How Hawking, Dawkins, Krauss and other Atheists are Helping to Destroy Science, Part 1

Recently on the Discovery Channel's new series "Curiosity", Stephen Hawking narrated an episode entitled "Did God Create the Universe?"  Watching this video inspired me to do a series on atheist scientists who have intertwined their philosophy with their science.  I'll embed and respond to the whole episode of Curiosity in a later post in this series.  For now, I want to set the stage by examining the recent work of other atheists. 

Specifically, I believe that it has been a trend amongst so-called popularizers of science like Dawkins and Hawking, and even average-Joe Atheists who follow their lead, to do something akin to what creationists do by promoting their unscientific metaphysical views by making them look like they have scientific authority.  Dawkins, Krauss, and even Hawking have all contended that science is equivocal to atheist philosophy.  That is, they believe that science disproves God altogether, or at least makes God's existence extremely unlikely.  This is a bad thing, but probably not for the reasons you're thinking.

(I apologize for the length of these posts, but this is one of the central theses of my blog and so I want to do a thorough treatment.  I'll try and split it up into smaller chunks.) Part 2 is here.  Part 3 is here.  Part 4 is here.  Part 5 is here.

The Problem

If you're a Christian, you're probably uncomfortable with what these atheists are doing because you respect science and you're also a believer, and you don't want there to be a conflict.  If you're an Atheist, you're probably ecstatic that you have a rational ground for your non-belief, and that the only apparent conflict that arises is between religion and science.  You get to feel rational and intellectual (regardless of whether or not you are), and you can keep on being an Atheist until you're presented with evidence that is sufficient to change your mind. 

But that's all besides the point, because no matter what side of the aisle you sit on, you're probably missing the big picture here.  You may have been sold a false narrative by some Atheists (and some Christians) that philosophy has become embedded into science, and because many people are so focused on the battle of ideologies that this creates, we never stopped to ask whether or not it was wrong to inject philosophy into science in the first place.

That's what narratives do - they force you to think on their own terms.  The problem is that, whether or not Atheism is 'true', what Atheists like Dawkins and Hawking are doing by injecting philosophy into science is bad for science.  We - Atheists especially - should condemn what these Atheists are doing to science and try to stop it.  Atheists moreso because they like to claim that science is one of the most wonderful developments in the history of humanity, and so logically they should want to defend it against anyone who would poison it - Atheist or otherwise.

So let's examine some of these Atheists and their arguments, and hopefully I can expose the narrative and shed some light on what the real issue is.  This post will be heavy on philosophy and some technical science, and I hope you'll be willing to trudge through because this is an important issue for everyone. In fact, I'll go so far as to say that this series of posts may be the most important posts on this blog.  They're so important that if I reach people the way I hope to, I'd almost never have to write another post on Atheism again.

Of course I probably won't reach people.  Our culture is too entrenched in the narrative of the ideological war, and we're so used to thinking on these terms that we won't easily abandon our way of thinking. Note, however, that this doesn't apply to most people.  Most people seem to be content to leave ideology out of the picture.  The vocal minority are causing the problems, and so this is only for them. 

Something from Nothing

Recently (2010) Lawrence Krauss gave a speech entitled "A Universe from Nothing" wherein he lays out the case that the universe was created by nothing (a logical impossibility), and that God is no longer necessary to explain our existence.  The entire speech can be seen in the video at the top of this post, and I'll be referencing it for the remainder of this post.  I will attempt to write this post assuming that, if you're reading this, you haven't seen the speech yourself.  Hopefully this will keep things from getting confusing. 

First, the entire speech is predicated on a logical contradiction.  Several times Krauss refers to the concept of "Nothing" or nothingness.  If you're to really understand what he's talking about then you have to understand what philosophers mean when they speak of Nothing.  Nothing is equivalent to Non-being, or to put it another way: Nothing is a 'lack of all things'.

Because we evolved, or live, in a universe which is Something, it is difficult, if not impossible, to properly conceptualize what nothingness is.  So hopefully I can clarify the term when I say that Nothing is a lack of all things, including attributes, properties, actions, and so on.  Nothingness (if you'll pardon me using it as a noun), is not capable of 'being' or 'doing' anything.  If anyone ascribes any actions or any descriptions to Nothing, they are no longer talking about Nothing, but instead they're talking about Something.

Krauss is off to a bad start already, but it's going to get worse - I promise.

 Missing the Point

It's at about 11 minutes into the above video that Krauss hits on an interesting point.  He talks about how Georges Lemaître, a priest and physicist, first derived the idea of a Big Bang.  Krauss explains that the catholic pope at the time hailed this idea of a Big Bang as proof that the Genesis account of the Bible was true.  

Krauss goes on to say that Lemaître wrote the pope a letter in response.  To quote Krauss, the letter to the pope said, "Stop saying that [the theory of the Big Bang proves Genesis true]...[The Big Bang] is a scientific theory.  You can take it, if you believe in God and you believe in Genesis, to validate your beliefs.  But you can also take it to believe that the laws of physics take us right back to the beginning of time without God."  Krauss continues, "What you take from [this theory] depends on your religious and metaphysical beliefs, but whatever you say, the Big Bang happened."  

Krauss then says, "If we could just convince a lot of people that the universe is just the way it is, whether we like it or not, I think we'd overcome a lot of problems in this country."

Exactly!  I couldn't have summarized the problem with Krauss' and other Atheists' reasoning better myself.  They're making the same exact mistake that the pope made not so long ago.  That is, they want so much to find some clues that the universe can exist without God (which is a metaphysical belief), that they are overeager to interpret certain scientific theories as evidence against God.  From Lemaître's time until today, the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. 

At this point the audience cheers Krauss on, but what they don't comprehend is the irony that the message they're cheering for is going to be ignored by Krauss who will do precisely what he just tried to criticize the pope for doing.  Krauss is going to assert throughout this video that the scientific theories he expounds upon confirm his own metaphysical beliefs. 

Are you beginning to see how Atheists and Christians alike are completely missing the point of what the issue is here?  

What is Nothing?

Between approximately 11 minutes and 20 minutes, Krauss goes on to educate his audience about some really interesting discoveries in science.  I have no qualms with his speech during this time, in fact I learned a few things myself that I found really exciting.  The fact that a dime held up to the night sky obscures hundreds of thousands of galaxies is absolutely mind blowing.  Krauss is, to be sure, a great orator and he definitely makes science accessible to the layman.  On these grounds, he can't be criticized.  

However, he begins making mistakes again at about 20 minutes into the video when he begins to equivocate on the definition of Nothing.  He says, "...Nothing isn't Nothing anymore - in physics."  This is a signal phrase that indicates the error Krauss is about to make.  That is, Krauss is about to redefine what philosophers mean when they use the word 'Nothing', and when he does so he'll no longer be referring to Nothing, but rather to Something.  In other words, it's a bait and switch.  He's redefining Nothing so that it means something else, but then he continues to use the word out of context as if he didn't just change its definition. 

He continues, "Because of the laws of Quantum Mechanics and Special Relativity, on extremely small scales Nothing is really a boiling bubbling brew of virtual particles popping in and out of existence in a timescale so short you can't see them."

What Krauss is talking about here, if you don't know, is the Quantum Vacuum.  In empty space there is still an underlying energy which fluctuates randomly and creates little bits of matter that we call virtual particles.  The problem is that Krauss wants to define this Quantum Vacuum as "Nothing" - but it is not "Nothing".  The Quantum Vacuum has attributes, and it has actions and works based on physical laws.  If not, then we wouldn't be able to accurately depict what it is mathematically.  The Quantum Vacuum is a description of space and includes such a thing as energy.  Since space and energy and fluctuations are all existing things, it necessarily follows that the Quantum Vacuum as a whole is an existing thing (and therefore is not Nothing).  This may seem like the fallacy of composition, but since the term "Quantum Vacuum" isn't actually a "thing" in itself, but rather an umbrella term for its disparate parts, I don't think it applies.

So what Krauss is really doing is equivocating.  William Lane Craig explains the mistake in this reasoning here, and elsewhere, better than I could ever hope to so if you're not getting what I'm saying I would check him out.  Anyway, Krauss is essentially defining the Quantum Vacuum as "nothing", which it is not, and then saying that because it can 'create matter' from 'nothing', we can be assured that the universe could have been created by Nothing.

Since he is not using the term 'nothing' in the traditional sense, however, his argument fails from the get go.  Unfortunately for him, his entire argument is based on whether or not he can demonstrate scientifically that Something can come from Nothing.  Since he failed to demonstrate how this was possible, all of the metaphysical assertions in his speech are not justified and we have absolutely no reason to believe they're true.   

This point is incredibly important.  The argument that something can come from nothing, by atheists, is very common lately.  The problem is that, if the universe has a beginning, it would seem to beg for a cause outside of itself.  Atheists, in order to avoid this conclusion, hope to demonstrate that the universe could somehow have appeared out of Nothing, for no reason, at random.  However, this has not been demonstrated, nor can it be demonstrated because it is logically incoherent.  So the next best tactic is to redefine the word Nothing and hope no one notices.  

I'm beginning to digress from the point of this article however.  I'm not writing this to argue for God's existence.  I'm writing this because I want to argue that whether or not God exists, what Krauss is doing is damaging to science.  But first I need to point out a few more areas where Krauss goes wrong. 

Part 2 is here, Part 3 is Here, Part 4 is here, Part 5 is here.