Tag Archives: Origin

Polemics

Is belief in God explained by chemicals in the brain?

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Greg Koukl of Stand to Reason explains. (H/T Melissa)

As Greg often says, before you can show WHY a belief is false, you know to show THAT a belief is false.

For those of us who are stuck behind a firewall, you can read this article by Paul Copan instead.

Here’s the problem:

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins suggests that our “extraordinary predisposition” to “insist on believing in God” is that we, like computers, tend to do what we’re told. Young minds are susceptible to “infection” and mental “viruses” especially when they latch on to the bad or worthless religious ideas of charismatic preachers and other adults.1 Anthropologist Pascal Boyer believes that the latest “scientific” developments reveal that our “central metaphysical urge”—an “irredeemable human propensity toward superstition, myth and faith, or a special emotion that only religion provides”2 stands at the root of all religion. Author Matthew Alper considers humans to be religious animals whose brains are hard-wired for “God,” though no God exists, and maintains that the “spiritual” is really the “scientific.”3

And here’s the solution:

To say God doesn’t exist because people believe for inferior reasons or motivations is to commit the genetic fallacy—to say that a view is true/false based on its origin. God’s existence, however, is logically independent of how people come to believe in Him.

Consider the strong reasons for God’s existence distinct from human hard-wiring and psychology. The existence of valuable, morally responsible, self-aware, reasoning, living human beings who inhabit a finely tuned universe that came to exist a finite time ago is not plausibly explained naturalistically—namely, as the result of disparate valueless, mindless, lifeless physical processes in a universe that came into existence uncaused out of nothing. The better unifying explanation is a supremely valuable, supremely aware, reasoning, truthful, powerful, intelligent, beautiful Being. Such a context robustly explains—and unifies—a wide range of factors where naturalism fails. If God exists and leaves clues of his existence, then CSR’s reductionistic claims about theistic belief lose their force.

There is a LOT more in the Paul Copan essay on cognitive science of religion (CSR).

And Michael Murray published a book with Oxford University Press on his solution to this problem.

Excerpt:

Critics argue that belief in God is unwarranted because it arises from evolved, hard-wired cognitive mechanism. But, if these psychologists are right, so are many (if not all) of our other beliefs.

“Surely the critic doesn’t want to say that any belief that is the output of our mental tools—our cognitive tools—is unwarranted,” Murray notes, because “we can’t reasonably think that all of our beliefs are unreliable.” Further,

most of these critics think that our cognitive tools usually get things just right. To see this, just substitute the following words (or phrases) into the argument [above] and see if the critic would still find the underlying reasoning acceptable: human minds, rocks, rainbow, or science’s ability to discover the truth.

In other words, “Why do they think it’s fair to single out belief in the existence of God as the one thing that turns out to be unreliable or unwarranted?”

Hence, Murray notes, this sweeping argument is self-defeating. For if all brain-dependent beliefs are unwarranted, then the idea that “belief in God is unwarranted” is itself unwarranted.

Dawkins and many of his peers think this argument shows belief in God to be “merely” a “by-product” of human evolutionary development. Theistic intellectuals like Murray conclude that “God instead, designed us so that belief in him is easy and natural. The human mind is naturally constructed in such a way that we have a tendency to form beliefs in God concepts, and even of a somewhat specific sort.”

So if you believe Koukl, the argument commits the genetic fallacy. But even if you allow it to go through, like Michael Murray does, it’s self-refuting. (You can read more about Murray’s views in “Contending With Christianity’s Critics” and “Passionate Conviction” – and don’t worry about chastising him about his moderate views of intelligent design, I already wrote to him and beat him up about that, and he said it was just a bias / preference he had against intervening acts of fine-tuning subsequent to the moment of creation).

You may also be interested on the original “wish-fulfillment” objection, which Greg Koukl demolishes here. And another Greg Koukl article on whether you are your physical brain, or whether you are your non-physical mind and you have a brain.

Commentary

John Lennox and William Lane Craig respond to Stephen Hawking

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Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking is in the news again theorizing about untestable speculations. He thinks that physical laws, (which are just descriptions of the way matter operates), can actually bring the entire space-time universe into being. Specifically, he thinks that the law of gravity can create matter out of nothing.

Here’s John Lennox of Oxford University responding to Stephen Hawking.

Excerpt:

There’s no denying that Stephen Hawking is intellectually bold as well as physically heroic. And in his latest book, the renowned physicist mounts an audacious challenge to the traditional religious belief in the divine creation of the universe.

According to Hawking, the laws of physics, not the will of God, provide the real explanation as to how life on Earth came into being. The Big Bang, he argues, was the inevitable consequence of these laws ‘because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.’

Unfortunately, while Hawking’s argument is being hailed as controversial and ground-breaking, it is hardly new.

For years, other scientists have made similar claims, maintaining that the awesome, sophisticated creativity of the world around us can be interpreted solely by reference to physical laws such as gravity.

It is a simplistic approach, yet in our secular age it is one that seems to have resonance with a sceptical public.

But, as both a scientist and a Christian, I would say that Hawking’s claim is misguided. He asks us to choose between God and the laws of physics, as if they were necessarily in mutual conflict.

But contrary to what Hawking claims, physical laws can never provide a complete explanation of the universe. Laws themselves do not create anything, they are merely a description of what happens under certain conditions.

What Hawking appears to have done is to confuse law with agency. His call on us to choose between God and physics is a bit like someone demanding that we choose between aeronautical engineer Sir Frank Whittle and the laws of physics to explain the jet engine.

That is a confusion of category. The laws of physics can explain how the jet engine works, but someone had to build the thing, put in the fuel and start it up. The jet could not have been created without the laws of physics on their own  –  but the task of development and creation needed the genius of Whittle as its agent.

Similarly, the laws of physics could never have actually built the universe. Some agency must have been involved.

To use a simple analogy, Isaac Newton’s laws of motion in themselves never sent a snooker ball racing across the green baize. That can only be done by people using a snooker cue and the actions of their own arms.

Hawking’s argument appears to me even more illogical when he says the existence of gravity means the creation of the universe was inevitable. But how did gravity exist in the first place? Who put it there? And what was the creative force behind its birth?

And here is an MP3 file with Bill Craig’s response. Craig thinks that Hawking’s new book is basically the same as his previous book where he introduced the idea that his quantum gravity theory can explain the creation of the universe out of nothing, and then the multiverse to explain the fine-tuning.

UPDATE: I added a new post with Henry F. Schafer’s take on Hawking’s no-boundary proposal.

My thoughts

The law of gravity is just a mathematical equation that describes nature. Gravity is part of the natural world – it is a force of attraction between material objects. How can this force exist causally prior to the creation of all matter at t=0? It cannot. Self-creation is a self-refuting contradiction. For a thing to create itself, it would have to exist before it existed.

Maybe that passes for intelligent thought in the world of atheistic speculations, but not in the world of experimental science, which provides strong evidence for a Creation out of nothing, and a Design plan for the universe. Maybe this is just like Dawkins avoiding a debate with William Lane Craig – it’s not about seeking truth, it’s about book sales. It’s not like Hawking is going to subject his speculations to a public debate.

You can learn more about the argument for God’s existence from the creation of the universe in the Big Bang.

News

The Cambrian explosion is getting more explosive

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A story on the Cambrian explosion from the radically pro-evolution BBC. (H/T Evolution News)

Excerpt:

In a new study, Canadian researchers identified a previously unclassifiable fossil that was long believed to belong perhaps to the shrimp family.

They called it Nectocaris pteryx – a small soft-bodied cephalopod with two tentacles rather than the eight or 10 seen in today’s octopuses.

The new survey’s results were presented in the journal Nature.

The findings make the ancestors of modern squid and octopuses at least 30 million years older.

Evolutionary biologist Martin Smith, the main author of the study, told PA news agency that the findings bring cephalopods much closer to the first appearance of complex animals.

“We go from very simple pre-Cambrian life-forms to something as complex as a cephalopod in the geological blink of an eye, which illustrates just how quickly evolution can produce complexity,” said Mr Smith.

Yes, isn’t it amazing how naturalistic mechanisms like “evolution” can create brand new complex body plans out of nothing, in the blink of an eye? And isn’t it amazing that this evidence doesn’t falsify naturalism at all! Oh, no no no no no no, it doesn’t – because naturalism is a blind faith commitment. Evidence is irrelevant to a blind faith commitment. The entire physical universe can pop into being out of nothing, but naturalism is still true – because they want it to be true. All praise the Flying Spaghetti Monster!

The more body plans that appear suddenly, the less plausible evolution becomes. You can’t have a massive infusion of biological information appearing out of nowhere without an intelligent agent to sequence the individual characters. New software requires a software engineer.

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