Let’s examine the situation a little more deeply. Question: What is the real connection with evolution to any kind of disagreement on theology? Answer: Absolutely nothing.  Unfortunately, evolution has been dragged into this fight presumably without first consulting it. There is nothing about atheism that connects with evolution any more than atheism connects with gravity or knot theory.  But evolution had the misfortune to have some implications that certain religious groups couldn’t reconcile with their long held myths, so it has been branded a religious debate.  Let’s not pretend that this is a completely one-sided fault either. While there may have been some Christian science watchdogs analyzing the theory of evolution and its implications from the start, there probably was an equivalent force on the other side, waiting for the opportunity to say “Hey! Look, you guys are wrong, and we have proof!” The debate is what it is today, and it’s short-sighted to claim that it was one side’s fault over the others.

But is it really untouchable? I don’t think that it’s completely out of line to say that this debate has become so polarized, that some people are so incredibly invested in one side or the other, that they may ignore any criticism from the outset. Honestly, I’ve spent enough time on the internet to know that these people are around for just about every debate you might have. It’s only because of the enormous fame of this one that these people have actually gotten real publicity. But I think that the real problem comes from a confusion of terminology that plagues evolution already. People who don’t understand the terms that scientists use will snicker at the “theory of evolution”, when it’s actually quite a solid idea. The terminology that gets lost here, though, is what people mean when they say “Evolution”. Richard Dawkins is often misinterpreted when he says that there is no doubt in his mind about evolution. “Oh REALLY?” his opponents say. “You must have some strong FAITH in that THEORY!” Or something like that. But it’s all rubbish. There is evolution the theory and evolution the fact, and it’s important to understand the distinction.

When Dawkins says that evolution is a fact, he’s stating something that we can be almost 100% certain of – creatures evolve. It has been seen; it’s a known effect. The overarching principles, the explanation of the effect, the reasons, that’s the theory. Suppose that someone said that gravity was a fact, and he was dead certain about that. Any qualms with that? Nope, he’s perfectly justified in saying that because we see the effect. Things fall down; masses are pulled together. We see it. It happens. Fact. Why does it happen? How does it happen? Can we quantify it? Those are questions for the theory. The Law of gravity is, essentially, wrong. Newton described things quite well, but he was ultimately wrong. So our theory changed, but the fact is still true. The one we have now seems pretty good, but who knows? It could change again, but I still will see things falling no matter what our best understanding is of the reasons.

I think that very few real thinkers would actually claim that we have an exact scientific theory with no holes or open questions, which will be solid forever, about evolution. What they get defensive about is that people are trying to force the idea out of consideration all together. “Look at this problem with evolution…”  is ultimately followed by “Life doesn’t evolve”, which is the mistake. It would have seemed incredibly silly for Einstein to say “I see problems with the Law of Gravity… Gravity must not exist!” But it happens every day for evolution. Science progresses by observing and theorizing, then repeating, over and over and over. Claiming that problems with our theory discount the observation is backwards – so don’t do it.

Yes, evolution is somewhat untouchable – evolution the fact. We’ll be refining evolution the theory for a long time to come.

So I finally got to reading it. Did he do what he said? Is it more even-handed and honest about its intentions? Let’s take a stroll through the introduction together, and I’ll just throw out my thoughts as they come up, ok?

<stream of thought>

Starting with a (brief) biography of Darwin. Ok, not much to say about that, if it’s factual. Not really relevant to the validity of the theory, but interesting to know I suppose.

Seems very interested in 1) Not getting good grades 2) marrying his cousin

P4:  Second time he refers to Cambridge as “Christ’s College”

P5:  And we start the discussion of Darwin’s religious views. Come on. What does that have to do with evolution? This is exactly the problem all over this debate. Religion has absolutely NOTHING to do with science. Evaluate a theory for its own merits. Portraying Darwin as a godless heathen to make him seem less credible, or to make it seem like a religious debate is wrong.

P9: The DNA code… So, did Comfort read this book before adding an introduction?

As you can see, random letters rarely produce words that make sense. But in time, mindless chance formed them into the order of meaningful words with spaces between them. Periods, commas, capitals, italics, quotes, paragraphs, margins, etc., also came into being in the correct placements. The sentences then grouped themselves to relate to each other, giving them coherence. Page numbers fell in sequence at the right places, and headers, footers, and footnotes appeared from nowhere on the pages, matching the portions of text to which they related.

This is nothing like evolution, and pretending so is either blatantly misleading, or it shows a complete lack of understanding. Here’s a better example, easy to visualize. Take 100 dice and throw them on the table. What are the odds you get all 6’s? Pretty slim. Do it again? Still pretty slim. How many times do we have to do this to get all 6’s? A huge number (think almost 100 digits). Now, play this game: take one die and roll it until you get a 6. Set that one aside. Take another and roll it until you get a six. Set it aside too. Continue to do this until you have 100 sixes. How long would that take? A while, but not really, compared to the first. It isn’t magic ink falling from the sky into perfectly formed words in one shot.

P11: DNA similarities -

To the question of whether sharing 96 percent of our genetic make-up with chimps makes us 96 percent chimp, Steven Jones, a renowned British geneticist, humorously commented, “We also share about 50% of our DNA with bananas and that doesn’t make us half bananas …”

Well of course not. Who said it did? I have two parents – am I half of each of them? I have 4 grandparents, am I 25% of each of them too? So I’m 200% of a human already, how far back do I go and still say I’m xx% of that? When you say that DNA is similar, it’s an observation. He’s trying to use that as evidence for a “common creator”, but at the same time acting like it’s ridiculous to consider. Pick one, man.

p15:

The creatures that Gingerich was looking at were simply different animals with similar hearing ability, and his conclusion was merely unscientific speculation.

Oh the irony of “unscientific speculation” in this context! Still, discussing “transitional forms” and lack of a “missing link” is interesting. Sure, on some level we will always wish for more fossils than we have. But what if we found some sort of transitional form between two species? Actually now there are 2 gaps to fill! Now we need to find two transitional forms to convince him! In all seriousness, evolution doesn’t happen linearly or on an even time scale. Changes in environment cause the need for a species to evolve, which happens in spurts and jumps. The fossil record is not going to be quite the pretty picture that Comfort seems to demand.

P 20:

Admittedly, this puts a tremendous responsibility on mutations to accidentally create complex new body parts, and on natural selection to recognize the benefit these new parts will eventually convey and make sure the creatures with those new parts survive.

Is Comfort admitting this? That doesn’t count as “admitting”, since you’re arguing against it. And really, he’s talking about irreducible complexity. I’ve said my piece on ID before.

P 23:

Therefore, mutations are not logical adaptations that make a creature better suited for its environment. They are completely random—the result of mindless, undirected chance.

Yes! Precisely! But I don’t think that means what you think it means. They are mindless and undirected, but that doesn’t mean that some of them don’t happen to be beneficial. The unhelpful ones don’t have any reason to propagate, and the helpful ones do. Mindless, undirected, but when viewed over a large population and large timescale – evolutionary.

P 26: Evolution’s difficult questions.

I’m a little tired of this. Does anyone actually claim that evolution is perfect and ties up everything in a perfect package? I doubt it. That’s not how science works. The real error is to say “Evolution isn’t perfect, ergo – GOD”. Science works on improving theories and finding better and better explanations (a little evolutionary, no?). So, yes we should ask the tough questions, but not having an answer for them (yet) isn’t checkmate – it’s how we make the theory better.

P 27: Which came first blood or heart?

Oh Good! This one again. Here’s the answer. Also, quit using irreducible complexity as a scientific rebuttal. There’s no prediction of the theory, it just says “is this one irreducibly complex? No. Ok what about this one? No. Ok what about…” How long do we have to play that game to satisfy you?

P 30:

However, if an organ were no longer needed, it could at best be considered devolution. This is consistent with the Law of Entropy—that all things deteriorate over time. What evolution requires, however, is not the loss but the addition of information, where an organism increases in complexity. “Vestigial organs” therefore do not serve as evidence for evolution.

Oops, nope. Let’s remember to keep our vocabulary correct. Evolution is the name of the theory and refers only to change. There is no ultimate goal of evolution, and no such thing as devolution. A species could perfectly well evolve to adapt to a certain change, and evolve back if a new change spurred it. There is no “perfect species” that we’re all progressing toward, and evolution doesn’t say that. It merely makes us fit together. If you can’t live in your “niche” then you either evolve or die.

Plus – Entropy? Really? That’s not exactly what entropy is about. By your logic, we shouldn’t be able to build a car, because that’s not deteriorating those specific atoms, which violates thermodynamics.

P 31: Darwin’s unsavory views, Atheism, Christianity

I knew it… <sigh>. Here’s a fun list of topics we get to enjoy: social darwinism, Darwin’s racism, atheists agree he was a racist, disdain for women, Hitler (!), lots of Hitler, Darwinism = Atheism = do-whatever-you-want-no-morals-ism, nothing created everything, theist scientists from history, lots and lots of “let me save you from Hell”, analyzing other religions as answers to Christianity’s questions?, go love Jesus, go love Jesus, come on just be a Christian!

An atheist wrote and said, “What do Darwin’s personal views on race have to do with our modern understanding of evolution? Nothing. Absolutely nothing, Ray. Even a fool knows this.” Indeed, Darwin’s racism has nothing to do with the credibility of the theory of evolution. It should stand or fall on its own merits. However, the theory itself teaches that all men are not created equal. Darwinian evolution doesn’t say that human beings are made in the image of God and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. It rather states that they are mere animals, some closer to apes than others, and it therefore opens wide the door to racism.

He was so close to an intelligent thought I got chills, but then another flatline. No, the theory says nothing about rights, a God or anything like that (including some people being closer to apes than others, which is a blatant lie). There are many ways we can derive morals and rights, which have nothing to do with being told how to live by a God. It doesn’t open the door to racism, but what if it did? I don’t advocate racism in any way, but the social implications of a theory don’t make it wrong. What if I had some crazy way to connect gravity with killing babies. Does that mean that you’re going to stop believing in gravity because you think killing babies is wrong? Evolution stands or falls by itself, and clouding the issue with this is incredibly misleading, dishonest, and sad.

</stream of thought>

Well, I have to say that whether or not he actually changed the introduction to be more fair like he said he would, it’s exactly what I expected. There are blatant lies, misleading facts and irrelevant crap all over the place. It’s a shame that he did it, but What do we do about it? Exactly what I’m doing. Share your thoughts. Expose the crap that doesn’t belong in this discussion. As he notes just before the actual text:

Someone once graciously said, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” However, it seems that some contemporary atheists don’t share such honorable convictions. When they learned about this publication they threatened lawsuits, book burnings, and even censorship in vowing to tear the Introduction out of the book.

And for once, he’s entirely right. This is exactly the wrong reaction. If ideas are good, they will be judged as good. It’s not up to us to keep ideas from anyone, only to combat the bad ones with even more good. Instead of burning them or tearing out the pages, why not get out a red pen and mark the crap out of it, go back to the street and hand it out to someone new?

Still, there were a couple of interesting topics brought up that got me thinking. They have to do with the idea of a soul, and how to reconcile that with various situations. Personally, I have trouble with the word “soul” because it’s so inimately tied to religious connotations. On top of that, people generally describe a soul as “non-physical”, which leads me to ask what that actually means, usually to unsatisfying answers. Anyway, the topics that really made this conversation interesting to me were these: What would be the implications of being able to transfer consciousness between people/bodies? What are the implications of a soul in evolutionary terms?
First scenario – If you believe in a soul, do you think that it might be possible (in theory) to move consciousness from one body to another. To put it another way, if we had the ability to exactly reproduce the electrical workings of your brain in another body (or even some mechanical replica), would that still be you? Is there something beyond this that makes you, you? It’s an interesting possibility. For people who think that there is a non-physical soul that is really “you”, how would this get transferred, or would it? If it did not, what happened to it? If it did, are there some rules involved in how much of your brain activity needs to be transferred before the soul makes the jump too? What about if we just copied your consciousness over, and now there are two places your soul needs to be associated with? For those that think that you couldn’t transfer a soul this way, I want to know why. What is it about this body that ties it to my soul? If I lose some part of my physical body, I assume that I retain my soul. Then what’s the tie to my physical body? And if we can reproduce my consciousness, did we implicitly reproduce my soul somehow? If we copy my consciousness into a mechanical replica, do you have the same moral obligations to it that you do to me? What a metaphysical can of worms this is.

Second scenario – Does evolution lead to rejecting the idea of a soul? Most soul-advocates would agree that animals do not have one (except sometimes the family dog, which we’d like to see again in the afterlife). Many of them also want to be science-savvy and open-minded about evolution, but I have to ask, are the two compatible? To accept evolution is to accept that we share a common ancestor with creatures that have no soul. So then, somewhere along the way some creature must have had no soul, but given birth to one that did have a soul. Is this what we’re really saying? Where did that soul come from? At which point in the evolutionary line did we become just-human-enough to deserve a soul? Did that child have the same moral responsibility to its mother that we grant to fully human parents and children, or was its mother just an animal?

I don’t have good answers for most of this stuff, but it sure is mind-bending to think about and discuss. If you have good answers for what I see as logical problems with a soul here, let me know. I’m very interested.

There are 2 reasons for making such a big deal out of this. Either they’re trying to “prove” that Christianity is a false religion, or they’re trying to kick up controversy. It’s fairly obvious that whatever the goal was, the second one is really all that’s going to happen. Let’s look at this from a Christian point of view. What does the research say? Mostly it says that he came up with a way to put a similar image on a similar type of cloth with means that they might have had some time in the past. So what! You’ve got to be kidding me. We have (according to statistics that Richard Dawkins quoted, and I haven’t researched) just under 50% of the people in this country blatantly admitting to the belief that all the scientific evidence for evolution is crap! In the face of such an enormous amount of evidence for our planet being billions of years old, they believe that it’s more like 10,000! Now, let me ask again, what were you thinking you would do with science to show these people that the shroud is a fake? It’s already been dated to the 13th or 14th century, and that didn’t mean a thing to the ‘true believers’.

Don’t get the wrong idea – I understand completely that it might be nice for you to just systematically disprove every last little piece of divinity that these people cling to.  But it just isn’t going to happen this way. Seriously, it’s more like a neat thing to wonder about for most Christians, rather than a place to base your beliefs. People like to claim to have a  piece of the ‘true cross’, or put a bone from a saint in their church. How many people in the country have a baseball that was signed by their favorite player. Yeah, it would suck to find out that the ball was a fake, but does that make you think any less of the player? I really don’t think it’s any different for Christians, even in the event that you could definitively prove that it wasn’t divine (which I doubt you could, for them).

I wouldn’t really have a problem with someone sitting in their basement and tinkering with this idea in their free time, but what we actually have is funded research in the quest to disprove the shroud.  From one report:

Garlaschelli received funding for his work by an Italian association of atheists and agnostics but said it had no effect on his results.

Well, good that it didn’t affect him, but that’s not the point. This is what this Italian association of atheists and agnostics chooses to spend money on? I don’t know the situation in Italy nearly as well as I do here, though I’d like to (actually, I feel the same way about their wine…). But I really must protest to any significant use of funds for such a purpose. It doesn’t get us anywhere, but it makes the A&A community look like we’re actively working against religion. A campaign of hate is pointless. Let’s see that funding going to getting better science and reasoning courses in schools, or exposing domestic abuse condoned by certain religions. The Shroud of Turin? Come on, it’s a trinket. There are much more pressing issues facing our world today.

And as it gets closer to December 25th, the decorations start coming out and the city lights up with festive colors and lights. It’s hard to beat a night with your loved ones, driving around with hot chocolate and snacks, looking at lights and decorations and savoring the time together. It builds up to Christmas day, and for me that’s a wonderful family and friends celebration. We give out gifts; we drink, eat and laugh. The stress of the rest of the year doesn’t matter for a day. I look forward to seeing people I don’t see often enough, sharing gifts and seeing their reaction to what I pick out for them. I will forget about health food for a day and eat whatever tastes good. I’ll drink some great wine, maybe take a nap by a crackling fire, and for a day I get to really relax. “Christ”mas or not, I can’t wait for this season to come.

Sometimes when people shed a religion, they’re eager to also cast off any ties to it. It may be a symbolic act for them, rejecting the practices all together. That’s fine, if it’s meaningful for you, but I have no problem keeping some holiday traditions. I don’t feel like it’s anything hypocritical, and doesn’t mean anything about my belief system. Deep down, I know that I enjoy lots of the aspects of Christmas (which has grown very far from celebrating the birth of Jesus, much to the chagrin of many Christians), and I know that a day (or season) of celebration is a great way to recharge for the coming year, and reflect on the past one. I don’t go to church; I don’t put an angel on the top of my tree. But it’s also not necessary to hoist a copy of Origin of Species up there just to make a stand. The holiday, for me, has nothing to do with religion or a belief system, and forcing that upon it is just plain silly. If I wanted to make a stand, I’d make up some other holiday and celebrate that – but then it wouldn’t be celebrating a holiday, it would be making a show of my beliefs.

In fact, I think the secular celebration of Christmas is a great thing. Some holidays commemorate special events, and some are purely religious. But there’s nothing wrong with celebration for its own sake. I don’t have to deprive myself of things that I truly enjoy to be comfortable with my beliefs. Come on, it’s Christmas… just have a good time!

Of course, any and all viewpoints and beliefs are more than welcome to participate. I will be compiling the Christian views as described, but to contrast these with other religions or atheists is also very informative.

So, help me out! Pass the link on to your Christian friends and family! Thanks for your help!

http://www.reasonabledissent.com/survey/

Now, I understand the reasoning, but I’m used to questions that are about the authenticity of the gospels. There are all kinds of debates that talk about whether or not we can believe them, who they were written by, when they were written, how the canonical gospels were chosen and the gnostic gospels were rejected… lots of interesting topics. But he seemed to be saying that it doesn’t matter. The new testament is (I guess?) evidenced by Genesis, rather than evidence for it. Huh.

It was honestly something I hadn’t even thought to prepare for. I would say that the credibility of Genesis is already in doubt to all but the most die-hard literalists. The book is how old? Written by who? Changed and translated when, how, why, and by whom? But those aren’t facts. And anyone who’s debated with a fundamentalist knows that, unfair though it be, the burden is on you to know the facts, because their default position when you don’t is: “I win”. It’s not like a gospel where you can say, “So and so couldn’t have written this, and it wasn’t formalized for 100 years. Then it was chosen by popular vote to be in the bible 300 years after that.” Nope, all you have is “How on earth can you put so much trust in that ancient myth?” That just lets them (fallacious as it is) smugly say “God says so. It’s in the divinely-inspired bible.”

I like to think that I’m fairly quick on my feet with most topics, but I just didn’t really come up with what I would have liked at that moment. What would you say?

As I mentioned, this is a project that is motivated by the increase (it seems) in recent times to having fewer authoritative teachings, and more ‘personal interpretation’. Even with authoritative teachings, there are so many denominations and shades of gray within those denominations that I encounter, “Well that’s not what I believe,” more than getting into a real discussion.

Actually, I’ve already started conducting a few correspondence interviews, and they’re going well. I haven’t decided the format that I want to use for the results of this project yet, though, so I haven’t talked too much about them. Really, I think the most interesting material will come at the end, when I can compare all that I’ve gathered. But since I’m beginning my face-to-face interviews, I want to give any of my readers one more chance to post subjects that they want discussed. I want to try to hit as many of the same topics as I can with all of my interviewees, so I need to get as much as I can before I go into them.

I’m already planning the standard stuff. We’ll talk about creation, creationism, intelligent design, evolution, literal interpretation of the bible, homosexuality, gay marriage, prayer, the nature of God, arguments and proofs for and against God, the god of the old and new testaments, evangelism, morality, Jesus, miracles, resurrection, gnostic gospels, canonical gospels, the trinity, separation of church and state… just to name a few. Hopefully I’ll have time to really get into this in the hour or two that I have with them.

But what’s most important is what you all encounter as well. The point of my project is that we may all have some issues or arguments with some Christian teachings, but the followers are so scattered that it’s difficult to actually discuss it, nail it down and deal with it. I want to try to eliminate the argument that you may be opposed to one person’s understanding of Christianity, but that’s just because you haven’t encountered this one before. You’re welcome to hold whatever beliefs you have, but if you say that you’re a Lutheran, or a Protestant, or a Mormon, or a Catholic, that has certain implications. I want to know what those are, and know what each of them has to say about the important issues of our time.

So, before I go tomorrow, here’s a final call: if you were going to do this yourself, what would you want to know? What questions have never been answered to your satisfaction? It’s easy for me to ask the questions I want to know about, but yours are just as important. Leave a comment, or send it through the ‘Contact’ page.

Now, I’ll admit that I did not invest the time to read the book, and only have experience with the >2 hours of movie that explains his journey. That said, it’s amazing the number of biased or otherwise improper research techniques he employs in the short amount of time he had to work with. It’s also amazing how he could ask a few good questions, and then abandon the reasonable thought that brought him to those questions. As an example, and probably the one that bothers me the most, he trots out many different ‘authority’ figures for whatever he’s researching throughout the movie. Not once did a person’s background not look something like this:

I. B. Right – Professor of Divination, Nutjob Bible ‘College’

It was a sea of people who have dedicated their lives to the study of Jesus, but not an objective study. There may be hints of real research in these places, but overall they are colleges founded with the answer already in mind. They undoubtedly have school charters that mention the first rule of following God. This is not objective research.

Another example: math blasphemy. I don’t recall the group of researchers he mentions, but he smugly quotes a probability that makes me almost want to cry. They somehow tried to calculate the probability that one man could fulfill all of the prophecies that Jesus would have to (and did, apaprently) in order to be the messiah, and this number was some fantastically small probability (1:10^30, or something). What? How do you pretend to make a calculation like that? Are we saying that a man living a random life doing random things would only fulfill all of those things? Are we including “rise from the dead” as one of them, and how exactly do you get a probability for being able to do that? The biggest problem I have is that in this case Jesus knew exactly what would be expected of him if he was to be the messiah. He undoubtedly spent his childhood learning all of the scriptures and their predictions, just like all other boys. But the difference is that he had his mother telling him from the start, “You are the son of god.” So it’s not a random life that happens to fulfull a bunch of predictions. It’s a guy living his life thinking about them all the time, and finding ways to make it happen. My guess is that if you’re trying to do this stuff, the odds get quite a bit smaller.

Lastly, I have a big problem with all the gospels that didn’t make the cut. It’s especially bad in The Case for Christ, because he uses one argument to try to get me to accept the 4 official gospels, and the opposite argument to get me to reject the rest. A not-insignificant amount of time is devoted to reminding us how accurate these 4 gospels really can be even though they were written decades after Jesus actually lived. We’re told to understand that oral tradition was a huge part of life back then, and people devoted their lives to memorizing the exact words and getting it right. Also, it was a huge community of people memorizing the same stuff, so it would be a “self-correcting process”, since your friends would let you know if you screwed something up (really? How sure are we about that?). So, what if I accept this argument? Well, then I might feel the same way about those dozens of gospels that weren’t included. What’s the problem there? Not 5 minutes later, he asks the same question and answers it by saying how old that writing is, even as old as a couple of hundred years! Wait, I thought being old wasn’t a problem? I don’t think they were in some sort of ‘information age’ by the second or third century yet.

As you may have gathered, I was not convinced. Really, it didn’t change my mind about anything except journalists (what he claims for a day job). I hope they don’t all report like this, but how would you know if they did? Even-handed reporting is not a trivial task, but this is just ridiculous.

There are 5 of these proofs, but I really will only spend any time on 2 of them. The last 3 are, even under his own admission, more convoluted and, to me, even harder to follow than the first (which I’m rejecting anyway). You will recognize the arguments in these proofs by the very common “first cause” argument. Really, I’m throwing the two together, because they’re pretty much the same. He simply uses motion specifically in the first, and more general cause/effect in the second. A brief summary of the argument is this: Things are currently in motion. For something to be in motion, it must be moved by something. That something must, in turn, be moved by something. This logic must continue until you reach a first mover, something that moves things, but is not moved itself. In more general terms, for something to be in effect, it must have a cause. There cannot be an infinite regression of causes, for that would mean there’s no first cause, therefore, there must be a first cause that is uncaused, with the kicker, “– and this all men know as God”.

Well, first of all all men do not know this as God. That’s quite a leap to make, even assuming I accept your logic before, which I don’t.  So I understand what he’s thinking here. Let’s picture a ball in space moving along. For this ball to be moving, something else had to run into it to cause it to move. But that ball was moving already. In order for that to happen, something had to run into that ball, and so on. But this view of the natural world is outdated. Our understanding of the forces at work makes this not nearly as convincing as it was when he wrote it. For example, let’s consider gravity. Two objects, some distance apart, need no prior motion in order to fall together. Gravity acts upon them simply because they exist and nothing more. If the universe consisted of a bunch of static objects, the simple fact that gravity attracts all matter would cause them to move, and once the chain is started, we have no more need for the idea of God as the first cause.

The argument I anticipate at this point is that we haven’t explained where all this stuff came from. Sure, if it popped into existence all still, we can deduce that it would move, but what does it mean to pop into existence? First of all, I think it’s harder to imagine non-existence than people give credit to. What would it mean for nothing to exist? Not that there is a big empty universe (Really, not that. Quantum physics has some great results about how empty space really isn’t empty at all). The empty space wouldn’t exist. Time wouldn’t exist. What does that actually mean? I challenge you to explain it. If there were no existence at all, we couldn’t ask the question “What if nothing existed?”  So why is it so hard to accept an infinite past? To claim that God created everything out of nothing is really just claiming that there is some other plane of existence that we don’t comprehend. It actually solves nothing, because we would just redefine “existence” to that new thing we discovered, and ask the same question.

The other real problem with these kinds of questions is the extremely unintuitive nature of time. Time and space are completely interwoven. We talk about the theory of the big bang, and how everything was scrunched down so small and exploded. But to talk like this conversationally is a little misleading. The fantastic density at this moment just “before” the big bang would have rendered time and space completely meaningless. They would both have been stretched and warped more than any black hole in existence now. And the way that such high gravitational force warps space and time, nothing can escape. This means that absolutely all information is lost once it falls into this gravitational well. Everything. We can’t “look deeper” and glean information from before the big bang.

And here’s my point. What does “infinitely old” really mean when old is just a time-relative term, and time is so dubious? It’s not the flat line extending infinitely into the past and future that it seems to us in our day to day lives. There was no “moment of creation”, because moments can’t mean anything without existence.  We don’t have the tools to comprehend all of the universe, but that’s ok. We make progress all the time. Nothing yet has said that we can’t understand, just that we don’t yet. God isn’t necessary, just convenient. Give us some time: we’ve had a good history of figuring things out.