PragerU claims in multiple conservative propaganda videos that science has proved God exists and atheists should just go stuff it already. I’ll tackle this nonsense today—just to be useful, since most of PragerU’s critiques online target its lies, fallacies, and distortions about history and politics. Which is great. But I feel like the God thing is a bit neglected. Remedy herein.

Background

Prager University, or just PragerU, is of course not a university. It’s an internet propaganda mill for a crazy person. This has been systematically demonstrated many times. Its Media Bias Fact Check concludes PragerU scores “low” on reliability as a source, owing to its “extreme right wing bias, promotion of propaganda, the use of poor sources who have failed fact checks and the publication of misleading information.” Parker Molloy has provided a link-filled analysis of how “PragerU relies on a veneer of respectability to obscure its propagandist mission” at Media Matters for America, surveying its sleazy methodology and mission. The Southern Poverty Law Center has analyzed how PragerU channels its viewers toward reactionary extremism in its own article on PragerU’s Influence. The blogger Fuck That has composed a good summary of its manipulative practices and extremist viewpoint in Doublespeak: Prager University, a Propaganda Machine. Know The System collects informed critiques of many of PragerU’s videos, illustrating how it’s far more educational to read those than to listen to PragerU videos. It’s so far out there even many conservatives have trashed its methods and mission.

For quick video analyses of some good examples of all these points, see Shaun’s videos How PragerU Lies to You (30 mins), How PragerU Lies to You: The British Empire (20 mins) and How PragerU Lies to You: Charlottesville (15 mins).

So, yeah, PragerU is a bullshit source with near zero reliability.

How does it do in making its brilliant new case for belief in God?

Science for God?

PragerU has a lot of propaganda videos pushing theism. Indeed, ultra-conservative theism, with such terribly important videos like Why Is God a He? and Do Not Misuse God’s Name and I Am the Lord Your God. Likewise such genius video clips as No Other Gods and If There Is No God, Murder Isn’t Wrong (which is wrong) and Is There Life After This Life? (no, there isn’t) and The Ten Commandments: What You Should Know (what you should know is this). It also offers rambling collections of stock apologetic canards like God and Suffering and illogical, scientifically illiterate shambles like God vs. Atheism: Which Is More Rational?

There’s even a Biblical supremacist video by Ben Shapiro (Why Has the West Been So Successful?) in which almost everything he says about religion is false. Just contrast his bullshit religious propaganda with actual fact–based information in No, Tom Holland, It Wasn’t Christian Values That Saved the West, That Christian Nation Nonsense, Christians Did Not Invent Charity and Philanthropy, The Mythical Stillbirth of Science in Greece, Yes the Dark Ages Really Were a Thing, The Ancient Romans Essentially Did Have Universities, and Ancient Industrial Machinery & Modern Christian Mythology, just for starters.

But topping all this off is the PragerU video Does Science Argue for or against God? by the “merely Christian” nonscientist Eric Metaxas. (Qualifications? B.A. in English. For real.) Echoing his inept Wall Street Journal op-ed, this five-minute video’s description tells us:

Why are we here? Literally. The latest science says we shouldn’t be. It says that the chance life exists at all is less than zero. So, is science the greatest threat to the idea of Intelligent Design or is science its greatest advocate? Best-selling author and lecturer, Eric Metaxas, poses this intriguing question and comes up with a very unexpected and challenging answer.

This is weird wording from a YouTube channel pretending to be an academic collection of “the best ideas from the best minds.” I think the best minds would know it is literally logically impossible to have a “chance” that is “less than zero.” I also would hope their “best minds” would know the difference between “science” as the international body of qualified, published scientists (who are not the “greatest advocate” for Intelligent Design but almost uniformly condemn it, and have never said “the chance life exists at all is less than zero”), and a selection of scientific findings cherry-picked and misrepresented not by scientists, but by theologians, to push a pseudoscientific agenda. And of course, the answer that this completely unqualified Mr. Metaxas comes up with is not at all “unexpected” or “challenging,” coming from an extremist theistic propaganda mill. It is, rather, completely expected; even droll.

The video warrants a face palm right out of the gate for citing the 1966 cover issue of Time magazine asking “Is God Dead?” as somehow signaling society’s abandonment of God. In fact that issue was actually about a movement in theology itself to redefine God non-supernaturally to better fit what had in fact become a secular world; and that Time article did not conclude that that movement had prevailed. It was, rather, quite openly about that movement being so novel and fringe. But hack apologists love to keep citing it as some sort of “premature” judgment call by…someone (in fact, it was theologians).

The further implication being that since that issue was published in 1966, some sort of new scientific discoveries have changed their conclusion. They have not. The God-as-metaphor movement has since grown and now claims a sizable chunk of liberal theologians and churches. Indeed, as many as one in four theistic philosophers may have already embraced it, given that 25% of them favor naturalism over supernaturalism; and so many pastors and professors of theology have gone that way now as to evoke concerns of scandal: see my observations of the recent Future of God Seminar. Christian atheism is also now a thing, catching up where cultural Judaism had already been standing for decades; and as we know, atheism has been on a steep rise in the Western world since 1966. And, of course, there have been zero new scientific discoveries increasing the likelihood of God (despite PragerU claiming otherwise, as we’ll see).

So how will this undergraduate English major prove otherwise in just five minutes? Is it even worth getting the popcorn to find out? “The best arguments” for God’s existence come “from science itself,” Mr. Metaxas tells us. His first “evidence” is the failure of SETI to find alien civilizations. This argument is hosed from top to bottom, confusing different variables with each other, misunderstanding all the science, and getting the logic exactly backwards. It’s almost a master class in science illiteracy; unfortunately a sad example of English majors really sucking at basic math and science.

First, Metaxas quotes Carl Sagan’s past optimism about SETI as somehow indicating its subsequent failure is a scientific “discovery,” but in fact most scientists did not share his optimism—and not because of theism, but chemistry (we’ll get back to that shortly). Metaxas thus falsely equates Sagan’s unusual opinion with “scientists” in general. Secondly, he keeps confusing “life” with “observable intelligent life” throughout his argument. The SETI program Sagan promoted (which was begun by Frank Drake years before, not Sagan; another bit of inaccuracy in this PragerU video) was only a search for extraterrestrial intelligence (that’s the “I” in SETI), not “life.” Most life, as even Sagan well knew, won’t have developed into advanced civilizations, and is exceedingly difficult if not impossible to detect from earth (see Rare Earth for explication of this point). So SETI “not having found any” is not a “scientific discovery” regarding the rareness of life.

Third, Mr. Metaxas confuses Sagan’s estimate of habitable planets with a claim about life actually arising on them, which is not what Sagan said. It’s well known that Sagan concluded that N in the Drake Equation (which signifies someone’s estimate of the number of alien civilizations in the visible universe that could still be observable to us) could be as high as a million (whereas most scientists believed it would be much lower). Instead, Metaxas quotes Sagan’s estimate of a completely different variable in the Drake Equation, n_e (the number of planets per solar system that are suitable for life), which is not even the variable f_l (the fraction of such planets that actually spawn life), much less f_t (the fraction of planets with intelligent life that produce technologically capable life, such as would then have been visible to the SETI program Sagan sponsored), or L (how long such civilizations survive—or, perhaps more accurately, continue to radiate detectable signals into space). Thus Metaxas falsely implies Sagan predicted a “septillion” planets will have developed life. No. He estimated a septillion planets would be habitable to life; but only a million might have advanced enough to be radiating signals in a time period we would observe. He was wrong. But many scientists predicted he would be. In fact, on present scientific observations, there Could Be a 38% Chance We Are the Only Civilization in the Known Universe.

Fourth, this doesn’t support the existence of God. It is rather an argument against God. It’s called The Argument from Scale, demonstrating that the universe is as inhospitable to life as any universe can be and yet still be observed. Yet it’s so extraordinarily huge and old as to ensure such extraordinarily rare accidents will occur in it (such as we observe ourselves to be). Which is exactly what atheism predicts (it is, in fact, the only way we can exist without there being a god), but not at all what theism predicts—unless you “gerrymander” theism with a bunch of bizarre, ad hoc assumptions about how a god would behave that make no sense for a rational creator; which only reduces, not increases the probability of that God. Whereas no ad hoc assumptions are needed for atheism. Observation perfectly matches atheism without any adjustment. Hence the observed rarity of cosmic civilizations is not because “God,” but because of the absence of God (see Why Life Must Be Complex (and Thus Probably Won’t Be on Mars)).

Finally, Metaxas confuses this number of habitable planets with “spectacular odds” favoring life. He would have to be assuming life always arises anywhere it could survive, like some sort of inevitable magic—which Sagan did unrealistically imagine, but most scientists were skeptical of. In fact, such a thing would sooner be what we expect if God designed the universe for life. That we don’t observe this is therefore, as I noted, fairly strong evidence God did not design the universe for life. And, again, most scientists disagreed with Sagan here. They well knew it should in fact be chemically rare for life to arise on a habitable planet, simply due to the fact that the random accident required has some very low probability (Frank Salisbury had already made this point in 1969, albeit with math that was inaccurate at the time, but nevertheless illustrated the point). And planets only remain habitable for a relatively short time. Most such planets—most by far—will thus come and go before ever winning that lottery.

And that is exactly what atheism predicts: since only an extraordinary accident can spontaneously assemble any self-replicator, atheism predicts life will arise on habitable planets only extraordinarily rarely (and will arise never on uninhabitable planets, of which by far most are). And therefore, if there is no God, life like us will only find itself in extraordinarily large and old universes, because only in those will such rare events likely ever happen by chance (as in, without God). Lo and behold, this is exactly what we observe: a universe (a) that is vastly large and old, (b) in which only extraordinary accidents can produce life, (c) that is almost entirely uninhabitable, and (d) wherein anyplace that is habitable is still almost always uninhabited. God cannot actually explain this. This is actually quite the contrary of what we’d expect if God built this universe to produce life. Indeed, even more so, as God would not be limited to physics and chemistry to build universes—as Neil Sinhababu demonstrated in 2017 in “Divine Fine-Tuning vs. Electrons in Love,” American Philosophical Quarterly 54.1 (2017). Only godless universes must be built that way.

Moreover, since it is not a given that any life, once generated, will evolve into a radio-signal-generating species before the planet it inhabits is destroyed or otherwise becomes uninhabitable again (as inevitably all planets will), most planets with life—most by far—won’t have become visible to Sagan’s SETI program (and the survival rate of advanced civilizations was something Sagan was pessimistic about). Thus, the number of “habitable planets” does not grant “spectacular odds” to SETI finding an advanced civilization by now. Those odds depend on several other variables—most significantly, the probability of spontaneous accidental assembly of a self-replicator on a single planet within a narrow window (of only a few billion years) with only a very limited amount of material being mixed to even have a chance at it.

After all, the amount of chemicals interacting per planet so as to even have a chance at this is astronomically small compared to the amount of material in the universe occupied to entirely other ends. And that’s mainstream science. The smallest self-replicators known so far have a probability of spontaneous assembly of no more than 1 in 10^41, which is a 1 followed by forty one zeroes! The universe just so happens to be so extraordinarily large and old that events of such improbability can be expected to happen in it millions and millions of times. Indeed, even creationist William Dembski admits random events to an improbability of even 1 in 10^150 can be expected to happen in a universe of ours’ size without any intelligent meddling, which means the probability is all but 100% that over 1 in 10^100 events of an improbability of 1 in 10^41 will have happened by now—by chance alone. That’s how big and ancient our universe is. See my peer reviewed article on this in Biology & Philosophy.

Of course, most such extraordinary events will not be the arising of life, but random other things of no particular importance to us. But we have no evidence that life, somewhere, would not be one of them; only, at most, evidence that it will not be common. Thus, in conjunction with known science, atheism already predicts life will be so rare in the cosmos as to not likely produce any other visible civilizations within our lifetime. And that does not argue for, but against the existence of any life-interested God. It is, again, only what we always expect to observe if there is no such God.

Metaxas then pulls a total face-palm around minute 1:30 when he claims that not having observed an ETI by now means there are not only zero such things in the universe (a non sequitur; we’ve only been looking for a tiny while, and can fully expect to miss most examples of it), but “zero, followed by an infinite number of zeroes.” No, Mr. Metaxas. It’s just one zero. Adding an infinite number of zeroes doesn’t change the result. It’s still just zero. This isn’t Elementary school. (“Sooo many zeroes! That’s more zeroes than you can even imagine! Gosh wowy! That’s a lot of zero!”) And of course, “haven’t observed any” is still not “there aren’t any.” Metaxas then goes on to claim that subsequently to SETI’s failure “it became clear there were far more factors necessary for life.” Which looks a little bit like lying. Sagan himself already was aware there were “other factors” (he wrote about them himself, in Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence in 1975, publishing his take on a scientific conference on the subject back in 1971), as did all other scientists of the time, including the majority who did not share Sagan’s optimism—like Salisbury.

Hence this was not a “subsequent discovery.” It was already well-known even in 1966, the very year a conference of scientists assembled at the behest of the Wistar institute concluded on the basis of the required chemistry that the probability of a spontaneous origin of life was unknown. A debate recorded there between Murray Eden and C.H. Waddington illustrated the state of science at the time: Eden argued a chemico-mathematical reason to assess the probability of biogenesis as astronomically low; Waddington pointed out that Eden’s mathematical assumptions were flawed, but did not disagree with Eden’s overall point. Waddington, and the panel observing, more or less ended with a conceded uncertainty as to what that probability must be, though agreed that whatever it was, it did have to take the chemistry into account.

Thus the improbability and thus rarity of self-replicator assembly on habitable planets was already known to be small enough that it had to be taken into account. In fact, it’s right there in the very Drake equation Sagan himself cited, which was constructed before 1966. And as we just saw, it was already then known that that frequency might be low, and that we didn’t yet know how low it must be. Sagan was unusually optimistic; most of his colleagues were not. Hence that he turned out to be wrong was no surprise. Most scientists already anticipated that that’s exactly what we’d discover. Thus when Metaxas cites the 2006 article by Peter Shenkel in Skeptical Inquirer (SETI Requires a Skeptical Reappraisal), that wasn’t some surprising shot across the bow of consensus. It was basically just reaffirming what most scientists had always thought. That’s why SETI always struggled to find funding, and only a very low level of funding for it has ever been agreed warranted. The program is important (we don’t want to miss an obvious signal), but not that important (even most scientists agree there probably aren’t any detectable signals).

Metaxas then goes on to claim there are over 200 parameters that must be “perfectly met” for a planet to sustain life. This does not come from any peer reviewed science. It’s just an assertion by the astronomer and Christian apologist Hugh Ross, who couldn’t get that claim published in any real science journal, because it’s mostly bullshit—for instance, his list confuses parameters earth life has adapted to with parameters any life could arise in and adapt to; it includes parameters that already include most planets anyway; it double-counts parameters by ignoring the mutual interdependence of parameters; and so on. In actual fact, once we set the viable planets-and-moons parameter (those in habitable zones of their respective galaxies and solar systems), we end up with vast numbers of viable worlds; after that point, only very few parameters are scientifically necessary. Because most just increase the odds of life forming on a planet, which is not the same thing as being necessary. And no parameter must be “perfectly met.”

Unlike in 1966, we now know life is adaptable to an extremely wide range for every parameter we imagined necessary. In fact, exactly contrary to the PragerU video’s narrative, the range of estimable habitability has increased. We now know life can arise and survive in temperatures far lower (and higher) than we believed in 1966; likewise in much drier and more toxic environments than we thought; smaller planets than we thought (which will now include some moons, greatly expanding the number of viable habitats); we now know habitability can even be found on planets or moons radically different from ours (from eyeball planets to ice or ocean worlds); and so on. Combined with those findings, the estimate now is that upwards of 20 billion earths may exist in our galaxy alone. And as all experts now agree (confirmed in works from Rare Earth to Life in the Universe: A Beginner’s Guide), on a cosmic scale, simple life is probably common; only complex life rare—and civilizations rarer. But even if all life is rare, the only reason that’s the case will not be a lack of available habitats—science has now confirmed there are, in fact, vast numbers of habitable worlds. Rather, there remains only that one main barrier: random chemical assembly. Which only godless universes require. You might want to take that as a clue.

To exemplify the science illiteracy of this PragerU video, consider what happens at timestamp 2:35 when Mr. Metaxas argues life could not arise on planets whose solar systems don’t have gas giants (like Jupiter) “to draw away asteroids.” What you aren’t being told here is, well, the actual science: gas giants are common in alien solar systems; gas giants actually don’t produce any net protection for inner planets from asteroid impacts; and rather than asteroid impacts preventing life forming or evolving, to the contrary, life requires them. Sure, at some very high frequency of very large impacts, the probability of sustaining life starts to go down (still not quite the same thing as preventing life; rather, this simply makes life less likely to find itself there). But there is no evidence that’s commonly the situation any planets (or moons) find themselves in. After all, earth was once so heavily and regularly bombarded with asteroids and comets its surface was a liquid magma. Eventually that simply thinned out the available projectiles, allowing earth to cool into habitability. That does not appear to be uncommon. Notably, Jupiter had no role in this. It neither prevented earth’s being regularly melted into magma, nor caused it to stop being so. Gas giants turn out to be wholly incidental. And yet, are so common, it wouldn’t even matter if they mattered!

This is how Hugh Ross spins bullshit, that Mr. Metaxas then apes ignorantly in a PragerU propaganda video. They don’t check the latest science. Then take what is still a true statement (“the odds against life [arising] in the universe are astonishing”), leave out a crucial fact (the universe is so vast and ancient that even events with such long odds frequently happen), confuse this fact with a completely different one (how often life will develop into signal-radiating civilizations that last any significant amount of time), and draw an illogical conclusion (“God must have arranged things this way”), ignoring the only actually valid inference, which is that if atheism is true, life can only expect to find itself in a universe in which life had long odds (but is so crazy big long odds happen anyway), whereas if theism is true, life should never find itself in such a universe. Thus, the evidence these guys are pointing to, is only good evidence against the existence of God. (And the same goes for the “fine tuning” argument appealing to cosmic parameters, which this video concludes with. Actual science does not support them.)

I’ll just close this section by answering Mr. Metaxas’s rhetorical question, “At what point is it fair to admit that it is science itself that suggests that we cannot be the result of random forces?” When a peer reviewed paper says so in a legitimate science journal. And that’s just to admit it “suggests” this; to conclude science has proved this requires that study’s results to be multiply replicated and convince a majority of scientists specializing in the subject. There is a reason none of these things has ever happened.

Fixing Quotes

Metaxas wraps his video up with the usual apologetical propagandistic device of quoting “authorities” out of all historical and literary context. It’s worth illustrating how manipulative and dishonest this is by actually fact-checking them…

Metaxas first quotes the usual forty-year-old nonsense of Fred Hoyle. Christian apologists love to quote Fred Hoyle’s old, outdated, personal editorial for the Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics in 1982, “The Universe: Past and Present Reflections.” In it Hoyle generates a completely bogus mathematical calculation for the probability of biogenesis (which was never peer reviewed), demonstrating astronomers should never attempt to claim to be biochemists. As I show in Biology & Philosophy, Hoyle’s calculation starts with the false premise that life had to originate spontaneously with a fully developed DNA genome and complex cellular machinery; no biochemist thinks this. End of story.

When Hoyle’s incompetent ramblings then drifted into wondering at how convenient it is that there is so much carbon and oxygen in the universe, he trips over his own shoe laces, confusing “life can only observe itself in a universe like this” with “this is the only universe that life could observe itself in.” The former is always true; the latter never is. That there is such an abundance of molecules like carbon and oxygen is why life is made of it. In some other universe, with completely alien molecules, life will be made of whichever two molecules are sufficiently abundant and reactive there. Let’s say in a neighboring universe, it’s the molecules Blopon and Malonar, and Hoyle’s counterpart there is “amazed” that there is so much Blopon and Malonar. Then in another neighboring universe, it’s the molecules Hroop and Krog, and Hoyle’s counterpart there is “amazed” that there is so much Hroop and Krog. And so on.

See what’s happening here? There can be an infinite number of completely different universes with life in them—and all of them will have a sufficient abundance of molecules suitable for it. Because life cannot exist anywhere else. In other words, the probability of observing what Hoyle does if there is no god, no design, just random chance, is always 100%. Because he can only ever exist in just such worlds. Whereas a God does not need carbon and oxygen (or blopon and malonar, or hroop and krog) to make a world with life in it. God can just make life exist. Period. Since all atheist worlds will look like what amazes all these Hoyles, whereas no divine worlds would ever need to, Hoyle’s argument is exactly backwards: this is evidence for random chance generating us, not intelligent design.

And this is precisely what theoretical physicist Paul Davies would have explained to Eric Metaxas: Fred Hoyle was falling victim to crappy pseudoscientific thinking, which is why he failed to get any of it passed scientific peer review. So maybe you shouldn’t quote him. That just makes you looks foolish—or dishonest. As Davies observed in his survey of multiverse theories (cited below), specifically in refutation of Hoyle’s famously gullible argument (emphasis mine):

Many key parameters of physics do not seem to be very strongly constrained by biology. Take the much-cited example of carbon abundance. The existence of carbon as a long-lived element depends on the ratio of electromagnetic to strong nuclear forces, which determines the stability of the nucleus. But nuclei much heavier than carbon are stable, so the life-giving element lies comfortably within the stability range. The electromagnetic force could be substantially stronger, without threatening the stability of carbon. Of course, if it were stronger, then the specific nuclear resonance responsible for abundant carbon would be inoperable, but it’s not clear how serious this would be. Life could arise, albeit more sparsely, in a universe where carbon was merely a trace element, or abundant carbon could occur because of different nuclear resonances.

Instead of listening to Dr. Davies, Mr. Metaxas votes for “dishonest,” and misquotes Paul Davies as endorsing intelligent design. He didn’t. In fact, Paul Davies never said what Mr. Metaxas quotes him saying, that “the appearance of design is overwhelming.” Davies’ actual words (from way the fuck back in 1983!) were “The temptation to believe that the Universe is the product of some sort of design…is overwhelming.” Davies himself rejects intelligent design theory. Granted, he embraces a bizarre and illogical pantheism instead, but if you are going to cite someone with loony beliefs as an authority, you can’t pretend you didn’t just do that.

Paul Davies more assuredly endorses multiverse theory, not design theory, declaring “some version of a multiverse is reasonable given the current world view of physics,” in his survey paper, “Multiverse Cosmological Models,” Modern Physics Letters A 19 (2004). As Davies said in his op-ed for The Guardian, “Yes, the universe looks like a fix. But that doesn’t mean that a god fixed it.” Record scratch. Metaxas claims Paul Davies supports intelligent design, when actually Paul Davies, quite famously, has explicitly repudiated that conclusion. Repeatedly. So Metaxas is basically lying.

As Davies wrote for The Guardian (emphasis mine), “If there is an ultimate meaning to existence, as I believe is the case, the answer is to be found within nature, not beyond it. The universe might indeed be a fix, but if so, it has fixed itself.” Now, Davies’ own theory is itself woo nonsense about the universe unconsciously self-programming toward biofriendly organization (and thus, as he puts it, any universe will “engineer its own bio-friendliness”), a barely intelligible idea that has also never passed peer review in any scientific journal. And once again, if Davies can go so far off the rails like this, Mr. Metaxas might want to rethink quoting him.

Davies does concur that if any multiverse theory is “right, the impression of design is illusory: our universe has simply hit the jackpot in a gigantic cosmic lottery.” And indeed, we have far more reason to believe that than theism (see Six Arguments That a Multiverse Is More Probable Than a God). But then, like Hoyle, Davies trips over his own shoe laces, when he asks whence came the “meta-laws” that govern that multiverse. But he’s lost the plot here. Even if such a metaphysics were necessary (it actually isn’t; the complete absence of physical laws can fully explain the arising of almost any multiverse), they would have no connection to life (intelligent or otherwise). So there wouldn’t be anything to explain.

The physics generating a multiverse doesn’t have to be finely tuned to produce any result (life or otherwise), precisely because every result is thus generated by it. Davies is acting like someone amazed that a cloud would ever be shaped like a rabbit…when clouds will inevitably cycle through every shape there is. You don’t need a “fine tuning theory of clouds” here. Just random clouds. Clouds did not “engineer their own rabbit-shape-friendliness.” Nor did the universe “engineer itself” to generate “rabbit clouds.” And anyone who concluded they must have is kind of a nut. Sorry, Dr. Davies, but yes, this makes you a bit of a nut. As likewise Mr. Metaxas who, even worse, cites you in defense of Prager’s ancient volcano god.

Then, of course, Mr. Metaxas quotes Christopher Hitchens as saying “Without question the fine-tuning argument is the most powerful argument of the other side.” That’s another fake quote. Lying again. What Hitchens actually said was:

At some point, certainly, we’re all asked which is the best argument you come up against from the other side. I think every one of us picks the ‘fine-tuning’ one as the most intriguing. … Even though it doesn’t prove a design, doesn’t prove a designer, it could all have happened without [one], you have to spend time thinking about it, working on it. It’s not a trivial [argument]. We all say that.

So much for that then. Mr. Metaxas makes up a quote, and omits the pertinent context even of the real quote he could have used, to completely mislead the viewer. Hitchens actually said it was a crap argument. He conceded only that it was intriguing and required thinking about before you’ll catch its mistake. Metaxas thus converted what Hitchens actually said, into nearly the exact opposite of what he said, while concealing from PragerU’s marks—er, I mean, audience; or, uh, “students”—Hitchens’ actual opinion. And Metaxas is not a dupe here; he is lying. He knows the original quote and its context. Welcome to religious propaganda. Welcome to PragerU.

Meanwhile, quoting Christian apologist and mathematician John Lennox as claiming “the more we get to know” about the universe, “the more the hypothesis that there is a Creator gains in credibility” is just one propagandist quoting another. There are literally zero peer reviewed scientific articles saying or implying this or anything like it, anywhere, in the last fifty years. Instead, all we find in actual science literature, are god-free explanations of everything. God is being replaced by scientific results. Not found. And in the domain of rational philosophy, it’s fully the other way around: the more we learn about the universe, the more support we gain for multiverse and chance accident explanations, and the less support remains for theism.

Four “New” Arguments?

The video Does God Exist? 4 New Arguments by retired baseball player Frank Pastore—who at least had masters degrees, one in religion and ethics, another in political philosophy—is little more than just an ad for his book. He’s pretty much just another poor man’s Lee Strobel, claiming to have been an atheist who set out to disprove God and ended up a believer. But the story he tells about that in this video does not match the story he has told elsewhere. Big surprise. These guys never can get their stories straight.

In truth, it’s clear Pastore had never really thought much about the God question, until he lost his career due to an injury, and in crisis read Mere Christianity and Evidence That Demands a Verdict—and didn’t fact-check either. He just believed it all; hook, line, and sinker. He just bought into a lifestyle delusion—and made a lot of money. He didn’t follow evidence and reason. Instead his way of answering “four” questions someone told him were important—how did the universe come to be, how did life come to be, how did the human mind come to be, how did moral reasoning come to be—was to not read any science on any of those questions, but read some pop market books by atheists instead, books that weren’t even about those questions, then concluding atheists had no answers to them, “therefore God!”

I’m not kidding. I just described Frank Pastore’s whole apologetics career in a nutshell. But never mind that. What “new” arguments has he got? Oh. Okay. No new arguments. Sigh. Just that. “We can’t explain those four things.” Oh for fuck’s sake. I’ve already done this before, of course. Because this is not new. See 20 Questions, where we’re told atheists can’t answer not just four, but twenty–twenty!—questions (which include Pastore’s four). An assertion there proved to be total bullshit. What they really mean is, “I never checked how atheists answer these questions, nor looked into the reasons those answers convince almost all living scientists, therefore God exists.” The argument is so laughable you are left wondering how theists aren’t living in a constant state of self-embarrassment.

Okay, listen up. All extant evidence supports the conclusion that both our universe and life on earth each arose from some sort of natural accident, and not intelligent design. I’ve already gone over that in sections above, but my most formal answer demonstrating the point is my chapter on design arguments in The End of Christianity. All extant evidence likewise confirms the conclusion that the human mind gradually evolved by natural and not intelligent selection, over hundreds of millions of years, and as a result is very ad hoc and flawed, disproving any possible claim that it’s built by a god. See Plantinga’s Tiger and Other Stupid Shit and Why Plantinga’s Tiger Is Pseudoscience. And moral reasoning, just like all reasoning, is just the combined result of an evolved capacity of all social mammals and a human-invented technology—as, again, all evidence confirms. See The Real Basis of a Moral World and How Can Morals Be Both Invented and True?

What response does Pastore have? None. Because he doesn’t even know what our answers are. Nor cares. This video isn’t really made to persuade atheists. It’s only made to dupe the gullible and reassure believers. But no matter. Let’s run through them anyway…

Stupid Argument Number One:

Pastore thinks atheists answer “Why is there something rather than nothing?” with “the Big Bang.” No. No atheist has ever said that. Nor is the Big Bang theory “there was nothing, it popped, and boom, there’s something,” as Pastore claims (also, contrary to Pastore, the Big Bang was almost 14 billion years ago, not 16). Anyone who is at all up on cosmology knows the scientific consensus is that there was never “nothing” in the sense he means. Even Lawrence Krauss’s A Universe from Nothing doesn’t actually say that. Just read the heading of chapter 9: “Nothing is Something.” His whole point is that you can explain all observations (including countless weird observations that positing “God” does not explain at all) by positing an extremely simple brute fact, a fact far simpler than any God, a fact as close to nothing as science has ever proved possible, for which there is already a lot of empirical, scientific evidence. Occam’s Razor does the rest. And that’s even if you want to insist spacetime had a beginning at all. But we have no evidence that was ever the case.

If you want to learn more about what atheists—and more importantly, scientists—actually have to say about this (which is not what Pastore claims, so he isn’t even responding to us), follow my recent cosmological debate with Dr. Wallace Marshall.

Stupid Argument Number Two:

Pastore (and, apparently, Prager University) thinks abiogenesis means “life from nothing” (literally: they show that as a fake dictionary entry, verbatim). Christ. Best minds, Prager? Really? Dude. Even fucking Google will tell you abiogenesis means “the original evolution of life or living organisms from inorganic or inanimate substances.” Note to stupid: “inorganic or inanimate substances” is not “nothing.” Nor is the evolution of living organisms from them a mystery.

Contrary to Pastore claiming “we don’t have a clue” how life began, we have way more than a clue. We actually have a lot of really well-developed, evidentially supported ideas about how life originated, far more evidenced than any god theory, which actually fails to explain countless really weird observations, which scientific theories explain completely. Even Wikipedia has an extensive article on this fact. But you’ll do better starting at TalkOrigins’ introduction to abiogenesis, The Origin of Life, written by an actual biologist, Albrecht Moritz (not a baseball player with a bunch of low-level humanities degrees). Compare its content with Pastore’s. Weep.

Pastore’s embarrassing, near total ignorance should not be a surprise. Because apparently he has never heard of almost the entire history of the last hundred years of science, as we discover when he face-palmingly says, “We still don’t have a way to account for the great diversity of life forms” we find on earth? OMG.

Stupid Argument Number Three:

Atheists can’t explain “how a mechanistic animal brain can become a self-reflective human mind.” Yes we can. Pastore never references any of the vast and established science of the evolution of consciousness from early worm brains to mammalian, then primate, then ape, then hominid, then human brains. Total. 100%. Ignorance.

Pastore face-palmingly claims “even the lowest life forms have brains and central nervous systems.” Complete with a diagram of a single cell with a little brain inside it. Wow. No. Single-celled organisms have neither brain nor “nervous system.” Those only evolved around 500 million years ago. Life was evolving on earth for billions of years before it ever hit upon either innovation. Subsequent stages of neural evolution, through hundreds more millions of years, produced increasing degrees of conscious awareness and introspective, creative, playful, and investigative behavior, only recently culminating in a human level of these, tens of thousands of years ago.

Likewise, Pastore claims we can’t explain “free will,” evidently completely 100% ignorant of how in fact atheists do explain that, which is not with Pastore’s primitive woo nonsense, but with well-established, evidence-based science (see my summary in Do We Have Free Will?). Pastore is just as completely unaware of any of the pertinent science regarding how human consciousness arose, what machinery evolved to produce it, and why it generates introspection and inquiry. Let an actual neuroscientist explain it to you. Or this one. Or this one.

Stupid Argument Number Four:

Pastore then claims atheists can’t explain the “human moral or aesthetic sense.” In fact we have far more scientific and evidence-based explanations of both, than theists do. I already linked you to summaries on the evolution and development of human moral reasoning (e.g. this, this and this). Meanwhile, all actual evidence supports the conclusion that all aesthetic responses humans feel (to, say, “beauty, art, music, falling in love, our longing for ultimate meaning, and the mysteries of the mathematical realm”) are the contingent outcomes of our evolution by natural selection. There is no evidence they do or even plausibly would derive from a divine source. See my summary on this point in The End of Christianity (pp. 300-02); my discussion in All Godless Universes Are Mathematical and Musical Aesthetics; and my summaries of the science in Sense and Goodness without God (pp. 125-27, 161-64, 193-207, 349-66).

Are all theists ignorant fools? Or only the ones hired to shill for Prager University? I have to ask. Because Pastore claims all four of these things require “bangs, sudden binary pops into existence.” Indeed, he is adamant, “There is no evidence for any gradual development in any of these” cases. Which only an ignorant fool would say. Why can’t theists be bothered to even check the science before saying shit like this?

The Big Bang theory itself defines a whole sequence of events, not an instant switch-flip; and is itself well explained by theorized pre-bang developments like eternal inflation. It also follows necessarily as an inevitable consequence of those very models (like inflation theory). Thus, no binary “leaps,” of fact or faith, are required by it.

Leading theories of protobiology describe even longer periods of gradual development, from billions of years of stellar synthesis and planetary accretion, to millions of years of chemistry—from randomly repeated chemical cascades, to prebiological molecular synthesis, to autocatalytic processes, to PNA replicators, evolving into RNA replicators, evolving into DNA replicators—followed by billions more years of evolution by natural selection before even producing the first simple brain in arthropods, then hundreds of millions more years of meandering evolution before finally building up that simple brain into one complex enough to observe its own operation, and even that development led to hundreds of thousands of years of gradual acquisition of ability first from toolmaking (which long predated humans, over 2 million years ago) to much later language (150,000 to 50,000 years ago) to even later artmaking (around 40,000 years ago) to even later agriculture (around 10,000 years ago) to yet even later civilization (around 6300 years ago) to still later “inventing science and philosophy” (around 2500 years ago). Nothing binary about that. No pop. No switch flip.

Moral reasoning was similarly gradual, beginning in earlier social species which evolved the first moral sentiments like compassion, justice, and cooperation (see, for example, Wild Justice and Animal Altruism), becoming more honed over millions and millions of years until humans had the best ability at it, yet still remained primitively savage and thus nowhere near well-developed in their more reasoning, just more so than other animals (see, for example, The Origins of Morality and Morality: An Evolutionary Account). Humans then started innovating improvements on this primitive moral reasoning—just as they did all other reasoning, with their late invention logic and mathematics, scientific methods, and critical thinking skills, none of which we evolved or were given to us by the gods. But once again with no divine guidance, it took us thousands of years to develop similar improvements in moral reasoning—once again, entirely on our own. Yes, on our own. The Old Testament moral code is primitive and savage and full of barbarism and superstition, and now almost entirely repudiated. And Christianity was no help either. It had hardly any notable effect. It still took us almost two thousand more years to even imagine slavery was wrong or that women should vote. No pop. No binary. No switch just being flipped.

That’s reality. And unlike theists, atheists base their beliefs on reality.

Not Enough Faith for a Multiverse?

So much for that. It gets even worse in the Prager University video What’s a Greater Leap of Faith: God or the Multiverse? by physics professor Brian Keating, where we get nothing but a bunch of lies. Such as the false claim that there is no and can be no evidence for other universe. Here Keating lies to his viewers when he claims we have to “access them” to have evidence supporting the conclusion they more likely exist than gods do—and accordingly, he never even mentions, much less addresses, any of the actual arguments scientists have advanced, under peer review, for the likelihood of a multiverse.

You know who could correct Keating’s errors here? Oh right, Paul Davies. Who, as I just quoted above, wrote a whole peer reviewed survey on multiverse theory in which he concludes multiverse theory is credible. Instead, Keating lies about Paul Davies, claiming Davies rejects multiverse theory. He doesn’t. The quote we get here is, “Invoking an infinity of unseen universes…is just as made up as invoking an unseen creator.” This comes from Davies’ 2003 op-ed for The New York Times. In fact that remark is about “Extreme multiverse explanations,” meaning ad hoc suppositions rather than actual explanatory models, whereas Davies concludes by admitting “Maybe there is some restricted form of multiverse.” More importantly, when he subjected this opinion to scientific peer review, he was forced to change his mind. A year later, after completing a proper peer reviewed survey of multiverse theories, he was forced to admit “some version of a multiverse is reasonable given the current world view of physics.” Of course Keating will never tell us that. Prager University can’t have accurate history or an honest citation of authorities in these videos. Dear no.

Here is what Davies said after doing a proper peer reviewed study (and you’ll notice it almost completely reverses everything he said in the NYT op-ed), emphasis mine:

Recent developments in particle physics, quantum mechanics and cosmology lead naturally to the postulate of an ensemble of universes, or multiverse. Some extension to the restricted view that “what you see is what you get” would surely seem both inevitable and reasonable to all but the most out-and-out logical positivist, if only because the limits imposed by the cosmological particle horizon are merely relative to our specific cosmic location. Although direct confirmation of other universes, or regions of our universe, may be infeasible or even impossible in principle, nevertheless the multiverse theory does make some observable predictions and can be tested.

Okay. So Keating is a liar. Got it. What else has he got?

Literally the only other argument he offers against any multiverse theory is that a multiverse theory might mean that “that girlfriend who broke up with you, you’re married to…in another universe,” which is “a bit far fetched.” This doesn’t really follow. When there are infinite possible configurations, we actually cannot know there will be more than one instantiation of each in an infinite array, so there may well be infinitely many universes and at the same time no other universe with anyone resembling you in it. But even if there are, so what? Dr. Keating is acting here like Lactantius declaring the earth must be flat because otherwise there would be upside down people on the other side of it, and that’s just “a bit far fetched.” Keating is a shit scientist.

Moving on.

Oh wait. That’s it. That’s all PragerU has to offer for convincing us God exists. Everything else just repeats the same stuff, or attempts to explain away inconvenient facts like millions of years of unimpeded suffering and injustice (God and Suffering). Just compare that to my treatment of the same old failed excuses in my recent debate with Wallace Marshall. Even their video God vs. Atheism: Which is More Rational? simply repeats the cosmological argument I already addressed, and simply adds more false and scientifically illiterate statements about how time works or what the underlying justifications actually are for popular cosmological theories. Crap. Basically.

Conclusion

PragerU is full of bullshit propaganda about history and philosophy. It’s just as full of shit regarding its crusade for conservative theism. It may well be the worst apologetics vehicle I have ever consulted, and yet, ironically, may well be the best funded. Theists should be ashamed of it. I suspect many are.