1.
Despite the many other enormous advances of modern physics, little has changed in this regard. As Wigner wrote, “The enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and there is no rational explanation for it.”
The scientific method was created in the 18th century by mixing mathematics with the occult experimentalism of the Renaissance. That's why math is an integral part of science. Science is a cultural offspring of math.
In other words, as something supernatural, it takes the existence of some kind of a God to make the mathematical underpinnings of the universe comprehensible.
Behold the God of the gaps!
2.
The great British physicist Roger Penrose in 2004 put forward a vision of a universe composed of three independently existing worlds – mathematics, the material world and human consciousness.
And the human consciousness is soooooooooooooo independent from the material world that we can manipulate it at will with drugs.
And let's ignore that some animals have more consciousness than a human toddler. It's as if the consciousness were a side-effect of the complexity of the brain...
3.
Yet, our nonphysical thoughts somehow mysteriously guide the actions of our physical human bodies. This is no more scientifically explicable than the mysterious ability of nonphysical mathematical constructions to determine the workings of a separate physical world.
These "non-physical thoughts" are physically tangible electrochemical signals between neurons that can be manipulated in a myriad ways.
We already have primitive Brain-Machine-Interfaces that can translate thoughts into digital signals.
We have bionic eyes. They are so far still way, way worse than a natural human eye (and expensive as shit), but hey, it's better than being blind.
We have bionic limbs with a sense of touch.
The supernatural character of the workings of human consciousness offers a second strong rational grounds for raising the probability of the existence of a supernatural God.
Oh Noes! The God of the gaps has returned!!!
4.
With these developments bringing standard evolutionary understandings into growing question, the probability of a God existing has increased correspondingly.
From a summary of this guy's book:
"Shapiro integrates advances in symbiogenesis, epigenetics, and saltationism into a unified approach that views evolutionary change as an active cell process, regulated epigenetically and capable of making rapid large changes by horizontal DNA transfer, inter-specific hybridization, whole genome doubling, symbiogenesis, or massive genome restructuring."
Oh, look! The darwinian theory of evolution now has a competitor in Shapiro's theory of evolution! Funny how his theory also ignores God... It's almost as if the author of the article misrepresented Shapiro's work to pretend to have an argument.
5.
In the Axial Age (commonly dated from 800 to 200 B.C.), world-transforming ideas such as Buddhism, Confucianism, the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, and the Hebrew Old Testament almost miraculously appeared at about the same time in India, China, ancient Greece and among the Jews in the Middle East – these peoples then having little interaction with one another.
Dude...
Really?
That's your argument?
Stuff happened at the same time, therefore there must be a God?
The development of the scientific method in the 17th century in Europe and its modern further advances have had at least as great a set of world-transforming consequences. There have been many historical theories, but none capable of explaining as fundamentally transformational a set of events as the rise of the modern world. It was a revolution in human thought, operating outside any explanations grounded in scientific materialism, that drove the process.
You do not want to go there.
You do not...
Ah, forget it. Let's go there.
The 17th Century was the late Renaissance. The scientific method did not exist yet. (It would come a century later.) What did exist was a flurry of scholars, mystics and philosophers who recognized that something was wrong with main-stream religion. They realized that there were answers that religion could not provide. They were looking for what's beyond religion. And they used methods such as magical rituals and materials, imagines, an early version of psychology, astrology, numerology, that fringe concept known as "laws of nature"... By mid-17th century, the Renaissance-occultism was already losing its reputation, because none of their theories were proven true. The rise of mathematics killed off the mystic parts of this research-movement, but when mathematics and experimentalism were combined, they resulted in the "scientific method" which turned out to be very reliable.
(I suggest the books of Frances Yates on this topic.)
The rise of the modern world. Science did that. Hard work did that. Errors and mistakes and dead ends and sacrifices did that.
It was the rejection of religious and magical concepts that did that.
But, hey, if it makes you feel better: Feel free to attribute the cultural revolution that rejects religious concepts to God.
6.
In several of my books, I have explored how Marxism and other such “economic religions” were characteristic of much of the modern age. So Christianity, I would argue, did not disappear as much as it reappeared in many such disguised forms of “secular religion.”
That the Christian essence, as arose out of Judaism, showed such great staying power amidst the extraordinary political, economic, intellectual and other radical changes of the modern age is a fifth rational reason for thinking – combined with the other four – that the existence of a God is very probable.
Wait.
Polls are showing that the fastest-growing religious segment are the people who have no interest in religion whatsoever, neither positive (like believers), nor negative (like atheists and agnostics).
That means that by that very same argument as the author made above, God probably DOES NOT exist because religion is disappearing.
But if you think that the survival of a particular cultural meme in a narrow segment of the human population is somehow proof for God's existence because it was him who made that meme stick around... then all I have to say is "Buh-bye."
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