A Response to Forbidden Fruit

Forbidden Fruit,

I came across your video yesterday on reddit’s /r/atheistvids and was a bit surprised to see an objection to this post from Ed Brayton on FTB: “Atheists, please stop saying these things”.  I considered what Ed said to generally be pretty sound, and effectively it’s an appeal to be more philosophically nuanced in our critiques of theists.

I disagree with almost all that you said in your video, and for whatever reason I felt compelled to write up a response.  I apologize for not doing a proper video reply, but work and family really get in the way of me doing videos right now.  

I’m writing this to try and convince you why I think you’ve got these things wrong on most of these issues, largely because we’re on the same team.  Like Ed I don’t like seeing atheists make these arguments either, and I don’t want to see people “on my side” make arguments that can be dismissed by apologists who can see the same flaws I do.  Hopefully we can come to some agreement here.

Before the Big Bang 3 by Skydivephil

I've been a bit late in posting this due to racing to finish my last post/video on the Kalam before going through a major two week project at work.

What I want to share is another great science education video by Phil and Monica who post on YouTube under the handle SkyDivePhil.

In this video they go through some more of the theories being worked on in modern physics to help us describe what could possibly be "before the big bang", with a focus on String Theory.

They both have a good knowledge on the subject and do a great job of helping to communicate it to a lay audience. What's more is that they have access to the scientists working in the field and got them to agree to an interview.  This is truly a gem of a series and the video is extremely dense with information that attempts to give a look at what would be entailed by the theories if we were ever able to prove them. Spoiler Alert: There's no god required.

I highly recommend giving it a look.

An Educational Video and Ammo Against Cosmological Arguments

The couple behind the SkyDivePhil YouTube account have produced another awesome educational video on modern cosmology that's well worth watching (as are their other videos).

In this video they discuss Roger Penrose's Conformal Cyclic Cosmology (CCC) model, which is interesting for those of us in the counter apologetics area since it supports the view of an eternal universe.




The video is well worth watching in its entirety, but something of particular interest shows up at the 20:05 mark, where they ask Roger Penrose about William Lane Craig's interpretation of the CCC model.  Suffice it to say that Craig isn't much of a fan of the CCC given that it would contradict the Kalam Cosmological Argument.

The summary of it is that Craig represents the CCC model as some kind of multiverse theory, or one where there's a singular origin point of two parallel universes.  Sir Roger is very quick to point out that this is not a correct interpretation of his model, and that he is proposing a sequential series of cyclic universes.

A bit of egg, nothing more

I don't want to make much more of this than there is here.  Craig is eager to dismiss the CCC for obvious reasons, but it'd be more than a bit uncharitable to claim he was intentionally misleading people.  I honestly don't think he'd do that.

What's far more likely is that Craig was simply wrong in his interpretation of the CCC.

Now it's kind of embarrassing to be quite so wrong on this given that:

1. One of the first papers on the CCC was titled "Before the big bang"
2. The book Sir Roger wrote explaining the model is called "cycles of time"
3. Sir Roger was on the Christian radio show "Unbelievable" which sponsored Dr Craig's debates and he was asked if the universes in his model could be eternal into the past, he said yes. 
4. Sir Roger has been arguing that there are signals in the CMB form before the big bang, verifying his model. If the universes were not chronologically prior, how could such a claim make sense?

Note: A special thanks goes to SkyDivePhil for providing these four points to me in an email.

 

That last point is potentially very important, since the data is preliminary, but it is quite possible that there is experimental evidence that could confirm the CCC model.

 

That all aside, other than Craig possibly having some egg on his face here, there's a pretty important point.

 

The Point

 

The point isn't that the CCC is probably true, therefore the Kalam is false. We don't yet know if the CCC is completely accurate.  There are competing models by other cosmologists that very well could be correct.

 

The point is that apologists are so very quick to assert that the entire material universe must have had a beginning in order to try and drill out a god shaped hole to stick Yahweh in.   The problem for apologists is that there's no evidence that all of material reality must have had a beginning.  What we have is simply an unknown in our current understanding, with numerous competing theoretical models that could explain the data we have. 

 

Right now the best apologists can do is try to read their preferred metaphysical positions into the Big Bang and make arguments from those assumptions, but it's nothing more than that.  

Video Response to YouTube user StupidTheist

Note: What follows is a transcript of the video above.

This is going to be a video reply to YouTube user StupidTheist. Not to get all meta, but he left a video reply to my fourth video on the Countering the Kalam series and has been expecting me to respond in kind.  I’ll link both our videos in the description box, but this is kind of an “inside baseball” video; and I wouldn’t recommend continuing with it unless you’ve watched both my video and StupidTheist’s response.