UPDATE: I posted a link to this after the Rabbi’s article (my first post on HuffPo!), inviting Lurie to reply. I doubt that will happen, or even whether my comment will survive moderation.

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When will I learn that Jewish rabbis can be just as ignorant as goyishe clerics? Another painful instance has just surfaced in HuffPo, with Rabbi Alan Lurie expatiating on “Why the universe has a creator (and why some atheists refuse to even consider it).”

Now I’m not going to say that Rabbi Alan Lurie has no business pronouncing on science since he lacks advanced degrees in the field, but his “unique background,” as detailed by HuffPo, doesn’t give us much confidence that he’ll be able to show that all evolutionists and cosmologists are wrong about their trade:

Alan Lurie has a unique background. He is currently a Managing Director at Grubb & Ellis, a national real estate service firm, following a 25-year career as a licensed architect. He is also an ordained rabbi, teaching, leading prayer services, and writing on issues of faith and religion. This combination of meeting the demands of the business world while attending to the needs of the spirit gives Alan both insight into, and access to, a diverse community.

His article, like his tuchus, has two parts: a “proof” that the Universe was designed, and then an analysis of why atheists won’t admit that. Let’s take the science first. I may get so peeved posting this that I’ll deal with the “why atheists reject creationism” argument later today.

Throughout recorded history the majority of humanity has seen the existence of a Creator, Who intentionally brought the Universe in to being and sustains all life, as an obvious truth . . Scientific discoveries have only reinforced this realization, as it becomes even clearer that the Universe was carefully designed. Prominent British mathematician Roger Penrose calculated the probably of random chance producing a Universe conducive to life at vastly less than the scientifically accepted definition of “zero.” Even if one were to accept arguments from those who claim that the Universe is not so “fine tuned,” we must rely on the mind-boggling, and empirically unproven, concept of multiple Universes, and even then the probability of random events leading to life only budges from staggeringly unimaginable to extraordinarily unlikely.

The fine-tuning argument has become the last weapon in the arsenal of apologists. But although I don’t have Marshall McLuhan behind this sign, I do have a smart physicist, Sean Carroll, who, when I sent him Lurie’s piece, told me that the good rabbi knows nothing about physics. Sean doesn’t address the idea of multiple universes, but you can read his great essay “Does the universe need God?” to see why multiverses are not a desperation move to save physics from the supernatural, but a natural outgrowth of some theories of physics. Anyway, here’s Sean’s response to Lurie’s nonsense, quoted with permission, of course:

First, the phrase “vastly less than the scientifically accepted definition of “zero”” is just nonsensical. The “scientifically accepted definition of zero” is, in fact, zero. There are plenty of numbers less than zero, but they are all negative. I suspect that Lurie is talking about the entropy problem of the early universe, which Penrose has indeed championed, and which is a very important problem. My last book, From Eternity to Here, is all about what it means and how we might solve it. We have a universe with a certain amount of stuff in it, and we can think about all the different ways that stuff (photons, neutrinos, atoms, dark matter) could be arranged. Almost all of those ways look like thermal equilibrium — basically, huge amounts of empty space plus a few particles with some extremely low temperature. But that’s not at all what the universe actually does look like; the matter is arranged into planets and stars and galaxies. So we are “low entropy.” The early universe was an even more non-typical arrangement (even lower entropy), with all that matter very smoothly distributed over a large region of space. If you randomly chose a configuration that the universe could be in, the chance that it would look like our early universe is about 1 in 10^(10^120). Very small, and certainly something that cries out for an explanation. (If you explain the low entropy of the early universe, you also explain the not-quite-as-low entropy of the current universe, since we’re in the midst of the gradual march toward equilibrium.) From this we can safely conclude that our early universe is not well explained by choosing a random configuration of stuff. Nobody disputes that, and people like me are hard at work trying to come up with physics mechanisms to account for it. However, we certainly can’t conclude that it’s designed. Indeed, theologically-minded folk who pick on this particular cosmology problem have fallen completely into a trap. The point is that if the universe were designed for life (in particular, for human beings), there is absolutely no reason why the entropy at early times would have to be anywhere near as small as it was. The “God did it” theory, to the extent that it accounts for anything at all, makes a prediction: the universe should be finely-tuned enough to support us, and no more. Every galaxy in the universe has a much lower entropy than it might have, and none of those galaxies (over 100 billion) is at all relevant to the existence of life on Earth. Indeed, the other stars in our galaxy aren’t really relevant. You could have done with just the Sun and Earth, maybe the Moon if you’re picky. (You need some heavy elements to create biochemistry, which in the real world come from supernova explosions — but God can just snap His fingers.)The rest of the universe should be in thermal equilibrium — a smooth gruel of ultra-cold particles spread thinly throughout empty space. Of course you could say that God made all the other stars and other galaxies because he wanted to create not just humans, but 10^22 other intelligent civilizations. And that the universe is dominated by dark matter and dark energy, even though they are also irrelevant to life, because God likes to give astronomers and physicists something to keep themselves amused. That’s the great thing about God — whatever happens in the universe, you can say that’s exactly how God would have wanted it. Or you can be intellectually honest, and take the predictions of your theory seriously. If God made the universe in order to support life on Earth, the skies should be empty. They are not. QED.

But Lurie isn’t content to just go after cosmology, for he takes on biology as well:

And we are still left with such clearly designed, and incredibly complex, mechanisms as DNA and the brain. . .

Clearly designed? Maybe to Lurie! The rest of us are working on how the hereditary material and the brain evolved. Lurie’s creationist explanation would have us stop all this work and just fob it off on Yahweh. And, OMG, Lurie brings up Anthony Flew:

Late in his life the previously ardent atheist Anthony Flew famously noted, “What I think the DNA material has done is that it has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce life, that intelligence must have been involved in getting these extraordinarily diverse elements to work together.” . . . And to make the claim, as did the late Christopher Hitchens (who I deeply respect for his exposure of injustice), that there is no Creator/Designer because Hitchens did not approve of the way that eyes are designed, is also the pathetic voice of ego; it is the refusal to say “thank you” for the gift of life and the miracle of sight. This is very sad.

This, of course, is a combination of intelligent-design creationism and a God-of-the-gaps argument. It’s the argument that “unbelievable complexity” could not have evolved by natural selection (Lurie isn’t even smart enough to use the concept of “irreducible complexity”, which, if true [it isn’t], would be a genuine problem for neo-Darwinism). And to say that Hitchens’s argument rested on his “disapproval” of the way eyes were designed is fatuous.

If you read Hitch’s argument, you’ll see that he doesn’t really “disapprove” of the eye’s design, but asserts, correctly, that the human eye is a botch, with the nerves and blood vessels running in front of the retina, where they not only impede vision, but can efface it if a blood vessel ruptures. And those nerves have to then gather together into the optic nerve and dive back through the retina to get to the brain, leaving us with a blind spot where they go through. That’s evidence not only against an intelligent creator, but for evolution, since this bad design is a byproduct of the origin of the vertebrate eye as an evagination of the brain. (Cephalopod eyes don’t have the problem of a blind spot—the nerves and blood vessels are behind the retina—because in that group eyes evolved as an in-pocketing of the head.)

Here’s a video showing Yahweh’s incompetence vis-à-vis the eye, and here’s another showing how the eye could have evolved gradually.

Now Lurie has the temerity to assert that his argument is not a god-of-the-gaps argument. But in so doing he shows that it really is:

This is not a “God of the Gaps” explanation, any more than looking under the hood of a car and deducing a designer is “Engineer of the Gaps.” To postulate a random, undirected, meaningless, existence in the face of this unbelievable complexity and purpose of life is, in actuality, the much more irrational, and less logical, conclusion. This has been compared to proposing that a hurricane whipped through a junkyard and randomly assembled a jet plane.

That is, to Lurie design implies a designer. Shades of William Paley! Does Lurie not know that the complexity of life has been rationally explained by Darwin and his successors, and that natural selection is not a “random” process but a deterministic one, one that produces the appearance of purpose: the “purpose” of adapting plants and animals to their way of life? The “hurricane” argument is simply recycled and ignorant creationism. I’ll take a well-understood process, known to operate in nature and be capable of producing complexity, over an unevidenced sky-fairy who disapproves of bacon any day.

To make the scientific claim that one will “go where the evidence leads,” and yet consider such utterly unsupported hypotheses as multiple Universes, alien seeding (which, of course, still leaves the questions of where the aliens came from), mind memes (a total fantasy) and lightening strikes that animated primordial chemical soup to create life (which has never been scientifically reproduced), while not even considering the obvious possibility of a deliberate Creator, is to be intellectually dishonest at best. What are the reasons for this irrational, and often very nasty, refusal by some to even consider the existence of a Creator as a viable hypothesis? I offer several possibilities:

We’ll get to those possibilities later today, which includes the accusation that those who won’t accept God’s design are mentally ill. But let me note again that multiple universes, as Carroll points out in the article cited above, are not “unsupported,” but natural predictions of some theories of physics. And who among us, except for a few eccentrics, believes in “alien seeding”? I don’t know what Lurie means by “mind memes,” but it’s irrelevant here. And he really needs to learn to spell “lightning”, as well as “free rein” (which he misspells as “free reign” later in the piece). And yes, we don’t yet understand yet how life originated, but does that prove that God did it?

As for our refusal to consider the existence of a Creator as a viable hypothesis, science used to do that! That was, in fact, how natural historians explained the “design” of organisms before Darwin. And earlier astronomers claimed that God’s hand was needed to keep the planets in orbit. But, as Laplace noted, we no longer need the hypothesis of a creator in science, for many of the unexplained phenomena once attributed to God have fallen to purely naturalistic explanation. There’s no reason to think that the others won’t.

God is simply a science-stopper, an appeal to ignorance. And, of course, there’s not a shred of evidence for Lurie’s God, but plenty of evidence for natural selection. So which is more rational to believe: the methods of science and naturalism, which have worked and made enormous progress—or the methods of theology, which haven’t helped us understand anything about the universe?

We’ll get to the psychoanalysis part in a post later today. Now I want to talk about Oreos. . .