Return of the God Hypothesis

After having read the author's two other books Signature in the Cell and Darwin's Doubt. I've been waiting for this book to be available for purchase. Finally got my pre-ordered copy.Excited to dive in and devour.

Working in a potato-field, wartime land-worker John Stewart Collis came up with the following reflections, (from his excellent book 'The Worm Forgives the Plough.) ' '' A mouse,'' said Walt Whitman, '' is enough to stagger sextillions of infidels'' Or a potato. What is an infidel? One who lacks faith. What creates faith? A miracle. How then can there be a faithless man found in the world? Because many men have cut off the nervous communication between the eye and the brain. In the madness of blindness they are at the mercy of intellectual nay-sayers, theorists, theologians and other enemies of God. But it doesn't matter; in spite of them, faith is reborn whenever anyone chooses to take a good look at anything - even a potato.' . And that is surely unanswerable.

Sloppy, lazy science just like Signature in the Cell and Darwin's Doubt. This is something which clearly appeals to people who want there to be a God or Designer responsible for life in the universe. Unfortunately, the claims that the best inference is God or an intelligent designer simply does not wash. Meyer tries to explain in this and his previous books that we can eliminate reasons A B C and D as explanations for the appearance and, as a result, we can infer an intelligent designer as the best explanation by using human made machines as an analogy. Meyer does not think, as other real scientists would do that there could also be explanations or theories F G H, indeed there could be an infinite number of explanations, some potentially valid, others not valid but which can eventually be proved or disproved by scientific research. How exactly does a transcendent mind exist or work the first place? Meyer needs to explain this. Meyer is very fond of making question-begging statements about other scientific research but there are plenty of questions to be begged about ID. Meyer also relies on his colleague Dembski's specified complexity to rule out life coming into existence and then developing into something more complex by mutation and natural selection. However, this would only be valid if Meyer is fully appraised of ALL the environmental circumstances exiting on Earth at the time life first developed and then eliminating all possible scientific explanations before coming to the conclusion that there was a mind behind it all. As to the belief that an intelligent agent caused the beginning of the universe, could Meyer provide a little more detail about how the Designer brought this about as well as how the 'designer' designed life? The same goes for his argument in Darwin's Doubt. He uses gaps in current scientific knowledge to infer design. To say that scientists have not yet discovered exactly what caused the Big Bang or brought life into existence as an excuse for ID supporters therefore for them to not need to say is just a cop out. If scientists support a designer of life or the universe they should have the evidence for it. Otherwise, it is just a cop out. I'm sure that in 10, 20, 50, 100 years time, ID supporters will still be complaining how the academic elite is suppressing the ID argument despite the number of ID books that have and will be published and are out there in the public domain Whenever new scientific evidence is discovered ID will always be able to push back and say that that discovery was caused by intelligent design, so they will never lose but at the same time will never be able to prove their own pseudoscience.

I bought this book to find out if Meyer has lost the plot by going on about Christianity & faith, i.e. accepting beliefs without evidence, instead of depending on a rational critique of the shortcomings of materialist science which points instead to intelligent design. I thought that if he did this he would have ‘blown’ years of successful effort by the Discovery Institute to establish the bona fides of the intelligent design movement, which has so far assiduously avoided getting into creationism, and discussing ‘who’ the creator might be. I have read both Signture and Darwin’s Doubt, and together with Denton’s Evolution: a Theory in Crisis (and its follow-up Still in Crisis) & more, I do not doubt the validity of the I.D. case, and I particularly like Illustra Media’s The Information Enigma video.In my view, this latest book is an explanatory tour de force up to around page 430. However it is possible to accept a theistic conclusion, without getting into the nature of a ‘transcendental mind’ - about which we can suspect nothing apart from its existence. By that I mean that we do not have the evidence for an anthropomorphic god that is a ‘being’ (although Meyer uses that term) and certainly not one with a gender - He. Nor do we have to accept that this god is ‘personal’, a word Meyer introduces without explanation. However Meyer drops us the information that he’s a Christian and takes the unjustified position of assuming without evidence that this god is ‘benevolent’. Victims of Covid & other tragic deaths may find difficulty in accepting ‘benevolence’ claims when ‘theistic indifference’ provides an alternative view.There is a distinct problem with the word ‘God’ which puts off large numbers of people since it has accrued so many questionable connotations over previous millenia - labels such as Father, Lord, Saviour, We his children, plus the need for praise, worship and adoration; in short, religiosity. None of this is needed to accept a theistic conclusion, so it appears to me that Meyer has risked dropping the ball and short changing the ID movement by not keeping his head down about this; & leaving others to come to their own conclusions. Accepting theism as a powerful theoretical solution to the the Big Questions of Existence that materialism fails to answer adequately, does not require religious faith. The notion of ‘God creating us in his image’ - a closing idea from a guy called Platinga, is simply guesswork and a no no from a rational perspective.One thing that strikes me is that Meyer appears to assume that death is final. He barely refers to consciousness as a possibly fundamental quality of the universe, but there is plenty of empirical evidence supporting consciousness surviving the death of the body, with numerous reputable scientists & others backing this possibility. To ignore this as ‘simply unwarranted’ is not unlike materialists refusing in principle to consider intelligent design theory. String theory with eleven dimensions but no evidence - yes let’s talk about that! A single spiritual dimension for which there is empirical evidence. Well no, that doesn’t deserve comment (even though it may support a theistic conclusion!). I realise that spiritualism has gone out of fashion, but if consciousness really does survive the death of the body as the evidence suggests, the ball game Meyer has been writing about is altogether bigger and different from his thesis. However i do not wish to run this book down. There is a huge amount of valuable content in most of it.

Meyer is never short on words and he never skims over topics but gives each one due respect. This book follows a similar pattern. It is wide ranging, thorough, accessible and prented irencally making it reader friendly. The writing flows and the arguments unfold naturally. It is well researched and evidenced. It presents a formidable challenge to would be naturalists/materialists exposing the weaknesses in such philosophies across the whole of science and it corrects many misunderstandings and misrepresentations of science, philosophy and theism along the way. But, the text goes further, presenting a coherent, cogent and evidence-based argument for the God Hypothosis. I'm sure it will bring comfort and increased confidence to theists and provide a serious challenge to atheists and agnostics. Whether you are an atheist or theist you should read this book, if only to get a clearer understanding of the importance of theism to science and to understand how theists think and why they hold firmly to their worldview.

Couldn't put the book down from cover to cover.It takes the approach of setting the cosmological scene as we understand it today and then draws out the natural inferences we can make from the singularity, fine tuning parameters and information inherent in ex nihilo creation and later interspersed through abiogenetics and evolution.Very well researched, argued and counter-argued throughout. Scientists that dismiss this on the grounds of lacking academic credulity will either expose their prejudice or ignorance. This is a landmark argument that must be arrest the attention of the scientific community (like Blind watchmaker did).The strongest sections of the book were how Meyer comprehensively dismantled Hawkings and Hartle's wave function of the universe, Hawkings belief in scientific laws to create , Panspermia and Dawkins DNA computer model, and the Multiverse/materialist exoticism.A must read.