I've recently started reading some posts by Sean Carroll at his blog, Preposterous Universe. Carroll is a physicist and an atheist, and he has written a ton of fascinating material about physics and cosmology. I'm learning some new stuff, even though I disagree with his premise/conclusion about the existence of God.
I'd like to briefly discuss one paragraph in his essay titled, "Rapped on the Head by Creationists". (I'm not going to critique the whole essay because I'm not smart enough and don't have the time to work things out.)
As I like to emphasize, the God hypothesis could in principle count as a scientifically promising explanation, if only it could actually explain something new, something beyond our mere existence. For example, it's unclear why there are three generations of fermions in the Standard Model; can God perhaps account for that? Even better, make a testable prediction. Does God favor low-energy supersymmetry? What is God's stance on proton decay, and baryognesis? If you are claiming to explain some features of known particle physics or cosmology by appeal to God (and maybe you aren't claiming that, but some people are), you should be able to carry the program forward and make predictions about unknown particle physics. Otherwise you are just telling a story about stuff we already know, without explaining anything, and that's not science.
My opinion is that this paragraph illustrates a significant lack of humility by Carroll that is common among modern atheist scientists.
Whether or not you believe God exists, it's foolish to argue that the "God hypothesis" hasn't produced anything of value -- any new knowledge, philosophy, science, art, etc. Western Civilization is a cultural edifice that has been built on the foundation of the God hypothesis over the course of several thousand years, and it's naive to think that any modern Western person is learning or accomplishing anything without standing atop this monumental structure. (Richard Dawkins makes exactly this error -- divorcing the Enlightenment from its historical and cultural foundation.)
Science, rationalism, and enlightenment thinking are children of the God hypothesis. You may think -- like Nietzsche -- that the children have now overthrown their father and that "God is dead", but don't be so arrogant as to deny their paternity. Modern man is the inheritor of an ancient and powerful legacy, and he should be grateful rather than arrogant.
