A Reasonable Argument for God's Existence

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One really wonders whether people like this Rabbi who make these god-of-the-gaps arguments really are that dense or whether they have so much disrespect for their target audience's intelligence that they believe that they can get away with BS like that.

Not only does the god-of-the-gaps route commit the fallacy of arguing from ignorance, but his premise is simply wrong and even if it weren't and even if arguing from ignorance really was "reasonable" as the Rabbi claims, even then would his argument be self defeating.

But let's have a look:

1) Ok, first of all, we'll never know how life arose on our planet. That kind of thing simply doesn't leave many traces, not to mention that billions of years of erosion, meteor impacts, volcanic eruptions and dinosaurs trampling all over the place would have destroyed any direct evidence. So if that's what he's after, congratulations, but it can't serve as a basis for his argument, simply because we wouldn't expect any physical evidence for it. Personally I don't think that this is what the dear Rabbi means, but he deliberately formulates it this way so that he can always go back should he be confronted with the evidence he must know exists.

2) Which leads us to the second point: We do, in fact, have some pretty good ideas how DNA could have developed by entirely natural means. Checking out the freaking Wikipedia page on abiogenesis would have been enough to figure that out. Next, he should check out the research Nobel Laureate Jack W. Szostak has done in this field and which should even be intuitive for a Rabbi. But I'm sure that he's done just that but preferred to remain silent about this.

3) Even if the dear Rabbi was correct about his assertions (which he's demonstrably not), the dichotomy for the non-believer that he comes up with is of course false (surprise). First of all, the non-believer doesn't have to take anything on faith. He can however have reasonable expectations of science, based on past performance. Next, he can also just accept that he might never find out. A train of thought that seems unfathomable for believers like the Rabbi: Yes, we can accept ignorance without invoking magic. Next, how does the Rabbi know how tiny the odds actually are? He obviously doesn't, nobody does, but the guys that know their science do in fact think that given the situation on the early earth, life was very probable indeed. Finally, even if the odds were minuscule, this still doesn't mean impossible and given the massive size and age of our universe, even the improbable will eventually become inevitable.

4) Which leads us to the self defeating part of his argument. If something as "simple" as DNA is so unlikely to arise naturally, then how about something infinitely complex like god? How did he come to exist and how likely is THAT?

Obviously, Dr. Robert pulled that analogy out of his butt. But worse, the kind of analogy he's making implies something which he either knows to be false, in which case he was deliberately misleading his audience, or he doesn't know it to be false, in which case he has no business talking about this topic anyway.
What I'm talking about is him implicitly equating the "language" of DNA with the English language of Shakespeare. This seems plausible at first, after all the DNA encodes "information" just as the English language does. And I'd even grant him that much. There are however a crucial differences:

1) DNA automatically alines itself chemically, so there's the first misleading implication.

2) The language of DNA has 4 letters, every language on Earth combined probably thousands.

3) Most crucially though, in his scrabble example, the language exists first, so the letters have to align in a very specific way in order to make sense.
The DNA however formed first and only afterwards came the "meaning". So it didn't matter at all how it aligned.

So the better analogy would have been a set of magnetic scrabble blocks that can only fall into a straight line, consisting of four letters that produce a random sequence of letters where we then go and assign meaning to certain combinations. And only after millions of years of evolution would we expect to see complete sentences.
Producing a random sequence of molecules that align themselves all of a sudden doesn't appear to be very unlikely anymore, does it?

If you look at the analogy, you see that Dr. Robert doesn't say that the scrabble example is analogous to how DNA formed, he merely compares the odds. I think that once again this is done deliberately. He knows that making such an analogy would be false, but he still implies it, so that the audience takes away the wrong message.

Now I don't know about Francis Crick, but I do know that Dawkins never held the panspermia theory, let alone used it in order to explain the origin of life. He did say that panspermia is feasible, but that even if life originated elsewhere, we'd still need to explain it.

It does not. The evidence (like that of Prof. Szostak I mentioned earlier) clearly points to a natural origin.
But even if it didn't, how could anything possibly point to a supernatural explanation?

there are!

It's not and even if it were, the vastness of space and time would compensate for that.

No, even granting everything above, it would not be reasonable.

Wow, and with this move he tries to reverse the burden of evidence. Very smooth, but I'm sorry, this won't go. Not to mention that we have evidence to the contrary.

 

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"DNA automatically..."

in order for something to do something "automatically" there must be an intrinsic property that directs the process. there ought to be a reasonable explanation for how that property happens to operate. it isn't like "The Laws of Physics", where cause and effect can be seen in virtually any scenario.

in point of fact, the assumption is made that there is a naturalistic process that accounts for these phenomena and then a search begins to develop ideas that align with the assumption.

up to that point, it's a reasonable way to do scientific business, but what is lacking is any test to determine whether the hypothesis is valid because it isn't possible to conduct such a test.

and then Hawking comes out and says that we don't need a god to explain the universe. he cites "the inevitable laws of physics."

if i'm not mistaken there are no laws of physics without matter and energy, so they are only inevitable if there is matter and energy. they are theoretically inevitable, true enough, but his contention is based on the actuality of matter and energy.

interesting hypothesis.

test it.

 

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I don't get what you're saying here. Are you saying that we can't test chemistry? The laws according to which molecules bind? Now that would be totally wrong of course. And when you go to the bottom of this, it's indeed entirely due to "The Laws of Physics", where cause and effect can be seen in virtually any scenario.

Does a tree that falls make a sound, even when there's nobody present to hear it? Does the law of gravity exist even when there's no matter to work upon? The answer to both questions is yes.

Now you might say: "Well, that might be so, but what good is gravity in empty space? You might as well have no gravity at all!"
While that sounds reasonable enough, it's ignoring another set of physical laws, namely quantum mechanics which states that matter does spontaneously and randomly come into existence. And guess what, it has been tested...

 

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I wish people would stop trying to use science and religion to prove or discredit each other. They are fundamentally different ways of looking at the world and they don't need to be at odds.

Religious people need to stop with the "well, it's complicated and mysterious so it must have come from god" claptrap and atheists need to stop getting defensive - or worse - every time a religious person starts with the claptrap.

 

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A lot can be said about this. First of all, you're right, they don't need to be at odds, but very often they are. Quite often religious dogma is at odds with scientific knowledge.
Creationism is one common example.
But even less extreme religious positions usually end up colliding with science at some point, because a scientific view of the world doesn't leave any room for an interventionist god, which is exactly the kind of god most religious people believe in.

So theists of any kind will always hide behind some gaps that seem big enough to hide their god. A current favorite is the cosmic fine tuning argument. So let's say that you're a religious physicist who believes that god finely tuned our cosmos. How could you then possibly do research in that field? Your mind would have been made up beforehand after all. I hope you see what I mean.

Thankfully, religiosity is negatively correlated with the amount of education one receives, especially in the sciences, so we can expect science to continue to yield great results.


Also, you are of course right that religion and science are two very different ways of looking at the world. However, I wouldn't say that they're fundamentally different, because they're linked at birth.
One could argue that both religion and science are subsets of philosophy, designed to make sense of the world we live in. And both religion as well as science have historically made lots of claims regarding how the world functions. It's just that with the advancement of human knowledge, every single religious claim that eventually became testable turned out to be false while science step by step better approximates the truth.

So when today religion and science appear to be fundamentally different ways of looking at the world, then this is only so because of the unprecedented success of science and the utter failure of religion as a means to explain the world. Religion has since had to retreat and modern religions basically don't make any claims about the natural world anymore at all, with the exceptions of gaps that appear far away still (like the fine tuning mentioned above).

Why? You may think of the Huffington Post whatever you like, but it's certainly widely read. So when someone uses that platform to spread anti-science BS, then I think the only responsible thing to do is to object.

 

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More robots, dinosaurs and rocket ships, please.

 

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Yeah, I'm sorry I said anything.

 

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i'm saying that claiming the DNA "automatically aligns" is unexplained.
even if we know that it does align chemically, and i assume we do, can we say what forces, phenomena, processes, cause this alignment? in what way is it automatic?

the idea of automatic, when dealing with processes, means that there are built-in, immutable laws that direct the processes. if that's true, then we should be able to state how the laws operate, not just say they are "automatic".

as far as quantum mechanics is concerned, do you mean to say that in a zero-energy state, matter and or energy will spontaneously appear? if you were able to create a container that did not radiate any energy and empty it so that there was no matter within it, matter or energy would appear within the container spontaneously?

 

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Of course we can state the laws. Atoms and molecules can only bind in very limited ways, depending on the number and location of electrons any given element has.

It really is kinda like with magnets where the +pole of one magnet can only cling to the -pole of another one.

This is high school chemistry really. But since I chose to specialize more in physics and biology when I was in school, I can't give you too many details there, plus it's been a while. A superficial search gave me this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_binding
But I'm sure that there's a lot more detailed information out there.

Yes. It happens everywhere and all the time, even in absolutely empty space.
See for example this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-point_energy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_effect

 

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Why must you always beat me to the answer...lol

 

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Exactly. I can't find my car keys... god must have moved them