Thank God for Luck

I have been reading Stephen Hawkings latest book. “The Grand Design”. The take-away theme from the book: the latest understandings science has accumulated in the recent decade point strongly to the case that god is not necessary to have created the universe.

Last year I had attended a debate between theologian Dr. William Lane Craig (philosopher) and Dr. Victor Stenger (physicist) where the existence of God was debated. One of several “proofs” Craig offered for the existence of a god (from a philosophical standpoint) was the argument that even within the overwhelming life-hostile conditions, our universe is so “finely tuned” that it could not possibly be due to “luck” that we exist. Therefore our existence in this universe is thus proof of a creator god.

This position, that the vast number of variables of constants, physical properties and conditions are so statistically overwhelming against the existence of life in our universe, is called the Anthropic Principle. The recent physics should indeed bear this out – as Hawkings and others have suggested – if the number of dimensions in our universe varied only slightly, as they likely do in other universes [Multiverses ¹], atoms could not combine to form molecules, stars could not form, matter would not coalesce into planets and life could not evolve. How is it we ended up so incredibly lucky?

I got to thinking about this recently one evening as I tried to sleep. I suffer from horrible insomnia and pondering the origins of the universe or mentally balancing my checkbook do not serve me well in my pursuit of sleep. Nevertheless I got to thinking about a post I had written last month about the odds of winning the lottery.

The odds of holding the winning lottery ticket are 1 in 5,000,000,000. Actually those odds are substantially better than the postulated number of Multiverses which is calculated to be 10⁵⁰⁰. (I don’t have enough space here to post all the required “zeros”). But, the fact remains that occasionally people DO actually win the lottery and become multi-millionaires.

Now if you happen to be one of those lucky lottery millionaire winners, you have two distinct options from which to conclude regarding your goof fortune: you were either simply the recipient of luck or god smiled down upon you and intentionally chose to make you a millionaire. It’s one or the other; it can’t be both.

Then in this larger sense, all of us are “cosmic millionaires” – we can either conclude that we are the lucky recipient holders of the winning Universe Lottery Ticket, -OR- that we were intentionally placed here by a benevolent god.

I have seen interviews of lottery winners who seem more than eager to profess their fortune to a benevolent deity. But is there another explanation; does one need a god to win the lottery, or does one simply need to happen to be holding the winning ticket?

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1. The concept of multiverses -- an ensemble of universes -- the outcome of the originating process that generated our own universe, and as an explanation for why our universe appears to be fine-tuned for life and consciousness.

Coming Out

After all these years I have decided to finally come out of the “closet”. No, I’m not gay… I am declaring openly that I am an Atheist. I have recently placed the “scarlet A” on my blog sidebar.

Until recently I generally referred to my beliefs as Agnostic. Now the loosely documented rule of thumb denoting the difference between Atheist and Agnostic was that the latter contended that, at some point of reductionist reasoning, the question of whether god exists was supposedly unknowable. But as someone recently pointed out to me, the sum of all knowledge yet to be acquired is NOT knowledge of god.

Until now, being an Agnostic allowed me to hang back on the sidelines, keeping my beliefs (lack of them actually) quietly to myself. But recently I have been feeling more compelled to stand up and be counted. It’s not often a comfortable stance as a non-theist; we are not very popular with the religious majority. It is said that atheists are vilified more deeply in this country than child murderers. Yet polls are showing that the number of people claiming to be non believers represents a significant percentage of the US population; if you count those who claim they are not religious, the numbers are even greater. More significantly, these numbers are increasing.

Of course, I recognized that one of the great appeals of being a “believer” is that they can surround themselves with like-minded, affable, friendly, community-spirited individuals. There is a comfortable payoff to being among a group of people who appear to be like you; a sense of “belonging” is deep in our psyche. Conversely, Atheists are often not big on joining. Taking an invidualistic point of view can leave one feeling as though you are left to twist in the wind; outside of “conventional” acceptance. Not always a comfortable place to be.

For a number of years I have attended meetings of the Corvallis Secular Society. There are perhaps a dozen of us “regulars” who meet once a month. Yet elsewhere in town thousands of people are regularly going to all manner of Christian churches, a mosque, a synagogue, often several days a week; and new LDS “wards” are regularly popping up all over town. But Atheists do not have a strong need to congregate; we don’t need to bolster one another’s beliefs. To us, “None of the Above” is not a choice – it is an absence of choice.

The thought that atheists are a threat to believers, in view of the disparity between our numbers, is quite laughable. But we represent something that believers find insidious and fearful: doubt!

Of course the other benefit of being a believer is the feeling that an omnipotent being is going to somehow act as a mediating force between you and the harsh randomness of statistical chance. The numbers are pretty clear and quite telling; the probabilities that some of us will come down with ugly diseases or die or are injured in accidents, has remains fairly constant and predictable. The belief that praying for divine intercession to ward off some of these unhappy events; well, I can certainly understand the attractiveness of holding onto such an idea.

When I was a kid I had a teddy bear. "Ba Ba" slept with me at night and gave me comfort from the dark, from the monsters hiding under my bed. I could hold Ba Ba close and bury my face in his comforting cotton fur. But Ba Ba eventually wore out... as did my belief in god. I recognized Ba Ba for what he really was; cloth and stuffing and thread.

I am left, as are all atheists, with a tough choice. Is it better to fool ourselves into believing in the "comforting lie", or deal honestly with the harsh realities of the real world? For me, as comfortable as it might appear, I cannot return back to embracing a Ba Ba; my heart and my brain both tell me it is the wrong choice.

It is said that it is much easier to “believe” than to “know”. Doing the easy thing has seldom proven to be the right choice in my life.

Footnote: Tonight I moderate a local public event called "Ask and Atheist" at the public library. It is an open forum where members of the public can ask questions about the positions of non-believers. The topic tonight is where does morality come from. If some of the vehement anonymous online comments to the announcement to the newspaper are any indicator, it could prove to be an interesting evening. If I am not burned at the stake, I will post a recounting of how it went.

If There's A God In Heaven...

The Television news is all about the devastating earthquake in Haiti currently. Of course, not in the news are the millions of people in other parts of the world dying due to war, starvation, economic manipulation, anarchy and dwindling resources. Haiti has the media eye right now. In a week, it will be old news.

My wife was telling me that back in 1958 her school was gathering used shoes to send to the poor people of Haiti. That’s 52 years ago – things haven’t improved all that much.

What I find most disturbing in the Media coverage is all the references to miracles, praying and God – deeply disturbing.

What is the “miracle” exactly? That thousands of people died; some quickly, some agonizingly slowly, but a handful were saved from the rubble? When will the miracle happen for the man whose arm is crushed and is waiting for medical personnel to amputate it while it festers with maggots?

How are the Prayers working, at the moment? Many believe God has some “plan”, apparently to have children starve or die of disease. Are people praying to ask God to change his Plan for their sake?

Many are giving Thanks – thanks that the other person died instead of them or THEIR loved one. What are the victims themselves thanking God for?

Of course, there are learned men and women who go to university and have academia bestow upon them titles like Doctor of Theology. These people have the incredible luck of being able to intellectualize God and produce incredible volumes of justification “trash” in the form of books and papers, explaining to us how intricate God’s plan really is.

The interesting thing is, if you completely take God out of the equation, things pretty much progress as one would expect them to. Natural disasters happen with predictable regularity. Some people recover from dreaded diseases, some people win the lottery or are hit by lightening within statistically predictable expectation.

As a friend pointed out to me, if there is a one-in-a-million chance of something happening, with Six billion people on the planet, that event can happen 6,000 times every day.

Some people are surprised that a few of us mere mortals may even have the ability to thwart the power of and omnipotent God; for example, by wearing seat belts or having regular medical check-ups.

When I was little I thought my Teddy Bear would protect me from monsters at night. I later learned that Teddy was merely an assembly of cloth, cotton and thread. But I wasn’t frightened at that discovery because I also learned that there were no monsters.

I know that many find a belief in God very comforting… well that is precisely what it is for. But for me, I would rather know an uncomfortable truth than believe a comforting lie. The truth is that God does not exist outside our imagination.

Lyrics to an Elton John song that never made the charts (for obvious reasons):

If there's a God in heaven, What's he waiting for
If He can't hear the children, Then he must see the war
But it seems to me, That he leads his lambs
To the slaughter house, And not the promised land.

Only God can make a weed

When I was a kid, the absolute worst chore my parents could give me (besides “lining” the garbage can) was to pull weeds. Lining the garbage can required my using newspaper to cover the sides and bottom of the garbage can so the inside wouldn’t get dirty… from garbage. There is no logic here so don’t look for it.

Anyway, the worst penance was the assignment of pulling weeds. In the temperate California climate, it was always weed season. Always!

I am an avowed Skeptic and Happy Agnostic; I don’t believe that the Book of Genesis is the recipe God used to bake up the universe as we know it. Our understanding of the mechanisms regarding the world around us is increased with every passing day, with every scientific paper published. We are a reasoning species and seek to comprehend the workings of largest and smallest objects in the universe. Yet there is still that little nagging voice back there that teases us to “believe”.

I hear that voice whenever I pull weeds.

Intelligent Design would have us believe that a universe as complex as ours could never have come into being randomly on its own; the probabilities are far too astounding for that to be possible. (The Anthropic Principle). To underscore the argument, the ID people point to the complexity of the eye (oops, explained by Evolution) … well then, the complexity of the bacteria flagellum (oh, sorry, Evolution explains that too) … Ok, the autoimmune system could never have… (ummm, nope, already well understood through... good guess).

So just where exactly can we find the divine hand of God touching our life on earth? Weeds! Almost every species of weed I have ever laid hands on does everything in its power to avoid being pulled. Weeds are the scourge of plant life put here (by You-Know-Who) to be the bane of mans existence. I will lay out the evidence:

In conditions were most plants won’t grow, weeds thrive. Clay soil, cracks in concrete; they will outperform more desirable plants two to one.

When one tries to extract them they easily snap off at ground level; as if a biological “quick release” mechanism has been built into their tiny stems to keep them snugly in the soil. Carrots don’t do that, Daisies come out of the ground roots an all. But weedy roots tenaciously cling to the bosom of Mother Earth as if they were One.

Lastly, most weeds are stickery; encrusted with little spines and nettles which hurt when touched. Now why would a weed need stickery spines? Edible plants evolved defense mechanisms like thorns to protect them, but what is the evolutionary benefit of nettles to weeds? Nobody eats them, or happily plucks and arranges them in attractive bunches on the breakfast table.

I can come to only one conclusion: God intentionally made weeds to enable Man to suffer. The Garden of Eden, I am most sure, did not grow dandelions, chickweed or crabgrass. No, God created the weed in his Infinite Mercy to force man to his knees the toil painfully in an endless and fruitless task, harvesting a crop of woe and despair. Only God could have come up with weeds. But, God gave Man a mind – and the mind of Man came up with “RoundUp”.