Truth
The Language of God 2
Abstract
Evidence for Belief?
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, 21 January 2009
God the Father
Collins next seeks to dispose of psychological explanations of belief by taking a passage of Freud, a trained physician whose whole experience was of western people, ie Jews and Christians. Freud considered his patients’ God was a likeness of an authoritarian father, typical of the time. It is hard to imagine how a Christian who calls his God “lord” and “father” can deny Freud’s analysis, but, using a common Christian trick, he dismisses Freud because some gods in other traditions do not fit Freud’s description. Moreover, Christians ignore social analysis of religions that suggest plausible, convincing, naturalistic origins for God in which God, as a tribal founder and ancestor—a tribal father—plays a large part. Why would Collins, a scientist, want to ignore such matters and “refute” specific findings with dispersed and inappropriate data? A fundamental tactic of the scientific method is to isolate factors, not to broaden them so widely that no hypothesis can cope. Christians, of course, do the opposite, as Collins does here. He adopts the Christian method, not the scientific one!
Collins thinks any God who merely fulfilled the wishes of its devotees would be quite different from God. Indeed, it would, but it is a straw man. No one suggests a committee got together to decide upon what they wanted God to be like to fulfil their wishes, yet God can fulfil wishes nevertheless. What people wanted from their God is what he represented as the tribe—security—a major wish people wanted to be fulfilled. Different features thereafter accrued in different tribes and circumstances, some being the rights God as the tribe guaranteed the tribespeople, and others being the duties God required of the tribespeople. It is the duties that Collins cannot equate with wish fulfilment, and which he thinks his moral God has exclusively. Yet he has already cited Lewis as showing that all religions and world views offer essentially the same things. The transfer from tribal and city gods to national and imperial gods meant whole regions and different races of people finished up with common gods. Tribal gods became universalized. Christianity is the imperial God of the later Roman empire.
Moreover, if any coddler god had ever actually arisen, how many of his devotees would remain with him as soon as there was a famine or the tribe lost a bloody war. The law of evolution works here too. Any coddler god would have been abandoned as soon as he failed to coddle adequately. Gods are never simply indulgent coddlers as Collins thinks a wish fulfilment God would be, but nor do they fit the pure morality Collins thinks is universal in humanity. After all, any cursory reading of the Jewish scriptures shows the Hebrew God was an immoral monster. He is just the God to suit Christians.
We are still considering Freud’s notion of God the father, in fact, and Collins’ next angle is that we all grow up, become independent of our parents and flow the nest, but Christians do not want to escape their Father. Children do, indeed, tend to rebel against their parents in their teens, but few children of caring parents split irretrievably. Quite the opposite, they mainly feel a sense of loss when their parents die. This sort of behaviour is often mirrored in religion, certainly in Christianity. Teenage rebellion is often rebellion also against the religion of their parents, yet most often they often return to their childhood beliefs in a conversion experience. Collins effectively did it!
Moreover, when people in their teens in tribal societies leave their home and parents, they have good reason to feel insecure and to hope to be in the care of something greater. They are! They undergo a rite of passage into adulthood and full tribal membership. They are now directly in the care of the tribe and its father god—society. Society is God in reality, and the tribal Father is God spiritually, that is symbolically, for the God symbolizes the tribe. God therefore does actually provide security, comfort and morality in early human societies, and these characteristics have been associated with the supernatural concept of God ever since the true meaning of it was lost.
Collins’ final tilt in this section is that when something is wished for it is not necessarily imaginary. He cites his wife. He wished for a good wife and was lucky or discerning enough to get one. There is no denying that such fortune occurs, but no one doubts that it can. Good wives might be as rare as lotto wins but no one doubts that they happen because some husbands can flaunt them. Such wishes can be directly confirmed as possible by experience. Collins cannot seem to get it does not mean that a wish for the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow will ever be fulfilled. Sure, people have seen pots of gold, but no one yet has been to the end of a rainbow and found one. And this is the category that his supernatural God is in.
Buddy Jesus is not stopping his human buddies like Bush and Blair from committing atrocities, and is apparently not impelling lesser buddies like Collins from protesting against indiscriminate murder of innocent Arabs out of pure malice and revenge. God’s moral law is not working through his great pals who control WMD. The law of right and wrong is not working for many people. God as an imaginary buddy today is pure fantasy! The value of the ancient tribal God was proved by experience. The tribe he founded and stood for provided for his worshippers, the members of the tribe. God was real. The socially based tribal notion of God provided much of what Christians imagine their supernatural God provides—but in actuality. Wish fulfilment was real.
That the Christian God fails in the twentieth century is blamed on to human sin when it is the failure of the modern nation and imperial states to provide adequately for all of its people, and also, in the shrunken world we occupy, to realize that all humans are now mutually responsible for each other. The Christian God says clearly He is not partial, but Christians are. If Christianity, or any other imperial religion, is to be truly universal then Christians cannot continue in their partiality. They must realize that the only way to love God is to love their fellow man—all of them! God acts through us because collectively we are God. If we do not do God’s will, then God’s will will never be done!
Collins asks, “why do we have a ‘god shaped vacuum’ in our hearts and minds unless it is meant to be filled?”. Why doesn’t Collins, a scientist, make a serious attempt to answer his own questions? He seems more of an “idiot savant” in his inability to attempt it except in the most infantile, if not indeed dishonest, way. He is wise in one field but an idiot in all others. No one would expect Collins to make errors in his science, but would anyone expect him to believe myths given his analytical abilities?
He cites Moses as a religious leader as if the story of him and the exodus was unequivocal. Given that it appears in one source only, the Jewish scriptures, there is no circumstantial or archaeological evidence for any such event, it is not recorded in history until a thousand years after it happened astonishing though it was, and the consequences of it do not correspond with the known archaeology and history of Israel, how can a prominent scientist simply accept it as if it were certain? It must be because it is in the book he has accepted with no analysis as the word of God.
Indeed, he never explains how he can get from his hypothetical “controller of the universe”, who implants morality into humanity but otherwise leaves no detectable mark on the real world, to belief that a book of Jewish and Christian myths is the permanently recorded truth of the same invisible controller? He does not regard the bible as being infallible, but is utterly hazy how therefore he knows what parts can be relied upon.
A Rusty Faith or Secular Christianity
A metaphor Collins is fond of is that the pure clean water of Christian “spiritual truth”—faith—is contained in rusty cans. The cans are, of course, the human containers of the pure spiritual faith. Pure water in rusty cans ends up as rusty water, and it is all the fault of the cans. So, the vileness and corruption of the churches throughout the ages is the fault of humanity falling short of God’s moral law, while the pure water of faith is blameless. Yet the metaphor shows that it is impossible for faith ever to be anything than contaminated by the rusty cans. Christians tell us all of us are sinners. The only way the pure water can manifest itself is by being caught in a rusty can. Inevitably, it is rusty.
Despite this Christian “truth”, almighty God persists in pouring the aqueous purity of his salvific faith into his polluting human containers, apparently expecting it to cure their rustiness. Hypothetically faith might be pure, but practically it never can be, it is always contaminated. What value then is it? The divine plan is plainly idiotic, and plainly not a plan that an almighty being could have divised. Does it suggest to the plethora of clever Christians that they have been duped, that the plan is a human scam to collect a following, and guarantee an easy life for the few who lead them? Not a chance! Christians are happy to think God is a cretin. Maybe God is a cretin, but surely Francis S Collins cannot be. He aptly cites Voltaire:
Is it any wonder there are atheists in the world when the church behaves so abominably?
According to Collins’ metaphor, how else can it be? Without a jot of evidence, he now turns on to the “many churches of a spiritually dead, secular faith, which strips out all the numinous aspects of traditional belief, presenting a version of spiritual life that is all about social events and/or tradition, and nothing about the search for God”. Here we have the crux of religion for Christians. They have but the slightest interest in what God Himself had to say about it in His incarnation as a man in their holy myths. Instead, they like to think they have a terrifically hard job finding Him, and yet by attempting it, God is pleased and will “save” them. This is the falseness that Paul led the Christians into, and they willingly followed because they could not bring themselves to do what God instructed them directly, and from his own mouth, they say, to do.
We will see that Christ gave two answers when asked for the most important commandment, and the reason is that the two commandments he gave are the same one, to Love God and to love your neighbour. It is a clear indication that God, in practical terms, is your neighbour, your fellow human being on this planet. Just in case anyone should doubt it, let them read Christ’s description of the Last Judgement in Matthew 25:33-46. God says to the sheep at his right hand whom He has blessed:
I was hungry and you gave me food. I was thirsty and you gave me drink. I was a stranger and you made me welcome, naked and you clothed me, sick and you visited me, in prison and you came to see me.
The virtuous say to him in reply:
Lord when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and gave you drink? When did we see you a stranger and make you welcome, naked and clothe you, sick or in prison and go to see you?
And God replies:
In so far as you did it to one of the least of my brothers, you did it to me.
To the goats gathered at His left hand God says:
Go away from me, with your curse upon you, to the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you never gave me food. I was thirsty and you never gave me a drink. I was a stranger and you never made me welcome, naked and you never clothed me, sick and in prison and you never visited me.
And they too will ask:
Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty, a stranger or naked, sick or in prison, and did not come to your help.
And again God will answer:
In so far as you neglected to do this this to one of the least of these, you neglected to do it to me.
If you are a Christian and consider Christ to speak with the authority of God, because he is God, then just what could be clearer than this description of how to be saved. And what could be clearer than that God considered any human being, even the least of them, as being Himself. To abuse or fail to help any human being is to do the same to God, and only by helping your fellow human beings are you displaying your love of God.
Collins does not even understand the simple words of the man he supposedly, as a Christian, regards as God. He is a fool and a blatherer, preferring mystical delusions to the plain words of his own God in his own holy book. Well, the same passage makes it clear where he is headed.
Nothing in this passage—which could serve as the Christian bible in itself—has anything to say about sacraments, or magical salvation by faith. The instructions are direct and practical, and show both those who follow them and those who do not what to expect. It is the epitome of the “secular faith” he is disparaging. Could it be, Dr Collins, that the “secular faith” is closer to your God’s intentions than the nonsensical, mysticism and analytical failings that demonstrate the immature personality you share with most Christians? The truth is that secular Christianity is Christianity, and the Pauline mysticism you think is Christianity is Hellenistic magic.
In justification of his lies, and presumably apologizing for the baneful and murderous history of the Church, Collins says China and the Russia, apparently atheist states, have been responsible for more deaths than any other. He picks on two countries that few in the west would be willing to defend, but even so, it is not scientific to propagate falsehoods about them, and we are led to believe Christians do not lie! The evidence is that they find it hard to say anything without lying.
In refutation of this allegation, we turn to World War II. It was fought in Europe between Christian nations, and the country that began it was Germany, which then was around 90% Christian just as the USA claims to be now. Nor will it do to blame it on atheistic German leaders. They too were almost entirely practising Christians. Hitler was a Catholic. It is history that an intelligent man should know. Of the other Axis countries, Italy was a devoutly Catholic country. Though Mussolini claimed to be an atheist, he came to terms with the Vatican as its ally, and both Hitler and Mussolini set up Christian educational systems. Japan was a theocracy led by a god, and the country was covered in shrines, both Shinto and Buddhist. The death toll in the war started by the devout Christian, Adolf Hitler, was 55 million. Russia and China combined did not kill so many people, as Collins alleges.
The exaggerrated death tolls in both countries require the addition of many millions who died of civil war and famine, brought on largely by attempts at regime change by external intervention! Ring any bells, Dr Collins? It is what our modern Christian leaders are attempting in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine. And supposing Russians and Chinese were to blame for murdering millions in their own country, who did it? Both are countries with long religious traditions, Russia with the largest population of Orthodox Christians, and China with multiple traditions of Taoism, Buddhism and Confucianism, not to mention countless peasant traditions. Plainly, many of the people doing the supposed murdering were people of faith of one kind or another, and how many refused to join in the mass slaughter? So why blame it on to atheists? Collins has said all of us are rusty cans who simply dirty the pure water of faith, so it must be invalid to blame atheism.
Atheism, in fact, allows us to look at Christ’s teachings objectively, as a man teaching other men how to behave. Believe he was God, if you wish, and it should make his teachings absolutely true, not disposible as Christians treat it. It does not. they become incidental, proof simply that God was a nice man! Meanwhile God wanted us to think his death had absolved them of all sin. The passage above shows it was not so, Christ did not say anything of the sort for he could not have and drawn the above picture of the Judgement. The ones saved did good deeds, and the ones who were not saved did not. The rest of Pauline Christianity was invented to detract from the pure water of God’s immediate message. By acting on it, humanity could prove they were stainless cans not rusty ones, and that was the point—lost on Christians like Collins. The purpose of religion is mutual security, compassion and assistance. It means we must treat each other as if we were treating God. That is Christ’s clear message, and it is in our own interest to hear it.
Would you condemn an oak tree because its timbers had been used for battering rams, or the air because lies were transmitted through it? Collins poses these and several other questions meant as analogues of the clean pure water of faith kept in rusty cans. The really relevant question is, why would anyone want to put clean pure water into rusty cans? Why especially would an infinitely wise being? Some Christians think God has chosen them as an elect, presumably pure enough to be rustless cans for the clean pure faith, but history does not assure us that God has a better record of choosing rustless cans for his elect than picking them at random. Christians tell us we are all rusty cans in that we are all sinners, all “flawed” to use Collins’ word, so the Infinitely Wise is on a loser.
God and Miracles
He fails to find a rustless can in Collins, because the evidence from his book is that he is as bent as any other Christian when it comes to defending his faith. Yet, an almighty God who can square the circle, Christians tell us, and can make π equal 3 exactly, surely can find genuine rustless cans if He wanted to. Wasn’t Christ a genuine rustless can? Collins admits that the existence of suffering in the world is one problem for the Infinitely Wise, and this problem of finding rustless cans for the pure faith is obviously another. Such problems are problems caused by the impossibility of Christian beliefs. They are not problems when there is no God.
Nonsense remains nonsense, even when we talk it about God.C S Lewis, cited by F S Collins
Do Christians read their own words? They feel free to write whatever they like about God as long as it is pious enough, imagining it is revealed to them, as Collins does. Yet his hero, C S Lewis, tells him not to do it.
At this point Collins tells us that free will is an inexorable fact, yet neurophysicians, psychologists, cognitive scientists and philosophers are a lot less sure. Is Collins willfully ignorant as well as being willfully blind? He struggles with the paradox of human suffering in a world governed by a God who loves us each and every one. He produces ingenious but unconvincing arguments explaining it that are superfluous as soon as you reject the hypothesis of a God. Why pick any hypothesis, especially an ill founded one, when it does not produce solutions, only problems? There is relief to be had for Christians who stop beating their heads against the wall.
Collins covers miracles in a similarly unconvincing way. We saw that he accepts the Jewish fairy tales about Moses as true and miraculous, though they do not differ in kind from Aeneas, Romulus, King Arthur, Athena, Robin Hood, and so on. He believes Moses, and probably does not believe Athena, because he believes the book Moses appears in to be the word of God, though he has no sound basis for that either. Collins evidently cannot see this as an arbitrary choice. The holy word says the sun stood still while Joshua won a battle. Can a scientist really believe such a fantastic story despite the catastrophic consequences, that science predicts? It is far easier to think an enthusiastic story teller made it up than that it actually happened. Imagination can invent things that even an almighty God would find impossible—unless He too was imaginary.
Now, among Collins’ talents is mathematics, and here he gives an example of Bayes’ theorem to show that miracles are not impossible but likely! His hypothesized “miracle” is to draw a card from each of two separate decks chosen randomly from 100 identical decks. Two aces of spades are needed to be “saved”. The chance of the ace from any pack is one in 52, so the chance of picking two, one each from two packs is 52 x 52, or 2704:1. The chances are slim, so to draw the two cards is a miracle. Supposing it had happened, Collins postulates that the miracle could be explained partly by a sympathizer who had made up a deck entirely of aces of spades and had contrived to insert it among the 100 decks available. Collins says the chances now of picking the two aces is actually 96%!! It is almost certain (100%). Is he serious? It actually tells you that, given the miracle happened, it is 96% certain that one of the two decks selected was the phony deck!
If one of the decks is the phony one, then the odds of picking it from the 99 others is 1:100, but once picked the odds of picking the ace from it is certain, ie 1. So, the odds of picking the ace by this route is 100:1. Two decks have to be picked so there are two chances of picking the phony deck, reducing the odds to 50:1, and the odds of picking the ace the same. As there is only one phony deck, once it has been picked the other must be a normal deck with a 52:1 chance against picking the ace. The overall chance of getting the ace twice is therefore 52 x 50, or 2600:1, barely reduced from the original 2704. The presence of the phony “miracle” deck improves the chances of the “miracle” only by about 4%, not 96%, but given that the miracle occurred, as already said, one of the decks was 96% certain to have been the phony one.
What is objectively unlikely cannot be made more likely by mathematical analysis. It requires a change of circumstances. Odds of 2704:1 against or even 2600:1 against cannot, by using the Bayes theorem, turn out to be 26:1 on. Has Collins misundertood Bayes theorem or its interpretation? He is soon saying that the believer in the existence of God…
…having once admitted that the prior probability of a miracle, while quite small, is not zero… will… conclude that a miracle is more likely than not.
That is what Christianity does to the best minds. Even so, he warns his Christian friends not to declare usual events as miracles. He knows many of the ancient “miracles” have been explained by science, and not one has been proved to be supernatural. Indeed, many features of modern life would seem miraculous to the ancients. Collins, being a physician, as well as a Christian says he is “loath” to ascribe unexpected cures of serious or terminal illness as miraculous. Miracles must be very uncommon otherwise the world would be chaotic, because a miracle is a violation of Nature, of natural order.
He also cites his hero, C S Lewis, again that miracles only occur at the “great ganglions” of “spiritual history”. These occasions seem to be those recorded in certain books, overflowing with miracles, that have been declared as holy by some sect or other, because miracles are God’s work. Collins cannot see the argument is entirely circular. Moreover, even a believer must question the unfairness of God on these occasions. He will allow a plethora of miracles in, say, the curing of illness, when most of the time people simply have to suffer them.
Christ and the saints, for example, evidently performed many gratuitous cures of people with various illneses merely to show they could do it, and gather a following. Christ even raised his chum, Lazarus, from death only a short while before Jesus was similarly raised and declared a God because of it. Earlier, he raised a twelve year old girl from death so that her parents might believe! Those who do such tricks in more modern times are unevitably charlatans and mountebanks, and their followers are gullible fools. Could it be that Christianity began like this, and continues to attract them still? Collins cannot bare to even think of it. And why does Jesus’s resurrection make him a God when others in the “great ganglions of spiritual history” do not confer the same honour?
Whatever! But miracles are more than the “supernatural acts of a capricious magician, simply designed to amaze”. Curious, then, that Christ’s biblical miracles seem to be predominantly self serving tricks designed to amaze, and the dominant reaction is amazement! Yet anyone who reads their divine bible must question this ganglion of miracles because Christ himself says quite positively that he will offer his evil generation no sign! Well, miracles seem like signs of some kind, so how can they not be? Answer: when they are not miracles at all! They are either later inventions to make Christ look extraordinary, or they are deliberate misconceptions of something else turned into false miracles. The simplest explanation is that Christ used metaphors to describe people, mainly his enemies, such as lepers, the blind, the halt and the deaf. When any of them converted to the messianic cause, it was considered a miracle.
Christians refuse to weigh in a fair balance the vast amount of incoherence in their beliefs, excusing it as itself somehow miraculous. It is miraculous that anybody believes any of it! It is what astonishes the skeptic. They are besotted by their idea of an almighty God doling out supernatural rewards for their illusion of divine boot licking. Freud’s analysis was that this was a type of compulsive obsessive behaviour. A mass of repetitive behaviour revolves around a compulsion to believe a fantastic and incoherent story, rendered no more persuasive by the endeavours of centuries of theological speculators inventing paper to cover the cracks. Collins is the latest of them.
The Great Questions
Collins now turns to “the great questions of human existence”, beginning with a little history. Christian believers who say they are scientists are fond of telling us how many early scientist were Christians. It is rather like a Pagan pointing out how many of the first Christians had been Pagans. These early scientists were Christians at a time when it was almost impossible to be anything but, especially if you wanted to hold down a university position. Collins features Copernicus (1473-1543), Kepler (1572-1630), Galileo (1564-1642), and Newton (1642-1727).
Why doesn’t Collins mention that Giordano Bruno was burnt to a cinder in 1600, despite being a Dominican friar, because the Church did not like what he thought. Copernicus was too scared to publish until he was dying. Galileo was forced to appear before the Inquisition and told to keep his ideas to himself. He was kept under house arrest to make sure he did. Newton had to be a Christian to hold his professorship at Cambridge. Besides the coercion of those who dissented, Christianity was fed to infants with their mothers milk, and it takes a very independent mind to free themselves from this indoctrination. Collins is not among them. Nevertheless, he notes that the church dogma used to nail down these scientists had no sound scriptural basis, though he can draw no general conclusions from it.
Anyway, what of the Big Bang, which “cries out for a divine explanation”, proving in six words that Collins has rejected science. He warns against the “God of the Gaps” habit Christians have, but simultaneously advocates it, declaring:
I cannot see how nature could have created itself.
At one time believers had no trouble with spontaneous generation. Maggots and mice spontaneously generated themselves every day. The apostle, Paul, seemed to think seeds died in the ground, so all plants must have arisen by spontaneous generation, or every plant was resurrected! Ancient people had no problem with gods who were self generated. Photons, alpha particles, beta particles and gamma particles appear spontaneous from excited atoms and from radioactive molecules respectively. So from a scientific viewpoint and from the viewpoint of ancient belief, both of which Collins holds to in different sides of his dual personality, spontaneous generation is possible. Yet he cannot bring himself to think of Nature arising without being created by some pre-existing entity that requires no spontaneous generation at all because it is conceived in Christian brains as living forever.
Even the example of a seed growing into a plant could be an explanation of the way the universe arises. Perhaps universes arise from some sort of cosmic seed? It is an explanation that should at least occur to a scientist before he explains it away as the invention of a divinity. Maybe God is just a primitive way of imagining a metaverse or an energy field existing in metatime for planting universe seeds. If Nature is defined as what exists in our universe, then the supernatural is anything that exists outside of it and in metatime, whether called God, a metaverse or whatever. The difference is that God, in the Christian imagination is conscious of what He is doing, but the metaverse is not. The discoverer of the language of God cannot see it. He wants his conscious God, conscious angels, demons and the rest of the panoply of supernatural humanoids.
Collins has read A Brief History of Time, and understands quantum mechanics, but ignores Hawking’s QM work on the origins of the universe. It need not have been bounded, and therefore need not have had a beginning. As Christians would put it—if so-and-so, then whatever you want to be true—if the universe is unbounded, then no creator God is necessary! We look back in time like someone looking down a long straight tunnel. It seems as if we are looking at the inside of the apex of a cone. The tunnel seems to converge to a point, but it is an illusion. When there are no bounds, the situation is like the 2D surface of a globe which can be traversed forever, yet is not infinite in extent. We can seem to follow time backwards but we never get to any origin, just as we never reach the end of the surface of a globe. Both are unbounded. Living on a globe, we seem to see a boundary at the horizon, yet when we get to the horizon, all we see is another horizon. What is so hard about this for Collins to understand? Nothing! What is in the way is willful blindness. Science cannot yet prove it is so, and might come up with better answers, but it is an plausible answer. God is no more plausible, so why should the hypothesis of God take precedence except by prejudice?
Collins continues to use the Christian ploy of making conditional clauses serve as if they were premises. They think “if” means “because”. If God can handle six million human beings to their satisfaction, then he can handle any number of aliens too. Collins’ point is what the implications would be of finding alien life. The “if” here serves as “because” for Collins, there being no question in his mind that God is making humanity happy. In reality large numbers of humans outside Baltimore are extremely unhappy, many of them from their treatment by US Christians. How then is God looking after them? Indeed, any neutral observer would say that many of the six billion people could be a lot happier in the world, and a few hundred million, at least would have been undoubtedly happier, if the US had saved them from electing Christian presidents like Bush.
A “great question” he comes to now is the Anthropic Principle, which Christians take to be proof of God when it is simply that we mortals have worked out the conditions necessary for us to be here. The conditions necessary for the world to be as it is, used to be the art of metaphysics. Though it has become part of science, Christians still think it is the old metaphysics, and use science as proof of God. God is necessary for us to exist, for Christians, so any conditions that science finds are proof of God, QED. The conditions are such as that the universe is expanding to within one part in a million of the ideal rate for it to exist. Larger or smaller rates would not allow our universe to be here now. Therefore it is God’s handiwork.
It is a fine theory except that had the conditions arisen naturally, and been the wrong ones, then the universe would not be here or would have developed differently, and we would not have been here to think about it. We are here, and the circumstances are very unlikely, so something must explain it. God is one theory, but like all God theories it takes us nowhere because there is no way of investigating God. If the answer is scientific, it has to explain what circumstances could let us be looking at an extremely unlikely universe. It must be that many universes are made and are unsuitable for human life, but, if enough arise, then eventually one will be suitable for us, and, as we can see, this is it! So, to return to the hypothesis of universe seeds being planted in a metaverse, we are seeing that very many seeds must have been planted because we are here and we are a very unusual plant. We are the seed that grew with the necessary characteristics. It implies that millions of universes exist or have existed, because the conditions for ours to exist are so narrow.
A Christian might argue that God is no more fantastic than millions of universes, but that is not so. Christians say God is a conscious intelligence far greater than all of the universes we have just envisaged, yet universes are not in themselves conscious. They are conglomerations of matter. All we have done is extend the cosmic onion outwards, as we have over the last century extended it inwards. There is no need to postulate intelligence or consciousness as a pre existing property of it. And our observations within our own environment suggest that intelligence requires a lot of evolution to develop to the conscious state. It emerges only after a lot of preparatory development. If God knew how to do it from the outset, then creationism would be true, Adam and Eve could be true, but nothing discovered by science confirms the ancient speculations in the Jewish scriptures, and everything proves that evolution was a long, slow and tortuous process. Intelligence has to evolve. It is an accumulation of experience. It cannot be made. Wishing it were so, does not make it so!
The metaphor for the many universes used above was to think of them seeding, and, if the seeds inherit characteristics of their parent, and these characteristics can be the source of some sort of competition and selection, then the formation and development of universes could be rather like evolution on earth. Some cosmologists have thought in this way, suggesting that universes bud baby universes via black holes. The propagatory success is measured by the ability they have of forming black holes within them. Then it is possible, given infinite metatime and metaspace, for the optimum universe to dominate all others. Then all universes budded would be of the dominant type, and all universes would be essentially alike. If that were so, and ours is that type, then we might have millions of universes virtually identical to our own. The Anthropic Principle would then not be addressing unlikely conditions for life, but the only conditions that can exist in the metaverse. When Collins says “our universe is wildly improbable”, he could be utterly wrong. It could be the only possibility.
It might seem to be wild speculation, though not as wild as inventing a conscious intelligence bigger than the universe, it is based on real science, and it just so happens that the whole idea of multiple universes is also suggested by quantum mechanics, as Collins must know, so the same sort of idea is suggested by looking outwards and by looking inwards in our universe, by looking to the largest scale, and by looking to the smallest. It is suggestive of some sort of fundamental fact.
Using the typical Christian ploy of the excluded middle, Collins offers only three possibilities of explaining the Anthropic Principle. Another example is the popular one that Christians find terrifically convincing is to say Christ must have been mad, bad or God. Many more possibilities are excluded by this range of three, and are more likely. Mad, bad or God suits simple minds, but Collins is supposed to be a great mind! Here, he similarly offers us just three options. That ours is the only universe is extremely unlikely, so either somehow it was deliberately chosen, for Christians by God, or there must be countless different universes, of which ours is just one—the one suitable for us to observe it.
Collins says millions of universes is not in accordance with Occam’s Razor. But Occam’s Razor is not concerned with statistical groups of common entities, it is concerned with distinct entities intended to explain different things. The Gas Laws are not invalidated because their explanation is the accumulation of the impacts of billions of atoms or molecules. Nor is the genetic code invalidated because it consists of millions of base pairs. The entities of a theory are its independent variables, the variables that determine the behaviour of the model. There can be any number of dependent variables described by independent variables elsewhere in the theory, such as momentum and spatial coordinates. Here we suppose that the properties of the universes are determined by their physical “constants” varying according to some law as yet unknown, but behaving rather as inheritance does, so that each new universe has slightly different “constants” from the one that spawned it, and so behaves in slightly different ways.
Christians might be impatient with all this technical stuff, but that is what explanation is, and giving God infinite powers of whatever kind is needed, certainly is a violation of Occam’s Razor. God is assumed to have whatever arbitrary powers are necessary for Him to do what Christians want Him to do, though He is not necessary Himself for explaining anything. That violates Occams Razor, even before God is given all His arbitrary powers, each of which is a new entity. And having given Him all these powers, they still do not know how He does it, and so God is no explanation at all. The supernatutral creator of the Big Bang tells us nothing about what happened.
Collins also says we can know nothing about what went before the Big Bang. That would not be surprising if in reality there never was one, as Hawking suggested. But even given that there was a time, t = 0, why would he think we can know nothing about what went before it? Collins says he has mathematics among his talents, but this idea shows an ignorance of mathematics, and a lack of creative imagination. The time t = 0 is an arbitrary time. It does not necessitate that time begins then. Time can be negative, and, if the cosmological wave function is continuous, then it can extend backwards into negative time, and we can know what happened before the Big Bang once we have discovered what the wave function of the universe is. As Hawking has shown, it can have other behaviours, but nothing stops us in principle from knowing. There are possible answers, which cosmologists can see and describe using mathematics that should be familiar to Collins from his description of himself, and which preclude the necessity of God. Why will Collins not think about it? Why does he invent supernatural beings with arbitrary powers instead of considering what scientific powers applied mathematically could solve the puzzle?
Most of us can imagine impossible things, but once we have passed childhood, we cease to believe them, except Christians who make it a virtue. Scientists try to find ways of realizing the impossible, testing their attempts to determine whether they work. If they work consistently, then they can be believed. This difference in approaches between Christianity and science is the unbridgeable chasm that Collins thinks he can cross by harmonizing gullibility with skepticism. Doubtless Christians are sure God can do it, but he has not selected Collins as His prophet.
Collins believes there was a king David who wrote the biblical psalms:
The heavens declare the glory of God, the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Psalms 19
He might as well believe that Sam McGee wrote The Ballad of Sam McGee. Anyway, these psalms impress him. He cannot understand that anything, except God, can exist in its own right, and can see nothing inherently conflicting between science and God.
Given that science is capable of explaining Nature without recourse to God, all that the believer need do is believe that God invented Nature and therefore all the laws that science discovers. Voilà! God and science is harmonized. What though of Occam? Occam was a believer, and invented his razor as a theological principle, not a scientific one. Any God behind Nature is superfluous when Nature can be explained with no recourse to Him.
Moreover, what is the problem in harmonizing impossible things like skepticism and credulity? God can square the circle, Christians tell us, so harmonizing science and religion ought to be easy. Indeed, if religious belief were true, they ought not to need harmonizing. Science would simply be confirming it. It is easier to see impossible things as impossible, God being among them, than to postulate them as inevitable.
People once thought the summer drought was broken by the autumn rains, the semen of a randy God which fertilized the arid and barren fields thus saving people from starvation for another year. Collins would not believe that now. The ancient dogma explained things to the satisfaction of the people then, but it was not scientific and was not true. It was wrong! Why should the unproven dogmata still believed by people like Collins be considered any different? It does not tie in with science, but the science is tried and tested unlike the dogmata. Collins even notes himself how the dogmatic Christianity of the late middle ages held back science. Yet he remains inflexibly attached to his own pathetically infantile need for a supernatural buddy to get through life.
Incidentally, Collins buddy God is always masculine, so does he think God has a sex? The whole of the Christian holy books assume that God is necessarily male, and he has the male role in producing a son, because the son’s mother is a woman! So, God is masculine, but what is the purpose of sexuality to an eternal single (monotheistic) God? Are we to believe God occupies the endless boredom of eternity by wanking? Or is this just another ancient and erroneous belief, yet another false dogma, the whole story being allegorical? If God is not male, in fact, then the false Christian dogma of the masculinity of God has demeaned women and falsely exalted men for two thousand years. That is such a serious crime for Christianity, it puts the reference to a wanking God in the shade.
We now get more excluded middle like options:
- God must be supernatural.
Except, perhaps when He is imaginary, or when He is identical to Nature when He must be entirely natural. - A supernatural God cannot be limited by natural laws.
Maybe, but he could be confined to beyond Nature and therefore have no impact at all upon it. Or the assumption of God’s unlimited powers might be false, and God is actually restricted even though able to act within Nature. God can be supernatural in some respects only, but otherwise is subject to natural law. For example, the first chapter of creation does not show creation ex nihilo but shows God separating order from chaos. If only chaos existed, was God Himself a chaotic being, and, if so, how could He think or do anything? If God was Himself ordered, then order is necessary even for God to exist. Order is a law that God is Himself subject to. - A supernatural God can transcend time. He existed before the Big Bang. Collins will not consider that time might be an illusion of our experience, in which case there never was a Big Bang. Even if time is real, before the Big Bang it still existed, simply having negative values. According to Hawking, time is actually not a real number but is an imaginary one, requiring the inclusion of terms in the square root of minus one. It introduces virtual time when things can happen that are not immediately perceived in real time, for example, that time is actually unbounded. No Big Bang! Collins knows all this. He is a mathematician. And, if God existed before there was anything else, then what was God made of, and how did He get His powers? How could He think and plan with no matter or energy available? How could, even God know how the universe would develop, if Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle says that momentum and position cannot be known simultaneously? Don’t say! God can do anything, and the more impossible it is the easier it is for God to do. Or are Christians like Collins going to turn to science to figure out how God could have lived before the Big Bang?
God is a fantasy. It is a cesspit for disposing of whatever Christians cannot bear to think of—just leave it to God! And, if God suddenly needs some new attribute to be able to do the impossible, Christians are generous to their God—they give Him everything He needs to keep them happy. Of course, Christians can always say, “prove it isn’t so”, knowing that figments of the imagination cannot be disproved. They just do not exist in reality and cannot leave any evidence one way or the other!
