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!