Article 9 : Does science make belief in Allah/God obsolete?
Yes. declares a rationalist philosopher...
Once upon a time there were a number of strong pseudo-scientific arguments for the existence of an Allah or God. One of the oldest and most prevalent is the argument from design. Most people look at the complexity of the world and cannot conceive of how it could have come about except by the action of a being or force of great power and intelligence.
The design argument received perhaps its most brilliant exposition in the work of the Anglican archdeacon William Paley. In his « Natural Theology, or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity Collected from the Appearance of Nature », first published in 1802, Paley wrote about finding both a stone and a watch while crossing a heath. Though the stone would be regarded as a simple part of nature, no one would question that the watch is an artifact, an instrument built by human intelligence, designed for the purpose of telling time. Paley then proposed that objects of nature, such as the human eye, give every indication of being similar contrivances. Although this is also a worthwhile question as to how such an Allah / God could have designed such complicated and details structure ; and who designed such an intelligence designer!
When Charles Darwin entered Cambridge in 1827 he was assigned to the same rooms in Christ's College occupied by William Paley seventy years earlier. By that time the syllabus included the study of Paley's works, and Darwin was deeply impressed. He remarked that Paley's work "gave me as much delight as did Euclid."
Yet Darwin ultimately discovered the answer to Paley and showed how complex systems can evolve naturally from simpler ones without design or plan. The mechanism he proposed in 1859 in « The Origin of Species » (inferred independently by Alfred Russel Wallace) was natural selection, by which organisms accumulate changes that enable them to survive and have progeny that maintain those features.
But, as Darwin recognised, a serious objection to evolution existed based on the known physics of his time. Calculations by the great physicist William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) estimated ages for the sun that were far too short for natural selection to operate. However, at the time, nuclear energy was unknown. When this new form of energy was discovered early in the twentieth century, physicists estimated that the manner in which energy was released by nuclear reactions correctly explain that the sun and other stars would last billions of years as stable energy sources and that the ages for this activity of the sun that were appropriate for natural selection to operate.
Prior to the twentieth century, the simple fact that the universe contains matter also provided strong evidence for a creation. At the time it was believed that matter was conserved, and so the matter of the universe had to come from somewhere. However, in 1905 Einstein showed that matter could be created from energy.
In 1929, astronomer Edwin Hubble reported that the galaxies were moving away from one another at speeds approximately proportional to their distance, indicating that the universe was expanding. This provided the earliest evidence for the Big Bang. An expanding universe could have started with low entropy and still have formed localised order.
Extrapolating what we know from modern cosmology back to the earliest definable moment, we find that the universe began in a state of maximum disorder. It contained the maximum entropy for the tiny region of space. Once the universe exploded out of chaos, we no longer have total disorder; but regularity dominates the universe. Most of the matter of the universe moves around regularly.
If he is to have any control over events so that some ultimate plan is realised, God or Allah has to poke his finger into the works amidst all this regularity. Yet there is no evidence that God pokes his finger in anyplace. The universe and life flows naturally. And humanity, although only occupying a tiny speck of dust in a vast cosmos, looks like a special gift of biological evolution, intelligent enough to observe, understand, invent and built, in fields of science as well as of society without permitting any fictional Allah/God any role of interference.
The universe visible to us contains a hundred billion galaxies, each with a hundred billion stars. But by far the greatest portion of the universe that expanded exponentially from the original chaos lies far beyond our horizon. Yet we are supposed to think that a supreme being exists who follows the path of every particle, while listening to every human thought and guiding his favourite football teams to victory. Science has not only made belief in God obsolete. It has made it incoherent.
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In the greater interest of civilisation, all articles in this series may be reproduced or published in any language.
Does science make belief in Allah/God obsolete ? Article 1:Necessarily, it does - says a physicist
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/humanist_international/message/114>
Articlw 2: Yes, of course - speaks a psychologist
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/humanist_international/message/115> Article 3 : No, and yes - speaks a Christian Priest… ! <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/humanist_international/message/116> Article 4 : Absolutely - says an eminent scientist <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/humanist_international/message/117>
Article 5 : Of course –responds a philosopher <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/humanist_international/message/118>
Article 6 : Not Really - says a biologist http://groups.yahoo.com/group/humanist_international/message/120
Article 7 : Not but il should, argues an Atheist http://groups.yahoo.com/group/humanist_international/message/122
Article 8 : ? No, claims a priest….. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/humanist_international/message/123
