Guillermo Gonzalez is an Associate Professor of Physics at Grove City College. He received his Ph.D. in Astronomy in 1993 from the University of Washington. He has done post-doctoral work at the University of Texas, Austin and at the University of Washington and has received fellowships, grants and awards from such institutions as NASA, the University of Washington, the Templeton Foundation, Sigma Xi (scientific research society) and the National Science Foundation.
If you watch 5 minutes, then you’ll definitely stay and watch the whole thing. It’s fascinating.
Details:
Join Dr. George Yancey in an in depth discussion of the bias taking place within academia against religion in general, but more specifically Christianity. Within the discussion Dr.Yancey uses brief explanations of his previous book, Compromising Scholarship and many other excerpts of his past research as well as his forthcoming research to give us a new viewpoint on academia and religion.
Republican scholars are more likely than Democrats to end up working outside academia,as documented by Daniel Klein, an economist at George Mason University. Dr. Klein, who calls himself a classical liberal (a k a libertarian), says that the university promotes groupthink because its system of “departmental majoritarianism” empowers the dominant faction to keep hiring like-minded colleagues. And when a faculty committee is looking to hire or award tenure, political ideology seems to make a difference, according to a “collegiality survey” conducted by George Yancey.
Dr. Yancey, a professor of sociology at the University of North Texas, asked more than 400 sociologists which nonacademic factors might influence their willingness to vote for hiring a new colleague. You might expect professors to at least claim to be immune to bias in academic hiring decisions.
But as Dr. Yancey reports in his new book, “Compromising Scholarship: Religious and Political Bias in American Higher Education,” more than a quarter of the sociologists said they would be swayed favorably toward a Democrat or an A.C.L.U. member and unfavorably toward a Republican. About 40 percent said they would be less inclined to vote for hiring someone who belonged to the National Rifle Association or who was an evangelical. Similar results were obtained in a subsequent survey of professors in other social sciences and the humanities.
Dr. Yancey, who describes himself as a political independent with traditional Christian beliefs and progressive social values, advises nonliberal graduate students to be discreet during job interviews. “The information in this research,” he wrote, “indicates that revealing one’s political and religious conservatism will, on average, negatively influence about half of the search committee one is attempting to impress.”
Dr. Yancey’s research was a survey, not a field experiment, so it’s impossible to know how many of those academics who confessed to hypothetical bias would let it sway an actual decision. Perhaps they’d try to behave as impartially as the directors of graduate studies in Dr. Gross’s experiment.
The lecture is a real eye-opener. It turns out that in academia, you are likely to be viewed the same way as blacks were viewed by slave-owners, and Jews were viewed by Nazis. Stereotypes, ignorance and hatred abound.
We have a lot of work to do to correct these perceptions, and unfortunately nothing that Christians see and hear in church is likely to change this. Until we get serious about prodding our young people to think and achieve, this is what people on the secular left will think of us. Not because they really are smarter, but because we are not capable of pointing out the nonsense on their side of the aisle, e.g. – eternal universes, aliens seeding the Earth with life, fatherlessness is good for children, and so on. If we don’t study the evidence, then their stupidity will rule the day, and they are the ones who are entrenched in academia.
This debate took place on March 1, 2010 at Oregon State University.
In this debate, Victor Stenger does affirm his belief that the universe could be eternal in his second rebuttal (1:02:30), thus denying the standard Big Bang cosmology. He also denies the law of conservation of energy and asserts that something can come from nothing in his concluding speech (1:33:50). He also caused the audience to start laughing when he said that Jesus was not moral and supported slavery. There is almost no snark in this summary. Instead, I quoted Dr. Stenger verbatim in many places. I still think that it is very entertaining even without the snarky paraphrasing.
The debate includes 30 minutes of Q&A with the students.
There is no scientific evidence for God’s existence in the textbooks
There is no scientific evidence for God acting in the universe
God doesn’t talk to people and tell them things they couldn’t possibly know
The Bible says that the Earth is flat, etc.
There is no scientific evidence that God answers prayers
God doesn’t exist because people who believe in him are ignorant
Human life is not optimally designed and appears to be the result of a blind, ad hoc evolutionary process
The beginning of the universe is not ordered (low entropy) but random and chaotic
It’s theoretically possible that quantum tunneling explains the origin of the universe
The laws of physics are not objectively real, they are “our inventions”
Regarding the beginning of the universe, the explanation is that something came from nothing*
Nothing* isn’t really nothing, it is “the total chaos that we project existed just before the big bang”
If something has no structure, then “it is as much nothing as nothing can be”
Consciousness is explainable solely on the basis of material processes
There are well-informed, rational non-believers in the world and God would not allow that
Dr. Craig’s first rebuttal:
Stenger’s argument that there is no objective evidence for God’s existence:
First, it is not required that God rely only on objective evidence in order to draw people to himself (Alvin Plantinga)
Second, God is not required to provide evidence to everyone, only to the people who he knows would respond to him
Third, Craig gave lots of objective evidence, from science, history and philosophy
Stenger asks for certain evidence (answered prayers, prophecy, etc.), but Craig presented the evidence we have
Stenger’s argument that the balance of energy is zero so “nothing” exists:
if you have the same amount of assets and liabilities, it doesn’t mean that nothing exists – your assets and liabilities exist
Christopher Isham says that there needs to be a cause to create the positive and negative energy even if they balance
the quantum gravity model contradicts observations
the vacuum is not the same as nothing, it contains energy and matter
the BVG theorem proves that any universe that is expanding must have a beginning
Stenger’s argument that mental operations can be reduced to physical operations:
mental properties are not reducible to physical properties
epiphenomenalism: is incompatible with self-identity over time
epiphenomenalism: is incompatible with thoughts about other things
epiphenomenalism: is incompatible with free will
substance dualism (mind/body dualism) is a better explanation for our mental experience
God is a soul without a body
Dr. Stenger’s first rebuttal:
Craig’s cosmological argument:
Craig’s premise is “everything has a cause”, but quantum mechanics has causeless events
There are speculative theories about how something could have come into being uncaused out of nothing
“I don’t know of a single working cosmologist today who believes there was a singularity prior to the Big Bang”
“If there wasn’t a singularity then there’s no basis for arguing that time began at that point”
“There’s no reason from cosmology that we know of that the universe can’t be eternal”
“When I talk about an eternal universe, I mean a universe that has no beginning or end”
The Hartle-Hawking model doesn’t have a beginning
“There was no violation of energy conservation by having a universe coming from nothing”
“The universe could have come from a previous universe for example or even just from a region of chaos”
The paper by Vilenkin is counteracted by other papers (he doesn’t specify which ones)
Craig’s moral argument:
Dr. Craig is arguing from ignorance
But morality can be decided by humanity just like governments pass laws, and that’s objective
Dr. Craig has too little respect for the human intellect
I don’t need to tell me that slavery is wrong
The Bible supports slavery
Atheists can behave as good as theists
Morality just evolved naturally as an aid to survival
Craig’s resurrection argument:
No Roman historians wrote about the execution of Jesus but none of them did
The empty tomb is doubtful because it is only mentioned in the gospels, not by Paul
John Dominic Crossan says there was no empty tomb
Christianity only survived because the Roman empire thought that they were useful
Dr. Craig’s second rebuttal:
Craig’s cosmological argument:
There is no reason to prefer an indeterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics
Dr. Stenger himself wrote that deterministic interpretations of quantum mechanics are possible
The vacuum in quantum mechanics is not nothing
The quantum vacuum he proposes cannot be eternal
The cosmological argument does not require a singularity
The Hartle-Hawking model is from 1983
Hawking says that there is a beginning of space and time after that model
The Hartle-Hawking model does still have a beginning of time – the model is not eternal
The BVG theorem that requires a beginning for expanding universes is widely accepted among cosmologists
Craig’s moral argument:
Stenger redefined objective to mean that most people agree with it – but that’s not what objective means
Objective means right and wrong whether anyone accepts it or not
Richard Dawkins himself says that on atheism there is “no evil and no good” – why is he wrong?
Even Dr. Stenger says that morality is the same as passing laws – it’s arbitrary and varies by time and place
But on his view, right and wrong are the same as deciding which side of the road to drive on
But somethings really are right and some things are really wrong
Craig’s resurrection argument:
Josephus is a Roman historian and he wrote about Jesus, for example
There were four biographies of Jesus are the best sources for his life
The scholars that Stenger mentioned are on the radical fringe
Dr. Stenger’s second rebuttal:
Knowledge and the burden of proof:
Dr. Craig has to bear the burden of proof, not me – because his claim is more “extravagant”
“I don’t have to prove that a God was not necessary to create the universe”
“I don’t have to prove that a God did not design the universe and life”
“I don’t have to prove that the universe did not have a beginning”
“I don’t have to prove that God did not provide us with our moral sense”
There are a lot of books written about how morality evolved naturally
“I don’t have to prove that the events surrounding the supposed resurrection of Jesus did not take place”
Bart Ehrman says that the gospels are generally unreliable (Note: Ehrman accepts all 3 of Craig’s minimal facts)
Just because people are willing to die for a cause, does not make their leader God, e.g. – the Emperor of Japan
Aesthetic concerns about the universe:
I don’t like dark matter and I wouldn’t have made the universe with dark matter
I don’t like the doctrine of penal substitution
I don’t like the doctrine of original sin
I don’t like the heat death of the universe
Dr. Craig’s conclusion:
The case for atheism:
Dr. Stenger had two arguments and he has to support his premises
Dr. Craig addressed his two arguments and each premise and Dr. Stenger never came back on it
The contingency argument:
Dr. Stenger has dropped the refutation of this argument
The cosmological argument:
The theoretical vacuum he proposes cannot be eternal
The moral argument:
He asserts that things are wrong, but there is no grounding for that to be objective on atheism
The resurrection of Jesus:
There are surveys of scholars on the empty tomb and 75% of them agree with it
Bart Ehrman agrees with all 3 of the minimal facts that Dr. Craig presented
Ehrman’s objection to the resurrection is not historical: he’s an atheist – he thinks miracles are impossible
Religious experience:
No response from Dr. Stenger
Dr. Stenger’s conclusion
The cosmological argument:
“I argued that we have very good physical reasons to understand how something can come from nothing”
“There is a natural tendency in the universe… to go from.. simpler thing to the more complicated thing”
The transition from a vapor to a liquid to ice shows how something could come from nothing
“It cannot be proven that the universe had a beginning”
The moral argument:
Objective morality, which is independent of what people think, could be developed based on what people think
“Jesus himself was not a tremendously moral person… he had no particular regard for the poor… he certainly supported slavery… he was for the subjugation of women” (audience laughter)
The resurrection argument:
Bart Ehrman says that the majority of the gospels are unreliable
Religious experience:
I don’t see any evidence that there is anything more to religious experience than just stuff in their heads
God’s purpose of the world should be to make people feel happy:
God could have made people feel happier
God could have made people not die
God could could have made the universe smaller: it’s too big
God could have made it possible for humans to live anywhere “even in space”
WINTERY KNIGHT 