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Creationists and Conspiracy Theories

Creationists and Conspiracy Theories
By Wendy Wippel

The website live Science this morning featured a column called “Why Creationists are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories”.

Their answer, in case you’re interested, is “teleological thinking”, meaning, (explained in their own words like this), “When something occurs that’s hard to explain, many people say that “everything happens for a reason” and that the event was “meant to be.” The thought thus provides a purpose for what, in reality, was a random, accidental event.

The authors helpfully provide us with a concrete example: “Believing that the “sun rises in order to provide us with daylight” is a teleological thought, whereas “the sun rises because earth rotates on its axis every 24 hours” is not.”

In short, interpreting the presence of the sun in the sky as an indication that there had to be some one or something that put it there is teleological thinking.

Count me guilty.

They go on.

“This type of thinking, teleological thinking, is what gives rise to creationism, which, in this case, refers to the belief that Earth was created by an all-powerful being less than 10,000 years ago.”

Guilty again.

But let’s inject some actual science into this discussion, shall we?

Scientists, (I was one of them for a long time) generally decide things with statistics, and I just happened to come across the statistical likelihood that, (Yep. I’m a party girl) the universe came into being all by itself. Like magic. With no purpose at all in mind.

These odds that should end the debate for good but probably won’t. According to Fred Hoyle, a renowned astrophysicist at Cambridge University in England, and I quote,

“A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.”

The numbers, are staggering involved. According to Oxford University Professor of Mathematics Roger Penrose (who helpfully provides us an illustration of just how staggering). “Try to imagine the space… of the entire universe. Each point in this space represents a different possible way that the universe might have started off. We are to picture the Creator, armed with a ‘pin’ — which is to be placed at some point in phase space… Each different positioning of the pin provides a different universe. Now the accuracy that is needed for the Creator’s aim depends on the entropy of the universe that is thereby created. It would be relatively ‘easy’ to produce a high entropy universe, since then there would be a large volume of the phase space available for the pin to hit. But in order to start off the universe in a state of low entropy — so that there will indeed be a second law of thermodynamics — the Creator must aim for a much tinier volume of the phase space. How tiny would this region be, in order that a universe closely resembling the one in which we actually live would be the result?”

Lennox goes on to cite Penrose’s answer:

“His calculations lead him to the remarkable conclusion that the ‘Creator’s aim’ must have been accurate to 1 part in 10 to the power of 10 to the power or 123, that is 1 followed by 10 to the 123rd power zeros.”

That’s not very much of a possibility. Fortunately, Penrose provides an analogy that helps us visualize it. The computed likelihood of a universe that just came into being would be impossible to write out in the usual decimal way, because even if you were able to put a zero on every particle in the universe, there would not even be enough particles to do the job.”

I think we have ruled random chance out. Which only leaves one possibility; Somebody did it deliberately!

Three guesses and the first two don’t count!

Lord, God of Israel, you are enthroned between the mighty cherubim! You alone are God of all the kingdoms of the earth. You alone created the heavens and the earth.

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