So, I'm critiquing this book...

The book is called I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist by Frank Turek and Norman Geisler

I picked up this book only a day before Dr. Turek visited MSU’s campus and spoke to an, unfortunately, small audience on a rainy Thursday night. The book is organized so that everyone can quickly identify the sequence of arguments that the authors make so that the reader eventually sets the book down with at least a healthy respect for the logic behind theism. The book’s arguments are sequential, so each argument rests on the accuracy of the previous one. That is, they first establish whether or not Truth exists. Concluding that an absolute truth does exist the authors then argue that we can know whether it is true that the theistic god exists using four lines of argument:
The Cosmological argument.
The Anthropic Principle (weak and strong anthropic principle)
Intelligent Design
and
The C.S. Lewis "Moral Argument"

After drawing these arguments to their conclusions, the authors submit that this is sufficient evidence for one of the theistic worldviews. The authors proceed to argue for the existence of Miracles, the Historicity of the Bible, and the conformation of Jesus’ miracles to endorse the Christian brand of theism as the truth.

I accept, for the most part, that the earlier conclusions drawn by the authors such as “Truth about reality is knowable” and the “opposite of true is false”. If any fans of Berkely read this criticism and want to take Turek and Geisler on this point, they are welcome. As a scientist, I believe that there is truth in at least the proximal understanding of the material universe and that this reality is knowable.

As a naturalist, I believe that science is the best method for knowing truth and the only method to know anything objectively. This assertion stands to their oft-repeated law of non-contradiction: “If science is the only way to know anything objectively, can we know that objectively?” We can discriminate objective knowledge from subjective knowledge based upon whether or not the conclusions of the method are “discovered” as opposed to “created”. The scientific method is created to protect our knowledge from subjective bias. Through measurable experimental testing, falsifying bad data, and transparency in methodology; science meets this objective standard. While the laws and the language describing them are subjective (the same way “agua” and “water” are words we’ve created to describe something that objectively exists) we have effectively discovered a number of natural laws: fundamental forces, evolution, etc. If there is any doubt to the veracity of these objective discoveries, the method permits anyone the opportunity to falsify and refine what we do know.

For example what we “know” about gravity has changed hands, from Aristotle’s model, to Newton, to Einstein, and now a more unified Quantum Gravity. However, even though our understanding has changed, the physical phenomena that it explained has not.

This review will address the foundational claims of the argument for a theistic god, namely, that the universe and life within it is evidence of an intelligent designer (God) and that we can know about this designer if it exists.

The first argument is the Cosmological, or Kalam, argument. Which is as follows:
1. Everything that begins to exist must have a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe had a cause.
This is a reiteration of the argument made by the popular apologist William Lane Craig. The book addresses this but makes a more specific argument to support premise 2 above. Specifically:
1. An infinite number of days has no end.
2. But today is the end day of history (history being a collection of all days).
3. Therefore, there were not an infinite number of nays before today (i.e., time had a beginning).
(p. 90)
How do they justify the conclusion from these premises? “How here’s how this proves time had a beginning: since time certainly ends (as the present), the timeline cannot be infinite because something that is infinite has no end. Moreover you can’t add anything to something that is infinite, but tomorrow we will add another day to our timeline. So our timeline is undeniably finite.” (p. 91)

This is a very poorly designed argument. First, it is a bad idea to define time based upon the length of a day. Einstein has shown us that our perception of time depends completely on how it relates to the finite speed of light. This is why time appears to elapse at different rates relative to different observers in motion relative to one another. This means that for different observers, time appears to proceed differently. This results in a philosophically relevant phenomena known as time dilation. Both velocity and gravity have an effect in altering the way time is measured. In 1971, researchers Hafele and Keating placed two cesium atomic clocks (some of the most accurate clocks we have, since we define the “second” as the amount of time it takes 9,192,631,770 cycles of radiation between two hyperfine energy levels of a ground state Cesium 133 atom) around the world in opposite directions. The clocks on the planes had a net loss of time compared to the clock on the ground where the planes took off. Gravitational time dilation, however, accounted for a net “gain” (because they were further away from the gravity well of earth, and therefore more subject to the gravitaitonal distortion of space time than the clock on the ground). However, taking this all into account, time on earth speeds up when you are flying closer to the speed of light in space.

Theoretically, this yields what is known as the “twin paradox”. Say that we have a pair of twins and we send one up into space on a round trip to the nearest star besides the sun which is 4.45 light years away at a speed that is 86.6% the speed of light (so really freakin’ fast). For the purposes of the thought experiment, the ship will be at full speed from departure until landing. The round trip would take 10.28 light years in Earth’s frame of reference (the ship would return to find everyone 10.28 years older). However, everyone on the ship and the flow of time will be slowed by a factor equal to √(1-v^2/c^2 ) , or the reciprocal of the Lorenz factor, which in this case is 0.5. So, the travelers will only age 5.14 years. This is also how the people on the spaceship will perceive the journey (that is, they will think the star is only 2.23 light years away due to length contraction, consistent with general relativity). So if both twins were 10 years old when the experiment was performed, by the time the spaceship lands one will be 20.28 years old and the space faring one will be 15.14 years old.

So what does this have to do with the Kalam argument? Well, let’s re-examine the specific form that the argument takes in Turek’s book:
1. An infinite number of days has no end.
2. But today is the end day of history (history being a collection of all days).
3. Therefore, there were not an infinite number of days before today (i.e., time had a beginning).

The problem that the argument faces when it is put to the scientific litmus test is this:
What is the actual end day of history? It depends on your frame of reference. For the second twin, the “end day” (in this case, the day that the twin sets foot on earth after his journey) of history came twice as quickly than the twin remaining on earth. This refutes the second premise because “today” is a description that is completely relative based upon your frame of reference!

Therefore, the justification: “How here’s how this proves time had a beginning: since time certainly ends (as the present), the timeline cannot be infinite because something that is infinite has no end. Moreover you can’t add anything to something that is infinite, but tomorrow we will add another day to our timeline. So our timeline is undeniably finite (p. 91)” fails, because we cannot know where the theoretical timeline “ends”.
This also has important physical implications. For if space-time did originate in a singularity (which is the position that the book takes, as opposed to the more contemporary theoretical models of the Augustinian epoch including Hartle-Hawking state, string theory, M-Theory, and Ekpyrotic scenarios), the question “What happened before the big bang?” is completely nonsensical because, as far as we know, there was no time before the Big Bang.

Even if there was something before the big bang, our frame of reference (being limited to our universe) prevents us from any knowledge of what that would be.
This also means that Craig’s version of the argument fails in its second premise “the universe began to exist” because it implies time where, as far as we know, there was none.

Later, the authors write, “The problem for the atheist is that while it is logically possible that the universe is eternal, it does not seem to be actually possible. (p. 92)”. This should be re-written as “the problem of the theist is that while it is logically possible that the universe has a beginning, it does not seem to be actually possible.”

Already this book has failed the scientific standard. I'll post more in between medical school duties when I critique the other lines of argument they make...