Well that about wraps it up for God!

In my post on Stephen Hawking's new book "The Grand Design", I suggested that the attachment of religious people to the Big Bang theory as proof of God was unreasonable since there were other plausible explanations for the origin of the universe. It now seems that the cyclic universe idea maybe more than just plausible and may in fact be the probable origin of the universe.

The evidence comes from the preprint of a paper by Roger Penrose detailing his research into conformal cyclic cosmology. Penrose began researching the idea when he started to view the inflationary (Big Bang) theory from a thermodynamical perspective. Since the entropy of the universe tends to increase in the time-forward direction, Penrose reasoned that it must necessarily decrease in the time-backward direction. He proposes that the extremely low entropy at the moment of the big bang indicates that space and time were not created at that point but merely mark the start of a new "aeon" in the history of the universe.

The evidence for the theory comes from the analysis of CMBR or cosmic microwave background radiation. Using the Wilkinson Microwave Background Probe (WMAP) and the Boomerang balloon data in Antarctica, Penrose and his team have found concentric circles in the CMBR data consistent with shockwaves (see below) from previous Big Bang events.

Of course, for the god-botherers who argued so vehemently against Stephen Hawking and regard the Big Bang as the ultimate proof of God, this is going to be a tough one to reconcile. If the evidence for this theory increases (and there's no reason to think it won't) then modern deists who rely on the First Cause argument to defend their faith are going to have some serious 'splainin' to do. Of course the emergence of evidence has never slowed down their beliefs before so who knows, they may just adapt this new revelation to fit within their iron age fairy-tales anyway.

Scientific Evangelisation

I have said before that although people are entitled to believe whatever they want, I find evangelisation and proselytising insulting and offensive. It seems strange then that I should wish to engage in evangelisation myself. In the last week, however, I have become increasingly obsessed with the genius of John Boswell's Symphony of Science. 

Boswell is a musician who has stitched together interviews, soundbites and documentary clips to create music videos designed to inspire people about science and the world around them. When I watched these for the first time, the experience was nothing short of revelatory. To see the great minds of science like Dawkins, Feynman, Sagan and Hawking showing the enthusiasm and passion for the wonder of nature which I have come to share is truly remarkable. I encourage everyone who reads this to watch the video and explore the site and hopefully you'll come away with a deeper understanding and admiration for the beauty of the universe.

Grand Designs and all that follows.

Having approached Stephen Hawking's new book "The Grand Design" with a sense of restrained excitement (i.e. taking it slowly to savour the full benefit of his insight), I have to say that now that I am finished, it was worth the wait. When the book was released back in September, it received a wide variety of reactions. In Ireland, the feedback was mainly negative, due mostly to the god-botherers of the nation. 

The charge against the book was lead by none other than David Quinn of the Iona Institute. His article, as usual is full of quote-mining and bad logic. One of the best examples of this is the mention of Professor Antony Flew, who Quinn points out was de-converted from atheism because of the complexity of DNA. However, since Flew was a professor of philosophy of religion and wrote his book on DNA during a period of mental decline, he was hardly in a position to comment, as anyone would be having received a classics degree and spent his academic career teaching philosophy. 

The real problem with this backlash against Hawking is that it is a sign of a far more fundamental issue festering just under the surface. This issue is the age old God of the Gaps idea. In practice, this argument has two distinct lines of reasoning, both of which are flawed, which are posited by catholics worldwide as the "proof" of the truth of catholicism. 

The first line of reasoning deals with the classic interpretation of the "God of the Gaps". This argument assumes the form: "Science cannot explain why X exists. Therefore God must have created X." This is the type of statement which Stephen Hawking refuted in The Grand Design. With specific regard to the origin of the Universe, Hawking shows by means of a crash course in quantum theory, QED, special relativity, general relativity and M-theory that it is possible, at least on a theoretical level to explain the origin of the universe without the need for God. He does not say that there is no God or that God is not a possible explanation for the origin of the universe but merely that there are credible alternative explanations which can be used without resorting to God.

The line of reasoning above is something that I get hit with quite a lot, particularly when revealing myself as an atheist. More often than not it is used with another type of argument, the cosmological argument, more commonly known as the First Cause argument or Uncaused Cause argument. The argument as outlined by Aristotle is as follows:

1. There exists movement in the world.
2. Things that move were set into motion by something else.
3. If everything that moves were caused to move by something else, there would be an infinite chain of causes. This can't happen.
4. Thus, there must have been something that caused the first movement.
5. From 3, this first cause cannot itself have been moved.
6. From 4, there must be an unmoved mover.

Proponents state that God is the unmoved mover or the uncaused cause. However, there are at least two major flaws with this argument. The first problem is that point 3 precludes the possibility of infinity. We don't know what happened before the Big Bang. It's perfectly reasonable to imagine that the Big Bang that created this universe was caused by the destruction of a previous universe and continues back in time inifinitely so that the universe can be seen as a cycle of expansions and contractions with each contraction resulting in a singularity which explodes into a new universe. The second flaw in the argument is that the unmoved mover concept is an evasion. As Stephen Hawking states:

It is reasonable to ask who or what created the universe, but if the answer is God, then the question has merely been deflected to that of who created God. In this view it is accepted that some entity exists that needs no creator, and that entity is called God.

The how and why of the creation of God is still left unanswered, not to mention the fact that the "it just is" implication of the argument is an intellectual dead-end.

The second line of reasoning which stems from the God of the Gaps argument is usually used as a consequence of the first. That line of reasoning is what I call the "all that follows" argument. Well, to be fair, it's not so much an argument as it is a philosophical position of people who tend to use the God of the Gaps and First Cause arguments to defend their faith. The basic premise of the position is that if they can hold to the idea that God exists then everything that they have since developed in their religion must be true. An example of this is that from God follows the nature of God (i.e. since God is love and there is love in the world then God must have created the world). Of course this argument was spectacularly shot down by David Attenborough when he raised the issue of the Loa Loa parasitic worm:

My response is that when Creationists talk about God creating every individual species as a separate act, they always instance hummingbirds, or orchids, sunflowers and beautiful things. But I tend to think instead of a parasitic worm that is boring through the eye of a boy sitting on the bank of a river in West Africa, [a worm] that's going to make him blind. And [I ask them], 'Are you telling me that the God you believe in, who you also say is an all-merciful God, who cares for each one of us individually, are you saying that God created this worm that can live in no other way than in an innocent child's eyeball? Because that doesn't seem to me to coincide with a God who's full of mercy.

 At the end of the day, the religious population of this country, or any country for that matter, can be split into two distinct groups. The first group is the faithful, the devout, the crazies. These people believe in the catechism of the catholic church completely and take everything on faith. They win, hands down, no rational person is going to piss up that rope. The other group consists of the ordinary religious, the moms and dads, the hypocrites. These people are the ones who support gay marriage and condoms and accept evolution and physics. These and not the first group are the really scary people. These people are the proponents of the gaps argument and these are the ones who need to make a choice about holding to some archaic 2000 year old mythology or embracing reality and the rules which govern it.

Finally, I was watching some old episodes of South Park recently, when I came across one quote, which, viewed in a new light, sums up the essence of the struggle between scientists working toward a solid explanation of our existence and the crazies rehashing a mixed bag of ancient mythologies:

The big questions in life are tough: why are we here, where are we from, where are we going? But if people believe in asshole douchey liars like you, then we're never going to find the real answers to those questions. You're not just lying to people, you're slowing down the progress of all mankind, you douche!

Catholics crack me up!

Unlike some people in the New Atheist movement, I don't think that religious belief is inherently dangerous. It can lead to fundamentalism and extremism but so can any philosophical position if you push it far enough. There are those people who depend on religion as a guide or at least a crutch to explain their lives and the world around them. That's just fine, people are entitled to believe whatever they want, including supporting Man Utd. Personally, I think the world would be worse off without religion because then the rest of us would have nothing to laugh at.

In particular, the recent mid-term elections in the US were a great source of comedy. In Nevada, you had Sharron Angle running for the Senate who believes that the US should pull out of the United Nations because of their liberal agenda and for being "the umpire on fraudulent science such as global warming". Thankfully she lost. In Delaware there was Christine O'Donnell who objects to cloning, stem cell research, evolution, abortion, social security and anything else that can't be explained to her in single syllable words. On the issue of stem cell research she said:

American scientific companies are cross-breeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully functioning human brains

There's not really much else to say other than wow. Thankfully, she also lost.

None of these nutjobs really compare to this morning's nugget of brilliance from Bill Donahue, President of the American Catholic League. For those out there who are unfamiliar, the Catholic League is a group which professes to defend the rights of catholics in America. Their tagline is "for religious and civil rights". Already they're not off to the best of starts. I don't think that they understand civil rights to mean the same thing that the rest of us do. Particularly when they think that the only right gays should have is to occupy a jail cell. Bill Donahue as president pretends to speak for Catholics. Unfortunately for Bill's career aspirations, catholics already have someone to speak for them. He lives in Rome, wears a lot of funny hats and likes children ... a lot.

This morning he published his reaction to the election results in an article entitled:

Catholics decide the election

Apart from the obvious air of smugness about giving the Democrats a big black eye, there is a fair amount of rhetoric about the persecution of catholics and the unity of their social behaviour. There's nothing new in this. Most catholic writers employ this air of adversity and hardship in their articles which would give an uninformed reader the sense that Catholics are this persecuted minority, hiding their beliefs and meeting in secret. They seem thrilled that they have had such a large influence on the election results. 

As with a lot of religious people, the real problem with this view is reality. There are at the moment approximately 310 million people in the USA. Of these 22% are Roman Catholic. That equates to almost 69 million catholics. In terms of an identifiable social group (i.e. a group united by a single identifying characteristic) they are one of the largest equal to the total number of African-Americans and Hispanic Americans combined. As a religious domination they are the largest, equal in size to the next ten biggest religions combined. In no common sense of the word could you possibly describe catholics as a minority.

Look, Bill, if you're reading this, you probably won't be reading this because you're too busy getting ready to overthrow Ratzi but if you've been doing some egosurfing and stumbled across my little plot of the web by mistake, can you please give the whole persecution complex angle a rest. We're really not buying any of it. People like me who are atheist or other people who really do have to be careful about expressing their beliefs can see right through the act. Catholics have run the world (into the ground) for most of the last two thousand years and for most of that time minorities, particularly those with opposing views were violently suppressed. Before you decide to present yourself as a real victim, try talking to people who really are, you self-righteous wanker. Oh, and one more thing, in response to your obvious pride about the difference that catholics made in the election, here's something to hoist you with your own petard:

In his pride the wicked does not seek him; in all his thoughts there is no room for God

 Psalms 10:4