

    Cheers!

  • Mr. Wapojif says:

    The des­per­ate pros­e­lytis­ing attempts of the reli­gious brigade are get­ting more and more tedious. The advances in sci­ence over the last 150 years had made a mock­ery of reli­gious beliefs and as it con­tin­ues to do so hope­ful­ly, in the dis­tant future, humans will let go of their ter­ror of death and the futil­i­ty of exis­tence and just enjoy their lives. There is peace in one life, but so many can’t accept this.

    There are those who say, “You can’t prove God doesn’t exist!” This is a moron­ic state­ment which helps pro­long the debate. Show me that God DOES exist. You can’t, but also you can’t show that an invis­i­ble omnipo­tent being is out there. What we can do is look at sci­en­tif­ic facts, evi­dence, and log­ic and see that it is high­ly improb­a­ble that we live in a fan­ta­sy world gov­erned by a deity. Where is the phys­i­cal evi­dence for this deity? Is there any evi­dence at all? Is there even a sin­gle grain of sands worth? Nope; and all this after thou­sands of years of mind­less belief. Reli­gious peo­ple; it’s time to aban­don the fan­ta­sy world and embrace log­ic.

  • Clara says:

    such 3rd grade argu­ments

  • Butch says:

    These speak­ers all seem to be ref­er­enc­ing their dis­be­lief in reli­gious and the­o­log­i­cal dog­mas and myths. They don’t dis­tin­guish between “reli­gious belief” (in oth­er words, belief in a the­o­log­i­cal mod­el to under­stand the uni­verse, which is what most reli­gions con­sist of) and meta­phys­i­cal ques­tions which are, by def­i­n­i­tion, beyond the realm of physics. “Why does any­thing exist rather than noth­ing” is the first ques­tion of meta­physics. I think one speak­er in this mon­tage rec­og­nized or at least sug­gest­ed that why the laws of physics exist is prob­a­bly unknow­able by sci­en­tif­ic inquiry. The philoso­pher Ken Wilbur remarked that many of the great­est physi­cists were mys­tics. Some speak­ers in the video point to the tremen­dous advances in phys­i­cal sci­ences in the last two cen­turies, but we may also be approach­ing a peri­od when the­o­ret­i­cal physics has reached its lim­its. String the­o­ry, for exam­ple, which attempts to rec­on­cile the quan­tum with the New­ton­ian is, at least so far, seen by many physi­cists as unprov­able and there­fore essen­tial­ly a “phi­los­o­phy”. The nature of con­scious­ness remains elu­sive despite attempts to com­pare it to a dig­i­tal feed­back loop. Prob­ing “mat­ter” at the sub­atom­ic lev­el has reduced “sub­stance” to ener­gy poten­tials. The Big Bang posits that the uni­verse sprang from an infi­nite­ly small point — and that the law of physics break down as we approach the moment of the Big Bang. I have no qualms about those who look on the­o­log­i­cal cre­ation myths and the­o­log­i­cal­ly based cos­mol­o­gy as the equiv­a­lent of fairy tales. We don’t need a “man in the sky” to explain what sci­ence can probe. How­ev­er, those who ignore the essen­tial mys­ti­cal and meta­phys­i­cal ques­tions about exis­tence, the pos­si­bil­i­ty that there are oth­er ways of see­ing real­i­ty (for exam­ple through intu­ition) are show­ing the mech­a­nis­tic lim­i­ta­tions of their thought process­es. These speak­ers in fact seem quite sat­is­fied not to ask philo­soph­i­cal ques­tions at all and be sat­is­fied that the uni­verse sim­ply “is”. I agree with anoth­er com­menter that this video would have been much more inter­est­ing if it had con­trast­ed views on the ques­tion of “god” by also includ­ing some sci­en­tists who might have artic­u­lat­ed oth­er points of view — espe­cial­ly some that are not nec­es­sar­i­ly the­o­log­i­cal, but meta­phys­i­cal.

  • MinSTL says:

    Very inter­est­ing dis­cus­sion and clear­ly enlight­ened thinkers in this video. My one com­plaint: only one female voice in this list of 50…really??

  • Jono says:

    I find it embar­rass­ing that the author did not choose to inter­view Fran­cis Collins, lead of the human genome project and cur­rent Direc­tor of the Nation­al Insti­tutes of Health. And yet he is left out. Also a Chris­t­ian, of course we have our own objec­tives to serve, its just sad when this video is so utter­ly one sided and self serv­ing.

  • Guest says:

    I’m an apathe­ist: I don’t care if God exists or not. It does­n’t impact my life either way. Athe­ists have become just as dog­mat­ic and evan­gel­i­cal as reli­gious believ­ers these days. It is pos­si­ble denounce the evils of orga­nized reli­gion with­out mount­ing a Cru­sade for your own beliefs.nnStill, inter­est­ing video. I would have (like some oth­ers men­tioned) enjoyed see­ing dif­fer­ing points of view, rather than dozens of peo­ple essen­tial­ly say­ing the same thing over and over again. nnAnd why only one woman?

  • Janette says:

    If one stud­ies the brain’s struc­ture & func­tion and may I also add genetics/DNA sci­ence, and still does­n’t believe in a cre­ator of humans, then that per­son belongs to “homo stul­tus” and not to “homo sapi­ens”.

    • Mattapult says:

      I’m guess­ing you learned that in Bible col­lege… being wrong about the sci­ence, and call­ing peo­ple names over it. ID has long been dis­proven, and even the courts agree it is not sci­ence.

  • Mattapult says:

    Faith,nnThere are numer­ous exam­ples of things unseen, yet still proven. One broad exam­ple are the crim­i­nal cas­es that are solved via foren­sic analysis.nnYou men­tioned the Big Bang. True, we were not there to see it, but there is a bet­ter ques­tion, “How do we know?” The Cos­mic Microwave Back­ground is a good exam­ple. The CMB was pre­dict­ed based on mod­els of the Big Bang. Sci­en­tists knew just where to look, and when the tech­nol­o­gy was avail­able, they found it. A “proph­esy” in a sense.nnPaleontologists are prophets in the same sense. They want to dis­cov­er a long lost species, so they esti­mate the time­frame the species exist­ed. They study geo­log­i­cal maps for areas the formed in that time­frame. They dig, and they (often) find what they are look­ing for.nnnnThat’s fair­ly con­clu­sive proof when your mod­el tells you where to look and you find it. Ein­stein is famous today for E=MC2, but it was the con­fir­ma­tion of grav­i­ta­tion­al lens­ing that orig­i­nal­ly brought him fame.nnnCheers!

  • DryHillDrinks says:

    Is it too far of a leap to sug­gest that sci­en­tists are not nec­es­sar­i­ly the most adept spec­i­mens for inter­pre­ta­tions regard­ing per­spec­tives on life, force, ener­gy, and love?

    As the liv­ing, breath­ing, ever mis­take mak­ing indi­vid­u­als we are; is it dif­fi­cult to sug­gest that any per­ceived mean­ing con­trived through infor­ma­tion analy­sis is con­stant­ly at odds with too much or too lit­tle sub­jec­tiv­i­ty? Is this tru­ly per­cep­tion, or pos­si­bly judg­ment?

    First, let us pre­tend that every sin­gle cul­ture before us has not pos­sessed some form of faith with wor­ship; and you are the first to stum­ble upon this idea of a cre­ator.
    How rea­son­able would it be (with­out an expe­ri­ence) to scoff at it as irrel­e­vant due to a per­ceived irra­tional nature?

    Sec­ond­ly, I have a list with a test.

    Oxy­gen (65%)
    Car­bon (18%)
    Hydro­gen (10%)
    Nitro­gen (3%)
    Cal­ci­um (1.5%)
    Phos­pho­rus (1.0%)
    Potas­si­um (0.35%)
    Sul­fur (0.25%)
    Sodi­um (0.15%)
    Mag­ne­sium (0.05%)
    Cop­per, Zinc, Sele­ni­um, Molyb­de­num, Flu­o­rine, Chlo­rine, Iodine, Man­ganese, Cobalt, Iron (0.70%)
    Lithi­um, Stron­tium, Alu­minum, Sil­i­con, Lead, Vana­di­um, Arsenic, Bromine (trace amounts)
    The above ele­ments are all con­tained in the human body, with the cor­re­spond­ing (approx.) amounts.
    If you have a blender and a spat­u­la, you should be able to mix these just prop­er­ly.… ;}

    And no, evo­lu­tion does not bear any spe­cial hold­ing to me con­cern­ing God.

    Would the expan­sion from a sin­gu­lar­i­ty (big bang the­o­ry) rep­re­sent a com­plete perception/consciousness?
    Or the lack there­of ?
    If it is a lack there­of then the truth is that every per­son is locked into a set sys­tem, com­pris­ing and rep­re­sent­ing a uni­ty or whole­ness.
    Which would raise a ques­tion; how could some believe and some not?

    I’ll end on TWO quotes (cause I’m an ass :D)

    “Sci­ence with­out reli­gion is lame, reli­gion with­out sci­ence is blind.”
    &
    “Imag­i­na­tion is more impor­tant than knowl­edge. For knowl­edge is lim­it­ed to all we now know and under­stand, while imag­i­na­tion embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and under­stand.”
    Both by Ein­stein.

  • DryHillDrinks says:

    -Mat­ta­pult

    All you refer to is still in our phys­i­cal world, sur­round­ed by par­ti­cles, light, and pos­si­bly my wind.
    Foren­sics, dna, waves..You or I can touch or feel all of them, I do not see the rel­e­vance either way.

    Did these big bang mod­els wear dress­es, or swim­suits ? You’ve lost me.

  • Mattapult says:

    Dry­HillDrinks,

    There are plen­ty of things we can­not touch or feel direct­ly, but we can gath­er evi­dence for their exis­tence. The rel­e­vance is that things unseen can be proven–and often are proven.

    I’m assum­ing you are Chris­t­ian, and there­fore believe in a god–which I also assume you want to dis­cus. Before we dis­cuss how that god can be proven, which god do you believe in? Please, give me a spe­cif­ic def­i­n­i­tion, and some prop­er­ties of that god.

  • Simon Morgan says:

    “This video con­tains con­tent from Lit­tle Dot Stu­dios, Big­Think, BBC World­wide and Deep­Min­ing­Cor­pAs­soc, one of more of whom have blocked it in your coun­try on copy­right grounds.”

    I thought the whole point of this web­site was that this kind of thing did­n’t hap­pen?

  • (((BELEVE STATE MY))) THIS IS THE POSITIVE GOOD TRUTH OF GOD INBODY OF THE REALITY OF THE THEIF CROSS TWO MY PAGE I WANA SHOW YOU THE BETTER OF ALL I AM THE POSITIVE GOOD TRUTH OF GOD TRUTH REALITY… MARK (((9:38–39))) BELEVE THE (((ABSLUTE))) POSITIVE GOOD TRUTH OF GOD OF JESUS CHRIST THE GOSPAL OF TOMAS (((35))) WHAT WAS LOST IS NOW FOUND I AM NOT OF RELIGION OR FAITH BELEVE FAITH INBODY OF ALL MATTER OF CREATION OF EXSISTENCE IS (((FICTION))) STATIC SCATTERED TWISTED UNDEFIND IT CROSSES TWO NO (((ABSLUTE))) POSTIVE GOOD TRUTH FOUR ALL AN FOUR THIS ITS A NEGITIVE NOUTHING LIE AN (((SNAKE))) ON ALL MANKIND WHO INBODY ITS (((FRUIT))) AS THERE LIFES MATTER BELEVE I AM A MAN WHO ONLY STATES THE (((ABSULTE))) TRUTH OF GOD TWO REALITY FOUR ALL I AM POSITIVELY THAT CAN BE PROVEN EVERYWAY BY ALL PHYSICS OF EXSISTANCE OF CREATION THE POSITIVE GOOD TRUTH OF GOD US ALL GOD TRUTH REALITY… BELEVE ALL ELSE IS (((FAITH))) THE POSITIVE GOOD TRUTH OF NOTHING THE BLIND DARKNESS OF ALL (((ABSLUTLY))) UNDEFIND TWISTED STATIC SCATTER MATTER OF FOOLISH NEITIVITY AN THE ONLY DECAY AN DESENGERATION AN DEATH OF MANKIND GOD TRUTH REALITY… LETS BOND AN CROSS IT TWO THE NOUTHING IT IS TWO ALL MANKIND BELEVE (((HOPE FOUR A BETTER WAY ALWAYS AN FOUREVER GOOD POSITIVE AN ALIVE))) WAS WHAT OUR ANSESTERS WERE TRYNG TWO STATE WITH (((FAITH))) AN HERE AN NOW IT IS THAT BETTER WAY (((ABSLUTLY))) THE POSITIVE GOOD TRUTH OF GOD OF (((STATE MY LIE))) GOD TRUTH REALITY… Beleve Steve Hawkins is hafe equat­ed like all of this mat­ter Look it is an Equa­tion (((ATOM))) pro­duce your body of male or femal mat­ter two the fact of God Cre­ation if one pos­i­tive you are stat­ed one GOOD an can by all physics of cre­ation of exsis­tanc only cross (((TWOGETHER))) A one bet­ter man or woman God Truth Real­i­ty an if thats how you always pro­duce That will be the Good Truth of God You Me Jesus an the Theif A life that can nev­er die EVERLASTING GOD TRUTH REALIY… BELEVE THE GOSPAL OF TOMAS (((11 35 48 85))) ALL WHO SEE CROSS TWO MY PAGE READ LINKS SCROLL AROUND ITS TIME TWO PRODUSE OUT ALL MANKIND KINGS AN QUEENS FOUR INFINITY GOD TRUTH REALITY… (((BELEVE RE-POST TILL HELL FREEZES OVER (((STATE MY LIE))) EVERYBODY WHO SEES YOUR A MUSTARD SEED CROSS TWO MY PAGE AN READ TOP POST AN SHARE WITH ALL GOD TRUTH REALITY… BELEVE LETS BOND AN ALL DO BETTER (((HERE AN NOW))) FROM INSIDE OUT THATS HOW GOD TRUTH REALITY STATES THE GOOD TRUTH OF GOD OF YOU INBODY OF MATTER POSITIVE TWO BETTER OR NEGITIVE TWO NOUTHING GOD TRUTH REALITY… BELEVE GOD BLESS (((ALL))) MANKIND WHERE EVER THE POSITIVE OF YOU IS BETTER THE ALL NEGITIVEITY THE GOOD TRUTH OF GOD OF ME IS THE ONE WITH YOU THE GOSPAL OF TOMAS (((24 25))) A‑MAN WHO NEVER DIES NEGITIVE TWO NOUTHING GOD TRUTH REALITY… +++(((BELEVE)))+++ MUSLIM CHRISTAIN JEW HINDU AN BUDDIEST TWO ALL HOLY SCRIPTURES ARE POSITIVE AN NEGITIVE TWO THE GOOD TRUTH OF MANKIND ALWAYS CROSSING BETTER OR FOREVER CROSSING TWO NOUTHING DUST OF WIND BELEVE ONLY TEACH THE POSITIVE GOOD TRUTH OF GOD ALL ELSE IS A NEGITIVE NOUTHING LIE ON ALL MANKIND JOHN 3:16 GOD TRUTH REALITY…YOU MAY WANA READ THIS AN RE-THINK YOUR VIEWS OF THE CRUSIFICTION ITS INPOSSIBILE BY ALL PHYSICS OF CREATION OF EXSISTANCE JESUS OR THE THEIF EVER DIED BELEVE THEY POSTIVLY BONDED ONE INBODY OF MATTER WITH THE GOOD TRUTH OF GOD OF JESUS WHERE TWO OR MORE (((ATOMS))) CROSS AN BOND ONE POSITIVE THEY ARE STATED ONE (((GOOD))) AN CAN ONLY ABSLUTLY CROSS ONE BETTER (((TWOGETHER))) INBODY OF MATTER OF SHAPE FORM AN MASS TWO THE TRUTH OF THEM INBODY OF MATTER THE REALITY OF THERE EXSISTANCE AN THEY STOLD THERE LIVES BACK FROM THOSE NEGITIVE ONE FOOLS CROSSING ALL THEY ARE STATIC TWISTED UNDEFIND TWO NOUTHING DUST OF WIND BELEVE THEY LIVED BY EXSAMPLE SO YOU ALWAYS AN FOUREVER COULD GOD TRUTH REALITY… LETS BOND THE GOSPAL OF TOMAS (((33 35 48 85))) GOD TRUTH REALITY… (((BE AN LOVE EVE))) ONLY (POSITIVLY) WORD UP (((X))) MARKS THE SPOT OF A THEIFS PARIDCE WE ALL SHARE THE SAME (((GOOD TRUTH))) IF WE FOUND MONEY OR WE SEEN A DEAR FRIEND OR WE SAID A KIND WORD OF CONPASSION ALL STATE ALL MANKIND INBODY OF MATTER POSITIVE AN POSITIVE STATES ALL INBODY OF MATTER OF CREATION OF EXSISTANCE GOOD TWO THE TRUTH OF OUR SHAPE FORM AN MASS ONLY CROSSING ABSULTLY BETTER INBODY OF MATTER OF CREATION OF OUR LIFES LASTING ALWAYS AN FOUREVER GOD TRUTH REALITY THE GOOD TRUTH OF MANKINDS EXSISTANCE… KNOW THE CONFLICT IF WE WENT TWO JAIL IF SOME ONE WE LOVED DIED OR OUR BILL MONEY GOT LOST ALL WOULD STATE ALL MANKIND THE SAME ABSULTLY NEGITTIVE TWO THE GOOD TRUTH OF OUR SHAPE FOR AN MASS ONLY CROSSING BETTER GOOD FOUR NOUTHING TWO ALL MANKINDS GOOD TRUTH INBODY OF MATTER AN THE ONLY DECAY AN DECENGRATION INBODY OF MATTER TWO UNDEFINED TWISTED SCATTER MATTER OF DUST OF WIND THE BETTER OF ALL NEGITIVITY TWO THE GOOD TRUTH OF GOD INBODY OF MATTER OF CREATION OF EXSISTANCE OF GOD TRUTH REALITY… BELEVE (LETS BOND) THERE IS NO DEVILS DEAMONS OR EVIL JUST A BUNCH OF STATIC UNDEFINED TWISTED FOOLS SCATTER INBODY OF MATTER THAT CAN’T ALWAYS STAY POSITIVE TWO THE GOOD TRUTH OF THERE SHAPE FORM AN MASS AN BEFORE THEY CROSS TWO NOUTHING FROM DECAY AN DECENRAGRATION SOME HUL(SIN)ATE THERE BEING CHASED WITH FIRES AN PITCH FORKS CRAZY (ASS) HELL GOD TRUTH REALITY… BELEVE AS STATED BY GOD THE TRUTH OF JESUS AN THE REALITY OF THE THEIF AT THE CRUSIFICTION YOU HAVE ((TWO)) BOND (ONE) (POSITIVE) WITH THE TRUTH OF GOD INBODY OF MATTER OF REALITY AN STEAL YOUR LIFES BACK FROM THOSE (NEGITIVE) (ONE) FOOLS CROSSING ALL THEY ARE GOOD TRUTH INBODY OF MATTER TWO NOUTHING DUST OF WIND STATIC TWISTED UNDEFIND SCATTER MATTER INBODY OF SHAPE FORM AN MASS OF CREATION OF GOD OF EXSISTANCE ONLY BE STATED (POSITIVE) GOD TRUTH REALITY… Beleve Jesus said where two or more come togeth­er in my name I am there… Beleve where two or more Atoms cross an Bond twogeth­er (One) Pos­i­tive they are stat­ed Good an can only get Big­ger an Bet­ter inbody of mat­ter of the (Truth) of there shape form an mass inbody of mat­ter of Cre­ation of Exsis­tance An Neg­a­tiv­i­ty is the only stat­ed -)LIE(- Decay an Degen­er­a­tion of the Pos­i­tive Good (Truth) of shape form mass two Nouthing Dust of twist­ed scat­ter mat­ter of wind an is the only Mis­ery an Death of Mankind 123 God (Truth) Real­i­ty The Gospel of Tomas 4 7 11 18 31 32 48 71 77 81 85 (((108))) 114 Know the name of +++(((GOD)))+++ (((ALL OF ALL))) TRUTH INBODY OF TRUTH OF CREATION OF EXSISTANCE +++(((ALLAH)))+++ BE PRAISED… (PEACE) (((PI))) THATS

  • Rose Petal says:

    Not one sin­gle woman on the list.

    You could­n’t find ONE woman qual­i­fied to be includ­ed?

  • Ronald J MacPherosn says:

    You can’t prove a neg­a­tive!

  • Will says:

    Lawrence Krauss–the more I see him speak, the less I respect him. What a fool. As a SCIENTIST one would think he would be more open-mind­ed.

    As a coun­ter­point: https://amzn.to/2wMYdsv

    Numer­ous, equal­ly gift­ed and astute thinkers find ample evi­dence for a Design­er.

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