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Perhaps the reason people first turned to religion was because they wanted to understand their surroundings. Before telescopes could tell us the location of planets and stars, before carbon dating could tell us the age of a rock, and before meteorology could predict the weather; people had very little power to understand the world outside of what they could perceive with their own senses. So they made up stories to fill in the blanks. But these stories weren’t just for entertainment. They explained and defined the universe, they provided people with meaning and purpose.
With time these stories took on a cultural quality. They not only defined the world and people’s place in it, but also defined what behavior was and was not accepted.
With modern science we have little need for these stories any more. They no longer have the power to define the universe because we have science that does that. The big bang, evolution through natural selection, it has all been explained. Those stories can not define the world for us anymore, and thus they have no justification in defining our behavior. There is simply, no place for god anymore.
Below I have provided a bit of information about why god is no longer needed to explain he universe, as well as why god should not be used to explain the universe. The information below is just a starting point however. If you are interested in a topic please do further research in order to find out more. |
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A Universe Built on Laws |
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The Big Bang is the cosmological model of the universe whose primary assertion is that the universe has expanded into its current state from a primordial condition of enormous density and temperature. The term is also used in a narrower sense to describe the fundamental "fireball" that erupted at or close to an initial time-point in the history of our observed spacetime. Theoretical support for the Big Bang comes from mathematical models, called Friedmann models. These models show that a Big Bang is consistent with general relativity and with the cosmological principle, which states that the properties of the universe should be independent of position or orientation. Observational evidence for the Big Bang includes the analysis of the spectrum of light from galaxies, which reveal a shift towards longer wavelengths proportional to each galaxy's distance in a relationship described by Hubble's law. Combined with the evidence that observers located anywhere in the universe make similar observations (the Copernican principle), this suggests that space itself is expanding. The next most important observational evidence was the discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation in 1964. This had been predicted as a relic from when hot ionized plasma of the early universe first cooled sufficiently to form neutral hydrogen and allow space to become transparent to light, and its discovery led to general acceptance among physicists that the Big Bang is the best model for the origin and evolution of the universe. A third important line of evidence is the relative proportion of light elements in the universe, which is a close match to predictions for the formation of light elements in the first minutes of the universe, according to Big Bang nucleosynthesis. |
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is the process by which genetic mutations that enhance reproduction become, and remain, more common in successive generations of a population. It has often been called a "self-evident" mechanism because it necessarily follows from three simple facts: · Heritable variation exists within populations of organisms. · Organisms produce more offspring than can survive. · These offspring vary in their ability to survive and reproduce. These conditions produce competition between organisms for survival and reproduction. Consequently, organisms with traits that give them an advantage over their competitors pass these advantageous traits on, while traits that do not confer an advantage are not passed on to the next generation. The central concept of natural selection is the evolutionary fitness of an organism. This measures the organism's genetic contribution to the next generation. However, this is not the same as the total number of offspring: instead fitness measures the proportion of subsequent generations that carry an organism's genes. Consequently, if an allele increases fitness more than the other alleles of that gene, then with each generation this allele will become more common within the population. These traits are said to be "selected for". Examples of traits that can increase fitness are enhanced survival, and increased fecundity. Conversely, the lower fitness caused by having a less beneficial or deleterious allele results in this allele becoming rarer — they are "selected against". Importantly, the fitness of an allele is not a fixed characteristic, if the environment changes, previously neutral or harmful traits may become beneficial and previously beneficial traits become harmful. Natural selection within a population for a trait that can vary across a range of values, such as height, can be categorized into three different types. The first is directional selection, which is a shift in the average value of a trait over time — for example organisms slowly getting taller. Secondly, disruptive selection is selection for extreme trait values and often results in two different values becoming most common, with selection against the average value. This would be when either short or tall organisms had an advantage, but not those of medium height. Finally, in stabilizing selection there is selection against extreme trait values on both ends, which causes a decrease in variance around the average value. This would, for example, cause organisms to slowly become all the same height. A special case of natural selection is sexual selection, which is selection for any trait that increases mating success by increasing the attractiveness of an organism to potential mates. Traits that evolved through sexual selection are particularly prominent in males of some animal species, despite traits such as cumbersome antlers, mating calls or bright colors that attract predators, decreasing the survival of individual males. This survival disadvantage is balanced by higher reproductive success in males that show these hard to fake, sexually selected traits. An active area of research is the unit of selection, with natural selection being proposed to work at the level of genes, cells, individual organisms, groups of organisms and even species. None of these models are mutually-exclusive and selection may act on multiple levels simultaneously. Below the level of the individual, genes called transposons try to copy themselves throughout the genome. |
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The age of the universe, in physics, is the time elapsed between the Big Bang and the present day. Current observations suggest that this is about 13.7 billion years, with an uncertainty of about +/-200 million years. |
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In the philosophy of religion, Occam's razor is sometimes applied to the existence of God; if the concept of God does not help to explain the universe, it is argued, God is irrelevant and should be cut away (Schmitt 2005). While Occam's razor cannot prove God's nonexistence, it does imply that, in the absence of compelling reasons to believe in God, disbelief should be preferred. The history of theistic thought has produced many arguments attempting to show that such reasons do exist. The cosmological argument, for example, states that the universe must be the result of a "first cause" and that that first cause must be God. Similarly, the teleological argument credits the appearance of design and order in the universe to supernatural intelligence. Many people believe in miracles or have what they call religious experiences, and creationists consider divine design to be more believable than naturalistic explanations for the diversity and history of life on earth. The majority of the scientific community generally does not accept these arguments, and prefers to rely on explanations that deal with the same phenomena within the confines of existing scientific models. Among leading scientists defined as members of the National Academy of Sciences, 72.2% expressed disbelief and 93% expressed disbelief or doubt in the existence of a personal god in a survey conducted in 1998[2] (an ongoing survey being conducted by Elaine Ecklund of Rice University since 2004 indicates that this figure drops to as low as 38% when non-eminent scientists and social scientists are included and the definition of "God" is expanded to allow a non-personal god as per Pantheism or Deism).[3] According to the typical scientific view, the necessity of a God in the teleological argument is challenged by the effects of emergence, leading to the creation-evolution controversy; likewise, religious experiences have naturalistic explanations in the psychology of religion. Other theistic arguments, such as the argument from miracles, are sometimes pejoratively said to be arguing for a mere God of the gaps - whether or not God actually works miracles, any explanation that "God did it" must fit the facts and make accurate predictions better than more parsimonious guesses like "something did it", or else Occam's razor still cuts God out. Rather than argue for the necessity of God, some theists consider their belief to be based on grounds independent of, or prior to, reason, making Occam's razor irrelevant. This was the stance of Søren Kierkegaard, who viewed belief in God as a leap of faith which sometimes directly opposed reason (McDonald 2005); this is also the same basic view of Clarkian Presuppositional apologetics, with the exception that Clark never thought the leap of faith was contrary to reason. (See also: Fideism). In a different vein, Alvin Plantinga and others have argued for reformed epistemology, the view that God's existence can properly be assumed as part of a Christian's epistemological structure. (See also: Basic beliefs). Yet another school of thought, Van Tillian Presuppositional apologetics, claims that God's existence is the transcendentally necessary prior condition to the intelligibility of all human experience and thought. In other words, proponents of this view hold that there is no other viable option to ultimately explain any fact of human experience or knowledge, let alone a simpler one. Considering that the razor is often wielded as an argument against theism, it is somewhat ironic that Ockham himself was a theist. He considered some Christian sources to be valid sources of factual data, equal to both logic and sense perception. He wrote, "No plurality should be assumed unless it can be proved (a) by reason, or (b) by experience, or (c) by some infallible authority"; referring in the last clause "to the Bible, the Saints and certain pronouncements of the Church" (Hoffmann 1997). In Ockham's view, an explanation which does not harmonize with reason, experience or the aforementioned sources cannot be considered valid. |
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Russell's teapot, sometimes called the Celestial Teapot, was an analogy first coined by the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), intended to refute the idea that the burden of proof lies upon the sceptic to disprove unfalsifiable claims of religions. In an article entitled "Is There a God?",commissioned (but never published) by Illustrated magazine in 1952, Russell wrote: If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time. In his 2003 book A Devil's Chaplain, Richard Dawkins developed the teapot theme a little further: The reason organized religion merits outright hostility is that, unlike belief in Russell's teapot, religion is powerful, influential, tax-exempt and systematically passed on to children too young to defend themselves. Children are not compelled to spend their formative years memorizing loony books about teapots. Government-subsidized schools don't exclude children whose parents prefer the wrong shape of teapot. Teapot-believers don't stone teapot-unbelievers, teapot-apostates, teapot-heretics and teapot-blasphemers to death. Mothers don't warn their sons off marrying teapot-shiksas whose parents believe in three teapots rather than one. People who put the milk in first don't kneecap those who put the tea in first. The concept of Russell's teapot has been extrapolated into humorous, more explicitly religion-parodying forms such as the Invisible Pink Unicorn and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. |
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Age of the Universe |
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Big Bang |
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Evolution Through Natural Selection |
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Occam’s Razor |
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Russell’s Teapot |
