How to effectively critique New Age ideas?

[Confused Ape]

Science doesn't necessarily have to support atheism, DNA and genetics was discovered by a monk and Jesuit Priest first proposed the Big Bang.

Francis Collins wrote his book 'The Language Of God' in his spare time and I haven't heard of him mentioning God where his actual work's concerned. That wasn't good enough for Richard Dawkins, however.

God vs. Science - A debate between Richard Dawkins and Francis Collins

COLLINS: My God is not improbable to me. He has no need of a creation story for himself or to be fine-tuned by something else. God is the answer to all of those "How must it have come to be" questions.

DAWKINS: I think that's the mother and father of all cop-outs. It's an honest scientific quest to discover where this apparent improbability comes from. Now Dr. Collins says, "Well, God did it. And God needs no explanation because God is outside all this." Well, what an incredible evasion of the responsibility to explain. Scientists don't do that. Scientists say, "We're working on it. We're struggling to understand."

Richard Dawkins' says this as an argument against God.

DAWKINS: People who believe in God conclude there must have been a divine knob twiddler who twiddled the knobs of these half-dozen constants to get them exactly right. The problem is that this says, because something is vastly improbable, we need a God to explain it. But that God himself would be even more improbable. Physicists have come up with other explanations. One is to say that these six constants are not free to vary. Some unified theory will eventually show that they are as locked in as the circumference and the diameter of a circle. That reduces the odds of them all independently just happening to fit the bill. The other way is the multiverse way. That says that maybe the universe we are in is one of a very large number of universes. The vast majority will not contain life because they have the wrong gravitational constant or the wrong this constant or that constant. But as the number of universes climbs, the odds mount that a tiny minority of universes will have the right fine-tuning.

I can't find any reports that either of these explanations has been proved yet. Maybe we're all living in a computer simulation instead.

Is The Universe A Computer Simulation

CSM: ............. Martin Savage, a physicist at the University of Washington, thinks we can't discount the idea. In fact, he and two colleagues (Silas Beane and Zohreh Davoudi) published a paper in November 2012 exploring the possibility. I spoke to him about why he thinks we may be the byproduct of some sophisticated computer code.

As we spoke, I noticed he used the word they a lot, when referencing the proposed simulators. I couldn't help but ask, "who is they?" His answer will blow your mind.

MARTIN SAVAGE: As a physicist I don’t think about those things. But that was the first time when you start putting this stuff together, it is the first time where you think, you know, you might result from just a piece of code, writing another piece of code, writing another piece of code. And then you do ask the question about the original simulator, if you like. And so if we are a simulation, we’re probably a simulation from our descendants, right? So, as our universe evolves and becomes more mature, then somebody in that universe launches a simulation to simulate where they came from.

If this turns out to be true, evolution in this simulation would have been started by someone who is outside all this. He or she just wouldn't be a supernatural being.