Cosmology, Theology and Meaning - Dr. Tim Maudlin (Greer Heard Forum 2014)
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On the day following the debate between theologian Dr. William Lane Craig and cosmologist Dr. Sean Carroll, four speakers were invited to give papers on various topics pertinent to the debate topic. In this video, Dr. Tim Maudlin (Ph.D. History and Philosophy of Science) presents his paper titled "Cosmology, Theology and Meaning". Afterwords, Dr. William Lane Craig and Dr. Sean Carroll each get an opportunity to respond. Dr. Tim Maudlin's faculty page: http://philosophy.fas.nyu.edu/object/timmaudlin.html
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Tim constructs a fundamentalist straw Biblical account and then 28:00 mins in to his talk claims fine-tuning doesn't describe our "heliocentric" universe. If he had simply read scripture the way most have read across the last 2000 years he would have saved himself from this embarrassing misrepresentation.
He mentions even if we discover that God is behind fine-tuning, we can't know why.. That is like saying after we use the Pythagorean theorem to find the shortest distance to travel between to base side, it (the theory) doesn't move us one inch towards our goal. Had Tim said this everyone in the audience would say, "that is inane, it is not ment to help with locomotion, your misusing the method for something it wasn't designed to do."
By misrepresenting fine-tuning as answering a "why" question, instead of a "what" question many will be fooled. What best explains a fine-tuned universe for life on atheism? Chance can't approach it. -
Enjoy Tim and his work. That said, he plays a trick here misrepresenting scripture as painting a geocentric view of the universe therefore the universe that is fine-tuned for life is not the universe described in the bible.
This is poor philosophical work which betrays how low opinion of theists. Does he think think theist just ignore the scriptural accounts? No. In order to produce a "Biblical" picture of the universe as geocentric, which Maudlin does, one must accept that prescientific writings were written, not by men, but by God. In other words, In order to reveal himself as creator God must dictate a full-blown cosmological explication of the universe. We do see some ill-informed Christians defend reading the Bible as if it were the Quran or the Book of Mormon, as divine dictation. But that is not the preponderance of the historical view. It is a divine/human book and is not revealing or intending to reveal God's description of the grand unified theory.
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