Ping!
[Jerry Coyne is another matter. Coyne’s manner is sarcastic and supercilious, or at least as supercilious as one can get without relevant literacy. Coyne is an evolutionary biologist of the first rank, but that is where his competence ends. His arguments against the existence of God are embarrassing, and, like the arguments of Richard Dawkins and other New Atheists, are eliciting a backlash among intellectuals who have at least a modicum of philosophical and theological education.]
My background in science leads me to accept evolution as the valid explanation for the diversity of life on Earth and it also leads me to choose to not hold any religious beliefs. But this is where I part ways with Richard Dawkins and other atheists whose intolerance of and contempt for those of faith is indeed damaging to the cause of science.
Science is not equipped to disprove the existence of God and it’s embarrassing to watch some scientists (who should know better) try to do so.
Dawkins’ book “The God Delusion” is saturated with fallacies of logic that should have been obvious to the author if he wasn’t so blinded by his own arrogance.
...and HIV does not cause AIDS.....
Coyne is,..., well, an idiot. Theists do not admit that God had a beginning. Physicists do not accept the steady state universe. IOW, materialistic science accepts as axiomatic, that all things scientific have a material cause. Atheists, then would seem to accept it as axiomatic that all things have a material cause, lest there be wiggle room for supernatural things, namely a god of any sort. So the best thing for atheists is an eternal bubbling super-universe where "normal" universes pop in an out of existence. IOW a poor man's god.
Nonetheless, it is a legitimate question to ask for the cause of matter. To which they would reply, "it needs no cause, it just is". Similarly when asked what God did before he created everything, the answer is, "He did godly things."
No, he cannot. Coyne is equating the need for the 'causation' of matter (true because the universe, and therefore matter, is limited by dimension of time) with a declared rationalization that he can apply the same constraint to God who declares that He is outside the constraint of the dimension of time and therefore not bound by it. Coyne is committing the logical fallacy of equivocation and should know better.
"And why is God exempt from having a cause, but matter or physical laws are not?"
Because matter and physical laws are constrained by the 3 spatial dimensions and the 4th dimension of time. God has declared that he created matter, physical laws and time and therefore He is not bound by them. Only one additional dimension is required for God not to be bound by time and a truly omnipotent, omniscient God would not be bound by any number of dimensions.
The god of Coyne's argument must be bound dimensionally and constrained by time and would therefore require causation. It is just Coyne insisting on a definition of terms such that his argument cannot be wrong. Truth by definition. This should not be understood as actually applying to God and does not mean that God is constrained by time (or any dimension) and therefore requires causation.
"This is just sophistry."
And, as usual, the claim of sophistry is merely projected onto those who disagree with him when Coyne himself is the one committing gross sophistry through the fallacy of equivocating 'caused matter' with 'uncaused God'.
This is why it is important that people understand that geokineticism is only a belief and is entirely compatible with geocentrism under both classical physics and GR. In reality, 'science' has delivered no such blows to Scripture (evolution being likewise a belief based on multiple logical fallacies).
“Can we formulate physical laws so that they are valid for all CS [coordinate systems], not only those moving uniformly, but also those moving quite arbitrarily, relative to each other? […] The struggle, so violent in the early days of science, between the views of Ptolemy and Copernicus would then be quite meaningless. Either CS could be used with equal justification. The two sentences: “the sun is at rest and the earth moves” or “the sun moves and the earth is at rest” would simply mean two different conventions concerning two different CS.”
Einstein, A. and Infeld, L. (1938) The Evolution of Physics, p.212 (p.248 in original 1938 ed.); Note: CS = coordinate system
"...Thus we may return to Ptolemy's point of view of a 'motionless earth'...One has to show that the transformed metric can be regarded as produced according to Einstein's field equations, by distant rotating masses. This has been done by Thirring. He calculated a field due to a rotating, hollow, thick-walled sphere and proved that inside the cavity it behaved as though there were centrifugal and other inertial forces usually attributed to absolute space. Thus from Einstein's point of view, Ptolemy and Copernicus are equally right."
Born, Max. "Einstein's Theory of Relativity",Dover Publications,1962, pgs 344 & 345:
“The relation of the two pictures [geocentricity and heliocentricity] is reduced to a mere coordinate transformation and it is the main tenet of the Einstein theory that any two ways of looking at the world which are related to each other by a coordinate transformation are entirely equivalent from a physical point of view.... Today we cannot say that the Copernican theory is ‘right’ and the Ptolemaic theory ‘wrong’ in any meaningful physical sense.”
Hoyle, Fred. Nicolaus Copernicus. London: Heinemann Educational Books Ltd., 1973.
"People need to be aware that there is a range of models that could explain the observations,” Ellis argues. “For instance, I can construct you a spherically symmetrical universe with Earth at its center, and you cannot disprove it based on observations.” Ellis has published a paper on this. “You can only exclude it on philosophical grounds. In my view there is absolutely nothing wrong in that. What I want to bring into the open is the fact that we are using philosophical criteria in choosing our models. A lot of cosmology tries to hide that.”
Ellis, George, in Scientific American, "Thinking Globally, Acting Universally", October 1995
Bump for an excellent article and links to others..