Now when you talk about these things somebody in your audience...
...must come up, I assume, and say "Well we only understand 4% of these stuff...
So how is that different from Bill O' Reilly saying:
"Well in that case the rest of it is God, you guys are just...
...you're just expanding beliefs here, you've got no evidence, for the 96%.
The difference is we do understand the tides, the tides are part of the 4% we understand.
So Bill O' Reilly is giving a list of things that are fully understood.
If he given a list of things that are not understood...
...ok, that would be a different reaction and it would be less susceptible to comedic mockery...
than saying "Tides come in and out, you can't explain that."
Yes we can, we've know that one for the last 200 years. Give me a better example.
So if he said "There's dark matter and there's dark energy, forcing expansion of the Universe...
...so fast that it's accelerating, you can't explain that."
Right, we can't explain that! I don't think he knows enough physics...
...to be able to tell us what it is that we don't understand yet.
That would have been a more interesting exchange with the atheist guy.
I forgot his name, forgive me but the guy who he was interviewing.
Now if he wants to use that as evidence for God...
...but then we just have to come back and say "Well...
...does it mean if you don’t understand something, and the community of physicists doesn’t understand it...
...that means God did it? Is that how you want to play this game?
Because if it is, here’s a list of the things in the past that the physicists at the time didn’t understand...
...and a talk show you might have conducted 200 years ago would have said...
"The planets do retrograde? Can’t understand that, must be a God."
And we’d say, "You know? You’re right." And then ten years later we understand it, so what do you do?
So if that’s how you want to invoke your evidence for God, then God is an ever-receding pocket...
...of scientific ignorance that’s getting smaller and smaller and smaller as time goes on.
So, just be ready for that to happen, if that’s how you want to come at the problem.
So that’s just simply the "God of the Gaps" argument, it's been around forever.
-So in fact people who want to make arguments... -Wait, wait.
And i don't even mind, i don't even care if someone wants to say "You don't understand that, God did it."
That doesn't even bother me. What would bother me is if you were so content in that answer...
...that you know longer had curiosity to learn how it happened.
The day you stop looking, because you’re content God did it, I don’t need you in the lab.
You are useless on the frontier of understanding the nature of the world.
I'm glad whoever those folks are, there aren’t that many of them.
Because if they dominated the world, we’d still be in the cave. We would have never left the cave.
Because there are mysterious things out there and God is doing that...
...and you don’t need to know that and don’t even think about it.
Where would we be if their understanding of the world ruled the world?
So i don't mind if they just don't prevent others from conducting that investigation themselves.
So he could have made a better case if he had an astrophysicist as a consultant advising him.
He would have made a different case, find some physics we don't understand...
...and if he wants to call that God well, then you come out with the God of the gaps argument.
But you don't pick something that we can understand cause then you're just an object of mockery.