(February 16, 2017 at 5:05 pm)bheath Wrote: An apologist friend of mine said this a while back and I thought I'd pose the question here. He says, there is a god, because e=mc².
Any clue what he could be talking about? Or where he could have gotten this idea?
He isn't really 'talking' about anything. This is simply one of the latest manifestations of arguing from ignorance. Not saying your friend is stupid, exactly, but I'd be willing to wager a fair sum that he has - at best - a rather vague notion of what the equation means or implies. You get this all the time when people start going on about frequency, vibration, quantum entanglement, and so on. They inflate their own lack of understand to the point where they're claiming the concept (whichever one is the flavour du jour) isn't understandable. Since - in their mind and to confirm their own bias - something isn't understood by human beings, it must be the product of a super-human intelligence. From there, it's simply a short rhetorical spasm to land in the lap of God.
The trouble with this is painfully, grindingly obvious: the inability of one mind to grasp a particular concept doesn't mean that the concept is ungraspable by someone else. For example, I'm not remotely a physicist (I tend to visualize an atom as something about the size and shape of a small pea), but my own ignorance doesn't negate physics. And even those bits of nature which are not yet understood by any human doesn't justify dragging God in as an 'explanation'.
Boru
‘But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods or no gods. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.’ - Thomas Jefferson
