Part 3 of my series on the new Macmillan reference Theism & Atheism: Opposing Arguments in Philosophy: my discussion of the Argument from Science, which holds that the collective consequence of the advance of the sciences is the substantial reduction in the epistemic probability of theism. I’ll also discuss the other atheist contributions on the subject, and compare all of it with the theists’ entry. (For a description of the entire volume and my role in it see Part 1.)

Science

This volume has a large section on the subject of “Science.” The atheist side spans some thirty pages, tackling such questions as: “Does Science Favor Theism or Atheism?” by Herman Philipse of Utrecht University; “Religious Experience and Neuroscience” by Kenneth Williford of the University of Texas; “Near-Death Experiences Are Not Evidence for Either Atheism or Theism” by Keith Augustine, Editor-in-Chief of Internet Infidels and a leading published expert in that subject; “Arguments Involving Cosmology and Quantum Physics” by Taner Edis of Truman Sate University; and of course my contribution: “The Effect of Scientific Progress and the Science of Religion on the Credibility of Theism” (pp. 588-90).

The chapter as a whole is described as:

A proper assessment of the bearing of scientific inquiry on theistic religion requires recognition that conflict, mutual consistency, independence, or concilience are possible but depends on the methods accepted and the claims made in each domain at particular times and places—which can, and have, varied. This chapter, therefore, focuses on questions relating to whether the best methods, findings, and theories in contemporary scientific disciplines support, cohere with, or conflict with commitments made by theistic theologies

Philipse covers the general point well, establishing three propositions: (1) “scientific progress has caused a gradual theistic retreat…in all domains of science, from cosmology to medicine,” which is more probable if theism is false than if it is true, therefore it is evidence against theism; (2) this same advancement in the sciences has caused a continual decrease in reliance on religious sources of information about humans and the world, which is again more probable if theism is false than true, and thus again evidence against theism; and (3) “many scientific results…make it improbable that theism is true,” which is all again less likely on theism than atheism (e.g., “it is unlikely that God would have created such an inhospitable universe” as cosmically we’ve found ours to be; it’s unlikely we’d have found “all mental phenomena depend on complex brain processes”; it’s unlikely God “would…have created humans by means of biological evolution”; it’s unlikely God “hid himself to humanity during many millennia,” including some 200,000 years, as we now know, of their prehistorical existence; and it’s improbable “that monotheism or theism in the sense defined started to appear quite late in human history” as in fact we now know it did), which is thus all evidence for atheism.

This amounts to in effect what I called the Basic Argument for Naturalism and the Basic Argument to Naturalism as the Best Explanation, which through those links you can find a formal presentation of.

And indeed I take all of that, expand on it, and develop it into a singular argument (p. 588):

Theology has responded by continually “redefining” God or beliefs about God to fit these newly revealed facts [from the sciences]. Nonetheless, the singular fact that theism (in any form, worldwide) never anticipated any of these developments and always has to be changed to accommodate them demonstrates that this evidence has lowered the probability that theism holds true. If that evidence hadn’t been lowering its probability, theism would not have had to continually change to fit what was being revealed. In the logic of probability, the more a theory’s predictions are disconfirmed and, consequently, the more that theory has to be revised with more additions after the fact to fit those disconfirmations, the less likely that theory is to be true (Carrier [Proving History] 2012)—unless evidence is acquired that independently confirms that those ad hoc additions are true. That, however, has never happened in the history of theism.

I then address all attempts at rebutting this observation, in particular claims such as “that scientific progress may have failed to vindicate theism but nevertheless requires a foundation of assumptions dependent on theism”; “that theistic hypotheses are the only ones viable for answering a certain few as yet unanswered questions” (such as in cognitive science and cosmology); and “that theism has occasionally made successful scientific predictions.” All of which I show are never founded on true facts. I then close with a counter-argument:

That religious experience is never scientifically verified to contain any knowledge not already possessed by percipients or the cultures they are influenced by and thus routinely conforms to the ignorance and factually false beliefs of that culture and time further verifies this conclusion. The very evidence needed to verify that a religious experience came from any superhuman source is never to be found outside unverifiable legends and popular tales. This is to be expected in atheism but not in theism, thereby increasing the probable validity of atheism over theism. The authors of the Bible and Qurʾan, for example, despite claiming a channel to the divine, never learned of the immorality of slavery or gender inequality or of the truth of heliocentrism or the germ theory of disease or anything at all remarkable for their time. For all these reasons, the science of religious experience actually supports atheism over theism.

Williford then supports our points by surveying the current state of the science of religious experience, concluding that “a naturalistic explanation that combines neuroscience, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and perhaps evolutionary biology [that] can explain the wide variety of [religious or mystical experiences] seems to be both more parsimonious and more comprehensive” and “is therefore to be preferred, on elementary, well understood, and generally accepted explanatory grounds, to a theistic explanation.” Which I point out is improbable on theism; but exactly what we expect on atheism.

Augustine then extends the same point to “Near Death Experiences.” Although he rightly explains there’s no reason to expect the specific phenomenon of NDEs on theism, so their being naturally explicable is also not evidence for atheism. The true facts of the matter simply argue for neither conclusion. But he nevertheless shows that NDE’s cannot be used as evidence for theism, without embracing false or inaccurate descriptions of the discovered or documented facts. Which you’ll note is a recurring theme.

Edis likewise debunks a lot of mystic and theist myths about cosmology and quantum mechanics, showing there isn’t any god to be found there either. Indeed, he points out, “Religions usually take a top-down view, starting with an irreducible mind to shape the material world from above” whereas “Physicalism, whatever form it takes, supports a bottom-up understanding of the world, where life and mind are the results of complex interactions of fundamentally mindless components,” and “the current state of science, including quantum mechanics, supports chance-and-necessity physicalism.” So the “burden of proof” for theism is now in consequence “very high.” A point I’ve also made before.

The Pope’s Astronomer Weighs In

All of that is preceded by the theists’ section on science, taking up almost as many pages again, entirely written by Guy Consolmagno, Director of the Vatican Observatory. He describes his chapter as describing:

[T]he relation between religion and science, providing an overview of contemporary science and the very nature of scientific knowledge. Predominant methods of science are detailed as well as its proper subject matter and goals, which are essential for addressing questions about whether scientific knowledge seems to support or to conflict with the sacred texts of theism.

Consolmagno’s position is that the advance of all the sciences does not favor theism or atheism. He thus rightly excludes prayer studies and cosmological science and all sorts of religious claims to find evidence of God in science. But he won’t go the next step of course and admit that this is itself evidence against the existence of God. Because he never addresses the strong cases made (which I just summarized above, but are laid out in more detail in my section of this volume) that these scientific results in fact do favor atheism. Instead he only addresses straw men. A common problem with formats like this, where each side is asked to simply write a position paper without seeing the others’, is that it invites the careless to argue against their own imaginary opponents rather than any real ones. And that’s what happens here.

Most of Consolmagno’s chapter is an arduous pile of useless rigmarole. Firstly, about how neither faith nor science produces certainty or finality in knowledge, which could have been covered in just a few sentences rather than several pages. Lastly, about how motivations to advance the sciences can be compatible with theism, which could have been covered in just a few sentences rather than several pages. And in between he goes on page after page about how “three axioms” essential to science only come from religion because ‘some religions advocate them’.

Which is a straight up fallacy. Just try it out: “because some fascists have always advocated these axioms, therefore these axioms come from fascism”; “because some pagans advocated these axioms, therefore these axioms come from paganism.” Etc. Why does this sound like bollocks? Because it’s the fallacy of false generalization: “If some P support Q, then only P support Q.” Wrong. Atheism and the irreligious also support these same axioms. Therefore they no more “come from religion” than rules against theft and murder or the belief that stars are far away.

Consolmagno means “the axioms of the existence of reality, the existence of scientific laws, and the innate value of the scientific enterprise itself.” I demonstrate in The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire that in our Western tradition all three of these axioms derive from pagan and secular Greek philosophy, not from any religion, certainly not the Bible. I also show that Christendom was originally deeply resistant to the third of these axioms (until after a thousand plus years it rediscovered and finally absorbed that pagan value), and remained quite disinterested in the second (doing nothing with it for over a thousand years), and subverted the first with a belief that an imaginary world that doesn’t exist is nevertheless far more important than the one that does, which is hardly a respectable axiom conducive to science. And lo, history proves it wasn’t.

In actual fact, none of these are actually axioms. The first two are empirically verified theories; and the second is a value for pursuing them. And truth is:

  • Pagans came to believe in the existence of a discoverable reality because that theory resulted in a more successful engagement with the world than any contrary thesis. We came to believe it, in other words, because it works. And as ancient philosophers—not the Bible—demonstrated, it would not likely work, if it was not likely true.
  • The same happened with scientific laws: gradually it became clear the universe behaved in such orderly ways that it can be described quantitatively with mathematical relations. The first law of physics humanity discovered was likely the law of the lever, (d1)(W1) = (d2)(W2), discovered shortly after Aristotle, possibly by Archimedes, who likewise himself discovered the law of equilibrium, Wi = Wo — Wd, all before the New Testament even existed—which contains not a single reference to even the concept of a mathematical law of physics, much less the scientific principles needed to discover one, or even the value of doing so. All of those things came from heathen philosophers, who argued to them from evidence and reason, not from religion.
  • And their discovery of those things led many philosophers to sing the praises of pursuing this knowledge, lauding the beauty of curiosity and knowledge for its own sake as well as its many demonstrated practical uses, which value for empirical progress in scientific knowledge of the world Christianity rejected and abandoned for well over a thousand years, and only reacquired by being infected by a literal “renaissance” of dead pagan philosophy.

In Scientist I demonstrate and document all of this.

By contrast, Consolmagno falsely claims “atheism” is agnostic about these values. That’s no more true than that “religion” is agnostic about these values. For every version of atheism that doesn’t adopt them, there is a version of religion that doesn’t adopt them. So there is simply no correlation here. In fact he has reality backwards: atheists don’t adopt these principles because of their atheism; they adopt them because of evidence and reason—hence, regardless of religion. So, too, any religion that adopts them. No religion adopts them “because of” the religion. A religion only incorporates them into itself when reason and evidence compels it to. And the fact that this is how we had to learn these things is evidence against theism. God would just tell us the value of these things. That he didn’t is yet one more way we know there is no God.

But notice that’s just one evidence against theism. One that Consolmagno completely missed and never addresses; because he has a false understanding of history, due to his religion duping him with a fake narrative it invented for itself. Which he gullibly never fact-checks. Because, religion. And on and on it goes. The argument from theistic retreat? He never addresses it. The argument to physicalism as the better explanation? He never addresses it. The argument from the persistent diversity and cultural evolution of religious experience? He never addresses it. The argument from all scriptures’ persistent scientific ignorance? He never addresses it. This is what theism does: ignore reality. And that is why it’s irrational.

Getting History Embarrassingly Wrong

The theists, I suspect, peer reviewed their own sections. I cannot otherwise explain how Consolmagno got so many false statements about history through peer review in this volume. For example, he shockingly says:

Arguably, it was Aristotle [who first thought there were laws of physics to discover and looked for and found some]. But it is interesting that for a thousand years after him no further progress was made in physics.

Holy balls of Batman. He just erased the entire history of ancient science! In his fabricated history, Archimedes never existed. Hero never existed. Ptolemy never did any work in optics or harmonics or mechanics or geography or cartography. Herophilus never launched neurophysiology as a field. Galen never advanced the study of human anatomy, mapping out the correct operation of the renal system or the vocal system. Roman-era controlled drug dosage experiments never happened. Aristarchus and Seleucus never launched the heliocentric school of astronomy and discovered the mathematical system of lunisolar tide theory. And everything else.

In actual fact, continuing advances in the sciences did not stop until the Roman economy collapsed in the third century A.D. and Christianity took over society in the following century, putting an end to scientific progress for a thousand years, East and West. (My book covers the details thoroughly, but for a taste, see my article on The Mythical Stillbirth of Science in Greece.) Consolmagno’s version of history is a naive fiction invented by prior Catholic apologists who didn’t actually study what they made assertions about. They are likely the ones who fed him all the baloney he repeats, such as:

The Romans were great practical engineers; … [but that] is not the same as science, or studying simply for knowledge. The Romans made no progress at all in asking questions of how the natural universe works, much less why it works the way it does.

All false. The Romans extensively praised and pursued knowledge for its own sake and made continual advances in many sciences. This includes even Italians like Seneca and Pliny, as consumers of and dabblers in science. But those weren’t the only Roman citizens under the Roman government doing science.

Consolmagno advances an inadvertently racist view of history, whereby if you weren’t an Italian, you weren’t a Roman, no matter what government you are funded by or citizenship you hold. This is like saying Americans have never advanced the sciences because Einstein and Feynman were actually Jews, and “really” only German and Lithuanian. It’s just as silly to claim Ptolemy and Galen weren’t Roman. Yet so he does:

Indeed, the one name in Roman astronomy who is remembered today, Ptolemy, was actually a Greek living in Egypt, not a Roman. He worked out the motions of the planets with all their epicycles as a mathematical trick to let him cast horoscopes, which is as close as astronomy gets to engineering.

Egypt was as Roman as Texas is American. And Ptolemy was a Roman citizen who was almost certainly a member of a Roman-funded scientific academy and served the Roman government in the production of maps and technologies for its military and trade. So this attempt to “exempt” him and erase him from history is perverse.

It’s equally perverse to use this trick to make it seem as though there weren’t hundreds of other scientists under the Roman empire—only a small fraction of which we have surviving writings from, because medieval Christians were disinterested in preserving hardly any of it. It’s even more perverse to ignore every achievement Ptolemy made, such as experimentally developing the index of refraction we still use today, inventing the system of latitude and longitude and several systems of cartographic projection we still use today, or formulating the first law of planetary motion (“equal angles in equal times,” which Kepler would tweak into “equal areas in equal times”). And just to put a cherry on top, Consolmagno mocks Ptolemy as an astrologer in the same chapter he praises Kepler as the better astronomer—who was also an astrologer!

So we get total crap history here. All in aid of a racist, Catholic-supremacist false narrative Consolmagno apparently needs in order to maintain his faith. Welcome to theism. In the process he gets practically every other detail wrong. As I show in Scientist, Ptolemy did not invent the epicyclic system he used to demonstrate geocentrism; and there were still heliocentrists in his own day he had to argue against (we just don’t get to read them); and Ptolemy advanced the epicyclic system he inherited into a more reliable model that would later crucially inspire Kepler.

In fact it was the great Hellenistic scientist Hipparchus who developed epicyclic geocentrism in the second century B.C. Ptolemy improved on that system with the first known law of planetary motion, which actually made his system observationally superior, far better even than the heliocentric model of Copernicus which was full of arbitrary aesthetic assumptions that proved false. Ptolemy was right, and Copernicus was wrong: planets do move at inconstant velocities, and do not trace perfect circles but follow complex eccentric orbits. Kepler had to go back to Ptolemy to get these advances he needed to make Copernican heliocentrism actually work. And even Kepler did not then discover the principles of universal gravitation his new system made probable; whereas ancient astronomers were already debating theories of universal gravitation in Ptolemy’s day. All of which I show in Scientist.

Moreover, Ptolemy himself said that the epicycles his model uses might not even exist—they were only a device to simplify calculations and ease the construction of mechanical computers to make celestial predictions with. He well knew (and outright says, following Hipparchus who said it himself) that the principles of relative motion entailed that epicyclic motion merely recreates a singular quasi-elliptical motion.

Ironically the only reason Ptolemy gave for even thinking the epicycles real was that surely God, being a great engineer, would make it that way; otherwise, he admitted, we might prefer the simpler variant of direct complete motions that epicycles merely reproduce. Kepler simply took his advice, having a different idea of which model God would think aesthetically “beautiful.” Which turned out to have nothing whatever to do with why the planets moved that way (as Newton would demonstrate a century later). So Kepler and Ptolemy were pretty much indistinguishable in their methods and respective number of scientific advances.

Consolmagno knows none of this. Consequently his image of history is completely incorrect, and thus so are the conclusions he draws from it. And yet here we are. Again and again we see theism depends on such systems of falsehood. That’s why it’s irrational.

It’s False History All the Way Down

It’s only by erasing the entire history of ancient science that Consolmagno can absurdly claim “pagan gods or the physics of Aristotle” stalled science because they produced false certainty. They did neither. In fact the contrary. Pagan “theological certainty” is precisely what the ancient Greek philosophers rejected when they originated empirical science—first with the presocratics, who argued for evidence and reason over myth and theology, then culminating in Aristotle’s formalization of science, which then spawned many subsequent centuries of continuing scientific advance.

And advance it did. Aristotle actually claimed his conclusions might be false and needed to be tested and verified. Consequently, far from Aristotle’s system stalling progress, subsequent scientists got busy questioning and empirically refuting Aristotle. Herophilus proved the mind was located in the brain, not the heart as Aristotle claimed, and even began studying the neurological localization of function; Hipparchus disproved Aristotle’s theory that nothing changes in the heavens by recording the first observation of a supernova; Archimedes proved lightness and heaviness were relative properties caused by projecting forces, and not innate elemental properties; Hero proved circular motion was no more natural than rectilinear and that the only thing that actually made a vacuum difficult to create was air pressure, which increased and decreased with temperature. Even Seneca made observations confirming the post-Aristotelian theory that, contra Aristotle, comets were not atmospheric phenomena but distant planets in wide eccentric orbits; and he explained why geocentrism was not a settled conclusion against heliocentrism and that only some future discovery could tell the difference between them.

Consolmagno repeats many other bogus myths. “Where did science get started?” He asks; then answers, “The medieval universities for the first time had the magic combination.” Wrong. No actual scientific advance ever occurred in a medieval university. In fact they stood in the way of scientific advance with an ardent dogmatism and antiquarianism that scientists continually argued against and had to work outside of to bypass.

Only by the late 1500s, well after the Middle Ages had ended, did some universities at least employ as teachers some scientists making real advances on their own time; but even then the university system was avoided or came in for criticism by those very scientists as not particularly conducive to making advances (just look at he writings of Vesalius, Gilbert, Galileo, Harvey, Boyle). Separate institutes eventually had to be created to bypass the universities and finally push for scientific progress as an actual agenda, like the Royal Society, the Académie des Sciences, and the short-lived Academia dei Lincei, none of which had university support. Universities only really came around to supporting scientific progress after that. Likewise the Vatican.

More real science was done in ancient universities than in their medieval counterparts. In fact, as I demonstrate in Scientist, the methods that were taken back up in the Scientific Revolution and ultimately defined it did not originate in universities at all, but were already invented and used in pagan antiquity. And what the Scientific Revolution did was merely complete a course toward refining those methods that was already being recommended by the last ancient scientists, like Galen, Hero, and Ptolemy. Had it not been for the Christian Middle Ages stalling all such advances, we would not have had to wait a thousand years for someone to listen to them and actually begin what likely would otherwise have soon followed them. Meanwhile, when it came to real empirical scientific research, the ancient Greeks and Romans had already “decided that it was worth doing.”

This is the truth of what happened. Consolmagno’s narrative is a lie. A lie he gullibly believes. Because he never checked if it was true. Because, religion.

Consolmagno likewise doesn’t know that even the speculations he lists as innovations (which are not really science, just creative philosophy) actually all originated in the ancient world and were merely rediscovered in the Renaissance (not, really, the Middle Ages). A rudimentary impetus theory, and the theory that stars were distant suns with planets and civilizations, for example, were developed by Hellenistic Epicurean atomists and their Aristotelian sympathizers like perhaps Strato and Menelaus. They likewise correctly surmised the “elements” of which stars and everything else were made were not four in number but much more numerous, actually being defined by the shape and structure of the atoms comprising them. And many more things they guessed right as well. Far more things than the Medievals did. Until they rediscovered the Epicureans in the Renaissance and borrowed their ideas back into popularity! And that was just philosophy, not even science—but neither were the same Medieval musings Consolmagno lists. None of which he can credit to Christianity. The pagans were always better at it. Whereas Christians didn’t even do it until finally borrowing the idea from pagans.

Conclusion

Consolmagno does not actually address the question posed him at all. He asserts scientific advances have had no effect on the epistemic probability of theism. But he never addresses the many potent arguments to the contrary, which the atheist section summarizes. And the only argument he makes that even attempts to come close to saying anything relevant—that the existence of science today is more probable if theism is true—he rests on completely false premises about what happened in human history, replacing the truth with a bigoted and fictional Catholic propaganda narrative.

Consequently, like many a theist, Consolmagno never discovers the truth: that the only reason science exists today was because some pagan philosophers once noticed, and then decided to argue, that only reason and evidence, independent of all theology, is a valid and worthwhile way to learn the truth about reality. Which fact, as well as that it came from no religion, and that it came tens of thousands of years after religions even began, combined with the subsequent retreat of theism with every era of resulting advance, and the continually growing support for physicalism that has likewise resulted, is simply far less likely if theism were true. Therefore the advance of the sciences affords considerable evidence for atheism. And Consolmagno makes no relevant argument to the contrary.

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