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Stephen Meyer: 3 scientific discoveries point to God. As usual, his claims mislead

#1
C C Offline
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2022/07/1...isleading/

INTRO (Jerry Coyne): Stephen Meyer is an intelligent-design creationist who has spent his career trying to squelch the teaching of evolution in the U.S. and advancing the big mission of his employer, the Discovery Institute (he’s director of the Center for Science and Culture): debunking naturalism and materialism in favor of religion, preferably Christianity.

Meyer has managed to con the right-wingnuts at Newsweek into publishing the article below, which list three scientific discoveries that, says Meyer, point directly to God. They’re apparently the subject of his new book (published by HarperOne, the religious wing of Harper), Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Discoveries that Reveal the MInd Behind the Universe. If you go to its Amazon site, you find it highly lauded by those looking for any reason to believe in God. Since that is most Americans, these books usually get high ratings and sell respectably.

But,in truth, Meyer’s “Discoveries” have been long known, and have been debunked insofar as there are more plausible, naturalistic, and non-Goddy explanations for all of them.

Moreover, before we start accepting the God hypothesis—note that Meyer explicitly calls the Intelligent Designer “God”—he has (as Hitchens used to say) “all his work before him.”  For even if the three examples pointed to an intelligence operating in the Universe, that doesn’t mean it’s God, much less the Christian God. As the Discovery Institute used to say before its mask slipped, the Designer could be any form of  unknown cosmic intelligence, including space aliens.  Before you decide that an observation confirms the God Hypothesis instead of the Science (naturalistic) Hypothesis, you better show us that there’s a God that conforms to traditional belief. Otherwise it could confirm yet another supposition: the Xenu Hypothesis.

I’ll deal below with the features of the Universe, not mentioned by Meyer, that show how the Universe fails to conform to what we’d expect if there were a God... (MORE - details)

REFERENCED ARTICLE: https://www.newsweek.com/how-science-sto...on-1724448
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#2
Syne Offline
(Jul 17, 2022 06:30 PM)C C Wrote: Meyer has managed to con the right-wingnuts at Newsweek into publishing the article below, which list three scientific discoveries that, says Meyer, point directly to God. They’re apparently the subject of his new book (published by HarperOne, the religious wing of Harper), Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Discoveries that Reveal the MInd Behind the Universe. If you go to its Amazon site, you find it highly lauded by those looking for any reason to believe in God. Since that is most Americans, these books usually get high ratings and sell respectably.
Lot of ad hominem.

Quote:But,in truth, Meyer’s “Discoveries” have been long known, and have been debunked insofar as there are more plausible, naturalistic, and non-Goddy explanations for all of them.
Meyer doesn't claim any of the discoveries are new:

Over the last century, important scientific discoveries have dramatically challenged science-based atheism, and three in particular now tell a decidedly more God-friendly story.

Debunked usually means to expose the falseness of. But then this admission belies that any real debunking has been done at all:
Quote:I’ll give alternative naturalistic explanations for each of the three “proofs of God”. We don’t know the materialistic answers for sure, but at least the scientific explanations are in principle testable, and there is some evidence behind them.

"In principle testable" is little more than a profession of faith, in the reach of the utility of scientific methods. IOW, scientism. Every time someone tries to cite some future, potential science as evidence in the here and now, they are merely making a claim of their belief. Otherwise, they'd have actual evidence. This whole article is looking extremely lazy.

Quote:It’s a stretch to harmonize this with what we know of the Big Bang, since there appears to have been water, Earth was created before light, and light was created before the “firmament” (presumably stars like the sun), and, importantly, before the Night and the Day, which are caused by the rotation of the earth. And that water deeply disturbs me. Is it metaphorical water or real water? The only thing that harmonizes with the Big Bang here is light (presumably accompanying the Big Bang) followed by the firmament. (And yet earth was created before the light and the Big Bang!) And later on, we see that the plants are created before the stars and the Sun. It’s a big mess.
Trying desperately to take something not meant to be literal as a factual account, written before we had any inkling of cosmology at all, is a straw man, at best, and at worst, pure ignorance.

Quote:There are actually several sequences of creation here, and they don’t harmonize.
No, that's just a willfully ignorant trope of atheists.

Quote:In the 8.5-minute debate video below, Sean Carroll gives five arguments in favor of naturalism and against the theistic argument for God from fine-tuning (the latter he calls a “terrible argument”). In fact, he shows that only naturalism supports the idea that life is permitted by certain physical parameters, for God could have done anything that he wanted regardless of the laws of physics. Finally, Carroll argues that the physical properties of the Universe are not those predicted by an a priori theistic theory, but comport better with the predictions of naturalism. (One of these is that theism predicts that “God should be easy to find.”) That is an important argument against Meyer’s thesis!
Only if you completely ignore the necessities of free will. If God didn't create an orderly universe that followed laws, which give consistent results to willed actions, free will could not manifest, even as self-illusion. Causality would be capricious, and we would have never developed beyond superstitions and human sacrifice.

If you say, “naturalism did it,” that stops all research on how free will could exist.

Quote:In fact, the discoveries of modern biology, in particular the jury-rigged features of life (just taking humans, the recurrent laryngeal nerve, the swelling of the male prostate, and so on), show that the designer was not intelligent.
Except you conveniently only get there by denying God would create laws of physics, where things can interact in sub-optimal ways.


If anything, this "debunking" is at least as weak as that it seeks to undermine.
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#3
Kornee Offline
Responding as hoped to click bait.....Bible apologist YEC sites sometimes provide good articles. Below is imo one such:
https://www.icr.org/article/flytrap-orig...oblem-for/
Search all you want and see if any evolutionist article claiming to 'solve' Venus Fly-trap 'evolution' can do more than offer filled-with-gaps hand-waving.
Michael Behe imo would utterly own Jerry Coyne in any serious one-on-one debate. He exposes the underhanded methods of his detractors here:
https://evolutionnews.org/2019/02/train-...n-science/

Similarly, Kenneth Miller's 'famous disproof' of irreducible complexity e.g. bacterium flagella has been torn apart by Behe.
One facet of that - it's been known for some time that flagella almost certainly long predated Type III secretory systems:
https://evolutionnews.org/2015/07/why_the_type_ii/
Besides - how would a sophisticated Type III secretory apparatus itself 'gradually evolve functionality'? Another go/no-go dilemma? I'd say so.
Well, just keep faith in Nature's boundless creativity: 'Life finds a way' as Jeff Goldblum sagaciously spouted in Jurassic Park. Not an actual nature documentary btw.
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