A Physicist's Intellectually Empty Explanation of Why He Is an Atheist

For ages humans have looked up at the stars, and have got a kind of feeling that they were somehow important, for some reason. Speaking rather metaphorically, we can say that the stars do tell us something very important, but too few scientists are listening to what the stars are saying.  (At the end of this post, I'll clarify what I mean by that.) 

Liller 1 star cluster (credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, F. Ferraro)

In a recent interview, physicist Carlo Rovelli says one of the silliest things I have ever heard someone say. He says, "There's no fundamental difference between natural objects and mental objects, between culture and nature, between living beings and dead beings, between men and women." 

On page 228 of his book "There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness," Carlo Rovelli has a short essay entitled "Why I Am an Atheist." It's an essay remarkable for its extremely vacuous content. Rovelli fails to give any reason that has any intellectual weight. 

Let's discuss how you could state bad reasons and good reasons for being a theist or being an atheist. By "bad reasons" I mean reasons that are relatively unpersuasive or that have little intellectual weight. By "good reasons" I mean reasons that are relatively persuasive or that have relatively high intellectual weight.  Let's start with bad reasons you could state for being a theist. A bad reason might be something like the reason that your friends are theists, or that your parents told you to be a theist, or that you enjoy the music and the architectural grandeur of the church you go to. Another bad reason (from an intellectual or philosophical standpoint) you might give for being a theist is that you were emotionally moved by reading some text long ago that some people claim was inspired by God. But if you had some convincing argument that such a text or scripture was inspired by God, that might be a better argument. 

It is easy to think of some good reasons that a person could give for being a theist. For example, a person might argue that the sudden unexplained origin of the universe suggests the existence of a deity that caused such an event. Or a person might argue that the enormous hierarchical organization, fine-tuned functional complexity, enormously high information richness and component interdependence within living organisms such as humans could only have arisen if there were a supernatural designer helping to bring about the appearance of such organisms so rich in complex systems made of complex systems made of complex systems made of complex systems.  Or a person might argue that the enormous amount of precise fine-tuning in the universe's fundamental constants and laws argue strongly that we live in a universe that must have been fine-tuned by a supernatural designer. Or a person could argue that the wonders of the human mind and human memory are things almost entirely beyond any explanation involving an appeal to brains and their neurons, dendrites and synapses. Endless facts of neuroscience and endless neuroscience case histories and medical case histories could be brought up to support such an argument. The argument would be that since the human mind and its powers absolutely cannot be explained by anything we know about the human brain, it must therefore be there every human is a soul that must originate from a divine source. 

Making equally weighty reasoning, a person could argue that we absolutely cannot explain the natural physical origin of any adult human being, because of the failure of physical science to explain the progression from a speck-sized zygote (containing no specification of how to build a human body or any of its cells) to the vast state of hierarchical organization that is the full human body. This argument could be powerfully combined with the previous argument.  The combined argument would be that we do not have any credible natural explanation for how either the mind or the body of any adult human arises, and that therefore the very existence of adult humans with fantastically organized bodies and enormous depths of mental powers requires something like transcendent causal agency. 

What kind of arguments might theoretically qualify as relatively weighty arguments for atheism? You might give some argument trying to show that biologists have done a great job of explaining all the wonders of the human mind and the human body, and the wonders of the biosphere. You might also give some argument that there is a natural reason why the universe might have originated in an event like the Big Bang, without any purposeful agency being involved in such an event. You might also try to give some type of speculative argument trying to show that it is not so improbable that there could have accidentally existed a universe as fine-tuned for the existence of life as our universe. Making such arguments in any compelling way would be very difficult. 

Does Rovelli give anything like such arguments in his "Why I Am an Atheist" essay? He does not. He acts just as if no such arguments can be given. 

He starts out his essay with the very ridiculous reason that he does not like people who are virtuous because they fear post-mortal punishment. We have this laughable "false dilemma" piece of reasoning: 

"I don't like those who devote themselves to others and to justice, thinking that in this way they will please God. I like those who instead devote themselves to others because they feel love and compassion." 

This is an example of the fallacy of a false dilemma. You can do good for both of the reasons stated. And the line of reasoning is fallacious, because what type of people a person likes or dislikes has nothing to do with whether he should believe in a God. Humans make all kinds of mistakes, and have all kinds of faults. If it were true that those who believe in God tend to be unlikable people, that would not be any good reason for disbelieving in God, if there were adequate reasons for holding such a belief. Similarly if most of those who believe in UFOs are unlikable, that would be no reason for disbelieving in UFOs. 

Rovelli's next paragraph is equally vacuous. He states this:

"I've never liked feeling in communion with a group of people standing in silence inside a church listening to a service. I like to feel in communion with a group of friends, talking with them, looking into their eyes and their smiles."

This is pretty much the worst reason ever for being an atheist. It's another false dilemma. Being a theist does not stop you from feeling "in communion with a group of friends, talking with them, looking into their eyes and their smiles." And it makes no sense to bring up what you enjoy when you are explaining why you are a theist or an atheist. I may note that the silence of students in a lecture hall listening to an atheist professor such as Rovelli is very similar to the silence of church attendees during a church service. 

The next paragraph is equally ridiculous from the standpoint of nonbelief justification. It features only more irrelevant "what I like" talk by Rovelli, such as him saying "I don't like shutting myself away in silence to pray to God." Prayer is not a requirement for belief in God, and what you like has no weight when you are trying to justify whether you believe or disbelieve in God. 

The next paragraph is equally ridiculous from the standpoint of nonbelief justification. It consists only of Rovelli maintaining that theists are dogmatic because they claim that God created the universe. A contrast is drawn between such claimed dogmatism and an "I don't really know" attitude. The line of reasoning has no weight. While a belief in organized religions such as Christianity and Islam typically involves a great deal of dogmatism, theism by itself does not require any great dogmatism. And atheists like Rovelli tend to be just as dogmatic as anyone claiming that God created the universe. Atheists such as Rovelli dogmatically assert all kinds of unproven and extremely dubious claims, such as the groundless claim that Darwin showed that all species have a common ancestor (a claim Rovelli makes in his chapter on Darwin), and the claim that brains produce minds and store memories (a claim inconsistent with a host of observations, as discussed in the posts of my site here). So it is not actually true that atheists are less dogmatic, as Rovelli tries to suggest. 

The second-to-last paragraph is more "what kind of people I like" reasoning that is featherweight from an intellectual standpoint. It has absolutely zero weight from the standpoint of justifying a philosophical position. For example, Rovelli say he does not like people who say that they know what is good and what is evil. 

We then have the grand climax of Rovelli's "Why I Am an Atheist" essay. It starts out in the least convincing way imaginable, by saying this:

"I like talking with friends, trying to help them when they are in trouble. I like talking to plants, and giving them water to drink when they need it. I like being in love. I like gazing in silence at the sky. I like stars. I have an infinite liking for stars." 

What on Earth does that have to do with whether we should believe or disbelieve in God? 

After strangely noting that he has "an infinite liking for stars," Rovelli tells us more about how he does not like theists, speaking as if he strongly dislikes people who "seek refuge in the arms of religion when they feel lost, when they are suffering." He ends his "Why I Am an Atheist" essay with this sentence that sums up his whole essay: "And since I want to be like those I like and admire, and not like those I don't like and am not impressed by, I do not believe in God."

Adoring all the stars while hating many people?

I have never read an attempted justification for atheism that sounds as vacuous as this one. There is zero intellectual weight and zero argumentative force in anything Rovelli has said in this essay. Rovelli's essay sounds very much like something that a thirteen-year-old might write, but only if the thirteen-year-old was a clumsy reasoner.

Rovelli should do more studying of biology, which might cause him to stop making extremely misleading claims such as the claim that we are made of stardust. Physically humans are made of enormously well-arranged organ systems which are made of gigantically organized organs which are made of vastly organized cells which are made of extremely organized organelles which are made of proteins and protein complexes so well-organized (and with so many well-arranged parts) that they are often called molecular machines, even by materialist scientists. Physical organization so fine-tuned and hierarchical (and with so very many interdependent very complex components) is the opposite of dust (something utterly unorganized), and also something that would be fantastically improbable to ever arise in the godless universe Rovelli believes in. 

I suspect that Rovelli has spent too much time gazing adoringly at the stars, and not enough time studying how stars like the sun require the most precise fine-tuning of physical laws and fundamental constants for them to exist, fine-tuning that would be enormously improbable in the godless universe he believes in. Studying that topic would have been easy for a physicist such as Rovelli. Below are some relevant quotes in which scientists are talking about stars and how they require very precise fine-tuning:

• "We conclude that a change of more than 0.5 % in the strength of the strong interaction or more than 4 % change in the strength of the Coulomb force would destroy either nearly all C [carbon] or all O [oxygen] in every star. This implies that irrespective of stellar evolution the contribution of each star to the abundance of C or O in the ISM would be negligible. Therefore, for the above cases the creation of carbon-based life in our universe would be strongly disfavoured." -- Oberhummer, Csot, and Schlattl, "Stellar Production Rates of Carbon and Its Abundance in the Universe."
• "From 1953 onward, Willy Fowler and I have always been intrigued by the remarkable relation of the 7.65 Mev energy level in the nucleus of ¹²C [Carbon 12 isotope] to the 7.12 Mev level in ¹⁶O [Oxygen 16 isotope]. If you wanted to produce carbon and oxygen in roughly equal quantities by stellar nucleosynthesis, these are the two levels you have to fix, and your fixing would have to be just where these levels are actually found to be. Another put-up job? Following the above argument, I am inclined to think so.  A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature."  -- Astronomer Fred Hoyle, "The Universe -- Past and Present Reflections" (link). 
• "Fred Hoyle first pointed out, the beryllium would decay before interacting with another alpha particle were it not for the existence of a remarkably finely-tuned resonance in this interaction. Heinz Oberhummer has studied this resonance in detail and showed how the amount of oxygen and carbon produced in red giant stars varies with the strength and range of the nucleon interactions. His work indicates that these must be tuned to at least 0.5% if one is to produce both these elements to the extent required for life."  -- Physicists B.J. Carr and M.J. Rees, "Fine-Tuning in Living Systems." 
• "A mere 1 percent offset between the charge of the electron and that of the proton would lead to a catastrophic repulsion....My entire body would dissolve in a massive explosion...The very Earth itself, the planet as a whole, would crack open and fly apart in an annihilating explosion...This is what would happen were the electron's charge to exceed the proton's by 1 percent. The opposite case, in which the proton's charge exceeded the electron's, would lead to the identical situation...How precise must the balance be?...Relatively small things like atoms, people and the like would fly apart if the charges differed by as little as one part in 100 billion. Larger structures like the Earth and the Sun require for their existence a yet more perfect balance of one part in a billion billion." -- Astronomy professor emeritus George Greenstein, "The Symbiotic Universe: Life and Mind in the Cosmos," pages 64-65.
• "What is particularly striking is how sensitive the possibility of life in our universe is to a small change in these constants. For example, if the constant that controls the way the electromagnetic field behaves in a vacuum is changed by four percent, then fusion in stars could not produce carbon....Change the cosmological constant in the 123rd decimal place and suddenly it's impossible to have a habitable galaxy." --  Marcus Du Sautoy, Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, "The Great Unknown," page 221. 
• "The values of some fundamental physical constants are considered to be finely tuned and balanced to give our observable world. Examples include finely tuned balance between quark masses needed to produce protons and neutrons ...and production of heavy nuclei in stars, which depends on the finely tuned balance between the fine structure constant ...and the ratio of the proton mass ..and electron mass...These and other examples suggest a narrow 'habitable zone' in parameter space...where essential biochemical elements can form... For this reason, fundamental constants are referred to as 'biofriendly' or 'biophilic' ....We need to tune the same fundamental constants setting α and β (ℏ, e, c, me, mp) that, importantly, involves tuning, which is additional and different to tuning involved in fixing α and β....We can conjecture that multiple independent tunings were involved. This includes tuning fundamental constants to produce heavy nuclei and additional tunings needed for other observed sustainable structures to emerge." -- Kostya Trachenko, "Constraints on fundamental physical constants from bio-friendly viscosity and diffusion" (link).
• "If we extend the model back to nucleosynthesis, about 1 second after the beginning, then the density of the universe must be within one part in 10¹⁵ of the critical density in order to still be close to critical today. The further we push back, the closer the constraint: at the Planck time, it is one part in 10⁵⁵...The contribution to the vacuum energy is ∼ 1, 123 orders of magnitude larger than the observed value. This is a fine-tuning problem. Quantum field theory and general relativity can explain the small observed value of the cosmological constant, but only by supposing that the different (positive and negative) contributions to the vacuum energy from each quantum field happen to cancel each other to 123 decimal places. This requires an unmotivated but suspiciously precise coincidence between a number of independent factors. As an example of fine-tuning for life, the cosmological constant problem is a near perfect storm...Make the cosmological constant a few orders of magnitude larger and structure formation freezes before anything has formed. The universe will be a thin, uniform hydrogen and helium soup, a diffuse gas where the occasional particle collision is all that ever happens. A very simple way to make a universe lifeless is to make it devoid of any structure whatsoever. Alternatively, a negative cosmological constant causes the universe to recollapse. If the cosmological constant were −10⁻⁶⁸, then the universe would recollapse ...10⁻¹⁰ seconds after the big bang...Weaken the strong force by a few more percent, or increase the strength of electromagnetism, and carbon and all larger elements are unstable (Barrow & Tipler, 1986). The parameters of the standard model must walk a tight-rope in order to form stable nuclei and support stable stars." -- Physicist Luke Barnes, "The Fine-Tuning of the Universe for Life" (link). 
• "It is commonly argued... that if the fine-structure constant α were off by a few percent, the shift in the resonance energy would inhibit stellar production of ¹²C [main type of carbon] required for the emergence of carbon-based life."-- Four scientists (link).
• "Now, there are a few aspects of this situation that appear fine-tuned. First, the average density of the Universe—the average density around which you have these part-in-100,000 variations—is quite special. If it had been larger, the force of gravity would have caused the whole Universe to stop expanding very early on and it would have collapsed in on itself. For instance, if it had been just 1% denser one second after the big bang, the Universe would have collapsed, effectively coming to an end, less than seven minutes later. On the other hand, if it had been a bit smaller, the reduced gravitational attraction would have allowed the Universe to expand much more quickly, making it far too diffuse for stars, or any sort of complex structure, to ever form. To have a Universe that lasts as long as ours, the initial density had to be extremely fine-tuned....The amplitude of the tiny, part-in-100,000 variations in this average density also appear fine-tuned....Furthermore, there are a number of other properties of our Universe that appear 'selected' for life....Fine-tuning is striking because a number of seemingly disparate aspects of the early Universe and of physics have conspired together to enable a universe like ours to develop. It has the quality of a statistical residue, since the physical conditions of the early Universe together with the values of the parameters of physics constitute a concrete pattern that is not predicted by the big bang theory per se nor by the structure of our (current) laws of physics per se. However, this pattern turns out to be just the right one such that particular, complex structures can emerge, like galaxies and stars and planets and a periodic table of elements that can form complex molecules and eventually life." -- Adam D. Hincks, holder of a Physics PhD from Princeton University (link).