Critique "The Language of God" Chapter 2 by Francis Collins:
The War of the Worldviews
Page 34: "Doubt ... If the case in favour
of belief in God were utterly airtight, then the world would be full of
confident
practitioners of a single faith. But imagine such a world, where the
opportunity to make free choices about belief was
taken away by the certainty of the evidence. How interesting would that
be?
Interesting aside. Isn't this, a single faith, the objective of most particular religions?
Page 36, 37: "It transports the scientist
into an experience that defies a completely naturalistic explanation. ...
Or is this, like Moral Law described in the preceding chapter, an inkling of
what lies beyond, a signpost placed deep
within the human spirit pointing toward something much grander than ourselves?
The atheist view is that such longings are not to be trusted as indications of
the supernatural, ..."
These feelings are brain phenomenon. Awe, wonder, joy, love,
astonishment, inspiration, thrill, meaningfulness, zeal, happiness, jealousy,
anger,
sadness, fear and other intense
feelings are natural human emotions and emotions happen in the brain. All
atheists that I know trust these feelings.
There
is a lot of neurological evidence that they are brain caused and there is no evidence that they have anything to do with a realm beyond the
natural.
Regarding intense religious experience: Many people, religious (no
matter their religion) and non-religious experience these intense events, some
more than others.
This experience says nothing about the truth of a religion or the truth of a God
or the truth of the supernatural. There is no evidence that a person's God is anything other than local
and personal, and this God dies when the brain dies.
Prayer is privately talking to this personal God -
like talking to yourself. This talking to yourself can potentially be
helpful in resolving some issues in a person's life.
On the other hand Public prayer is simply propaganda.
The danger in a God-belief comes when a person assumes his personal, internal God
of his brain is the creator
of the universe and that everyone should know about it.
Also check Searching for God in the Brain in the Scientific American: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa017&articleID=434D7C62-E7F2-99DF-37CC9814533B90D7&sc=WR_20071016
A quote in the Vancouver Sun a few years ago by Mr. Unger who is an x-Moonie: "a nothing experience can be very intense".
Page 37: ... would likely give rise to a very different kind of God than the one described in the Bible. ... and are potentially eternally separated from the author of the Law."
Mr. Collins seems to think highly of the God of the
Bible. You wonder if he ever really studied the Bible or is he getting his
information second-hand from C. S. Lewis.
If you study the Bible closely you find that the God of the Old Testament Bible
is a very mean God and becomes even meaner in the New Testament
where anyone that does not believe Jesus is God (Jesus who is believed to be the God of the OT) is
condemned to eternal suffering in Hell (well described in the NT) - not a nice
God, not a moral God. Good thing that we do not as a civilization follow the
morals of the Bible.
Good thing that our laws are not based on the laws of the
Bible.
Good thing that believing people's idea of their God is
quite different than the God of the Bible. Each God believing person has a
God that differs somewhat
from other members of his congregational group and differs from the God of people outside his
group. Some choose to attend to only the few good verses in the
Bible
There appear to be as many personal Gods as there are God believers.
Page 38: "Why do we have a "God-shaped vacuum" in our hearts and minds unless it is meant to be filled?"
To many people "God-shaped vacuum" has no meaning. What is meant by these words?
Page 38: Harm done in the name of religion:
Page 41: ... even to present-day violent attacks such as that of September 11,
2001, created the unfortunate impression that Islam is necessarily
violent."
If you look at the Quran, the Muslim holy book, a
Muslim that believes literally in the Quran and the hadith (vast a majority
of Muslims do) believes in violence.
An example: "Believers make war on
the infidels who dwell around you. Deal firmly with them. Know that
God is with the righteous. (Koran 9:123)
From the hadith which is the literature recounting the sayings and actions of
the Prophet:
"Jihad is your duty under any ruler, be he
godly or wicked."
"A single endeavour (of fighting) in Allah's cause in the forenoon or in
the afternoon is better than the world and whatever is in it."
"A day and a night fighting on the frontier is better than a month of
fasting and prayer."
"Nobody who dies and finds good from Allah (in the Hereafter) would wish to
come back to this world even if he were given the whole world and whatever is in
it,
except the martyr who, on seeing the superiority of martyrdom would
like to come back to the world and get killed again (in Allah's cause)."
" He who dies without having taken part in a campaign dies in a kind of
unbelief."
"Paradise is in the shadow of swords."
From "The End of Faith" by Sam Harris
Page 42: Why would a Loving God allow Suffering in
the World?
Page 43: "If God were good, he would wish to make creatures perfectly
happy, and if God were almighty, he would be able to do what he wishes....
Therefore, God lacks either goodness or power or both."
Right on!
Some Examples of evil in God's creation:
(1) suffering,
pain, and death in animals. An animals feel terror, fear,
pain.
Other animals have the same neurons and the same brain structures as the human
animal.
Also see page 45 below.
(2) diseases caused
by bacteria, viruses, genetics, old age, etc., etc.
Millions of good, evil, and innocent people (men, women, children, babies,
fetuses)
suffer intensely and for a torturous duration and die because of these.
Cancer, when seen under a microscope is very beautiful - a work of beauty
in appearance.
(3) natural disasters
- earthquakes, tsunami, tornadoes, hurricanes, plague, draughts.
Devastations that result in ideal conditions for disease because of lack of
healthy
water supplies. Why in a world for which God is ultimately responsible are there
natural disasters that kill millions of innocent people?
(4) hell. The
Christian God (Jesus) continually sends most of the people to an
endless hell of torment and agony because they do not claim Jesus is God.
The Muslim and other gods also send unbelievers to a Hell.
If more than 1 of these religions is true then it must be that everyone goes to this bad place.
You would think an all-knowing God would be able to create a world where
animals don't have to live by eating each other just to survive. The
animal creation is
"red in tooth and claw" -- blood and horror for the innocent victims.
The above evidence suggests very strongly that there is no loving God.
Mankind, obviously does not have a special place in God's creation to
suffer the above. If, as some say, God is incapable of evil, he is neither
moral, immoral; he is amoral. So God is an unnecessary entity in a
discussion
of morality.
Page 43: "After all, we have somehow been
given free will, the ability to do as we will. We use this ability
frequently to disobey
the Moral Law. And when we do so, we shouldn't then blame God for the
consequences."
Everything and anything can be investigated with science,
including the supernatural, and also this topic of free will.
I did some research on the topic of free will a few years ago and found the
following. Also, about a year ago the Scientific American had an article on it.
Repeating and extending part of an earlier comment:
Brain research has shown that it takes about a third of a second for a person
to become aware of an event, thought, emotion, etc. Many bodily activities,
speech, thought processes, decision making, imaginings require less than this
time for sensory input (if needed) and to react to it.
It has been found that brain activity becomes intense during this third of a second, after which we, our conscious mind, become aware of the bodily activity, words, thoughts, decisions, and opinions that come from the unconscious part of our brain.
In other words these things have already been formed in the unconscious,
before they suddenly "pop" into our head and we become aware of them.
The physical changes in your body due to an emotion, for instance are happening
before you realize you are emotional.
Example: Anger. Your body is already changing for anger before you know you are
angry.
It looks like the conscious "I" is not the origin of these things, but
is only a receiver of these things; after they have been produced by the
unconscious part of the brain.
Speech, thoughts, decisions, imaginings, emotions, feelings freely come to our
conscious mind already formed in the unconscious.
It makes things like speech, thoughts and imaginings seem automatic.
The question of free-will arises here. Is conscious free will a sham?
Is there such a thing as unconscious free-will?
Does free-will really reside only in the unconscious and that the conscious part
of us is pre-determined?
Another fact: The unconscious can multitask, whereas the conscious can only work on a single task at a time, sometimes alternating tasks in quick succession.
A good way of summarizing this is done by Cordelia Fine in the book "a mind of its own" in the simple example of tapping a finger:
(1) Unconscious Mind: {to
waiting neurons} Tell Conscious Mind to think "tap finger". And
get that finger up.
then Conscious Mind:
I'll tap my finger ...
(2) But according to the research the Conscious mind could cancel this
directive:
the Conscious Mind can react to this as
follows: I'll tap my finger ...oh, hang on. Actually I won't.
Finger remains still.
Actually it seems the following occurs:
Unconscious Mind: {to waiting neurons}
Tell Conscious Mind to think "tap finger". And get that finger
up.
Conscious Mind: I'll
tap my finger ...
Unconscious Mind: Change of
plan. Put the brakes on that finger. And don't forget to tell
Conscious Mind to change its mind.
Conscious Mind: Oh, hang on.
Actually, I won't tap my finger.
Finger remains still.
So where is free will?
Of course, we can still act as if we have free will.
Some speculations:
Did the evolution of our 4 times as large mammalian brain compared to the
ape's concentrate mostly on the development of the more important unconscious
part and the conscious part was just there, kind of a side phenomenon?
Brains of other organisms are structured much like the human mammal's brain. It would follow that they would also have this important part of the brain, the unconscious. Do they also have this veneer of consciousness that we have, but this consciousness has to depend on a smaller, less able unconscious part; so that is this the reason these organisms do not have the degree of abilities as the human species?
Page 45: " The consequences of that can include
the unpredictability of weather, the slippage of a tectonic plate, or
the misspelling of a cancer gene in the normal process of cell division. If at
the beginning of time God chose to use these
factors to create human beings, then the inevitability of these other painful
consequences was also assured?"
The answer is No. Isn't God all powerful, therefore couldn't He have
made the Universe anyway he liked.
He could have avoided all these consequences, but he didn't.
Page 45: "... whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of the day, 'a good time was had by all.' "
Why be so drastic? Why create such overwhelming suffering?
I would like to quote a passage from the book "Farewell to God, My reasons
for rejecting the Christian faith" by Charles Templeton.
Mr. Templeton is a former evangelist/preacher who lost Faith in Faith and the
existence of a personal God.
He was a fellow evangelist and close friend to Billy Graham.
The book's ISBN number is: 0-7710-8422-6. I consider his 2 chapters on Evil and
Good as his best.
On page 197 he talks about suffering in the animal world (I am skipping a lot
here, but you will get the idea).
===============================
"The pervasiveness of pain and suffering and death is equally horrific in
the animal world. It is a world pervaded by - based on - suffering and death.
According to the first chapter of Genesis, before God made man he created
animals: the great and lesser beasts, the birds, the reptiles, the fish,
and "all manner of creeping things." They are all in different,
degrees sensate creatures. They manifest fear, they feel pain, they suffer and
die.
Their life and death is part of what has been called nature's grand design.
This being so, one is bound to ask why the loving God found it necessary to base
the sustaining of the life of so many of his creatures on killing and
devouring?
Surely it would not be beyond the competence of an omniscient deity to create an
animal world that could be sustained and perpetuated without suffering and
death.
Why does God's grand design require creatures with teeth designed to crush
spines or rend flesh, claws fashioned to seize and tear,
venom to paralyze, mouths to suck blood, coils to constrict and smother - even
expandable jaws so that prey may be swallowed whole and alive?
On land: the big cats kill zebras or wildebeest or impala or any creature they
can bring down. ...
Grizzly bears kill salmon, skinning them while still alive. (Etc., etc. etc.)
...
On and on, day and night, the maiming, killing, and the devouring continues,
with all the omnivorous (us included) or predatory creatures "doing what
comes naturally."
The grim and inescapable reality is that all life is predicated on death. Every
carnivorous creature must kill and devour another creature.... It has no
option.
Herbivorous creatures must devour vegetation.
Ingest some living thing or die of starvation.
Unless you are a vegetarian, you are alive because a steer or lamb or pig or
calf or chicken was butchered and brought to market. In one large (North
American) city 12,500 cattle, 8,000 pigs, 2,700 sheep, and 50,000 chickens are
slaughtered EVERY day so that we omnivorous humans may live. ….
Nor is mercy admitted to the occasion. When animals kill, as often as not the
victim's death is painful and protracted. ...
The predators - at whatever level and whatever their method of killing -- are
not evil; they are doing what they are born to do.
It is the way the world works, and has been across millions of years as animals,
including humans have perpetuated themselves by eating one another.
Nature is, as Tennyson's vivid phrase, "red in tooth and claw," and
life is a carnival of blood.
.... Etc. etc.
(His conclusion:)
How could a loving and omnipotent God create such horrors, as we have been
contemplating?
Jesus said: "Are not five sparrows sold for a penny, and not one is
forgotten before God; and are you not more value than many sparrows?"
But if God grieves over the death of one sparrow, how could even his eternal
spirit bear the sickness, suffering, and death of the multiplied millions
of men, women, children, animals, birds, and other sensate creatures, in every
part of the world, in every century since time began?
Especially when he would know that it all stems from his creativity!
The inescapable answer is that "a loving God" could not possibly be
the author of the horrors we have been describing -- horrors that
continue every day, have continued since time began, and will continue as long
as life exists. It is an inconceivable tale of suffering and death, and
because the tale is fact - is, in truth, the history of the world - it is
obvious that there cannot be a loving God."
The End of excerpt.
Dr. Collins is weak on the topic of suffering. It is interesting how
some religious people approach suffering:
Click My
Critical Analysis of RBC Ministry's tract on Suffering
Page 46: "Most
important decisions we are to make on this earth is (1) Decision about belief,
... (2) relationship with God, ...
(3) not limited to what we know and observe during our lifetime, then sufferings
take on a wholly new context."
On (1) Why? On (2) What if
there is no reliable evidence for an external God?
On (3) Ask yourself:
How far would science develop if supernatural causes (e.g. God, gods,
miracles,
holy ghost, evil spirits, heaven, hell, angels, long dead deities) were
acceptable
in explaining processes? The death of science would follow soon
thereafter.
Page 47: " ... growth through suffering ..." "Buddha - Life is suffering"
May be true but only for a very, very small part of our
lives and others.
The process of evolution creates a tremendous amount of suffering.
This is not good for an overwhelming majority of individual humans and other organisms.
An almighty God could have created
a universe where evolution was unnecessary.
But as things are, to understand suffering and decrease it you must
understand evolution.
To me evolution is evidence that there is no external God, especially not one
that is concerned about the individual.
Page 47: How can a rational person believe in
miracles?
Page 48: "All religions include a belief in certain miracles. The
crossing of the Israelites through the Red Sea, led by Moses and
accompanied by the drowning of Pharaoh's men, is a powerful story, told in the
book of Exodus, of God's providence in preventing
the imminent destruction of His people. Similarly , when Joshua ..."
The digs of archeologists and Orthodox Jews, Israel
Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman showed the Exodus never happened.
In crucial digs in Israel, Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon found the wandering of the
Patriarchs, the Exodus from Egypt, Joshua's conquest
of Canaan never happened and that David and Solomon's vast empire was just
puny.
Abraham, Moses, Joshua never even existed.
Sadly to the authors, (according to these anthropologists) the scientific evidence
overwhelmingly agrees with this.
All these people and events were not miraculous revelations, but a brilliant product of the human
imagination, according to the authors.
Their book "The Bible Unearthed, archeology's new vision of ancient Israel
and the origins of its sacred texts" is naturally " slammed
as heretical by religious Muslims, Jews and Christian even though the
evidence is all there.
Not an example of a miracle as mentioned by Dr.
Collins.
Page 48: "In Islam, the writing of the
Quran was started ...of Muhammad provided supernaturally by the angel Jibril."
Claims by the Quran (and the Bible) about miracles does
not mean they happened. If these claims by the Quran are true, is not the
rest
of the Quran the TRUTH?
Page 48: "... Christ's rising from the dead."
There is a lot of doubt about what supposedly happened in
the resurrection of Jesus.
What follows is a challenge.
Check it out to find out for yourself by taking the challenge. You will be
surprised:
In each of the 4 Gospels, begin at Easter
morning and read to the end of the book: Matthew 28, Mark 16, Luke 24 and John
20-21. Also read
Acts 1:3 - 12 and Paul's tiny version of the story in 1 Corinthians 15:3 -
8. These 165 verses can be read in a few moments.
Then, without omitting a single detail from these separate accounts, write a
simple, chronological narrative of the events between the resurrection and
the ascension: what happens first, second, and so on; who said what; when;
and where these things happened.
Since the gospels do not always give precise times
of day, it is permissible to make educated guesses. The narrative does not
have to pretend to present a perfect picture -
it only needs to give at least one plausible account of all of the facts.
Additional explanation of the narrative may be set apart in parenthesis.
The important condition to the challenge, however, is that not one single
biblical detail be omitted.
This is a little like doing a Puzzle Geocache.
This strongly indicates that the resurrection was a figment of imagination.
Page 51: " ... miraculous cancer cures ..."
Spontaneous remission happens naturally at quite a
regular rate. Not a miracle in the sense of the supernatural.
Mr. Collins is correct when he says we must always search for a natural cause in
science.
The essential characteristics of Science are quite different from those
of Religion.
The essential characteristics of science are:
(1) It is guided by natural law.
(2) It has to be explanatory by reference to natural law.
(3) It is testable against the empirical world.
(4) Its conclusions are tentative, -- are not necessarily the final word.
(5) It is falsifiable
.This makes science so powerful and successful, and so different from all other ways of gaining knowledge of reality.
Compare these characteristics with the characteristics of
religion such as the many variety of Creationism, including Intelligent Design
(ID) which depend on a supernatural realm.
To find aspects of the supernatural and supernatural entities using science has
failed, so the supernatural isn't a part of the methods of science anymore.
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