Sunday, September 12, 2010

Catholic Priest vs. “silly” Stephen Hawkins on Science

A Catholic Priest, Father Robert Barron, “weighs in on renowned scientist Stephen Hawking's upcoming book release in which he offers his "scientific" view on the existence of a creator.”




You can read the article here: -

http://wordonfire.org/WoF-Blog/WoF-Blog/September-2010/Culture--Stephen-Hawking---More-Tiresome-Atheism.aspx

How time repeats itself. Millennia ago scientists were no doubt ridiculed by theologians that “philosophized” that the Earth is round. Galileo was put under house arrest for proposing that the world isn’t at the center of the universe. And Charles Darwin’s discovery of bottom up, as opposed to top down design, evolution, is still denied today.

So Stephen Hawkins quote of, “Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing”, one would have though that theologians would have learned to keep their moths shut for fear of sounding ridiculous… again… and again… and…

Quoting Father Barron, “scientists tend to make lots of silly statements when they attempt to philosophize”. Implying that only those like him that are gifted with the powers of witchcraft, voodoo, and magic can tell us such things as, god injects a human “soul” into a zygote at the moment of conception, and god won’t allow two people of the same sex that love each other to get married, and the integrity of the Catholic church is more important than the sexual molestation of our children, and that condoms are bad, even if one partner is known to have AIDS.

Real brain twisters like, space and time are interconnected so high speeds and immense gravity alter the passage of time itself, (what?), the double slit experiment where electrons can behave as either waves or particles depending on if a conscious entity is observing them, (what? what?), or when two particles are ‘entangled’, they can theoretically be on opposite sides of the universe but behave as if they were together, (what? what? what?). So Father Barron’s philosophical quote of “from nothing comes nothing” sounds just as ignorant as saying, “what goes up, must come down”, in reference to the Voyager space craft.

Our brains were designed by natural selection over millions of years to serve us well as hunter gatherers. The comprehension of concepts such as cosmology and quantum physics is only a lucky byproduct of that evolved intelligence. We can’t honestly comprehend times in excess of more than a few human generations, or distances more than one could naturally travel. But theoretical physics pushes us beyond that. Our brains can’t comprehend a ‘place’ without space or time so it’s an arrogant person that can so easily deny it in the face of mounting evidence, and an ignorant person that demands everything, including gravity, needs “contingency”.

The only true answer to the question, “why is there something rather than nothing” is, “nobody knows”. Science is starting to discover that, contrary to human intuition, “nothing” is unstable. Religion is still flogging the medieval dead horse of “magic man did it”, and “magic man doesn’t need an explanation”. Science is turning to evidence, such as the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider experiment. Conversely, Father Barron is trying to make the existence of god NOT a scientific question. He relies on fuzzy “metaphysics”, vague rhetoric and the degradation of science (by calling the need for evidence before acceptance an “ism”), as his tools. But god’s ‘gap’, continues to get even smaller.

5 comments:

  1. Why would this priest attract your attention? Wouldn't something more substantive like the Dawkins-Lennox debate be more thought provoking?

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  2. Your writings that deal with the Catholic church are very disappointing. If you are really going to sum up the formidable intellectual life of the Catholic Church with references to voodo and magic, you have lost all credibility to criticize the Church before you even start. Simplifying the Church's views on marriage, sex, and creation only proves you lack the learning or the ability to substantively challenge the Church's position.

    What I find when I traverse the pages of atheistic blogs is a number of people agreeing with themselves about how the Church is silly and stupid and how they have all the reason and logic and commonsense. But I very rarely find anyone actually engaging the Church's position in an even remotely in-depth manner. It's as if it's a foregone conclusion, which it may be in your case; but, if you're going to create a blog dedicated to it, do some homework for crying out loud and at least know what the Church teaches and why! It's no wonder Fr. Barron calls the new atheists superficial and frivolous!

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  3. Dude, his name is Stephen Hawking...not Hawkins. Even Christians know that.

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