Does science prove God? It is painfully ironic that Justin Brierley opens his chapter on this topic with a false quote from a scientist (p. 22). This common Christian failure to do the work to ascertain what scientists have actually said about these subjects explains every failure to get any of the pertinent facts right in a chapter like this—and thus why Christians ever become or remain Christians: they are bad at fact-checking. Werner Heisenberg was a Lutheran believer, but he never said anything about science leading to his belief in God. To the contrary, he said rather the opposite, that science was separate from what he based his faith on, a notion of “separate ways of knowing” elaborated by his student, Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, from whom the fake quote Brierley uses seems later to have been manufactured by parties unknown, by distorting its intent into its exact opposite. Dishonest Christian apologists do have a tendency to fake quotes like this; and gullible Christian apologists do have a tendency to just believe them. Both need to stop.

This will be the third expansion on my general summary of Justin Brierley’s book Unbelievable? Why After Ten Years of Talking with Atheists, I’m Still a Christian, illustrating again how Brierley rests his Christian faith on failures of fact and logic. I have already provided a summary conclusion about the whole book, and then covered more specifically his discussions of meaning and purpose and morality and the problem of evil. Here I’ll illustrate the same points in respect to his second chapter, “God Makes Sense of Human Existence” (pp. 22-50). Because this is the only chapter in his book containing anything like an actual argument for the existence of a god. Every other chapter is just a pile of non sequiturs. Here there is at least some stuff to explain, and merit to comparing the competing explanations. But still all we finally end up with here is more failures of fact and logic.

Biogenesis

Brierley exhibits more of that lazy non-research in this chapter I’ve been noticing throughout, where we find him just gullibly “believing” what some random person says to him, as long as it supports what Brierley wants to be true—sometimes, he gets these mal mots from scientists who suck at their jobs; other times, from Christian apologists who are notorious liars. He never actually checks to make sure what he was told was correct. And this is how he ends up still being a Christian.

We get a glaring example of this right out of the gate in Brierley’s brief summary of something like an Argument from Biogenesis (pp. 25-27), before he confesses he will not defend that claim (“I shall set aside the question of design in biology,” p. 30) and focus instead on the Cosmological and Fine Tuning Arguments. But before that retreat, he says he once asked his father, an electronics engineer with a degree in biochemistry, about the origin and evolution of life, and he told him he finds it “intriguing that the emergence of life on our planet seems to disobey one of the fundamental laws of nature,” because “the second law of thermodynamics states that, when left to their own devices, all closed systems…will move toward increasing ‘entropy’—the scientific word for disorder,” and “yet the development of life on earth and the human species seems to contradict that principle” (p. 26).

Brierley’s dad can’t have studied chemistry very well, because not a single one of those statements is true. And this is actually rather basic science in the field, so it is perplexing he’d not know anything about how the Second Law of Thermodynamics actually operates to cause increased complexity and organization through heat dissipation. Consider even just the forming of stars, planets, and crystals: chemistry students have long been taught how this happens because of, not in spite of, the Second Law of Thermodynamics. But the entire field of biochemistry is based on the role of dissipative systems (local open systems within closed systems), including autocatalysis, whereby heat dissipation uses an increase in entropy to create and sustain increases in organization—by trading waste heat for physical order. The total closed system’s entropy increases, while local entropy decreases in the subsystems within it. As long as the sum net entropy of the whole system is greater, the second law is obeyed, no matter how many local decreases in entropy happen within it—and lo, that is exactly what we observe is the case.

That’s how babies grow into adults and how bodies maintain their metabolism and immune systems, by burning energy and radiating body heat. The net entropy indeed increases—organized food molecules have been converted into disorganized waste heat. But the local entropy decreases—cells grow and assemble and keep themselves alive and running. That is, literally, the work that converting that food into heat did on the system. Hence you always get more orderly systems, and also more disordered energy in the universe, because of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

So either Brierley’s dad forgot everything he was taught about biochemistry, or his studies contained no instruction on how the laws of thermodynamics actually operate—for even if he was so old that his studies predated the last quarter century, when this knowledge was applied more directly to biogenesis, our understanding of dissipative chemical systems (the way order always arises from increases in entropy) is over a century old by now. So he could have no good excuse for having forgotten all about that. In the end, Brierley just isn’t doing real research when his sole plan is “I’ll just ask my dad.” He could have done proper research instead, and discovered everything his dad told him is wrong.

This is how Christians end up being Christians, because they don’t make the effort to actually understand any of the pertinent science. They do no research. They just ask around, cherry pick, and armchair their way to conclusions. This is not a credible way to go about deciding what to believe. The rest of us do the work, and thus find out not only is the origin of life (and its subsequent evolution) entirely naturally explicable on already-existing science, but the “God” theory actually performs quite poorly as an explanation of it. In fact the evidence of the actual way life originated and developed is strong evidence against any God being involved. As I wrote before:

Only blind natural evolution requires such outrageous lengths of time to develop and refine organs as complex as modern cells. That the Earth was ruled by single celled organisms six times longer than any multicellular life has even lived, that this went on for literally billions of years before animals and plants appeared, is pretty well proof God had nothing to do with it. Natural biogenesis can only proceed from single molecules to single cells before ever arriving at animals and plants, and only after epically vast stretches of trial and error; and it can only proceed by building those animals and plants out of those cells, which is why we are (strangely) just sophisticated colonies of single cells. God has no need of any of this. But it is exactly predicted by any theory of natural biogenesis.

Whereas, by contrast, “We totally could have proved the Genesis theory of origins—had it been true, the evidence we would have collected of it would be extensive by now. It just didn’t turn out that way.” Instead, we found that what happened was the only way it could ever have happened without a God. Which is a strange thing for a God to do. And strange is just another way of saying improbable. God therefore predicts a different observation than we get, while the actual evidence we do get is improbable on the God hypothesis. Meanwhile, what we see in respect to biogenesis is exactly what atheism predicts we would. This is bad news for theism.

Cosmogenesis

Brierley notes the observation that science has for centuries, across millions of inquiries, trended consistently without fail toward ruling God out of explaining anything. But Brierley then declares a hopeful suspicion that maybe now “the arrow is actually traveling in the other direction,” at least “when it comes to our understanding of the universe” (p. 29). The basis for this hope is no actual peer reviewed science, but only a bunch of illogical, incompetent, and sometimes even dishonest Christian apologetics. Brierley is just too trusting; gullibility being another common cause of Christian belief. Once again, he doesn’t check if the things the Christian apologists he trusts are telling him are even actually true. They aren’t. We see this most glaringly in Brierley’s attempt to defend the Cosmological Argument.

Consider Brierley’s presentation of what a certain prominent liar, William Lane Craig, has told him about the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin (or BGV) Theorem (p. 32). All lies. Brierley has even been duped into recycling false claims about what the physicists Borde, Guth, and Vilenkin themselves have all actually said, right down to the latter’s quote-mined statement about “there is no escape” from a “cosmic beginning,” which Brierley has been duped into thinking refers to a beginning of existence from nothing. It does not. This is a lie that Craig, and his army of minions and dupes, keep repeating even after being repeatedly caught and called out for it by prominent physicists, even by the very men themselves he is lying about: Guth and Vilenkin have both publicly repudiated Craig’s lies about what they said, what it meant, and what they believe (a fact I have documented more than once now).

The ease with which Brierley can be duped here does admittedly relate to his not taking the trouble to actually understand the science. He could have defended himself from this deception, if he actually knew what he was talking about, or approached what he was told with a useful amount of critical thinking. Take Brierley’s quotation of Vilenkin: in its actual context, it is referring to our current bubble of classical spacetime, not “all of existence.” The BGV Theorem proved only that our current universe must have a starting point in pre-classical physics. In other words, there had to be a Big Bang that originated at a quantum scale. Which was not a revolutionary thing to find; almost all physicists had already long believed this was the case. All Borde, Guth, and Vilenkin did was prove it.

What the BGV Theorem did not claim is that other universes, or states of this universe, didn’t precede this event; and in fact all three authors, including Vilenkin, are strong proponents of multiverse theory, even of the particular conclusion that a vast array of other universes preceded ours. Leonard Susskind even formally proved the BGV Theorem entails this is the case. Which is a fatal problem for Brierley’s desire to defend the Fine Tuning Argument (a point we’ll get to next). But my point here is that Brierley has been deceived into thinking a quotation of Vilenkin about our current universe having a quantum origin is a quotation about all of existence—all of time and space—having a beginning. Which isn’t true. What outrages me the most here is that Brierley’s gullibility has been weaponized by these liars: they have immorally used Brierley, tricking him into unknowingly spreading this lie to his readers. It’s sad. But such immoral travesties are a common cause of Christian belief, and a prominent reason more and more people, once they get honestly informed, ditch Christianity for good: any religion that has to be defended with outright lies is almost certainly false.

Brierley repeats other lies, such as that “If our universe really did extend eternally into the past, we would never actually ‘arrive’ at the present moment” (p. 33). This conflates “us” with “all of existence.” “We” are not past-eternal. We’ve only been around a few million years. Even our particular universe has only been around a few billion years. It’s the cosmos that would be past-eternal. And since that means it has no starting point, it just has always been running, it follows that there is no place it had to “start from” to get here. In other words, to say the past is eternal is to say that there is an infinite amount of time that things have been chugging along, not that “zero” time has passed. And trust me. Infinite time is plenty of time to get around to “us,” almost certainly more than once (if the past is eternal, the number of past universes in which civilizations arose is likely infinite). This has been pointed out to William Lane Craig by mathematicians and logicians for over a decade now. He just pretends he was never schooled, and continues telling this lie. So, it may have once been a mere error; but that can no longer explain his continuing to assert it. That Craig continues to repeat yet more lies like these about the mathematics of infinity (such as falsely claiming infinite series are “impossible”) simply confirms this. But Brierley would not fall for these lies if he’d critically test them rather than just gullibly believing them. So he doesn’t get a full pass. Failure to fact-check is the most dominant cause of Christian belief.

It also isn’t true that if spacetime (existence itself, not just our one universe) did have a beginning, that it needed an “immaterial, timeless” cause, much less that it is in any way plausible that that cause would be the extremely bizarre coincidence of an even more improbable and complex “God” just happening to exist for no reason (see The Argument from Specified Complexity against Supernaturalism). Regardless of that probability, God can still no more exist “before” time than any other cause. Hence no cause needed to be “timeless,” as just like God, it could have simply simultaneously caused the time it resides in. Nor does the cause need be “immaterial.” If anything as complex as God can just “exist” for no reason, so can anything have. What it is made of is irrelevant. But that’s all moot anyway. Because if existence ever did begin, then it didn’t even need “a cause” at all: because if nothing existed, neither did the laws of causality. This is even a mainstream conclusion agreed to by cosmological scientists—the people who most certainly know what they are talking about here (see Debunking the Kalam Cosmological Argument). Sorry, Christian apologists. You need to listen to the actual experts on this.

It’s even the worse, that positing there was once absolutely nothing actually entails the inevitable spontaneous existence of a vast multiverse: because with no laws that existed to prevent anything from happening, literally anything could have happened, and everything that could have happened must then be equally likely (as nothing exists to make any one thing more likely than another), and lo, almost all the things that could have happened, when you count them all up, are near-infinite multiverses (see The Problem with Nothing: Why The Indefensibility of Ex Nihilo Nihil Goes Wrong for Theists). And since “absolutely nothing” is vastly simpler than any God, that makes this the simplest possible explanation of existence. It’s therefore to be preferred—if you wish to insist on the premise of everything having begun. No cosmological scientists are sure it did; and even those who hypothesize it might have, propose far simpler first causes of it than a god. Either way, no God is needed. To the contrary, God becomes the worst explanation on offer. All the evidence points to a random, accidental origin of existence, not a compassionately engineered one.

It’s also not true that “the facts that we currently have in front of us also seem to accord very well with the long-standing Christian view of a God who created the universe…out of nothing” (p. 34). There actually is no such view in the Bible. Genesis says there was already a bunch of stuff around (“formless earth” and “water”) that God used to make the world, and nothing it says about what he then did with that stuff matches any of “the facts that we currently have.” The original Christian view of the origin of the cosmos has been as thoroughly refuted by facts as any such claim could ever have been. The idea that God created “from nothing” was a later fabrication based on a tendency to glorify God and make him sound even more impressive; but neither Jesus nor Yahweh or his prophets ever mentioned such a thing. And there has still never been found any evidence, not among any of “the facts that we currently have,” that there ever even was “nothing.” But since it’s 50/50 whether there was or not (it’s either “something always existed” or “once upon a time nothing existed”), there can be no great prescience in guessing which it will be. Odds are you’ll be right either way, purely by accident.

The bottom line is that positing God as the cause of the universe is to posit your own “brute fact” (p. 34), something that just exists for no reason, yet in this case a thing extraordinarily fantastical and complex, for which we have no supporting evidence at all, and abundant evidence against. That makes it the least likely brute fact it could have been. It’s also an extremely low-powered theory, as in, it predicts no specific detail of the universe that we’ve observed—unlike, for example, chaotic inflation theory or zero-state instability theory. There are vastly simpler brute facts based in well-established scientific observations that actually explain specific details of the observed result, from ultra-simple quantum states to primordial chaoses. And this is why only such theories pass peer review in the actual science of cosmology. There is just no way to get to God here. And actual expert cosmologists have been explaining this for decades. So there is no excuse to still be ignoring them. Yet alas, ignoring the vast majority of scientists is all that sustains Christian belief these days.

Fine Tuning

Were the fundamental physical constants of the universe “finely tuned” by some intellect so as to ensure the appearance of life? Not likely. Once again, there is a reason almost no actual expert scientists on this subject think so—and any scant few who do, tend to already be Christian apologists, who thus have a vested bias in not agreeing with the vast majority of their peers. I’ve already recently covered this claim fairly thoroughly (see A Hidden Fallacy in the Fine Tuning Argument). And leading expert scientists have already thoroughly debunked it as well (see The Fine Tuning Argument Debunked). But in short, the reason the fine-tuning argument doesn’t work is that it fails both at the “evidence-predictive” level and at the “prior probability of model” level. And Christians often don’t know this, because on this question they only ever listen to Christian apologists, not the actual scientists who dominate the field; like someone who will only talk to their crystal healer and never an actual M.D.

Any genuine critical query into the merits of the fine-tuning argument would discover two things…

First, when you put the evidence back in that the apologists who use this argument leave out, the conclusion reverses: the evidence actually supports an accidental cause of the cosmos, not an intelligent one. This has been formally proved under peer review twice: “The Anthropic Principle Does Not Support Supernaturalism” by Michael Ikeda and Bill Jefferys (published in The Improbability of God in 2006) and “The Design Argument” by Elliott Sober (published in The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Religion in 2004). As I summarized their point once before:

[T]he only way we could exist without a God is by an extremely improbable chemical accident, and the only way an extremely improbable chemical accident is likely to occur is in a universe that’s vastly old and vastly large; so atheism predicts a vastly old and large universe; theism does not …

Likewise, if chance produced this universe, we should expect it to be only barely conducive to life, indeed almost entirely lethal to it (as in fact it is), since there are vastly more ways to get those universes by chance selection, than to get a universe perfectly suited to life throughout. … Design predicts exactly the opposite.

In short, we have two competing hypotheses: the convenient arrangement of fundamental physical constants was caused by either (1) blind accident or (2) a deliberate intent to create life. Theory 1, if it is true, predicts that we will most likely observe a vast, ancient universe, almost entirely lethal to life, where only in very scant few cases can life arise (because almost all the cosmos is a lethal radiation-filled vacuum; almost all the stuff in it consists of stars and black holes on which no life can live or arise; and so on). In short, Theory 1 predicts a universe as poorly built for life as any universe could possibly be, short of not being able to produce life at all (since we’d never be around to observe that). Theory 2, if it is true, predicts that we will most likely observe a small, young universe, almost entirely conducive to life, where life automatically thrives everywhere, finding the whole of creation built for it. The evidence confirms Theory 1, and refutes Theory 2. And that’s the end of that.

Second, one might retreat to saying that Theory 1 still requires a very unlikely accident. But in fact, so does Theory 2. So that’s at best a wash—on their face, both theories require us to be bizarrely lucky, either lucky with the physics or lucky to have a very conveniently specific God. So merely being bizarrely lucky cannot argue for or against either Theory (see, again, A Hidden Fallacy in the Fine Tuning Argument). But it’s worse than that. Because on Theory 1, we don’t actually need all that much luck. Even the single-universe models require far simpler (and thus far more a priori probable) starting points than a God. But it is fairly broadly the consensus in cosmological science now that our universe is but one within an inevitable multiverse (this is not “highly controversial” in the field as Brierley claims, p. 44; I suspect that’s another lie his Christian peers have told him). And the things that can generate a whole vast multiverse, in which so many random universes are made that there will statistically inevitably be universes randomly tuned to produce life, are extremely simple and have a strong empirical basis now (as I already mentioned earlier). By contrast, a God is extraordinarily complex and bizarre, and unprecedented as a cause of anything. In fact, Brierley’s God has pretty much the highest specified complexity any entity could even have—it is therefore, on random chance, literally the least likely thing that could ever exist. So even with respect to prior probability, God is a rather poor theory compared to spontaneous multiverse theory (see Six Arguments That a Multiverse Is More Probable Than a God).

And that’s the end of that. Christians are usually only persuaded by the Fine-Tuning Argument because they don’t actually research it, and thus never learn either of the two facts I just enumerated. And even those (like Brierley) who at least have heard of these two facts, will come up with completely illogical ways to dismiss them—because dismissing, rather than following, the evidence is how Christianity still exists as a belief system at all.

The Boltzmann Brain Argument

Brierley’s first attempt to dismiss multiverse theory is to appeal to an illogical argument from Luke Barnes. Barnes argues (pp. 44-45) that if there is a vast multiverse (although it seems he failed to tell Brierley that the following is true even if there is only one universe, as we have no evidence our universe will ever cease to exist, so this isn’t just a problem for multiverses), then “the most common type of observer” would be what’s called a Boltzmann Brain, a brain just randomly formed (and usually immediately dying) in chaotic atomic dust clouds (or as Brierley describes it, “a ‘brain’ that randomly fluctuates into and out of existence in a small patch of order in an otherwise unordered universe”), and therefore “since we aren’t in fact a Boltzmann brain, we can conclude that there is probably no multiverse.” As I have caught Barnes making illogical and mathematically bogus arguments before, I am not surprised to see this head scratcher from him too.

A simple analogy will show why this argument, even granting its premise, is logically invalid. It is a fact that the vast majority of people on Earth will observe themselves to be non-philosophers. Therefore, since I’m not in fact a non-philosopher, I can conclude that the rest of the population of Earth doesn’t exist. Needless to say, something terribly illogical has just been said. And yet this is the same illogical thing Barnes just told Brierley—and that Brierley just swallowed, hook-line-and sinker, mesmerized into mistakenly thinking it was sensible. Any skill at logic would have rescued him; as would any tendency to not just gullibly believe anything he hears that rescues his faith from the evidence. Which makes this another example of how Brierley remains a Christian only because he can’t vet the logic of an argument; he just lets himself be duped by someone like Barnes.

The fact of the matter is that it would not matter how many “more” Boltzmann brains there are. Since a vast multiverse logically entails there will also be countless non-Boltzmann brains—whole civilizations arising from causal sequences in stable environments—it follows that the probability that there will also be persons observing themselves in one of those conditions is as near to 100% as makes all odds. So a merely immediate observation alone can’t tell you which kind of brain you are; because there will be infinitely many of both kinds of brain. Therefore, that someone (like, say, us) is observing ourselves to be in the evolved civilization condition remains confirming evidence that that is what we are, and that we therefore aren’t a Boltzmann brain (since we didn’t just wake up in the vastness of space and immediately suffocate to death). Just as with my being a philosopher: that most people aren’t philosophers in no way argues it can’t be true that I’m a philosopher, or even more absurdly, that by observing I’m this unusual thing called “a philosopher” that this means other people probably don’t exist! I observe myself to be a philosopher. And that’s all I need to confirm that I am. I would need evidence against that conclusion to disbelieve it. More importantly, there is no logical way to get from that to “all those other people don’t exist.” Which is Barnes’s actual argument. It’s nonsense.

The number of Boltzmann brains in the universe has no relevance to whether “we” would be one. By definition, brains that evolved into civilizations won’t be Boltzmann brains. Therefore there is a near zero probability that a brain observing itself in an evolved civilization will be a Boltzmann brain. Infinitely more Boltzmann brains will have experiences nothing at all like ours (almost all will find themselves in the near vacuum of space and die immediately). So, to posit additionally that we would get an even more vastly improbable (and thus vastly less frequent) Boltzmann brain, one packaged with an entire coherent memory-trace identical to that of a brain in an evolved civilization, is to advance a type of Boltzmann brain that is vastly less common than other kinds of Boltzmann brains. And yet even if that happened, we’d still immediately die in the vacuum of space. We observe we don’t. So…we can’t be one of those brains. Obviously the universe external to us remains stable and real; it isn’t just a spontaneous fake memory-trace. So we can’t be a Boltzmann brain of that type either.

There is only one possibility left: the even less probable possibility of an entire Boltzmann civilization. In other words, we don’t just pop into existence with a fake memory of living on a planet with other people who don’t really exist, and then immediately die because we aren’t. To the contrary, we and the entire planet and its sun and civilization and all its inhabitants would have to have popped into existence—and all of us with impossibly coincidentally identical memories. But almost all Boltzmann civilizations won’t come with global coherent memories of a common past, much less a future-discoverable physical memory in the evidence of cosmology, geology, archaeology, and so on. So our having all that, means the odds are greater that you aren’t in a Boltzmann civilization either. Maybe, then, we are in a Boltzmann universe. Oh. Right. That’s exactly what we probably are in: a universe produced by random chance, not intelligent design—as I just noted all the evidence shows to be the case. Which was an example of how you can argue that something did indeed arise by a Boltzmann process. It’s just that that argument only carries on actual observations in one single case: that of the origin of our particular universe. Most Boltzmann brains have experiences nothing like ours and immediately die. Virtually all brains like ours, by contrast, experience what we do. We are therefore unlikely to be a Boltzmann brain.

So this line of argument about isolated Boltzmann “brains” doesn’t get you any such conclusion as “there is no multiverse” or “we can’t be in one.” There is no intelligible logic to be found here. That we are in a Boltzmann universe will always be more probable than that we have a detailed, billions-of-times globally duplicated, entirely coherent Boltzmann memory of being in one (see The God Impossible). In fact if we observe ourselves to be in an evolved civilization (we don’t just die immediately, but reality and other people stick around, and it all remains coherent with respect to a singular past history), that simply confirms that we are; just as my observing myself to be a philosopher confirms that I am. There are vastly more Boltzmann brains that don’t conveniently come packaged with an entire, detailed, coherent memory of where you are and how you got here. And vastly more still that don’t “also” pop into existence next to billions of other Boltzmann brains arising at exactly the same time with memories impossibly coherent with yours. And vastly more still that don’t “also” arise at exactly the same time as an entire Boltzmann planet and solar system exactly matching those memories, which then sticks around (meaning, the fundamental constants have also just popped into perfect arrangement as well).

So being one of those kinds of Boltzmann people is the least likely thing you can be. Whereas there will be infinitely many evolved civilizations in any vast multiverse, too. In fact, more of them than Boltzmann civilizations—since those require both the same fine tuning to hold everything together, functioning as we observe it to, and an impossibly lucky instantaneous arrangement of other facts, whereas real civilizations are a 100% inevitable outcome of suitably tuned universes. So you cannot say it is likely you are not in one when you observe yourself to be. Without evidence, the odds will always favor your observation being the reality over any Cartesian Demon scenario. Just as I could be the lone philosopher in an infinite population of non-philosophers: I still could not then conclude I wasn’t a philosopher; nor again, even more absurdly, that none of those infinite other people existed—which latter is the actual argument coming from Barnes. Thus even if I were the lone real brain in an infinite multiverse full of Boltzmann brains, I still could not conclude none of those infinite other universes existed, as I have made no such observation.

I also couldn’t conclude I “must be” a Boltzmann brain, which is the more usual paradox discussed (see “Does My Total Evidence Support That I’m a Boltzmann Brain?” by Sinan Dogramaci in Philosophical Studies 177 (2020)). Almost no Boltzmann brains experience the kinds of things we do but almost all real brains do, so the likelihood ratio always highly favors ours being a real brain. Boltzmann brains simply don’t stick around long enough to match our observation. Thus what most discussing this conundrum don’t notice is that this really has to be an argument about Boltzmann civilizations, as I’ve noted. But Boltzmann universes producing civilizations will outnumber Boltzmann civilizations, because the latter require multiple stacked coincidences whereas the others require only one. Even single universes that go on indefinitely will end in Boltzmann Big Bangs far sooner than they’d ever generate a Boltzmann civilization. Indeed, far far sooner, as most Big Bangs that will occur by accident won’t even produce civilization-generating universes. Thus we get no prior expectation of being in a Boltzmann civilization rather than a Boltzmann universe, but the reverse.

Miscellaneous Illogical Dodges

Brierley closes out this chapter with a few more attempts to evade the consequences of the actual evidence, a typical tactic of delusional persons—and thus a commonly observed behavior of Christians.

First, Brierley attempts to answer the problem that “God” is just as brute a fact as anything else would be (and thus positing God not only does not outperform godless alternatives, it underperforms them, as God is way more bizarre and complex and unevidenced than those alternatives) by insisting God “is a necessary being” (p.47), and then falsely asserting “that’s not special pleading.” This tells me Brierley doesn’t know what the logical fallacy of special pleading actually is. Brierley presents no demonstration of the logical necessity of God. No one ever has. Therefore to just “insist” that he is logically necessary is by definition special pleading.

To see what I mean, just turn it the other way around: I insist quantum spacetime is a logically necessary being (which then logically entails chaotic inflation theory and its resulting multiverse). Brierley would cry foul, insisting I have not proved this, so I can’t just “declare” it. He would be correct. Which is why he is incorrect to use the same illogical tactic to just make God a necessary being. If we get to just make up necessary beings, there are far simpler ones more in line with observed evidence than God, as I’ve already pointed out. But really, we don’t get to make up things. The only way to claim anything is a necessary being is to actually formally prove that it is. And despite thousands of years of trying, no one has succeeded at that. Which bodes ill for the chance anyone ever will. They’d sooner end up proving spacetime is a necessary being and caused everything else to exist.

So that’s an illogical non-argument.

Second, Brierley attempts a different kind of fine-tuning argument, as if to reinforce the first, asking the rhetorical question, “Why is our universe so eminently explorable? Why can a single human mind map it out with a pencil and paper?” This is “something that the physicist Eugene Wigner termed the ‘unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics'” (p. 48). Here we have Brierley again not fact-checking anything. Wigner wrote his essay on that sixty years ago. His naive remarks have since been decisively refuted by multiple experts in science and mathematics (e.g. Ivor Grattan-Guiness and Sorin Bangu). It’s actually not even possible to have a universe that isn’t describable with mathematics. So by not checking his facts, or even thinking through the question himself at all logically, Brierley ends up with this hocus pocus reason to still be a Christian. That’s why he remains a Christian. The rest of us actually do the work, and thereby discover there is nothing unreasonable or even unexpected about the effectiveness of mathematics, because it would be logically impossible for it to be otherwise (see All Godless Universes Are Mathematical).

The same goes for all of science. It isn’t true that the whole universe can be “mapped out with a pencil and paper” much less by a “single” person. Most science is dependent on the extremely complex employment of computers, and a vast industry of extraordinarily complex instruments, and an enormous dependence on thousands of people working problems at any one time and across centuries—and still there are countless things science can’t do, because it can’t access the data. What we have been able to do is entirely explained by the mere fact that we evolved two skills for completely different reasons of survival in the wild—problem-solving tool use (which entails the ability to invent instruments and techniques for solving problems) and language (which entails the eventual construction of tools like logics and mathematics). Once you have those two things, it is once again logically impossible that you couldn’t do all the science we have done—it’s simply a question of inventing the tools you need to do it. Which history shows we didn’t get from any god. So there is nothing here to explain (see, again, All Godless Universes Are Mathematical and Why Plantinga’s Tiger Is Pseudoscience).

That in fact we had to build these tools (and it took us tens of thousands of years to even start thinking them up, and thousands of years more to get where we are now with them), that we weren’t built with them already installed (to the contrary, our brains are built to reason far more poorly—scientific methods are counter-intuitive precisely because we weren’t made to think that way) is evidence against God having anything to do with our ability to do science. If that ability arose by accident from unrelated evolutionary developments (like language and tool-use), we would expect to observe science to be a very late invention counter to all our innate reasoning tendencies, and nowhere mentioned (or applied) in any Holy Scripture. That is exactly what we observe. If God had instead made us to be scientists, we’d have been scientists from day one, with sound logics and scientific methods born into the very structure of our brains, and Scripture would be all about commending and applying them. The actual evidence of the history and neurology of science thus supports atheism, not belief in God.

So that’s another illogical non-argument.

And that’s all Brierley has. He concludes there.

Conclusion

Brierley does admit that the sciences have yet to “provide an iron-clad proof for God’s existence” (p. 50). Which is peculiar. Because it has so done for evolution by natural selection, natural biogenesis in random chemistry, the near total lethality and uninhabitability of the universe, and countless other facts that have actually reinforced the conclusion that God does not exist (see Naturalism Is Not an Axiom of the Sciences and Bayesian Counter-Apologetics). By Brierley’s reasoning, God appears to have intelligently designed the universe to look exactly like a universe with no God anywhere involved in it. Which is an extremely strange thing for a God to do. A better explanation of this observation is that what we observe is actually the case: there is no God.

The only way Brierley can escape this inevitable conclusion is to gullibly trust certain Christian apologists who are lying to him about the actual science of cosmology (or who are themselves gullibly repeating such lies to him). Almost all cosmological scientists agree that a multiverse is likely, that it could well have always existed, and that even if it didn’t, far simpler and more empirically grounded causes for it are abundantly available. There just is no way to get to God out of these facts. Brierley can only avoid them by gullibly trusting all manner of falsehoods and illogical arguments. But there is no logical argument from Boltzmann brains to there being no multiverse; there is no case to be made that God is a necessary being; and God is actually the worst explanation for the effectiveness of mathematical and scientific methods. It’s also the case that “God” is an even more improbable brute fact than random fine-tuning of even a single universe would be (and yet the evidence more strongly supports there being a multiverse anyway). God is actually far more impossibly fine-tuned than our universe is, has no discernible explanation for his existence, and contradicts in his every property everything science has learned about the way the world actually works (there is a reason why disembodied minds and supernatural spirit powers have never found any place in any peer reviewed science—and it has nothing to do with bias).

You can’t explain one improbable thing by appealing to an even more improbable thing. In the end, Brierley replaces all facts and logic with an irrational, emotional reason to believe these myths and lies instead, declaring that he “cannot reconcile” himself “to believing that humanity is simply the accidental by-product of an undirected and unpurposed universe that came from nowhere and is heading into oblivion” (p. 50). This is not a valid reason to declare that “atheism cannot account for such a world” as we observe ours to be. It totally can; and in fact, already has. There are many well-understood theories of godless cosmogenesis and biogenesis, even fine-tuning; the exact opposite of not being able to have any. And those theories stand on far more evidence than Brierley can adduce for God. There is therefore no logical or evidence-based reason to prefer God as an explanation of them. Which means Brierley can only maintain being a Christian by abandoning logic and evidence.

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