It’s funny to watch Bill O’Reilly flail around in his attempt to prove the existence of God by reference to the tides, or the existence of the Sun and the Moon. But, what he’s really doing is playing sloppily at an old philosophical game. Perhaps the biggest question in philosophy is “why does anything exist rather than nothing at all?” Science can’t answer that question. We can trace everything in the universe back to a big bang, and we can even give a solid estimate for how long ago that big explosion took place. But we can’t say why there was a Big Bang, or what happened before it, or why the universe operates with the physical laws that it does, rather than different laws.
If you want to assert that we had a Big Bang because God decided to light the fuse, no one can really argue with you. If you want to explain our particular laws of physics as just what God ordered off the menu, no one can prove you wrong. If you want to say that there is life on Earth because God set the universe in motion in such a way that life of Earth would develop, that is certainly your right. The thing is, I don’t know what is really gained by insisting on these explanations.
Believing God to be responsible for not only the Universe but the particular form of the Universe doesn’t seem to answer any of the important moral questions. Does this mean that we have free-will? Or not? Should we be able to have two, three, four, or more spouses? Can we marry our brother or sister? Can we marry someone of the same sex? Can we get some Man-on-Dog action going? Why, or why not? Is it wrong to lie and steal? When is it okay to kill and eat something? You know, it just seems like insisting on the existence of God as the creative force of the universe doesn’t do much work. It has no real explanatory power.
Now, it’s true that we have Holy Books that purport to tell us the answers to many moral questions. Some of those answers are wholly and roundly rejected in all modern societies, but others are still taken very seriously. Still others, like monogamy, are the subject of great dispute. Appealing to these Holy Books on an a la carte basis is throughly unconvincing, which is why we have fundamentalist movements in all these Abrahamic religions. If you take the book(s) completely literally, then you can avoid the problem with being inconsistent about which moral lessons you want to adopt for yourself and your children.
The important thing to remember is that we can explain how the universe works and how it was created (from the Big Bang on) without relying on any god. So, no, neither the regularity of the tides, nor the complexity of life, nor the existence of the Moon offer any evidence for or against the existence of God. But that doesn’t matter. You can believe that God put things in motion. You can believe that God has a plan. You can believe that God loves you. Just realize that you can not believe any of that with a completely equal level of justification.
Our Founding Fathers understood that people would never agree about religion. All they wanted was to create a system where people would stop killing each other over their differences. The problem with Bill O’Reilly isn’t that he doesn’t understand the nature of faith vs. science; it’s that he keeps wanting to inject his interpretation of religion into the nation’s political debates. That’s exactly what the Founding Fathers wanted to fix.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that science “can’t answer that question”. The fact that they haven’t, doesn’t mean that “they can’t”.
Actually, there is tremendous research going on as we speak concerning the “why does anything exist rather than nothing at all?” question. And physicists, through a series of experiments at the Tevatron Particle Accelerator at the FermiLab in Chicago, are getting ever closer to understanding the physics of The Big Bang. And these discoveries will continue to chip away at this old, familiar and favorite question that theists like to ask.
The onus for providing proof is always on the one making the claims. And there is no empirical evidence for the existence of god. O’Reilly is making a classic argument to ignorance. It is one of the most common logical fallacies that theists make when trying to frame a God-vs-Science argument.
There is much debate right now as to whether morality can be defined using the scientific method. The book, “The Moral Landscape” by Sam Harris has sparked a real discussion of this topic. I doubt, however, that this is the type of book which someone like Bill O’Reilly would ever consider reading.
O’Reilly, like many others on that side of the political spectrum, is simply trying to make hay while the political sun shines on their latest opportunity to push a little bit more of the “America is a Christian Nation” meme. He is nothing more than one part of the ongoing war in this country to demonize science, intellectual thought and rationality in order to push the far right agenda. These people are proud of their ignorance. And they don’t believe that there is anything to be ashamed of. It is not hard to understand why our nation continues see a decline, year in and year out, in the levels of knowledge related to science, math, history and, worst of all, critical thinking skills.
They want us to be ignorant and stupid. It is all part of the plan.
Soon science may not need god to explain why the universe exists. According to general relativity, the positive energy of matter in the universe is balanced by the negative energy associated with self-gravitational attraction, so no net energy is needed to create a universe — the big bang can therefore occur spontaneously, with no outside help, godlike or otherwise! Nothingness is unstable, and thats why we are here. Freeman Dyson’s latest book explains this better than I can.
I think that over the next several years it is likely that we will see test results out of the Large Hadron Collider which will revolutionize our understanding of the processes which took place at the time of The Big Bang.
Throughout history there has always been a logical progression on these types of big questions. They always start out in the realm of philosophy, religion and theology. But, without fail, they gradually progress into the realm of science as both our technology and our imaginations grow. And the one constant through all of these is that religion fights, kicks and screams to the bitter end. And still, when the hypothesis becomes theory, for all scientific intents and purposes, becomes accepted as fact, faith still trumps it in the mind of the religious believer. They are inexorably at odds all the time, and probably forever.
Boo, maybe you and Bill need to do some graduate Philosophy study at Glenn Beck University.
Worth mentioning is a line of philosophical thought that there must be an afterlife or any morality is meaningless. Unless there is a chance you will burn in Hell or bask in Heaven, then what real stick is there over you to do the right thing.
So it is not just about whether a god exists it is also a matter of whether a heaven and hell exists.
I’m not much for believing in such things but I am rooting that if there is a hell there is a warm corner reserved for Beck, O’Reilly and a few others.
The fact that religious views pertaining to doing good or evil tend to focus primarily on how to achieve well being and happiness in the next life generally makes them poor tools in achieving happiness in this life.
Broadly speaking, the Achilles Heel of most religious morality is that it will often cause people to care about the wrong things. This will lead them to make choices which can perpetuate human suffering in the here and now in exchange for an action which they perceive will have more beneficial results in their eternal life.
As for the heaven and hell question; if there is no omniscient and omnipotent god who is judging the good or evil of mankind’s actions in this life, then it would follow that a heaven and hell would have no reason to exist.
Science teaches us how the heavens go, not how to go to heaven.
Really, I’d rather get my theology from a toaster.
O’Reilly’s too late. Douglas Adams figures this out some time ago.
Makes
just as muchmore sense than the swill some of the current media moguls are peddling.http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2011/02/can_you_get_something_for_noth.php
What came before… that is the problem of infinite regression. The assumption is that all things must have had a beginning. If someone says “God has always existed, he didn’t need to be created or to have a beginning,” then I can make the exact same argument for matter/energy.
If you accept the premise that all things must have a beginning, then the problem of infinite regression can be answered in one of two ways: either everything in the universe came from nothing at the beginning of time, or a supernatural being came from nothing at the beginning of time and then created everything else. It seems much more likely to me that simple atoms and energy could wink into being spontaneously than an omniscient, omnipotent being could do the same. Hawking has argued that the sum total of all matter and energy in the universe is zero, so all of everything that came from nothing still equals nothing and our equation is balanced.
So, how do I answer the question of what came before the big bang? I say it is a nonsense question. There was no “before” the big bang. Time is a function of space. With all matter/energy contained within an infinitely small singularity there was no space and therefore no time, thus no “before.”
Devil’s advocate on the matter of free will (meaning I know but don’t support the arguments): it can be argued from both a religious and a scientific point of view that there is no free will. From the religious side: if God is omniscient and omnipotent, then he has prior knowledge of every decision everyone would ever make, and the ability to alter those choices or the circumstances which lead to those choices if he desired. Therefore, we could not choose anything other than what He knew we would choose. In the scientific realm: it might be argued that if the laws of matter and energy are immutable, then everything that has happened and will ever happen, including the electrochemical reactions in our brains responsible for the choices we make, was determined by the trajectories set by the big bang.
As for morality and fundamentalism… contrary to what true believers will tell you, taking the books completely literally does not prevent people from having contradictory morals or beliefs, because the books themselves are rife with contradictions. So no matter what, people end up picking and choosing what parts to adhere to, and what parts are maybe a bit too bronze age to follow; they bend the interpretations of the books to match their morality as much as they bend their morality to match the books.