God: The Failed Hypothesis (22 page)

¹³
John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler,
The Anthropic Cosmological Principle
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).

¹⁴
See “Anthropics” online at
http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/vstenger/anthro.html
(accessed June 10, 2005).

¹⁵
J. J. Davis, “The Design Argument, Cosmic ‘Fine Tuning,’ and the Anthropic Principle,”
Philosophy of Religion
22 (1987): 139-50.

¹⁶
Neil A. Manson, “There Is No Adequate Definition of ‘Fine-tuned for Life,’”
Inquiry
43 (2000): 341-52.

¹⁷
Robert Klee, “The Revenge of Pythagoras: How a Mathematical Sharp Practice Undermines the Contemporary Design Argument in Astrophysical Cosmology,”
British Journal for the Philosophy of Science
53 (2002): 331-54.

¹⁸
F. Hoyle et al., “A State in C12 Predicted from Astrophysical Evidence,”
Physical Review Letters
92 (1953): 1095.

¹⁹
α
=
e2/hc
or
e2/4πε0hc,
depending on unit system, where
h = h/2π, h
is Planck’s constant,
c
is the speed of light, and
ε0
is an electrical constant called the permittivity of free space. The low-energy value of
α
is 1/137.

²⁰
W. H. Press and A. P. Lightman, “Dependence of Macrophysical Phenomena on the Values of the Fundamental Constants,”
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London A
310 (1983): 323-36; B. J. Carr and M. J. Rees, “The Anthropic Principle and the Structure of the Physical World,”
Nature
278 (1979): 606-12.

²¹
Victor J. Stenger,
The Unconscious Quantum: Metaphysics in Modern Physics and Cosmology
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1995), pp. 236-38; “Natural Explanations for the Anthropic Coincidences,”
Philo
3, no. 2 (2001): 50-67.

²²
See, for example, R. Totten, “The Intelligent Design of the Cosmos: A Mathematical Proof” (2000),
http://www.geocities.com/worldview_3/mathprfcosmos.html
(accessed February 6, 2005).

²³
Anthony Aguire, “The Cold Big-Bang Cosmology as a Counterexample to Several Anthropic Arguments,”
Physical Review
D64 (2001): 083508.

²⁴
Craig J. Hogan, “Why the Universe Is Just So,”
Reviews of Modern Physics
72 (2000): 1149-61.

²⁵
Takashi Nakamura, H. Uehara, and T. Chiba, “The Minimum Mass of the First Stars and the Anthropic Principle,”
Progress of Theoretical Physics
97 (1997): 169-71.

²⁶
Gordon L. Kane, Michael J. Perry, and Anna N. Zytkow, “The Beginning of the End of the Anthropic Principle,”
New Astronomy 7
(2002): 45-53.

²⁷
M. Livio et al., “The Anthropic Significance of the Existence of an Excited State of 12C, ”
Nature
340 (1989): 281-84.

²⁸
Steven Weinberg, “A Designer Universe?”
New York Review of Books,
October 21, 1999. Reprinted in the
Skeptical Inquirer
(September/October 2001): 64-68.

²⁹
The subscript indicates the number of protons, the superscript the number of protons and neutrons. The total of each number is conserved in a nuclear reaction, as can be seen in reactions discussed in the text.

³⁰
Elements beyond iron are only produced in the massive stars that produce supernovae.

³¹
Stanley L. Miller, “A Production of Amino Acids under Possible Primitive Earth Conditions,”
Science
117 (1953): 528-29.

³²
Overman,
A Case Against Accident and Self-Organization,
pp. 41-49.

³³
Darling,
Life Everywhere,
pp. 33-51, and references therein.

³⁴
Steven Weinberg, “The Cosmological Constant Problem,”
Reviews of Modern Physics
61 (1989): 1-23.

³⁵
A. Reiss et al., “Observational Evidence from Supernovae for an Accelerating Universe and a Cosmological Constant,”
Astronomical Journal
116 (1998): 1009-38; S. Perlmutter et al., “Measurements of Omega and Lambda from 42 High-Redshift Supernovae,”
Astrophysical Journal
517 (1999): 565-86.

³⁶
Victor J. Stenger,
The Comprehensible Cosmos: Where Do the Laws
of Physics Come From?
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2006).

³⁷
Lawrence Krauss,
Quintessence: The Mystery of the Missing Mass in the Universe
(New York: Basic Books, 2000).

³⁸
Gilbert Fulmer, “A Fatal Logical Flaw in Anthropic Design Principle Arguments,”
International Journal for Philosophy of Religion
49 (2001): 101-10.

³⁹
Martin Wagner, private communication.

⁴⁰
Kip S. Thorne,
Black Holes & Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy
(New York: Norton, 1994).

⁴¹
Paul Davies,
The Cosmic Blueprint
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988; Radnor, PA: Templeton Foundation Press, 2004); “Multiverse or Design: Reflections on a Third Way,”
Proceedings of Universe or Multiverse?
Stanford University (March 2003),
http://aca.mq.edu.au/PaulDavies/Multiverse_StanfordUniv_March2003.pdf
(accessed January 4, 2005).

⁴²
Christian de Duve,
Vital Dust
(New York: Basic Books, 1995).

⁴³
Stuart Kauffman,
At Home in the Universe: The Search for the
Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity
(New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

⁴⁴
Warren S. Brown, Nancey Murphy, and H. Newton Malony, eds.,
Whatever Happened to the Soul? Scientific and Theological Portraits of Human Nature
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998).

⁴⁵
Steven Johnson,
Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software
(New York: Touchstone, 2001).

⁴⁶
Christoph Adami,
Introduction to Artificial Life
(New York: Springer, 1998); Christoph Adami, Charles Ofria, and Travis C. Collier, “Evolution of Biological Complexity,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA
97 (2000): 4463-68.

⁴⁷
Max Tegmark, “Does the Universe In Fact Contain Almost No Information?”
Foundations of Physics Letters
9, no. 1 (1996): 25-42.

⁴⁸
Deepak Chopra,
Quantum Healing: Exploring the Frontiers of
Mind/Body Medicine
(New York: Bantam, 1989);
Ageless Body, Timeless Mind: The Quantum Alternative to Growing Old
(New York: Random House, 1993).

⁴⁹
Stenger,
The Unconscious Quantum.

⁵⁰
Roni Harnik, Graham D. Kribs, and Gilad Perez, “A Universe without Weak Interactions,”
Physical Review
D74 (2006): 035006.

bq._ If the statements it_ [the Bible]
contains concerning matters of history and science can be proven by extrabiblical records, by ancient docu-ments recovered through archaeological digs, or by the established facts of modern science to be contrary to the truth, then there is grave doubt as to its trustworthiness in matters of religion. In other words, if the biblical record can be proved fallible in areas of fact that can be verified, then it is hardly to be trusted in areas where it cannot be tested.

—Archer L. Gleason
¹

Testing Revelation

T
he God of Jews, Christians, and Muslims is believed to communicate with humanity. Mystics of all faiths and in all ages have reported such communication. The knowledge they claim to have received from God fills religious literature. While much of the material is esoteric and not readily confirmable, we can reasonably expect that some revealed wisdom should be amenable to empirical verification. This is especially true for statements about the observable world and physical events. We should be able to find remarkable examples where specific information about the world, which was unknown to science at the time of the revelation, would later be confirmed by observation. We should also be able to find numerous cases of successful predictions of future events that have no plausible alternate explanation.

Instead we find the opposite. Scriptures and other records of claimed revelations contain many disagreements with science about the physical world. These are not just disagreements about “theories,” such as biological evolution as covered in chapter 2, but disagreements with now well-established empirical facts. (Well, evolution is an established empirical fact, too, but this has not stopped it from being politically controversial.)

Similarly, the records of claimed revelations contain no prediction of a future event that cannot be plausibly accounted for without recourse to the supernatural.

We will discuss three types of failures of revelation. In the first, we will see that no information supposedly gained during a mystical or religious experience, which could not have been otherwise known to the individual claiming the experience, has ever been confirmed. In the second type of revelation failure, the scriptures will be seen to contain gross errors of scientific fact.

Third, we will see that not a single risky biblical prophecy can be shown, by objective means, to have been fulfilled. Finally we will show that lack of physical evidence proves conclusively that important biblical tales, such as the Exodus and the events surrounding Jesus’ birth and death, cannot have occurred on the scale and manner described in the Bible. From all of this, it follows that the scriptures and reported religious experiences are not sources of revealed information.

Now, once again, standard scientific criteria are being applied in drawing these conclusions—the same criteria that are used to test all extraordinary claims. Personal testimonials and anecdotal stories have little or no value as evidence for the truth of extraordinary claims. Poorly controlled experiments are similarly useless.

Furthermore, predictions of future events have little or no value unless those predictions are risky, that is, they could have turned out otherwise. Predicting the sun will come up tomorrow is not risky. Predicting it will not—now that’s risky! And, although this may seem an obvious requirement, prediction must be made before the fact. Many of the claimed fulfilled prophecies in scriptures were actually made after the prophesized events took place.

Religious Experiences

One place where truly spiritual revelation would be expected to produce testable consequences is with so-called religious experiences. Throughout history, people have claimed deep, lifealtering mystical experiences and formed prophecies based on their visions. They say that they have been in touch with God or some other form of higher reality. I am convinced that many are sincere in that belief (television evangelists excepted). However, without independent confirmation, the reported experiences could have been all in their heads.

As was the case for the claimed special powers of the mind discussed in chapter 3, ways can be conceived to test for supernatural involvement in a religious experience. Once again, despite the widespread belief that science cannot deal with spiritual phenomena, it is really very simple. If a person undergoes a religious experience that truly places her in communication with some reality from beyond the material world, then we may reasonably expect that person to have gained some deep, new knowledge about the world that can be checked against the empirical facts. Now, typically, the person having a religious experience returns with messages from beyond about how we humans should all love and care for one another, be kind to animals, preserve the environment, and not eat too much red meat. As seen in chapter 3, purely material brain processes can produce the same experiences as reported in a mystical experience. Indeed, such experiences can be induced by various physical and chemical means. In short, the mere occurrence of a religious experience is no evidence for a supernatural event.

Suppose, however, that instead of simple homilies someone undergoing an epiphany gains new knowledge that she could not have possibly obtained by purely physical means. For example, imagine that someone in the twentieth century had a vision that foresaw that on December 26, 2004, a tsunami in the Indian Ocean would kill tens of thousands of people. If that had happened, we would take seriously the notion that some power beyond the material world does indeed exist. In short, the validity of an otherworldly component to a religious experience is readily verifiable.

Despite many stories, however, no such report has stood up under scientific scrutiny. The prophecies of mystics have been either too vague to constitute a reasonable test, or downright failures. Just consider how many times throughout history that the end of the world has been proclaimed, with specific dates usually given. The world is still here.

Reported religious experiences are wholly unremarkable despite the cosmic proportions of the claim. We saw in chapter 3 that no successful (meaning statistically significant in ruling out all ordinary explanations) empirical tests for extrasensory perception, mind-over-matter, the efficacy of prayer, and other mystical or semimystical claims can be found in reputable scientific literature. Similarly, special revelation through religious experiences has not become part of common scientific knowledge.

It does not suffice to say that perhaps these phenomena may still exist at some low level that has not yet been detected, or that the issue is still controversial. Believers can accuse nonbelievers of being dogmatically skeptical and unwilling to “open their eyes to the truth.” But our eyes are open and we see no convincing evidence for phenomena that under the God hypothesis would be expected to hit us all square in the face. If the religious experience were as deeply significant as the monotheistic religions have taught, then data would exist that even the most die-hard skeptic could not ignore.