Science has eliminated God:

Anyone who has disagreed with this argument has discredited and abused science. This is nothing new and has been understood since the time of Darwin.

Guys come on talk of Celestial teapots and invisible dragons (oh you forgot the spaghetti monster) what is it you guys use, Hakims Razor, so lets see have these things been revealed to us at the same time as any other true religion been written about for thousands of years or could it be something that has been invented recently to avoid theism? ummm that’s a tough one. Nonsense.

Philip Pullman:

The most important point I was trying to make was to do with Yeltsin and Stalin (atheists who killed lots of people), its just religion usually gets all the blame for this.

% Of Scientists

To I guess most of you 58% is higher that 42% so there. To me 42% is a remarkably high number for such a group of rational people.

Emphasis mine, but c’mon, a little help from the leather community probably wouldn’t hurt either.

I’d love to see them hold a meeting at the Eagle. HA!

First off, it is not only polite, but a requirement of copyright law, to provide source results when quoting other people’s work. I noticed that this was missing from your post, and was curious about the source myself, so I renewed my friendship with Google. The paper you quoted is titled “The Anthropic Principle and the Science and Religion Debate,” by Reverend Dr. John Polkinghorne, and can be found here.

Is that right?

Okay, I’d be more convinced if it wasn’t a priest, since these pattern things seem to keep happening from priests, but whatever.

The warning bells started going off when I got to the line, “Professionally, scientists aspire to generality, and this makes
many of them unduly wary of the particular.” Um, no. Scientists are human too, so scientists can’t be said to aspire to any particular set of traits, but really, generality? Is this guy serious?

And of course, the old “For many scientists, cosmic fine-tuning came as an unwelcome shock” bit. I read a fair amount in this field, and this is the first I’ve seen anyone putting much stock in the principle. From what I’ve been reading, it seems to be treated as an extension of Paley’s watchmaker argument, and look, Polkinghorne does indeed mention Paley. In fact, the entire tone of the part you quoted tries to show that Paley was right, just on a far greater level.

But what it all boils down to is the same old philosophical yaya that’s been offered for centuries, just in a different form. Basically, “OMG, we couldn’t happen by accident! There must be a plan!” And to establish this, a bunch of numbers are offered.

Prime stumbling block of numbers, here, so pay attention: Until you can effectively outline all of the possibilities, trying to express something in terms of probability is completely and utterly meaningless. You cannot calculate probability without parameters.

One of the most frequent suppositions used is, “If gravity were just a teeny tiny fraction different, stars and planets could not form, no fusion, no heavier elements, and no life.” Sure. But gravity, according to relativity, is a function of space/time. In order for gravity to be different, so would space/time, and thus all of the parameters that entails, which would include fusion itself and indeed, quantum physics and the spin of electrons. So, given a fractional difference in gravity, you may also have a fractional difference in quantum mechanics as well, which may balance out nicely and still lead to a self-replicating chemical reaction we call “life.” And until we know why gravity behaves the way it does, you really can’t say this is either good or bad science.

You see, the argument, “Unless it was just perfect, we wouldn’t be here,” is good only so far as thinking there is something special about us, and that life cannot take many forms. Again, what’s so special about us? In the scope of the universe, hell, in the scope of merely our own sun, we’re a ridiculously small fraction of energy usage. That’s about it. So what possible reason, other than sheer ego, do we have to suppose that we’re special in any way? Demonstrate, in any way that you like, that this is not a product of our own vain minds.

The creation option, in your later post, becomes just funny, in a very sad kind of way. “Widespread human testimony to experience of encounter with the reality of the sacred, can be understood as arising from actual perception of the veiled presence of God.” Except that, apparently, god always takes the form of whatever cultural god the experiencer is familiar with. Funny how that keeps happening that way, isn’t it? No, actually, it’s not funny, it’s really firm evidence that it’s all a product of the mind. And until someone, in their divine contact, manages to produce something that’s outside of human knowledge, a nice prediction of future scientific discoveries, the quote above is a great example of what we see a lot of these days – trying to meld science with the insecure bugaboo in people’s heads that makes them want their Magic Sky Pony.

So now run the numbers for a realm of existence that allows for the creation of a creator, who has the power to bring the universe we know it into existence. How “just right” do you suppose those conditions would have to be? And don’t forget, they would have to include a hyper-extended set of physical laws in and of themselves.

That’s the problem with the Anthropic argument. It postulates that something as basic as a law of physics that prevents space/time from being anything other than what we see is so ridiculously low in probability that it could not ever have happened (which is a flaw in logic by itself), but then makes the broad assumption that something magnitudes of times more complicated, a creative being, must therefore be the case. So, what, now the maths don’t count?

A little more poking around led me here, a review of one of Polkinghorne’s books. It came from a page of links located here, which I’m willing to bet is not what you’re really looking to find. But science isn’t about finding a conclusion you’re happy with.

1. Multiverse
It is suggested that maybe there are very many different universes,
each with very different kinds of laws of nature. In this vast portfolio
of worlds, just by chance there is one capable of developing carbon-
based life and that, of course, is our universe, since we are carbon-
based life. An anthropic cosmos is simply a rare winning ticket
in a multiversal lottery.
The most economical version of this idea supposes that these different
worlds are actually large domains within a single physical
universe. The way in which the symmetry of the primordial GUT
was broken as expansion cooled the universe, thereby producing
the forces that actually operate today, need not have been literally
universal. Instead the cosmos could be a mosaic of different
domains, in each of which symmetry-breaking took different
detailed forms. We are unaware of this, because inflation has driven
all the other domains out of our sight and, of course, our domain
must be the one in which the results of symmetry-breaking fitted in
with anthropic necessity. The idea is plausible, but it only modifies
to some degree the requirement of specificity, since it is still necessary
that the aboriginal GUT took a form that, when its symmetry
was broken, could yield appropriate force strengths.
Any suggestion more radical than this, takes one into a realm of
speculation beyond the scope of sober physical thinking. Shaky
appeals need to be made to currently ill-defined notions of quantum
cosmology, together with resort to ad hoc assumptions of radical
differences between the lawful characters of the worlds supposed to
have been generated in this way. The multiverse in this form is no
more than a metaphysical guess of excessive ontological prodigality
– appealed to, it might seem, partly in order to avoid the theism
associated with the second approach.

2. Creation
The theist can believe that there is only one universe, whose
anthropic character simply reflects the endowment of potentiality
given it by its Creator in order that it should have a fruitful history.
This too is a metaphysical guess but, in contrast to the multiverse,
it is one that does a number of other explanatory pieces of work in
addition to addressing anthropic issues. For example, the intelligible
and wonderful order of the world, so striking to the scientist,
can be understood as being a reflection of the mind of its Creator.
Widespread human testimony to experience of encounter with the
reality of the sacred, can be understood as arising from actual perception
of the veiled presence of God. Understood in this way, the
anthropic specificity of our world is not claimed to provide a logically
coercive argument for belief in God that no one but a fool
could deny, but it makes an insightful contribution to a cumulative
case for theism, regarded as the best explanation of the nature of the
world that we inhabit.