Disproving Gods with History and Science (Richard Carrier)

okay so well let's begin with history I'm going to mix it up a little will end with science we'll start with history and as the beginning said I'm going to talk about ngati religions that means religions with gods in them they all fall in the same way and I'm going to focus mostly on the Western tradition but you might start to see how these arguments would apply to even things like Hinduism and so on okay so let's start with the grand picture of history right imagine religions as species of animals and you put animals in a big family tree essentially right of how they started at one one original species net radiated out into various others into branches and leaves and whatnot now think of religions in the similar way the earliest religions date at least a 40,000 BC now actually we have evidence that goes even further back than that but by 40,000 BC we have shamanistic cave paintings and other things like ritual burials and and things like that that indicate that there was some sort of religion going on 40,000 years BC think about that now the first priesthoods were looking at 10,000 BC when we have cities and/or cities and villages and things where we have actual priesthoods established so we've got 30,000 years where humans are walking around with religions and having religious beliefs before they even get priesthoods but then finally get priesthoods is still eight thousand years before yahweh comes along and says oh hey by the way i am the one true god and you see of course that's just he does this in one tiny little place i mean he doesn't mention the fact that he exists anyone but one tiny tribe of goat herders in one little place and for another thousand years even after that he neglects to ever mention this Jesus character right so when you look at history this Yahweh religion this Yahoo a base religion even Christianity just looks like one among many it makes no sense from the perspective of a cosmic deity who would of course been revealing the gospel from you know year 40,000 BC and all cultures all history would show that the same God was sending the same messages to people in every culture and everywhere from as far back as we have any kind of evidence of religion even our written records go back to about 2000 BC and yet there's no evidence of this having occurred so history just in the big picture already refutes all religions right if there was any God based religion God would consistently be talking to people with the same message the same same belief system but that's not what we see what we see is looks pretty much like human invention humans are making stuff up according to their local culture and happenstance of history now we skip up to look at Judaism so we're going to start with Judaism because that's the first of the Western religions that's still around and has influenced the other major - now in between 539 and 332 BC Persia conquered Judea now I I want to point out of course those of you who know geography you can try to find Judea on there the Palestine the Holy Land cordon quote it barely shows up I mean it's basically almost just a red lot piece of a red line of the border there and compare that of course to the Persian Empire looks like the Persians had better gods apparently but the significance of that is that now the Persians of course that means Iranian the modern-day country of Iran is where is the center of the Persian culture it's where everything Persian came from Zoroastrianism was the / the main Persian state religion of the time when they conquered the Jews and hauled them off into slavery or into exile into others Persian cities the Jews were much mixed up with and seeing the the basically the God system of this incredibly enormous Lee powerful Empire that easily conquered them and they said well they can't have a better God than we do so we better get some of these cool God attributes pretty quick and so they borrowed a lot of the ideas of the Syrians had and added them to their religion these are attributes of Judaism did not exist before the Exile you won't find them in the old testament writings that were written before the Persian conquest but afterwards then you start to see it happening all throughout this idea first of all of a war of a good God versus an evil god of light versus dark that was as a streon idea the Jews did not have that before the Persian conquest Satan was actually one of the right-hand man of God and was doing the will of God so when Satan goes down to cause evil he was doing it on orders from God he's not an adversary in a sense of ant the enemy of God but after that of course Second Temple Judaism started to acquire this idea of Satan as a rebel who took a legion of angels rebelled against God and was cast out of heaven and now is responsible for all evil and now all death in the world and so forth is this big struggle between the good God and the evil God you know God and Satan and so on which the Christians picked up but that comes from around that's a Persian an idea the idea that the world will and that was not a part of Judaism before this conquest the idea that God's justice would be realized in one great apocalyptic Cataclysm that was as harassed Rhian belief that came from Persia the Jews like that idea they adopted it and of course they turned everything around so it would be the Persians that God would melt and and not the other way around but but the idea comes from their Iranian conquers the idea that this world would end by a river of fire being sent by God that will flow over the universe and burn everything up except the righteous that's the raster Ian the idea of the the great apocalyptic burning a new better world that will be created in its place this is the future the future heavenly paradise kind of thing that comes from Zoroastrian that desert Zoroastrianism that wasn't originally in Jewish belief and the idea then the most crucially that all the good people will be resurrected by God to live in that new world happily ever after this idea of an eternal paradise life was not a part of Judaism before when you died you just died and stayed dead basically you're kind of like a vague spirit in the earth they didn't have an idea of an eternal paradise or in eternal afterlife but the Jews picked that up from the Zoroastrian and it became a fundamental requirement of Judaism now and you look at the Talmud one of the requirements of being a Jew is affirming that you'll be resurrected everyone else has to explicitly declared a heretic in the Talmud and yet that wasn't a Jewish belief that was an Iranian belief picked up from the Persian cult of Zoroastrianism so when you look at this you realize that this is just man-made religion right this is not a single God who thought of all this stuff at the origin point of Judaism there was no you look at when God's communicating with Abraham in the Bible he doesn't say oh by the way the world is going to end at a certain time I'm gonna resurrect everybody I'm gonna burn everything and there's this awful guy named Satan and you need to watch out for him that's not there right so not all of that stuff gets added on later and it's borrowed from a human created religion of Zoroastrianism so certainly this is a historical piece of evidence that shows that Judaism is not a God oriented or God origin ated religion it's just another cobble together man-made thing now other things of course you know there are failed prophecies in the Old Testament but related to this idea of God of the Sarastro an influence on Jewish belief I'm going to read one particular prophecy that is conspicuous for not having happened therefore refuting the entire Bible because they can't possibly be supernatural didi communicating to these prophets if they get things wrong and it's also pretty horrific here and this shall be the plague I'm going to read this shall be the plague we're by Jehovah will smite all the peoples that have Ward against Jerusalem their flesh shall rot away while they stand upon their feet and their eyes shall robbery rot away in their sockets and their tongue shall rot away in their mouths that's by the way where Steven Spielberg got the idea for Raiders of the Lost Ark melting ha ha here it is and the same plague shall befall the horse the mule the camel the ass and all the beasts that shall be in their camps what did the animals do that's kind of rude and it shall come to pass that anyone that is left of all the nations that came against Jerusalem shall go up from year to year to worship the king Jehovah of hosts and to keep the Feast of Tabernacles and it shall be that whoever of all the families of the earth does not go up to Jerusalem that's all the families of the earth if they do not go up to Jerusalem to worship the king Jehovah hosts upon them there shall be no rain and if the family of Egypt even go not up and come not neither shall rain be upon them there'll be that plague 2 don't forget we're by Jehovah will smite the nation's that go not up to keep the Feast of Tabernacles this shall be the punishment of all the nations that go not up to keep the Feast of Tabernacles never happened failed prediction but notice this idea of the apocalyptic end world and also the idea of the Jews is the master race of the entire world will bow down to they kept getting conquered instead by other nations like the Persians the Greeks and then the Romans so consistently history turned out exactly the opposite the way that God told them it would and this we see even is connected to aspects of oh that's a shame this is not coming through correctly well I can't read the passage the passage is hidden back behind there and this isn't playing oh I wonder if I can make it play let's see if this no I don't wanna try it yet so the passage is behind there's a passage about how God's going to burn everything up and there's a funny funny line in it in Malachi 4 one two three those who have mobile devices can look this up and what he does what he says there is that the the Jews of faithful of Jehovah will be able to gamble as calves of the stall upon the ashen ashes of the burned up victims and the step upon the skulls of their enemies and let's see if this happens but this isn't supposed to be an animated gif from determine a which is supposed to be VOC see if it works no it doesn't work okay so unfortunately you lose the video effect the the joke was that I've heard this or seen this before oh right yeah so that's that's Judaism it's and you could go on and on about that but the point is it's very easy to look at historical facts and show that it's a man-made religion it doesn't have a pipeline to God so it's not a divine thing and so what they're saying about God is probably not true but let's look at Christianity Christianity is originated as a Jewish sect and what they did is they the original Christians is they took Judaism and they took this other fashion going on all around them and combined them to create a new version of Judaism a sort of super Judaism but notably they did the exact same thing the Jews did when they were conquered by the Persians they adopted all of these harassed rien ideas and made their religion different by incorporating this foreign culture that had conquered them well this is exactly what the Christians then did which is to say exactly what the Jews did again by creating Christianity is they'e borrowed all of these ideas of these popular religions around them held by their conquerors the Greeks and then the Romans and created a new religion and some of the gods that their new God or their new reven or their revised sub God would be based on the Son of God right is all of these sons of God except the one on the end is a daughter of God Osiris Adonis Romulus el Maxis and ananna are just the ones that we know for sure had resurrection cults prior to prior to Christianity there are many other similar gods that could be put into this category but they're harder to date Anana on the end by the way we have stone tablets dating back to 1700 BC in which she is descends to the lower world and into what we would call Hell is stripped naked put on trial on a kangaroo court is stricken dead by a death spell and then nailed up basically crucified and then her minions come down and feed her the food of water and life three days later and she's resurrected from the dead and ascends to glory sounds like a similar tale we've heard before right but it gets repeated again and again and again and all these other gods each time transformed all of these stories of all of these gods are completely different from each other but have the same similar structure behind them and the ones the Christians would most be aware of are Romulus for example Roman state God his death and resurrection action was celebrated in annual passion plays actually called passion plays they were actually acted out the death and resurrection of Romulus every year it was a Roman state religion Osiris Egyptian god those baptized yes baptized into his death and resurrection are saved in the afterlife sound familiar zel Maxis as a Thracian possibly Celtic God his death and resurrection assures followers of eternal life as well as el Maxis was in Herodotus this their cult is described in Herodotus and Herodotus was one of the main school texts that would be used to teach how to write for advanced writers who are writing at the level of the writers we see in the New Testament who were writing in Greek which means we can be absolutely certain that the authors of the Gospels read Herodotus because everybody read Herodotus if he'd learned how to write Greek that well and therefore they would know about Psalm Oxus it would not be a coincidence and of course it each if tis right next to the Holy Land quote-unquote therefore Osiris would be well known to them and of course they were conquered by the Romans so they would be familiar with Roman ceremonies as well but I want to caution there are some of the gods that you hear on the internet and so forth as being dying and rising gods were not in fact Mithras is one of the common ones that you'll hear about he's not a dying and rising God but he does undergo a passion there is a passion of Mithras in which he undergoes some sort of suffering or struggle through which he acquires victory over death which he then shares with his followers who were baptized in his name so there is a very the similarity is still there as to structured differently incidentally all the Gospels of Mithras were destroyed not preserved the only closest thing we have we have hints and quotations and suggestions and descriptions in various places in various texts but no complete gospel and this is the only one we have it's actually the picture Bible version this is a comic book essentially of the story of Mithras from beginning to end with the central events in the middle but the thing is is this is like having a picture Bible without having the text of the Bible so we don't actually know what's going on any scene because we don't that we don't have the description but nevertheless we can kind of make certain inferences of what was going on through it but this is the closest we get to the gospel of myth Ross is a stone comic book in a sense but what all these gods do have in common including myth Ross and the other ones they're all saved your gods they're all the Son of God or daughter of God some of them are women they all undergo a passion the using the exact same greek word by the way which means suffering or struggle in that time they all obtained victory over death which they share with their followers they all do this with some form of baptism or communion or both and they all predate Christianity so what we're looking at here is just like the Zoroastrian scenario all of that this whole structural idea was borrowed and then added on to Judaism and what you do and you take these elements and add them on to Judaism is what you get is Christianity right so once again we see a man-made thing and it wasn't a case where like to Abraham God revealed in the Old Testament that there's going to be this Jesus figurin is going to if you have faith in him we're going to be resurrected in all of this stuff this stuff doesn't appear until coincidentally when the Jews are conquered by a nation that has religions that have these elements so it looks like man-made not divinely made so Christianity is just like Judaism borrowed from other religions let's talk about evil so I'm going to move on into a different period of history what was another broad scope of history let's look at it that way but we'll start with Epicurus so given this famous line is God willing to stop evil but unable then he is not powerful is he able but unwilling then he is not good is he both able and willing then how can there be evil is he neither able nor willing then why call him God that was Epicurus and as this meme says atheists winning the argument since 300 BC there's never really been a good answer to this but we'll give one example slavery this this photograph I don't know if you've seen this before it's quite quite famous this was taken after the Civil War when slaves were freed in America and this fella wanted his wounds to be photographed and preserved from memory and disseminated so that people would see the incredible cruelty that American slavery involved and these are bible-thumping people right these are people who think the Bible as the they did this they did this to him and this is appalling how could any God stand by and watch this happening much less watch it happening being done in his name with people citing his book worshiping him his actual worshippers his actual followers without saying a word it's an unbelievable so what is the probability that a benevolent God would have a valid excuse to say 1 heavily were heavenly words was noted believers about this ever in the whole of history even worse in the time of American slavery and what evidence do you have supporting that probability if you're going to make up some excuse how likely is it and what is it what are you estimating what are you basing that estimate on those are the questions you would ask but in reality from our background knowledge of benevolent beings because we know lots of benevolent beings they're called humans these humans who happen to be nice people there among the nice humans anyway nice humans with the power to speak unharmed who don't have to fear anything I mean if you're god you're like Superman you're invincible you can't have your head cut off can't be shot can't be burned there isn't anything they can do to punish you you can't have your job taken away whatever it is if you have no limitations on you that will prevent you from speaking and you're a nice person you have no valid excuse not to say anything in fact when we look at people all the examples of other benevolent beings who are in the position of having the power to speak unharmed a valid excuse not to speak is so rare we never see one instance of it and the word rare by the way means very infrequent which happens to mean very improbable and in fact it's got to be at least millions to won against because we know millions of benevolent people who are in this position who are vocally saying condemning this kind of thing if God is not doing it then whatever excuse he has has to be rarer than millions to one against so that's one way to look at it and of course you know many other ways to design that argument in terms of pointing out that the excuses just don't hold up all they do is make their theory more improbable rather than saving it but I'm going to turn something around altogether you've probably heard the philosophical moral argument right the morals only come from God people believe there are morals therefore God must exist because where else would morals come from well let's look at history history actually refutes this let's treat atheism and theism as two different theories here atheism has a theory predicts that moral rules will only come from human beings they will begin deeply flawed and will be improved by experiment over thousands of years no that is exactly what we observe slavery is just one example of many things where the moral ruse start were created by humans they were deeply flawed completely up one would say and were improved gradually very painfully slowly by experiment over thousands of years therefore atheism is vindicated by the historical record theism has a figure however predicts a universe directly governed morally right from the start in other words the correct moral laws are disseminated immediately from the beginning it would've been 40,000 BC not 800 BC but we would also possibly see the universe actually designed to be moral we would have justice laws stewardship of the world enacting justice and mercy on gods of through God we see none of these things all of the things you would expect from a moral engineer are not there but we observe no such laws built into the universe no stewards or law enforcers but us ever so the theistic theory is completely refuted its predictions for history do not come true it's falsified by history itself whereas the predictions of atheism are completely verified so the moral argument goes the other way around so that's for morals now I'm going to talk about things whether they're moral or not but they're still involve moral concern yeah what you do after you wipe your butt you wash your hands right okay everybody knows this G except Jesus by the way in mark 7 Jesus comments on the Jewish tradition at the time of washing your hands and washing your utensils before you use them for meals and washing your hands before you eat and Jesus says this is a human tradition it's not in the Torah God did not command it therefore it's you don't have to do it you do not have to follow this rule he says the things that go into your mouth can't harm you only things that come out of your mouth are evil and meaning words of course but in blasphemies but the point being is that he clearly did not know about germs right this was the one the best teaching moment in the history of the human race where if you're a divine being but one thing you know if you're if you stumbled across a TARDIS and we're able to teleport you know in time back to here and people mistook you for a God and we're listening to you what was one of the first things you tell them about is germs right because there's millions of people kids women men are dying and suffering in horrible ways because they don't know about germs and simple things simple hygiene just cleaning your hands could save countless lives and you have this guy Jesus who's portrayed is going around randomly healing this or that individual isolated person but doesn't do anything like cholera done gone if it was a God you could eliminate cholera as easily as laying on hands on the earth right just no more cholera done that would be how God would do it he wouldn't walk around town like a Benny Hinn clone trying to do faith-healing acts but the key thing here is that if God if Jesus was God or had any pipeline to God surely he would know about germs and would teach and say by the way that is a tradition of men but it's a really good one it'll save lots of lives in fact you should do this more and used to sterilize your instruments we're going to gauge in surgery there's all kinds of things that you should know about and by the way water should be potable you should make sure it doesn't have germs in it and so on and so forth and clean your hands after you wipe your butt but instead Jesus seems to act like diseases are caused by demons inhabiting a person in other words he acts like the same primitive mindset of the time so here we have conclusive evidence just in the Gospels themselves even if you treat them as literal books Jesus is not God because God would know about germs so clearly God has ie God has not been talking to anyone for all of these is just examples after example after example there are many more one could go on so history proves God's not been talking Islam's no different I mean I'll briefly just say the Quran also fails to mention germs incidentally so when the angel Gabriel was rambling on and on and on with the asuras to Muhammad you'd think by the end Mohammed would be pissed off at Gabriel didn't at any time mentioned germs I mean that would be really helpful information by the way also so with the printing press and a few other things the Quran also endorses slavery including sex slavery which of course the Old Testament also does and therefore the angel Gabriel op slavery was really cool keep up with that like Judaism God's promise of prosperity and superior to your superiority over all nations was also refuted by the opposite I mean almost all Islamic nations are failed States or economic disasters compared to much of the quote-unquote infidel West which has all the power and wealth now that doesn't indicate that we're morally better than them but it does indicate that we if we're going to talk about God's helping us out it looks like our God's doing better job than theirs but I want to point out that all of these religions are the same religion in fact Christianity and Islam are just Jewish sects you're they're all just different sects of the same one religion they're all resurrection cults because they all teach basically the same thing and just differ on the details Judaism says the world will one day be dissolved the Dead will be raised and the loyal will become immortal Christianity says the world will be dissolved the Dead will be raised and the loyal become immortal Islam says the world will be dissolved and the dead will be raised in the loyal becoming mortal it's all the same religion so let's just pick one and analyze it a little more closely now I can't take credit for this by the way I'll read it in a moment but this is a meme that went around on the internet ages ago someone else came up with it they're pretty brilliant cuz it's spot-on this is the description of Christianity dead-honest the belief that some cosmic Jewish zombie can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him that you accept him as your master so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a RHIB woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree that is literally the Christianity that was being taught and it's first let's say 1,800 years almost 2,000 years of Christian history totally makes sense right now a lot of Christians say whoa okay that that's what that sounds a little ridiculous okay so I get you that that's crazy so we can see we can make this more sensible and so we came up with a new and improved Christianity where all that Eve stuff faked a trip woman stalking snakes okay that's all baloney we will grant you that what concede you that but I still have an imaginary friend who magically manipulates the world for me and he also magically impregnated a woman 2,000 years ago and she bore him a son who underwent an ancient ritual of blood sacrifice in order to dispel a curse laid upon me thus ensuring I will be immortal footnote although I've never seen this work for anyone else before now that's completely honest incorrect analysis of Christianity a description of it and yet it looks absurd when you actually spell it out that way but what if someone came up to you and said that they have an imaginary friend named zalmoxis who they Anstis is really real and they'll never die because this ancient demigod cleansed their soul with blood magic which grants them the power of living forever in a magical place no one can see that actually existed that was the description of the zalmoxis cult which is attested in Herodotus as I mentioned 500 years before Christianity so if zel Moxa's cult is ridiculous christianity is ridiculous because it's just the Jewish version of the same religion but let's go to history more recent Heaven's Gate cult the Heaven's Gate cult in was in California and they committed suicide mass suicide believing that there are souls or the information in their brains would be teleported into a spaceship they thought they'd get new bodies in this alien spaceship that was flying by the earth at the time and yet this whole belief this idea that when they die that they'll be resurrected in new superior bodies that's the Christian belief this is just the scientific version of Christianity so you have them saying that they'll get new bodies in an alien spaceship flying by versus what the Christians say is that they'll get new bodies in a magical alternative universe the weird thing is the Heaven's Gate cult makes more sense right because in point of fact they're talking about quantum teleportation and neural engineering which are actual things that exist we almost have the technology now we can see how to build this technology within 50 to 100 years we'll have it it'll be a simple matter to simply copy a brain and ricans it in another another man-made body all of that stuff is technology that's within human region within human understanding so their idea actually made sense there really could have been a flying saucer flying by and if there was and that owes aliens probably could have scanned their brains and reproduced them reproduce them in new superior synthetic bodies on the ship it's entirely possible but this compare this what the Christians are saying the Christians are saying not that they're saying that God needs blood to fix the universe but only his own had enough magical power to do it so he gave himself a body and then killed it now when you look at it like this Christians are talking about voodoo and magic and stuff they're not talking about anything that even has plausibility the Heaven's Gate cult is actually more believable than Christianity so if the Heaven's Gate cult is absurd Christianity is absurd so okay that hole looks bad but the usual thing is we can't we fix the plot holes with elaborate explanations and I've misspelled explanations I see here x.x can nations I was hoping to be a joke in there somewhere but there really isn't can't we make excuses but the thing is if we have to make excuses regardless what they are and our excuses have no evidence for them in other words they don't because that's why we're making them up right on the spot and those excuses are very improbable and they typically are like having an excuse not to mention to your own devoted believers for thousands of years that they shouldn't be keeping slaves if your excuses are very improbable then your theory is very improbable if you have to use an improbable excuse to tack that onto your theory the improbability of that excuse then attaches to the theory right so the theory becomes as improbable as your excuse or actually more improbable because if you have multiple excuses those in probabilities multiply right and those of you who know how to do basic probability math basic multiplying of probabilities you'll notice that this probability gets smaller smaller smaller exponentially and the fact still is that God has never communicated any essential scientific knowledge ever no germ theory of disease is in the Quran in the Old Testament or the New Testament for example nor anything else that's significant like that God has also never communicated any essential moral knowledge for example he completely dropped the ball on slavery God has never even communicated any consistent religious knowledge of any kind despite claims going on for forty thousand years all these different religions no consistency whatsoever so these facts remain no matter what excuses you make for them and these three facts are exactly what you'd expect if there are no gods but they're not at all what you expect if there are gods okay so maybe we can grant that what if God is a total douchebag then right can't there be one of those elites then maybe yeah he doesn't care about germs or slaves maybe he's totally pro-slavery he wants us to die of diseases he's total awful okay whoops but he could still exist right so that you really haven't refuted God yet so there's really two possible kinds of douchebag God's the one is natural beings which are aliens computers and things like that we could be living in the matrix right now and the douchebag gods could be our AI agents or whatever but what we're going to rule that out because that requires positing two improbable universes to explain one of them so that leaves us with the other kind of douchebag God which is the supernatural being being that has irreducibly mental powers sort of a brainless bodyless ghost mind that can just wheel things into existence there are two hypotheses then left the god hypothesis which is that the universe was designed by a ghost even to produce life the godless hypothesis that the universe was not designed to produce life and the first thing you look at is when you compare these two hypotheses is that we've done this comparison before again and again and again the explanation of lightning the explanation of disease Jesus thought it was demons it actually turned out to be germs and on and on and on we have constant millions and millions of examples of where supernatural explanations were proffered and they turned out to be false and natural explanations turn out to be true instead now when you have a horse that wins every single one of a million races and you have another horse that loses every single one of a million races and they're about to go head-to-head in another race which horse you bet on it's kind of a no-brainer conclusion right so even from the start before I even continue I could fold this and walk offstage and I'd be done right there's no probable basis for believing in any gods even douchebag gods but I'm going to go on because it's funny now unfortunately my animations aren't working so I'll talk you through this slide this is the history of life right so we've got 2.4 billion years life began and then there about 2.4 billion years after that where life was just sitting around evolving a single-celled life now in actual fact single-celled life is over six times more evolved than plants and animals just by time alone right animals have only been around about 2.6 billion years in other words 600 million years whereas a single-celled life has been around 3.7 billion years about 6 times more so single celled live bacteria for example have been evolving six times more and longer than we have so they're actually way more evolved than we are but in fact the rate of evolution for single-celled life is actually 500,000 times faster than for multi-celled life like animals which means that single-celled life is actually many billions of times more evolved than your hand for example so single celled life is badass now that makes a lot of sense in terms of evolutionary theory but it makes no sense in terms of God God really likes bacteria he's spending he spend most of his time working on those suckers but very little of his time working on us so what was God doing for the 2.4 billion year is fiddling around he's got all these single-celled organism doesn't know what to do with them you can't even figure out that maybe they could work together to do something and then eventually he comes up with the idea that you know what maybe I could maybe they could congregate together and make more complex entities like algae algae that's clever so he creates things like algie's whereas multiple cells can cooperate but he's still sticking around with those for a billion years before he realizes oh you know what maybe I should have these cells differentiate their function so that we can have a more complex animal yeah why didn't I think about that 3.4 billion years ago still couldn't figure it out but eventually did and he comes up with this differentiation of cells within a multi-celled organism about point six billion years ago but then it takes him five hundred million years to figure out Apes just eight right so he's tinkering around with mice and bugs and all kinds of this stuff but no it takes him a while to go eight oh right that maybe I should do something with those and then even when he gets to Apes to take some four million years more of tinkering before he figures out how to make people what was he doing for four million years god these apes are really stupid why can't I fix them they should be smarter than this oh right maybe I should do something with the brain I don't know when you look at this you realize that this is exactly what we should expect if life is a natural product of random evolution it would obviously take billions and billions of years for us to evolve obviously if single-celled life would have to evolve vastly longer in order to develop the intracellular machinery and complexity to actually start engaging in cooperation and it obviously once you have cells engaging in cooperation it would take a very very long time for them to evolve the sophisticated machinery they would allow them to start differentiating tissues and therefore creating what we recognize as plants and animals so this is exactly what we expect that there's no god it's it makes no freakin sense if there is a god even a douchebag God would be more time efficient than this so what does the godless hypothesis predict this is what we would expect to see if we are alive if we exist and there is no God and the universe therefore had to have come about by random chance or whatever what would we expect to observe what could we predict about the universe we find ourselves in the moment we'll open the door and look outside what would we see what we would see is that almost all of the universe will be lethal to life right if you pick random universes you're going to get one that you know if it's the universe it's completely hostile life obviously that you're never going to be in that universe right because if you're alive you're not in that universe you would never observe that universe the probability of that being outside when you open the door is 0% but if the universe is randomly picked from among all the possible universes that could just by chance maybe produce life then what you're going to see outside that door if it's not been intelligently designed is you it's almost entirely lethal life but life is just a very small a very rare occasional out product of it now because we know in this case if life is not engineered if it's not intelligently designed it has to be an extremely improbable chemical accident the right chemistry has to come together just the right way so we know that's a cat we have to concede that that's true in if there's no god designing things there's no designer that's the only way life could come about but we also know from probability theory that extremely improbable events almost always occur only in vast spaces and timescales in other words if an event is a billion to one against but you have a billion events right so the odds of you having at one of those events is actually quite high so what you would expect to see outside that door is a really enormous number of failed attempts to create life and just one where a few random successes because that's what you would normally appear to see if there's no design but that's what we noticed right this is what we look at we look outside that door what we see is a universe that trudged along for 10 billion years before life began on earth we see there are trillions of galaxies galaxies with billions of stars each and many planets and moons on on average per star and that's just the part of the universe we can see by the way the universe is actually predicted to be many times larger than even the part we can see so that trillions is probably a low estimate a very low estimate of galaxies and we notice that single celled life like I pointed out evolved for two billion years before multicellular life arose from it all of these things that we expect to see if the universe is if life is a product of random chance and non product of design we could have predicted that without even knowing it before we looked out the side of the door but it gets worse than that when you look at the universe and map and catalogue what's in it 99.99999% of the universe is a lethal radiation filled vacuum think about that that's almost at the entirety of the universe's in tight to a tiny little bit that is not a lethal radiation filled vacuum so God really really likes lethal radiation filled vacuums if he's the designer it gets worse than that because once you erase all of that and you disclose just focus on the stuff okay there's very little stuff it's almost all deadly space but what's left let's look at that we just look at the material 99.999999% of all the material in the universe composes stars and black holes on which nothing can live right think about that like most of the matter in the universe is dedicated to these gigantic things called stars and black holes are vastly huger than planets all that mass and they are the exactly the one place where life is not going to be found they're incredibly lethal and hostile maybe you can't live there and then okay so set aside all of that let's look at the tiny little crumbs that remain 99.99999% of all the other material in the universe space dust asteroids planets moons is barren of life or inhospitable to life that's an extremely bizarre thing to observe for an intelligently designed universe it's supposed to be custom-built to make life right this is actually the opposite of what we would expect them but this is exactly what we do expect to see the moment you open the door if there is no God because the only universe we could be in is one like this or at least the probability is extremely high that's what we'd see now I want you to think about this in terms of scale imagine this house I've got up here now imagine this house contains the entire universe that we know about the entire known universe the amount of volume in this house that would be hospitable to life the rest of it is completely entirely lethal drive the amount of volume that we hospitable the life would be smaller than a single proton not smaller than a bacterium even smaller than the proton in an atom in a bacterium if you walked into that house would that you see that it's almost entirely leaf of life and you you couldn't even find the one proton that life was living on in there would you conclude that the house was designed to create life or designed to be hospitable to life no you'd conclude the opposite now it's worth pointing out that Aristotle actually thought the universe was much more conducive to life than this and he described to the complete cosmos in in going all the way to the stars it was completely inhabited and caliche inhabitable Aristotle's universe was 10 to the power of 30 times more hospitable to life than ours ins which means Aristotle is a vastly better engineer of universes than God would be apparently maybe think even a douchebag God could outdo Aristotle but evidently not so the results we cannot predict any distinct features of this universe on the god hypothesis almost all the distinct features of it are unexpected to the contrary the god hypothesis predicts very different observations should be made but we can successfully predict numerous very weird features of this universe its vast size and is incredible lethality and all of that on the godless hypothesis in fact the probability that the universe would look like the look like this the way of described it is 100% expected it's exactly the universe we should expect to see the moment we look out the door now so then what they'll come up with is well but fine-tuning is still improbable and the universe requires fine-tuning the problem is is that their God requires more fine-tuning in fact they're proposing first of all they're proposing something they have no evidence of the super nanny we have no evidence that that's even a possible thing so they're already off the rails from the start but even if we grant them that what they're proposing is that there is a mind that just happens to exist for no reason that is at least as complex as a human mind because it has to be at least as intelligent as a human at least have at least as much knowledge as a human in reality of course their God they're imagining is vastly greater than that and therefore grant vastly more complex but if you're going to pick random solace or random body less minds out of a grab-bag of all logically possible bodyless minds and you want to get something that's human intelligent or better you're going to have to get information specificity equivalent to human or better the in fact information specificity the complexity of human intelligence is in the vicinity of 10 to the power of 5 billion so think about that 10 to the power of 5 billion that's extraordinarily unlikely in other words the attributes required for a creator are extraordinarily improbable attributes to have theology that's posits an even greater coincidence than a random universe they want to explain a mildly finely tuned universe by positing a massively finely tuned God and not explaining where that fine-tuning came from and maybe they'll go to gods all the way down like the turtle argument but I think that's a losing way to go and you know they won't go there so here's the summary no moral god is likely to exist on present evidence quite clearly only very improbable excuses can rescue that rescue God from that no supernatural causes or communications have ever been discovered but millions of natural ones have excuses make no difference to the resulting probability and the universe is contrary to predictions of any likely God hypothesis only improbable excuses make it fit and the universe is exactly what is predicted by the godless hypothesis even really weird predictions come true and that's the state of things and that's where we get from science and history so we could write rule on Clifford's book long before and he'd actually is supposed to have written that according to Douglas Adams and I could say well that about wraps it up for God thank you

Channel: Religion, Atheism, Science

Views: 116,449

Keywords: gaga, perry, cyrus, beyonce, bieber, atheist, atheism, debate, apologetics

Id: NFGTu-OxFpU

Length: 39min 43sec (2383 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 27 2015