Rocks on the Road to Enlightenment by Roy Brown

*Roy Brown is immediate past president of IHEU and main IHEU representative, United Nations, Geneva.

Thank you, Dr Vijayam, the Gora family and the Atheist Centre for hosting this 7th World Atheist Conference: “The March of Atheism”, a conference which itself marks an important step on that march. But the path of Atheism has never been easy. I would like this morning to examine some of the reasons why.

Over the past hundred years, science has revealed the unimaginable vastness of the Universe. We now know that our planet is just a tiny speck in that vast expanse of the Cosmos, barely visible from the outer reaches of the Solar System, let alone from stars and galaxies a trillion times further away.

We also know that far from being formed complete and perfect, the object of divine creation, we humans are simply one species (well OK, a particularly versatile species) but only one species among the many millions of others that have evolved here on Earth by the blind, unguided process of evolution through natural selection.

In the light of that knowledge the idea that we humans are the ultimate and privileged product of a purposeful, divine creation can be seen as the purest fantasy. So why do so many people still cling to such beliefs?

Since Atheism is such a liberating, logically tenable, rational philosophy, why is the march of Atheism such a long, hard slog along such a difficult and rocky path? I want to suggest that there are four major obstacles on the path. And the first of these is …

Religion
Whether we like it or not, many people find religion attractive. Every religion claims to have a monopoly of truth and a monopoly of virtue. Who among us, other things being equal and provided the personal cost is not too high, would not like to be considered both virtuous and endowed with knowledge of the truth? We like the splendour, the ritual, the music, the repetition and the comfort that religion provides. But more than that, we love the certainty that religion offers in an uncertain world. Seeking answers to life’s great questions is an important part of what makes us human – and religion supplies the answers. Above all, with its promises of reincarnation or an afterlife surrounded by angels, religion offers an attractive alternative to the bleak prospect of our mortality.

How can we compete?
One problem we have in confronting the certainties of religion is that the transcendental really does exist. Don’t look so surprised! It exists in our imagination. Gods, fairies, unicorns, ghosts and angels may all be creatures of the imagination but we have no certain logical way of demonstrating that they are purely imaginary. The best we can do is to point out in the light of our newfound scientific knowledge the vanishingly small probability that the supernatural world really exists. But while we offer only probability, religion offers absolute certainty.

Now perhaps it would not matter that religion teaches nonsense (or perhaps, being charitable, I should say “that religion makes unsubstantiated claims”) if that nonsense was totally benign.

But scratch any religion and you find violence lurking just beneath the surface. Every successful religion has evolved memes for self-protection. Whether it is the promise of eternal damnation or the death penalty for apostasy, the promotion of faith over reason, or the demonization of science, these memes have helped sustain the hegemony of religion.

Finally, religion offers many people a purpose in life. Not everyone is capable of accepting the truth that we are all here by chance and that evolution gave us no other purpose in life than to reproduce. For Atheists, Rationalists and Humanists the purpose of life will always be what we choose to make it.

The second stumbling block in our path is …
Human nature
None of us is entirely rational. However much we may wish we were guided purely by reason, we are all emotional creatures. We have evolved to be that way. We trust our emotions more than we trust reason. I know I do. And I know that I have frequently been guilty of using my reason to justify my gut reaction to events. We would like the promises of religion to be true, so we have a desire to believe, an emotional commitment to belief. We use our reason to argue that, well, how can I be sure the claims of eternal life or reincarnation are unfounded? Or that if I die in battle in the cause of Allah I won’t be comforted by 72 virgins?

Secondly, it is in our nature to conform. We are social, tribal animals. Each of us grew up as part of a culture with shared beliefs and values. For most people religion is an essential part of that culture, the glue that binds society together. As children we are taught the beliefs of our parents and our community as fact. If we are part of a community that sees its particular religion as the sole repository of virtue, then to attack or challenge that religion is to attack the very foundations of society. Why would I risk alienation from my community by calling these claims into question? Surely it is better to play along; to pretend to believe even if I am not entirely sure.

The third rock in our path is …
Politics
Two thousand years ago the Roman statesman Seneca the Younger said that the common people find all religions to be equally true, the philosophers find them all equally false, and the rulers find them all equally useful. Not much has changed in 2000 years. Every tin pot dictator, every demagogue, every unworthy ruler attempting to reinforce his power has claimed the support of religion. And the priests have been all too willing to provide that support. What better means could the priests find to preserve their own power than by supporting the rulers and to have their active support in return?

The fact that our political masters find religion useful is, I would suggest, the primary reason for the continuing dominant position of religion in society. We can see this happening today not only in dreadful authoritarian states like Iran and Saudi Arabia but in the world’s great democracies such as India, the United States and even France. Just a few years ago the President of the United States said that, in his view, unbelievers should not be considered citizens.

But it is not only the priests and the rulers that find religion useful. Some philosophers do so too. I have here an article by Matthew Parris, one of the best-known atheist commentators in England, from The Times of just ten days ago. It is called: “As an atheist I truly believe Africa needs God”. He notes that in Africa people who convert to Christianity generally behave better than those who retain their earlier animist beliefs. What he means of course is not that Africa needs God but that Africans need to believe in God. Here then is a philosopher who has replaced the pursuit of truth by the pursuit of expediency. If it makes people better – even if it is based on a lie – let’s go for it. With friends like these, religion is getting an easy ride. It is just one more manifestation of the often heard, paternalistic line that “Of course I don’t believe all that nonsense myself but it helps keep the people in line.”

The fourth rock that I see impeding the March of Atheism is
… Atheism itself

Atheism, particularly in the West, has a bad name. In the public mind it is linked to the idea of State Atheism, Stalinism and the Cultural Revolution of Mao Tse Tung.

Secondly, and in contrast to religion, Atheism per se is not a complete philosophy of life. Disbelief in the transcendental may well be the only respectable, philosophically sound position for an educated, thinking person to take, but the mere absence of a belief does not constitute a philosophy of life. It is quite possible for a rational Atheist to be completely self-obsessed and to care nothing for others.

Indeed, I suspect that some of us know of such people.

The Atheist Centre of course offers more than mere Atheism, it offers Gora’s Positive Atheism, not just Rationalism. It offers Rationalism in the service of compassion: what we call Humanism. Atheism then is a necessary step on the road to enlightenment and to Humanism, but it is not enough. It is where our Atheism leads that is important.

We must recognise that the March of Atheism is not an end in itself but a step on the way to understanding ourselves, the world, and our place within it; a step on the road to caring for others as we care for ourselves; and a step towards the ultimate goal of Humanism and enlightenment.

So how can we shift the rocks from our path? Here are some ideas and some arguments we can use.

1. I would point out the importance of uncertainty, of doubt, as the mainspring of human progress. Humanity has only ever made progress when an individual has stood out from the crowd and cast doubt on the received wisdom of the day.

Any society that prohibits doubt and dissent is probably doomed to stagnation and failure. I would cite Imperial China, Soviet-style Communism, and fundamentalist Islamic states such as Iran as prime examples. Iran and Saudi Arabia may not have failed – yet – but their ultimate failure is surely inevitable.

2. While Rationalism and Atheism are, well, rational, concern for others, the second leg on which Humanism stands, is difficult to explain by reason alone. Yet altruism, or empathy, is an important part of what makes us human. We have evolved to be compassionate. The apparent irrationality of altruism can be explained by evolution. We have evolved to show kindness to strangers. Even though we feel that altruism may be driven by emotion rather than reason, it would not have evolved if it did not confer on us some evolutionary advantage.

3. Humanism offers a complete alternative to religion. Humanists the world over have shown that you don’t need God to be good. And remember that men never do evil as willingly as when they do it in the name of religion.

4. We must do all we can to promote scientific education and critical thinking. Wishful thinking is no substitute for knowing how the world really is. Applying reason to our problems might just help us find a solution; praying never will. Prayer is simply a waste of time and effort; a poor substitute for action.

5. We must challenge the truth claims of religion. Where is the evidence? The believer will reply that we must have faith. But as Mark Twain said: “faith is believing what you know ain’t so”. If religion offered any credible evidence to support its claims, believers would not need faith. The only evidence religions offer for their truth claims is reference to their ancient holy books (ignoring some of the more recent holy books concocted by failed science fiction writers). But the pre-scientific scribblings of some desert tribe are surely no competition for the evidence of science and the application of reason.

6. We must challenge the claims of religion to a monopoly of virtue. First, many of the virtues they claim as uniquely their own were known to the ancients long before their favourite prophet revealed them to the world. They evolved with human civilisation. Secondly, what some religions call virtues, others might call criminal barbarity. We need look no further than the stoning of women for adultery, at one time sanctioned by both Christianity and Judaism, to show that religions too evolve. Perhaps it is not too much to hope that stoning and slavery, no longer accepted by Christianity and Judaism, will also disappear from the Islamic world. Can we even hope that India will one day see the caste system as a primitive and barbaric throwback to a less civilised era?

7. Religion does not lead to a better world. It has always and everywhere stood in the way of progress. Many of the precepts that religion teaches us about how we should live do have value both for ourselves and for society as a whole. But all of these principles can be arrived at without reference to the supernatural – and in fact were so in the course of human history.

8. The linking of morality to religion has created a major problem for society. Teaching children that they must be moral because God wants them to, and that he will punish them if they behave badly, denies the truth that good behaviour is a worthy end in its own right. Loss of belief then leads to loss of good behaviour in society.

I could go on but I will stop there and conclude. Yes, Atheism is on the march, but we must be clear about where it is leading. Without Humanism as the goal the march of Atheism will fail to bear full fruit. We are fortunate that writers like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens have finally broken the taboo and created a climate in which it is once again respectable to speak about Atheism.

Richard Dawkins in particular, with his clarity of thought and writing, has given us irrefutable arguments for Atheism. I would like this conference to agree to pass a resolution of thanks to Richard Dawkins. Here is a man in the tradition of Bertrand Russell, Robert Green Ingersoll, M N Roy and Gora who, through his integrity and devotion to truth can truly be said to have changed the world for the better. Thank you.

Address to the 7th World Atheist Conference, Vijayawada, India, 6 January 2009

Does science make belief in God obsolete? Part 5: It depends ... says Michael Shermer

The answer turns on whether one emphasizes belief or God. Science does not make belief in God obsolete, but it may make obsolete the reality of God, depending on how far we are able to push the science.

On the question of belief in God, the answer is clearly no. Surveys conducted in 1916 and again in 1997 found that 40 percent of American scientists said they believe in God, so obviously the practice of science does not make belief in God obsolete for this sizable group.

Neither does it for the hundreds of millions of practicing Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and members of other faiths who both believe in God and fully embrace science. Even on one of the most contentious issues in all of science—evolution—a 2005 Pew Research Center poll found that 68 percent of Protestants and 69 percent of Catholics accept the theory.

Of course, reality does not bend to the psychology of belief. Millions of people believe in astrology, ghosts, angels, ESP, and all manner of paranormal phenomena, but that does not make them real.

Mormons believe that their sacred text was dictated in an ancient language onto gold plates by the angel Moroni, buried and subsequently dug up near Palmyra, New York by Joseph Smith, who then translated them by burying his face in a hat containing magic stones. Scientologists believe that eons ago a galactic warlord named Xenu brought alien beings from another solar system to Earth, placed them in select volcanoes around the world, and then vaporized them with hydrogen bombs, scattering to the winds their souls (called thetans, in the jargon of Scientology), which attach themselves to people today, leading to drug and alcohol abuse, addiction, depression, and other psychological and social ailments that only Scientology can cure.

Clearly the veracity of a proposition is independent of the number of people who believe it.

On the matter of God's existence, the answer to the question slides toward a yes, depending on how far we extend the sphere of science into the space of theology. If we apply the methods of science to understanding all of nature, where would God be and how would we detect Him or His actions? That's the rub. God is described by most Western religions as omniscient and omnipotent, the creator of all things visible and invisible, an Intelligent Designer capable of constructing the universe, Earth, life, and us. If scientists go in search of such a being—as Intelligent Design (ID) creationists claim to be doing—how could we possibly distinguish an omnipotent and omniscient God from an extremely powerful and really smart Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (ETI)? I call this problem Shermer's Last Law (pace Arthur C. Clarke): any sufficiently advanced Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence would be indistinguishable from God.

Here is how the problem breaks down. Biological evolution is glacially slow compared to cultural evolution. Because of this, and the fact that the cosmos is very big and the space between the stars is vast, the probability of making contact with an ETI that is technologically equal to or only slightly more advanced than us is virtually nil. If we ever do encounter the representatives of an ETI, they will be so far ahead of us technologically that they will appear as gods to us. Consider something as relatively simple as DNA. We can already engineer genes after only 50 years of genetic science. An ETI that was, say, only 50,000 years ahead of us would surely be able to construct entire genomes, cells, multi-cellular life, and complex ecosystems. The design of life is, after all, just a technical problem in molecular manipulation. To our bronze-age ancestors who created the great monotheistic religions, the ability to create life was God-like. To our not-so-distant descendents, or to an ETI we might encounter, the ability to create life will be simply a matter of technological skill.

By pursuing a course of scientific inquiry to its natural extension of examining the nature of God, what we will find, if we find anything, is an alien being capable of engineering cells, complex organisms, planets, stars, galaxies, and perhaps even universes.

If today we can engineer genes, clone mammals, and manipulate stem cells with science and technologies developed in only the last half century, think of what an ETI could do with 100,000 years of equivalent powers of progress in science and technology. For an ETI who is a million years more advanced than we are, engineering the creation of planets and stars may be entirely possible. And

if universes are created out of collapsing black holes—which some cosmologists think is probable—it is not inconceivable that a sufficiently advanced ETI could even create a universe.

What would we call an intelligent being capable of engineering a universe, stars, planets, and life? If we knew the underlying science and technology used to do the engineering, we would call it Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence; if we did not know the underlying science and technology, we would call it God.

Science traffics in the natural, not the supernatural. The only God that science could discover would be a natural being, an entity that exists in space and time and is constrained by the laws of nature. A supernatural God would be so wholly Other that no science could know Him.

Does science make belief in God obsolete? Belief, no. God, yes.

Does science make belief in God obsolete? Part 4: No, but is should... says Christopher Hitchens

No, but it should..
Until about 1832, when it first seems to have become established as a noun and a concept, the term "scientist" had no really independent meaning. "Science" meant "knowledge" in much the same way as "physic" meant medicine, and those who conducted experiments or organized field expeditions or managed laboratories were known as "natural philosophers." To these gentlemen (for they were mainly gentlemen) the belief in a divine presence or inspiration was often merely assumed to be a part of the natural order, in rather the same way as it was assumed—or actually insisted upon—that a teacher at Cambridge University swear an oath to be an ordained Christian minister. For Sir Isaac Newton—an enthusiastic alchemist, a despiser of the doctrine of the Trinity, and a fanatical anti-Papist—the main clues to the cosmos were to be found in Scripture. Joseph Priestley, discoverer of oxygen, was a devout Unitarian as well as a believer in the phlogiston theory. Alfred Russel Wallace, to whom we owe much of what we know about evolution and natural selection, delighted in nothing more than a session of ectoplasmic or spiritual communion with the departed.

And thus it could be argued—though if I were a believer in god I would not myself attempt to argue it—that a commitment to science by no means contradicts a belief in the supernatural. The best known statement of this opinion in our own time comes from the late Stephen Jay Gould, who tactfully proposed that the worlds of science and religion commanded "non-overlapping magisteria." How true is this on a second look, or even on a first glance? Would we have adopted monotheism in the first place if we had known:

That our species is at most 200,000 years old, and very nearly joined the 98.9 percent of all other species on our planet by becoming extinct, in Africa, 60,000 years ago, when our numbers seemingly fell below 2,000 before we embarked on our true "exodus" from the savannah?

That the universe, originally discovered by Edwin Hubble to be expanding away from itself in a flash of red light, is now known to be expanding away from itself even more rapidly, so that soon even the evidence of the original "big bang" will be unobservable?

That the Andromeda galaxy is on a direct collision course with our own, the ominous but beautiful premonition of which can already be seen with a naked eye in the night sky?

These are very recent examples, post-Darwinian and post-Einsteinian, and they make pathetic nonsense of any idea that our presence on this planet, let alone in this of so many billion galaxies, is part of a plan. Which design, or designer, made so sure that absolutely nothing (see above) will come out of our fragile current "something"? What plan, or planner, determined that millions of humans would die without even a grave marker, for our first 200,000 years of struggling and desperate existence, and that there would only then at last be a "revelation" to save us, about 3,000 years ago, but disclosed only to gaping peasants in remote and violent and illiterate areas of the Middle East?

To say that there is little "scientific" evidence for the last proposition is to invite a laugh. There is no evidence for it, period. And if by some strenuous and improbable revelation there was to be any evidence, it would only argue that the creator or designer of all things was either (a) very laborious, roundabout, tinkering, and incompetent and/or (b) extremely capricious and callous, and even cruel. It will not do to say, in reply to this, that the lord moves in mysterious ways.

Those who dare to claim to be his understudies and votaries and interpreters must either accept the cruelty and the chaos or disown it: they cannot pick and choose between the warmly benign and the frigidly indifferent.

Nor can the religious claim to be in possession of secret sources of information that are denied to the rest of us. That claim was, once, the prerogative of the Pope and the witch doctor, but now it's gone. This is as much as to say that reason and logic reject god, which (without being conclusive) would be a fairly close approach to a scientific rebuttal. It would also be quite near to saying something that lies just outside the scope of this essay, which is that morality shudders at the idea of god, as well.

Religion, remember, is theism not deism. Faith cannot rest itself on the argument that there might or might not be a prime mover. Faith must believe in answered prayers, divinely ordained morality, heavenly warrant for circumcision, the occurrence of miracles or what you will.

Physics and chemistry and biology and paleontology and archeology have, at a minimum, given us explanations for what used to be mysterious, and furnished us with hypotheses that are at least as good as, or very much better than, the ones offered by any believers in other and inexplicable dimensions.

Does this mean that the inexplicable or superstitious has become "obsolete"? I myself would wish to say no, if only because I believe that the human capacity for wonder neither will nor should be destroyed or superseded.

But the original problem with religion is that it is our first, and our worst, attempt at explanation. It is how we came up with answers before we had any evidence. It belongs to the terrified childhood of our species, before we knew about germs or could account for earthquakes. It belongs to our childhood, too, in the less charming sense of demanding a tyrannical authority: a protective parent who demands compulsory love even as he exacts a tithe of fear.

This unalterable and eternal despot is the origin of totalitarianism, and represents the first cringing human attempt to refer all difficult questions to the smoking and forbidding altar of a Big Brother.

This of course is why one desires that science and humanism would make faith obsolete, even as one sadly realizes that as long as we remain insecure primates we shall remain very fearful of breaking the chain.

Does science make belief in God obsolete? Part 3: Yes, if by ... says Stephen Pinker

Yes,

if by "science" we mean the entire enterprise of secular reason and knowledge (including history and philosophy),

not just people with test tubes and white lab coats.

Traditionally, a belief in God was attractive because it promised to explain the deepest puzzles about origins. Where did the world come from? What is the basis of life? How can the mind arise from the body? Why should anyone be moral?

Yet over the millennia, there has been an inexorable trend:

the deeper we probe these questions, and the more we learn about the world in which we live, the less reason there is to believe in God.

Start with the origin of the world. Today no honest and informed person can maintain that the universe came into being a few thousand years ago and assumed its current form in six days (to say nothing of absurdities like day and night existing before the sun was created).

Nor is there a more abstract role for God to play as the ultimate first cause. This trick simply replaces the puzzle of "Where did the universe come from?" with the equivalent puzzle "Where did God come from?"

What about the fantastic diversity of life and its ubiquitous signs of design? At one time it was understandable to appeal to a divine designer to explain it all. No longer. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace showed how the complexity of life could arise from the physical process of natural selection among replicators, and then Watson and Crick showed how replication itself could be understood in physical terms. Notwithstanding creationist propaganda,

the evidence for evolution is overwhelming, including our DNA, the fossil record, the distribution of life on earth, and our own anatomy and physiology

(such as the goose bumps that try to fluff up long-vanished fur).

For many people the human soul feels like a divine spark within us. But neuroscience has shown that our intelligence and emotions consist of intricate patterns of activity in the trillions of connections in our brain.

True, scholars disagree on how to explain the existence of inner experience—some say it's a pseudo-problem, others believe it's just an open scientific problem, while still others think that it shows a limitation of human cognition (like our inability to visualize four-dimensional space-time). But even here, relabeling the problem with the word "soul" adds nothing to our understanding.

People used to think that biology could not explain why we have a conscience. But the human moral sense can be studied like any other mental faculty, such as thirst, color vision, or fear of heights. Evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience are showing how our moral intuitions work, why they evolved, and how they are implemented within the brain.

This leaves morality itself—the benchmarks that allow us to criticize and improve our moral intuitions. It is true that science in the narrow sense cannot show what is right or wrong. But neither can appeals to God.

It's not just that the traditional Judeo-Christian God endorsed genocide, slavery, rape, and the death penalty for trivial insults. It's that morality cannot be grounded in divine decree, not even in principle. Why did God deem some acts moral and others immoral? If he had no reason but divine whim, why should we take his commandments seriously? If he did have reasons, then why not appeal to those reasons directly?

The Golden Rule.

Those reasons are not to be found in empirical science, but they are to be found in the nature of rationality as it is exercised by any intelligent social species.

The essence of morality is the interchangeability of perspectives: the fact that as soon as I appeal to you to treat me in a certain way (to help me when I am in need, or not to hurt me for no reason), I have to be willing to apply the same standards to how I treat you, if I want you to take me seriously. That is the only policy that is logically consistent and leaves both of us better off. And God plays no role in it.

For all these reasons, it's no coincidence that Western democracies have experienced three sweeping trends during the past few centuries: barbaric practices (such as slavery, sadistic criminal punishment, and the mistreatment of children) have decreased significantly; scientific and scholarly understanding has increased exponentially; and belief in God has waned.

Science, in the broadest sense, is making belief in God obsolete, and we are the better for it.

Does science make belief in God obsolete? Part 2: Yes says Victor Stenger

Templeton Foundation posed the question. Does science make belief in God obsolete?

link via http://richarddawkins.net/article,2511,n,n

Once upon a time there were a number of strong scientific arguments for the existence of God. One of the oldest and most prevalent is the argument from design. Most people look at the complexity of the world and cannot conceive of how it could have come about except by the action of a being or force of great power and intelligence.

The design argument received perhaps its most brilliant exposition in the work of the Anglican archdeacon William Paley.

In his Natural Theology, or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity Collected from the Appearance of Nature, first published in 1802, Paley wrote about finding both a stone and a watch while crossing a heath. Though the stone would be regarded as a simple part of nature, no one would question that the watch is an artifact, designed for the purpose of telling time. Paley then proposed that objects of nature, such as the human eye, give every indication of being similar contrivances.

When Charles Darwin entered Cambridge in 1827 he was assigned to the same rooms in Christ's College occupied by William Paley seventy years earlier. By that time the syllabus included the study of Paley's works, and Darwin was deeply impressed. He remarked that Paley's work "gave me as much delight as did Euclid."

Yet Darwin ultimately discovered the answer to Paley and showed how complex systems can evolve naturally from simpler ones without design or plan. The mechanism he proposed in 1859 in The Origin of Species (inferred independently by Alfred Russel Wallace) was natural selection, by which organisms accumulate changes that enable them to survive and have progeny that maintain those features.

But, as Darwin recognized, a serious objection to evolution existed based on the known physics of the time. Calculations by the great physicist William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) estimated ages for the sun that were far too short for natural selection to operate. However, at the time, nuclear energy was unknown. When this new form of energy was discovered early in the twentieth century, physicists estimated that the energy released by nuclear reactions would allow the sun and other stars to last billions of years as stable energy sources.

Prior to the twentieth century, the simple fact that the universe contains matter also provided strong evidence for a creation. At the time it was believed that matter was conserved, and so the matter of the universe had to come from somewhere. In 1905 Einstein showed that matter could be created from energy. But where did that energy come from?

This remained unanswered for almost another century until

accurate observations with telescopes determined that an exact balance exists between the positive energy of matter and the negative energy of gravity. So, no energy was required to produce the universe. The universe could have come from nothing.

Independent scientific support for a creation was also provided by a basic principle of physics called the second law of thermodynamics, which asserts that the total disorder or entropy of the universe must increase with time. The universe is growing more disorderly with time. Since it now has order, it would seem to follow that at some point in the past, even greater order must have been imparted from the outside.

But in 1929, astronomer Edwin Hubble reported that the galaxies were moving away from one another at speeds approximately proportional to their distance, indicating that the universe was expanding. This provided the earliest evidence for the Big Bang. An expanding universe could have started with low entropy and still have formed localized order consistent with the second law.

Extrapolating what we know from modern cosmology back to the earliest definable moment, we find that the universe began in a state of maximum disorder. It contained the maximum entropy for the tiny region of space, equivalent to zero information. Thus, even if the universe were created, it retains no memory of that creation or of the intentions of any possible creator. The only creator that seems possible is the one Einstein abhorred—the God who plays dice with the universe.

Now, such a God could still exist and play a role in the universe once the universe exploded out of chaos. We no longer have total disorder; but disorder still dominates the universe. Most of the matter of the universe moves around randomly. Only 0.1 percent, the part contained in visible parts of galaxies, has any significant structure.

If he is to have any control over events so that some ultimate plan is realized, God has to poke his finger into the works amidst all this chaos. Yet there is no evidence that God pokes his finger in anyplace.

The universe and life look to science just as they should look if they were not created or designed. And humanity, occupying a tiny speck of dust in a vast cosmos for a tiny fraction of the life of that cosmos, hardly looks special.

The universe visible to us contains a hundred billion galaxies, each with a hundred billion stars. But by far the greatest portion of the universe that expanded exponentially from the original chaos, at least fifty orders of magnitude more, lies far beyond our horizon. The universe we see with our most powerful telescopes is but a grain of sand in the Sahara. Yet we are supposed to think that a supreme being exists who follows the path of every particle, while listening to every human thought and guiding his favorite football teams to victory. Science has not only made belief in God obsolete. It has made it incoherent.

Victor Stenger pdf.

Does science make belief in God obsolete? Part 1: Templeton Foundation ad in New Scientist

The Templeton Foundation, the group that awards the annual Templeton Prize has placed a one page ad in New Scientist (26 April 2008 issue). The Templeton Prize was first awarded in 1973 and monetary amount is adjusted to always be slightly higher than the Nobel Prize. In 2008 the prize was $1.6 million. According to the Foundation, it gives away about $60 million a year in research grants and programs.^[3]

The ad asks "Does science make belief in God obsolete?"

Prof. Steven Pinker (psychologist) says "Yes if by science we mean the entire enterprise of secular reason and knowledge (including history and philosophy) ...." Pinker concludes "Science, in the broadest sense, is making belief in God obsolete, and we are the better for it."

Others who answer broadly in the negative in the ad are:- William Phillips (Nobel laureate physicist), Pervez Hondbboy (physicist) and Prof. Jerome Goodman (medicine).

Other scientists answer the question (including some who answer broadly in the affirmative) on the Templeton website and my favourite replies are on our blog here.