Responses to a reader who rejects Christianity

A loyal reader of my blog, who praises my way of popularizing science, rejects Christianity and seems bothered by the fact that my articles imply that I am a Catholic. In a series of comments that he wrote in one of my posts, he explains his arguments. I did not answer him there, because of the length of his comments, which in total contain 3,346 words, while my article only has 644 (more than five times less).

I think that this reader should be classified as an agnostic rather than an atheist, as it’s possible to deduce from the following words:

There is nothing stupid about rambling about the possible existence of God and deciding "I'm going 100% that he does exist." The universe is SO complex that, as long as there is no evidence to the contrary, believing that there may be someone/something that "designed" all this... cannot be dismissed as "stupid thinking."

I think the reader's various criticisms can be summarized by quoting the following words, which also appear in his first comment:

The problem comes when we try to use all these reasonings (which, in principle, speak of God as something completely ethereal and impersonal) to try to validate the story of Jesus Christ, which seems to be the goal.

Simple, right? The reader accepts my speaking about God, but not about Jesus Christ. Apparently, he deeply resents my doing so. I have named Jesus Christ in eight posts out of more than 450, although perhaps my Christianity is also clear in posts where I don’t name him. And he accuses me of trying to bring water to my mill (or sweeping home). This is a textbook case of the ad hominem fallacy. As we know, this fallacy (which in this case can be summarized as follows: you say this because you are Catholic) can be answered in the same way: you say that because you are an atheist, or agnostic, or whatever corresponds.

Most of the comments of the reader (2092 words) are directed against the possibility of miracles, and in particular against the miracle of Fatima, to which I have dedicated several posts in this blog. I suspect that the reader thinks that his arguments contradict what I said in those posts, but on the whole I think that he has just provided a confirmation. I said this:

1. Either the event really occurred, i.e., the witnesses told the truth.
2. Either the event did not take place, and the witnesses deliberately lied.
3. Or the event did not take place, but the witnesses did not lie, they were simply mistaken, or were the prey of a collective hallucination, or some equivalent explanation.

And I added:

Skeptics say that the miracle was a collective hallucination, or an optical effect due to the contemplation of the sun. Believers prefer the first option.

G.K.Chesterton

And what does the reader do? Assert that the only valid alternatives to my trilemma are the second and the third. In other words, what I had anticipated. An agnostic or an atheist must deny the possibility of miracles, therefore must necessarily adopt the other two alternatives. A believer has one more alternative, the first. (Catholics don’t automatically accept everything we are told is a miracle, as proved by G.K. Chesterton’s stories in the collection The Incredulity of Father Brown.) Then those 2000 or so words confirm what I had predicted.

There is also some reference to the other argument used usually by atheists to deny the existence of God: the problem of evil. In this regard he says:

If the planes that were going to hit the Twin Towers had frozen in the air 20 meters from the impact... it would have been amazing, there would have been no explanation of any kind and it would have been recorded on video... However, that did not happen... And thousands of people died. And many others suffered a mind-blowing psychological impact. It seems that miracles only happen to do inconsequential nonsense.

This is the problem of human evil, to which the usual response is to point out that we are trying to blame God for the evil that men do. Or as Mark Twain may have said: There are many scapegoats, but the most common is Providence. In this specific case, God is blamed for not having performed a miracle to prevent a barbaric human act. Others usually mention Auschwitz. This demand of miracles reveals a magical-mechanical concept of God, who would only be the automatic corrector of the evil done by human beings. Times don’t change much; that was also what they said to Christ crucified: Save yourself by coming down from the cross! (Mk. 15:30).

It’s curious: some time before the reader posted these comments in my blog, I had used similar arguments in a debate about the existence of God between two artificial intelligences in my latestscience fiction novel: Operation Viginti. The debate ends in a draw, which is what usually happens in this type of debate. Reaching an agreement is almost impossible, for both sides start from different axioms: one affirms that God exists, the other denies or questions it, so it’s difficult to find a convincing argument.

The same post in Spanish

Thematic Thread on Science, Faith and Atheism: Previous Next

 Manuel Alfonseca

Is popular science in crisis?

In the last thirty years, interest in scientific popularization has decreased worryingly. Perhaps not unrelated to this is the loss of prestige of science, which the man in the street tends to consider guilty or accomplice in some threats, such as the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the uncontrolled destruction of the environment or climate change.

During this time, several permanent sections of the media dedicated to popular scientific have disappeared, as well as a few important magazines, while books on popular science do not usually achieve great sales, with few exceptions, mainly related to health.

In the mass media, the only thing that matters now is the appeal of the headline, at the expense of scientific accuracy. Thus the effects of this type of dissemination are often negative and counterproductive: instead of informing, they distort the public opinion. I have spoken about the harmful effects of this type of disclosure in several posts in this blog.

The golden age of scientific popularization

Scientific popularization, as it was carried out after 1970, can be divided into three large groups:

• High-level scientific popularization, represented by magazines aimed at readers with a good scientific base, who want to stay up to date on the advances made in disciplines other than their own:

o   Scientific American, which had entered its second century of existence and published monthly each year less than one hundred long select articles, in addition to a small number of short information articles. Its prestige increased even more when it became the medium through which some important discoveries were made public, this journal being chosen instead of better-known scientific publications, such as Nature or Science. Thus, in October 1970, Martin Gardner published in his section (Mathematical Games) the first article dedicated to the Game of Life, devised by the British mathematician John Conway: The fantastic combinations of John Conway's new solitaire game "life". And in May 1975, Gregory Chaitin published in Scientific American his famous article Randomness and Mathematical Proof, where he showed that the randomness of integers is undecidable, an undecidability theorem comparable to Gödel’s.

The prehistory of scientific popularization

Being interested in the world, being curious to find out the causes of natural phenomena, is as old as man, but in the strict sense one cannot speak of science until the invention of writing, as the knowledge communicated through oral transmission was disorganized, imprecise, and fragmentary. For science to appear, the body of knowledge must constitute a coherent and ordered whole, which was practically impossible before more permanent means of storing information than human memory could be used.

As soon as writing systems appeared in the Middle East, India, China and America, sciences began to develop. The first three were medicine, mathematics, and astrology. They arose for practical reasons: to cure diseases; for the good management of the economy; to predict natural phenomena related to the cycle of the seasons. The natural sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, and geology) were less necessary for early human societies, so they did not emerge until the Greek civilization.

The ethical frameworks in technology

Chernobyl disaster

Oxford Languages gives the following two definitions to the word Ethics:

Moral principles that govern a person's behaviour or the conducting of an activity.

The branch of knowledge that deals with moral principles.

The Wikipedia gives the following definition:

A branch of philosophy that involves systematizing, defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong behavior.

Since Aristotle wrote two (or three) books on ethics (the Nicomachean Ethics, the Eudemian Ethics, and perhaps the Magna Moralia or Great Ethics), ethics has been considered an important part of philosophy.

Traditionally, three main approaches have been considered (there are more) that can serve as a framework for the construction of ethics:

Mathematical trivia and quotes from mathematicians

I have taken the following trivia and quotes about mathematics from the book A Passion for Mathematics, by Clifford A. Pickover, which I have mentioned in another post in this blog. These are the trivia:

• Let's see four amazing properties of number 5: a) It is the hypotenuse of the smallest Pythagorean triangle. b) There are five Platonic solids. c) It is the smallest automorphic number. Automorphic numbers are those whose square ends in the number. d) It is probably the only odd untouchable number. Untouchable numbers are those that are not equal to the sum of the proper divisors of any other number.

Computer programs and intelligence games

In 1956, John McCarthy and colleagues, in a seminar that took place at Dartmouth College in Hanover (USA), defined the term Artificial Intelligence, so abused now. On the same year, Arthur Samuel, working at IBM, built the first computer program capable of playing checkers. This program kept information about the games it had played and used it to modify its future plays. In other words, it “learned.” After a certain number of games, the program was able to defeat its creator and play reasonably well in official championships.

At first sight, this seemed to go in the good direction. The creators of the term Artificial Intelligence had predicted that ten years later (that is, around 1966) we would have programs capable of performing perfect translations between any two human languages and playing chess better than the world champion. And this would only be the beginning. We would soon be able to build machines capable of behaving with equal or more intelligence than man. The old dream of building artificial men would have come true.

Information and intelligence

Von Neumann’s architecture, which applies to almost every computer ever built during the history of computing, builds computers from two clearly separate parts: the processing unit, where instructions are executed, and the memory, where data is stored. Consequently, almost all the programs we run on our computers are divided into two different sections: the algorithm (the executable instructions) and the data that provides the information needed by the algorithm (its input).

Such a clear separation reminds the difference between the two concepts in the title of this post:

Historical quantification of violence

Auchswitz

In a recent conference that I heard, the speaker said that in recent times violence in the world has decreased a lot. She added that many people have the feeling that it is the other way around, that we have now more violence than ever before. Is what she said true, or is what people think true?

Let’s start by defining violence. The Encyclopedia Britannica defines it like this: An act of physical force that causes or is intended to cause harm.

Systems of truth and knowledge

Pitirim Sorokin

Pitirim Sorokin was one of the main sociologists of the 20th century, perhaps the best. One of his masterpieces is titled Social and Cultural Dynamics, where he makes an analysis of the history of civilizations parallel to that carried out independently by the philosopher Oswald Spengler, the historian Arnold J. Toynbee and the anthropologist A.L. Kroeber. In one of the 42 chapters of this work, Sorokin distinguishes seven systems of truth and knowledge, which can be grouped into three large groups:

1.      Ideational systems: they are based on the truth of faith. The principle of truth is God, who provides truth through revelation, divine inspiration, mystical experience, and so forth. In this group, Sorokin classifies three systems of truth and knowledge:

A new fine-tuning case and the “great design”

Almost every case of fine-tuning discussed so far concerns nuclear reactions and their consequences, in the realm of the very small. This is what could happen if the universal constants and parameters were not fine-tuned:

• Either there would be no hydrogen in the universe, and the stars would last too short a time for life to appear.
• Or the fusion of hydrogen to give helium would not be possible, so there would be no stars.
• Or oxygen or carbon, essential elements for life, would not be generated in stars.

In all these cases, concepts and ideas are drawn from particle physics, astronomy, and cosmology.

The principle of indifference

In several previous posts I have applied the principle of indifference, albeit I did not call it by that name.

• In the post The eerie silence I wrote this:

The probability of the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence is 50%. As we know nothing, this is equivalent to throwing a coin, and if it comes up heads, we say that we are alone; if tails, that we have company.

• In the post Relativism in science? I said this:

If we have no reason to assume that a theory is true or false, its probability should be close to 0.5... Theories about which we have no information, for or against, with a probability between 0.4 and 0.6. I will cite the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence, the possibility of building strong artificial intelligence, or the various theories of the multiverse.

Lavoisier, father of modern chemistry

Lavoisier

Antoine Laurent de Lavoisier is considered the father of modern Chemistry, having introduced the quantitative method into this science. In 1768, aged 25, he was elected a member of the Academy of Sciences. The astronomer Joseph Jérôme Lalande, who defended his candidacy, explained it this way:

A young man with knowledge, ingenuity, activity, whom fortune exempts from practicing another profession, would naturally be of great use to the sciences.

Indeed, his mother’s family inheritance allowed him to buy a position in a financial company called Ferme générale, whose members were responsible of collecting taxes on behalf of the king, a position he held until 1791 and which eventually led him to the grave. Here he met his future wife, Marie-Anne Paulze, whom he married in 1771 when she was 13, who became his best scientific collaborator.

Descriptions and explanations

Lavoisier

An example will illustrate the difference between these two concepts:

• Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier is considered the father of modern chemistry. His Traité Élémentaire de Chimie revolutionized many of the ideas that until then had dominated this science. However, when it comes to the chemical reactions it describes, this book is a mere catalogue. So we are told something like this:

If we mix oxygen gas and hydrogen gas and apply fire or an electric spark to the mixture, an explosion occurs and the result is water.

This is a description. It tells what happens but offers no explanation of the phenomenon.

Exploration of the solar system in science fiction

The exploration of the solar system is one of the classic themes of science fiction, although it is surpassed by the exploration of the galaxy, both in the number of works and in the variety of arguments to which it has given rise.

Among my favorite works on this subject I will cite the following:

• Exploration and colonization of the moon. Two novels that make a series: De la Terre à la Lune and Autour de la Lune by Jules Verne, whose protagonists circumambulate the moon, but are unable to land; and two short stories: The Singing Bell by Isaac Asimov and The Menace from Earth by Robert Heinlein. In the second there is a well-established base on the moon.

Richard Dawkins versus John Lennox

Richard Dawkins

At the age of fifteen I wrote my first book, with no intention of publishing, just for my personal use. It was a two-volume zoology of invertebrates. I still refer to it, although classifications have changed a lot, with the rise of cladistics and DNA analysis.

In 1977, this time with the intention of sending it to the printer, I wrote another book in English under the title Human cultures and evolution, where I proposed the following:

·         Cultural evolution is equivalent to biological evolution. Many properties are common to both fields. Human civilizations are equivalent to biological species and describe similar life curves. There is a cultural selection, equivalent to and very similar to natural selection, proposed by Darwin to explain the origin of the species.

Transhumanism, is it possible?

First, we must differentiate three different concepts:

a)   Technological singularity: the apparently exponential increase of our technological advances will tend to infinity in a very short time. By then, anything we may want to do, will be possible.

b)  Transhumanism: the amelioration of the human species by means of technology.

c)   Posthumanism: the generation of a new species as a hybrid of human beings and technology.

Possible ways of divine action

In the previous post, we saw that chaotic determinism, quantum indeterminism and free will can be considered the three vertices of a bi-dimensional triangle that, together, define the material-immaterial coordinates of the world. God in his Providence can interact with the world through the three vertices of the triangle.

• Upon the deterministic vertex, God can act by manipulating the initial conditions of the universe. For God, such conditions would not be affected by chaos theory: He would be capable of setting them to an infinite number of decimal figures. Also, the restriction of the principle of uncertainty is applicable to us, but not to the Creator. Given that God is also outside time, He would be able to use his global knowledge of the cosmos to settle the initial conditions in such a way that certain events may take place in any subsequent future. This possibility was offered by C.S. Lewis as a solution to the problem of the efficacy of prayer.

The problem of Free-Will

In the current image of the world provided by physics, we have at one side, an apparent fuzzy determinism, because the universe is chaotic; at the other end we get indeterminism. What can we say about human freedom?

Free-Will, as envisioned by classical philosophers, is incompatible with determinism. But it would be a mistake to assume that it is the same as quantum indeterminism. When a radioactive atom disintegrates, it is not free; it is subject to the influx of probability. One atom may disintegrate ten times later than another, but its longevity has not been chosen individually, it is the result of the play of blind forces which, on the average, produce the effect that one half of the atoms must disintegrate in a perfectly defined time.

Determinism or indeterminism?

Modern science has revolutionized our vision of the world. In the eighteenth century, Newton's theory of gravitation could be considered established, and gave rise to a materialistic-deterministic vision of the universe which can be personified in one of the most significant scientists of the time, Pierre-Simon, Marquis de Laplace (1749-1827), whose fields of study covered mathematics, astronomy, chemistry and biology. The success of his studies on the dynamics of the solar system moved him to state that, if we knew the exact initial conditions of the universe, it would be possible to predict all its past and future development. This gave rise to materialistic determinism, so successful in the nineteenth century and still a part of the popular vision of the world, in spite of the three devastating attacks it has suffered during the twentieth century.

Chariots of the gods

During the 1970s, a Cinerama film with the same title as this post was exhibited and advertised with the following words: Can we say that the existence of extraterrestrial intelligent beings has been proved?

Although watching the film was worthwhile, because it shows many wonderful landscapes and artistic works, I was not convinced by the point it was trying to make. Eric von Däniken, author of the book of the same title, in which the film is based, seems to have very little faith in man’s creative capacity. As soon as a human production seems difficult, he always attributes it to the intervention of aliens. He does so with the pyramids of Egypt, the Mayan astronomical observatories, the mortar of the Incas, and many other things.

The (in)credulity of English writers

Charles Dickens

I am going to talk about three famous English writers, and their answers towards the pseudoscience of the time. One of them lived in the middle of the 19th century, another halfway between the 19th and 20th centuries, and practically all the work of the third was written in the 20th century.

Charles Dickens: His brush with pseudoscience appears in one of his best works (in my opinion the best): Bleak House. One of the characters, called Krook (who is really a crook), dies of spontaneous combustion.

The idea that the human body can ignite spontaneously arose from a series of anecdotal cases of people, often alcoholics, burning to death under dubious circumstances. Some argued that ingested alcohol could ignite spontaneously within the body, even though doctors claimed that the amount of alcohol needed to do so would have to be so large that the person would have died of alcohol poisoning long before igniting.

Pathological science, wishful science, or ironic science?

Irving Langmuir

In 1953, Irving Langmuir (Nobel Prize Winner in Chemistry in 1932) gave a lecture on pathological science, a name he applied to the results of the investigations of perfectly honest scientists, enthusiastic about their work... but who are completely deluded. This is Lagmuir’s definition of pathological science, which Milton Rothman in 1990 called wishful science and John Horgan in 1996 called ironic science:

These are cases where there is no dishonesty involved but where people are tricked into false results by a lack of understanding about what human beings can do to themselves in the way of being led astray by subjective effects, wishful thinking or threshold interactions.

Langmuir signalled five cases of pathological science:

A model for ChatGPT

How does ChatGPT work? Suppose we ignore for the moment that ChatGPT uses an artificial neural network, and represent its algorithm in the traditional way. This algorithm can be divided into two parts:

1. Training: ChatGPT is provided with data (text files), which are used to build two data sets:
1. A list of all the words that appear in any of the texts, without repetition, regardless of their order or the number of times each one appears.
2. An array of indices to the word list, reporting the number of times a given word occurs after a series of words. For example, if the following series appears in the texts: time travel, the indices of the words travel, and time will appear in the array, followed by the index of the next word, followed by the number of times that this sequence of three words appears in the set of texts used for training.

Relativism in science?

Karl Popper

As I have said in other posts, quoting Popper, a scientific theory can never be considered utterly confirmed. In other words, we can never be completely sure that it is true. But some people try to rely on this (and on Kant’s philosophy) to reach the conclusion that we cannot know anything about reality, that scientific knowledge is relative, and that science is no different from other human activities, such as arts or fashion, whose productions cannot be said to be true or false.

Against this position, in an article published in 1990 in defense of realism, Martin Gardner wrote the following paragraph, which in my opinion hits the center of the bull’s eye:

Cyberethics

Norbert Wiener

In 1948, Norbert Wiener created the term Cybernetics, applicable to a new technology, which he defined as follows:

The study of control and communication in the animal and the machine

Cybernetics has a lot to do with Robotics and with the use of computers and microprocessors to control and communicate; in other words, to do almost everything we use them for.

But what is being talked about right now, rather than Cybernetics, is Cyberethics: ethical issues related to the use of computers, social networks, and most tools that modern technology puts within our reach.

Roger Penrose versus William Craig

Roger Penrose

I thank Plácido Doménech Espí for drawing my attention to this debate held in 2019 between Roger Penrose and William Craig, entitled The Universe: How did it get here & why are we part of it?

Roger Penrose rose to fame as a cosmologist in 1970 when he proved, with Stephen Hawking, a theorem stating that the application of Einstein’s theory of General Relativity to the entire universe requires the existence of at least one singular point in the universe (a point where all the geodesics of the universe meet). In other words, the Big Bang.

In 1989, Penrose became one of the most famous scientific popularizers with The emperor’s new mind, a book with deep philosophical implications. Among other things, he proposed the following question, inspired by Gödel’s theorem: how is it possible that we can prove that a theorem is true, if it cannot be proved mathematically from a reasonable set of axioms? According to Penrose, this would indicate that human intelligence is qualitatively different from computing machines.

In 2004 he published a book of extremely hard popularization, The Road to Reality, which is full of equations, where he proposes a unification of Einstein’s general relativity with quantum mechanics (a theory of quantum gravity). Then came his own cosmological theory, Conformal cyclical cosmology (CCC), according to which the universe did not begin with the Big Bang, which would only be the beginning of the current aeon, but there would be an infinite succession of previous eons, each beginning with a Big Bang and evolving to global heat death, when all that would remain in the entire universe would be photons. At that moment, (no one knows how) the entropy would suddenly drop to a minimum value again, to start a new cycle.

William Craig has proposed the kalam cosmological argument, which can be summarized thus:

1. Whatever begins to exist, has a cause of its existence.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.

William Lane Craig

Craig argues that the Big Bang was the beginning of the existence of the universe, so there must be a cause for that existence: an uncaused Creator, existing without beginning, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless, enormously powerful, and omniscient, to be the author of the abstract world. In other word: God.

In the debate, Penrose began by arguing that there are three components of reality: an abstract or Platonic world (mathematics); a physical world (the material world); and a mental world (the world of consciousness). In addition, he points out the existence of three mysteries, which refer to the relationships between these three worlds:

1. The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics (Eugene Paul Wigner): Why does the abstract world describe so well the workings of the physical world?
2. The origin of consciousness: How can consciousness arise from the physical world?
3. The mind’s ability to understand the abstract world: Why can we understand mathematics and apply it to describe counterintuitive phenomena?

Craig agreed with Penrose’s analysis, and added this consideration:

The abstract world cannot be the cause of the other two worlds, the physical and the mental, because it has no causal power and cannot make decisions. It is not clear that the physical world is the cause of the mental world: Penrose himself admits that this is a mystery. Can the mental world be the cause of the physical and the abstract worlds? It appears it can: we have the experience that our minds can produce physical changes through human intentionality. Could there not be an omniscient mind who is the author of the physical and the abstract worlds? That would solve the problem of the origin of the three worlds.

To this, Penrose could only reply that he does not like this idea (he declares himself an atheist) and would rather think that the abstract world is primordial, although he does not know how the other two worlds could proceed from the abstract world.

The second part of the discussion dealt with the fine-tuning problem. Craig indicated that there are three solutions to the problem:

1. Universal constants must have the value they have.
2. Our existence in such a fine-tuned universe may be due to chance in a multiverse.
3. Our universe has been designed by a Creator.

Penrose began by denying that fine-tuning is a fact, although he ultimately declared himself agnostic about this question. He proposed his CCC theory as an explanation of the origin of our universe. Craig pointed out that this theory is just another multiverse theory, in time rather than in space, (most multiverses are supposed to exist in space). Penrose, for whom this idea seemed to be new, embraced it happily and asserted that his theory has been experimentally confirmed, an assertion most current cosmologists would not accept.

My conclusion from this debate: Penrose was mostly on the defensive, and he was unable to offer one convincing argument in favor of his atheism.

The same post in Spanish

Thematic Thread on Science and Atheism: Previous Next

Thematic Thread about Science and Faith: Previous Next

Manuel Alfonseca