This was written as a review for SciSoc's newsletter, Aqua Regia, hence the references to Ben and others.

Hi Ben, Here's my super long "review". More like a rant. If it's too long, feel free to edit it down (but check with me before publishing) and I can post the full version on the web. Feel free to sarcastically call it "fair and balanced".

At the insistence of our equal-favourite editor, Ben Fulcher, I attended the debate, hosted by the Evangelical Union, between popular astrophysicist/lecturer Prof Tim Bedding, and Anglican minister Andrew Katay, on the proposition "that God is just a delusion". Okay, I was going to go anyway - regular readers may have noticed that I have an opinion on this issue - but it's always worthwhile to be challenged, to be open to the possibility that someone with whom you initially disagree may make a point that shifts your stance; even slightly. So, on a glorious spring-like day, I eschewed lunch with my fellow astro nerds in order to attend a packed PNR lecture theatre.

After enthusiastic applause, Tim's opening remarks set the scene. Borrowing heavily (with attribution) from the arguments used in recent popular books by Sam Harris and a well known zoologist (whose name has been mentioned in this publication too many times, apparently), Tim outlined the case that science is far from irrelevant to claims about God, as soon as you move past deism, and onto theism (that is, the idea that a God not only designed and created the universe, but intervenes in it in certain ways, for example, by influencing the writing of books, reading your thoughts, and sending their son to commit suicide).

During Katay's opening address, I started to develop a remarkable sense of deja vu. He devoted a considerable amount of time to an argument that was used by the apologist William Lane Craig at a similar event in 2001 - the so called cosmological argument. It goes something like this. Everything that has a beginning has a cause. The universe has a beginning; therefore the universe has a cause. Wave your hands a bit, and hey presto! This cause cannot be physical, so it must be "personal". As this sophistry unfolded, I and fellow cosmologists in the audience started shaking our heads and muttering under our breath. Here's why: for starters, the two premises are false.

In the vanilla flavoured interpretation of quantum mechanics, uncaused events happen all the time. Now, I don't actually believe that they are really uncaused, just that the causes cannot be found within quantum theory - a minority view, but nevertheless, it's not as clear cut as Katay implied. Now, for the 2nd premise: that the universe has a beginning. Isn't it interesting how some religious folk despise modern cosmology, and some love it because of the Big Bang singularity.

A Brief Lesson in Big Bang Cosmology: What it Does and Doesn't Mean

The Big Bang model of the universe begins with a few assumptions. The first is that the universe is approximately homogenous and isotropic on large scales (that is, the density is roughly the same wherever you go and wherever you look), and the 2nd is that the general theory of relativity is a good model for gravity. Of course, in science, one doesn't just make some assumptions and instantly believe them - we go on to calculate the observable predictions of the model, and then test them; in this case, the currently favoured Big Bang variant 'lambda-CDM' explains a shedload of different observations successfully - including those in which the predictions are very definite.

One of the key features of a cosmological model is what it predicts about a function a(t) - basically the relative size of the universe as a function of time (or, if the model universe is infinite, a is density^(-1/3)). And it turns out that there is a point in the past where a is zero - so density is infinite, the singularity. Unfortunately for people who are in love with the singularity, it is the one and only point in the model that we are absolutely certain, in advance, without doing any observations, that the model is false (since it does not take quantum effects, or indeed any microphysics, into account)! I hope this figure (courtesy A/Prof Geraint Lewis) explains what I mean.

So the Big Bang has very little to do with the question "why is there something rather than nothing", to which the best answer is "nobody knows, but it's about as likely to have something to do with Jesus as it is to have something to do with Aloysius Snuffleupagus".

But there was worse to come. Katay appealed to the alleged historical evidence of Jesus' resurrection. Now, I am no historian, but I am led to believe that the case that there even was a historical Jesus is not all that secure. Okay, bear with me here. Even if Jesus existed for certain and had eyewitnesses, there is no more reason to believe in that than there is to believe in all of the other miracle claims throughout human history, many of which are even viewable today (by eye and video witnesses) and are therefore slightly less ridiculous than 2,000 year old ones, a point Tim made.

A Guy in the Back Row Has A Go At Probability

As an expert in probability, the way it is bandied about in arguments like this really raises my blood pressure. Apparently the probability of a protein forming "by chance" is 1 in some ridiculously high number, according to a guy in the back row. Tim couldn't answer this, not being a biochemist (incidentally, sitting near the guy in the back row was a girl I had a severe crush on last year, a super cute biochem student. Hi Clare), thereby making the guy more sure of himself. Now, I know what research is like and it's damn hard. Could someone please show me who did the supercomputer calculations, involving the physics of complex molecules and bonding, to work out the probability of spontaneous generation of self replicating molecules (to give natural selection a start), in order to work out this number? Of course, it doesn't exist. Also, as Geraint Lewis pointed out, they always forget to multiply by the number of trials (hmm, avogadro's number of molecules per handful, trillions of handfuls per planet, interacting millions of times per second over billions of years, on 10^23 planets, and that's in the observable universe, nobody knows how big the full universe is). But yeah, it's all for our benefit.

Katay's next tactic was to play the nihilism card. This was the most preposterous part of the entire event, where he tried to claim that any atheist who is not also an extreme moral relativist and a nihilist is being inconsistent. Apparently, if the universe has no fundamental moral purpose, then we cannot speak of ethics or purpose on the higher level of human affairs. This is like hearing someone complain that since computers work via the flow of electrons through complex circuits, there is no such thing as software, and that anyone who claims to talk about "Windows" while simultaneously believing in electrical engineering is deluded.

The last resort was to claim that there are extra, non-scientific "ways of knowing" such as personal experience, which proves that Jesus was a magic man. But these are not non-science, they are bad science. The reasoning looks something like this: I have felt wonderful emotions while thinking about Jesus, this is impossible except on the hypothesis that the claims of Christianity are true, therefore the claims of Christianity are true. It is a logical, scientific argument - just with one rather faulty premise, the one starting with "this is impossible...".

So, unfortunately, this is how the review had to be. The worst that could be said about Tim was that he doesn't know everything, but unfortunately I had to devote the rest of this space to his opponent's drivel, on the off chance that anyone found any of it persuasive.