Has Science Buried God?

#evidence

Why is the universe so fine-tuned?

If the rate of exp-ansion of the uni-verse 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© NASA. Used by permission

1 1,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000

weak force 1

10100

Probability of the Big Bang’s low entropy condition arising by chance: 1 in 10 to the power of 10123

Roger Penrose

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

Paul Davies

© Ars Electronica, used under a Creative C

omm

ons licence

Premise 1: Fine-tuning of the universe is due to physical necessity, chance, or design.

Premise 2: The fine-tuning is not due to physical necessity or chance.

Conclusion: Therefore the fine-tuning of the universe is due to design.

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A common-sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature.

Fred Hoyle

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The universe is unlikely. Very unlikely. Deeply, shockingly, unlikely.

Discover magazine1 Nov 2000

Why is the universe here?

© 2013, European Space Agency, Planck Collaboration; used by permission

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

© Ars Electronica, used under a Creative C

omm

ons licence

why did the Big Bang happen?

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The Higgs boson ‘brings science closer to dispensing with the need for any supernatural shenanigans all the way back to the beginning of the universe.’

Lawrence Krauss author of A Universe from Nothing

Although science may solve the problem of how the universe began, it cannot answer the question: Why does the universe bother to exist? I don’t know the answer to that.

Stephen Hawking© NASA. Used by permission

Premise 1: Whatever begins to exist has a cause.

Premise 2: The universe began to exist.

Conclusion: The universe has a cause

I am not postul-ating a ‘God of the gaps’, a god merely to explain the things that science has not yet explained.

I am postulating a God to explain why science explains; I do not deny that science explains, but I postulate God to explain why science explains. Richard Swinburne

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My whole life has been guided by the principle of Plato’s Socrates: Follow the evidence, wherever it leads.

Antony Flew former atheist philosopher

How can we trust what we think?

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If my mental processes are etermined wholly by the atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.

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In order to escape from the necessity of sawing away the branch on which I am sitting, so to speak, I am compelled to believe that mind is not wholly conditioned by matter.

J.B.S. Haldane

What happened when we tried to bury

God before?

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