A2. Is God a Delusion?

Is God a Delusion?

reality

?How many people do you know who describe themselves as atheist or agnostic?

Why do people not believe in the existence of God?

Dawkins

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God Delusion

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Isn’t enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it?

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I think that a case can made that faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate. Faith, being belief that isn’t based on evidence, is the principal vice of any religion.

Richard Dawkins

I think that a case can made that faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate. Faith, being belief that isn’t based on evidence, is the principal vice of any religion.

Richard Dawkins

Science = Truth

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Scientists [are] the specialists in discovering what is true about the world and the universe.

A Devil’s Chaplain, p. 242

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Science can explain everything

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Religion = Delusion

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Religion = Unscientific

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It cannot be proved

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It is not supported by evidence

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really?

experiential evidence

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?Why is your personal experience of God so important?

philosophical evidence

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scientific evidence

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cosmological argument

1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.

2. The universe began to exist.

3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.

•uncaused

• immaterial

• changeless

• timeless

•enormously powerful

•personal

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scientific evidence

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Big Bang

what kind of universe is it?

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Static universe

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1929 – Edwin Hubble

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expanding universe

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red shift

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Big Bang

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The Big Bang represents the creation event. The creation not only of all the matter and energy in the universe, but also of space-time itself.

Paul Davies

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steady-state expanding universe

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oscillating universe

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Big Bang / Big Crunch

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1965 – Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson

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cosmic echo

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cosmic echo

microwave background radiation

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A cosmic echo

24% helium

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beginning of space and time

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Suppose you suddenly hear a load bang, and you ask ‘What made that bang?’ and I reply, ‘Nothing, it just happened,’ you wouldn’t accept that. In fact, you would find my reply quite unintelligible.

Kai Nielsen

philosophical evidence

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teleological argument

1. The fine-tuning of the universe is due to either physical necessity, chance or design.

2. It is not due to physical necessity or chance.

3. Therefore, it is due to design.

scientific evidence

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2. The fine tuning of the universe

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David WilkinsonVideo from God: New Evidence – www.focus.org.uk

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If the rate of expansion of the universe one second after the Big bang was smaller by 1 part in 100,000,000,000,000,000, it would have re-collapsed into a hot fireball.

Stephen Hawking

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Probability of the Big Bang’s low entropy condition arising by chance: 1 in 10 to the

power of 10123

Roger Penrose

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Odds against the initial conditions being suitable for star formation: 1 followed by a thousand billion billion zeroes at least

Paul Davies

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John PolkinghorneVideo from God: New Evidence – www.focus.org.uk

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[It looks as if] a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics as well as with chemistry and biology.

Fred Hoyle

The evolution of complex life, indeed its very existence in a universe obeying physical laws, is wonderfully surprising – or would be but for the fact that surprise is an emotion that can exist only in a brain which is the product of that very surprising process. . . .

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There is an anthropic sense, then, in which our existence should not be surprising. I'd like to think that I speak for my fellow humans in insisting, nevertheless, that it is desperately surprising.

The God Delusion, p. 366

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?In ways can this fine-tuning evidence be accounted for?

How could you use this to help people consider the existence of God?

moral argument

morality

1. If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist.

2. Objective moral values and duties do exist.

3. Therefore God exists.

The position of the modern evolutionist . . . is that humans have an awareness of morality . . . because such an awareness is of biological worth. Morality is a biological adaptation no less than are hands and feet and teeth . . .

Considered as a rationally justifiable set of claims about an objective something, ethics is illusory. I appreciate that when somebody says 'Love they neighbor as thyself,' they think they are referring above and beyond themselves . . .

Nevertheless, . . . such reference is truly without foundation. Morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction, . . . and any deeper meaning is illusory.

Michael Ruse

?Why is the existence of God necessary for objective morality?

Some activities are objectively morally wrong and we ought not to do them.

morally wrong implies a moral law-giver

objectively morally wrongexternal and infinite moral law-giver

we ought not to do itpersonal moral law-giver

external, infinite, personal moral law-giver

if there is nothing other than a purely material

universe, we cannot trust anything that we think

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