Creationism in Crisis - The Fallacy of the Fine-Tuned Universe

Creationism in Crisis

The Fallacy of the Fine-Tuned Universe

Great Mysteries of Physics 2: is the universe fine-tuned for life?

It won't be long in any debate forum with Creationists, or even theists who are not Bible literalists but still like to think their magic invisible friend created the Universe with them in mind, that someone will claim the Universe is fine-tuned for life. The claim is that there are about 30 constants which all have to have just the values they have for intelligent life to exist.

There are of course many problems with this claim, most of which the person making it will be completely unaware, having only read what they want to believe and not anything that might contradict their 'faith'.

The main ones are:

• In effect, they are arguing that their putative creator god can only create life within very narrow parameters, and yet an omnipotent god who allegedly created the 'rules' should be capable of creating anything it wants to create in any given set of parameters. So, if the creator constrained by natural laws and incapable of working outside its limitations? If so, who or what set those limitations.
  
  The fine-tuned argument is actually an argument against the existence of an omnipotent creator god, not for one.
• Discussions about the existence of intelligent life can only be conducted in a Universe in which intelligent life exists, therefore, the fact that the debate is taking place means the Universe must be capable of giving rise to intelligent life. Trying to work out the probability of something happening that has already happened is statistical nonsense. The probability is 1 (certainty).
• Assuming those constants do have a range of possible values (and that's only an assumption with no evidence ever presented), in order to calculate the probability of it having the value it has in this Universe, we would need to examine a large sample of universes. That of course is impossible, so, for all we know, the probability of any constant having its current value may be certainty, i.e. it might not be capable of having any other value. That the probability of it having its current value being unlikely, is merely an assumption - a claim without evidence which can be dismissed without evidence.
• In this universe, the vast majority of it is highly hostile to life as we know it. Even in this planetary system, life can only exist on one planet, and intelligent (human) life can only exist on a fraction of the surface of this planet and within a few thousand feet of its surface without special equipment. So, far from being fine-tuned for life, almost all of it is fine-tuned to make life impossible.
• Earth is not particularly well designed for human life (which is what Creationists men by 'intelligent life'). It is tectonically active which means it is subject to frequent natural disasters such as earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis; humans cannot survive for long and without equipment in the oceans or at the top of mountains, in deserts of at the poles. Earth is subject to occasional cosmic disasters such as meteorite strikes and it orbits a sun which will one day destroy it by turning into a red giant, hence intelligent life such as that on Earth will only exist for a fraction of the time the Universe will exist.
• There are very many more black holes in the Universe than there are humans, so it would be more logical to argue that the Universe is fine-tunes for making black holes.

Creationism in Crisis - How the Bible Narrative Misled 19th Century Palaeontologists

Creationism in Crisis

How the Bible Narrative Misled 19th Century Palaeontologists

Reconstruction of the ceremonial burial

Credit: Natalia Klimczak
© National Museum of Wales

Paviland Cave (Goat’s Hole), Gower Peninsula

Red Lady of Paviland: the story of a 33,000 year-old-skeleton – and the calls for it to return to Wales

The significance of the discovery of human remains in a Welsh cave almost exactly 200 years ago to the day, on 18 January, 1823, was entirely missed because the Oxford University Palaeontologist, William Buckland, was also an Anglican priest who believed the Bible to be the inerrant word of a creator god and so literal history.

Today, this is something only believed by scientifically illiterate Creationists and those made too afraid by childhood indoctrination to question it or acknowledge the evidence to the contrary.

After changing his mind several times, Buckland concluded on scant evidence that the skeletal remains were that of a female prostitute who had drowned in the Biblical flood and whose body had got washed into the cave along with the other animal remains found there, because this was the only way he could think of to fit the facts into the Bible narrative.

In fact, the body is that of a man of about 25-28, who died about 33,000 years ago and so is the earliest example of a ceremonial burial in Western Europe. In taking the remains, together with the artifacts found with them, back to Oxford and failing to recognise their cultural significance to Wales, he so deprived Wales of a cultural icon.

The story of how the Bible, or rather the mistaken belief that the Bible is literal history, mislead 19th Century palaeontologists is told by Ffion Reynolds, Honorary Research Fellow, and Jacqui Mulville, Professor in Bioarchaeology and Head of Archaeology and Conservation, both of Cardiff University, in an article in The Conversation. The article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency.

How Religion Muddles Along Because it Doesn't Have Any Evidence to Go By

Are Christian souls gendered?

In a fascinating analysis of how the Christian notion of the 'soul' evolved to suit local political needs and to pander to popular demand, Professor Philip C. Almond, Emeritus Professor in the History of Religious Thought, The University of Queensland, explains how Christian ideas about the soul have changed since the notion was adopted from the Greek Platonists in the late second century CE, the idea of an immortal soul being absent from both the Old and New Testaments. Until then, Christians had used the Hebrew notion of a human being a single entity composed of both spiritual and physical parts.

For 'spiritual' parts read 'magic ingredient' making it alive. In fact we can see remnants of the lack of belief in immortality in verses such as this The following bible verses that seem to have escaped the editors' notice and been included in the modern editions.

From the Old Testament from a time when ideas of God's omniscience hadn't formed and death was seen as the end:

Man that is born of a woman is of few days and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not.

And doth thou open thine eyes upon such an one, and bringest me into judgment with thee? Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? not one.

Seeing his days are determined, the number of his months are with thee, thou hast appointed his bounds that he cannot pass; Turn from him, that he may rest, till he shall accomplish, as an hireling, his day. For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease. Though the root thereof wax old in the earth, and the stock thereof die in the ground; Yet through the scent of water it will bud, and bring forth boughs like a plant.

But man dieth, and wasteth away: yea, man giveth up the ghost, and where is he? As the waters fail from the sea, and the flood decayeth and drieth up: So man lieth down, and riseth not: till the heavens be no more, they shall not awake, nor be raised out of their sleep.

Job 14:1-12:

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So I reflected on all this and concluded that the righteous and the wise and what they do are in God’s hands, but no one knows whether love or hate awaits them.

All share a common destiny—the righteous and the wicked, the good and the bad, the clean and the unclean, those who offer sacrifices and those who do not.

As it is with the good, so with the sinful; as it is with those who take oaths, so with those who are afraid to take them.

This is the evil in everything that happens under the sun: The same destiny overtakes all. The hearts of people, moreover, are full of evil and there is madness in their hearts while they live, and afterward they join the dead. Anyone who is among the living has hope — even a live dog is better off than a dead lion!

For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing; they have no further reward, and even their name is forgotten.

Ecclesiastes 9:1-5:

Clearly, the idea that it didn't matter how you lived your life as it made no different in the long run, was not what the church authorities needed the masses to believe. What they needed was the ability to promise a reward for good behaviour, unquestioning obedience and compliance with dogma, which the dead couldn't complain about and couldn't report back to the living and reveal that it was a false promise and what they'd been sold was a pig in a poke.

So, the idea of an immortal soul was pinched from the Greek Platonists and inserted into Christianity, complete with the idea that the soul doesn't have a gender.

The following article is reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence and reformatted for stylistic consistency. The original may be read here:

Another Bible Blooper Exposed by Science.

One more clue to the Moon’s origin | ETH Zurich

There are several theories about the origin of the moon. The discovery of noble gases in lunar meteorites brings us one step closer to understanding its origin.

Image: Adobe Stock

Creationists and members of other Bible literalist cults regard the description of the formation of the cosmos and then Earth in the opening chapter of Genesis as the bast available description of reality, notwithstanding that it describes Earth as having a dome over it from which the creator god hung the moon as a lamp, so we would know it is night time.

And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.

And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.

Genesis 1:16-19

The problem these cultists have is that science continually and consistently proves this, and much else in the Bible, wrong - which is embarrassing for words of the supposed creator of it. Sadly, for them, it can't even be passed off as an allegory or a metaphor - the usual excuse when the Bible describes something that isn't so - because there is nothing that can be represented as a firmament to which the sun and moon are fixed, and the moon can't even be represented as a lamp, since a lamp has its own light, and the moon doesn't. Nor is the moon only visible at night, so if its purpose really was to tell us when it is night time, the putative creator couldn't even get that right!

Oops! Scientists Expose Another Creationist Lie

The fossilised remains of Keuppia, an extinct genus of octopus alongside an artist's impression of what the animal may have looked like

Credit (left): Jonathan Jackson/NHMUK
Credit (right): Smokeybjb, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia.

Rotting fish help solve mystery of how soft tissue fossils form | News | University of Leicester

As anyone who frequents social media Creationism vs Science groups will be familiar, Creationists love fossilised 'soft' tissue, which they claim shows Earth is just a few thousand years old because soft tissue would have rotted away before now if Earth really is billions of years old, like scientists say. Some Creationists will even try to pad out their soft tissue 'argument' with the lie that such fossils have been subjected to carbon 14 dating and found to be just a few thousand years old, forgetting for the moment that Creationist dogma requires that all radiometric dating techniques must be dismissed as fake because "radiometric (read C14) dating is a flawed concept, because it doesn’t work for anything older than 50,000 years".

It is, of course, nonsense, because what these so-called soft-tissue fossils are not, is soft. They are hard fossils of what had been soft tissue just as hard-tissue fossils are hard fossils of what had been hard tissue. The question for science was not why they are still soft, but how soft tissues, in certain rare conditions, remained intact and with such detail preserved for long enough to be replaced by minerals. In particular, why do some internal organs fare better than others in that process?

Now a team of scientists from Leicester University, UK, believe they have answered that by following the process of decay in a fish. The answer is to do with the pH of the tissue as it decays, which affects how readily it can be replaced with calcium phosphate, or apatite. As the news release from Leicester University explains:

God of the Gaps News - Creationism's Little Skrinking God Just Got a Lot Smaller

Olivine basalt

Source

Scientists announce a breakthrough in determining life's origin on Earth—and maybe Mars

The basic problem with Creationism's favourite 'argument' - 'the God of the Gaps' - is not only that it is based on two fallacies - the argument from ignorant incredulity and the false dichotomy fallacies, but also that it tends to disappear every time the gap is subjected to scientific scrutiny.

That's exactly what has just happened with one of their favourite gaps - the origin of living organisms, which they always conflate with the theory of evolution of which it is not and never was a part. Evolution is what happened after ‘life’, or more precisely, self-replication, got started.

Essentially, living organisms can trace their origins back to a self-replicating molecule because once that had arisen, everything else follows naturally by Darwinian natural selection acting on small variations in the copies (the sieve of natural selection acting on each generation to filter out the best at producing copies of themselves and remove those least able to). Just such a molecule known to exist is a short length of RNA which has been shown to self-catalyse copies of itself in a mixture of nucleotides, by nothing more complex than the operation of the basic laws of chemistry.

But the question is, how did such a molecule first assemble?

Intelligent Design Hoax News - How an 'Irreducibly Complex' System Evolved

Rove Beetle, Staphylinidae sp.

A beetle chemical defense gland offers clues about how complex organs evolve -- ScienceDaily

Rove beetles are a widespread family of beetles, comprising some 64,000 different, soil and leaf-litter dwelling species, many of which have interesting defensive organs for producing noxious chemicals that would normally have an unscrupulous Creationist fraud jumping up and down with glee - they appear to be irreducibly complex in that all components need to be present for the system to work.

What Creationist frauds, presented with these systems, do, is declare that such a system could not have evolved by Darwinian evolution which depends on an accumulation of small differences each of which conveys a benefit, since the entire evolutionary process would need to complete before any benefit became apparent. They then declare it to have been intelligently designed as is, by magic, because the probability of it arising as is, by chance in a single evolutionary event, is so low as to be indistinguishable from zero. The entire Intelligent [sic] Design industry is founded on just such a spurious argument, coupled with the implied false-dichotomy fallacy that if science can't explain something, "God did it!".

Islam is not the Problem. Faith is the Problem!

The grotesque random slaughter of innocent people, including young children, in the name of Islam, in Britain, France and Afghanistan by Muslim fanatics, and the equally grotesque murders of innocent Norwegians by the Christian fanatic, Anders Breivik a few years ago are the results not of Islam or Christianity; they are the result of faith.

They are the result of people arrogating for themselves the right to determine who can live and who should die, based on nothing but faith and the belief faith gives them certain knowledge of what a god wants, who it wants to punish - and that it requires their help in meting out that punishment.

It would be easy to condemn the deluded, simple-minded fools who carried out these acts as 'evil'; as representative of an inherently 'evil' religion or the products of inherently evil cultures, but that would be missing the point entirely.

The problem is not Islam; the problem is not Christianity. The problem is faith.

Why Science Grows And Religions Stagnate

A couple of interesting articles in the science literature this week showing how science works and why it ultimately corrects it errors, whether because of mistaken claims or deliberately false ones, and above all why it continues to grow and develop. I wonder if any keen theologists can cite examples of religions being extended and kept on track by a similar process.

The first, in Scientific American, concerns the recent announcement of the detection of evidence of gravity waves as predicted by the inflation model of the Big Bang. This model explains a great deal about the observable universe such as why widely separated areas of the Universe that could never have been in contact with one another given the limitations imposed by the velocity of light, appear broadly the same. However, inflation remained a hypothesis pending definitive evidence supported only by the fact of its mathematical elegance and that it explained what can be observed.

Then last March, as reported in this blog and elsewhere a team working on the Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization 2 (BICEP2) experiment at the South Pole announced that they had found the evidence in the form of gravity waves, or more precisely, evidence for gravity waves; the smoking gun of inflation.

Now, however, and in the finest traditions of a major discovery, some serious questions are being asked and as yet not being fully answered. Doubts have been expressed about the validity of the conclusions from the data which the team have not yet made available for public scrutiny, nor have they produced a promised 'systematics' paper setting out possible sources of error although one was promised. Another problem for the science community is that, although the peer-review process is underway the team have not yet published their findings in a science journal.

Note that no-one is suggesting any dishonesty or falsification of data here, only questioning the validity and reliability of the conclusions from the data and whether it is the conclusive evidence for inflation that it was hailed as initially. As always, the concern is not whether the evidence agrees with the conclusion but whether the conclusion follows from the evidence. This is a crucial difference and one which can't be overstated.

The second article, this time in Science Magazine, is on a different scale altogether and deals with a strong suspicion of dishonesty and data manipulation or falsification. Although not formally proven there is growing concern about the work of Jens Förster, a Dutch researcher in psychology who resigned recently from the University of Amsterdam. As reported by Frank van Kolfschooten in Science Magazine, doubts had been raised about the statistical probability of his results being genuine and not the result of data manipulation to produce the desired results. One enquiry by the University of Amsterdam concluded that they were 'virtually impossible' whilst another concluded that there had been data manipulation in a 2012 paper.

Förster had accepted the charge of data manipulation but claimed the data used was from research in Germany, mostly at Jacobs University Bremen between 1999 and 2008 and suggested an unidentified and over-enthusiastic assistant had changed the data. However, emails have now emerged from 2009 which appear to be discussing the details of the experimental method to be used and which clearly post-date the pre-2008 German research claim. The offer of a professorship at Ruhr University, Bochum, Germany, supported by a €5 million grant from the German Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, has now been postponed.

So, in both these examples we see the scientific community using the scientific method to ensure that both genuine mistakes and deliberate falsifications are identified and investigated with all sides of the argument being heard before a final conclusion is reached - and the sanctions which inevitably follow from exposed deliberate falsification which can bring a reputation into disgrace and a career to a sudden end.

The reason for this, and the reason why it raises such concern in the scientific community is because the entire point of science is to arrive closer to the ultimate truth and to ensure that any conclusions are only and precisely what the evidence supports, nothing more and nothing less. It does not matter how badly one wishes that there was data to support a favourite hypothesis or how much one wishes to be the first to provide an elusive proof of a hypothesis, and it does not matter how much one researcher might put his own career prospects above his respect for truth, honesty and integrity, or how easily one researcher falls for the temptation to just change the data a little to show the world the 'truth' as he/she sees it, or to flatters his/her boss with the brilliance of his methods. None of this adds to the strength of the conclusion. The only thing that matters is the truth.

Contrast this to what we witness daily in theology and especially fundamentalist theology and apologetics where the only thing that matters is that the argument arrives at the 'right' conclusion; the conclusion that faith tells them is the right one. This allows apologists like William Lane Craig to get away with blatantly false arguments, circular reasoning, repetition of refuted arguments to a different audience and glaring misrepresentation of statistical methods such as Baye's Theorem which, used correctly would have proved the probability of Jesus resurrecting from the dead was virtually zero, as shown here, not the virtual certainty he claimed to the delight of his Christian audience eager for confirmation of their bias.

This is the simple faith fallacy which allows Muslims, Christians, Jews, Shintoists and Hindus to look at the same evidence and arrive at entirely different conclusions, and why that conclusion never changes. It's also why no evidence that might change that conclusion is ever recognised or taken into account. It doesn't support the conclusion therefore the evidence is wrong, and why when asked for the evidence for their god, all supporters of all religions can, with equal confidence and with a sweep of the arm tell you to, "Look around! The evidence is everywhere". The evidence is everywhere because it is simply deemed to be evidence; their faith tells them so. And it's also the reason that what's presented as a serious science text book for Christian schools can come up with this extraordinarily bigoted statement presented as a basic principle of science:

1. 'Whatever the Bible says is so; whatever man says may or may not be so,' is the only [position] a Christian can take..."
2. If [scientific] conclusions contradict the Word of God, the conclusions are wrong, no matter how many scientific facts may appear to back them.
3. Christians must disregard [scientific hypotheses or theories] that contradict the Bible.

William S. Pinkerton, Biology for Christian Schools

The conclusion is sacred so the facts must be ignored. If science had staggered along with that philosophy we would still be in the Bronze Age arguing about the best shape for wheels and arrowheads, and you couldn't be reading this. Religions, with their sacred conclusions and fixed dogmas, offering nothing more than comforting certainties, the delusion of false 'knowledge' and excuses for hate and ignorance, have no choice but to become increasingly irrelevant as human society progresses without them.

'via Blog this'

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The Ontological Blunder

Prof. Ian Stewart, Dr. Terry Pratchett and Prof. Jack Cohen

I've previously blogged about the 'Ontological Argument' for gods (I use the plural because, idiotically, if the argument is valid - and I have seen it referred to as a conclusive proof - then it should only work for one god, yet it works for any. Make one up yourself and try it).

Briefly, the idea was thought up by Anselm, an early Anglo-Norman archbishop of Canterbury. He argued in his Proslogion that,

God [is] "that than which nothing greater can be conceived", and then argued that this being could exist in the mind. He suggested that, if the greatest possible being exists in the mind, it must also exist in reality. If it only exists in the mind, a greater being is possible—one which exists in the mind and in reality.

Source: Wikipedia - Ontological argument

Apparently, this is still trotted out in all seriousness by (especially) Christian apologists, who apparently see nothing wrong with essentially claiming they can define a god into existence and that such a god is obliged to exist.

I came across this elegant illustration of the simple, intellectually dishonest, fallacy behind this apologetic in a book by Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, The Science of Discworld IV - Judgement Day.

This book is the fourth in a series dealing with basic scientific principles in a very readable way using stories set in Terry Pratchett's Discworld. The science is almost all Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, two popular science writers. I can highly recommend both the Discworld series and the Science of Discworld series.

On Anselm's Ontological Argument, they have this to say, though they refer to it as Thomas Aquinas's argument from Summa Theologica which is virtually identical in form:

Logicians and mathematicians are painfully aware, however, that this argument is flawed. Before you can use a characterisation of some entity to deduce its properties, you have to provide independent proof that such an entity exists.

The classic example is a proof that the largest whole number is 1. Consider the largest whole number. Its square is at least as big, so it must equal its square. The only whole numbers like that are 0 and 1, of which 1 is the larger. QED. Except, 1 is clearly not the largest number. For instance, 2 is bigger.

Oops.

What's wrong? The proof assumes that there is a largest whole number. If it exists, everything else is correct, and it has to be 1. But, since that makes no sense, the proof must be wrong, and that implies that it doesn't exist.

So, in order to use the ontological argument to infer the existence of the greatest conceivable being, we must first establish that such a being exists, without simply referring to the definition. So what the argument proves is 'if God exists, then God exists'.

Congratulations.

So the ontological argument is nothing more than sleight of hand; a circular argument which surreptitiously assumes its conclusion and then feeds that a priori assumption into the argument in order to produce the required answer. That is why, just like the Cosmological Argument so beloved of William Lane Craig, it works with any god or any daft notion you can dream up. If you didn't spot it earlier, Anselms fallacy was in the opening sentence. He first defined God as "that than which nothing greater can be conceived" without first providing any independent proof that such an entity actually exists.

Quite obviously, had such proof been available to Anselm, or anyone else for that matter, he wouldn't have needed to invent the ontological argument in the first place, let alone perform that little bit of deception. We can be sure then that Anselm knew there was no available proof of the Christian god, just as we can be sure that those who still try to get away with it know they have no such proof.

As I've said before, substitute a peanut butter sandwich for 'God' in any theological apologetic and you can justify worshipping peanut butter sandwiches. If you are gullible enough to to fall for religious apologetics, exercise caution here or you could end up worshipping equally insane and inanimate objects. You could even start your own cult if you can find a few equally gullible idiots with thinking difficulties

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The Argument From Incredulity

The argument from incredulity is one of the commonest 'arguments' against science and history, and for gods. It's not based on rational discussion, or a dispassionate assessment of the evidence, but on intuition and usually ignorance and an intellectually dishonest attempt to shoehorn the Universe into a preferred view of it and force it to conform to requirements.

A person who has never read any science or history or paid any attention in school, never-the-less feels competent to dismiss it as wrong and scientists or historians as mad because they find it hard to believe they are a biological member of the Great Ape family or that there really was nothing before the beginning of space and time, or that the Exodus story might well have been made up.

You only need spend a few minutes on Twitter when a swarm of Creationists are calling other people names for not agreeing with them to see examples of it being made by people who couldn't tell a test tube from a Bunsen burner or a amoeba from a cabbage and yet feel able to announce to the world that the science they are using to send the message to the world, has got it all wrong, and magic is the best explanation for everything.

That's just stupid! It can't be true!

The argument from incredulity is of course just another form of the God of the Gaps fallacy which argues that, because I can't think of any way this can be explained it must have been done by [insert preferred god]. It's found in the Cosmological Argument and the Teleological Argument, including it's modern pseudo-scientific versions, Intelligent Design, Irreducible Complexity and Fine-tuned Universe.

Personal incredulity

Another form, the argument from personal incredulity, takes the form "I can't believe P, therefore not-P." Merely because one cannot believe that, for example, homeopathy is no more than a placebo does not magically make such treatment effective. Clinical trials are deliberately designed in such a way that an individual personal experience is not important compared to data in aggregate. Human beings have extremely advanced pattern recognition skills, to the extent that they are objectively poor judges of probability.

General incredulity

Sometimes argument from incredulity is applied to epistemological statements, taking the form "One can't imagine how one could know whether P or not-P, therefore it is unknowable whether P or not-P." This is employed by some (though not all) strong agnostics who say it is unknowable whether gods exist. The argument in this case is, "No one has thought of a way to determine whether there are gods, so there is no way." The implied major premise, "If there were such a way, someone would have thought of it," is disputable.

Source: RationalWiki - Argument from incredulity.

I don't believe it! If that's what scientists say, they must be mad!

The psychological process going on here is our old friend, coping with cognitive dissonance. What ever it is being waved aside and dismissed is inconsistent with a pre-existing and preferred world view, so believing it would have set up a dissonance or conflict. The simplest way to resolve the conflict is to dismiss it as stupid or the opinion of someone who is mistaken, stupid or insane, or even evil. Voilà! Conflict resolved, no need to assimilate that new knowledge and a nice warm glow of smug self-satisfaction that your careful ignorance gives you a deeper kind of wisdom, a superior form of knowledge and the moral right to tell others what's right and what's wrong. A preferred view is preserved, undamaged by real-world facts and without much concern about its truth.

I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not knowing.

Richard Dawkins

And preserved along with it is a sense of superiority to those who 'waste their time' learning all that 'nonsense' when superstition, intuition and believing what mummy and daddy, or that preacher at Bible/Qur'an class, said is obviously the best way to understand things.

And so much easier too!

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William Lane Craig's Logical Kalamity

Let's have another look at William Lane Craig's filched (from mediaeval Islam) argument for a god (in his case, of course, not the Islamic god but the Christian god, which is the only one he will allow) the Kalâm Cosmological Argument.

I've previously debunked this fallacy in Favourite Fallacies - The Kalâm Cosmological Argument but a closer look at the argument reveals the basic flaws in logic with which Lane Craig bamboozles his credulous audiences using the same tactics as a televangelist wringing donations out of lonely, vulnerable and gullible people.

This argument isn't mine - I only wish it were - it's from Dan Barker's must-read book, Godless: How An Evangelical Preacher Became One Of America's Leading Atheists.

Basically, the KCA argues:

1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therfore the universe had a cause.

Of course, like medieval Islamic scholars who wanted to prove the universe was caused by Allah and so declared Allah to be the cause, William Lane Craig concludes that it must be his preferred god (or more accurately, his desired conclusion) and so declares the Christian god to be the cause.

It's fun to substitute anything you like for 'God' in Lane Craig's argument and so 'prove' it was anything you want. It works. Try it! You can 'prove' a peanut-butter sandwich created the universe if you want to.

So, where is the fallacy? How come something which Craigites love to tell us proves their favourite god created everything, can also, with equal ease, 'prove' it was anything you like which caused everything to exist? The answer of course is that there is a subtle trick in the argument which Lane Craig hopes you won't see.

The trick Lane Craig pulls is hidden in the first line - everything that begins to exist has a cause. This clearly implies that there is a set things which don't begin to exist. So what is there in this set of things-which-don't-begin-to-exist? Can you think of any? Are these natural things? If not, why not?

How do we identify these things and, more importantly, if there are such things, how does Lane Craig eliminate them as candidate causes of the universe?

What Lane Craig does, having created this convenient set of things-which-don't-begin-to-exist simply by including the deceptive clause, 'which begins to', is to allow only his desired conclusion to occupy it, and so he rigs the argument by stating it in such a way as to exclude everything but the answer he wants.

If you deny him that right and, with the same justification that Lane Craig uses (i.e., no justification at all) put any number of things you want into that set of things-which-don't-begin-to-exist, you can create as big a range of choices of causes of the universe as you want.

You can also choose, with the same justification, to say this set-of-things-which-don't-begin-to-exist is empty; that there are no such things. After all, if Craig can simply deem his preferred conclusion to be in that set, we can equally deem it not to be. We can, if we assume the same right that Lane Craig claims, declare that there is nothing that could have caused the universe, and conclude that therefore the universe had no cause. QED!

But why should there not be perfectly natural things which don't begin to exist, such as a non-zero quantum energy field, a black hole in another universe, or simply 'something' which may be the default state of existence rather than the nothing assumed by the KCA?

In essence, the KCA as used by William Lane Craig is nothing more than saying, "If the universe had a cause it must have been my god.". It is of course, the religious ploy of fact by fiat. Fiat Deus! Let there be God!

The only thing it proves is that there is a gap in William Lane Craig's knowledge and understanding into which he has projected an imaginary deity. Once you take away his deception of the rigged argument, you open up the possibility of perfectly natural causes of universes whilst still retaining the logic of 'everything which begins to exist' having a cause.

And you don't need to subscribe to that other logical absurdity in the KCA: the notion that there can be such a thing as nothing. How on earth can something which, by definition doesn't exist, exist? How can there be nothing for any possible meaning of the word 'be'? And how can anyone possibly claim to be able to assign properties to it or to make any meaningful statement about nothing, like declaring that nothing can come from it?

This may well be the most absurdly irrational assumption ever made. I'd certainly like to hear of a more absurd one.

Shifting The Burden

You see, if, in all seriousness, I claimed I have an undetectable hippo in my loft, challenged you to prove it didn't exist, and then claimed it must exist because you can't prove it doesn't, you'd probably think I was off my trolley and had lost my marbles.

Unless you're a religious fundamentalist that is.

If you are, you'd immediately recognise this argument as identical to the one you very probably use when confronted by Atheists. Almost invariably, you'll insist your god exists and challenge them to prove it doesn't, then claim it must exist if it can't be disproved.

If you're an honest religious fundamentalist, that is.

If you're a dishonest one you'll deny your argument is identical in logic to my silly hippo-in-my-loft argument and then try to bring in other arguments, change the subject and avoid dealing with the logical fallacy you've been caught trying to get away with.

Actually, it's not so much a logical fallacy as a dishonest tactic designed to overcome the fact that the perpetrator believe in something for which they have no supporting evidence. It betrays the fact that they know they have as much evidence for their god as they have for fairies, or I for my undetectable loft-hippo.

It's called shifting the burden. It's the tactic of making a claim you know you can't substantiate and then trying to divest yourself of the moral obligation to substantiate it. It's no different morally to going into court and claiming the accused is guilty, then challenging them to prove their innocence because you know you have no evidence. Another name for this tactic is 'bearing false witness'. It's implicitly claiming you have evidence for something for which you know you have no evidence.

Some examples of fundamentalists bearing false witness can be seen here:

For example, 18.How do we know the supernatural does not exist? The answer of course is that we don't. Dr Saunders is implicitly claiming it does and divesting himself of the responsibility of substantiating his claim, almost certainly because he knows he can't.

Dr Peter Saunders. Twenty questions Atheists struggle to answer

Here's the great Mat Dillahunty dealing with someone who's trying it on him:

To be fair to many fundamentalists, they probably don't realise they're being intellectually dishonest. They're probably just aping the tactics of the charlatan who fooled them with it in the first place and lack the intellectual integrity or ability to analyse the tactic and see it for the trick it really is.

You can see these unfortunate people almost daily rushing onto Twitter, Facebook, or other social media eager to try out their new killer argument having seen one of their heroes use it.

Hopefully, this article will help them see where they've been fooled and maybe come to terms with the fact that this is probably their best 'argument' for their god's existence and it simply serves to highlight the fact that they don't have one.

So, here's my top tip for fundamentalists who may be tempted to try this shifting the burden trick. If you can think of a logical reason why my claim to have an undetectable hippo in my loft isn't proven just because you can't disprove it, neither is your claim proven by me failing to disprove it. Your claim to have a god is only proven by you producing definitive, authenticated and indisputable evidence for it. Just because that is impossible for you does not excuse trying to fool people with a dishonest tactic and false witnessing.

If you ever feel tempted to try the shifting burden trick because you've been caught making a claim you can't justify, try changing the word 'god' or 'life after death' or 'sin' or 'soul' or whatever daft idea you're trying to get away with, for 'undetectable hippo in Rosa's loft' and see if it convinces you. If it doesn't, your trick won't fool normal people. It might fool another fundamentalist but that's kinda cheating. The tactic will simply betray your moral bankruptcy and the fact that you know you are making a false claim. The only way to escape that charge is to believe in my undetectable hippo, fairies, all the gods other people do or have believed in, pink unicorns and any daft notion you or anyone else can dream up because no one can prove a negative, which is why the trick is so beloved of religious apologists who need to earn a living somehow.

Of course, this will render you incapable of living a normal existence without close adult supervision but that's the price you may have to accept to avoid the charge that you tried a deception and failed to get away with it.

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Help! What Should I Do?

You know, you'll never believe this but the other day in Oxford I met someone who said he had heard about a man who could do amazing stuff. Some of the things he could do included:

• Flying. He can just rise up into the air at will and fly about, so he can walk across water without even getting wet feet.
• Turning things into other things. He can turn water into beer or anything else like wine.
• Curing sick people. He can tell what's wrong with people, even when they don't know they're sick, and can cure them just by touching them. They even get better just by touching his clothes.
• Letting people live for ever. Apparently he said if you believe in him you'll never die.

Favourite Fallacies - The Straw Man.

One of the major problems faced by creationists and religious apologists is the mountain of science and scientific theories they need to somehow get past and still persuade themselves and/or their target audience that they have a valid, even superior argument. So they adopt strategies designed basically to pretend the evidence against them just isn't there.

All of these strategies are fallacious of course, but perhaps the commonest devise is known as the Straw Man Fallacy. The straw man is a metaphor for something which can be easily and safely attacked and which looks vaguely like the thing they would like to be attacking but know they can't. Usually, the straw man will be constructed in such a ludicrously childish fashion that it is easily dismantled by anyone with very low intellectual ability, and this of course is where apologists gain by using this device because that is usually a characteristic of the audience they are trying to fool with the straw man fallacy in the first place.

For example, you will see the Theory of Evolution misrepresented as a theory which says a monkey suddenly gave birth to a human or a living animal suddenly changed into another species, or that an entire species changed overnight into a different one so you would not expect to see any of the earlier ones around now. You will also see more subtle misrepresentations such implying that biologists recognise a distinction between evolution which results in a new taxon and evolution which results in mere change in frequency or a variable characteristic within a species. The most popular straw man in this respect is the pretence that the Theory of Evolution predicts and requires a complete set of fossils recording every change in every species throughout its evolutionary history and that the Theory of Evolution depends entirely on this requirement.

A common device used is to conflate two or more scientific theories into one, or more often, two or more straw men parodies of scientific theories such as the big bang, abiogenesis and evolution into one and throw stones at that parody instead of the real science. So you will see arguments attacking the idea that life arose in a big bang or that rocks evolved intelligence.

And of course, where this tactic works most effectively is when it is used on those with low reasoning ability and/or low scientific education who lack the ability to recognise the straw man parody and so take it on trust that it is an accurate and honest representation of science. Combined with their naive ignorance, the attacks from creationist charlatans provide them with the perfect excuse to pretend to know better than those who have spent time learning the subject and acquiring the necessary understanding, and all by learning a few simple parodies and some infantile questions based on them. This is also helped in those cultures where it tends to be assumed that those defending religions are honest and can be relied upon to tell the truth.

So we now see unfortunate victims of this deception swarming onto the Internet and infesting the social network media proudly showing off the 'killer arguments' they have picked up from people who've used this technique on them only to find they're making fools of themselves and displaying both their credulous gullibility and ignorance and ending up discrediting the very thing they came rushing excitedly on line to promote.

The other major group of people on whom this technique works, and at whom it it often aimed, are fellow religionists who have invested so much of themselves in their religion that the cognitive dissonance which results in learning science is too difficult to cope with, so avoidance strategies are readily adopted. Very often too these people will be earning their living from religion so will have made more than just a psychological investment.

Look beyond the straw man to the motives of those who assiduously create them and what do we see? We see people who know they need to create straw men to attack in the first place. What we don't see are people who have seriously looked at the science itself and made an effort to understand it, and who may be genuinely puzzled by it or genuinely mistaken about it. We see people who, if they have looked at all, have only looked for things to parody and misrepresent and have obviously had little regard for the way the body of science grows and develops, so that, for example, a book or paper, or even a popular magazine article from many years ago will be presented as current theory. And of course there will be the deliberate confusion of even the meanings of words where there is more than one current definition, such as the different popular and scientific meanings of the word 'theory' and 'law'.


Perhaps more than any other fallacy, the Straw Man Fallacy exemplified both the dishonesty of creationist and religious apologists and the naive ignorance and intellectual indolence of their credulous victims.

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The Teleological Fallacy or Paley's Broken Watch

One of the favourite fallacies used by creation 'scientists' to give spurious credence to creationism and its fashionable (and very lucrative) version, Intelligent Design, is the argument from design, or the teleological argument.

This argument has a long history but perhaps its most famous exponent was William Paley, the English theologian and philosopher. Briefly, his argument, which pre-dated Darwin's Origin of Species by 57 years, was that, if you found a watch on a piece of heathland, the most logical conclusion would be that someone had dropped it there and that it had been designed by one or more watchmakers and not by natural forces.

And of course, this is unarguable for a watch, for the simple reason that there is no other mechanism which could explain the watch's production, nor how it came to be where it was found. That explanation requires no mystery; there is nothing required which can't be readily understood and certainly there is no need to include an unproven supernatural hypothesis in the explanation. The explanation that a watch was designed by a watchmaker is complete and the most parsimonious answer available.

And, with the state of our knowledge of biology and biological systems in 1802, there seemed to be no reason why this analogy did not apply to living animals as well. Living animals appear to be designed in that they have component parts which need to be arranged in the right way, though, curiously, there are no wheels in nature so any movement has to rely on levers with lots of pushing and pulling, acceleration and deceleration and not the far more efficient rotary action of wheels (imagine a car with legs!) but that's by the by.

Now, what purpose does a living animal have which is in any way comparable to the utility value of a watch? Living things exist only to produce other living things. Not so watches. Watches have a very specific purpose and that is to keep an accurate record of the passage of time.

Jesus - History or Hoax?

This blog is derived from a Tweetlonger tweet by @dawkinsassange in reply to @tndan who cited Christianity: HOAX OR HISTORY by Josh McDowell as 'proof' of the historicity of Jesus.

I reproduce it here as a refutation of that book and of the many fallacious and inaccurate claims contained in it.

My thanks to @dawkinsassange for permission to reproduce it.

Pgs. 38-39 Appeal to Authority fallacy. Answered in this link.

Pgs. 40-41 No contemporary evidence of Apostles (earliest 150 AD)

Pgs. 41-44 Guilt by association fallacy & faulty analogy. The Watergate conspirators were not being promised eternal rewards in heaven. If these martyrs existed, I have no doubt they BELIEVED, which is irrelevant to actual events.

Pgs. 45-46 Appeal to Authority fallacy

Pg. 47 "Strong evidence that the NT written at an early date" not supported in text. Only assertions.

Pg. 48 "Oral tradition not long enough.." Proof? Evidence?

Pgs. 49-51 So there's no originals. Therefore unknown numbers of errors.

Pgs. 52-54 Much of the NT was admitted to be hearsay. The writer of Mark's confusion with Palestinian geography is circumstantial evidence that Mark wasn't there.

Pgs. 54-55 The contradictions between NT writers indicate lies.

Pgs. 55-58 An alternative explanation that doesn't include miracles is that it is all legendary.

Pgs. 58-59 Writers a hundred years after the event don't add a lot to historicity. In fact, there were many contemporary writers who never attested to Jesus.

Pgs. 59-60 Luke doesn't agree with Josephus.

Pg. 60 "One test of a writer is consistency" Agreed. Luke fails.

Pgs. 61-62 The same standard must be set to the Bible as other secular literature. No. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Otherwise it must be treated the same as other ancient records of legends such as Hercules.

Pgs. 62-63 Criterion of embarrassment argument. Limited in application and not proof that the event happened as described. May be used to fit writer's theology.

Pgs. 65-69 I felt the same joy when released from indoctrination.

Pgs. 73-79 Preaching and selling stuff.

Pgs. 81-83 Disagree. Bible is consistent only in it's inconsistency. It shows every indication of being written by ancient superstitious people.

Podcasts by Peter Coote (@cootey59) also dealing with this may be heard here.

Hoax or History? I vote Hoax

[Yet to be added: Josh McDowell's reply.]

[Further update: despite repeated invitations spread over several weeks, Josh McDowell failed to reply or even acknowledge the invitations.]

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Easy Task For Christians.

Just a simple little "Put your money where your mouth is" challenge to Christians.

Very many Christians, even some highly respected ones, often cite "all the fulfilled prophesies" in the Bible as their main reason for believing in their god and why they accept the Bible as its authentic word.

However, there are also very many failed prophecies in the Bible.

Would you explain all these, please or explain why you believe the words of prophets you know to be false and ignore Matthew's advice to beware of false prophets?

Alternatively, please explain any SUCCESSFUL prophesies in the Bible and give the historical evidence that they indeed occurred and occurred AFTER the prophesies were written.

That shouldn't be too difficult, should it?  After all, you just need to give the evidence you found convincing.

The Kalâm Cosmological Fallacy

The Kalâm Cosmological Argument (KCA) has its origins in medieval Islam of the Kalâm tradition but it has been adopted by Christian apologists, notably William Lane Craig, who appear to believe it proves only the Christian god of the New Testament, ignoring the fact that it was originally formulated to ‘prove’ the Islamic god of the Qur’an.

1. Everything that has a beginning of its existence has a cause.
2. The universe had a beginning.
3. Therefore the universe had a cause.
4. That cause must be God.

In essence, the KCA is arguing that:

1. There can be no natural cause for the universe.
2. Therefore the cause must be supernatural.
3. The only possible supernatural cause must be whichever god the argument is being used to promote.

Clearly, we only need to refute 1 for the entire argument to collapse since this is the premise from which the rest is assumed to flow. We only need to show that a natural cause is possible to refute the KCA. The onus of proof lies with those using the KCA to prove their implicit claim that the cause MUST be supernatural, so the onus is upon them to refute our possible natural cause AND show that there are no other possible natural explanations.

Unless they are able to do so, reliance on the KCA is dishonest and disingenuous.

Everything that has a beginning of its existence has a cause.

Fundamentalists Have a Problem With Numbers

Billions of Christians can't be wrong!

But billions of non-Christians definately are!

Just when you thought they couldn’t get more moronic, theists prove you wrong. In just two days now I had the numbers argument thrown at me, apparently in the belief that I’m going to be stupid enough to find it convincing and start worshipping some evidence-free sky pixey or other and taking some ancient texts written by primitive people as the source of all truth.

Briefly, the numbers argument goes, "My god must be real because X number of people believe in it."

In the last two days this has been given to me as a reason to believe both in Islam and Christianity. On one occasion a few months ago, astoundingly, I was told Christianity must be true because a few million Chinese believe in Jesus, conveniently ignoring that some 98% of them don't. Obviously, whilst a few million Chinese can't be wrong, well over a billion of them can be and most definitely are.

But let's look at the numbers argument for a moment.

No known religion has ever been believed by a majority of the world's people, but how does the number of believers in an idea determine whether that idea is right or wrong? Answer: it doesn't. An idea is either true or false. It matters not one tittle nor jot how many people believe it.