Wow! Great catch, advocatus. This article is filled with nonsense and mistakes. Salah has chastened us for critiquing Islam without understanding it. This website does the same with science and atheism.
A few short problems with the article:
(1) Finding that the universe began with a “big bang” is no proof of god’s existence. Indeed, there have been theistic philosophers who believed that god’s existence was compatible with a universe that had no beginning and no end. St. Thomas Aquinas was perhaps the most illustrious.
At any rate, the existence of a big bang does not imply the existence of a god who created it. It is silent on the matter. And there are many, many cosmological models (discussed by people like Stephen Hawking and J. Richard Gott) that suggest the universe had a big bang and yet have no need of a theological impetus of any kind.
So to derive a “god” from the big bang is simply to assume what needs to be proved.
(2) The anthropic principle again says nothing about a god. It is, in the opinion of many astrophysicists, simply a vacuous claim that the universe had to be structured for sentience to be possible in order for us to exist. Well, obviously! If the universe had made our existence impossible, we wouldn’t be here. So what? This sort of “principle” is unnecessary since it does no explanatory work. (And, of course, it also says nothing about god).
(3) Quantum mechanics has nothing to do with “consciousness” or “wisdom”, which are macro-states of the brain. The speculations in this section are simply fantasies written by someone with no knowledge of QM whatever. For a quick intro to what QM really is, see here .
(4) The section on “intelligent design” is scientifically illiterate. But we’ve dealt with this issue elsewhere , so I won’t repeat the arguments here.
(5) The section on Freudianism is odd, since many in the skeptic and scientific community consider Freudianism to be basically a form of pseudoscience. However, the associated claim that psychology is becoming faith-based is simply false, and once again shows a total lack of knowledge of contemporary psychological research .
(6) As for the section on medicine and religion, once again this shows a complete lack of knowledge of the actual evidence against such things as the so-called “power of prayer’.
(7) The fall of Communism was, for many of us, a delight. As humanist atheists we believe that totalitarian atheist governments are precisely as bad as totalitarian theocracies. However, the section fails to note that many contemporary and past fascist and other totalitarian governments were theocratic. One obvious example is Franco’s Spain, which was a Catholic fascist government. Many governments in the Middle East are precisely the same: theocracies.
So this particular essay appears little more than a work of willful theological fiction.
