How to effectively critique New Age ideas?

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I find it interesting how many scientists don't share Richard Dawkins' world view.

Science doesn't necessarily have to support atheism, DNA and genetics was discovered by a monk and Jesuit Priest first proposed the Big Bang. It's best to avoid arguements against God from science as educated theists know that there isn't really a conflict regarding the science we know and God. The conflict is when they claim knowledge of things science doesn't know without evidence. Also it's best not to fall into the trap of claiming to hold a "world view" implying you're doing the equal and opposite thing when you're not doing that at all, you're just abstaining from believing things for which there is no evidence.

[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.

[Zone]

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.

A supernatural being or us would technically be anyone who exists outside of our universe where our laws of physics don't apply. If the creator of the universe isn't uncreated and eternal then they would need a creator as well and so on into infinity so you can't really do that. Gnostic Christians didn't believe that God and the creator were the same thing. The creator of the universe was either evil or incompetent and that explains how you can have a God and a human life that can and does often suck. The creator being was called the Demiurge and was associated the asshole Jewish God of the Old Testament. Jesus was an agent of the good God or Pleroma sent to free humankind of the creator Gods tyranny and the prison of physical matter, rather than sin.

[Confused Ape]

A supernatural being or us would technically be anyone who exists outside of our universe where our laws of physics don't apply.

Quoting Martin Savage again.

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.

It would be no use someone running a simulation to simulate where they came from if the laws of physics in the simulation weren't programmed to be the same as in the 'real universe'. Whoever launched the simulation would be outside the simulation, though. This is why I said the simulation launcher wouldn't be supernatural. He or she would have evolved in the 'real universe' so couldn't be God. Which means -

Gnostic Christians didn't believe that God and the creator were the same thing.

Modern day Christians would have to go back to Gnostic Christianity if they wanted to keep believing in God. The Demiurge for this simulation would be a computer programmer in the 'real universe'. Christians could then give themselves headaches wondering whether the 'real universe' was directly created by God or had a Demiurge of its own.