Lawrence M. Krauss, a Professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration and Directors of the Origins Project at Arizona State University, attempted to reply, but the WSJ did not publish it, and so the Richard Dawkins foundation published it instead.
The latest update on all this is that the New Yorker has now published a complete debunking of the Wall Street Journal article, and that is of course by Lawrence M. Krauss.
The essence of the argument that was being made by Mr Metaxas is that …
Today there are more than 200 known parameters necessary for a planet to support life — every single one of which must be perfectly met, or the whole thing falls apart… The odds against life in the universe are simply astonishing.
… therefore a god must has done it.
In rebuttal, the rather obvious observation is now made by Prof Krauss …
Such a claim is fraught with statistical perils, however. The first is a familiar mistake of elaborating all the factors responsible for some specific event and calculating all the probabilities as if they were independent. In order for me to be writing this piece at this precise instant on this airplane, having done all the things I’ve done today, consider all the factors that had to be “just right”: I had to find myself in San Francisco, among all the cities in the world; the sequence of stoplights that my taxi had to traverse had to be just right, in order to get me to the airport when I did; the airport security screener had to experience a similar set of coincidences in order to be there when I needed her; same goes for the pilot. It would be easy for me to derive a set of probabilities that, when multiplied together, would produce a number so small that it would be statistically impossible for me to be here now writing.
His full rebuttal is a good one, you should go and read it.
Further Thoughts
Arguments and counter arguments aside, what is of concern here is that the Wall Street Journal, a supposedly reputable paper, published what is in essence a religious tract that was then shared or liked on Facebook almost 400,000 times, primarily because it falsely claimed that there was scientific evidence for a god, and of course you know that they did not mean Thor or Loki, but rather the specific god concept that prevails today, and so it acted as a form of confirmation bias for many.
Often when in conversation with those that believe, I encounter an unwarranted degree of certainty that has no rational basis and simply cannot be justified when challenged. The meta-argument that is perhaps the most common can be expressed as follows :-
- I have no idea how X could have happened naturally … therefore my specific cultural god concept did it, hence my belief is true.
Debunk whatever variation of this specific meta-argument is on offer and people do not change their minds. That is because that was never the reason they actually believed at all, but rather was more akin to a layer of rationalisation that was applied later, long after the belief took up residence in the human mind.
Those who are deeply invested emotionally in the prevailing cultural belief are in essence almost immune to any rational discourse and so if we are to win humans over to a more rational evidence-based modality, then we need to win hearts, and not just minds. To belittle, to take a “them vs us” stance, and to win every argument going is to run upon a treadmill that creates the illusion of progress, but in reality takes us nowhere. Instead we need to befriend and win the hearts of those ensnared in the psychological trance that human culture can inject into us, and share about how we have found freedom from the slavery of archaic cultural beliefs, and a desire to go and discover the things that are really true.
It is so tiring seeing the ridiculous spin and false analogies I see come from Krauss and also your post. You really seem to go out of your way to miss the point. Krauss tries you use human free will to act out a series of events as if that’s the same as mathematically improbable random chance. They are not at all the same thing. The dishonesty is infuriating. It’s like me pointing out the near impossible probability of perfectly predicting 200 die rolls, and Krauss’ response is he picked out 200 items in the supermarket, and so there is no big deal in predicting the die rolls. This is childish and moronic.
And then there’s your nonsense “friendly tip”. Let me correct that for you.
There are only two possibilities. Something came about with the involvement of an intelligent agent or it came about without an intelligent agent. When one is eliminated, you’re left with the other. It’s just that simple. When the probabilities of all of those fine tuning parameters being what they need to be for a functional universe are essentially impossible, then the random chance option is eliminated. The fine tuning problem is nothing new and seemed to be acknowledged by the scientific community, but you’d never know that by Krauss’ response. The multiverse theory was supposed to get over that hurdle, but that theory can’t be verified, tested, or confirmed (yep, lots of hypocrisy and double standards from the atheists)
There are things we simply do not know, the “Why is there something instead of nothing?“, and the “Why are things the way they are?” types of questions.
Many pretend they know and pretend they have a solution. They do that so well that they not only fool others, but have also successfully fooled themselves.
If, as you assert on the basis of no evidence at all, that things that are came about via an “intelligent agent”, then you have not actually resolved anything. You have instead simply inserted yet another layer into the mix. Where did this “intelligent agent” come from, what caused that? Why is there an “intelligent agent” instead of nothing? … etc.
Is it turtles all the way down?
If you wish to compose a list of things that can’t be verified, tested, or confirmed, then you really do need to pop your “intelligent agent” into that category. If indeed you can’t verify it, test for it, or confirm it in any objective way, then why do you believe it is real?
The only honest answer is “I don’t know”. Anything else is dishonest.
Mocking rational people who have considered all the evidence and come to the only reasonable conclusion that there’s no way we exist without a Devine creator reveals the vacuousness of the atheist. Talk about insular.
The claim that Eric Metaxas is being mocked is rather blatantly false, instead the posting is criticism of the assertion he makes within his WSJ article.
“vacuousness” is quite literally leaping to a supernatural conclusion without any truly rational justification for doing so.
Friendly Tip:
– “Here are 200 things that must be just right for life” is fine, that’s a wholly rational observation
– “Here are 200 things that must be just right for life, therefore god” is an answer that can’t be justified, verified, tested, or confirmed.
In the end the decision you face is to either stick with religious tradition, or to instead find out what is really true.
very well put… and extremely impotant advice.