The original post can be found here, and the forum post by Knifo (If it hasn't been deleted yet) is here

Let us begin.

Vex begins with the caveat that anyone who takes their holy book literally is being just a bit unscientific - I'd have to agree with him there. In the interests of defining the limits of debate, I'm not talking about fundies. That would make it too easy. I'm fairly sure we can all agree that someone who thinks God made all life in six days six-thousand or so years ago is a nutcase.

But he then goes on to propose, essentially, NOMA - non-overlapping magisteria. Science answers "how" things happen - i.e., Newton's laws of motion, Einstein's theory of relativity, all the other mechanics behind the universe - and religion answers "why" things happen - What's the purpose to life? Why am I here? and so forth.

I'd put forward that there are several immediate and obvious problems with NOMA:
- Science doesn't answer the 'why' questions because there is no way to answer the 'why' questions. Any answer to them is inherently unfalsifiable - and not the kind of unfalsifiable where it's an argument so incredibly watertight you can't help but agree with it, the kind where it's impossible to test. That takes it beyond the realms of scientific testing. Religions are answering the questions, sure, but there's no way to tell whether they have good answers or not. They are, essentially, guessing. It's clearly irrational to provide an answer when there is absolutely no way you can check your answer, no way you can even argue for your answer (Interestingly enough, if a hypothesis is unfalsifiable, you inherently cannot find evidence for it).

- Some religious claims are scientific questions, and thus fall afoul of scientific testing. God in its most general is unfalsifiable, and therefore outside science - more specific gods make claims about reality that can be tested - it's easy enough to see if there's a gigantic palace on the top of Mount Olympus in our modern world, for example, and the nonexistence of such a structure casts some doubt on the existence of the greek gods. The Christian god is very much testable - even if you remove all the miracles from someone's conception of the Christian god, there are still testable properties - because the Christian god is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, and there are some properties we would expect to see in a universe with a God possessing those three properties. Basically, you can make Problem of Evil arguments about God - as chains of deductive logic, these arguments are testable.

- This explanation may run afoul of god-of-the-gaps, and all the problems associated with that. What is not a scientific question today may well become testable in the future, and religion will then be 'answering questions' that science can test.

- NOMA can only stand if religious figures do not make claims about reality - if they do, they're running into scientifically testable ground. No religion does that. "You can pray, but it won't make a difference, because that would be scientifically testable"?

In short, I consider NOMA untenable.

Vex then goes on to use a horrible, horrible argument - Thomas Aquinas' First Efficient Cause. In short:

- The universe exists.
- The universe had a beginning
- Something does not come from nothing
- The universe could not come from nothing.
- Therefore, God created the universe.

That's simplifying a little - look at Vex's post to see his version of the argument, or look around on Wikipedia for more.

First Efficient Cause is quite possibly one of the first arguments for God ever put forward by man (Although there was a hilarious quote that ended up on FSTDT that was essentially point logic - it wasn't even circular logic. Circular logic has to go somewhere).

The problem is that it uses special pleading - the universe requires some sort of event to kick it off, but God does not. The justification for this is normally to claim that God is special somehow - that he/she/it is, by definition, not contingent on anything. This rather misses the point - you can substitute any noncontingent item as the 'first efficient cause'. Why pick God when there are so many others? Why can't the Big Bang be noncontingent? Why must the universe be contingent? There's no real reason. This is, incidentally, one of those god-of-the-gaps situations - there's no reason why this couldn't be scientifically testable in the future.


Vex then goes on to misunderstand evolution and science slightly. For starters, 'theory' in the scientific world does not mean questionable. 'theory' is the pinnacle. Consider the 'theory' of relativity. Scientists don't talk about the 'fact' of relativity, because 'fact' isn't a descriptive term.

And saying that evolution is becoming 'less theory and more fact' rather misses that it's been the accepted explanation for over a century. Because it's right, at its most basic. The driving force may change over time (Indeed, there has been recent scientific discussion about punctuated equilibrium and neutral genetic drift), but what could be called the 'law' of evolution - species split and diverge into other species over time - remains constant.

A theory is, quite simply, an explanation that ties together multiple phenomena, is well-evidenced, and stands the test of time. See this and this.

The distinction between a law and a theory is simple - laws are simple mathematical relationships. Theories explain laws. For example, the four laws of thermodynamics are simple and mathematical. They are explained by atom theory as the statistical behaviour of large groups of molecules in a gas.

He then goes on to ask how abiogenesis occurred (That is, how life arose from non-life). This particular part of science is, as far as I am aware, not as well developed as evolutionary theory (Which does not concern abiogenesis - evolution is only about the frequencies of alleles in populations over time). However, there are still scientific descriptions of abiogenesis, full of impressive sounding words that you're unlikely to understand unless you have a grounding in molecular biology. Quite frankly, when it comes to God, abiogenesis has no need of that hypothesis.

His free-will stuff is also pretty bad. I am a determinist - I do not think that the laws of physics allow for free will. But the illusion of free will is easy-peasy. Evolution could come up with that. Evolution could come up with a lot of things - it's an incredibly powerful mechanism.

Vex's list of 'valid questions to which God is a reasonable answer', is, in short, not really any such thing.

I would hold that there is nothing to which God is a reasonable answer - saying that xyz is true because of an unfalsifiable being is just bad philosophy - there is no way to rationally justify an unfalsifible concept, because it's unfalsifiable. It is consistent with all universes. The 'answer' adds no knowledge - it does not add to thought one iota. It's a non-answer - a fake answer - a stopgap until we can investigate the question more thoroughly.

There is no rational reason to believe that god, in general, exists. In that sense, belief is irrational. To the extent that modern religions have no evidence behind them (And I would conclude that they do not, Lee Strobel be damned), then belief in them is irrational too.

Keep in mind that I'm only talking about belief in terms of truth of the concept - if it could be demonstrated that benefits accrue to societies and individuals if you believe in some religion X, there is a rational reason to believe in X. There is still not a rational reason to believe it's true, however, assuming that there are reasonable scientific explanations of the benefits.

Religions are irrational in a second way - they are based on faith. All of them. Pretty much by definition, faith is religion.

Faith doesn't have evidence. Faith doesn't respect evidence. Faith is all about believing in something no matter what. If the evidence is against you, and you continue to believe, your faith is that much stronger.

Faith is clearly irrational. Rationality is about considering the evidence and constructing chains of deductive logic. Faith is raw belief. Faith is practically the antithesis of rationality. In that sense, religions are irrational too.

And yes, love is irrational too, because I know that one's going to come up. Just because it's irrational doesn't mean it's bad.

But religion is bad, though.

So there.