I should start giving an award for the Most Misleading Science Journalism of the Year. If I did, this article from The Sunday Express would surely be a contender. Here’s the headline (click on it to go to the article):

The piece starts like this:

A TEAM of scientists have made what may turn out to be the most important discovery in HISTORY–how the universe came into being from nothing. The colossal question has troubled religions, philosophers and scientists since the dawn of time but now a Canadian team believe they have solved the riddle. And the findings are so conclusive they even challenge the need for religion, or at least an omnipotent creator – the basis of all world religions.

Now the story, which I grant is well written and quite detailed for science journalism (and I realize that the headlines probably weren’t written by the article’s author), is based on a paper by Ahmed Farag Ali, Mir Faizal and Mohammed M. Khalil in The Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics. The bad journalism is not the reporting of the theory itself, but the way it’s sold, both in the headline and in snippets of the article.

I haven’t read the original paper, and even from the article can’t fully understand the revolutionary new findings (if they are revolutionary), but they are apparently an elaboration of what we know: in a quantum vacuum, virtual particles can pop in and out of existence, and that can eventually produce the Big Bang and our present Universe. Here’s a brief summary of what the article says; readers are invited to explain the big new finding in the comments.

Scientists have long known that miniscule particles, called virtual particles, come into existence from nothing all the time. But a team led by Prof Mir Faizal, at the Dept of Physics and Astronomy, at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, Canada, has successfully applied the theory to the very creation of existence itself. He said: “Virtual particles contain a very small amount of energy and exist for a very small amount of time. “However what was difficult to explain was how did such a small amount of energy give rise to a big universe like ours?” Under Inflation Theory the tiny energies and lifespan of the virtual particle become infinitely magnified, resulting in our 13.8 Billion-year-old universe. Just to make things more complicated Dr Mir says we have been looking at the question ‘how did the universe come from nothing?’ all wrong.According to the extraordinary findings, the question is irrelevant because the universe STILL is nothing.Dr Mir said: “Something did not come from nothing. The universe still is nothing, it’s just more elegantly ordered nothing.”

Well, this is above my pay grade, but of course even Lawrence Krauss’s book, A Universe from Nothing, which explained the creation of particles in a quantum vacuum, was attacked by theists and philosophers because, they said, a quantum vacuum is NOT NOTHING. That vacuum, they said, already instantiates the laws of physics and “fields”. As David Albert said in his review of Krauss’s book in The New York Times

The fundamental physical laws that Krauss is talking about in “A Universe From Nothing” — the laws of relativistic quantum field theories — are no exception to this. The particular, eternally persisting, elementary physical stuff of the world, according to the standard presentations of relativistic quantum field theories, consists (unsurprisingly) of relativistic quantum fields. And the fundamental laws of this theory take the form of rules concerning which arrangements of those fields are physically possible and which aren’t, and rules connecting the arrangements of those fields at later times to their arrangements at earlier times, and so on — and they have nothing whatsoever to say on the subject of where those fields came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular kinds of fields it does, or of why it should have consisted of fields at all, or of why there should have been a world in the first place. Period. Case closed. End of story.

That’s the way the theists and philosophers have argued that Krauss’s “nothing” isn’t really “nothing.” I won’t get into that debate now, except to say that my own feeling is that David Albert was proffering a version of the Cosmological Argument, and that the ultimate answer to why there are fields and particular laws of physics is simply “that’s just the way things are.” Or perhaps, “We don’t know.”

But how does the new theory “prove” (note the misleading scare quotes in the article’s headline) that there is no God? Leaving aside the fact that science isn’t in the business of proving anything, here’s what the article says:

And the findings are so conclusive they even challenge the need for religion, or at least an omnipotent creator – the basis of all world religions.

. . . Asked if the remarkable findings and the convincing if complex solution removed the need for a God figure to kick start the universe Dr Mir said: “If by God you mean a supernatural super man who breaks his own laws then yes he’s done for, you just don’t need him.“But if you mean God as a great mathematician, then yes!” The first statement doesn’t disprove God because one could always claim that God created the laws of physics in such a way that they’d give rise to the Universe. A similar claim is made for evolution: God needn’t have created all species ex nihilo: He simply created a world in which the process of evolution would produce the creatures He wanted. Now why an omnipotent God worked so indirectly in these cases (and, for evolution, using a wasteful and painful process) is another question, but let’s leave that to the theologians. The second snippet is a mixed bag. The first part about dispensing with supernatural intervention to explain the universe is good: we can explain its origin starting with a quantum vacuum—no breaking of the laws of physics is required. And it’s remarkable that we can explain how the universe began in that way using known laws of physics. This is one of the great triumphs of the human intellect. But the second bit, about God being a great mathematician, is simply the kind of sloppy language that enables religion and gives succor to theists. I doubt that Dr. Mir really thinks that God created the beautiful laws of physics that helped produce the Universe. But if he does, then why does the article have a headline claiming that Mir and his colleagues showed that God didn’t create the Universe? It’s a self-contradictory article if you take Mir’s statement at face value. But even if you don’t, there’s nothing in the piece that says anything about disproving God. What it says is that we’ve come closer to explaining the Universe using pure naturalism and rationalism. We may never understand why the laws of physics are as they are, but to say that “God made them” says exactly nothing. “God made them” is formally equivalent to “we don’t understand,” and so the burden of proof remains on the theists to find their God in the Big Bang. Regardless of what Feser or Craig say, you can’t simply conjure up an omnipotent being from philosophy alone: one needs evidence. Andrew Seidel, a lawyer for the Freedom from Religion Foundation who called the Express piece to my attention, summed up this problem on his Facebook page: Sloppy language like that combined with a desire not to offend religious sensibilities (which religion imposed on us after centuries of abuse), gives us quotes like Einstein’s “God does not play dice with the world.” Even though he clearly said, “the idea of a personal God is a childlike one” and called himself an agnostic. Faizal is seeking some “purely mathematical theory describing nature,” not god and not religion. So he should stop using the language of god to describe these things. There are better ways to talk about math, science, perfection, immutable laws, and the beginning of everything than by invoking an idea that, as Hitchens put it, “comes from the infancy of our species.”

h/t: Andrew Seidel