Sunspots 475

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to someone else:

Christianity: From Relevant Magazine, five bad reasons to leave your church.
 
Also from Relevant, a partly humorous, but Biblical, and historical, defense of wearing beards.
 
Rebecca LuElla Miller asks some questions about that favorite type of fiction among conservative Christian women, Amish romance.
 
The Speculative Faith blog, written by Christians, has posted another review of the God's Not Dead movie, and it points out some flaws. (See here for my review.)

Computing: A National Public Radio reported had experts monitor his on-line activity, just to see what the NSA, or others, could learn about him. A lot!
 
Gizmo's Freeware points us to a web site that will rotate a video that you shot with the wrong orientation.

Health: Big problems still exist at the Japanese nuclear power plant damaged by the tsunami, a few years ago.


Image source (public domain)

Evidence for the Big Bang, 50 years ago

As the recent movie, God's not Dead, put it, "Let there be light" in Genesis 1 is a description of the Big Bang. (The argument between the fictional atheist philosophy professor and the fictional outspoken college student, in the movie, was not over whether there was a Big Bang or not, but over whether or not there was a God who created the universe, using the Big Bang as part of His creative action.)

A few days over 50 years ago, Penzias and Wilson discovered background radiation from the Big Bang. (See here for the Wikipedia article on the Big Bang.) National Public Radio has a good report, commemorating the event, and points out what Penzias and Wilson originally reported, namely that they discovered this evidence by accident -- they weren't looking to prove that there was a Big Bang. The report apparently is partly based on discussions with Penzias and Wilson, who are still alive.

There is other evidence for the Big Bang, principally the shifting of light spectra towards the red, with this shift being greater, the further the object observed is from the earth. This is believed to be because the universe is expanding, as you would expect if there had been a cataclysmic explosion at its beginning. Red shifts were discovered before the discovery by Penzias and Wilson.

Although the background radiation and red shifting may not seem like a lot of evidence, they are an amazing amount of support, considering how long ago the Big Bang occurred.

Reasons to Believe, a Christian organization, claims that the Bible describes the Big Bang, especially in passages that use the phrase "stretched out" to refer to the starry sky. Perhaps. Perhaps not. I'm not an expert in the original language. "Stretched out" may mean expanding. It may merely mean that God created the starry sky. I don't know. Whichever way it was, the Big Bang was not a surprise to God, and required God to create a universe such that it could occur.

Thanks for reading.

Hawking's Grand Design and God's Not Dead

Stephen Hawking is one of the best-known scientists of our time. When he retired, he was occupying the same professorial chair that Isaac Newton once did. He is also an outspoken atheist.

In 2010, Hawking, in collaboration with Leonard Mlodinow, wrote The Grand Design, which became a best-seller, in spite of its non-fiction status and scientific content. The book argues that it is not necessary to suppose that God created the universe. It also says that "philosophy is dead," and suggests that the search for a unified field theory is futile, so it isn't exactly shy about attacking significant ideas. What they seem to mean by "philosophy is dead" is that some philosophers are not willing to agree with them on all points.

The Grand Design was referred to in the recent movie, God's Not Dead.  (See here for my review of that film. That review includes the pivotal quotation from The Grand Design, which was used in the movie. That quotation is the second and third sentences from the second quotation from the book, below.) God's Not Dead did not claim that the existence of God can be proved, but that His existence cannot be disproved. The Grand Design doesn't disprove God's existence, although the authors seem to think that it does, or that it almost does.

As indicated above, Hawking and Mlodinow weren't bashful. They claim, on page 32, that "recent experiments" have shown that our brains operate according to physical laws. There are no notes in the book, so I don't know what experiments they were referring to, but never mind. What other laws would our brains operate by? They claim that, because our brains operate by physical laws, "[f]ree will is an illusion," (p. 32) but are willing for us to act as if we really did have free will. That's a good thing, because if we don't have free will, Hawking and Mlodinow didn't, either, and they therefore believe the things that they do, not because they are true, but because of the physical laws operating in their brains. (And, by the way, if that discussion isn't a matter for philosophy, I don't know what is.)

The fundamental argument of The Grand Design is that there are really many, very many universes, according to M-theory, and that we exist in one of those that is compatible with life. All those universes came into being somehow, and here we are, in this one, the result of a cosmic accident. There are some serious problems with this notion. One of them is that even Hawking and Mlodinow aren't sure what M-theory is:
No one seems to know what the "M" stands for, but it may be "master," "miracle," or "mystery." It seems to be all three. People are still trying to decipher the nature of M-theory, but that may not be possible. It could be that the physicist's traditional expectation of a single theory of nature is untenable, and there exists no single formulation. It might be that to describe the universe, we have to employ different theories in different situations. Each theory may have its own version of reality, but according to model-dependent realism, that is acceptable so long as the theories agree in their predictions whenever they overlap, that is, whenever they can both be applied. (p. 117)

The above is a quotation from the book. That quotation indicates that, whatever M-theory might be, if it is true here, it isn't true elsewhere. That, and their fuzzy description, don't inspire confidence in science based on M-theory.

Another serious problem is that there is no experimental proof for M-theory and its relatives. Granted, a few decades ago, there was no experimental proof for quarks, which were proposed as a way of making sense out of the many types of sub-atomic particles then thought to exist, and, hence, there was skepticism about their existence. But that skepticism has largely disappeared, and there is experimental evidence for the existence of quarks. However, quarks, so far as we know, are the same everywhere in the universe. Quark theory didn't propose that there were different kinds of quarks, or no quarks at all, in other universes. It's not clear that, even if other universes exist, we can access them in any way, which would be necessary, I think, to vindicate M-theory.

Then there's the matter of gravity. 
Because there is a law like gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing in the manner described in Chapter 6. [Chapter Title - "Choosing Our Universe."] Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going. (p. 180.)
But why is there gravity? If they explain that, I missed it, or didn't understand it. And even if gravity had the power to make the universe create itself from nothing, wouldn't the powers of gravity be different in all the other different universes, according to their own thesis? So why should other universes exist?

Another serious problem is that scientists, and others, are not universally in agreement with Hawking and Mlodinow's central idea, mostly because of the first two serious problems indicated above.

Peter Woit, of Columbia University, has written a severely critical review of The Grand Design. Woit wrote:
I’m in favor of naturalism and leaving God out of physics as much as the next person, but if you’re the sort who wants to go to battle in the science/religion wars, why you would choose to take up such a dubious weapon as M-theory mystifies me. . . . [T]hinking about it, [I] have to admit that the kind of pseudo-science going on here and being promoted in this book isn’t obviously any better than the faith-based explanations of how the world works favored by conventional religions.
Well put, except that there shouldn't be "science/religion wars." If we really understood God's revelation in Christ, in the Bible, through the church, and in nature (which science unfolds for us) we would see that our existence is best explained by accepting, by faith, that God planned for our universe, and us, to exist. See Hebrews 11:3, which is quoted in the graphic at the top of this post.

I know of no evidence that Woit is a Christian. For other criticisms of the book, see its Wikipedia article.

See also the recent opinion piece in Time, "Why Science Does Not Disprove God."

Thanks for reading!

Sunspots 465

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to someone else:
Computing: Wired has some interesting thoughts on replacing car mirrors with cameras.
Literature: A short, but excellent review of the Tales of Goldstone Wood books, by Anne Elisabeth Stengl. I am reading the sixth one of these at the moment.
Philosophy: A review, by a philosopher and Bible scholar, of God's Not Dead (the movie).
Politics: (sort of) The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has produced a Living Wage Calculator. It is apparently adjusted for each county in the US.
From WBUR, in Boston: A report on how increasing income inequality should not be a surprise, based, in part, on Jane Austen and Balzac.
National Public Radio reports on a retiring congressman who says that $174,000 a year is not enough for a member of Congress. He may be right.
Science: NPR on the importance of whale poop to ocean life. It's critical.
  Image source (public domain)

God's Not Dead -- report on the movie

I saw the movie, God's Not Dead, today. It stars Kevin Sorbo, as Professor Radisson, and Shane Harper as a university freshman, Josh Wheaton. Radisson begins his philosophy class by having the students all write "God is dead" on a sheet of paper, with their names, and hand it in. Wheaton says that he can't do that, and Radisson says that, as an alternative, Wheaton must prove, in three 20 minute presentations at the end of the next meetings of the class, that God is not dead.

This movie was obviously made by Christians, and the intended audience is also Christians. Sorbo, and, probably, all the other actors, are also Christians. The Newsboys and Willie and Korie Robinson, of Duck Dynasty, appear as themselves, and are portrayed as outspoken Christians.

Some (not all, I'm sure) Christians may be disturbed by some aspects of the film. A Christian character prepares a meal, and purchases and serves wine. Wheaton's defense of God's existence includes the following, which some will not appreciate: 1) It's not possible to disprove God's existence, but it's not possible to prove it, either. 2) God worked through the Big Bang in the origination of the universe (for more on that, see here) and this is consistent with "Let there be light!" in Genesis 1. 3) Evolution occurred, as God's method of establishing the diversity of living things. This last point got only a couple of sentences, and neither Radisson or Wheaton mentioned the origin of humans.

I will try not to give away much of the plot, and there is a plot. In fact, there are several plots, more or less woven together, involving several characters. I will say that three different couples broke up during the film, and one of the less believable aspects of it is how they stayed together long enough to be presented as couples in the first place, considering that each one had at least one seriously self-centered egotist as one partner. (One of these was supposedly a Christian.) I thought there was too much going on in the movie, actually.

The film is a dramatized version of Christian apologetics. In my view, it does this well, presenting most or all of the important reasons that atheists claim argue against God's existence, and some rebuttals of these reasons. One apologetic defense is to ask "Why is there something rather than nothing?" or to ask "Who started the Big Bang?"

Stephen Hawking is a prominent atheist, and was named, by Radisson, as the greatest scientific mind in the history of the world. (That claim could certainly be disputed, with, say, Newton, as another candidate!) In his book, The Grand Design, co-authored by Leonard Mlodinow, the following statement occurs, and Radisson quoted all or part of it: Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.

There are some problems with using this passage to disprove God's existence. First, as you will see if you go to the Wikipedia article on the book, you will read that by no means all scientists are in agreement with Hawking and Mlodinow, and apparently some who don't agree with them are also unbelievers. Second, why is there gravity at all? (I am sorry that I have yet to read this book -- possibly the authors answer that, but I really doubt it.) Third, as Wheaton pointed out to Radisson, ". . . philosophy is dead." (p. 5)

There was an apologetics advisor for the film. I glimpsed that in the opening credits, but do not recall the name given, and I haven't found it in the movie's web site. Whoever this was, I thought he did a good job. (It was a he. That much I can recall.) At the end of the film, as part of the credits, there was a rather long list of universities that had been sued by Christians (and possibly by some others) for denying Christians their constitutional rights. I'm not sure that any of these were directly related to the subject of the movie. I found one such case on the web site of the Alliance Defense Fund. A student was required to argue in favor of adoption by same-sex couples, and asked for a different assignment, but, instead, was subjected to an examination ". . . for hours about her Christian faith," by a faculty committee. Eventually, apparently after action by the Alliance Defense Fund, she was exonerated, the professor was fired, and she was offered compensation by the university. The credits also said that, at the University I graduated from, the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship was banned as a student organization, and that ruling was overturned, after intervention by the ADF. I checked, and found that that claim seems also to be true.

Is being told that there is no God, by a professor, persecution? I don't think so. Being required to act as if you agreed with it, when you don't, would seem to be, however. I don't think being asked to defend one's beliefs is persecution either, in and of itself. It is often part of a higher education, on all sorts of issues.

At least one university philosophy professor has written in defense of Radisson. One claim he makes is that it is Christian universities who deny freedom of thought, by expecting students and faculty to agree to statements of belief, and then expelling them, or firing them, if they don't live up to such an agreement. To some extent, this is true. However, I was on the faculty of a Christian university for over four decades, and never heard of a student being asked to leave for unbelief. (Some were asked to leave for various kinds of bad behavior.) Some students did not believe, of course. At least a couple of faculty were let go precipitously, also for behavior inconsistent with the university's statement of belief. The professor cited claims that state universities are tolerant of all beliefs, and allow freedom of thought. Cases like the ones mentioned above indicate that freedom of thought isn't always tolerated on secular campuses, in spite of what the professor believes. He makes other claims. Some of them seem to be at least partly valid.

I'm glad that I went to see God's Not Dead. It wasn't the greatest movie ever made, but it was thought-provoking.

Thanks for reading! 

* * * * *
Note added, May 21, 2014. I have now read, and discussed, the book by Hawking that was so central to the conflict in the movie. My discussion is here. 

June 17, 2014. The Speculative Faith blog has published a review of the film, which points out some of the same flaws as the post above.