The Portable Atheist

NOTES

1

1. Necyomantia, 3. Lucian of Samosata (120?–180?), Syrian-born Greek satirist. The work referred to by Hume is more commonly known as Menippus or The Descent into Hades.

2

2. “The gods have their own laws.” Ovid, Metamorphoses 9.499.

3

3. Sadder refers to the Seder Eliyyahu, a Jewish book of homilies written between the third and thenth centuries C.E. The Pentateuch is the first five books of the Old Testament.

4

4. Zaleucus (fl. 550 B.C.E.), lawgiver of the Locrians and disciple of Pythagoras.

5

5. Brahmans or Brahmins are the priestly caste among the Hindus. Talapoins are Buddhist monks.

6

6. The ninth month of the lunar calendar, during which Muslims are to abstain from eating and drinking between sunrise and sunset.

7

7. Bomilcar or Bormilcar was a Carthaginian general (fl. 310 B.C.E.) who unsuccess fully sought to become tyrant in Carthage.

8

8. L. Sergius Catilina (108–62 B.C.E.), Roman patrician who attempted to lead a revolt against the government. Cicero delivered four celebrated orations condemning him.

9

1. Boswell never filled the blank.

10

1. In 1998, two international teams of astronomers independently reported unexpected evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. These findings suggest that the universe is not oscillating but will continue to expand forever.

11

2. Earth-based telescopes provided the answer in 1998. See previous note.

12

1. H. Küng, Does God Exist? (Collins, London, 1980; first published in German as Existiert Gott? by Piper-Verlag, Munich, 1978).

13

2. See the Appendix to The Cement of the Universe (see n. 2 to Chapter 1, Chapter 3, above) and “A Defence of Induction” (see n. 9 to Chapter 8, Chapter 21, above).

14

3. See n. 7 to Chapter 6, Chapter 13, above.

15

4. Cf. Chapter 6 of Hume’s Moral Theory (see no. 2 to Chapter 6, Chapter 12, above), and my “Cooperation, Competition, and Moral Philosophy,” in Cooperation and Competition in Animals and Man, edited by A. Colman (Van Nostrand, London, forthcoming).

16

5. N. Machiavelli, The Prince (many editions), Chapter 11.

17

6. R. Robinson, An Atheist’s Values (Oxford University Press, 1964; paperback Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1975), Chapter 8. The story is no doubt apocryphal. This book as a whole gives a very full answer to the question of the moral consequences of atheism. References in the text to Robinson are to pages in this work.

18

7. See the works referred to in nn. 3 and 4 (pp. 246 and 250) above.

19

8. Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, Section 10; cf. Chapter 1 above.

20

9. Plato, Euthyphro. The exact force of “the Euthyphro dilemma” is considered in Chapter 10 of my Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong.

21

10. Matthew 9:13. The passage from Luther is quoted by James on pp. 244–245 of The Varieties of Religious Experience (see n. 1 to Chapter 10, Chapter 25, above) and the story about Dr. Channing in no. 1 on Chapter 45 of the same work.

22

11. E.g., On the Jews and their Lies, in Vol. 47 of Luther’s Works, edited by H. T. Lehman (Fortress Press, Philadelphia, 1971), pp. 121–306, recommends the burning of synagogues and of the Jews’ houses, confiscation of their books, forbidding of worship and teaching, or alternatively expulsion of the Jews from the country.

23

12. E.g. Joshua 8, 10, and 11; Samuel 15.

24

13. De Rerum Natura, Book I, line 101.

25

14. See pp. 193–195 of Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, and the article mentioned in no. 4 above.

26

15. Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, Part XII.

27

16. The Prince, Chapter 25.

28

1. Intelligent design has been unkindly described as creationism in a cheap tuxedo.

29

2. Classical Latin and Greek were better equipped. Latin Homo (Greek anthropo-) means human, as opposed to vir (andro-) which means man, and femina (gyne-) which means woman. Thus anthropology pertains to all humanity, where andrology and gyne cology are sexually exclusive branches of medicine.

30

3. There is an example in fiction. The children’s writer Philip Pullman, in His Dark Materials, imagines a species of animals, the “mulefa,” that co-exist with trees that produce perfectly round seedpods with a hole in the centre. These pods the mulefa adopt as wheels. The wheels, not being part of the body, have no nerves or blood vessels to get twisted around the “axle” (a strong claw of horn or bone). Pullman perceptively notes an additional point: the system works only because the planet is paved with natural basalt ribbons, which serve as “roads.” Wheels are no good over rough country.

31

4. Fascinatingly, the muscle principle is deployed in yet a third mode in some insects such as flies, bees, and bugs, in which the flight muscle is intrinsically oscillatory, like a reciprocating engine. Whereas other insects such as locusts send nervous instructions for each wing stroke (as a bird does), bees send an instruction to switch on (or switch off) the oscillatory motor. Bacteria have a mechanism which is neither a simple contractor (like a bird’s flight muscle) nor a reciprocator (like a bee’s flight muscle), but a true rotator: in that respect it is like an electric motor or a Wankel engine.

32

1. Conservation of energy was not immediately recognized but was already implicit in Newton’s laws of mechanics.

33

2. Richard Swinburne, The Existence of God (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), Chapter 29.

34

3. It is commonly thought that only nuclear reactions convert between rest and kinetic energy. This also happens in chemical reactions. However, the changes in the masses of the reactants in that case are too small to be generally noticed.

35

4. Stephen W. Hawking, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (New York: Bantam, 1988), Chapter 17.

36

5. Technically, the total energy of the universe cannot be defined for all possible situations in general relativity. However, in V. Faraoni and F. I. Cooperstock, “On the Total Energy of Open Friedmann-Robertson-Walker Universes,” Astrophysical Journal 587 (2003): 483–486, it is shown that the total energy of the universe can be defined for the most common types of cosmologies and is zero in these cases. This included the case where the density is critical.

37

6. Alan Guth, The Inflationary Universe (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1997).

38

7. The mathematical derivation of the curves on this plot is given in Appendix C of Victor J. Stenger, Has Science Found God? The Latest Results in the Search for Purpose in the Universe (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003), pp. 356–357.

39

8. The mathematical proof of this is given in Appendix A, Stenger, Has Science Found God? pp. 351–353.

40

9. Pope Pius XII, “The Proofs for Existence of God in the Light of Modern Natural Science,” Address by Pope Pius XII to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, November 22, 1951, reprinted as “Modern Science and the Existence of God,” Catholic Mind 49 (1972): 182–192.

41

10. William Lane Craig and Quentin Smith, Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).

42

11. Clifford M. Will, Was Einstein Right? Putting General Relativity to the Test (New York: Basic Books, 1986).

43

12. Stephen W. Hawking and Roger Penrose, “The Singularities of Gravitational Collapse and Cosmology,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, series A, 314 (1970): 529–548.

44

13. Hawking, A Brief History of Time, p. 50.

45

14. Keith Parsons, “Is There a Case for Christian Theism?” In Does God Exist? The Debate Between Theists & Atheists, J. P. Moreland and Kai Nielsen (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1993), p. 177. See also Wes Morriston, “Creation Ex Nihilo and the Big Bang,” Philo 5, no. 1 (2002): 23–33.

46

15. William Lane Craig, The Kalâm Cosmological Argument, Library of Philosophy and Religion (London: Macmillan, 1979); The Cosmological Argument from Plato to Leibniz, Library of Philosophy and Religion (London: Macmillan, 1980).

47

16. Smith in Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology, by Craig and Smith; Graham Oppy, “Arguing about the Kalâm Cosmological Argument,” Philo 5, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2002): 34–61, and references therein; Arnold Guminski, “The Kalâm Cosmological Argument: The Questions of the Metaphysical Possibility of an Infinite Set of Real Entities,” Philo 5, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2002): 196–215; Nicholas Everitt, The Non-Existence of God (London, New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 68–72.

48

17. David Bohm and B. J. Hiley, The Undivided Universe: An Ontological Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (London: Routledge, 1993).

49

18. I discuss this in detail in Victor J. Stenger, The Unconscious Quantum: Metaphysics in Modern Physics and Cosmology (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1995).

50

19. Quantum mechanics becomes classical mechanics when Planck’s constant h is set equal to zero.

51

20. David Atkatz and Heinz Pagels, “Origin of the Universe as Quantum Tunneling Event,” Physical Review D25 (1982): 2065–2067; Alexander Vilenkin, “Birth of Inflationary Universes,” Physical Review D27 (1983): 2848–2855; David Atkatz, “Quantum Cosmology for Pedestrians,” American Journal of Physics 62 (1994): 619–627.

52

21. Victor J. Stenger, The Comprehensible Cosmos: Where Do the Laws of Physics Come From? (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2006), supplement H.

53

22. J. B. Hartle and S. W. Hawking, “Wave Function of the Universe,” Physical Review D28 (1 83): 2960–2975.

54

23. Hawking, A Brief History of Time, pp. 140–141.

55

24. E. P. Tryon, “Is the Universe a Quantum Fluctuation?” Nature 246 (1973): 396–397; Atkatz and Pagels, “Origin of the Universe as Quantum Tunneling Event”; Alexander Vilenkin, “Quantum Creation of Universes,” Physical Review D30 (1984): 509; Andre Linde, “Quantum Creation of the Inflationary Universe,” Lettere Al Nuovo Cimento 39 (1984): 401–405; T. R. Mongan, “Simple Quantum Cosmology: Vacuum Energy and Initial State,” General Relativity and Gravitation 37 (2005): 967–970.

56

25. Stenger, The Comprehensible Cosmos.

57

26. E. Noether, “Invarianten beliebiger Differentialausdrücke,” Nachr. d. König. Gesellsch. d. Wiss. zu Göttingen, Math-phys. Klasse (1918): 37–44; Nina Byers, “E. Noether’s Discovery of the Deep Connection between Symmetries and Conservation Laws,” Israel Mathematical Conference Proceedings 12 (1999), http://www.physics.ucla.edu/~cwp/articles/noether.asg/noether.html (accessed July 1, 2006). This contains links to Noether’s original paper including an English translation.

58

27. Walter Truett Anderson, The Truth About the Truth (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 1996).

59

28. Bede Rundle, Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004).

60

29. Frank Wilczek, “The Cosmic Asymmetry Between Matter and Antimatter,” Scientific American 243, no. 6 (1980): 82–90.

61

30. Stenger, The Comprehensible Cosmos, supplement H.

62

1. It should be apparent that in discussing these things I am speaking only for myself and that in this chapter I leave behind me any claim to special expertise.