In the various ways in which God might have been judged to be a helpful hypothesis — such as explaining the initial conditions for the universe, or the particular set of fields and couplings discovered by particle physics — there are alternative explanations which do not require anything outside a completely formal, materialist description.
I am therefore led to conclude that adding God would just make things more complicated, and this hypothesis should be rejected by scientific standards.
The problem is "what we know" means what we know by the methods that I choose, those methods are chosen because they yield the results I want; other forms of knowledge I do not have to regard.
He argues for a self contained paradigm and true to Thomas Kun's theory he absorbs anomalies into the paradigm so as not to admit that they are contradictions and he defends the paradigm like a political regime.
My overall argument is that his rejection of theism is ideological not scientific. In his abstract to the article he makes his purpose clear, that purpose I to rule out belief in God by moving it of the map as an issue. The way to do that is to assert science's role as the only form of knowlege: Abstract Science and religion both make claims about the fundamental workings of the universe.
Although these claims are not a priori incompatible we could imagine being brought to religious belief through scientific investigation , I will argue that in practice they diverge.
If we believe that the methods of science can be used to discriminate between fundamental pictures of reality, we are led to a strictly materialist conception of the universe. While the details of modern cosmology are not a necessary part of this argument, they provide interesting clues as to how an ultimate picture may be constructed. It sounds like he is saying that science can determine the truth between differing views.
He actually says ifwe believe that it can He's aware that it can't. He knows all he's really doing is just advocating an ideological view point that blinds itself to other possibilities. As further evidence of his commitment as a solider of atheism he opposes any sort of peaceful coexistence between science and religion: One increasingly hears rumors of a reconciliation between science and religion.
In major news magazines as well as at academic conferences, the claim is made that that belief in the success of science in describing the workings of the world is no longer thought to be in conflict with faith in God.
I would like to argue against this trend, in favor of a more old-fashioned point of view that is still more characteristic of most scientists, who tend to disbelieve in any religious component to the workings of the universe. Talk about propaganda! This "common and venerable view" is outmoded and has been left behind by many in scientific circles.
Stpehen J, Guild with his non overlapping magisteria found peace with religion by recognizing that religion and science have different purposes.
In particular, " No scientific understanding has ruled out God. He's appealing to tradition and the emotional investment he's made in enlightenment thinking. I have a hard time thinking that Carroll really has a conception of what religion is about. Roughly speaking, science has worked to apparently undermine religious belief by calling into question the crucial explanatory aspects of that belief; it follows that other aspects moral, spiritual, cultural lose the warrants for their validity.
Since science doesn't talk about existential or phenomenological matters one cam only conclude that he must think religion is about explaining where the sun came from and why it rains. This especially so since view he is juxtaposing is cosmology. So he must think that understanding the nature of reality is jus a matter of understanding the cosmic layout, planets and stars. The essence of materialism is to model the world as a formal system, which is both unambiguous and complete as a description of reality.
A materialist model may be said to consist of four elements. First, we model the world as some formal mathematical structure. General relativity describes the world as a curved manifold with a Lorentzian metric, while quantum mechanics describes the world as a state in some Hilbert space. Complete as a description of reality?
That assumes of course that your methods are up to the task of probing all of reality. Materialism has to rule out miracles.
It will rule them out as a matter of course. That is an ideological imperative. Then in a move of pure circular reasoning it will appeal to it's own authority in declaring miracles to be scientifically disproved.
But the state of the art in early-universe cosmology is not the point; the lesson here is that we are not forced to think of boundary conditions being imposed arbitrarily at the earliest times. In any of the scenarios mentioned here, the issue of initial conditions is dramatically altered from the classical Big-Bang scenario, since there is no edge to the universe at which boundary conditions need to be arbitrarily imposed.
Thus, one cannot argue that we require the initial state of the universe to be specified by the conscious act of a deity, or that the universe came into existence as the result of a single creative act. But these theories demonstrate that a distinct creation event is not a necessary component of a complete description of the universe. Being allowed to believe something, of course, is not the same as having good reasons for doing so.
This brings us to the second possible way in which scientific reasoning could lead us to believe in God: if, upon constructing various models for the universe, we found that the God hypothesis accounted most economically for some of the features we found in observed phenomena.
As noted, this kind of reasoning is a descendant of the well-known argument from design. A few centuries ago, for example, it would have been completely reasonable to observe the complexity and subtlety exhibited in the workings of biological creatures, and conclude that such intricacy could not possibly have arisen by chance, but must instead be attributed to the plan of a Creator. Indeed, modern science has provided plausible explanations for the origin of all the complex phenomena we find in nature given appropriate initial conditions, as we just discussed.
Nevertheless, these explanations rely on the details of the laws of physics, as exemplified in general relativity and the Standard Model of particle physics. In particular, when we consider carefully the particular laws we have discovered, we find them to be specific realizations of more general possible structures.
For example, in particle physics we have various kinds of particles fermions, gauge bosons, a hypothetical higgs boson , as well as specific symmetries among their interactions, and particular values for the parameters governing their behavior. Given that the universe is made out of fermions and bosons with particular kinds of interactions, to the best of our current knowledge we do not understand why we find the particular particles we do, or the particular symmetries, or the particular parameters, rather than some other arrangement.
Is it conceivable that in the particular realization of particles and forces of our universe we can discern the fingerprints of a conscious deity, rather than simply a random selection among an infinite number of possibilities? Well, yes, it is certainly conceivable. In fact, the argument has been made that the particles and interactions we observe are not chosen at all randomly; instead, they are precisely tuned so as to allow for the existence of human life or at least, complex structures of the kind we consider to be necessary for intelligent life.
In order for this argument to have force, we must believe both that the physical laws are finely-tuned to allow for life i. I will argue that neither statement is warranted by our current understanding, although both are open questions; in either case, there is not a strong reason for invoking the existence of God.
It is certainly true that the world we observe depends sensitively on the particular values of the constants of nature: for example, the strength of the electromagnetic and nuclear forces. If the strong nuclear force had a slightly different value, the balance which characterizes stable nuclei would be upset, and the periodic table of the elements would be dramatically altered R.
Cahn, , Rev. We could imagine so the argument goes values for which hydrogen were the only stable element, or for which no carbon was formed in the life cycle of stars. In either case it would be difficult or impossible for life as we know it to exist. Both of these claims are open to debate, and there are certainly scientists who disagree; but if nothing else these are the conservative positions. To appreciate the difficulty of reliably determining what the universe would be like if the constants of nature took on different values, let us imagine trying to figure out what our actual universe should look like, if we were handed the laws of subatomic physics but had no direct empirical knowledge of how particles assembled themselves into more complex structures.
A fundamental obstacle arises immediately, since quantum chromodynamics the theory of quarks and gluons, which gives rise to the strong nuclear force is a strongly-coupled theory, so that our most straightforward and trustworthy techniques involving perturbation theory in some small parameter, such as the fine-structure constant of electromagnetism are worthless.
We would probably be able to conclude that quarks and gluons were bound into composite particles, and could even imagine figuring out that the lightest nearly-stable examples were protons and neutrons and their antiparticles. It would be very hard, without experimental input, to calculate reliably that protons were lighter than neutrons, but it might be possible. It would be essentially impossible to determine accurately the types of stable nuclei that protons and neutrons would be able to form.
Most embarrassingly, we would never have predicted that there was a significant excess of matter over antimatter, since the process by which this occurs remains a complete mystery there are numerous plausible models, but none has become commonly accepted A. Riotto and M. Trodden, , Ann. So we would predict a world in which there were almost no nuclei at all, the nucleons and anti-nucleons having annihilated long ago, leaving nothing but an inert gas of photons and neutrinos.
In other words, a universe utterly inhospitable to the existence of intelligent life as we know it. Of course, perhaps life could nevertheless exist, of a sort radically different than we are familiar with. As skeptical as I am about the ability of physicists to accurately predict gross features of a universe in which the laws of nature are different, I am all the more skeptical of the ability or biologists or anyone else to describe the conditions under which intelligence may or may not arise.
Cellular automata, the simple discrete systems popularized by Wolfram and others, provide an excellent example of how extreme complexity can arise out of fundamentally very simple behaviors. For this reason, it seems highly presumptuous for anyone to claim that the laws of nature we observe are somehow delicately adjusted to allow for the existence of life. In a cosmological context, the most obvious example is the sheer vastness of the universe; it would hardly seem necessary to make so many galaxies just so that life could arise on a single planet around a single star.
All of the ordinary matter in the universe seems to be made out of two types of quarks up and down and two types of leptons electrons and electron neutrinos , as well as the various force-carrying particles.
But this pattern of quarks and leptons is repeated threefold: the up and down quarks are joined by four more types, just as the electron and its neutrino are joined by two electron-type particles and two more neutrinos.
As far as life is concerned, these particles are completely superfluous. Why do the constituents of nature exhibit this pointless duplication, if the laws of nature were constructed with life in mind? Beyond the fact that the constants of nature do not seem to be chosen by any intelligent agent, there remains the very real possibility that parameters we think of as distinct for example, the parameters measuring the strength of the electromagnetic and nuclear forces are actually calculable from a single underlying parameter.
This speculative proposal is the goal of so-called grand unified theories, for which there is already some indirect evidence. But perhaps the parameters are finely tuned; we might imagine that our understanding of physics, biology, and complexity some day will increase to a degree where we can say with confidence that alternative values for these parameters would not have allowed intelligent life to evolve.
Even in that case, the existence of God is by no means the only mechanism for explaining this apparently-unlikely state of affairs; a completely materialst scenario is provided by the well-known anthropic principle. This is a respectable possibility within our current conception of particle physics and cosmology. Guth, , Phys. Within each of these separate regions, we can imagine that the matter fields settle into one of a large number of distinct metastable states, characterized by different values of all the various coupling constants.
Dine, , Prog. In a universe comprised of many distinct regions with different values of the coupling constants, it is tautologous that intelligent observers will only measure the values which obtain in those regions which are consistent with the existence of such observers.
Find it on Scholar. Request removal from index. Revision history. Download options PhilArchive copy. From the Publisher via CrossRef no proxy pdcnet. Configure custom resolver. Methodological Naturalism and the Truth Seeking Objection. Big Bounce or Double Bang? Daniel Linford - forthcoming - Erkenntnis Keith Augustine - - In Joseph W.
Sociology of Modern Cosmology. Belmonte, F. Alberdi eds. Astronomical Society of Pacific. What can we in the reality-based community do when an ideology — the ideology that is currently dominant in science — is not merely wrong, but delusional?
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