RichardSRussell (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} richardsrussell) wrote,@ 2008-03-03 17:36:00 |
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The Christian Anthropic Principle
While I’ve often taken fully deserved cracks at the Bible’s bad science, I must admit that it’s chock full of dandy stories and metaphors. One of my faves involves the admonition to be less concerned about the mote in your brother’s eye than about the beam in your own.
Today I tackle a primo example of this willful blindness, as I look at
Yesterday we looked at how Kurt Williamsen, in his zeal to whack away at evolution and atheism, said they were in denial about the anthropic principle — the observation that the fundamental constants of the Universe seem to be “fine-tuned” to exactly the right values to permit the rise of intelligent life, notably us.
“How could this amazing state of affairs have come about?”, he wonders. “Must have been God. That’s the only possible explanation.”
As I’ve noted before, “God did it!” isn’t an explanation, it’s an excuse. It’s an excuse for ignorance. It’s an excuse for giving up the search for answers. It’s an excuse for being arrogant enuf to claim that you have the answer to a question when all you did was make one up.
Here’s a handy BS-buster that you should file away for future reference, because you’ll undoubtedly get lots of opportunity to exercise it: “God” is just a convenient nickname for a dude whose real name is “Nobody Knows”. Try it. Who made the Universe? What explains the speed of light having exactly the value it does? What causes lightning? (Oh, wait, that last one was Zeus, wasn’t it?)
So scientists forthrightly state that they don’t have any simpler, more fundamental explanation for why those various physical constants have the exact values we observe them to have. (Notice, once again, that it was scientists — not preachers or prophets, and certainly not the writers of the Bible — who discovered and measured these constants.)
But Christians come along and claim that they have the answer. “God made the Universe with these exact conditions because he was setting it up for wonderful us.”
Oh, really? The whole Universe was made just for our convenience, eh? Designed to give rise to intelligent life, specifically intelligent life made in God’s very own image, to wit, human beings. OK, so the idea that God looks like Helena Bonham Carter has a certain surface appeal, but really, let’s look at this a little more deeply, shall we?
There are about 400 billion stars in our Milky Way Galaxy. There are another 500 billion galaxies about like ours in the visible Universe. We can’t be sure, but it seems likely that most of those stars have planets revolving around them, so we’re easily up into the quintillions of planets. The whole shootin’ match got rolling 14.5 billion years ago with the Big Bang. Even if you grant that something arguably human was walking around on 2 legs as long as a million years ago, that’s still only 1/14500 of the total lifespan of the Universe. (By comparison, if you were the Universe and lived to be 80 years old, you’d have been plagued by those itchy little human beings for only the last 2 days of your life.)
So, if God did indeed make the Universe just for our convenience, he sure dawdled a lot and wasted a tremendous amount of stuff in the process. The “fine-tuning” that’s supposedly so exactly, precisely, carefully, intelligently designed to give rise to wonderful us turns out to be quite the botched hack job. Surely any creator who wasn’t the theological equivalent of a crippled mongoloid idiot could have done the job in jig time with a tiny fraction of the raw materials.
Only somebody whose brain has been softened by overlong exposure to Christianity could possibly be blind to the staggeringly obvious fact that it wasn’t human beings who were created in God’s image, it was the other way around.
Tomoro: Atheism As Faith
While I’ve often taken fully deserved cracks at the Bible’s bad science, I must admit that it’s chock full of dandy stories and metaphors. One of my faves involves the admonition to be less concerned about the mote in your brother’s eye than about the beam in your own.
Today I tackle a primo example of this willful blindness, as I look at
Yesterday we looked at how Kurt Williamsen, in his zeal to whack away at evolution and atheism, said they were in denial about the anthropic principle — the observation that the fundamental constants of the Universe seem to be “fine-tuned” to exactly the right values to permit the rise of intelligent life, notably us.
“How could this amazing state of affairs have come about?”, he wonders. “Must have been God. That’s the only possible explanation.”
As I’ve noted before, “God did it!” isn’t an explanation, it’s an excuse. It’s an excuse for ignorance. It’s an excuse for giving up the search for answers. It’s an excuse for being arrogant enuf to claim that you have the answer to a question when all you did was make one up.
Here’s a handy BS-buster that you should file away for future reference, because you’ll undoubtedly get lots of opportunity to exercise it: “God” is just a convenient nickname for a dude whose real name is “Nobody Knows”. Try it. Who made the Universe? What explains the speed of light having exactly the value it does? What causes lightning? (Oh, wait, that last one was Zeus, wasn’t it?)
So scientists forthrightly state that they don’t have any simpler, more fundamental explanation for why those various physical constants have the exact values we observe them to have. (Notice, once again, that it was scientists — not preachers or prophets, and certainly not the writers of the Bible — who discovered and measured these constants.)
But Christians come along and claim that they have the answer. “God made the Universe with these exact conditions because he was setting it up for wonderful us.”
Oh, really? The whole Universe was made just for our convenience, eh? Designed to give rise to intelligent life, specifically intelligent life made in God’s very own image, to wit, human beings. OK, so the idea that God looks like Helena Bonham Carter has a certain surface appeal, but really, let’s look at this a little more deeply, shall we?
There are about 400 billion stars in our Milky Way Galaxy. There are another 500 billion galaxies about like ours in the visible Universe. We can’t be sure, but it seems likely that most of those stars have planets revolving around them, so we’re easily up into the quintillions of planets. The whole shootin’ match got rolling 14.5 billion years ago with the Big Bang. Even if you grant that something arguably human was walking around on 2 legs as long as a million years ago, that’s still only 1/14500 of the total lifespan of the Universe. (By comparison, if you were the Universe and lived to be 80 years old, you’d have been plagued by those itchy little human beings for only the last 2 days of your life.)
So, if God did indeed make the Universe just for our convenience, he sure dawdled a lot and wasted a tremendous amount of stuff in the process. The “fine-tuning” that’s supposedly so exactly, precisely, carefully, intelligently designed to give rise to wonderful us turns out to be quite the botched hack job. Surely any creator who wasn’t the theological equivalent of a crippled mongoloid idiot could have done the job in jig time with a tiny fraction of the raw materials.
Only somebody whose brain has been softened by overlong exposure to Christianity could possibly be blind to the staggeringly obvious fact that it wasn’t human beings who were created in God’s image, it was the other way around.
Tomoro: Atheism As Faith
