One of the curious things about me is that I love to read studies in order to understand what to do in order to reach a goal. My goal is to find the “best practices” that are likely to achieve good outcomes for things I am trying to do. One of the things that we should all be concerned about is having a good love life. Well, believe it or not, there are studies about that!
Regular churchgoers, married people or those who enjoy harmonious social ties are most satisfied with their love life. This also goes for people who are currently in love or who experience the commitment and sexual desire of their partners, says Félix Neto and Maria da Conceição Pinto of the Universidade do Porto in Portugal. Their findings, published in an article in Springer’s journal Applied Research in Quality of Life, look at the influences on love life satisfaction throughout one’s adult life.
The researchers associate love with the desire to enter into, maintain, or expand a close, connected, and ongoing relationship with another person. In turn, love life satisfaction is a purely subjective, overall measurement of someone’s actual enjoyment of love. To investigate the factors that influence this across various age groups, 1,284 adult Portuguese women and men ranging between 18 and 90 years old were asked to evaluate and weigh specific facets of their own love lives by using the Satisfaction With Love Life Scale.
[…]While education does not impact a person’s love life satisfaction, religious involvement does. The finding that believers and regular churchgoers are positive about their love lives is in line with previous studies that associate religious involvement with better mental health and greater satisfaction with life and sexual relationships in general.
Previously, I blogged about a study reported in USA Today, which showed that people who attend church have lower divorce rates than those who don’t attend church.
Excerpt:
It’s been proclaimed from pulpits and blogs for years — Christians divorce as much as everyone else in America.
But some scholars and family activists are questioning the oft-cited statistics, saying Christians who attend church regularly are more likely to remain wed.
[…]The various findings on religion and divorce hinge on what kind of Christians are being discussed.
Wright combed through the General Social Survey, a vast demographic study conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, and found that Christians, like adherents of other religions, have a divorce rate of about 42%. The rate among religiously unaffiliated Americans is 50%.
When Wright examined the statistics on evangelicals, he found worship attendance has a big influence on the numbers. Six in 10 evangelicals who never attend had been divorced or separated, compared to just 38% of weekly attendees.
[…]Brad Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, agrees there’s been some confusion.
“You do hear, both in Christian and non-Christian circles, that Christians are no different from anyone else when it comes to divorce and that is not true if you are focusing on Christians who are regular church attendees,” he said.
Wilcox’s analysis of the National Survey of Families and Households has found that Americans who attend religious services several times a month were about 35% less likely to divorce than those with no religious affiliation.
Nominal conservative Protestants, on the other hand, were 20% more likely to divorce than the religiously unaffiliated.
“There’s something about being a nominal ‘Christian’ that is linked to a lot of negative outcomes when it comes to family life,” Wilcox said.
Whenever I talk to atheists about marital satisfaction and marital stability, they always tell me these myths about how atheists divorce less, have more and better sex, and are happier in their marriages than religious people. But when I ask them for studies, they don’t have any. It’s like they believe things without any evidence at all.
In addition, atheists have lower marriage rates than religious people. That’s not surprising, since marriage only works if both people are willing to give up on pleasure in the moment in order to build something together, over the long term.
Now clearly, there are going to be atheists with great marriages that never break up. But individual cases do not overturn peer-reviewed research studies. The fact is that marriage is an institution that is soaked through with moral values and moral obligations. If you think that morality is just arbitrary customs and conventions that vary by time and place, as is logically consistent with atheism, then the odds are that you won’t be able to stay married for long – if you even get married at all.
This is an accurate protrayal of what went down in this debate
I was very excited to see a recent debate by Christian philosopher William Lane Craig against atheist astronomer Jeff Hester. When I summarize a debate, I do a fair, objective summary if the atheist is intelligent and informed, as with Peter Millican, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong or Austin Dacey. But the following summary is rated VS for Very Snarky, and you’ll soon see why.
The debate itself starts at 29 minutes:
The audio is very poor.
Dr. Craig’s opening speech
Dr. Craig went first, and he presented 4 arguments, as well as the ontological argument which I won’t summarize or discuss. He later added another argument for theism from the existence of the universe that does not require an origin of the universe.
A1. Counter-examples
Theists who are elite scientists cannot be “irrational”, for example: Allan Sandage, Gustav Tammann, George Ellis, Don Page, Christopher Isham
A2. Kalam cosmological argument
Whatever begins to exist requires a cause.
The universe began to exist.
Therefore, the universe requires a cause.
A3. Fine-tuning of the universe to permit complex intelligent life
The fine-tuning of the universe is due either to physical necessity, chance or design.
It is not due to physical necessity or chance.
Therefore it is due to design.
A4. Moral argument
If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist.
Objective moral values and duties do exist.
Therefore, God exists.
Dr. Hester’s opening speech
Dr. Hester went second and presented two arguments which both committed the genetic fallacy, a logical fallacy that makes the arguments have no force.
Hester starts his opening speech by asserting that Albert Einstein was irrational, because he denied quantum mechanics.
Hester explains that he became an atheist at 15. This would have been before the evidence for the origin of the universe became widespread, before we had very many examples of fine-tuning, before the discovery that the origin of life problem is a problem of the origin of complex, specifed information, etc. What kind of reasons can a 15-year-old child have for becoming an atheist? It’s hard to say, but I would suspect that they were psychological. Children often desire autonomy from moral authorities. They want to be free to pursue pleasure. They don’t want to be thought of as superstitious and morally straight by their non-religious peers.
Later on in the debate, Hester volunteers that he hated his father because his father professed to be a Christian, but he was focused on his career and making money. In the absence of any arguments for atheism, it’s reasonable to speculate that Hester became an atheist for psychological reasons. And as we’ll see, just like the typical 15-year-old child, he has no rational basis for atheism. What’s astonishing is how he continues to hold to the atheism of his teens when it has been falsified over and over by scientific discoveries in the years since.
Dr. Craig’s deductive arguments do have premises that reach a conclusion through the laws of logic. On the contrary, he just asserts that God exists as his conclusion, and then says that this assertion is the best explanation of a gap in our scientific knowledge. Some of the gaps in our scientific knowledge he uses in his arguments are: 1) he doesn’t understand why the Sun moves through the sky, so God exists, 2) he doesn’t understand why the wind blows, so God exists.
What counts as “rational” are things that have not been disproved. The progress of science has shown that the universe did not need a casuse in order to begin to exist, and also there is no cosmic fine-tuning.
A1. The success of evolution in the software industry proves that there is no God
All hardware and software is developed using genetic algorithms that exactly match Darwinian processes. All the major computer companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, etc. are just generating products using mutation and selection to evolve products over long periods of time. If you look over a typical software engineering degree, it’s all about Darwinian evolution, and nothing about design patterns, object-oriented design, etc.
This widespread use of evolution in the software industry undermines all of the arguments for God’s existence. Evolution caused the origin of the universe. Evolution explains why the universe is fine-tuned for life. Evolution, which requires replication already be in place in order to work, explains the origin of the first self-replicating organism.
A2. Theist’s view of the world is just a result of peer pressure from their tribes
All of Dr. Craig’s logical arguments supported by scientific evidence don’t matter, because he got them from a primitive tribe of Christians that existed 2000 years ago. Everyone gets their view of origins, morality, meaning in life, death, etc. from their tribes. Except me, I’m getting my beliefs from reason and evidence because I’m a smart atheist. I don’t have an atheist tribe in the university that would sanction me if I disagreed with nonsense like homosexuality is 100% genetic, transgenderism, man-made catastrophic global warming, fully naturalistic evolution, aliens seeded the Earth with life, infanticide is moral, socialism works, overpopulation will cause mass starvation, nuclear winter, etc. Also, my argument isn’t the genetic fallacy at all, because smart atheists don’t commit elementary logical fallacies that even a first-year philosophy student would know.
A3. Our brains evolved so our rational faculties are unreliable, so God does not exist
The logical reasoning that Dr. Craig uses to argue for theism are all nonsense, because human minds just have an illusion of consciousness, an illusion of rationality, and an illusion of free will. Everything Dr. Craig says is just deluded nonsense caused by chemicals in his brain. He has cognitive biases the undermine all his logical arguments and scientific evidence. He just invented an imaginary friend with super powers. Except me, I’m a smart atheist, so I actually have real consciousness, real reasoning powers, and no cognitive biases. Also, my argument isn’t the genetic fallacy at all, because my arguments would not get an F in a first-year philosophy course.
Discussion
I’m not going to summarize everything in the discussion, or the question and answer time. I’m just going to list out some of the more interesting points.
Dr. Craig asks him how it is that he has managed to escape these biases from tribalism, projection, etc. He talks about how brave and noble atheist rebels are. The moderator asks him the same question. He repeats how brave and noble atheist rebels are.
Dr. Hester is asked whether he affirms a causeless beginning of the universe or an eternal universe. He replies he states that the universe came into being without a cause, because causality doesn’t apply to the beignning of the universe. He also asserts with explanation that Borde, Guth and Vilenkin have undermined the kalam cosmological argument, mentioning a web site.
Dr. Craig replied to this phantom argument after the debate on Facebook:
Speaking of which, although I haven’t had time to consult the website mentioned by Dr. Hester concerning Guth and Vilenkin on the kalam cosmological argument, I know the work of these two gentlemen well enough to predict what one will find there. Since neither one is yet a theist (so much, by the way, for the dreaded confirmation bias!), they have to reject at least one of the premises of the kalam cosmological argument.
Guth wants to deny premiss (2) The universe began to exist–for which Vilenkin has rebuked him. Guth would avoid the implications of their theorem by holding our hope for the Carroll-Chen model, which denies the single condition of the BGV theorem. This gambit is, however, unsuccessful, since the Carroll-Chen model does so only by positing a reversal of the arrow of time at some point in the finite past. This is not only highly non-physical, but fails to avert the universe’s beginning, since that time-reversed, mirror universe is no sense in our past. The model really postulates two different universes with a common beginning.
So Vilenkin is forced to deny premiss (1) Whatever begins to exists has a cause. He says that if the positive energy associated with matter exactly counterbalances the negative energy associated with gravity, then the net sum of the energy is zero, and so the conservation of energy is not violated if the universe pops into being from nothing! But this is like saying that if your assets exactly balance your debts, then your net worth is zero, and so there does not need to be a cause of your financial situation! As Christopher Isham points out, there still needs to be “ontic seeding” in order to create the positive and negative energy in the first place, even if on balance their sum is zero.
Dr. Hester is asked how he explains the evidence for fine-tuning. He literally says that “Life is fine-tuned for the Universe”, i.e. – that evolution will create living beings regardless of the laws of physics, constants, etc. For example, he thinks that in a universe with a weaker stong force, which would have only hyrogen atoms, evolution would still evolve life. And in a universe that recollapses in a hot fireball, and never forms stars or planets, evolution would produce life. Physicist Luke Barnes, who was commenting on the YouTube chat for the video, said this:
“Life is fine-tuned for the Universe” – complete ignorance of the field. Read a book.
Hester tries to cite Jeremy England to try to argue for life appearing regardless of what the laws of physics are. Barnes comments:
Jeremy England’s work supports no such claim.
Hester appealed to the multiverse, which faces numerous theoretical and observational difficulties. For example, the multiverse models have to have some mechanism to spawn different universes, but these mechanisms themselves require fine-tuning, as Robin Collins argues. And the multiverse is falsified observationally by the Boltzmann brains problem. It was so ironic that Hester claimed to be so committed to testing theories. The mutliverse theory cannot be tested experimentally, and must be accepted on faith.
Dr. Hester is asked how he grounds morality on atheism. He says there are no objective moral values and duties. He instead lists off a bunch of Christian beliefs which he thinks are objectively wrong. Even his statements about these moral issues are misinformed. For example, he asserts that homosexuality is causally determined by biology, but this is contradicted by identical twin studies that have a rate of 20-40% where both twins are gay.
Dr. Hester is asked about free will, which is required in order to make moral choices. He denies the existence of free will, which undermines his earlier statements about morality. Morality is only possible if humans can make free choices to act in accordance with a moral standard. So, he claims that Christians are immoral, then he claims that they have no freedom to act other than they do.
Dr. Hester also volunteered that his father believed in the prosperity gospel, and tithed in order to be rewarded with money by God. Dr. Craig immediately says “no wonder you’re in rebellion against Christianity”. Indeed.
Dr. Hester is asked about his view that human beings are unable to unable to perceive the world objectively. How is he able to perceive the world objectively, when all of the rest of us are unable to? His response is that he is just smarter than everyone else because his ideas have never been falsified by testing.
Scoring the debate
Dr. Craig’s 5 arguments went unrefuted. Hester’s argument about genetic algorithms was ludicrous to anyone who understands software engineering. His arguments about tribalism and unreliable mental faculties were self-refuting, and committed the genetic fallcy. At several points, Hester denied mainstream science in favor of untested and untestable speculations. It was the worst defeat of atheism I have ever witnessed. He was uninformed and arrogant. He didn’t know what he was talking about, and he tried to resort to speculative, mystical bullshit to cover up his failure to meet Dr. Craig’s challenge.
Both cosmology and philosophy trace their roots to the wonder felt by the ancient Greeks as they contemplated the universe. The ultimate question remains why the universe exists rather than nothing. This question led Leibniz to postulate the existence of a metaphysically necessary being, which he identified as God. Leibniz’s critics, however, disputed this identification, claiming that the space-time universe itself may be the metaphysically necessary being. The discovery during this century that the universe began to exist, however, calls into question the universe’s status as metaphysically necessary, since any necessary being must be eternal in its existence. Although various cosmogonic models claiming to avert the beginning of the universe predicted by the standard model have been and continue to be offered, no model involving an eternal universe has proved as plausible as the standard model. Unless we are to assert that the universe simply sprang into being uncaused out of nothing, we are thus led to Leibniz’s conclusion. Several objections to inferring a supernatural cause of the origin of the universe are considered and found to be unsound.
Here’s an excerpt in which the author, Dr. William Lane Craig, explains the Big Bang cosmology:
The monumental significance of the Friedman-Lemaitre model lay in its historization of the universe. As one commentator has remarked, up to this time the idea of the expansion of the universe “was absolutely beyond comprehension. Throughout all of human history the universe was regarded as fixed and immutable and the idea that it might actually be changing was inconceivable.”{8} But if the Friedman-Lemaitre model were correct, the universe could no longer be adequately treated as a static entity existing, in effect, timelessly. Rather the universe has a history, and time will not be matter of indifference for our investigation of the cosmos. In 1929 Edwin Hubble’s measurements of the red-shift in the optical spectra of light from distant galaxies,{9} which was taken to indicate a universal recessional motion of the light sources in the line of sight, provided a dramatic verification of the Friedman-Lemaitre model. Incredibly, what Hubble had discovered was the isotropic expansion of the universe predicted by Friedman and Lemaitre. It marked a veritable turning point in the history of science. “Of all the great predictions that science has ever made over the centuries,” exclaims John Wheeler, “was there ever one greater than this, to predict, and predict correctly, and predict against all expectation a phenomenon so fantastic as the expansion of the universe?”{10}
As a GTR-based theory, the Friedman-Lemaitre model does not describe the expansion of the material content of the universe into a pre-existing, empty, Newtonian space, but rather the expansion of space itself. This has the astonishing implication that as one reverses the expansion and extrapolates back in time, space-time curvature becomes progressively greater until one finally arrives at a singular state at which space-time curvature becomes infinite. This state therefore constitutes an edge or boundary to space-time itself. P. C. W. Davies comments,
An initial cosmological singularity . . . forms a past temporal extremity to the universe. We cannot continue physical reasoning, or even the concept of spacetime, through such an extremity. . . . On this view the big bang represents the creation event; the creation not only of all the matter and energy in the universe, but also of spacetime itself.{11}
The popular expression “Big Bang,” originally a derisive term coined by Fred Hoyle to characterize the beginning of the universe predicted by the Friedman-Lemaitre model, is thus potentially misleading, since the expansion cannot be visualized from the outside (there being no “outside,” just as there is no “before” with respect to the Big Bang).{12}
The standard Big Bang model thus describes a universe which is not eternal in the past, but which came into being a finite time ago. Moreover,–and this deserves underscoring–the origin it posits is an absolute origin ex nihilo. For not only all matter and energy, but space and time themselves come into being at the initial cosmological singularity. As Barrow and Tipler emphasize, “At this singularity, space and time came into existence; literally nothing existed before the singularity, so, if the Universe originated at such a singularity, we would truly have a creation ex nihilo.“{13}
[…]On such a model the universe originates ex nihilo in the sense that at the initial singularity it is true that There is no earlier space-time point or it is false that Something existed prior to the singularity.
Every theist should be able to understand and defend this argument. It is a scientific refutation of materialism, and it is supported by six lines of scientific evidence – all of which emerged as science has progressed.
Scientific evidence:
Einstein’s theory of general relativity (GTR)
the red-shifting of light from distant galaxies implies an expanding universe
the cosmic background radiation (which also disproves the oscillating model of the universe)
the second law of thermodynamics applied to star formation theory
hydrogen-helium abundance predictions
radioactive element abundance predictions
Those are the scientific discoveries that have led us to the beginning of the universe, which support’s Dr. Craig’s argument.
This is the kind of evidence I expect all Christian theists to be using when discussing the question of whether God exists. Scientific evidence. When talking to non-Christians, we first need to show that we understand science, because science is a reliable and respected way of getting knowledge about the universe. Non-Christians do not accept the Bible, but they do accept science, so we begin evangelism with science. Science (experimental, testable, repeatable science) should set limits on what anyone can believe – including non-Christians, who might otherwise not be inclined to listen to Bible verses and theology. Important: it’s not a good idea to discuss the resurrection of Jesus with a person who does not accept the scientific evidence for a Creator of the universe.
The Big Bang is not compatible with atheism
According to the Secular Humanist Manifesto, atheism is committed to an eternally existing universe, (See the first item: “Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created.”). If something non-material brought all existing matter into being, that would be a supernatural cause, and atheists deny that anything supernatural exists. The standard Big Bang theory requires that all the matter in the universe come into being out of nothing. This falsifies eternal models of the universe, which are required by the atheistic worldview.
WINTERY KNIGHT 