Science Increasingly Makes the Case for God (2014)

I will let Lawrence Krauss, who is thoroughly more qualified to speak about what science "says", do some talking: http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/astrobiology-made-cas...

Why is an article with only a tenuous connection to techn from an author who's written seriously about miracles existing showing up on HN?

for those who can't get past the paywall... the article says 'since we haven't found life in the universe in the past 30 years, god must exist'. you may now ignore the article.

Currently there is no conclusive way to prove either if God exist or not... But I tend to agree with what's described on the article, there are some points on the counter-argument that seem flawed.

"This approach, of course, involves many fallacies. It is clear that many routes could have led to the same result." Yet that doesn't mean that those routes have a greater probability than the ones they are currently accounting.

"However, we now understand that the process of natural selection implies that evolution is anything but random." yes, but isn't the proposition of intelligent design that evolution was the mechanism through which a superior intelligence shaped life on earth?

"Is it a miracle that the planet produced animals as complex as, and yet as different from, humans, dolphins, and cicadas, each so well 'designed' for its own habitat?" No, but the fact that this planet give place to such a process as natural selection may well be one..

"Living systems allow greater dissipation [of energy], which means that the laws of physics might suggest that life is, in some sense, inevitable." then shouldn't be the presence of life the rule and not the exception around the universe?

So let's assume there are even the septillion lifeforms. And let's assume there are trillions that are sentient and advanced enough to use radio, haven't destroyed themselves, etc.

Why haven't we seen them?

Well there's a lot of reasons:

1) Finding radio that isn't directed is hard to distinguish from the enormous output from a sun. (Why would you broadcast more powerful than your sun unless you're trying to communicate outside?) This is the big one.

2) The distances are incredible. See the map here [1] and just what a 1000 ly radius is. Outside that extremely small region those aliens would not only have to have been broadcasting for over 1000 years. We've really only been broadcasting for about 100 years and we're already speculating communication beyond radio.

I can keep going on more reasons but these two alone should be enough reason for anyone to realize that we haven't been listening for nearly long enough to make stupid conclusions like this.

[1] http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/milkyway.jpg

Click on the "web" link at the top of the page which takes you to a google search. Then click on the link to the article.

If google is the referrer, the wsj lets you read the article.

I always find these quite refreshing to read. Something to be clear about is that it's not a brand new argument, nor a "scientific argument for God" or irrefutable argument per se; it's providing a more casual everyday suggestion about God using some data that happens to come from science. Particularly, it points out the unlikeliness of life, which can be a sign if you are open to there being an agency behind it (in a "God's been leaving hints" kind of way), but if you're not would always be ascribed to the "unthought-of-yet explanation".

Which is why it's also not so surprising that Kraus wrote a follow-up for the New Yorker complaining that evidence of a gap isn't evidence for God as we can't dismiss the "unthought-of-yet" material explanation, or that there might be reasons for those odds to be smaller. (Those kinds of rebuttal pieces inevitably come across as Scrooge bah-humbugging the sunset in response to someone's casual remark that God's got a pretty cool set of paints...)

Science is an engine for providing material explanations for phenomena; it has no "there is no material explanation for this" option. This has not changed in thousands of years (though we only somewhat-formalised science as a field of endeavour more recently, empirical testing as a form of epistemology goes all the way back to "is this berry poisonous?"). So much so, that you'll even find bible verses talking about it:

Hebrews 11:3 By faith we understand that ... what is seen was not made out of what was visible

John 3:8 (NLT) Just as you can hear the wind but can't tell where it comes from or where it is going, so you can't explain how people are born of the Spirit.

Couldn't get around the paywall, but I found a New Yorker article that disputes the WSJ: http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/astrobiology-made-cas...

Sometimes, we forget that, as biological beings, we are, by environmental conditioning, limited in our reasoning abilities toward non-linear thinking. What constitutes absolutism of thought and to infer that we have absolute reasoning? We know that many imminent scientists, including Einstein, were disposed toward intelligent design, agnosticism, and not atheism. Stephen Jay Gould says, “...facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world′s data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts." For all the evidence and reasoning, we still have not proven or disproven, at least not with enough scientific rigor, that God exists. Even holding an agnostic view seems to be better than saying that we have disproven Intelligent Design. Until then, being predisposed to one of the polar claims ought not to be treated with contempt.

And someday I might read about this case behind the paywall.

To get around the paywall, google search the article URL and go through the search results.

Date is "Dec. 25, 2014"

Anybody have a cached version or something to get around the paywall?

TL;DR: God must exist since at this stage of human development we can't detect other forms of life.

This kind of argument is really very hard to defend.

since when does WSJ read like a Jehovah's Witness pamphlet? sheesh...