–John Ray, the English naturalist (1627-1705) considered by many to be the founder of modern biology.

————

A hilarious article titled “Top 5 Stupid Criminal Excuses” includes the actress Winona Ryder’s highly publicized shoplifting conviction in 2002, for which she was sentenced to three years probation and 480 hours of community service.  Her excuse?:  She claimed that she stole to prepare for an acting role…although she never revealed the movie for which she was supposedly preparing.

Ryder’s reasoning suggests that the law against shoplifting can be waived (under special circumstances) for famous actresses.  Such flawed reasoning should not be surprising…considering that it came from Hollywood, and considering that it came from a person desperately trying to defend herself.

But the special exemptions which atheism demands are even more ridiculous when one considers that atheism demands exemptions from the rules it purports to follow.  Atheism claims to be scientifically based but demands exemptions from accepted methods of scientific reasoning and from scientific laws.  Any argument which contains this sort of reasoning (known as special pleading) obviously cannot be deemed rationally sound.

An excerpt from the Rational Wiki post for special pleading:

Special pleading is a formal logical fallacy where a participant demands special considerations for a particular premise of theirs. Usually this is because in order for their argument to work, they need to provide some way to get out of a logical inconsistency – in a lot of cases, this will be the fact that their argument contradicts past arguments or actions.

Therefore, they introduce a “special case” or an exception to their rules.  While this is acceptable in genuine special cases, it becomes a formal fallacy when a person doesn’t adequately justify why the case is special.

And therein lies the problem for many arguments made in support of atheism:  Atheists often seem to think that their arguments and reasoning can be granted special considerations or special exemptions…without adequately justifying WHY.

A perfect example would be the question of how life emerged from non-living matter.  Many may be surprised to learn that Charles Darwin’s own methods of reasoning lead to the conclusion that life is the result of a conscious and intelligent cause (read: God).  This is likely part of the reason why Darwin was so explicit in stating his belief that life DID result from an intelligent cause, and why he self-identified as a “theist” in his autobiography (as demonstrated by essays entitled Why Evolution Cannot Be Used to Rationalize Atheism and Why Life Could Not Have Emerged Without God).

In Why Life Could Not Have Emerged Without God, I mention that the physicist Paul Davies points out that the phenomenon of the genetic code mediating information between the two languages of life (proteins and nucleic acids) provides a mystery: How can mindless processes set up codes and languages?

Microsoft founder Bill Gates writes: “Human DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any we’ve ever created.”  Natural processes do not create anything even vaguely resembling a computer program.

Even the world’s most outspoken atheist, the biologist Richard Dawkins, concedes that DNA is a language very similar to a computer language.  In his book River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life, Dawkins writes:

“…The machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like. Apart from differences in jargon, the pages of a molecular biology journal might be interchanged with those of a computer engineering journal.”

Elsewhere, Dawkins writes:

“What has happened is that genetics has become a branch of information technology.  The genetic code is truly digital, in exactly the same sense as computer codes. This is not some vague analogy, it is the literal truth.”

Stephen Meyer (who holds a PhD in the history and philosophy of science from Cambridge University) explains in a DVD set titled Does God Exist? Building the Scientific Case that Charles Darwin’s methods of reasoning lead to the conclusion that life emerged from God.  Darwin learned his method of investigating the remote past from Charles Lyell, his mentor.  The very wordy title of Lyell’s book explains in a nutshell what makes an explanation best:  Principles of Geology: Being an attempt to explain the former changes of the Earth’s surface by reference to causes now in operation.

So, by the method of investigation used by Lyell and Darwin, if you are trying to explain some event in the remote past, you don’t invoke some exotic hypothetical cause that no one has ever seen.  Rather, you invoke a cause which is ALREADY known to produce the effect in question….that is, a cause “already in operation”.  Indeed, Darwin cited the cause known to to be now in operation of natural selection of reproductive offspring and the random mutation of genes.  He did not cite any exotic hypothetical causes.

So if we apply Lyell’s and Darwin’s principle to the computer-like language of DNA, the question becomes: What is the cause NOW IN OPERATION that is ALREADY known to cause codes and languages?

There is only one plausible answer:  INTELLIGENCE.  To this end, Meyer cites information scientist Henry Quastler: “The creation of new information is habitually associated with conscious activity.” Natural processes such as wind and erosion do not create codes and languages, even very simple ones…let alone codes “far, far more advanced than any we have ever created,” in the words of Bill Gates.

In order to suppose that a code or language could be produced by an unintelligent natural process, atheists must receive a special exemption from the rule which states that codes and languages only result from intelligence.  And atheists fail to explain WHY it is necessary to grant such a special exemption.  Even though the reason Winona Ryder cited for being exempt from laws against shoplifting was hilariously lame, at least she provided SOME reason.

Atheists require an exemption from the rule that only INTELLIGENCE produces codes and languages because accepting that the DNA code was caused by an intelligence is DEVASTATING to atheism.  But they cannot cite a plausible reason for such an exemption, and must therefore engage in special pleading.

What is the logical necessity for postulating an unintelligent cause for the language of DNA?  The fact that atheists cannot accept the existence of an eternally existent consciousness—-even though this is the view most consistent with modern astrophysics and cosmology (as demonstrated in Is There A God?…What is the chance that our world is the result of chance?) and with modern physics (as demonstrated in God is Real…Why modern physics has discredited atheism)—-does not constitute a logical necessity.  Rather, it constitutes, at best, an IDEOLOGICAL necessity.

Prominent theoretical biologist (and atheist) Stuart Kaufmann tries to explain the emergence of life from non-living matter as the result of a hypothetical “fourth law of thermodynamics” (there are only three laws of thermodynamics).  Here, Kaufmann ignores the “cause now in operation” already known to cause codes and languages (intelligence), and instead, postulates an exotic hypothetical cause.  But, as we shall see, this is an especially special pleading.  William Dembski responds to Kaufmann’s hypothesis in his book No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased Without Intelligence:

“…what should be immediately evident from Kaufmann’s statement of these [proposed] laws is that they are very different in form and function from the traditional three laws of thermodynamics.  The traditional three laws of thermodynamics are each proscriptive generalizations, that is, they each make an assertion as to what cannot happen to a physical system.  The first law states that in an isolated system total energy neither increases nor decreases.  The second law states that the entropy [the measure of disorder] of an isolated system cannot decrease.  The third law states that it is not possible to reduce the temperature of an isolated system to absolute zero in a finite number of operations.”

“Kaufmann’s candidate laws are nothing like this.  Instead, they provide qualitative descriptions of the emergence of complexity in nature, yet without proposing a mechanism that is causally sufficient to account for the emergence of that complexity.”

Before one gets lost in any of the above high-brow scientific talk, it should be emphasized that what Dembski is driving at is very simple and easy to understand.  Natural laws such as the three laws of thermodynamics DO NOT CAUSE ANYTHING TO HAPPEN.  Rather, they determine what is possible…much as the rules of chess determine what chess moves are permissible.

I have provided the following citations in a previous essay, but I must do so again since Kaufmann has provided yet another example of the bizarre atheist penchant for ascribing creative properties to natural laws.  Edgar Andrews writes in Who Made God?:

 “…When we play chess, the laws determine the moves we can make but not the moves we do make. That is, the laws are not deterministic; they don’t impose a particular outcome for the game. In the same way, the laws of nature determine what is and what is not physically possible, but they do not determine what actually occurs within the multitude of available possibilities.”

A similar point is made by the former Manhattan Project physicist, and leading information theorist, Hubert Yockey, in the primary text on the application of algorithmic information theory to the origin of life, titled Information Theory, Evolution, and the Origin of Life:

“The laws of physics and chemistry are much like the rules of a game such as football. The referees see to it that these laws are obeyed but that does not predict the winner of the Super Bowl.”

Simply put, Kaufmann’s hypothetical “fourth law of thermodynamics” requires a special exemption from the rule that natural laws do not create, but only describe what is possible.  Postulating a natural law that causes something to happen (such as causing life to emerge from non-living matter) is an especially special pleading.  Supposing that a hypothetical “fourth law of thermodynamics” (or any other law) could create life from non-living matter is every bit as absurd as the idea that the laws of mathematics could cause money to appear in one’s bank account.  When compared with the special pleading of atheists such as Kaufmann, Winona Ryder’s shoplifting excuse appears almost reasonable.

“The number of Elvis Presley impersonators has reached an all-time record high – there are now at least 85,000 Elvis’s around the world, compared to only 170 in 1977 when Elvis died. At this rate of growth, experts predict that by 2019 Elvis impersonators will make up a third of the world population.”

Please take a moment to somberly digest the shocking social and cultural implications of the above trend (virtually no family will remain unaffected).  And as you do so, I will reveal the REAL reason that provided the above citation:

As absurd as it is, and although the writers never intended it to be taken seriously, it actually contains some key lessons regarding how atheists deceive people into thinking that atheism is “scientific” or “empirically based.”  What atheists present as “science” supporting their views is actually extremely shoddy philosophy posturing or posing as science…a posing and posturing that would make Elvis impersonators proud.

Much like the above citation, atheist reasoning often utilizes ridiculous over-extrapolation.  Just as it is ridiculous to think that ⅓ of Earth’s population will be Elvis impersonators by 2019 based upon an extrapolation from short-term rates of growth; it is ridiculous to extrapolate atheism from scientific theories such as Darwinism (as Charles Darwin himself clearly understood, as I demonstrate in Why Evolution Cannot Be Used to Rationalize Atheism).  The pathway leading from Darwinian evolution to atheism is not a scientific pathway.  Rather, it is a philosophical pathway….a pathway paved from an interpretation of, and then extrapolation from scientific observations.  An excerpt from I Believe in Science, Why Do I Need Religion is pertinent to this topic:

Let us bring to the surface the atheist philosophical/religious reasoning …so as to expose it to logical scrutiny:

1) An apparently mindless (Darwinian) mechanism known as random mutation and natural selection is responsible for the diversification of life from a common ancestor.

2) Because this mechanism for the diversification of life can be interpreted as mindless, we can extrapolate mindlessness into the origin of life from non-living matter, even though non-living matter has neither genes to mutate nor reproductive offspring to naturally select.  (See my post titled Why Life Could Not Have Emerged Without God for a more in-depth exploration of this topic).

3) And because this proposed mechanism for the diversification of life is apparently mindless, we can further extrapolate to a mindless source for this mechanism.

4) And because this proposed mechanism is apparently mindless, we can still further extrapolate to a mindless source for the physical laws that make this mechanism work.

5) Because physical laws can create things and cause things to happen [or so says the religion of scientism], we do not need to cite an intelligent source for the universe.

6) Therefore, there is no need for such a being as God.

In case the reader is wondering if atheists are really capable of such extrapolation gone wild, consider the atheist biologist Richard Dawkins’ statement in his book The Blind Watchmaker that he “could not imagine being an atheist at any time before 1859, when Darwin’s Origin of Species was published.”  Apparently Dawkins believes that a scientific theory which discusses the diversification of life through random mutation and natural selection can be applied to everything…whether or not the mutation of genes and the natural selection of reproductive offspring are involved.  Now that, folks, is a bizarre religion (or “philosophy,” if you prefer).

The atheist physicist Lawrence Krauss provides another excellent case study regarding how atheists attempt to present what is really atheist philosophy as “science.”  In Krauss’ book, A Universe From Nothing, he argues that our universe came from nothing rather than from God.  This concept will come as a shock to most readers, since they have no doubt spent their entire lives with the assumption that nothing cannot cause anything to happen or to exist.  After all, this is what the Law of Causation (without which, science would be impossible) dictates.

The following excerpt from Come Let Us Reason by William Lane Craig hilariously highlights the absurdity of the idea that nothing can cause something to happen or to exist:

Imagine the following dialogue between two people discussing the Second World War:

Person 1: “Nothing stopped the German advance from sweeping across Belgium.”

Person 2: “Oh, that’s good. I’m glad they were stopped.”

Person 1: “But they weren’t stopped!”

Person 2: “But you said that nothing stopped them.”

Person 1: “That’s right.”

Person 2: “So they were stopped.”

Person 1: “No, nothing stopped them.”

Person 2: “That’s what I said. They were stopped, and it was nothing which stopped them.”

Person 1: “No, no, I meant they weren’t stopped by anything.”

Person 2: “Well, why didn’t you say so in the first place?”

And this scathing New York Times review of Krauss’ book by Columbia University Professor of Philosophy David Albert expands upon the absurdity of Krauss’ assertion that science provides a way to cite nothing as the cause of the universe, rather than God:

Lawrence M. Krauss, a well-known cosmologist and prolific popular-science writer, apparently means to announce to the world, in this new book, that the laws of quantum mechanics have in them the makings of a thoroughly scientific and adamantly secular explanation of why there is something rather than nothing. Period. Case closed. End of story. I kid you not. Look at the subtitle. Look at how [the atheist biologist] Richard Dawkins sums it up in his afterword: “Even the last remaining trump card of the theologian, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?,’ shrivels up before your eyes as you read these pages. If ‘On the Origin of Species’ was biology’s deadliest blow to super­naturalism, we may come to see ‘A Universe From Nothing’ as the equivalent from cosmology. The title means exactly what it says. And what it says is ­devastating.”

Well, let’s see. There are lots of different sorts of conversations one might want to have about a claim like that: conversations, say, about what it is to explain something, and about what it is to be a law of nature, and about what it is to be a physical thing. But since the space I have is limited, let me put those niceties aside and try to be quick, and crude, and concrete.

Where, for starters, are the laws of quantum mechanics themselves supposed to have come from? Krauss is more or less upfront, as it turns out, about not having a clue about that. He acknowledges (albeit in a parenthesis, and just a few pages before the end of the book) that every­thing he has been talking about simply takes the basic principles of quantum mechanics for granted. “I have no idea if this notion can be usefully dispensed with,” he writes, “or at least I don’t know of any productive work in this regard.”

Regarding Albert’s above comments, it does not take a physicist to see that what Krauss presents as scientific reasons for doing away with God are actually ideological/philosophical reasons.  In order to clear a path from his scientific observations to a conclusion of atheism, Krauss must take the philosophical steps of:

1) bizarrely equating the laws of quantum mechanics with nothing and then,

2) ascribing creative properties to this nothing…which can never be done scientifically because, contrary to what Krauss seems to think, scientific instruments and the methods of science cannot effectively analyze nothing.  (Please note that I address the absurdity of ascribing creative properties to physical laws, as Krauss does, in Who Is Playing Make-Believe? (Atheists or theists))

3) deeming the question of where the laws of quantum mechanics come from as unimportant (because such a question is unanswerable from within the framework of the atheist/materialist worldview)…

It must be emphasized that neither Albert nor I present any objections to any of Krauss’ science…just the philosophical add-ons to his science. Further, if Krauss contends that the universe was created by the laws of quantum mechanics, why didn’t he title his book A Universe From the Laws of Quantum Mechanics instead of A Universe From Nothing?  Because he knows that this would leave open the question of where the laws of quantum mechanics came from…a question that science is fundamentally unequipped to address.  And admitting that the laws of quantum mechanics must have a source would provide a direct pathway to a Lawgiver.  Therefore, Krauss must make the bizarre, contorted philosophical move of equating the laws of quantum mechanics with nothing.

 And in an attempt to climb out of the hole of incoherence into which he has dug himself, Krauss experiments with different definitions of “nothing”, as he does in this Huffington Post interview.

Below are some of his words:

“Why is there something rather than nothing? Well, ultimately there are a variety of answers, which is why I wrote a whole book about it. But the remarkable thing is that our picture has changed completely because we changed what we mean by something and nothing. Nothing is far more subtle than you might imagine, for the Bible for example, nothing would have been a vast, eternal empty universe. That would have been, you know, a void. Well that kind of nothing we now understand–namely empty space if you get rid of all the particles and all the radiation–that kind of nothing is actually quite complicated. In the modern universe it’s a boiling, bubbling brew of virtual particles popping in and out of existence on a timescale so short you can’t see them. So there’s nothing there but actually lots of stuff is happening. You just can’t see it, and that kind of nothing, one of the remarkable things we’ve learned is that kind of nothing is unstable. Empty space is unstable.”

But, as the Oxford University mathematician John Lennox puts it:

“What serves to obscure the illogicality of statements is the fact that they are made by scientists; and the general public, not surprisingly, assumes that they are statements of science and takes them on authority. That is why it is important to point out that they are not statements of science, and any statement, whether made by a scientist or not, should be open to logical analysis. Immense prestige and authority does not compensate for faulty logic.”

So, let us take Krauss’ attempt to redefine nothing and expose it to logical analysis, as per Lennox’s advice:  How could two different definitions of nothing differ meaningfully from one another?!  Aristotle defined nothing as, “What rocks dream about,” and the Oxford Dictionary defines nothing as, “Not anything.  No single thing.”  Although these two definitions differ in the words which they utilize, their meaning is the same.  Krauss’ attempts to redefine nothing are really attempts to smuggle something back into nothing.  This is semantic maneuvering in support of an ideology.  It is NOT science.  There cannot be different types of nothing.  Period.  Case closed.  End of story.

Secondly, contrary to what Krauss’ thinks, nothing is actually a very simple concept and the definition of nothing has remained very stable over time.  Krauss’ worldview dictates that he must equate nothing with nothing material because allowing for something non-material would allow an opening for non-material entities such as God.  Nothing and nothing material are two entirely different concepts. What we understand matter to be certainly has changed with advances in science, but what we understand nothing to be has not and cannot change.  Nothingness is a philosophical concept, not a scientific concept.

Moreover, a person who is committed to objectivity, rather than ideology, does not try to “usefully dispense with” (in Krauss’ words) a crucial question such as where the laws of quantum mechanics come from.  Rather, such a person tries to provide objectively reasoned and rationally sound answers to such questions.  Krauss betrays his ideological motives with his own words.  A rationally sound answer to this question cannot be furnished from within the framework of his worldview, and so he prefers to “dispense with” it.

Notably, theists and atheist physicists such as Krauss seem to be in agreement on a few key points: Because matter, space, time, and energy are properties of the universe, they cannot be the cause of the universe.  Therefore, whatever the cause of the universe is, it must be immaterial, spaceless, timeless, and energy-less.  Both God and nothing, if one stops to think, are just that…immaterial, spaceless, timeless, and energy-less.

But since science is not and never will be capable of examining things of a immaterial, spaceless, timeless, and energy-less nature, deciding whether God or nothing is the best candidate for the cause of the universe can, ultimately, only be done philosophically.  So we must decide whether an eternally existent consciousness (God), or nothing, is the best candidate for having creative properties.  And unless one is an ideologically driven atheist, the choice is clear.  Indeed, I point out in God Is Real…Why Modern Physics Has Discredited Atheism how (and why) the majority of the most important contributors to modern physics (FAR more important contributors than Krauss and the like) have concluded that God is the best explanation.  Theism is the view which is by far most compatible with modern physics.

Although the threat to society posed by Elvis Presley impersonators presented at the beginning of this essay may have been overstated*, the threat posed by atheist philosophy impersonating science is indeed significant.

*at least outside of the greater Las Vegas area.

–Nobel Prize winning physicist Tony Hewish as cited in the foreword to John Polkinghorne and Nicholas Beale’s book Questions of Truth:  Fifty-one Responses to Questions about God, Science, and Belief.

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The following piece of “common sense” wisdom spread like wildfire in early 2007, and before:  “Real estate prices only go up, because they aren’t making any more land…so invest in real estate.”  Sadly, many people uncritically accepted this “common sense” view just before the real estate collapse of 2007.  Largely, this was the result of failing to expend the time and effort necessary to arm oneself with all of the facts and reasoning available, so as to ensure that one’s “common sense” was truly a fully informed common sense. (And if I was one of those people, I would never admit it).  Passively accepting “common sense” wisdom from one’s social/cultural environment can have dire consequences, because one cannot be certain that one has all of the facts unless one actually does the homework.

For a very select few who did the “heavy lifting” necessary to fully inform themselves about the true nature of the real estate market, however, not only was financial disaster averted, but fortunes were made.  The hedge fund manager John Paulson, for example, made billions of dollars from the real estate crash by correctly assessing the true nature of the real-estate market…a bubble about to burst.

In a similar light, to those willing to invest the time and effort in examining the claims about the divinity of Jesus, a spiritual fortune awaits.  Fortunately, the time and effort required to obtain this spiritual fortune is far less than that which was required of those who profited from the real estate crash.  This is partly due to the fact that much of the “heavy lifting” has already been done by others.

Albert Einstein once commented that, “It is harder to crack a prejudice than an atom.”  And the biblical claims surrounding Jesus’ divinity and resurrection are prejudicially rejected by many….with little or no examination of the evidence.  Why expend time and effort examining the claims about Jesus’ divinity and resurrection—goes the “common sense” reasoning of many—when there is no good reason to believe in anything that is non-material?  If we live in a world that is (as far as we can tell) made up of nothing but material objects, what reason is there to waste time and effort thinking about things of a non-material/spiritual nature?  Why believe in the spiritual when the only things we can perceive with our five senses are material things?

Unfortunately for those who do not want the inconvenience of the “heavy lifting” involved in carefully examining the biblical claims regarding Jesus, denial of the spiritual is a very weak starting point.

And, as I point out in God Is Real…Why Modern Physics Has Discredited Atheism, modern physics has shown that, contrary to the “common sense” intuitions of popular thought, the fundamental character of the universe is mental/spiritual, rather than material.  As Johns Hopkins University physicist Richard Conn Henry puts it in the concluding paragraph of his Nature magazine essay titled The Mental Universe, “The Universe is immaterial — mental and spiritual. Live, and enjoy.”  And if our universe is mental/spiritual, what choice do we have but to conclude that it is the product of a mind/spirit? (Read: God).

Earlier in the above mentioned essay, Henry writes:

The 1925 discovery of quantum mechanics solved the problem of the Universe’s nature. Bright physicists were again led to believe the unbelievable — this time, that the Universe is mental. According to [the knighted physicist, mathematician, and astronomer] Sir James Jeans: “The stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the Universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter… we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter.” But physicists have not yet followed Galileo’s example, and convinced everyone of the wonders of quantum mechanics. As [the great physicist] Sir Arthur Eddington explained: “It is difficult for the matter-of-fact physicist to accept the view that the substratum of everything is of mental character.”

And if rank-and-file physicists have a hard time accepting the mental/spiritual nature of the universe, it should be no mystery why the general public understanding has not caught up with the insights of modern physics.  Elsewhere, Henry elaborates on the topic of why the insights of modern physics have failed to successfully penetrate the general public understanding:

“Why do people cling with such ferocity to belief in a mind-independent reality? It is surely because if there is no such reality, then ultimately (as far as we can know) mind alone exists. And if mind is not a product of real matter, but rather is the creator of the illusion of material reality (which has, in fact, despite the materialists, been known to be the case since the discovery of quantum mechanics in 1925), then a theistic view of our existence becomes the only rational alternative to solipsism.” [Underlining is mine]

Accepting that it is the material world which is an illusion, and that it is the spiritual world which is real, involves a much too unsettling and inconvenient trip down the rabbit hole (to borrow from Alice in Wonderland) for many.  (Please read Mindful Universe by University of California, Berkeley physicist Henry Stapp, and The Matter Myth: Dramatic Discoveries that Challenge Our Understanding of Physical Reality by physicists Paul Davies and John Gribbin, as well as my essay God Is Real…Why Modern Physics Has Discredited Atheism for a further exploration of this topic).

Further, the commonplace perception that only the material world is real (and that the spiritual world is an illusion) is a perception which has become ever more deeply entrenched in our culture over the course of the last several hundred years.  Such deeply entrenched elements of the general public understanding do not become dislodged overnight.  To cite another example from history, the educated elites accepted that the earth is a sphere (rather than flat) several hundred years before the average person.

Physicists Paul Davies and John Gribbin explain how materialism (the view that only the material world is real) became so deeply entrenched in our culture, in their book The Matter Myth (mentioned above), in the chapter titled The Death of Materialism:

[Isaac] Newton’s view of matter as inert substance shaped and formed by external forces became deeply ingrained in Western culture.

…At the time of the publication of the Principia [Newton's seminal work] the most sophisticated machines were clocks, and Newton’s image of the working of nature as an elaborate clockwork struck a deep chord.

…It is hard to overstate the impact that these physical images have had in shaping our world view.  The doctrine that the physical universe consists of inert matter locked into a sort of gigantic deterministic clockwork has penetrated all branches of human inquiry.  Materialism dominates biology, for example.  Living organisms are regarded as nothing more than complicated collections of particles, each being blindly pulled and pushed by its neighbors.

Lastly, a theistic view of the universe is distasteful to many because the concept of having to answer to a higher moral authority is an affront to one’s moral autonomy.  (I discuss this topic in much greater depth in If the evidence for God is so strong, why are so many smart people unconvinced?) As a result, many “cling with…ferocity to a mind-independent [material only] reality,” in the above cited words of physicist Richard Conn Henry.

It is not inappropriate, then, to compare those who dismiss the claims of Christ’s divinity and resurrection, based upon a denial of the spiritual, to those who dismiss any notion that real-estate prices could go down sharply, based upon a denial that such an event is possible.

An exhaustive exploration of the evidence for Christ’s divinity and resurrection would be impossible in the short span of an essay.  However, what I can do is introduce the reader to brief excerpts of arguments from individuals who began their exploration of the gospels as hardened skeptics…but, as a result of their research, became believers.

One such individual was the British journalist Frank Morrison.  As an atheist setting out to write a book debunking the miraculous claims of the gospels, Morrison, much to his own amazement, eventually found himself, instead, writing a book confirming these miraculous claims.  His book Who Moved the Stone? is, in his own words, “the inner story of a man who originally set out to write one kind of book and found himself compelled by the sheer force of circumstances to write another.”  Below is an excerpt:

The modern reader, coming to these [biblical] passages with a certain instinctive reluctance to accept anything that transcends the field of normal experience is inclined to say, “I can understand Jesus predicting His own death. He must have foreseen what was the probable outcome of the ever-widening gap between Himself and the priests, and I think it is not unlikely that He may have prepared the disciples privately for the event. But surely these direct references to His rising from the dead can have been written only after His death and are not an integral part of the original utterances.”   Let us admit frankly that it does look like that at first sight. However, when we come to examine closely the minutes of this trial with all its primitive marks of authenticity, its meticulous and, in the end, fruitless hearing of hostile witnesses, we make the startling discovery that these very words (” in three days”), which reason asserts could never have been uttered by Christ, are precisely the words that according to all the witnesses formed the pith and core of the fatal and historic sentence with which He was charged. It would have been a strange coincidence indeed if the one sentence chosen by the enemies of Christ on which to base the most deadly charge they could bring against Him found no counterpart or parallel whatever in all the varied teaching of the two preceding years.

Warner Wallace is a former cold-case homicide detective who, like Morrison, began his exploration of the gospels as a hardened skeptic (and atheist).  Wallace’s experience as a cold-case detective provided him with an expertise in analysing written eyewitness statements, which he was able to apply to the eyewitness accounts of the gospels.  He writes in his book Cold Case Christianity: A Homicide Detective Investigates the Claims of the Gospels:

“In the end, it all comes down to the reliability of these accounts. When I was a nonbeliever, I heard Christians talk about the inerrancy or infallibility of the Bible, at least as these terms are typically applied to the original manuscripts that were composed by the authors. I examined these concepts in depth in seminary many years later, but as I first read the accounts in the Gospels, I was far more interested in evaluating their reliability as eyewitness accounts than their inerrancy as divine communiqués.  I knew from my experience as a detective that the best eyewitness accounts contained points of disagreement and that this did not automatically invalidate their reliability.”

“If it was God’s desire to provide us with an accurate and reliable account of the life of Jesus, an account we could trust and recognize as consistent with other forms of eyewitness testimony, God surely accomplished it with the four gospel accounts. Yes, the accounts are messy. They are filled with idiosyncrasies and personal perspectives along with common retellings of familiar stories. There are places where critics can argue that there appear to be contradictions, and there are places where each account focuses on something important to the author, while ignoring details of importance to other writers. But would we expect anything less from true, reliable eyewitness accounts? I certainly would not, based on what I’ve seen over the years.”

But perhaps the most prominent example of an atheist who became a believer as a result of his research into the gospels was C.S. Lewis:  A Professor of Medieval and Renaissance studies at Cambridge University, Lewis was a mythology expert of the highest caliber (with a photographic memory).  Art Lindsley recalls in C.S. Lewis’ Case for Christ that:

“When Lewis examined the Gospel narratives, having already become an expert in mythology, he was surprised to find that his literary judgment told him that they were more than myths:”

“[Lewis wrote] ‘I was now too experienced in literary criticism to regard the Gospels as myths.  They had not the mythical taste.  And yet the very matter that they set down in their artless, historical fashion…was precisely the matter of the great myths.  If ever a myth had become fact, had been incarnated, it would be just like this.  Here and here only in all time the myth must have become fact; the Word, flesh: God, Man.’”

And, regarding the reliability of the Gospel accounts, Norman Geisler notes in Who Made God?: And Answers to Over 100 Other Tough Questions of Faith:

Simon Greenleaf, one of history’s greatest legal minds, former Harvard law professor, and author of a book on legal evidence, carefully applied the rules of legal evidence to the Gospel accounts in his book The Testimony of the Evangelists. He argued that if the Gospels were submitted to the scrutiny of a court of law, “then it is believed that every honest and impartial man will act consistently with that result, by receiving their testimony in all the extent of its import.” He added, “Let the witnesses be compared with themselves, with each other, and with surrounding facts and circumstances; and let their testimony be sifted, as if it were given in a court of justice, on the side of the adverse party, the witness being subjected to rigorous cross-examination. The result, it is confidently believed, will be an undoubting conviction of their integrity, ability, and truth.”

I would like to conclude this essay by quoting scripture.  But before any hardened atheist or agnostic readers click away from this page in disgust, I should mention that I have decided to spice things up by quoting HINDU scripture (The Vedas which date to at least 1200 B.C. and the Upanishads which date to around 500-400 B.C….as excerpted from The Christ Connection: How the World Religions Prepared the Way for the Phenomenon of Jesus by Roy Abraham Varghese).  I do this in order to give a taste of the references to God’s self-sacrifice on the cross which are present in other cultures and time periods (which I detail in Which God Is Real?) :

“The Supreme Creator took a perfect human body (Nishkalanka Purusha) and offered it up as a self-sacrifice (Brihad Aranyak Upanishad 1:2:8).”

“If you want to be delivered from the sin, which you commit through eyes, mouth, ears and mind, bloodshed is necessary.  Without shedding the blood, there is no remission for sin.  That must be the blood of the Holy one.  God is our creator.  He is our King.  When we were perishing, He came to save us by offering even his own body on our behalf.” (Tandya Mahabrahmana 4.15).

“The redemption is through shedding of blood only and that blood has to be through the sacrifice of God himself.” (Taittiriya Aranyaka, verse 3).

“This [sacrifice] is the only way for the redemption and liberation of mankind.  Those who meditate and attain this man, believe in heart and chant with the lips, get liberated in this world itself and there is no other way for salvation too.” (Yajur-Veda 31:18)

“The Purusha was above sin, and only in knowing him does one attain immortality.” (Chandogyopanishad 1:6:6-7)

“After giving Himself as the supreme sacrifice, this Purush resurrected himself.” (Brihadaranyakaopanishad 3.9.28.4-5; Kathopanishad 3: 15).

“The purpose of this sacrifice is to provide the only way to Heaven and the only way to escape from Hell.” (Rig-Veda 9:113:7-11; 4:5:5; 7:104:3).

“His hands and legs are to be bound to a yoopa [a wooden pole] causing blood shed.” (Brihadaranyakaopanishad 3.9.28; Aitareya Brahmana 2:6).

“The sacrificial victim is to be crowned with a crown made of thorny vines.” (Rig-Veda 10:90:7, Brihadaranyakaopanishad 3:9:28).

“The skin/garment of the sacrificial victim must not be torn.” (Aitareya Brahmana 2:6).

“Before death he should be given a drink of somarasa [sour wine made of an herb called somalatha].” (Yajur-Veda 31).

“None of His bones must be broken.”  (Yajur-Veda 31:; Aitareya Brahmana 2:6)
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We are still uncovering the mysteries of what constitutes matter. Quantum physics discloses that “empty” space and strange characteristics of probabilities and nonmaterial information underlie the existence of what we perceive as solid matter. (See my discussion in A Case for the Existence of God.) The God behind these bizarre aspects of our physical nature must have considerable ability to make changes that could conceivably result in a resurrection. Why are we so amazed at the concept of a bodily resurrection when our science has given substantial verification to a model of a surreal network of probabilities and non-material information underlying the existence of all physical things? Why should we so limit our understanding of what is possible, given the very strange nature of the extremely successful model of quantum physics?

Former Oxford University Templeton Scholar Dean Overman, as cited in A Case for the Divinity of Jesus: Examining the Earliest Evidence

–Werner Heisenberg, the 1932 Nobel Prize winner in physics for the creation of quantum mechanics (which is absolutely crucial to modern science).

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“This much I can say with definiteness – namely, that there is no scientific basis for the denial of religion – nor is there in my judgment any excuse for a conflict between science and religion, for their fields are entirely different. Men who know very little of science and men who know very little of religion do indeed get to quarreling, and the onlookers imagine that there is a conflict between science and religion, whereas the conflict is only between two different species of ignorance.”

–Robert Andrews Millikan, the 1923 Nobel Prize winner in physics for his work on the elementary charge of electricity and on the photoelectric effect.

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An old joke tells of a shopkeeper who sold everything in his store below cost:
“How can you stay in business?” someone asked. “Aren’t you losing money on every sale?”
“Sure I am,” he replied, “but I make it up on volume!”

As inadvisable as this strategy sounds, it is very similar to that employed by the “new atheist” writers such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens.  When one surveys the writings of these “new atheists,” it soon becomes clear that such individuals think they can compensate for the logical inadequacy of their arguments by using a high volume of forceful and strident rhetoric. Christopher Hitchens wrote in his atheist diatribe titled God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything:

“One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody—not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms—had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as for comfort, reassurance and other infantile needs). Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion….”

Before one even begins to examine the logic of Hitchens’ views, one should take note of the red flag that exists in his frequent use of strident rhetorical terms such as “bawling”, “fearful infancy”, “babyish” and “infantile.”  What do I mean by this?  A logically coherent argument does not need to rely on rhetoric for support.  Rather, such strident rhetoric is a crutch that one uses to compensate for the weakness of a viewpoint that cannot be supported by sheer logic.

For example, how often do you suppose Einstein found it necessary to insult his critics when he was discussing his Theory of Relativity?  Answer:  Not very often…because Einstein was fully confident in the logical force of his theory.  And when an atheist such as Hitchens finds it necessary to make no fewer than four references to belief in God as babyish—in the span of a single sentence—one can safely assume that he does so because he is (at least subconsciously) aware of the logical inadequacy of his views.  Much as a nervous tick made by a poker player serves as a “tell” that he is holding a weak hand, the frequent use of strident rhetoric serves as a “tell” that an atheist is trying to prop up a weak argument because it can’t stand up on its own with the strength of its logic.

Hitchens’ logic commits what is sometimes referred to as “the Enlightenment Fallacy.”  This logical fallacy holds that reason and science are the only means that humans have for accessing truth.  Dinesh D’Souza does a superb job of dismantling this fallacy in his book What’s So Great About Christianity:

“The Enlightenment fallacy holds that human reason and science can, in principle, gain access to and eventually comprehend the whole of reality.”

D’Souza cites the logic of Immanuel Kant, who is widely regarded to be the foremost philosopher of the modern era.  Kant revolutionized our understanding of what it means to know when he distinguished between the world as it actually exists in its totality (the noumenal domain) and a the world as we experience it (the phenomenal domain).  D’Souza writes:

“Consider a tape recorder. A tape recorder, being the kind of instrument it is, can capture only one mode or aspect of reality: sound. Tape recorders, in this sense, can ‘hear’ but they cannot see or touch or smell. Thus all aspects of reality that cannot be captured in sound are beyond the reach of a tape recorder. The same, Kant says, is true of human beings. We can apprehend reality only through our five senses. If a tape recorder apprehends reality in a single mode, human beings can perceive reality in five different modes: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. There is no other way for us to experience reality. We cannot, for example, perceive reality through sonar in the way that a bat does. Our senses place absolute limits on what reality is available to us. Moreover, the reality we apprehend is not reality in itself. It is merely our experience or ‘take’ on reality.”

“…Kant points out, however, that we can never compare our experience of reality to reality itself. All we have is the experience, and that’s all we can ever have. We only have the copies, but we never have the originals. Moreover, the copies come to us through the medium of our senses, while the originals exist independently of our means of perceiving them. So we have no basis for inferring that the two are even comparable, and when we presume that our experience corresponds to reality, we are making an unjustified leap. We have absolutely no way to know this.”

“…The important thing is not to establish which is more real [the noumenal or phenomenal domain], but to recognize that human reason operates only in the phenomenal domain of experience. We can know that the noumenal realm exists, but beyond that we can know nothing about it. Human reason can never grasp reality itself.”

Indeed, the atheist reasoning which reflexively equates belief in the supernatural with superstition arises from a failure to recognize the distinction between reality as we are able to perceive it with our five senses (phenomenal) and reality in its totality (noumenal).  Belief in the supernatural is no more “woo-woo” than the concept that our five senses only provide access to a thin slice of reality.  Our ability to perceive only a thin slice of reality is well known to physicists.  Physicist Lisa Randall writes: “We are in this three-dimensional flatland…Our world is stuck in this three-dimensional universe, although extra dimensions exist. So we live in a three-dimensional slice of a higher-dimensional world.”

D’Souza also points out that Kant was a recognized scientist and mathematician who did not in any way disparage science.  Rather, Kant merely pointed out that science can only be applied to the world as we can experience it with our five senses (phenomenal domain) rather than to the world as it exists in its totality (noumenal domain).

The Enlightenment Fallacy is committed by atheists such as Hitchens anytime they assert that science provides direct access to the world as it exists in its totality (noumenal domain) and that there is no way to access truth other than through the senses.

Keith Ward is a retired Professor of Philosophy from Kings College in London, and a member of the Royal Institute of Philosophy.  He makes a point similar to that of D’Souza in his book Is Religion Irrational?

“In the fourth century BC, Plato made a distinction, fundamental to most philosophical systems, between appearance and reality. This distinction opens up the possibility that there is a deeper reality underlying the world as it appears to our senses. We know things as they appear to us. But those appearances depend upon the specific nature of our sense organs, the wavelengths that we are able to perceive, the cones of our eyes that are sensitive to specific wavelengths, the electrochemical impulses that convey information to our brains, and the visual areas of our brains that turn those wavelengths into the colours that we observe. The world of solid coloured three-dimensional objects that we perceive is in fact a construct of our perceptual equipment and of our minds.”

Examples of knowledge which science is unable to access (because our five senses are unable to access), but which most people nevertheless accept as true, are abundant.  This sort of knowledge is known as revelatory knowledge or revelation.  Following is one such example of revelatory knowledge gleaned from a recent news story: It is morally wrong to walk into a kindergarten class with an assault rifle and shoot children.  All reasonable and sane people accept the truth of this premise, but the truth of this premise does not come to us from a measurement and analysis of the data that we are provided through our five senses (science).  Quite plainly, science has no means whatsoever for evaluating the truth of this premise.  How could science do so?  With a chemistry or biology experiment?  And if the truth of this premise did not come to us through science, then where did it come from?  From revelation.  (Those wishing to argue that moral beliefs evolved are directed to my essay titled Why Atheism Is Self-Defeating, where this argument is refuted).

Ward continues with a discussion of revelation:

“Those who accept that the later prophetic teaching is an advance in thought and in religious understanding will see revelation as progressive. It does not come as one clear and definitive set of truths from God, which humans just have passively to accept. Just as human knowledge of the physical world develops, so does understanding of revelation. At first humans have a very defective understanding of the physical world, not realizing that there are laws of nature, not knowing anything at all about atoms and electrons, and no doubt positing many totally false theories about how things work. Yet there is a physical world there, and they obviously know something about it, even though they do not understand it very well. We can expect that the same is true of knowledge of God. Humans know something about a spiritual reality – that it exists, that it has causal power, that it is concerned with human welfare, and that it is not physical –but they begin with a very defective understanding of it. They have many false beliefs about it – that there are many gods at war with one another, and that the gods can be bribed with gifts. One way to view this is to say that the one true God is always present and active, but that God’s acts have to be interpreted by human minds, which begin from ignorance and misunderstanding, and only slowly learn more through painful experience.”

“God acts to reveal, and what God does cannot be incorrect. But human minds must receive revelation, and what human minds do is very often incorrect or inadequate. So my suggestion is this: all revelation is interpreted revelation, and human interpretations are very rarely completely adequate. God continually seeks to overcome such human inadequacies, but that process is gradual.”

And atheists such as Hitchens are fond of pointing to outmoded concepts of God as evidence that belief in God is a “primitive superstition.”  For example, the ancient Greeks portrayed the god Zues as throwing lightning bolts with his hands.  Since science has shown that lightning bolts are produced by electricity, and not thrown by a deity with his hands—argue atheists—there is no need for God in the explanation of what causes lightning.  But does demonstrating that there is no need for a deity to throw lightning bolts also demonstrate that there is no need for a deity anywhere in the phenomenon of lightning?  No, because the phenomenon of thunder and lightning is ultimately traceable back to physical/natural laws and science is not equipped to discern where physical/natural laws come from or who or what enforces these laws.

The above mentioned atheist reasoning further falls apart when one realizes that human understanding of both God and the natural world develops in a process that is both progressive and never complete.  And, unfortunately for atheists who cite outmoded concepts of God as evidence that belief in God is a superstition, this reasoning would also necessarily imply that outmoded scientific concepts are evidence that science is a superstition.

Lynn Margulis (a recently deceased Professor of Biology from Oxford University and the University of Massachusetts, who won the U.S. Presidential Medal for Science) points out the progressive, yet never complete nature of scientific description in her book What Is Life?:

“…science is asymptotic. It never arrives at but only approaches the tantalizing goal of final knowledge. Astrology gives way to astronomy; alchemy evolves into chemistry. The science of one age becomes the mythology of the next.”

“Asymptotic” is an adjective form of the noun “asymptote” which is defined as “a line that continually approaches a given curve, but does not meet it at any finite distance.”  And to understand what Margulis is driving at when she states that science always approaches, but never arrives at truth, one only need review the history of science:

Margulis provides the examples of astrology providing the origins for astronomy, and alchemy (which involved trying to turn such metals as lead into gold) providing the origins for chemistry…but there are many more examples.  Before Einstein, it was assumed by scientists that light waves needed a medium to travel through (much as sound waves travel through the medium of air).  Belief in this medium (known as “luminiferous aether”) was virtually unanimous within the scientific community of the time.  As another example, the scientific community used to embrace the “miasma theory of disease ” which said that diseases were transmitted by “bad air.”  A more exhaustive list is available at a Wikipedia post titled Superseded Scientific Theories.

It must be emphasized that none of this is meant to disparage science.  Rather, it is to demonstrate that (like revelatory knowledge) scientific knowledge is progressive, never complete, and subject to being described with inadequate human concepts.  Further, scientific knowledge only applies to the phenomenal domain of our five senses, not to reality in its totality (the noumenal domain) and therefore can never render belief in God outmoded.

Atheistic reasoning which judges belief in God to be a “primitive superstition superseded by science” is a “species of ignorance” (in the words of Robert Andrews Millikan, cited above this essay) which fails to understand the nature and limitations of scientific knowledge.  How can the “new atheists” compensate for this? In the same way they always have…by continually repeating the tired assertion that “science does away with the need for God,” and therefore using repetition to make up on volume for their logical failings.

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In my post titled Which God Is Real?, I demonstrate that the Judeo-Christian concept of God is common to a vast number of cultures throughout history…and therefore should be deemed revelatory knowledge.

Many atheists would have you believe that they hold no beliefs which are not the product of scientific inquiry.  But, unfortunately for atheists who believe this, such a state of affairs is actually impossible.  The person who disbelieves in God can only do so from the vantage point of some other belief which precedes and therefore underlies scientific inquiry…not from the vantage point of a “skeptical“ lack of any belief.  It is impossible to be a complete “skeptic” since to be skeptical of all beliefs would entail having no beliefs.

Timothy Keller deftly points out that even the most hardened “skeptic” has a faith, in The Reason for God:

But even as believers should learn to look for reasons behind their faith, skeptics must learn to look for a type of faith hidden within their reasoning. All doubts, however skeptical and cynical they may seem, are really a set of alternate beliefs. You cannot doubt Belief A except from a position of faith in Belief B. For example, if you doubt Christianity because, “There can’t be just one true religion,” you must recognize that this statement is itself an act of faith. No one can prove it empirically, and it is not a universal truth that everyone accepts. If you went to the Middle East and said, “There can’t be just one true religion,” nearly everyone would say, “Why not?” The reason you doubt Christianity’s Belief A is because you hold unprovable Belief B. Every doubt, therefore is based on a leap of faith.

Atheists are “skeptical” of Christianity (etc.), but are very rarely skeptical of the belief system that is alternately referred to as materialism or naturalism. This belief system says that the material world is all that exists and that therefore all natural phenomena will eventually be explainable in materialistic terms.  The eminent philosopher of science Karl Popper contemptuously refers to this belief as “promissory materialism,” since it promises to eventually explain everything (including consciousness, the origin of life, the origin of the universe, etc.) in material terms.

And the philosopher of science Michael Polanyi (who was also an Oxford University chemist, elected to the Royal Society) demonstrates why it is necessary to first believe before one can know.  In other words, belief precedes knowing.  Mark T. Mitchell discusses Polanyi’s philosophical insights in his article The False Dilemma of Modernity:

…the rationalist, who refuses to begin with any commitment or faith and instead seeks to proceed on the basis of reason alone, actually cannot avoid beginning with faith. At the simplest level, he necessarily begins with a faith in his rational faculties. Furthermore, as Polanyi argues, all thinking persons necessarily depend on a tacit commitment to a particular tradition, which includes one’s language and one’s culture, and even to articulate a rejection of one’s tradition requires a dependence on resources provided by that tradition.

Since all knowing rests on a fiduciary framework, belief, as we have seen, precedes knowing. [Fiduciary is defined as “involving trust”] But belief requires an object, and this role is filled by tradition operating within a community committed to its perpetuation. For example, at its most basic, language requires belief. When a child learns a language, he believes that the language-speakers who surround him are not uttering gibberish. The acquisition of skills, as we have seen, requires submission to a master even though the novice does not yet comprehend the meaning of that which he is practicing. Science is no different, for the aspiring scientist must submit himself to the authority of a scientist, and such submission requires belief. “Thus,” in Polanyi’s words, “to accord validity to science—or to any other of the great domains of the mind—is to express a faith which can be upheld only within a community. We realize here the connexion between Science, Faith and Society.” The connection is that science or any other area of knowing, depends on a fiduciary framework in which belief necessarily precedes all knowing. This belief, though, cannot exist apart from a community of believers who sustain the tradition by passing it to the next generation through a process of apprenticeship.

Because we are so accustomed to taking our rational faculties for granted, the idea that we rely on a faith in these faculties in order to participate in activities such as science may seem strange to many in modern day society.  But, as Albert Einstein famously said, “The most unintelligible thing about the universe is that it is intelligible at all.”

And unless one has spent some time studying various philosophical and cultural traditions, one may fail to realize that there have been, and continue to be, many such traditions which reject the belief that our rational faculties are reliable, and therefore that the universe can be intelligible to humans.  The most up-to-date example would be the philosophical stance known as “postmodernism”.  As this article mentions:

In the postmodern understanding, interpretation is everything; reality only comes into being through our interpretations of what the world means to us individually. Postmodernism relies on concrete experience over abstract principles, knowing always that the outcome of one’s own experience will necessarily be fallible and relative, rather than certain and universal.

Postmodernism is “post” because it is denies the existence of any ultimate principles, and it lacks the optimism of there being a scientific, philosophical, or religious truth which will explain everything for everybody – a characteristic of the so-called “modern” mind.

One is compelled to ask: How could scientific progress ever occur in an intellectual climate which lacks belief in such a thing as scientific truth?  How could scientific progress occur among a group of people who don’t believe human rational faculties are reliable because there is no objective world for our rational faculties to study?

In short, scientific knowledge can only be constructed upon an adequate framework of underlying belief.  The concept of scientists advancing science without a suitable underlying belief framework, upon which to build, is as absurd as the concept of a child advancing his/her understanding of the world without a language structure (as Polanyi alludes to above).

Here, the important question is which belief framework fits best with reality, and therefore, best allows for scientific progress.  The physicist, philosopher of science (and Catholic priest) Stanley Jaki demonstrated that belief frameworks other than Christianity failed to allow for the rapid growth of science.  This article, titled The Origin of Science details Jaki’s insights:

“Modern experimental science was rendered possible, Jaki has shown, as a result of the Christian philosophical atmosphere of the Middle Ages. Although a talent for science was certainly present in the ancient world (for example in the design and construction of the Egyptian pyramids), nevertheless the philosophical and psychological climate was hostile to a self-sustaining scientific process. Thus science suffered still-births in the cultures of ancient China, India, Egypt and Babylonia. It also failed to come to fruition among the Maya, Incas and Aztecs of the Americas. Even though ancient Greece came closer to achieving a continuous scientific enterprise than any other ancient culture, science was not born there either. Science did not come to birth among the medieval Muslim heirs to Aristotle.”

“….The psychological climate of such ancient cultures, with their belief that the universe was infinite and time an endless repetition of historical cycles, was often either hopelessness or complacency (hardly what is needed to spur and sustain scientific progress); and in either case there was a failure to arrive at a belief in the existence of God the Creator and of creation itself as therefore rational and intelligible. Thus their inability to produce a self-sustaining scientific enterprise.”

In short, science was not rendered possible until the Christian belief in a rationally intelligible universe (anchored in a rational and intelligent God) provided a belief framework upon which science could develop.

And, as I demonstrate in Why Atheism Is Self-Defeating, by rejecting God, the materialist/naturalist belief system fails to provide an adequate belief framework upon which to anchor the reliability of any human beliefs.  An excerpt from that essay:

The renowned philosopher of neuroscience Patricia Churchland, despite being a staunch naturalist, admits to this problem with naturalism in her article Epistemology in the Age of Neuroscience:

“The principal chore of nervous systems is to get the body parts where they should be in order that the organism may survive. . . . Improvements in sensorimotor control confer an evolutionary advantage: a fancier style of representing [the world] is advantageous so long as it . . . enhances the organism’s chances for survival. Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost.”

Prominent atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel admits to the same in his book Mind and Cosmos, and devotes much of the rest of the book trying to wriggle free from theism.  He writes:

“Evolutionary naturalism implies that we shouldn’t take any of our convictions seriously, including the scientific world picture on which evolutionary naturalism itself depends.”

Naturalism, simply put, leaves us no reason whatsoever to think that any of our beliefs are reliable…such as a belief in naturalism.  Please recall that naturalism insists that the evolutionary mechanism of natural selection is mindless and random.  Also recall that natural selection selects for survivability, not for truth.  And, if one stops to think, there is no reason to think that certain false beliefs could not provide just as much survival value as a corresponding true belief.  For example, the belief that eating a particular plant should be avoided because doing so would cause one to turn into a werewolf provides just as much survival value as the belief that eating that plant should be avoided because doing so puts poison into one’s body.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, atheist reasoning often deceives through the clever application of terminology.  Belief in God (theism) is labelled a “religious,” whereas belief in naturalism/materialism is labelled “scientific.”  But both theism and naturalism/materialism are belief systems that precede and underly science, and are therefore meta-scientific.

In modern “secular” society, however, it is commonly accepted that people who go to church (or mosque, etc.) and believe in God are “religious”, whereas people who are atheist (or at least don’t participate in the worship of God) are “non-religious” or “secular.” This viewpoint, however prevalent in our culture, is nothing but a cultural artifact without any intrinsic meaning.  In my essay titled Doesn’t Religion Cause Killing?, I cite religious scholar William T. Cavanaugh in his book The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict.  Although he writes in the context of discussing “religious” violence, his comments are relevant to the matter at hand:

“What would be necessary to prove the claim that religion has caused more violence than any other institutional force over the course of human history?  One would first need a concept of religion that would be at least theoretically separable from other institutional forces over the course of human history. …The problem is that there was no category of religion separable from such political institutions until the modern era, and then it was primarily in the West.  What meaning could we give to either the claim that Roman religion is to blame for the imperialist violence of ancient Rome, or the claim that it is Roman politics and not Roman religion that is to blame?  Either claim would be nonsensical, because there was no neat division between religion and politics.”

“It is not simply that religion and politics were jumbled together until the modern West got them properly sorted out.  As Wilfred Cantwell Smith showed in his landmark book, The Meaning and End of Religion, religion as a discrete category of human activity separable from culture, politics, and other areas of life is an invention of the modern West.”

“…The first conclusion is that there is no trans-historical or trans-cultural concept of religion.  Religion has a history, and what counts as religion and what does not in any given context depends on different configurations of power and authority.  The second conclusion is that the attempt to say that there is a trans-historical and trans-cultural concept of religion that is separable from secular phenomena is itself part of a particular configuration of power, that of the modern, liberal nation-state as it is developed in the West.”

Indeed, scholars have been entirely unable to reach an agreed upon definition of “religion,” as this article discusses.  The modern cultural context which associates theism with “religion,” but materialism/naturalism with “science,” serves to persuade many that theism is faith-based, whereas materialism/naturalism is scientifically and empirically based.  But this cultural context, again, is devoid of any intrinsic meaning since both worldviews are meta-scientific in nature.  Materialism/naturalism is no more or less of a “faith-based religion” than theism.

The ignition of a powder mixture consisting of the chemicals sulfur, charcoal, and saltpeter caused a rapid expansion of gasses which, consistent with Isaac Newton’s laws of motion, forced a lead projectile down a metal tube at a supersonic velocity.  The collision of the projectile against certain of Kennedy’s vital organs caused a transference of kinetic energy, which severely damaged these organs, resulting in death.

What’s that I hear you say?  You’re disappointed?!  You were suspicious of my bold claims from the outset?!  All I did was describe aspects of a gunshot (and subsequent wound), in pretentious scientific terms, rather than explain the assassination?  You were hoping I would explain who the guilty parties were, and what their motives were?

Well, you were justified in feeling suspicious and then disappointed.  The same suspicion, and then disappointment, should surround any bold claims atheists make about science “explaining” things without the need for God.  As I note in The God of the Gaps: Why God and Science Are Not Competing Explanations, atheists commit what is known in philosophy as a category error any time they declare that science and God are competing explanations for natural phenomena.  Below is an excerpt from the Wikipedia post for Category Error:

A category mistake, or category error, is a semantic or ontological error in which “things of one kind are presented as if they belonged to another”, or, alternatively, a property is ascribed to a thing that could not possibly have that property. Thus the claim that “Most Americans are atheists” is not a category mistake, since most Americans could be (contingently) atheists. On the other hand, “Most bananas are atheists” is a category mistake. This is because bananas belong to a category of things that cannot be said to have beliefs.

Just as bananas cannot have beliefs, science cannot provide complete explanations for natural phenomena.  Rather it can only provide useful descriptions.  This is why bold declarations from atheists that “science explains things without the need for God” amount to a category error.  Edgar Andrews writes in Who Made God?:

“…far from explaining everything, science actually ‘explains’ nothing. What science does is describe the world and its phenomenology in terms of its own specialized concepts and models — which provide immensely valuable insights but become increasingly non-intuitive as we dig ever deeper into the nature of physical reality.”

“…The formula [that describes the force of gravity] equates the gravitational force between two objects to the product of their masses multiplied by a universal constant (the ‘gravitational constant’) and divided by the square of the distance between them. But does the equation ‘explain’ why you don’t bump your head on the ceiling? Not really. It tells us there is a force that keeps your feet on the ground, but you knew that already. It also quantifies that force, allowing us to calculate its strength in any particular case, which is extremely useful. But it doesn’t tell us why there is such a force, why it follows an inverse square law, and why the ‘gravitational constant’ has the value that it does. The equation is a description of gravity rather than an explanation.” [underlining mine]

Science describes natural phenomena in terms of laws, but it does not explain where those laws came from, who (or what) enforces those laws, or why the universe has laws in the first place (rather than just chaos).  Scientific description, in other words, ends at the level of natural/physical laws.  So how does theism explain the above mentioned phenomena?  The answer is simple.  As I put it in I Believe In Science, Why Do I Need Religion?:

Such laws are the result of a lawgiver (God).  Moreover, theism asserts that matter is nothing more than a manifestation of consciousness (God’s consciousness), which is the view most compatible with modern physics, as I demonstrate in God Is Real: Why Modern Physics Has Discredited Atheism.  Robert Boyle, the founder of modern chemistry, summarized the theistic explanation of why matter follows physical laws succinctly when he said: “The nature of this or that body is but the law of God prescribed to it [and] to speak properly, a law [is] but a notional rule of acting according to the declared will of a superior.” [the word “notional” italicized by me]

 Or as James Joule, the propounder of the first law of thermodynamics, for whom the thermal unit of the “Joule” was named, put it: “It is evident that an acquaintance with natural laws means no less than an acquaintance with the mind of God therein expressed.”

Albert Einstein marveled at the existence of physical/natural laws, and the exquisite order (rather than the chaos that we should a priori expect) which lies therein.  He wrote (as cited in The God of the Gaps: Why God and Science Are Not Competing Explanations):

“…a priori, one should expect a chaotic world, which cannot be grasped by the mind in any way.  The kind of order created by Newton’s theory of gravitation, for example, is wholly different. Even if man proposes the axioms of the theory, the success of such a project presupposes a high degree of ordering of the objective world, and this could not be expected a priori. That is the ‘miracle’ which is constantly reinforced as our knowledge expands.”

And as Edgar Andrews points out, we could take the description of gravity a step further by mentioning how, as Einstein described it, gravity results from a curvature of the space-time fabric.  But rather than providing an explanation, this would still be just a case of taking description a step further.  Eventually, science hits a dead end when it arrives at “conceptual quagmires from which there is no escape” (in Andrews’ words) such as the curvature of space-time fabric.  In order to provide a final explanation, one must cite some sort of first principle which explains the “high degree of ordering of the objective world” (in Einstein’s words)…like God.

But this is only the beginning of the problem for atheists when they claim that science “explains” things without the need for God.  The next problem is that there is much in nature that cannot be described by referencing physical/natural laws.  Andrews continues:

“…When we play chess, the laws determine the moves we can make but not the moves we do make. That is, the laws are not deterministic; they don’t impose a particular outcome for the game. In the same way, the laws of nature determine what is and what is not physically possible, but they do not determine what actually occurs within the multitude of available possibilities.”

A similar point is made by the former Manhattan Project physicist, and leading information theorist, Hubert Yockey, in the primary text on the application of algorithmic information theory to the origin of life, titled Information Theory, Evolution, and the Origin of Life (also cited in Why God? Why Not Just Plain Luck?):

“The laws of physics and chemistry are much like the rules of a game such as football. The referees see to it that these laws are obeyed but that does not predict the winner of the Super Bowl. There is not enough information in the rules of the game to make that prediction. That is why we play the game. [Mathematician Gregory] Chaitin (1985, 1987a) has examined the laws of physics by actually programming them. He finds the information content amazingly small.”

“The reason that there are principles of biology that cannot be derived from the laws of physics and chemistry lies simply in the fact that the genetic information content of the genome for constructing even the simplest organisms is much larger than the information content of these laws.” (Yockey 1992).

This is why Yockey concludes that the origin of life from non-living matter is “unsolvable as a scientific problem.”  Scientific description cannot continue past the level of physical/natural laws.  Science can only describe “the rules of the game,” not the events or outcome of the game.  And, more importantly, it cannot describe who or what is playing the game in such “games” as the origin of life from non-living matter, and the origin of the universe (or universes if you prefer multiple universes) from a state in which there were no universes.

Further, both above mentioned “games” involved an almost unimaginable information specificity and complexity.  As I mentioned in Why Life Could Not Have Emerged Without God, the simplest living thing (the first self-replicating molecule) is several orders of magnitude more complex than anything humans have ever produced…supercomputers, spacecraft, anything.

Regarding the immense information content contained in the language of life (the language of DNA), Nancy Pearcey writes in her book Total Truth:

“…in principle, laws of nature do not give rise to information. Why not? Because laws describe events that are regular, repeatable, and predictable. If you drop a pencil, it will fall. If you put paper into a flame, it will burn. If you mix salt in water, it will dissolve. That’s why the scientific method insists that experiments must be repeatable: Whenever you reproduce the same conditions, you should get the same results, or something is wrong with your experiment. The goal of science is to reduce those regular patterns to mathematical formulas. By contrast, the sequence of letters in a message is irregular and non repeating, which means it cannot be the result of any law-like process.”

“To illustrate the point, let’s invoke our imaginary Scrabble game… but this time when you organize the letters, you decide to follow a certain formula or rule (an analogy to laws of nature). For example, the formula might require that every time you have a D, it is followed by an E. And every time you have an E, it’s followed by a S, then an I, then a G, and an N. The result would be that every time you started with D, you would get DESIGN, DESIGN, DESIGN, over and over again. Obviously, if the letters in a real alphabet followed rules like that, you would be limited to spelling only a few words—and you could not convey very much information. The reason a real alphabet works so well is precisely that the letters do not follow rules or formulas or laws. If you know that a word begins with a T, you cannot predict what the next letter will be. With some minor exceptions (in English, q is always fol-lowed by u ), the letters can be combined and recombined in a vast number of different arrangements to form words and sentences.”

So who or what is the author of this codified information?  It is not merely the case that science has failed so far to answer this question.  Rather it is that science can never, even in principle, answer this question.  And one is more likely to get a coherent answer to this question from a banana than from an atheist.  As I point out in Why Life Could Not Have Emerged Without God, the cream-of-the-crop atheist scientists have proposed answers to the question of the origin of life that include such gems as aliens-brought-life-to-earth-in-their-spaceship (called “directed panspermia”), and life-came-to-earth-from-space-without-alien-assistance (just “panspermia” without the “directed”), and life emerged as a result of a piggyback ride on crystals.

And how did a universe (or universes, if you prefer) emerge from a state in which there was no universe…and therefore no space, no time, no matter, no energy, and no laws?  As the great astrophysicist Sir Arthur Eddington put it, “The beginning [of the universe] seems to present insuperable difficulties unless we agree to look on it as frankly supernatural.”

Or as Allan Sandage, who is widely regarded to be the greatest living cosmologist, put it:

“I find it quite improbable that such order came out of chaos.  There has to be some organizing principle.  God to me is a mystery but is the explanation for the miracle of existence, why there is something instead of nothing.”

Put another way, naturalistic explanations are simply insufficient for explaining why there exists a natural world for us to explain, in the first place.  (Please read OK…I Want Numbers. What is the chance that the universe is the result of chance?  and Is There A God? (What is the chance that our world is the result of chance?) for a further discussion of the origin of the universe).

Just as the scientific description of a gunshot that I gave at the beginning of this essay provides no explanation whatsoever for the JFK assassination, scientific descriptions of natural phenomena provide no explanation whatsoever for those natural phenomena.  In order to truly be an explanation (rather than a mere description) of natural phenomena, any explanation must include: 1) where physical/natural laws come from, 2) who or what enforces those laws, and 3) who or what is responsible for the aspects of nature that cannot be attributed to physical/natural laws.  Because science cannot even in principle answer any of these questions, the suggestion that science provides an alternative to God is an open-and-shut category error.

One very prominent absurdity is the atheistic citation of pure chance or luck as an alternative explanation to God for such phenomena as the origin of life and the origin of our universe.

Sure—the atheist argument goes—the probability of such things occurring naturally is very low…but with enough time, and even a slight probability, what is there to prevent virtually anything from happening?!  But this atheist reasoning makes some very grave oversights.  First of all, bare probability and large amounts of time, alone, cannot accomplish anything, ever.  Period.

Does this seem like too strong a statement?  It is not.  Probability and time can never accomplish anything without 1) a causal mechanism and 2) an underlying structure, or order.

As an illustration, consider the lottery:  Even though the chance of a specific individual winning the lottery is incredibly small, many people have won lotteries in the past, and many more will win in the future.

What is necessary, then, for this bare probability of a lottery win to result in an actual lottery win?  Much more than just time and chance.  For one, in order to win the lottery, the causal mechanism of going to the store to buy lottery tickets on a regular basis is required.  Without this causal mechanism, the probability of winning the lottery is exactly zero.  As one lottery advertisement says, “You can’t win unless you play.”

Secondly, the structure of a lottery commission and a distribution network for lottery tickets (etc.) is necessary (not to mention the monetary system of the Dollar, Euro, etc.).  In other words, for one to win the lottery, there must first be a lottery, and there must first be such a thing as money to win.

Without this structure, the probability of an individual winning the lottery is also exactly zero.  In fancier language, the potential for a lottery win is embedded within the structure that exists in the lottery and the monetary system.  The causal mechanism of purchasing lottery tickets allows this embedded structure to manifest itself in the form of a lottery win.  Without this underlying structure, time and chance can produce nothing.

The fatal flaw with the atheistic argument that probability and time are an alternative explanation to God is that it assumes (and does not adequately explain) the existence of the structure and the causal mechanism…with the complex order contained therein.

University of Delaware physicist Stephen Barr discusses the topic of underlying order, or structure, in Modern Physics and Ancient Faith:

“The overlooked point is this: when examined carefully, scientific accounts of natural processes are never really about order emerging from mere chaos, or form emerging from mere formlessness.  On the contrary, they are always about the unfolding of an order that was already implicit in the nature of things, although often in a secret or hidden way.  When we see situations that appear haphazard, or things that appear amorphous, automatically or spontaneously ‘arranging themselves’ into orderly patterns, what we find in every case is that what appeared to be amorphous or haphazard actually already had a great deal of order built into it.”

“In fact, we shall learn something more: in every case where science explains order, it does so, in the final analysis, by appealing to a greater, more impressive, and more comprehensive underlying orderliness.  And that is why, ultimately, scientific explanations do not allow us to escape from the Design Argument: for when the scientist has done his job there is not less order to explain but more.”

Regarding the question of the origin of life, what are the source of the structure (or order) and causal mechanism that allow the bare probability of life to eventually produce actual life?  The theist answer to this question is simple: The structure is mind (God’s mind) and the causal mechanism is personal agency (God’s personal agency).

In everyday experience we often see this structure and causal mechanism pair manifested.  Indeed, in the lottery example, it was the minds of the lottery officials that produced the structure and the personal agency of the person who went to the store to buy lottery tickets that allowed the bare probability of a lottery win to be manifested in the form of an actual lottery win.

But what does atheism propose as the source of the structure and the causal mechanism that allows the bare probability of life to result in actual life?  Figuratively speaking, what is the source of the lottery that produces life, and who or what is making regular trips to the store to buy the tickets, according to atheism?

Atheistic reasoning has a penchant for emphasizing natural mechanisms while simultaneously taking for granted or ignoring the need for an adequate structure, or order, upon which those mechanisms operate.  For example, as to the question of how an organism as complex as a human being could have evolved from a simple common ancestor (the first single celled organism), atheists frequently cite Darwinian evolution (which is entirely compatible with both theism in general and Christianity in particular, as I demonstrate in Why Evolution Cannot Be Used to Rationalize Atheism and Doesn’t Evolution Prove the Biblical Account of Creation to Be False?).  Please note, however, that Darwinian evolution addresses the issue of the mechanism, but not the issue of the structure upon which this mechanism operates.  What is the structure within which the potential for something as complex as a human being is embedded?  In other words, what is the figurative lottery and monetary system that allows the potential for a human being to result in an actual human being?

One attempt at explaining this structure which atheists have proposed is that the potential for something as complex as a human being is embedded in the laws of physics and chemistry.

Hubert Yockey, a physicist and information theorist (who also worked on the Manhattan Project), responds to this proposal in Information Theory, Evolution and the Origin of Life, which is the leading text on the application of algorithmic information theory to the question of the origin of life (of which he is the lead author):

“The laws of physics and chemistry are much like the rules of a game such as football. The referees see to it that these laws are obeyed but that does not predict the winner of the Super Bowl. There is not enough information in the rules of the game to make that prediction. That is why we play the game. [Mathematician Gregory] Chaitin (1985, 1987a) has examined the laws of physics by actually programming them. He finds the information content amazingly small.”

“The reason that there are principles of biology that cannot be derived from the laws of physics and chemistry lies simply in the fact that the genetic information content of the genome for constructing even the simplest organisms is much larger than the information content of these laws.” (Yockey 1992).

Simply put, the laws of physics and chemistry do not have enough structure embedded within them to eventually produce even the simplest living thing, let alone a human being.  It would be just as absurd to declare that the laws of physics and chemistry could eventually produce life as it would be to declare that a society without a lottery or monetary system could eventually produce a lottery winner.

But we do not need to rely on the expert analysis of a top notch physicist and information theorist (or a famous mathematician like Gregory Chaitin) to appreciate what Yockey is driving at in his above statements.  Any thinking person can administer their own “smell test,” as it were, to determine if physical and chemical laws are enough to explain the structure in which the phenomenon of life is based:

When playing a game of billiards, do the rules of the game, and the laws of physics which govern the motion of the balls, determine the events and outcome of the game?  Certainly not.  The personal agency of the players and the people who manufactured the balls and table provide most of the required structure and mechanism.

As I mentioned in God Is Real…Why Modern Physics Has Discredited Atheism, there have historically been two basic worldviews regarding the fundamental composition of reality.  One worldview (in which atheism is grounded), known as materialism or naturalism, says that the fundamental composition of reality is mindless matter and/or energy.  The other worldview (in which theism is grounded) says that the fundamental composition of reality is mind, and that everything we experience (including matter) is a manifestation of this mind.

So which of these two worldviews provides the best explanation for the structure and mechanism which is capable of producing something as complex as a human being?  (On a side note, one is certainly free to compose their own unique worldview, but this does not do away with the need to provide explanation).  The Nobel Prize-winning Harvard University biologist George Wald, despite being ideologically opposed to theism, was forced by the weight of the evidence to make the following admission in his address to the quantum biology symposium titled Life and Mind in the Universe (also cited in Why Life Could Not Have Emerged Without God):

“It has occurred to me lately—I must confess with some shock at first to my scientific sensibilities—that both questions [the origin of mind and the origin of life from nonliving matter] might be brought into some degree of congruence. This is with the assumption that mind, rather than emerging as a late outgrowth in the evolution of life, has existed always as the matrix, the source and condition of physical reality—the stuff of which physical reality is composed is mind-stuff. It is mind that has composed a physical universe that breeds life and so eventually evolves creatures that know and create: science-, art-, and technology-making animals.”

Wald’s above comments are eerily reflected by the physicist who won the Nobel Prize for the crucial scientific contribution of founding quantum theory, Max Planck (as cited in God Is Real… Why Modern Physics Has Discredited Atheism).

“As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.”

Very few individuals have had a greater depth of logical insight into the fundamental composition of reality than Max Planck, or for that matter, Albert Einstein, who said:

“Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe–a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble.”

Once again, however, one does not need to rely on the analysis of prominent experts (such as Nobel Prize-winning physicists or biologists) to reach one’s own soundly reasoned conclusion.  Each individual can decide for him or her self:

In regard to these questions, should we assign any value whatsoever to the opinions of atheist academics who insist upon materialist explanations (entirely for transparently ideological reasons), despite the fact that modern physics has discredited materialism as conclusively as the flat-earth theory?  How can conscious, intelligent, and personal beings such as ourselves eventually emerge from a structure (or “matrix,” to adopt the term that both Wald and Planck use) that is not itself conscious, intelligent, and personal?  Can the vast richness and wonder of human life and human experience (culture, art, music, love, joy, etc.) be somehow embedded in mindless matter?  Does a reality fundamentally composed of mindless matter contain the necessary structure to eventually produce “science, art, and technology making animals,” to use Wald’s words?   As Yogi Berra, in his great wisdom, put it: “You can observe a lot just by watching.”

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Additional citations relevant to this subject matter appear below:

“Is intelligent mind an ultimate and irreducible feature of reality? Indeed, is it the ultimate nature of reality? Or is mind and consciousness an unforeseen and unintended product of basically material processes of evolution?”

“If you look at the history of philosophy, it soon becomes clear that almost all the great classical philosophers took the first of these views. Plato, Aristotle, Anselm, Aquinas, Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Locke, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel—they all argued that the ultimate reality, often hidden under the appearances of the material world or time and space, is mind or spirit.”

–Keith Ward, retired Professor of Philosophy at Kings College, London, and a member of the Council of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, as quoted in his book Doubting Dawkins, Why There Almost Certainly is A God.

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“…This sense of wonder leads most scientists to a Superior Being – der Alte, the Old One, as Einstein affectionately called the Deity – a Superior Intelligence, the Lord of all Creation and Natural Law.”

–Abdus Salam, winner of the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in electroweak theory.  He is here quoted in his article entitled Science and Religion.

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“I have looked into most philosophical systems and I have seen that none will work without God.”

“Science is incompetent to reason upon the creation of matter itself out of nothing.  We have reached the utmost limit of our thinking faculties when we have admitted that because matter cannot be eternal and self-existent it must have been created.”

–Physicist and mathematician James Clerk Maxwell, who is credited with formulating classical electromagnetic theory and whose contributions to science are considered to be of the same magnitude as those of Einstein and Newton.

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“There is a wide measure of agreement which, on the physical side of science approaches almost unanimity, that the stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.  Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the realm of matter.  We are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail mind as the creator and governor of the realm of matter.” (italics added)

–The knighted mathematician, physicist and astronomer Sir James Jeans as quoted in his book The Mysterious Universe.

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“For myself, faith begins with a realization that a supreme intelligence brought the universe into being and created man.  It is not difficult for me to have this faith, for it is incontrovertible that where there is a plan there is intelligence—an orderly, unfolding universe testifies to the truth of the most majestic statement ever uttered—-’In the beginning God.’”

–Nobel Prize winning physicist Arthur Compton, discoverer of the Compton Effect.

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“Those who say that the study of science makes a man an atheist must be rather silly.”

“Something which is against natural laws seems to me rather out of the question because it would be a depressive idea about God.  It would make God smaller than he must be assumed.  When he stated that these laws hold, then they hold, and he wouldn’t make exceptions.  This is too human an idea.  Humans do such things, but not God.”

–Nobel Prize winning physicist Max Born, who was instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics.

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“I believe that the more thoroughly science is studied, the further does it take us from anything comparable to atheism.”

–Lord William Kelvin, who was noted for his theoretical work on thermodynamics, the concept of absolute zero and the Kelvin temperature scale based upon it.

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“Why do people cling with such ferocity to belief in a mind-independent reality? It is surely because if there is no such reality, then ultimately (as far as we can know) mind alone exists. And if mind is not a product of real matter, but rather is the creator of the illusion of material reality (which has, in fact, despite the materialists, been known to be the case since the discovery of quantum mechanics in 1925), then a theistic view of our existence becomes the only rational alternative to solipsism.” ["Solipsism" is defined as "the view or theory that the self is all that can be known to exist."]

–Johns Hopkins University physicist Richard Conn Henry

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“Both religion and science require a belief in God. For believers, God is in the beginning, and for physicists He is at the end of all considerations… To the former He is the foundation, to the latter, the crown of the edifice of every generalized world view.”

“There can never be any real opposition between religion and science; for the one is the complement of the other.”

“I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”

Religion and Natural Science (Lecture Given 1937) Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers,trans. F. Gaynor (New York, 1949), pp. 184

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“God is a mathematician of a very high order and He used advanced mathematics in constructing the universe.”

–Nobel Prize winning physicist Paul A. M. Dirac, who made crucial early contributions to both quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics.

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“In the history of science, ever since the famous trial of Galileo, it has repeatedly been claimed that scientific truth cannot be reconciled with the religious interpretation of the world. Although I am now convinced that scientific truth is unassailable in its own field, I have never found it possible to dismiss the content of religious thinking as simply part of an outmoded phase in the consciousness of mankind, a part we shall have to give up from now on. Thus in the course of my life I have repeatedly been compelled to ponder on the relationship of these two regions of thought, for I have never been able to doubt the reality of that to which they point.”

–Werner Heisenberg, who was awarded the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics for the creation of quantum mechanics (which is absolutely crucial to modern science).

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“Atoms are weird stuff, behaving like active agents rather than inert substances.  They make unpredictable choices between alternative possibilities according to the laws of quantum mechanics.  It appears that mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent inherent in every atom.  The universe is also weird, with its laws of nature that make it hospitable to the growth of mind.  I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God.  God is what mind becomes when it passes beyond the scale of our comprehension.”

–Princeton University quantum physicist Freeman Dyson, as quoted during his acceptance of the Templeton Prize in 2000.

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“…Discussing the creation of the universe in terms of time and space is like trying to discover the artist and the action of painting by going to the edge of the canvas. This brings us very near to those philosophical systems which regard the universe as a thought in the mind of its Creator, thereby reducing all discussion of material creation to futility.”

—The knighted physicist, mathematician, and astronomer Sir James Jeans.

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“I want to know how God created this world, I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element.  I want to know His thoughts, the rest are details.”

–Albert Einstein

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“It is evident that an acquaintance with natural laws means no less than an acquaintance with the mind of God therein expressed.”

–James Joule, propounder of  the first law of thermodynamics (on the conservation of energy).  Joule also made important contributions to the kinetic theory of gases.  The unit of heat known as the “Joule” is named after him.

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“An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God.”

–Srinivasa Ramanujam, who is widely regarded to be one of the greatest mathematicians of all time (on a similar plane with such greats as Archimedes and Newton).

The easiest way for one to see that naturalism is self-defeating is to realize that, under naturalism, we have no reason to believe that ANY of our beliefs are true…let alone a belief in naturalism.  In fact, under the naturalist belief system, we have no reason to think that we even have the ability to reason accurately.

David Wood writes in his essay The Explanatory Emptiness of Naturalism (as it appears in True Reason: Christian Responses to the Challenge of Atheism):

“According to naturalists, our ability to reason is the product of natural selection acting on random mutation. Natural selection, of course, favors traits that help organisms survive and reproduce. So if human reasoning evolved naturally, it’s because it helped human beings survive and reproduce. Does this give us any basis for trusting our reasoning ability when it comes to questions of cosmology, or quantum mechanics, or neuroscience? Not at all. At best, our cognitive faculties would be reliable when it comes to finding berries, or using a spear against an enemy, or doing something to attract a mate. Interestingly, Darwin himself noticed this problem. He once admitted:

‘[W]ith me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?’

In other words, our reasoning ability serves the same evolutionary purpose as the traits of other animals (e.g., the claws of a lion, the song of a canary, or the colorful buttocks of a baboon). We wouldn’t trust the traits of animals to lead us to the truth, because they weren’t developed for that purpose. Why, then, would we trust our own convictions, which are the result of the same evolutionary process? There’s no way around this problem for naturalists, for in order to escape the Problem of Reason, they would need to construct an argument. But this argument would presuppose the reliability of human reason, which is precisely the issue under investigation. Hence, if we take Naturalism seriously, we cannot take our reasoning ability seriously, and science falls apart.”

The renowned philosopher of neuroscience Patricia Churchland, despite being a staunch naturalist, admits to this problem with naturalism in her article Epistemology in the Age of Neuroscience:

“The principal chore of nervous systems is to get the body parts where they should be in order that the organism may survive. . . . Improvements in sensorimotor control confer an evolutionary advantage: a fancier style of representing [the world] is advantageous so long as it . . . enhances the organism’s chances for survival. Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost.”

Prominent atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel admits to the same in his book Mind and Cosmos, and devotes much of the rest of the book trying to wriggle free from theism.  He writes:

“Evolutionary naturalism implies that we shouldn’t take any of our convictions seriously, including the scientific world picture on which evolutionary naturalism itself depends.”

Naturalism, simply put, leaves us no reason whatsoever to think that any of our beliefs are reliable…such as a belief in naturalism.  Please recall that naturalism insists that the evolutionary mechanism of natural selection is mindless and random.  Also recall that natural selection selects for survivability, not for truth.  And, if one stops to think, there is no reason to think that certain false beliefs could not provide just as much survival value as a corresponding true belief.  For example, the belief that eating a particular plant should be avoided because doing so would cause one to turn into a werewolf provides just as much survival value as the belief that eating that plant should be avoided because doing so puts poison into one’s body.

Philosopher Alvin Plantinga sums up this point in his book Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism:

“…neurology causes adaptive behavior and also causes or determines belief content [according to naturalism]: but there is no reason to suppose that the belief content thus determined is true. All that’s required for survival and fitness is that the neurology cause adaptive behavior; this neurology also determines belief content, but whether or not that content is true makes no difference to fitness. Certain NP [neuro-physiological] properties are selected for, because they contribute to fitness. These NP properties also cause or determine belief content; they associate a content or proposition with each belief. The NP properties are selected, however, not because they cause the content they do, but because they cause adaptive behavior. If the content, the proposition determined by the neurology (the NP properties of the belief) is true, fine. But if it is false, that’s no problem as far as fitness goes.”

Naturalism leaves us no reason to think that we can rely on our reason.  By dismissing God, naturalists have stripped away any reason to think that human reason can lead to truth.  We should therefore dismiss naturalism as having no more value than the empty “convictions of a monkey’s mind” (as Charles Darwin put it).

What reason, then, does the theist provide for believing that human reason can lead to truth?  Stanley Jaki, a leading philosopher and historian of science (and a physicist), provides perhaps the best articulated answer to this question.  This article, titled The Origin of Science describes how Christian theism anchors man’s rationality in God’s rationality and how Christianity was responsible for the rise of science.  Below is an excerpt:

In Christ and Science (p. 23), Jaki gives four reasons for modern science’s unique birth in Christian Western Europe:

1. “Once more the Christian belief in the Creator allowed a break-through in thinking about nature. Only a truly transcendental Creator could be thought of as being powerful enough to create a nature with autonomous laws without his power over nature being thereby diminished. Once the basic among those laws were formulated science could develop on its own terms.”
2. “The Christian idea of creation made still another crucially important contribution to the future of science. It consisted in putting all material beings on the same level as being mere creatures. Unlike in the pagan Greek cosmos, there could be no divine bodies in the Christian cosmos. All bodies, heavenly and terrestrial, were now on the same footing, on the same level. This made it eventually possible to assume that the motion of the moon and the fall of a body on earth could be governed by the same law of gravitation. The assumption would have been a sacrilege in the eyes of anyone in the Greek pantheistic tradition, or in any similar tradition in any of the ancient cultures.”
3. “Finally, man figured in the Christian dogma of creation as a being specially created in the image of God. This image consisted both in man’s rationality as somehow sharing in God’s own rationality and in man’s condition as an ethical being with eternal responsibility for his actions. Man’s reflection on his own rationality had therefore to give him confidence that his created mind could fathom the rationality of the created realm.”
4. “At the same time, the very createdness could caution man to guard against the ever-present temptation to dictate to nature what it ought to be. The eventual rise of the experimental method owes much to that Christian matrix.”

Atheists insist that naturalism is the worldview most compatible with science and that theism is unscientific.  And this viewpoint certainly gets plenty of play in the media, in academia, and in popular thought.  But, if naturalism does not provide us with any reason to trust our reason, why should we accept any naturalist reasoning?  And if Christian theism was responsible for the rise of science, why does naturalism so often get the credit for being the more scientific worldview?  Perhaps Vladimir Lenin was onto something when he said, “A lie told often enough becomes the truth.”

See larger image Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (Hardcover) By (author) Alvin Plantinga List Price: $27.95 USD New From: $21.05 In Stock Used from: $15.51 In Stock

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“The common belief that… the actual relations between religion and science over the last few centuries have been marked by deep and enduring hostility… is not only historically inaccurate, but actually a caricature so grotesque that what needs to be explained is how it could possibly have achieved any degree of respectability.”

–Cambridge University historian of science Colin Russell

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“Just because science hasn’t explained something yet doesn’t mean that we should just give up and say, ‘God did it.’”

-A comment made, in various versions, by multiple atheist commenters to this website.

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The cartoon above provides a good depiction of how many (perhaps most) atheists perceive God. They perceive him as an explanation for natural phenomena that competes with scientific explanations, and that serves to fill gaps in scientific understanding. But this perception is completely flawed and misguided.

Atheist Dan Barker (Public Relations Director for the Freedom From Religion Foundation) and Christian (philosophy professor) Richard Howe publicly debated God’s existence at the University of Florida in 1997. Barker comments:

“All through human history, we’ve had…questions [such as these:]. What causes thunder? What causes the lightning? I don’t know, there must be a big Thor [Norse God] up there that does it. [audience laughter] But now, now we’ve learned about electricity. Now we don’t need that Thor anymore. We’ve erased that God, right? And as the line moves up, answering more and more questions, the gods disappear. We still have a lot more questions up here and we no longer put a God down here… He’s living in gaps, and the gaps are getting smaller…”

And, among atheists, Barker is certainly not alone. A review of comments made by atheists at this website (or virtually any other website where God’s existence is debated) will quickly reveal that many (perhaps most) atheists consider God and science to be competing explanations for natural phenomena, such as thunder and lightning, or the phenomenon of life. God, according to this atheist view, is only necessary to fill gaps in current scientific understanding….”the God of the gaps.” Eventually science will fill the last of these gaps and then there will be no longer be any need for God whatsoever.

But when atheists make such arguments, they commit what is known in philosophy as a “category mistake” or a “category error.” Oxford University mathematician John Lennox provides excellent commentary on this logical fallacy as it relates to the above described atheist reasoning in God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?:

“…In some quarters the very success of science has also led to the idea that, because we can understand the mechanisms of the universe without bringing in God, we can safely conclude that there was no God who designed and created the universe in the first place. However, such reasoning involves a common logical fallacy, which we can illustrate as follows. Take a Ford motor car. It is conceivable that someone from a remote part of the world, who was seeing one for the first time and who knew nothing about modern engineering, might imagine that there is a god (Mr. Ford) inside the engine, making it go. He might further imagine that when the engine ran sweetly it was because Mr. Ford inside the engine liked him, and when it refused to go it was because Mr. Ford did not like him. Of course, if he were subsequently to study engineering and take the engine to pieces, he would discover that there is no Mr. Ford inside it. Neither would it take much intelligence for him to see that he did not need to introduce Mr. Ford as an explanation for its working. His grasp of the impersonal principles of internal combustion would be altogether enough to explain how the engine works.”

“So far, so good. But if he then decided that his understanding of the principles of how the engine works made it impossible to believe in the existence of a Mr. Ford who designed the engine in the first place, this would be patently false – in philosophical terminology he would be committing a category mistake. Had there never been a Mr. Ford to design the mechanisms, none would exist for him to understand. It is likewise a category mistake to suppose that our understanding of the impersonal principles according to which the universe works makes it either unnecessary or impossible to believe in the existence of a personal Creator who designed, made, and upholds the universe. In other words, we should not confuse the mechanisms by which the universe works either with its cause or its upholder.”

“The basic issue here is that those of a scientistic [not to be confused with “scientific”] turn of mind like [prominent atheists] Atkins and Dawkins fail to distinguish between mechanism and agency. In philosophical terms they make a very elementary category mistake when they argue that, because we understand a mechanism that accounts for a particular phenomenon, there is no agent that designed the mechanism. When Sir Isaac Newton discovered the universal law of gravitation he did not say, ‘I have discovered a mechanism that accounts for planetary motion, therefore there is no agent God who designed it.’ Quite the opposite: precisely because he understood how it worked, he was moved to increased admiration for the God who had designed it that way.”

Lennox’s above comments call attention to a grave oversight that is pervasive in atheist reasoning: Citing a natural mechanism behind a natural phenomenon is NOT equivalent to explaining the ultimate source for that phenomenon. In Lennox’s words, “We should not confuse the mechanisms by which the universe works either with its cause or its upholder.”  Put more simply, it is impossible to cite a natural mechanism as the source of the natural world because natural mechanisms are an aspect of the natural world.  An aspect of something cannot be cited as the cause for that something.

Moreover, Lennox’s above critique calls attention to an even more basic problem prevalent in atheist thought: The persistent confusion of scientific and ontological questions. God is an answer to ontological questions, NOT scientific questions. A little review of terminology is in order. The Oxford Dictionary defines science as “The intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment.”

Ontology is the branch of philosophy which discusses the nature of being, existence, or reality. And the Oxford Dictionary defines philosophy as “The study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence, especially when considered as an academic discipline.”

Any time a natural mechanism is cited as the cause of a natural phenomenon, a scientific explanation has been proposed….but an ontological explanation for the source of this mechanism has NOT been proposed. These are two separate questions. In simpler terms, science discusses questions of intermediate (or natural) causes, and ontology discusses questions of fundamental (or ultimate) causes.

Science cannot study the premises upon which science is based.  Questions that are of a fundamental nature cannot be answered by science.  As an illustration, consider the question of why 2 + 2 = 4.  Such a question cannot even be subjected to scientific study because it discusses a FUNDAMENTAL mathematical premise. Will a scientific experiment conducted sometime in the future finally reveal to the world why 2 + 2 = 4? Of course not, because such a fundamental mathematical premise is something which underlies science and is therefore meta-scientific. Scientific inquiry can contribute to ontological reasoning, but it cannot replace ontological reasoning.

For further illustration, consider the following breakdown of the topic of evolution:

Scientific question: What accounts for the diversity of life on Earth?

Proposed scientific answer to the above question: A mechanism known as the random mutation of genes and the natural selection of reproductive offspring is responsible for the diversification of life (Darwinism).

Ontological question: What is the source of this above mentioned mechanism? (Please read Why Evolution Cannot Be Used To Rationalize Atheism and Riddles for Atheists for a more thorough exploration of this topic).

Atheist answer to the above ontological question: ??????????????? (Atheist commenters to this website are encouraged to furnish any answers they wish).

Theist answer to the above ontological question: A conscious and intelligent being, God, is the fundamental ground of reality, and the mechanisms we experience in nature are the product of this being.

As I discuss in my essays titled God Is Real…Why Modern Physics Has Discredited Atheism and The Ultimate Cart Before the Horse (Why Atheism is Illogical), theism holds God to be the fundamental ground of reality, whereas atheism is rooted in the materialist worldview, which holds that inanimate matter is the fundamental ground of reality. Citing inanimate matter as the fundamental ground of reality leaves some very significant unanswered questions. Regarding this point, Albert Einstein wrote (also cited in Riddles for Atheists):

“You find it strange that I consider the comprehensibility of the world (to the extent that we are authorized to speak of such a comprehensibility) as a miracle or as an eternal mystery. Well, a priori, one should expect a chaotic world, which cannot be grasped by the mind in any way… the kind of order created by Newton’s theory of gravitation, for example, is wholly different. Even if man proposes the axioms of the theory, the success of such a project presupposes a high degree of ordering of the objective world, and this could not be expected a priori. That is the ‘miracle’ which is constantly reinforced as our knowledge expands.”

Please note that Einstein says this “miracle” is “constantly reinforced,” rather than diminished, “as our knowledge expands.” If inanimate matter is the fundamental ground of reality, why is the universe comprehensible rather than chaotic, and why is it so ordered, rather than disordered? Citing a natural mechanism or a physical law does NOTHING to answer such questions because three fundamental, ontological questions remain unanswered: 1) Where do natural mechanisms and physical laws come from? 2) If matter is the fundamental ground of reality, how can matter be compelled to do anything, much less follow a physical law (or “regularity” if you prefer)? 3) Why these laws and not laws that allow for chaos and disorder?

The theistic model places consciousness (God’s consciousness) as the fundamental ground of reality, which is much in line with modern physics (as demonstrated in God Is Real…Why Modern Physics Has Discredited Atheism). And if God’s consciousness is the fundamental ground of reality, and our world is a manifestation of this consciousness, it is immediately clear why there is such a “high degree of ordering of the objective world.” But if matter is the fundamental ground of reality (as with atheism) the question of where this ordering comes from is completely unanswered.

Further, NO AMOUNT of “the study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world” will ever by itself answer such fundamental questions as why there even exists a physical and natural world, for us to study, in the first place. In his book The Limits of Science, Peter Medwar (an Oxford University immunologist who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine) writes:

“That there is indeed a limit upon science is made very likely by the existence of questions that science cannot answer, and that no conceivable advance of science would empower it to answer…I have in mind such questions as:

How did everything begin?

What are we all here for?”

And David Bentley Hart incisively lays down the distinction between scientific and ontological explanations, as they relate to God, in his book Atheist Delusions:

“Even if theoretical physics should one day discover the most basic laws upon which the fabric of space and time is woven, or evolutionary biology the most elementary phylogenic forms of terrestrial life, or palaeontology an utterly seamless genealogy of every species, still we shall not have thereby drawn one inch nearer to a solution to the mystery of existence.”

“Even the simplest of things, and even the most basic principles, must first of all be, and nothing within the universe of contingent things (nor even the universe itself, even if it were somehow ‘eternal’) can be intelligibly conceived of as the source or explanation of its own being.”

In summary, atheists who argue that scientific explanations are an alternative to God either confuse, or deliberately conflate, science and ontology. We are not dealing with a “God of the Gaps,” but rather, as Lennox puts it, we are dealing with a “God of the whole show.” Atheists frequently try to frame the debate as God vs. science so as to distract attention from the inadequacy, or rather bankruptcy, of their ontological reasoning.

Scientific questions demand scientific answers, and ontological questions demand ontological answers. Therefore, answering such ontological questions as why there is such a “high degree of ordering of the objective world,” and why the world is comprehensible rather than chaotic (as Einstein marvelled at), by saying, “I don’t know, but science may someday figure it out,” simply has no value. Scientific and ontological explanations can and must interact, but science cannot by itself produce an ontological explanation because the scientific method cannot examine fundamental presuppositions that underlie science. Extra-scientific, and therefore philosophical / religious reasoning is a necessary part of the explanatory equation*.

*Please read I Believe in Science! Why Do I Need Religion?! for a further exploration of the necessity for extra-scientific, and therefore philosophical / religious reasoning.

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…I do believe that is why science will eventually do away with the need for religion. Our available information grows at astounding rates, even the most out of touch person today knows more about the world and the universe than the most intelligent of people 1,000 years ago. Science will only continue to expand while religion will only continue to recede. The need and usefulness of religion, not to even mention credibility, is shrinking and baring wildly unusual events, it will continue on that progression.

And if I were to encounter such a comment in the course of everyday conversation, my off-the-cuff reply would be, “What an interesting—but self-defeating—RELIGION you have!”  Atheists are fond of depicting the God debate as a conflict between science and religion…and of declaring that they have scientific views, but no religious views. But this is nothing more than clever sleight-of-hand.

The God debate is a conflict of religion versus religion, or philosophy versus philosophy…not of science versus religion.  ”The so called warfare between science and religion,” writes the eminent historian Jacques Barzun, should actually “be seen as the warfare between two philosophies and perhaps two faiths.”

What sort of religious beliefs do atheists hold?  A prominent religious belief within atheist thought is known by philosophers and psychologists as “scientism,” which holds that the only kind of knowledge that humans can have is scientific knowledge (I also discuss scientism in If the Evidence for God Is So Strong, Why Are So Many Smart People Unconvinced?).  Philosopher Mikael Stenmark discusses the problems with this religious view in his book Scientism: Science, Ethics and Religion.  As Stenmark points out, the key problem with the premise that “we can only know what science can tell us,” is that this very premise is something that science cannot tell us.  It is a self-defeating premise:

The problem is that the scientistic [not to be confused with “scientific”] belief that we can only know what science can tell us seems to be something that science cannot tell us. How can one set up a scientific experiment to demonstrate the truth of T1 [“T1” is Stenmark’s symbol for the premise, “The only kind of knowledge that we can have is scientific knowledge.”] What methods in, for instance, biology or physics are suitable for such a task? Well, hardly those methods that make it possible for scientists to discover and explain electrons, protons, genes, survival mechanisms and natural selection. Furthermore, it is not because the content of this belief is too small, too distant, or too far in the past for science to determine its truth-value (or probability). Rather it is that beliefs of this sort are not subject to scientific inquiry. We cannot come to know T1 by appeal to science alone. T1 is rather a view in the theory of knowledge and is, therefore, a piece of philosophy and not a piece of science. But if this is the case, then T1 is self-refuting. If T1 is true, then it is false. T1 falsifies itself.

Regarding Stenmark’s above comments, just think about it:  How could a statement such as, “The only kind of knowledge that we can have is scientific knowledge,” be verified scientifically?  With a chemistry experiment utilizing a bunsen burner and test tubes?  With a physics experiment utilizing a particle accelerator?  Because the belief that, “The only kind of knowledge that we can have is scientific knowledge” CAN NEVER ITSELF BE SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE, it is a self-refuting belief.

Or take the premise, “No belief can be accepted as true and rational unless it can be known by science or quantified and tested empirically.”  How can that belief be known by science or quantified and tested empirically?  It can’t, and therefore such a premise is self-refuting.

Einstein surely understood that scientific knowledge cannot be the only kind of knowledge, and that it must necessarily interact with religious/philosophical reasoning…which is why he said, “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”  So did many other crucial contributors to modern science…such as Max Planck (the Nobel Prize winning physicist who founded quantum theory), which is why he said, “There can never be any real opposition between religion and science; for the one is the complement of the other.”

Stenmark continues by citing Oxford University philosopher Richard Swinburne:

“For an ultimate explanation we need an explanation at the highest level of why those laws rather than any other one operated.  The laws of evolution are no doubt consequences of laws of chemistry governing the organic matter of which animals are made.  And the laws of chemistry hold because fundamental laws of physics hold.  But why just those fundamental laws of physics rather than any others?  If the laws of physics did not have the consequence that some chemical arrangement would give rise to life, or that there would be random variations by offspring from characteristics of parents, and so on, there would be no evolution by natural selection.  So, even given that there are laws of nature (i.e. that material objects have the same powers and liabilities as each other), why just those laws?”

But since evolutionary theory does not provide us with an answer to this kind of question, the mystery of our existence is not yet solved and evolution is not a way to get complex designs out of nothing.  Both naturalism and theism, on the other hand, provide answers to this question.  Therefore, theism does not compete with science, but it does compete with naturalism.  Naturalists maintain that it is merely an accident that these laws happen to operate and that the primitive soup of matter had the particular constitution it had.  The best ultimate explanation [according to naturalism] of the constitution and general order of nature is that it is a work of pure chance.

Here, Stenmark forces to the surface one of the core religious/philosophical beliefs that underlies the atheist worldview:  Natural or physical laws can be cited as the final explanation for things.  But the problem with such a view is immediately clear:  Where did these laws come from, and why these laws instead of entirely different laws?  Theism and naturalism are competing philosophical/religious explanations for why these laws exist and why they are as they are.

Naturalism (in which atheism is rooted) answers the two above questions with “they just are”.  In other words, naturalism does not explain why a universe which does not have an intelligent source would be imbued with physical laws.  If the universe is not the product of intelligence, what compels matter to so consistently follow physical laws (or “regularities,” if you prefer)?  How can mindless matter be compelled to do anything, much less follow a law?

Theism, conversely, answers the above questions by stating that laws are the result of a lawgiver (God).  Moreover, theism asserts that matter is nothing more than a manifestation of consciousness (God’s consciousness), which is the view most compatible with modern physics, as I demonstrate in God Is Real…Why Modern Physics Has Discredited Atheism.  Robert Boyle, the founder of modern chemistry, summarized the theistic explanation of why matter follows physical laws succinctly when he said: “The nature of this or that body is but the law of God prescribed to it [and] to speak properly, a law [is] but a notional rule of acting according to the declared will of a superior.” [italics added]

Or as James Joule, the propounder of the first law of thermodynamics, for whom the thermal unit of the “Joule” was named, put it: “It is evident that an acquaintance with natural laws means no less than an acquaintance with the mind of God therein expressed.”

The questions of where natural and physical laws come from, and why they exist as they do, are not scientific questions.  Rather they are ontological questions.  The methods of science can assist in answering these questions, but are not equipped to ever answer such questions without the help of extra-scientific, and therefore philosophical/religious reasoning.

But put aside for a moment the questions of where the laws of physics (or chemistry, thermodynamics, etc.) came from, and why they are as they are.  Declaring that physical laws can cause or create things is a bizarre religious belief, not a scientific stance.  The rules of chess do not cause chess games to happen….personal agents (people) do.  Nor do the rules of chess determine the outcome of chess games.  Similarly, the laws of physics cannot cause anything physical to happen because they are descriptive and predictive, not creative or causative.  The laws of physics describe and predict what will happen when one ball strikes another on a billiard table, but they certainly do not cause one ball to strike another.  And they also certainly do not create billiard balls or tables. (Note: I also discuss this topic in Who Is Playing Make Believe? (Atheists or Theists))

Oxford University mathematician John Lennox critiques the reasoning of one of the most prominent members of the scientistic religion, the atheist physicist Stephen Hawking, in his book God and Stephen Hawking.  Specifically, Lennox addresses Hawking’s contention that the universe was created by the laws of physics:

A supernatural being or God is an agent who does something. In the case of the God of the Bible, he is a personal agent. Dismissing such an agent, Hawking ascribes creative power to physical law; but physical law is not an agent. Hawking is making a classic category mistake by confusing two entirely different kinds of entity: physical law and personal agency. The choice he sets before us is between false alternatives. He has confused two levels of explanation: agency and law. God is an explanation of the universe, but not the same type of explanation as that which is given by physics.

Suppose, to make matters clearer, we replace the universe by a jet engine and then are asked to explain it. Shall we account for it by mentioning the personal agency of its inventor, Sir Frank Whittle? Or shall we follow Hawking: dismiss personal agency, and explain the jet engine by saying that it arose naturally from physical law? It is clearly nonsensical to ask people to choose between Frank Whittle and science as an explanation for the jet engine. For it is not a question of either/or. It is self-evident that we need both levels of explanation in order to give a complete description.

It is also obvious that the scientific explanation neither conflicts nor competes with the agent explanation: they complement one another. It is the same with explanations of the universe: God does not conflict or compete with the laws of physics as an explanation. God is actually the ground of all explanation, in the sense that he is the cause in the first place of there being a world for the laws of physics to describe.

Atheists would have you believe that they can go from a scientific theory such as, “An apparently mindless (Darwinian) mechanism known as random mutation and natural selection is responsible for the diversification of life,” to a philosophical (and more specifically, ontological) conclusion such as, “There is no God,” without engaging in extra-scientific, and therefore philosophical/religious reasoning.  But this is transparently false because “there is no God” is a philosophical/religious conclusion.  And by declaring all of their reasoning to be “scientific,” some atheists are trying to conceal their philosophical/religious beliefs so that these beliefs are not subjected to logical scrutiny…precisely because their philosophical reasoning cannot withstand logical scrutiny.

Let us bring to the surface the philosophical/religious reasoning that leads from the above scientific theory, to the above ontological conclusion…so as to expose it to logical scrutiny:

1) A mechanism known as random mutation and natural selection (the Darwinian mechanism) is responsible for the diversification of life from a common ancestor.

2) Because this mechanism for the diversification of life can be interpreted as mindless, we can extrapolate mindlessness into the origin of life from non-living matter, even though non-living matter has neither genes to mutate nor reproductive offspring to naturally select.  (Please read my posts titled Why Evolution Cannot Be Used to Rationalize Atheism and Why Life Could Not Have Emerged Without God for a more in-depth exploration of this topic).

3) And because this mechanism for the diversification of life can be interpreted as mindless, we can further extrapolate to a mindless source for this mechanism.

4) And because this mechanism can be interpreted as mindless, we can still further extrapolate to a mindless source for the physical laws that make this mechanism work.

5) Because physical laws can create things and cause things to happen [or so says the religion of scientism], we do not need to cite an intelligent source for the universe.

6) Therefore, there is no need for such a being as God.

In case the reader is wondering if atheists are really capable of such extrapolation gone wild, consider the atheist biologist Richard Dawkins’ statement in his book The Blind Watchmaker that he “could not imagine being an atheist at any time before 1859, when Darwin’s Origin of Species was published.”  Apparently Dawkins believes that a scientific theory which discusses the diversification of life through random mutation and natural selection can be applied to everything…whether or not the mutation of genes and the natural selection of reproductive offspring are involved.  Now that, folks, is a bizarre religion.

Nancy Pearcey provides excellent commentary on this subject matter in her book Total Truth: Liberating Christianity From Its Cultural Captivity:

Most ordinary people hold an idealized image of science as impartial, unbiased empirical investigation that attends strictly to evidence. That’s the official definition found in the standard science textbook, bristling with objective- sounding words like observation and testing. The problem is that, in practice, science has been co-opted into the camp of the philosophical naturalists, so that it typically functions as little more than applied naturalism. How do we know that? Because the only theories regarded as acceptable are naturalistic ones. Consider these words by the well-known science popularizer Richard Dawkins: “Even if there were no actual evidence in favor of the Darwinian theory . . . we should still be justified in preferring it over all rival theories.”  Why? Because it is naturalistic. Here’s the same argument, flipped over. A Kansas State University professor published a letter in the prestigious journal Nature stating:

“Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such an hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic.” Pause for a moment and let that sink in: Even if there is no evidence in favor of Darwinism, and if all the evidence favors Intelligent Design, still we are not allowed to consider it in science. Clearly, the issue is not fundamentally a matter of evidence at all, but of a prior philosophical [or religious] commitment.

A few more examples drive the point home. During the Ohio controversy, one of the drafters of the controversial state guidelines wrote a letter to Physics Today, insisting that, in order to be considered at all, “the first criterion is that any scientific theory must be naturalistic.”  In other words, unless a theory is naturalistic, it will be ruled out before any consideration of its merits. The editor in chief of Scientific American then entered the fray, stating that “a central tenet of modern science is methodological naturalism—it seeks to explain the universe purely in terms of observed or testable natural mechanisms.”  But who says we have to accept naturalism as a “central tenet” of science? As one professor I know retorted, “Who made up that rule? I don’t remember voting on it.”

So, to anyone who says, “We must strive to keep religion out of science,” the only proper reply can be, “Too late… much of the scientific community is already using science as a promotional tool for a religion known as naturalism.”

In conclusion, the statement “I have chosen science in favor of religion because science has a better track record for providing truth,” is every bit as meaningless and absurd as the statement, “I have chosen spending money in favor of obtaining money because spending money has a better track record of meeting my material needs than obtaining money.”  Just as obtaining money and spending it are necessary parts of the economic process, obtaining data (through science), and then providing meaning to that data by interpreting it (through religion/philosophy), are necessary parts of the human knowledge building process.

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In Why Life Could Not Have Emerged Without God, I bring to light the bizarre atheist religious beliefs surrounding the origin of life.  These beliefs include, but are not limited to, intervention from space aliens and a piggyback ride on crystals.  Return visitors to this website will note that I have brought this up several times before.  Unfortunately, the temptation to bring it up yet again was overwhelming, and I was unable to resist.

–The knighted mathematician, physicist and astronomer Sir James Jeans, as quoted in his book The Mysterious Universe.

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“I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”

–Nobel Prize winning physicist Max Planck, who founded quantum theory, and who is therefore one of the most important physicists of all time.

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Atheism relies on logic and science, and accepts nothing on faith.  Belief in God is a primitive superstition that can only be adopted by weak minded people who ignore cold, hard logic in favor of logically unsupported, faith-based beliefs.  Adopting atheism entails turning away from faith in favor of logic and reason….

…or so goes the atheist credo.  And this self-flattering atheist narrative has become so prevalent in the media and popular culture that, sadly, many people have begun to believe it largely as a result of hearing it repeated so often.  But the atheist credo suffers from one fatal flaw:  It is completely backwards.  Atheism relies much more on faith than does theism, and it is atheism that is utterly illogical.

To show where I am going with this, it is appropriate to start with a little review.  As I described in my essay titled God Is Real…Why Modern Physics Has Discredited Atheism, atheists and theists tend to agree that there is an ultimate reality, or a “something-that-has-always-existed.”  Physicist George Stanciu and philosopher Robert Augros, in their book The New Story of Science (as I cite in that essay), put it succinctly: “…something must have always existed; for if ever absolutely nothing existed, then nothing would exist now, since nothing comes from nothing.”  Somewhat reworded, Stanciu’s and Aurgros’ point could be stated as follows:  “There must be an ultimate reality (or a “something-that-has-always-existed”) of some sort, because, if at any point there was nothing, there would still be nothing because nothingness can’t cause anything to exist or to happen.”  Atheists and theists just differ on what this ultimate reality is.

In the above mentioned essay, I describe how atheism is rooted in the naturalist (or materialist) view which says that the physical universe or nature is the ultimate reality and that mind or consciousness eventually emerges (in human brains) from mindless matter as a result of natural processes.  Theism, conversely, holds that a pre-existing mind (God) is the ultimate reality and that matter (as well as everything else, including human minds) are the product of this pre-existent mind.  So, perhaps it could be said that the theism/atheism debate can be distilled to the question of, “Did mind (or ‘consciousness’) come from matter, or did matter come from mind?”

Because of the undercurrent of deeply entrenched materialist assumptions that prevail in modern secular culture, the idea of a pre-existent mind without a body may seem foreign, even alien, to many people initially.  And to atheists, the idea is downright superstitious and naively make-believe.  But common sense impressions cannot be relied upon because they are formed, in part, by one’s cultural environment and psychological makeup.  Therefore, it is a failure of logic to not expose one’s common sense impressions to the same level of scrutiny as anything else.

To determine if consciousness came first, or if it emerged from mindless matter, it is first necessary to do a little homework on consciousness.  Jeffrey M. Schwartz is a Professor of Research Psychiatry at UCLA.  He comments on the difficulty of explaining how the brain can produce consciousness in his book The Mind and the Brain:

How does a mental reality, a world of consciousness, intentionality and other mental phenomena, fit into a world consisting entirely of physical particles in fields of force? If the answer is that it doesn’t—that mental phenomena are different in kind from the material world of particles—then what we have here is an explanatory gap, a term first used in this context by the philosopher Joseph Levine in his 1983 paper “Materialism and Qualia: The Explanatory Gap.”  And so, although correlating physical brain activity with mental events is an unquestionable scientific triumph, it has left many students of the brain unsatisfied. For neither neuroscientist nor philosopher has adequately explained how the behavior of neurons can give rise to subjectively felt mental states.

…It seems ridiculous even to consider why a handful of wires and transistors fails to generate subjective perceptions, then ask the same question about neurons outside the brain. Why is it that no neurons other than those in a brain are capable of giving the owner of that brain a qualitative, subjective sensation—an inner awareness? The activity of neurons in our fingertips that distinguish hot from cold, for example, is not associated in and of itself with conscious perception. But the activity of neurons in the brain, upstream of the fingertips’ sensory neurons, is. If the connection linking the fingers to the brain through the spinal cord is severed, all sensation in those fingers is lost. What is it about the brain that has granted to its own neurons the almost magical power to create a felt, subjective experience from bursts of electrochemical activity little different from that transpiring downstream, back in the fingertips? This represents one of the central mysteries of how matter (meat?) generates mind.

…As the evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin puts it, “One restricts one’s questions to the domain where materialism is unchallenged.”

Consciousness cannot be simply the result of meat (the brain) because, no matter how complex a meat is involved, consciousness is a property entirely separate from matter.  Consciousness has an irreducible existence.  Regardless of how complex a material thing such as a brain gets through evolution, it remains just that…a highly complex material thing, and not a conscious or personal thing.

Moreover, the inescapable problem with materialistic explanations for consciousness is that they ignore the need for a subject in subjective experiences, or in other words, the need for an experiencer of experiences.   A person is a subject that can experience subjective experiences.  Brain chemicals and electrical signals in the brain cannot be subjects.  Just think about it…the last time that you were enjoying a piece of music, was it the chemicals and electricity in your brain enjoying the music, or was it you enjoying the music?

Keith Ward is a retired Professor of Philosophy from Kings College (in London) and a member of the Royal Institute of Philosophy.  He writes in his book Doubting Dawkins: Why There Almost Certainly is a God:

…It is only fair to point out that there are things he [the atheist author and biologist Richard Dawkins] systematically neglects to mention, but that a great many philosophers, both dead and alive, accept.  Two big ones are: the irreducible existence of consciousness, and the irreducible nature of personal explanation.

It is very unsatisfactory to have two different sorts of explanation, with no obvious way of connecting them in one coherent scheme of thought.  The materialist hypothesis tries to connect them either by reducing the personal to the physical (reductive materialism), or by supposing that the personal just emerges out of the physical for no particular reason (emergent or non-reductive materialism).  The former theory conflicts with our everyday experience of conscious life. The latter gives up on explanation.

Simply put, the materialist/naturalist (matter comes first) view struggles mightily to explain such things as the existence of consciousness and personhood because consciousness and personhood are entirely different phenomena than matter.  Because consciousness and personhood are not just highly complicated matter, the increasing complexity of material things through evolution cannot be cited as the cause of conscious, personal beings such as ourselves.

Materialists/naturalists try to get around this problem by using some highly contorted mental gymnastics.  As Ward notes, the two main methods for getting around this problem that materialism/naturalism utilizes are reductive materialism and emergent or non-reductive materialism.

Reductive materialism tries to reduce the personal (as well as consciousness) to the material.  So, put another way, reductive materialism says, “There really is no personal, just the material.”  In effect, you as a person don’t really exist.  I hate to be the one to deliver the bad news, but your existence as a person is really nothing but an illusion produced by a complex arrangement of matter.  What you refer to as “me” is really nothing but “a survival machine….a robot vehicle blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes,” to quote the atheist biologist Richard Dawkins from The Selfish Gene.  If learning that you are a mindless robot instead of a person has ruined your day, I ask that you please forgive me.  (And please forgive the preceding brief interlude into sarcasm, but I am intending to show, as Ward points out, that this explanation “conflicts with our everyday experience of conscious life.”)

Emergent or non-reductive materialism attempts to get around the problem by basically “giving up on explanation,” as Ward puts it.  No offense to Ward, but I think a better explanation of the problem with emergent or non-reductive materialism is that it confuses an observation of the emergence of such properties as consciousness, intelligence, and personhood with an explanation for the emergence of such properties.  As an example, to the question of how consciousness emerges from non-conscious matter, emergent or non-reductive materialism basically answers that once the complexity level of the brain evolves to a certain level, PRESTO, you have consciousness.  Consciousness “emerges” once the complexity level of the human brain reaches a certain degree.  The “emergence” of consciousness in complex brains is an observation that materialists/naturalists confuse with an explanation for the phenomenon of consciousness.  Yes, consciousness “emerges” in highly complex brains…good job.  Now please explain why this is so.  Emergent or non-reductive materialism provides no such explanation, but rather, “gives up on explanation,” because to observe something is not equivalent to explaining it.

And, as an example of the “irreducible nature of personal explanation,” consider a work of art such as a painting.  Since materialism declares that there is no reality other than the material, the painting, according to materialism, is really nothing but a complex collection of paint molecules arranged in a particular way.  The painting IS the paint and the canvas…nothing else.  Materialism leaves no room whatsoever for the personal expression the artist intended to convey.

But everyday experience declares that this is absurd.  What the artist intended to convey is personal, not material.  The paint and canvas are just tools to express the personal.

Some atheists may at this point be objecting, “you are using God-of-the-gaps reasoning.  Just because science doesn’t yet know how brains can produce consciousness and the personal, doesn’t mean that it never will.  We can’t just give up and say, ‘God did it.’”  But this is circular reasoning because if consciousness (God’s mind) is the ultimate reality, then THERE ARE NO GAPS TO BRIDGE.  God’s mind as the ultimate reality would be a case of “the God of the whole show,” not a case of God filling in explanatory gaps.  It is only if matter is the ultimate reality that there are explanatory gaps to bridge.  So an atheist making the accusation that “God of the gaps” reasoning is being committed is starting with the assumption that matter is the ultimate reality as a means of reasoning back to the conclusion that matter is the ultimate reality.

And a philosophical system that insists that matter is the ultimate reality (materialism/naturalism) can only continue running into a brick wall when it comes to explaining the existence of properties that are clearly not material…properties such as consciousness and personhood.  Watching materialists/naturalists try to explain consciousness and personhood reminds one of watching someone feverishly trying to hammer square pegs into round holes…it just doesn’t fit.  As the philosopher John Locke, who was one of the most important Enlightenment thinkers, put it:  “It is as impossible to conceive that ever pure incogitative matter should produce a thinking intelligent being, as that nothing should of itself produce matter.”

Believing atheism requires an enormous amount of faith that material explanations can account for the existence of consciousness and personhood (or intelligence, or life, for that matter).  The assumption that science will eventually provide satisfactory material explanations for everything was mockingly referred to as “promissory materialism” by the eminent philosopher of science Karl Popper.  Is it not ironic that the atheist credo (stated at the beginning of this essay) declares that atheism does not rely on faith, and yet, atheism places faith in the notion that science can provide material explanations for properties which are clearly not material?

Ward continues with regards to the difficulty of citing a mindless cause for mind, and an impersonal cause for the personal, etc.:

…there is force in the classical philosophical axiom that, for a truly explanatory cause to be intelligible, it must contain its effects potentially in itself.  As the classical philosophers put it, the cause must contain more reality than its effects.

When Ward cites the axiom that a cause “must contain its effects potentially in itself,” he is simply stating (in philosophical language) that the cause of conscious, personal, intelligent beings must itself be conscious, intelligent, and personal.  Mindless matter cannot eventually cause conscious, personal, intelligent beings because it does not contain the potential to do so.  In order to have the potential to do so, mindless matter must have some sort of mechanism to bring about this gradual evolution.  What is this mechanism?  Was it the laws of physics?  Ok, fine. Why is it that matter so consistently follows such laws?  What causes it to do so?  The theistic explanation for why matter follows physical laws (such as the laws of physics, thermodynamics, etc.) is simple…the same mind that creates matter also directs it.  As Robert Boyle, the founder of modern chemistry, put it: “The nature of this or that body is but the law of God prescribed to it [and] to speak properly, a law [is] but a notional rule of acting according to the declared will of a superior.” [italics added]

When atheism is asked the question of how it is that matter can be compelled to follow such physical laws, it is stuck with an it just does answer.  But “it just does” is not an answer.  Rather, it is an avoidance of a question that atheism cannot answer.  Atheism is a faith constructed of it just does and just so assumptions.  Norman Geisler coins the term “just-so storytelling” in his book I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist.  I highly recommend it.

I conclude by calling attention to the principle known as Ockham’s Razor, which states that, other things being equal, a simpler explanation is better than a more complex one.  In order to do away with a number of facts which are inconvenient to the atheist ideology, atheism must resort to a large amount of elaborate explaining away.  This makes atheism much less simple than theism.  Below I cite several examples of this elaborate (and often ridiculous) explaining away.

1) In Why Life Could Not Have Emerged Without God, I describe how prominent atheist biologists have resorted to citing intervention from space aliens (as well as a couple of other real humdinger explanations) to explain the origin of life.

2) In God Is Real…Why Modern Physics Has Discredited Atheism, I describe how modern physics strongly supports the mind-as-ultimate-reality model, which contradicts atheistic materialism/naturalism.  Does this mean that all physicists believe in God?  Of course not.  But what it does mean is that physicists who cling tenaciously to atheism must make absolutely embarrassing philosophical errors in doing so, as describe in Who Is Playing Make-Believe? (Atheists or Theists).  In this essay, I also describe how atheist physicists must resort to extremely elaborate explanations for the origin of the universe (such as the existence of 10 to the 500th power universes) in order to do away with God.

3) I detail how many thousands of people have claimed to have met God in what is known as a Near-Death Experience, in Has Anyone Met God and Returned to Tell About It?   The NDE phenomenon has become so convincing and so difficult to ignore that atheists have had to resort to explaining the phenomenon away as a result of hallucination…even though this explanation clearly does not fit since hallucinations are too unique to the individual to share such consistent similarity.

4) Doesn’t Evolution Prove the Biblical Account of Creation to Be False? illustrates how remarkably similar the biblical and scientific accounts of creation are.  The essay includes a video featuring the MIT physicist and biblical scholar Gerald Schroeder (which is very highly recommended).  As far as I can tell, the only atheist replies to Schroeder’s arguments are that the similarities are a coincidence.

See larger image Why There Almost Certainly Is a God: Doubting Dawkins (Paperback) By (author) Keith Ward List Price: $14.95 USD New From: $7.49 In Stock Used from: $2.02 In Stock

See larger image The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force (Paperback) By (author) Jeffrey M. Schwartz, Sharon Begley List Price: $16.99 USD New From: $7.38 In Stock Used from: $5.05 In Stock Release date October 14, 2003.

A moral law requires a source, and this source must be external to nature…because the natural/material world is itself valueless.  One cannot locate good or bad under a microscope or isolate some good or bad in a test tube.  Therefore science, which exists to examine the natural/material world, must necessarily be mute with regards to morality.

John C. Lennox notes in Gunning for God:

Albert Einstein, in a discussion on science and religion in Berlin in 1930, said that our sense of beauty and our religious instinct are: “tributary forms in helping the reasoning faculty towards its highest achievements. You are right in speaking of the moral foundations of science, but you cannot turn round and speak of the scientific foundations of morality.” According to Einstein, therefore, science cannot form a base for morality: “Every attempt to reduce ethics to scientific formula must fail.” Richard Feynman, also a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, shared Einstein’s view: “Even the greatest forces and abilities don’t seem to carry any clear instructions on how to use them. As an example, the great accumulation of understanding as to how the physical world behaves only convinces one that this behavior has a kind of meaninglessness about it. The sciences do not directly teach good or bad.”  Elsewhere he states: “Ethical values lie outside the scientific realm.”

Lennox continues by citing Jacques Monod in Chance and Necessity:

One of the great problems of philosophy is the relationship between the realm of knowledge and realm of values. Knowledge is what “is” and values are what “ought” to be. I would say that all traditional philosophies up to and including communism have tried to derive the “ought” from the “is”. This is impossible. If it is true that there is no purpose in the universe, that man is a pure accident, you cannot derive any ought from is.

And this is exactly what atheism claims humankind is…a purely purposeless accident that resulted from mindless natural processes.  One must ask, How can moral values (good and bad) result from mindless natural processes?

Maybe they evolved, atheists have objected.  Christian apologist William Lane Craig (whom atheists have constructed entire websites in trying to rebut) responds to this objection in On Guard:

…The objection is self-defeating. Given the truth of naturalism [the philosophical system upon which atheism rests], all our beliefs, not just our moral beliefs, are the result of evolution and social conditioning. Thus, the evolutionary account leads to skepticism about knowledge in general. But this is self-defeating because then we should be skeptical of the evolutionary account itself, since it, too, is the product of evolution and social conditioning! The objection therefore undermines itself.

Evolution selects for survival value, not for truth.  So the next time someone says to you, “Human moral beliefs did not come from God, but evolved to provide survival value,” you can simply respond, “Your beliefs about the evolution of morals must have also evolved to provide survival value, and not truth.  Therefore, your belief that morals evolved contains no objective truth.”

Philosopher Mikael Stenmark makes the same point in his book Scientism: Science, Ethics and Religion:

The argument [by certain atheist biologists] is that ethical norms or beliefs cannot be objective because they are merely the product of evolution.  They are rather an adaptation put in place to further our reproductive ends and nothing else.  But from the biological perspective science also is nothing else than a product of evolution.  Thus, science cannot be objective, but is an adaptation put in place to further our reproductive ends and nothing else.  But then there is no reason for us to believe that the objectivity of morality is an illusion because these biologists’ claim is merely the product of evolution.  In fact, if their theory is true (that our behavior is firmly under the control of genes and that we function better if we believe in the objectivity of morality), then it would be very unlikely that these biologists would be able to discover that the objectivity of morality is an illusion.  So if these scientific expansionists are right, they are probably wrong.

And, as infomercial pitchmen are fond of saying:  But wait, there’s more!  Using the naturalist account of the evolution of human beliefs as a guide, the naturalist belief system itself must have evolved to provide survival value…not objective truth.  So here we have naturalistic reasons for believing that the naturalist belief system contains no truth!!  Atheistic explanations for human morality and beliefs are every bit as meaningless as atheists suggest the universe is.

All accounts of human morality that do not involve a source for this morality that is transcendent to nature are doomed to fail because the natural and material world, again, is itself valueless.  There is no such thing as a good or bad rock, or a good or bad animal.

Craig elaborates on this point:

…Actions such as incest and rape may not be biologically and socially advantageous and so in the course of human development have become taboo. But that does absolutely nothing to show that rape or incest is really wrong. Such behavior goes on all the time in the animal kingdom. The rapist who goes against the herd morality is doing nothing more serious than acting unfashionably, like the man who belches loudly at the dinner table. If there is no moral lawgiver, then there is no objective moral law that we must obey.

On the atheistic view, human beings are just animals, and animals have no moral obligations to one another. …When a great white shark forcibly copulates with a female, it forcibly copulates with her but it does not rape her—for there is no moral dimension to these actions. They are neither prohibited nor obligatory.

And what source, transcendent to nature, am I suggesting is the origin of human morals?  You guessed it…the “conscious and intelligent mind” that “is the matrix of all matter,” in the words of the founder of quantum physics, Max Planck (as presented in God Is Real…Why Modern Physics Has Discredited Atheism).  Just as coded information is a necessarily mental (rather than material) entity (as I discuss in Why Life Could Not Have Emerged Without God), morality, too, is a fundamentally mental entity, and therefore must have originated with a mind that is transcendent to nature (read: God).

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Regarding the idea that morality is culturally relative, please read my essay titled Aren’t All Truths, All Morals Relative?

–Robert Griffiths, winner of the Heinemann Prize in mathematical physics.

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“What is mind?  Never matter.  What is matter?  Never mind!“

–T.H. Key

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Virtually everyone is familiar with the popular conundrum, “Which came first…the chicken or the egg?” But probably very few people realize that the question of God’s existence, in a very real sense, boils down to what is likely the ultimate chicken-or-the-egg conundrum:  Which came first, mind or matter?  In other words, is mind (or “consciousness”) the product of matter, or is matter the product of mind?  Is our universe—at its core—a material universe, or is it a mental (or spiritual) universe?

It will come as a surprise to many that modern physics has done much to answer this question.  And the answer which modern physics provides will require many people to completely reframe their perception of the world in which they live.

Stephen C. Meyer, author of Signature in the Cell, holds a PhD in the history and philosophy of science from Cambridge University. In this book, he reveals the following:

“Since the time of the ancient Greeks, there have been two basic pictures of ultimate reality among Western intellectuals, what Germans call a Weltanschauung, or worldview. According to one worldview, mind is the primary or ultimate reality. On this view, material reality either issues from a preexisting mind, or it is shaped by a preexistent intelligence, or both…This view of reality is often called idealism to indicate that ideas come first and matter comes later. Theism is the version of idealism that holds that God is the source of the ideas that gave rise to and shaped the material world.

The opposite view holds that the physical universe or nature is the ultimate reality. In this view, either matter or energy (or both) are the things from which everything else comes. They are self-existent and do not need to be created or shaped by mind….In this view matter comes first, and conscious mind arrives on the scene much later and only then as a by-product of material processes and undirected evolutionary change. This worldview is called naturalism or materialism.”

There really is no third stance. Everyone therefore needs to ask themselves, “On which side of this debate do I fall?”

Well…when Max Planck (the Nobel Prize winning physicist who founded quantum theory) says…

“As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.”

and Albert Einstein says…

“Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe–a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble.”

and the Nobel Prize winning physicist Eugene Wigner says…

“When the province of physical theory was extended to encompass microscopic phenomena, through the creation of quantum mechanics, the concept of consciousness came to the fore again; it was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to the consciousness,” and “The content of consciousness is an ultimate reality.”

and the great physicist Sir Arthur Eddington says…

“The idea of a universal mind or Logos would be, I think, a fairly plausible inference from the present state of scientific theory.” ["Logos" is defined as "the word of God, or principle of divine reason and creative order."]

and the knighted mathematician, physicist and astronomer Sir James Jeans says (in his book The Mysterious Universe)…

“There is a wide measure of agreement which, on the physical side of science approaches almost unanimity, that the stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.  Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the realm of matter.  We are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail mind as the creator and governor of the realm of matter.” (italics added)

…there can be no question on which side of this debate modern physics falls.  For a glimpse of the quantum research which has led physicists to draw conclusions such as the above, and to understand why materialism (with its belief that “either matter or energy, or both, are the things from which everything else comes” and “are self-existent and do not need to be created or shaped by mind”) can no longer be deemed scientifically plausible, please view this video of the famous double slit experiment.  As this article titled The Mental Universe by Johns Hopkins University physicist Richard Conn Henry reveals, “The ultimate cause of atheism, [Isaac] Newton asserted, is ‘this notion of bodies having, as it were, a complete, absolute and independent reality in themselves.’”

The simplest explanation of why modern physics has done away with materialism/naturalism is this:  Material things cannot have “a complete, absolute independent reality in themselves” because, as modern physics has demonstrated, the material world cannot exist independent from consciousness (mind).  There is no reality independent of mind.

Here is how University of California, Berkeley physicist Henry Stapp puts it in his book Mindful Universe:

“…According to contemporary orthodox basic physical theory, but contrary to many claims made in the philosophy of mind, the physical domain is not causally closed.  [italics are his] A causally open physical description of the mind-brain obviously cannot completely account for the mind-brain as a whole.”

“In short, already the orthodox version of quantum mechanics, unlike classical mechanics, is not about a physical world detached from experiences; detached from minds.”

Princeton University quantum physicist Freeman Dyson echoes Stapp’s above comments:

“Atoms are weird stuff, behaving like active agents rather than inert substances.  They make unpredictable choices between alternative possibilities according to the laws of quantum mechanics.  It appears that mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent inherent in every atom.  The universe is also weird, with its laws of nature that make it hospitable to the growth of mind.  I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it passes beyond the scale of our comprehension.”

Physicist George Stanciu and philosopher Robert Augros provide an excellent nutshell explanation of why the naturalist/materialist worldview is no longer scientifically or philosophically supportable in their book The New Story of Science, that further elucidates the above points:

“In the New Story of science the whole universe–including matter, energy, space, and time–is a one-time event and had a definite beginning.  But something must have always existed; for if ever absolutely nothing existed, then nothing would exist now, since nothing comes from nothing.  The material universe cannot be the thing that always existed because matter had a beginning.  It is 12 to 20 billion years old.  This means that whatever has always existed is non-material.  The only non-material reality seems to be mind.  If mind is what has always existed, then matter must have been brought into existence by a mind that always was.  This points to an intelligent, eternal being who created all things. Such a being is what we mean by the term God.”

Mainstream biology, however, continues to embrace the naturalist/materialist view of the world.  Why is this?  Part of the answer lies in the fact that physics is the branch of science that most closely approaches the boundary separating science from philosophy and religion.  It approaches this boundary much more closely than biology.  Physics, in other words, is the branch of science that deals with the most fundamental or “big picture” aspects of our reality.

Relevant to the disagreement between modern physics and mainstream biology on this topic, biophysicist Harold J. Morowitz writes in his article Rediscovering the Mind:

“What has happened is that biologists, who once postulated a privileged role for the human mind in nature’s hierarchy, have been moving relentlessly toward the hard-core materialism that characterized nineteenth-century physics.  At the same time, physicists, faced with compelling experimental evidence, have been moving away from strictly mechanical models of the universe to a view that sees the mind as playing an integral role in all physical events.  It is as if the two disciplines were on fast-moving trains, going in opposite directions and not noticing what is happening across the tracks.’”

Physicist Richard Conn Henry explains why people (such as atheist biologists) cling to materialism/naturalism despite the fact that it has been completely discredited by modern physics:

“Why do people cling with such ferocity to belief in a mind-independent reality? It is surely because if there is no such reality, then ultimately (as far as we can know) mind alone exists. And if mind is not a product of real matter, but rather is the creator of the illusion of material reality (which has, in fact, despite the materialists, been known to be the case since the discovery of quantum mechanics in 1925), then a theistic view of our existence becomes the only rational alternative to solipsism.” ["Solipsism" is defined as "the view or theory that the self is all that can be known to exist."]

Naturalism/materialism, simply put, is critical for maintaining an atheist worldview.  Mind must be the eventual product of mindless matter for atheism to stand.  An atheist must therefore ignore, remain ignorant of, or rationalize away the insights of modern physics in order to prevent his/her belief system from collapsing.  And because materialism/naturalism is the predominant cultural context within the insular world of atheist biologists (as well as other branches of academia), this is done collectively.  As Oxford University and University of Massachusetts Professor of Biology Lynn Margulis (winner of the U.S. Presidential Medal for Science) put it in The Altenburg 16: An Expose of the Evolution Industry:

“…people are always more loyal to their tribal group than to any abstract notion of ‘truth’ – scientists especially. If not they are unemployable. It is professional suicide to continually contradict one’s teachers or social leaders.”

It would be overly simplistic, however, to state that a cultural preference for atheism among the ranks of biologists is the only factor motivating mainstream biology’s embrace of naturalism.  Biologists are in the business of providing explanations for the phenomenon of life.  Therefore, an admission by biologists of the existence of a creator would also be an admission that there are aspects of the phenomenon of life that are beyond the bounds of science.  One should not be surprised that biologists would find such an admission humbling and unpleasant.  It is crucial, then, for readers to understand that what is presented by atheist biologists as a scientific conclusion of atheism is in reality an assumption of atheism made on philosophical grounds that precedes and therefore filters and distorts scientific inquiry.  Harvard University geneticist Richard C. Lewontin famously admitted in 1997:

” …It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”

(For a more in-depth exploration of mainstream biology’s rigid adherence to materialism, please read the post entitled “If the Evidence for God is So Strong, Why Are So Many Smart People Unconvinced?“.  Please also read The Ultimate Cart-Before-the-Horse (Why Atheism is Illogical), which is closely related to this essay.

Perhaps Werner Heisenberg, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics for creating quantum mechanics, explained the divergence between biology and physics (with regard to God) best when he wrote:

“The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.”

With the phrase “the bottom of the glass,” Heisenberg is referring to the study of the most fundamental aspects of reality…which are investigated by physics.

For a more in-depth discussion of why materialism/naturalism is no longer scientifically supportable, please read The Matter Myth by physicists Paul Davies and John Gribbin.  Much of the first chapter (entitled The Death of Materialism) is viewable by clicking on the above link to the book at Amazon.com.  Please also read The New Story of Science by physicist George Stanciu and philosopher Robert Augros.  The entire book can be read by clicking on the preceding link.  Chapter 4 entitled “God” begins on page 53, but it is recommended that readers read the book in its entirety.

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Additional citations from extremely important contributors to modern physics (indeed, the majority of the most important physicists) relevant to this subject matter appear below (as well as other prominent figures such as philosophers).  Please also view the post entitled Quotes about God to consider…if you think science leads to atheism.

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“…This sense of wonder leads most scientists to a Superior Being – der Alte, the Old One, as Einstein affectionately called the Deity – a Superior Intelligence, the Lord of all Creation and Natural Law.”

–Abdus Salam, winner of the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in electroweak theory.  He is here quoted in his article entitled Science and Religion.

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“I have looked into most philosophical systems and I have seen that none will work without God.”

“Science is incompetent to reason upon the creation of matter itself out of nothing.  We have reached the utmost limit of our thinking faculties when we have admitted that because matter cannot be eternal and self-existent it must have been created.”

–Physicist and mathematician James Clerk Maxwell, who is credited with formulating classical electromagnetic theory and whose contributions to science are considered to be of the same magnitude as those of Einstein and Newton.

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“For myself, faith begins with a realization that a supreme intelligence brought the universe into being and created man.  It is not difficult for me to have this faith, for it is incontrovertible that where there is a plan there is intelligence—an orderly, unfolding universe testifies to the truth of the most majestic statement ever uttered—-’In the beginning God.’”

–Nobel Prize winning physicist Arthur Compton, discoverer of the Compton Effect.

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“Those who say that the study of science makes a man an atheist must be rather silly.”

“Something which is against natural laws seems to me rather out of the question because it would be a depressive idea about God.  It would make God smaller than he must be assumed.  When he stated that these laws hold, then they hold, and he wouldn’t make exceptions.  This is too human an idea.  Humans do such things, but not God.”

–Nobel Prize winning physicist Max Born, who was instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics.

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“I believe that the more thoroughly science is studied, the further does it take us from anything comparable to atheism.”

–Lord William Kelvin, who was noted for his theoretical work on thermodynamics, the concept of absolute zero and the Kelvin temperature scale based upon it.

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“Both religion and science require a belief in God. For believers, God is in the beginning, and for physicists He is at the end of all considerations… To the former He is the foundation, to the latter, the crown of the edifice of every generalized world view.”

“There can never be any real opposition between religion and science; for the one is the complement of the other.”

“I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”

Religion and Natural Science (Lecture Given 1937) Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers,trans. F. Gaynor (New York, 1949), pp. 184

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“God is a mathematician of a very high order and He used advanced mathematics in constructing the universe.”

–Nobel Prize winning physicist Paul A. M. Dirac, who made crucial early contributions to both quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics.

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“In the history of science, ever since the famous trial of Galileo, it has repeatedly been claimed that scientific truth cannot be reconciled with the religious interpretation of the world. Although I am now convinced that scientific truth is unassailable in its own field, I have never found it possible to dismiss the content of religious thinking as simply part of an outmoded phase in the consciousness of mankind, a part we shall have to give up from now on. Thus in the course of my life I have repeatedly been compelled to ponder on the relationship of these two regions of thought, for I have never been able to doubt the reality of that to which they point.”

–Werner Heisenberg, who was awarded the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics for the creation of quantum mechanics (which is absolutely crucial to modern science).

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“We all know that there are regions of the human spirit untrammeled by the world of physics.  In the mystic sense of the creation around us, in the expression of art, in a yearning towards God, the soul grows upward and finds fulfillment of something implanted in its nature.  The sanction for this development is within us, a striving born with our consciousness or an Inner Light proceeding from a greater power than ours.  Science can scarcely question this sanction, for the pursuit of science springs from a striving which the mind is impelled to follow, a questioning that will not be suppressed.  Whether in the intellectual pursuits of science or in the mystical pursuits of the spirit, the light beckons ahead and the purpose surging in our nature responds.”

–The great physicist Sir Arthur Eddington, as quoted in his classic work The Nature of the Physical World:

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“Science is a game – but a game with reality, a game with sharpened knives.  If a man cuts a picture carefully into 1000 pieces, you solve the puzzle when you reassemble the pieces into a picture; in the success or failure, both your intelligences compete. In the presentation of a scientific problem, the other player is the good Lord.  He has not only set the problem but also has devised the rules of the game – but they are not completely known, half of them are left for you to discover or to deduce.  The uncertainty is how many of the rules God himself has permanently ordained, and how many apparently are caused by your own mental inertia, while the solution generally becomes possible only through freedom from its limitations. This is perhaps the most exciting thing in the game.”

–Erwin Schroedinger, winner of the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics “for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory.”

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“It has occurred to me lately—I must confess with some shock at first to my scientific sensibilities—that both questions [the origin of mind and the origin of life from nonliving matter] might be brought into some degree of congruence. This is with the assumption that mind, rather than emerging as a late outgrowth in the evolution of life, has existed always as the matrix, the source and condition of physical reality—the stuff of which physical reality is composed is mind-stuff. It is mind that has composed a physical universe that breeds life and so eventually evolves creatures that know and create: science-, art-, and technology-making animals.”

–Nobel Prize winning Harvard University biologist George Wald, as quoted in his address to the Quantum Biology Symposium titled Life and Mind in the Universe.  Wald is a noted exception to the widespread tendency of biologists to embrace materialism for ideological reasons (despite the fact that materialism has been completely discredited by modern physics).

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“…Discussing the creation of the universe in terms of time and space is like trying to discover the artist and the action of painting by going to the edge of the canvas. This brings us very near to those philosophical systems which regard the universe as a thought in the mind of its Creator, thereby reducing all discussion of material creation to futility.”

—The knighted physicist, mathematician, and astronomer Sir James Jeans.

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“The more I study science the more I believe in God.”

“I want to know how God created this world, I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element.  I want to know His thoughts, the rest are details.”

–Albert Einstein

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“It is evident that an acquaintance with natural laws means no less than an acquaintance with the mind of God therein expressed.”

–James Joule, propounder of  the first law of thermodynamics (on the conservation of energy).  Joule also made important contributions to the kinetic theory of gases.  The unit of heat known as the “Joule” is named after him.

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“An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God.”

–Srinivasa Ramanujam, who is widely regarded to be one of the greatest mathematicians of all time (on a similar plane with such greats as Archimedes and Newton).

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“Is intelligent mind an ultimate and irreducible feature of reality? Indeed, is it the ultimate nature of reality? Or is mind and consciousness an unforeseen and unintended product of basically material processes of evolution?”

“If you look at the history of philosophy, it soon becomes clear that almost all the great classical philosophers took the first of these views. Plato, Aristotle, Anselm, Aquinas, Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Locke, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel—they all argued that the ultimate reality, often hidden under the appearances of the material world or time and space, is mind or spirit.”

–Keith Ward, retired Professor of Philosophy at Kings College, London, and a member of the Council of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, as quoted in his book Doubting Dawkins, Why There Almost Certainly is A God.

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“It is as impossible to conceive that ever pure incogitative matter should produce a thinking intelligent being, as that nothing should of itself produce matter.”

–Philosopher John Locke, who was one of the most important Enlightenment thinkers.

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“It seems that the world that appears to us is not reality as it is in itself. It is a construct of human consciousness. Materialist philosophers argue that consciousness is a construct of matter. But Plato and almost all the great classical philosophers, East and West, suggest the opposite. Matter, at least as it appears to us, is a construct of consciousness.“

“…Consciousness is real and creative. It is not just a by-product of the world we perceive. Without consciousness, that world, the world we perceive, would not even exist. Another quantum physicist, John von Neumann, said, ‘All real things are contents of consciousness.’ This is about as far from materialism as you can get – and it is an interpretation of modern physics, not some weird religiously inspired theory.“

––Keith Ward, retired Professor of Philosophy at Kings College, London, and a member of the Council of the Royal Institute of Philosophy (mentioned above), as quoted in his book Is Religion Irrational?

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**But one does not need to be a physicist or mathematician to understand why the materialist / naturalist worldview does not hold water.  Please see my post titled Riddles for Atheists for a greater understanding of why theism is a better explanation.

–Sir Isaac Newton, who is widely regarded to be the greatest scientist the world has ever produced.

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The comedian Henny Youngman once famously quipped, “After reading about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading.”  And giving up reading (about cosmology and astrophysics) is the recommended approach for the person who wishes to maintain belief in a God-free universe, and the cherished freedom from moral accountability that it allows.  Anyone who probes into the origins of our universe soon becomes overwhelmed by the evidence that “the universe is a put-up job” (or, the product of deliberate, conscious intent), in the words of Cambridge University physicist and mathematician Fred Hoyle.

So compelling, in fact, has become the case for the universe as the product of a conscious creator that astrophysicist Hugh Ross, a former post-doctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology observes (in his book The Creator and the Cosmos: How the Greatest Scientific Discoveries of the Century Reveal God) that:

“Astronomers who do not draw theistic or deistic conclusions are becoming rare, and even the few dissenters hint that the tide is against them.  Geoffrey Burbidge, of the University of California at San Diego, complains that his fellow astronomers are rushing off to join ‘The First Church of Christ of the Big Bang.’”

For those not familiar with “the Big Bang,” this cosmological event, now almost unanimously regarded as fact in the scientific community, constituted the beginning of the universe about 14 or 15 billion years ago, and bears eerie similarity to the biblical account of the universe’s creation.  As Arno Penzias, the 1978 Nobel Prize recipient in physics, stated to the New York Times on March 12, 1978:

“The best data we have (concerning the Big Bang) are exactly what I would have predicted, had I nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms, the Bible as a whole.”

Similarly, the astronomer, physicist and founder of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Robert Jastrow, writes:

“Now we see how the astronomical evidence leads to a biblical view of the origin of the world.  The details differ, but the essential elements in the astronomical and biblical accounts of Genesis are the same:  the chain of events leading to man commenced suddenly and sharply at a definite moment of time, in a flash of light and energy.”

It is difficult to overstate the immensity of the problem the Big Bang poses to those wishing to hold fast to an atheistic, naturalistic view of the universe.  Since the early days of the Enlightenment, atheism has relied on the assumption that the universe did not need a creator because it has existed for an infinite amount of time, and therefore did not have a beginning…no origin, therefore no Originator.  Eighteenth century Scottish philosopher David Hume was among the first highly influential figures to posit this belief, and it continued to be promoted right up until the late 20^th century by such key atheist figures as philosopher Bertrand Russell.

But the fact that the universe is now known to have had a beginning is really only the beginning of the problem for atheists.  Patrick Glynn, in his book God: The Evidence notes:

“Beginning in the 1960s, scientists began to notice a strange connection among a number of coincidences in physics.  It turns out that many mysterious values and relationships in physics could be explained by one overriding fact:  Such values had been necessary for the creation of life.  The physicist Robert Dicke was the first to draw attention to this relationship.  The scientist John Wheeler, one of the most prestigious practitioners of cosmology, became interested in the idea in the 1960s.  Then, at Wheeler’s urging, [Cambridge University astrophysicist and cosmologist Brandon] Carter presented the observation in full-blown form at the Copernican Festivities (celebrating the 500^th birthday of Nicolaus Copernicus).”

Carter coined the term “anthropic principle” (also sometimes referred to as “anthropic fine tuning”) to describe this concept.  Distinguished former Cambridge University quantum physicist John Polkinghorne elaborates on this subject in his book Questions of Truth: Fifty-One Responses to Questions about God, Science, and Belief:

“Anthropic fine-tuning is a big topic that has been explored extensively, but the basic idea is easy to grasp.  As far as we know at present there are six apparently fundamental constraints in nature whose values have to be very close to their presently observed values if any intelligent, carbon-based life is to come into being anywhere in the universe.  In some cases these values have to be astonishingly accurate:  for example, the parameter called lambda, which controls the long-range acceleration of the expansion of the universe in relativity, has to be a factor of 10 to the 120^th power smaller than such an explanation would have considered natural.”

“…As [Nobel Prize winning physicist] Tony Hewish once remarked, the accuracy of just one of these parameters is comparable to getting the mix of flour and sugar right to within one grain of sugar in a cake ten times the mass of the sun.”

In his seminal work on the social psychology of scientists and the philosophy of science entitled The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn lays down the process by which “paradigms” (or sets of beliefs that underlie scientific theories) undergo transformation. Scientists with a vested ideological interest in supporting a given paradigm will not surrender it easily when the foundation underlying that paradigm begins to crack.  Rather, as Kuhn notes, “they will devise numerous articulations and ad hoc modifications of their theory in order to eliminate apparent conflict.”

Nowhere is this practice more thoroughly obvious than in the crumbling paradigm of the randomly occurring, creator-free universe.  In order to “eliminate the apparent conflict” between the concept of a finely tuned universe with a beginning, on one hand, and the concept of a universe without a creator on the other, atheistic scientists have devised such “articulations and ad hoc modifications” as using the theories of multiple universes and an oscillating universe to resurrect the creator-free cosmos.  So many universes exist, so the theory goes, that it is not surprising that one of these universes happened to randomly have the fine tuning necessary for the existence of life.  In the case of the oscillating universe, the universe alternates between phases of expansion and contraction, and therefore (say the atheists), it is not surprising that during one of these “bounces,” the universe happened to randomly develop this fine tuning.  Addressing this slant on the theory of multiple universes, the esteemed former Cambridge University astrophysicist John Polkinghorne notes in Questions of Truth:

“Answering an argument by a suggestion is hardly conclusive.  One problem is that we don’t just need a hundred other universes, or even a billion, but an utterly immense number—some string theorists suggest that there are up to 10 to the 500^th power other universes.  If you are allowed to posit 10 to the 500^th power other universes to explain away otherwise inconvenient observations, you can “explain away” anything, and science becomes impossible.”

Further, as Oxford University professor of philosophy Antony Flew facetiously observes in There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind:

“If the existence of one universe requires an explanation, multiple universes require a much bigger explanation: the problem is increased by the factor of whatever the total number of universes is.  It seems a little like that case of a schoolboy whose teacher doesn’t believe his dog ate his homework, so he replaces the first version with the story that a pack of dogs—too many to count—ate his homework.”

None of this is to suggest that the scientific consensus may one day tilt in favor of a theory such as multiple universes or the oscillating universe, which are modifications to the Big Bang. Scientific explanations are always evolving.  The core issue at hand is the philosophical implications that may be reasonably derived from such scientific theories.  To suggest that multiple universes or an oscillating universe can serve as an explanation for why a physical and natural world even exists in the first place is a clear example of atheistic scientists overreaching their field of expertise into another discipline entirely…that of philosophy.

This becomes evident by dissecting the most recent (and perhaps the best) example of an attempt to do away with the notion of a created universe:  Stephen Hawking’s concept of “spontaneous creation” (through the spontaneous emergence of multiple universes) presented in his book The Grand Design.  Hawking states that “spontaneous creation [rather than divine creation] is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.”  Multiple universes, including ours, he alleges, “arise naturally from physical law.”

The Oxford Dictionary defines science as “the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment.” Statements attempting to explain “the reason there is something rather than nothing” are not scientific statements.  This is because explaining why there even exists a physical and natural world in the first place is an entirely different subject than “the systematic study of the structure and behavior” of phenomena within that physical and natural world.  Contrary to what some may think, science is not and never will be capable of studying nothing.

Hawking’s above statement is therefore by nature philosophical, not scientific. The Oxford Dictionary defines philosophy as “the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence, especially when considered as an academic discipline.” And statements about  “why there is something rather than nothing” are philosophical statements.  If multiple universes, including our universe, “emerged naturally from physical law,” one is immediately faced with the question of from where these physical laws emerged.  Did they evolve through Darwinian natural selection out of utter nothingness?  The question of the origin of existence has therefore not been answered by Hawking, but merely delayed.

It is more accurate, then, to say that “by dabbling in amateur philosophy, Hawking has concluded that the universe generated spontaneously.” And Einstein is noted for reminding us that “the man of science is a poor philosopher.” Here, we are touching upon a fundamental deceit perpetrated by those in the scientific community wishing to do away with the notion of God: Using pretensions of science to make bold but shoddy and unsupported philosophical claims. Just as one should not go to his or her plumber for legal advice, one should not go to a scientist for novel philosophical insights. Readers should be on constant guard for this sleight-of-hand.

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This article further discusses the topic of anthropic fine tuning.

Please also listen to this audio by physicist Hugh Ross (and read the transcript if you like).

For some hard numbers as to the probability that the universe resulted from chance, rather than deliberate, conscious action (produced by Oxford University mathematician Roger Penrose) please read the post entitled “OK…I want numbers.”

To see what standard Big Bang cosmology (and mathematicians…including one of the 20th century’s greatest) say about the possibility that the universe (or multiverse) is eternal, please read the post entitled “Isn’t the universe eternal? (Thus doing away with the need for a creator)”

Please also read the related post entitled “Why is there something rather than nothing?”

ADDITIONAL QUOTES RELEVANT TO THIS SUBJECT MATTER APPEAR BELOW:

“Astronomers now find they have painted themselves into a corner because they have proven, by their own methods, that the world began abruptly in an act of creation to which you can trace the seeds of every star, every planet, every living thing in this cosmos and on the earth.  And they have found that all this happened as a product of forces they cannot hope to discover….  That there are what I or anyone would call supernatural forces at work is now, I think, a scientifically proven fact.”

–Astronomer, physicist and founder of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies Robert Jastrow.  Please also see Jastrow’s book God and the Astronomers.  Jastrow’s observations regarding the evidence for a divine act of creation are especially poignant when one considers that he is a self-described agnostic.  In other words, Jastrow’s research have led him to theistic conclusions despite having an ideological bias against theism.

But the truth is very much opposite to the atheist rhetoric.  It is actually disbelief in God that requires adults to play games of make-believe …games that rival those of those of children in their measure of naive credulity.

This point is perhaps best illustrated by the contorted mental gymnastics that those who are ideologically inclined towards disbelief in God will resort. In his book I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be An Atheist, Norman Geisler notes:

It was 1916 and Albert Einstein didn’t like where his calculations were leading him. If his theory of General Relativity was true, it meant that the universe was not eternal but had a beginning. Einstein’s calculations indeed were revealing a definite beginning to all time, all matter, and all space. This flew in the face of his belief that the universe was static and eternal. Einstein later called his discovery “irritating.” He wanted the universe to be self-existent—not reliant on any outside cause—but the universe appeared to be one giant effect. In fact, Einstein so disliked the implications of General theory that is now proven accurate to five decimal places—that he introduced a cosmological constant (which some have since called a “fudge factor”) into his equations in order to show that the universe is static and to avoid an absolute beginning.

But Einstein’s fudge factor didn’t fudge for long. In 1919, British cosmologist Arthur Eddington conducted an experiment during a solar eclipse which confirmed that General Relativity was indeed true—the universe wasn’t static but had a beginning. Like Einstein, Eddington wasn’t happy with the implications. He later wrote, “Philosophically, the notion of a beginning of the present order of nature is repugnant to me. . . . I should like to find a genuine loophole.” By 1922, Russian mathematician Alexander Friedmann had officially exposed Einstein’s fudge factor as an algebraic error. (Incredibly, in his quest to avoid a beginning, the great Einstein had divided by zero—something even schoolchildren know is a no-no!)

…He subsequently described the cosmological constant as “the greatest blunder of my life,” and he redirected his efforts to find the box top to the puzzle of life. Einstein said that he wanted “to know how God created the world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thoughts, the rest are details.”

Einstein, in a nutshell, was forced by the weight of the evidence to abandon his desire to disbelieve in God….a desire apparently so intense that he was willing to resort to such a desperate measure as dividing by zero!  Fortunately, the weight of the evidence eventually overcame Einstein’s “irritation” at the concept of God, and, in a display of integrity, he revised his views. The law of causation (without which science would be impossible) dictates that everything with a beginning requires a cause.  This is why those ideologically inclined towards disbelief in God have clung so tenaciously to the idea of a “static,” or eternally existing universe.

Fast forward to the current day.  The most famous living physicist, Stephen Hawking, in his book The Grand Design, attempts to demonstrate that the universe requires no such Grand Designer.  He writes, “Because there is a law like gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing…Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God…”

Oxford University mathematician John C. Lennox responds in his book God and Stephen Hawking:

…His [Hawking’s] notion that a law of nature (gravity) explains the existence of the universe is also self-contradictory, since a law of nature, by definition, surely depends for its own existence on the prior existence of the nature it purports to describe. …Thus, the main conclusion of the book turns out not simply to be a self-contradiction, which would be disaster enough, but to be a triple self-contradiction. Philosophers just might be tempted to comment: so that is what comes of saying philosophy is dead! [Hawking says this in The Grand Design] In the above, Hawking is echoing the language of Oxford chemist Peter Atkins (also a well-known atheist), who believes that “space-time generates its own dust in the process of its own self-assembly”.  Atkins dubs this the “Cosmic Bootstrap” principle, referring to the self-contradictory idea of a person lifting himself by pulling on his own bootlaces. His Oxford colleague, philosopher of religion Keith Ward, is surely right to say that Atkins’ view of the universe is as blatantly self-contradictory as the name he gives to it, pointing out that it is “logically impossible for a cause to bring about some effect without already being in existence”. Ward concludes: “Between the hypothesis of God and the hypothesis of a cosmic bootstrap, there is no competition. We were always right to think that persons, or universes, who seek to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps are forever doomed to failure.”  What this all goes to show is that nonsense remains nonsense, even when talked by world-famous scientists. What serves to obscure the illogicality of statements is the fact that they are made by scientists; and the general public, not surprisingly, assumes that they are statements of science and takes them on authority. That is why it is important to point out that they are not statements of science, and any statement, whether made by a scientist or not, should be open to logical analysis. Immense prestige and authority does not compensate for faulty logic.

…In the world in which most of us live, the simple law of arithmetic by itself, 1+1=2, never brought anything into being. It certainly has never put any money into my bank account. If I put £1,000 into the bank, and later another £1,000, the laws of arithmetic will rationally explain how it is that I now have £2,000 in the bank. But if I never put any money into the bank myself, and simply leave it to the laws of arithmetic to bring money into being in my bank account, I shall remain permanently bankrupt.

So this is what Einstein meant when he said that “the man of science is a poor philosopher!”  Even if one were to grant that all of Hawking’s science is 100% correct (which is a very, very big “if”, as this video featuring Hawking’s former colleague, the Oxford University physicist Roger Penrose, explains), Hawking’s attempts to do away with God fall apart with even the most rudimentary philosophical inquiry, as Lennox demonstrates.  Hawking clearly knows this (at least subconsciously), which is surely why he disparages philosophy in his book.  He writes, “Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead.”

Now, philosophy 101 students, what is wrong with the statement, “Philosophy is dead”?  This statement is itself philosophical!  (as Lennox points out).  Therefore, it is no less ridiculous and self-contradictory than the statement, “I cannot speak a single word of English,” spoken with a perfect British accent.  Hawking’s philosophy is that “philosophy is dead.”  One should wonder who taught him philosophy!  Notably, even the atheist philosopher Quentin Smith could not refrain from calling Hawking’s argument against God, presented in his book A Brief History of Time, “the worst atheistic argument in the history of western thought.”

Sadly, jaw-droppingly poor philosophy is not confined to atheist scientists.  Prominent atheist philosopher Daniel Dennett reflects Peter Atkins’ above mentioned “Cosmic Bootstrap” principle when he claims that the universe created itself using what he calls “the ultimate boot-strapping trick,” in his book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon.  As a sports car enthusiast, I have to ask:  If the universe can “bootstrap” itself into existence, is it unreasonable to expect that shiny new car might “bootstrap” itself into existence in my garage?  Is there any reason why Dennett’s philosophy would allow the universe, but not a car, to “bootstrap” itself into existence?  I hope not.

Back to Santa Claus…it’s time to administer a little thought experiment so as to establish a measure of make-believe reasoning:  Two kids sit under the Christmas tree waiting to open their presents. The first kid says, “Santa put the presents there.”  To this, the second kid replies, “No he didn’t. There is no Santa Claus. The law of gravity caused the presents to create themselves from nothing.”  Although the second child is using adult language to express his views, they involve a far greater degree of make-believe reasoning.

The law of causation (without which science would be impossible) dictates that everything with a beginning requires a cause.  Forget for a moment the fact that, as Lennox above explains, physical laws are not creative, but rather merely descriptive and predictive.  At least the first kid in the above example understands the law of causation.  He may have gotten the cause wrong (it was actually his parents who put the presents under the tree), but at least he understands that a cause cannot bring about an effect unless that cause is already in existence.

Put another way, the second kid’s “nothing” is actually a version of something.  The law of gravity is something, not nothing.  Either the universe emerged from nothing or it emerged from the law of gravity.  One cannot have it both ways.

And even if the universe emerged “spontaneously” from the law of gravity, the question immediately becomes, “Where did the law of gravity come from?”  Further, how can it be that matter follows natural laws so consistently if the the universe is fundamentally material?

Readers will recall from my essay titled God Is Real…Why Modern Physics Has Discredited Atheism that, historically, there have been two basic meta-scientific worldviews underlying science.  One worldview (called naturalism or materialism) says that matter comes first (or is fundamental) and that minds such as our own are an eventual product of unintelligent, natural processes. The opposite worldview (which includes theism) says that mind (read: God’s mind) comes first and that matter is the product of this fundamentally existing mind.

In the theistic worldview, it is immediately clear why these natural laws (such as the laws of physics, thermodynamics, chemistry, etc.) exist and why matter so consistently follows them: The same mind which produces matter also directs it.

But the naturalist/materialist worldview severely struggles with these two questions:  Where did the natural laws come from in the first place, and why is it that matter so consistently follows such laws?  The only answers that naturalism/materialism can provide are “they just are” and “it just does,” respectively.  How much explanatory power exists in either explanation?  Absolutely none whatsoever.  This is why the naturalist/materialist worldview, upon which atheism depends, is rooted in make-believe, just-so storytelling.

In my essay titled Is There A God? (What is the chance that our world is the result of chance?), I mention the topic of the extremely exquisite fine tuning of our universe that was necessary for life forms such as ourselves to exist.  In order to get around this, atheists (including Hawking and many others) have proposed the existence of multiple universes.  So many universes exist, so the theory goes, that it is not surprising that one of these universes happened to randomly have the fine tuning necessary for the existence of life.  A copy and paste  of two citations from that essay:

Distinguished former Cambridge University quantum physicist John Polkinghorne notes in Questions of Truth:

Answering an argument by a suggestion is hardly conclusive.  One problem is that we don’t just need a hundred other universes, or even a billion, but an utterly immense number—some string theorists suggest that there are up to 10 to the 500^th power other universes.  If you are allowed to posit 10 to the 500^th power other universes to explain away otherwise inconvenient observations, you can “explain away” anything, and science becomes impossible.

Further, as Oxford University Professor of Philosophy Antony Flew facetiously observes in There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind:

If the existence of one universe requires an explanation, multiple universes require a much bigger explanation: the problem is increased by the factor of whatever the total number of universes is.  It seems a little like that case of a schoolboy whose teacher doesn’t believe his dog ate his homework, so he replaces the first version with the story that a pack of dogs—too many to count—ate his homework.

None of this is to suggest that there cannot be multiple universes.  Rather, it is to suggest that, philosophically speaking, it is absurd to suggest that the existence of multiple universes can be used to explain away the exquisite fine tuning of our universe necessary for the formation of life.  (I discuss this fine tuning in my essay titled Is There A God? (What is the chance that our world is the result of chance?))  Even if there are 10 to the 500th power universes, what was the mechanism that caused our universe to be so very, very extremely fine tuned?  Further, what is the reason that ANY of these universes exist in the first place?  How is it that we can assume that these universes are at all different from one another, so that one universe is fine tuned and the others (or most of them) are not?

Nancy Pearcey comments in her book Total Truth:  Liberating Christianity from it’s Cultural Captivity:

David Gross, director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, recently admitted that his objection to the concept of fine-tuning is “totally emotional”:  It’s a dangerous idea because “it smells of religion and intelligent design.” Convoluted theories of a conscious cosmos, or of countless unknowable universes, are little more than desperate attempts to avoid the obvious evidence for design.

And it is this desperation that causes certain prominent atheist physicists to resort to make-believe.  Adult make-believe may be different from child make-believe, but it is make-believe nonetheless.

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And Stephen Hawking is not the only atheist physicist making ridiculous arguments.  This New York Times article gives a scathing review of atheist physicist Lawrence Krauss’ book A Universe From Nothing.  As it turns out, Krauss’ “nothing” is actually the laws of quantum mechanics.  So his “nothing” is actually something.  Krauss admits that he has no idea where the laws of quantum mechanics came from.  Declaring something to actually be “nothing” is an open-and-shut case of an adult playing a game of make-believe.

For more examples of adults playing make-believe in order to try to do away with God, please read my essay titled Why Life Could Not Have Emerged Without God.  In this essay, I describe how atheists (including Richard Dawkins) have resorted to such explanations for the origin of life as intervention from space aliens, and piggyback rides on crystals.  These are not typos.

Please also read my related essay titled I Believe In Science! Why Do I Need Religion?!

–Charles Darwin, the founder of evolutionary biology, as quoted in his autobiography.

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“The statistical probability that organic structures and the most precisely harmonized reactions that typify living organisms would be generated by accident, is zero.”

–Ilya Prigogine, winner of the 1977 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and winner of the 1955 Francqui Prize for Exact Sciences.

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 The Atheist-Biologist-in-Chief, Richard Dawkins, writes in his book The Blind Watchmaker:

“…Although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” But when one looks into the reasoning behind Dawkins’ statement, one quickly realizes that, to hijack a quote from another prominent atheist (the philosopher Bertrand Russell), “This is one of those views which are so absolutely absurd that only very learned men could possibly adopt them.” Indeed, years of intense research by highly credentialed biologists with rigid ideological commitments to atheism are required to concoct a view so ridiculous.

The first key point is that Darwinian theory does not even attempt to explain the origin of life. Rather, Darwinian evolution only attempts to explain the diversification of life from a putative common ancestor. The Darwinian mechanism of random mutation and natural selection, quite obviously, applies only to that which has genes to mutate and reproductive offspring to naturally select…namely, living things. So the key question pertinent to God’s existence, here, is not how life diversified, but how it originated. How did the first life emerge from non-living matter? To answer this question, one must first determine just what life is.

The simplest living thing (a single celled organism) is described by Oxford University scientist Franklin M. Harold in The Way of the Cell:

“…a high-tech factory, complete with artificial languages and their decoding systems, memory banks for information storage and retrieval, elegant control systems regulating the automated assembly of parts and components, error fail-safe and proof-reading devices utilized for quality control, assembly processes involving the principle of prefabrication and modular construction … [and] a capacity not equaled in any of our own most advanced machines, for it would be capable of replicating its entire structure within a matter of a few hours.”

In short, the simplest living organism is several orders of magnitude more complex than anything humans have ever produced: the space shuttle, supercomputers…anything. And this dizzyingly complex first life appeared in what amounts to a blink of an eye in geologic terms. Astrophysicist Hugh Ross writes in The Creator and the Cosmos:

“When it comes to the origin of life, many biologists (and others) have typically assumed that plenty of time is available for natural processes to perform the necessary assembly. But discoveries about the universe and the solar system have shattered that assumption. What we now see is that life must have originated on Earth quickly.”

“In early 1992 Christopher Chyba and Carl Sagan published a review paper on the origins of life. Origins is plural for a good reason. Research indicates that life began, was destroyed, and began again many times during that era before it finally took hold.”

“…From 3.8 to 3.5 billion years ago the bombardment [of earth by asteroids, comets, meteors, and dust] gradually decreased to its present comparatively low level. But during those 300 million years at least thirty life-exterminating impacts must have occurred. These findings have enormous significance to our theories about the origin of life. They show that life sprang up on Earth (and re-sprang) in what could be called geologic instants, periods of ten-million years or less (between devastating impacts).”

“From the perspective of our life span, a ten-million-year window may seem long, but it is impossibly short to those seeking to explain life’s origins without divine input.”

MIT physicist Gerald Schroeder makes the same point:

“…and then there is the uncontested reality that life started immediately on just-cooled earth and not after billions of years as had been once posited. Elso Barghoorn, while at Harvard University, discovered this fact that changed the entire emphasis in origin of life studies. Barghoorn discovered that the oldest rocks that can bear fossils already have fully formed fossils of one-celled life. And most amazingly, and yet by necessity, those first forms of life already had the ability to reproduce. Reproduction is not something that can gradually evolve. The first cell to survive had to have all the mechanisms for mitosis the first time around since all the attempts at life that came before (if there were other attempts) died without leaving any heritage simply because there was no succeeding generation prior to reproduction.” [italics added]

At this point, one might ask what IS known by the scientific community regarding how unintelligent natural processes could have brought about life. The answer is simple: Absolutely nothing! Zero, zip, zilch! The reader will please forgive me for recycling quotations from another essay at this website, but here it goes:

Francis Crick, the Nobel Laureate well known as the co-discoverer of the DNA double-helix, has stated in his book Life Itself:

“An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.”

Similarly, physicist and information scientist Hubert Yockey, who is the leading author of the text on the application of information theory to the origin of life, writes in the Journal of Theoretical Biology:

“Since science does not have the faintest idea how life on earth originated….it would be honest to confess this to other scientists, to grantors, and to the public at large. Prominent scientists speaking ex cathedra, should refrain from polarizing the minds of students and young productive scientists with statements that are based solely on beliefs.”

Theoretical physicist Paul Davies made the same point in his book The Fifth Miracle:

“Many investigators feel uneasy about stating in public that the origin of life is a mystery, even though behind closed doors they freely admit that they are baffled.”

Even prominent theoretical biologist (and atheist) Stuart Kauffman, who is known for his “self-organization” theories regarding the origin of life, admits:

“Anyone who tells you that he or she knows how life started on the earth some 3.45 billion years ago is a fool or a knave. Nobody knows.”

(As an aside, please view this Scientific American article titled Pssst! Don’t Tell the Creationists But Scientists Don’t Have a Clue How Life Began.  Predictably, the article ends with a lame atheist attempt at damage control by asking the question “What created the divine creator?”…as if an eternally existing being—without beginning— would require a creator.)

From my online debates with atheists, I know that many skeptical readers are now shouting at the top of their lungs, “You are committing the logical fallacy of argument from ignorance!! Just because science doesn’t currently know how unintelligent natural processes could have produced life doesn’t mean that it never will! We can’t just give up and say, ‘We don’t know how life emerged, so God must be responsible.’ You are using God-of-the-gaps reasoning!!”

But the view that life could not have emerged from unintelligent natural processes is not an “argument from ignorance.” Rather, it is an argument from knowledge.

Oxford University mathematician John Lennox notes the following in his book God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?

“How does one scientifically recognize a message emanating from an intelligent source, and distinguish it from the random background noise that emanates from the cosmos? Clearly the only way this can be done is to compare the signals received with the patterns specified in advance that are deemed to be clear and reliable indicators of intelligence — like a long sequence of prime numbers — and then to make a design inference. In SETI [The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, which was originally a NASA program] the recognition of intelligent agency is regarded as lying within the legitimate scope of natural science. The astronomer Carl Sagan thought that a single message from space would be enough to convince us that there were intelligences in the universe other than our own.”

“Writing on paper (or paint on a Rembrandt canvas) exhibits what philosopher Del Ratzsch calls counterflow — phenomena that nature, unaided by agent activity, could not produce. It is because we know that, even in principle, physics and chemistry cannot give an explanation of the counterflow exhibited by the writing, that we reject a purely naturalistic explanation, and we postulate an author. But it needs to be said that postulating an intelligent agent to explain writing is not falling into an ‘author-of-the-gaps’ syndrome; rather it is our knowledge of the nature of the ‘gap’ that demands we postulate an author.”

And if the complexity contained in a “long set of prime numbers” meets scientific standards for inferring intelligent agency, then why is the far, far, far greater complexity and specificity contained in the simplest living thing not enough to convince atheistic scientists of intelligent agency? The answer is that many of the most hardened atheist scientists clearly ARE convinced as such, although they are very reticent to admit it because it is so inconvenient to their ideology.

And herein lies a source of enormous entertainment value for theists reading this article. (I never said this website wasn’t supposed to be fun). Outspoken atheistic biologist numero uno, Richard Dawkins, cites “higher intelligence” as a potential explanation for the origin of life in this interview. But what is the source of this intelligent agency, according Dawkins and several other prominent atheists? ALIENS FROM OUTER SPACE! (Or “a higher intelligence from elsewhere in the universe” to use Dawkins’ exact words).

The hypothesis that life on earth originated when it was brought here by space aliens is known as “directed panspermia,” and has been endorsed by highly prominent atheists such as Dawkins, the biologist Francis Crick (who is famous as the co-discoverer of the DNA double helix) and the British chemist Leslie Orgel. (Click here to read an article regarding Crick’s support of the hypothesis). *

Astute readers will immediately recognize the problem with citing space aliens as the source for the origin of life: These aliens would themselves be a life form. The question then becomes, How did the aliens emerge from non-living matter? Dawkins, in the above video, suggests that the aliens “evolved, by probably some kind of Darwinian means.” But please recall that the Darwinian mechanism requires random mutation and natural selection. Because non-living matter has neither genes to mutate nor reproductive offspring to naturally select, citing “some kind of [unknown] Darwinian means” is an open-and-shut case of using one’s worldview to extrapolate far beyond the limits of reason.

But the complexity level of living organisms (as it relates to scientific standards for deducing intelligent agency) is not the only line of evidence that clearly suggests divine creation. As Bernard-Olaf Kuppers, a member of the German Academy of Natural Sciences, states in Information and the Origin of Life, “The problem of the origin of life is clearly basically equivalent to the problem of the origin of biological information.”

And therein lies the next problem for those attempting to cite unintelligent, material causes for the origin of life. Even the simplest living organism is an information processing machine that uses the complex coding and decoding of a language that is akin to (but much more complex than) a computer language.

Dawkins concedes this point in his book River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life:

“…The machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like. Apart from differences in jargon, the pages of a molecular biology journal might be interchanged with those of a computer engineering journal.”

Elsewhere, Dawkins writes:

“What has happened is that genetics has become a branch of information technology.  The genetic code is truly digital, in exactly the same sense as computer codes. This is not some vague analogy, it is the literal truth.”

So what is the relevance of mentioning the informational nature of living things? Informational exchange is fundamentally mental in nature. Coded information is ALWAYS the product of a conscious, intelligent mind. No exceptions. Period.

As the physicist Paul Davies points out, the phenomenon of the genetic code mediating information between the two languages of life (proteins and nucleic acids) provides a mystery: How can mindless processes set up codes and languages? Mindless natural process cannot even in principle account for the presence and exchange of codified information.

(Atheists wishing to dispute this point can go here to participate in an online forum).

Information scientist Werner Gitt, a former director and professor at the German Federal Institute of Physics and Technology, makes this point clear in his book In the Beginning Was Information:

“…According to a frequently quoted statement by the American mathematician Norbert Wiener (1894-1964) information cannot be a physical entity: ‘Information is information, neither matter nor energy. Any materialism which disregards this will not survive one day.’”

“Werner Strombach, a German information scientist of Dortmund, emphasizes the nonmaterial nature of information by defining it as an ‘enfolding of order at the level of contemplative cognition.’”

“Hans-Joachim Flechtner, a German cyberneticist, referred to the fact that information is of a mental nature, both because of its contents and because of the encoding process. This aspect is, however, frequently underrated: ‘When a message is composed, it involves the coding of its mental content, but the message itself is not concerned about whether the contents are important or unimportant, valuable, useful, or meaningless. Only the recipient can evaluate the message after decoding it.’”

“It should now be clear that information, being a fundamental entity, cannot be a property of matter, and its origin cannot be explained in terms of material processes. We therefore formulate the following theorem. Theorem 1: The fundamental quantity of information is a non-material (mental) entity. It is not a property of matter, so that purely material processes are fundamentally precluded as sources of information.”

Meaning and symbolic representation are properties of mind, not of matter or energy.  As an illustration of this point, consider the following: A song is a non-material, informational entity that can be stored on a compact disk, in an iPod, on a cassette tape, or in a musician’s head, etc. But these storage devices cannot account for the song itself. Rather, the song exists independently of any storage medium, and resulted from the activity of an intelligent, conscious mind (in this case, the composer of the song). Matter and energy are useful for the transmitting and storing of information, but the information itself is neither matter nor energy and can only be produced by a conscious and intelligent mind. Just as songs cannot created by unintelligent processes, coded information (such as that stored in the DNA of a living organism) cannot be produced by unintelligent processes.

A crucial point to be grasped is that the theories for the origin of life that have been produced cannot even in principle account for the origin of genetic information. Rather, they can only be used to address the origin of the storage medium for genetic information (or the material aspect of the organism). So, in reference to the above analogy, no theory for the origin of life that has been produced so far seriously confronts the issue of the song on the compact disk. Rather, they have only engaged the issue of the emergence of the compact disk itself. This should not be a surprise when one considers that the prevailing cultural context among the ranks of biologists involves a rigid adherence to a materialistic/naturalistic worldview that does not even acknowledge information as a separate category from matter and energy.

Physicist Paul Davies makes the distinction between the medium (the physical aspect of the organism) and the message (the informational aspect of the organism), with regard to the origin of life, clear in The Fifth Miracle:

“The laws of physics, which determine what atoms react with what, and how, are algorithmically very simple; they themselves contain relatively little information. Consequently they cannot on their own be responsible for creating informational macromolecules [such as even the most simple organism]. Contrary to the oft-repeated claim, then, life cannot be ‘written into’ the laws of physics…Once this essential point is grasped, the real problem of biogenesis [or life emerging through unintelligent processes] is clear. Since the heady success of molecular biology, most investigators have sought the secret of life in the physics and chemistry of molecules. But they will look in vain for conventional physics and chemistry to explain life, for that is the classic case of confusing the medium with the message.”

Elsewhere, Davies writes:

“Trying to make life by mixing chemicals in a test tube is like soldering switches and wires in an attempt to produce Windows 98.  It won’t work because it addresses the problem at the wrong conceptual level.” [italics added]

Perhaps most importantly, it should be noted that the above facts have been more than enough to convince many top-notch scientists and philosophers who are (or were) ideologically opposed to theism. Dr. Hubert Yockey, as I mention above, is the leading author of the text on the application of algorithmic information theory to the origin of life, and is certainly no friend of theism. He is a physicist (who worked on the Manhattan Project) and an information theorist who states in Information Theory, Evolution and the Origin of Life that “the origin of life is unsolvable as a scientific problem.” Note that Yockey does not say “as yet unsolved.” Rather, “unsolvable.”

The Nobel Prize winning Harvard University biologist George Wald (also certainly not an ideological ally of theism) stated the following in his address to the Quantum Biology Symposium titled Life and Mind in the Universe:

“It has occurred to me lately—I must confess with some shock at first to my scientific sensibilities—that both questions [the origin of mind and the origin of life from nonliving matter] might be brought into some degree of congruence. This is with the assumption that mind, rather than emerging as a late outgrowth in the evolution of life, has existed always as the matrix, the source and condition of physical reality—the stuff of which physical reality is composed is mind-stuff. It is mind that has composed a physical universe that breeds life and so eventually evolves creatures that know and create: science-, art-, and technology-making animals.”

Dean Kenyon was one of the leading chemical evolutionary theorists in the world, and the author of a best-selling text on chemical evolutionary explanations for the origin of life. But, as the video below reveals, Kenyon was eventually obliged by the weight of the evidence to renounce his naturalistic views and endorse theism.

And perhaps most prominently, the Oxford University philosopher Antony Flew was for 50 years considered to be the intellectual “frontman” for atheism as a philosophical cause. His paper Theology and Falsification was the most reprinted philosophical tract in the world during this period. But as the video below reveals, Flew was forced by the facts of biology to endorse theism in 2004. To learn more, please read Flew’s book There Is A God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind.

In light of the preceding facts, perhaps Richard Dawkins’ statement, which is recounted in the first paragraph of this essay, should be rephrased as such: “…Although atheism might have been logically tenable before the magically appearing space aliens, these aliens made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”

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*For those not satisfied with the aliens-brought-life-to-earth-in-their-spaceship explanation for the origin of life….do not fear!  Atheism has other explanations.  The prominent atheist biologist Michael Ruse hypothesizes that the origin of life can be explained by a MAGIC CRYSTAL PIGGYBACK RIDE!  Sound bizarre?  Click on the preceding link.  Still not satisfied?  There is more!  Other atheists have dropped the “directed” from “directed panspermia” to come up with just plain “panspermia.”  In this hypothesis, life came to earth from outer space without the help of aliens.  Supporters of this hypothesis include atheists such as the Cambridge University mathematician and astronomer Fred Hoyle, and Chandra Wickramasinghe, the director of the Buckingham Centre for Astrobiology.

Please also read my related posts titled Why evolution cannot be used to rationalize atheism and If the evidence for God is so strong, why are so many smart people unconvinced?

–Charles Darwin

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“There is no real conflict between theistic religion and the scientific theory of evolution. What there is, instead, is conflict between theistic religion and a philosophical gloss or add-on to the scientific doctrine of evolution: the claim that evolution is undirected, unguided, unorchestrated by God (or anyone else).”

Philosopher Alvin Plantinga, as quoted in Where the Conflict Really Lies : Science, Religion, and Naturalism.

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Because of all of the talk in the media about Darwinism and creationism, it can be easy to get lost in the rhetoric.  But beneath the layers of rhetoric lies the simple fact that Darwinian evolution is actually a NON ISSUE when it comes to the question of the existence of God.  What do I mean by this? Darwin’s proposed “blind mechanism” of random mutation and natural selection is cited as an alternative to creation of life by God.  But, as Oxford University mathematician John Lennox writes in his book God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?:

“For, from one point of view, there is nothing controversial in describing forces or mechanisms as ‘blind’.  Quite obviously, most are.  The strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetism and gravity have no eyes to see with, either physical or mental.  And most mechanisms are blind — think of a watch, a car, a CD player, a computer hard-disc.  Moreover, they are not only blind but also unconscious; indeed, to be even more precise, they are incapable of conscious thought since they have no mind to think with.  But those mechanisms, though blind in themselves, are all the products of minds that are far from being blind; such mechanisms are intelligently designed.  What is more, this holds even for mechanisms that involve an element of randomness in their operation.”

Lennox provides a simple thought experiment as an illustration, which I shall paraphrase:  Imagine an automobile factory in which all of the manufacturing is done by robots.  Can we declare that, because all of the work is accomplished by robots, no intelligence is involved in the manufacturing process?  To make such a declaration, we would need to also declare that the robots, the software that guides the robots, and the factory itself were not the products of intelligence.  But any reasonable person can see that this is not the case…human intelligence was clearly involved.

Not a scientific question

The key point is that the question of whether or not life is the result of an intelligent or unintelligent source is not a scientific question.  Rather, it is a meta-scientific or ontological* question.  This is because biology is concerned with issues of intermediate causation with regard to the phenomenon of life, rather than ultimate causation.  It would be impossible, put another way, to demonstrate through the scientific method how the natural laws and processes (that purportedly guide evolution) came into existence.  Where these laws and processes came from would be a question of ultimate causation, and such ultimate questions are meta-scientific or ontological rather than scientific.  Put more simply, the view that Darwinian evolution does not involve intelligent input (even in the formulation of natural laws that guide evolution) is a philosophical add-on and not science.

Theists who accept Darwinian evolution adopt the meta-scientific view that (akin to the human agents responsible for creating the robots, the software, and the factory itself) a higher intelligence is responsible.  Atheists must assume that such sophisticated natural laws and processes just are.

Indeed, Christian theists who endorse Darwinian evolution are plentiful.  Lennox cites several:

“In, Britain, for example, Sir Ghillean Prance, Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS), former director of the world-famous Kew Gardens in London, Sir Brian Heap, FRS, former Vice President of the Royal Society, Bob White, FRS, Professor of Geology at Cambridge University, Simon Conway Morris, FRS, Professor of Paleobiology, Cambridge University, Sam Berry, Professor of Evolutionary Biology, London University, and Denis Alexander, Director of the Faraday Institute, Cambridge, are all distinguished contemporary evolutionary biologists who are theists, indeed Christians.  In the USA there is Francis Collins, Director of the Human Genome Project, who prefers the term Biologos to that of theistic evolution.  They would all vigorously reject as invalid any attempt to deduce atheism from evolutionary theory.”

Perhaps most poignantly, Charles Darwin himself expressed his views on this subject matter.  In his autobiography, he wrote:

“[Reason tells me of the] extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capability of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity.  When thus reflecting I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called a Theist.”

Physicist Stephen Barr makes the same point as Lennox in Modern Physics and Ancient Faith in the context of responding to Richard Dawkins book about evolution and atheism titled The Blind Watchmaker:

When examined carefully, scientific accounts of natural processes are never really about order emerging from mere chaos, or form emerging from mere formlessness. On the contrary, they are always about the unfolding of an order that was already implicit in the nature of things, although often in a secret or hidden way. When we see situations that appear haphazard, or things that appear amorphous, automatically or spontaneously “arranging themselves” into orderly patterns, what we find in every case is that what appeared to be haphazard actually had a great deal of order built into it…. What [atheist biologist Richard] Dawkins does not seem to appreciate is that his blind watchmaker is something even more remarkable than Paley’s watches. Paley finds a “watch” and asks how such a thing could have come to be there by chance. Dawkins finds an immense automated factory that blindly constructs watches, and feels that he has completely answered Paley’s point. But that is absurd. How can a factory that makes watches be less in need of explanation than the watches themselves?

Those wishing to explore this subject matter in more depth are referred to Evolution: The Disguised Friend of Faith?  by the distinguished British molecular biologist (turned Anglican priest) Arthur Peacocke.  Also, my essay titled Why Trying to Explain Away God With Science is an ERROR further elaborates on why it is an utter fallacy to cite natural mechanisms as an alternative explanation to God.

*For those not familiar, ontology is the branch metaphysics (which is in turn a major branch of philosophy) dealing with the nature of existence.  Meta-scientific is a term which refers to a principle which is fundamental to science but cannot be scientifically tested.

1) What are life, consciousness, and conceptual thought?  How could they spring forth from undifferentiated matter or, if you prefer, an energy field?  Are these properties “emergent,” as some atheists suggest?  OK, fine…. but “emergence” is a description of rather than an explanation for the appearance of such phenomena as life, consciousness, and conceptual thought.  Please provide an explanation for the emergence of these properties.

2) Why is the universe comprehensible?  Albert Einstein wrote: “You find it strange that I consider the comprehensibility of the world (to the extent that we are authorized to speak of such a comprehensibility) as a miracle or as an eternal mystery.  Well, a priori, one should expect a chaotic world, which cannot be grasped by the mind in any way… the kind of order created by Newton’s theory of gravitation, for example, is wholly different.  Even if man proposes the axioms of the theory, the success of such a project presupposes a high degree of ordering of the objective world, and this could not be expected a priori.  That is the ‘miracle’ which is constantly reinforced as our knowledge expands.”

So, with reference to Einstein’s above quotation, the following riddle for atheists emerges:  If the world as we know it is simply the result of random interaction of mindless matter, how did the “high degree of ordering of the objective world” come to pass such that conscious minds (that are able to comprehend) emerged?  What is the source of this ordering?  Was it the laws of physics?  The laws of chemistry?  Ok fine…please reference riddle #5.

3) How did reality come to be structured such that there are fundamental laws of nature and a hierarchy of intelligence in the natural world?  Even if natural selection is cited as the mechanism for this state of affairs, our question remains unanswered since the mechanism can only work within a structure.  How did this structure originate?  Why is reality structured so that random mutation and natural selection, for example, can occur?  Regarding this question, Alister McGrath, who was awarded a doctorate from Oxford University for his research in molecular biophysics, writes in Surprised by Meaning:

…This point is consistently overlooked in many accounts of evolution, which seem to treat physics and chemistry as essentially irrelevant background information to a discussion of evolution. Yet before life can begin, let alone evolve, this biological process requires the availability of a stable planet, irradiated by an energy source capable of chemical conversion and storage, and the existence of a diverse array of core chemical elements with certain fundamental properties. Biology has become so used to the existence and aggregation of highly organized attributes that they are seen primarily as core assumptions of evolutionary theory, rather than something that requires explanation in its own right. There is an implicit assumption that life would adapt to whatever hand of physical and chemical cards were dealt it. Yet this is untested and intrinsically questionable. The emergence of life cannot be studied in isolation from the environment that creates the conditions and provides the resources that make this possible.

4) Physicist Paul Davies has said that the phenomenon of the genetic code mediating information between the two languages of life, proteins and nucleic acids presents a mystery: How can mindless processes set up codes and languages?  Please read my essay titled Why Life Could Not Have Emerged Without God for a more in-depth exploration.

5) How can an inanimate thing be made to follow a law? (Such as the laws of physics, chemistry, or thermodynamics).  How can such a structure of laws (or “regularities” if you prefer) that govern the universe exist in a truly random world?  Please note that this is a question that science can never answer because it is not a scientific question.  Rather, it is an ontological question.

In the theistic model, it is immediately obvious why matter follows natural laws: The same mind that creates matter (God’s mind) also directs it. As Robert Boyle, the founder of modern chemistry, put it: “The nature of this or that body is but the law of God prescribed to it [and] to speak properly, a law [is] but a notional rule of acting according to the declared will of a superior.” [italics added]

Or, as James Joule, the propounder of the first law of thermodynamics, for whom the thermal unit of the “Joule” was named, put it: “It is evident that an acquaintance with natural laws means no less than an acquaintance with the mind of God therein expressed.”

Or, as the knighted mathematician, physicist and astronomer Sir James Jeans put it in his book The Mysterious Universe:

“There is a wide measure of agreement which, on the physical side of science approaches almost unanimity, that the stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.  Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the realm of matter.  We are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail mind as the creator and governor of the realm of matter.” (italics added)

What answer does the atheistic model provide to the question of how an inanimate thing can be compelled to follow a law?  Only various versions of “matter follows laws because it just does.”

6) Why is the human brain so much more complex than is necessary for survival?  If we are “survival machines” that exist for no other purpose than passing on DNA, then why do have such capacities as the ability to appreciate beauty in music, art, and in nature?  Why do we have the capacity for advanced mathematics and science?  What survival value did these capacities provide?  For example, was our primitive ancestor who was able to appreciate the beauty in a sunset somehow less likely to be eaten by a predator than our primitive ancestor who was not?  Did this capacity somehow help him/her to find food more easily?

7) Why is there something rather than nothing?  Prominent atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell answers this question by suggesting that the universe is a “brute fact.”  Russell’s answer gives us a perfect example of such an “it just is” explanation.  In other words, by endorsing a universe that is a “brute fact,” Russell is encouraging us to cease rational inquiry and simply accept that the universe “just is.”

8) If sight originated in light-sensitive cells, how did it come to be the case that reality is structured to allow a symbiosis between light energy and the physico-chemical structure of the brain and eye?

Reader:  Please note that several of these questions were extracted verbatim from Roy Abraham Varghese’s book The Wonder of the World. A Journey From Modern Science to the Mind of God.  This book was cited by Oxford University philosopher Anthony Flew (formerly the world’s most prominent atheist philosopher) as one of the two books that most influenced him to accept the existence of God, in 2004.  I very strongly recommend that you read it.  Please view this video detailing Flew’s acceptance of the existence of God.

³ He was despised and rejected by mankind,
a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.
Like one from whom people hide their faces
he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.

⁴ Surely he took up our pain
and bore our suffering,
yet we considered him punished by God,
stricken by him, and afflicted.
⁵ But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was on him,
and by his wounds we are healed.
⁶ We all, like sheep, have gone astray,
each of us has turned to our own way;
and the LORD has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.

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If you guessed Jesus Christ, you would be correct.  If you guessed any book in the New Testament, you would be wrong (yes, this was a trick question).  This passage is from the book of Isaiah, Chapter 53 in the OLD TESTAMENT, written seven hundred years before Jesus birth.

–Convicted serial killer and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer

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The idea that religion causes violence is taken as an almost self-evident truth in many circles.  Atheists often use this as a justification for embracing a “secular” lifestyle and belief system that does not acknowledge the existence of God.  But there are big problems with this line of reasoning.  Religious scholar William T. Cavanaugh writes in The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict:

“What would be necessary to prove the claim that religion has caused more violence than any other institutional force over the course of human history?  One would first need a concept of religion that would be at least theoretically separable from other institutional forces over the course of human history. …The problem is that there was no category of religion separable from such political institutions until the modern era, and then it was primarily in the West.  What meaning could we give to either the claim that Roman religion is to blame for the imperialist violence of ancient Rome, or the claim that it is Roman politics and not Roman religion that is to blame?  Either claim would be nonsensical, because there was no neat division between religion and politics.”

“It is not simply that religion and politics were jumbled together until the modern West got them properly sorted out.  As Wilfred Cantwell Smith showed in his landmark book, The Meaning and End of Religion, religion as a discrete category of human activity separable from culture, politics, and other areas of life is an invention of the modern West.”

“…The first conclusion is that there is no trans-historical or trans-cultural concept of religion.  Religion has a history, and what counts as religion and what does not in any given context depends on different configurations of power and authority.  The second conclusion is that the attempt to say that there is a trans-historical and trans-cultural concept of religion that is separable from secular phenomena is itself part of a particular configuration of power, that of the modern, liberal nation-state as it is developed in the West.”

Thus, it is impossible to establish which conflicts were caused by “religion” and which conflicts were caused by “politics” or “culture”  because such categories have no intrinsic meaning, but rather, are human inventions.  Cavanaugh continues:

“At first glance, this may seem like an academic exercise in quibbling over definitions, but much more is at stake. The religious-secular dichotomy in the arguments sanctions the condemnation of certain kinds of violence and the overlooking of other kinds of violence.  …The myth of religious violence is so prevalent because, while it delegitimates certain kinds of violence, it is used to legitimate other kinds of violence, namely, violence done in the name of secular, Western ideals.  The argument that religion causes violence sanctions a dichotomy between, on the one hand, non-Western, especially Muslim, forms of culture, which—having not yet learned to privatize matters of faith—are absolutist, divisive, irrational, and Western culture on the other, which is modest in its claims to truth, unitive and rational.”

(Please see this article for more detail).

And history provides no better example of violence legitimized for “secular” reasons than the violence committed by atheistic communism (although many scholars believe that Marxist communism fits the definition of a “religion”).  In 1920, Vladimir Lenin (the key founder of the Soviet Union) stated:

“We repudiate all morality that proceeds from supernatural ideas that are outside class conceptions.  Morality is entirely subordinate to the interests of class war.  Everything is moral that is necessary for the annihilation of the old exploiting social order and for uniting the proletariat.”

Lenin also said,

“Our program necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism.”

Adopting a “religious” faith in no way guarantees that someone will become a moral person. Just as going to the hospital does not guarantee that someone will recover from an illness, adopting “religious” beliefs that promote peace and love will not guarantee that a person will become peaceful and loving. But if a person kills in the name of a religion with a text that clearly says, “Thou shalt not kill,” that person is clearly perverting that religion. This is entirely consistent with the biblical concept of humankind’s “fallen nature.”

With political systems that embrace atheism or concepts of human dignity that are rooted in atheism, no such perversion is necessary. Communism is a political system that officially embraces the atheist worldview. It is telling that the number of people who have been killed by atheistic communism is estimated to run as high as 110 million (sources: Death by Government by political science professor R.J. Rummel and The Black Book of Communism).

Nazism was not officially atheist, but it was staunchly anti-religious and similar to communism in the respect that it adopted concepts of human dignity that are rooted in atheist philosophy. I recommend From Darwin to Hitler by professor of modern European history Richard Weikart, to explore this subject further.

When I say that “no such perversion is necessary,” I mean that the atheist worldview greatly diminishes the value of human life by declaring that people are nothing but “survival machines” that exist mainly to pass on their genes and ensure the survival of the species. This is why the communists were able to send people to their deaths in “gulags” (or prison camps) in such great numbers with so little restraint.  As Lenin is quoted above, the atheist communists “repudiate all morality that proceeds from supernatural ideas”….such as the supernatural Judeo-Christian idea that human beings have a supernatural soul and therefore transcendent value.

In a nutshell, because atheism denies the existence of any “supernatural” (or transcendent) reality, it also, by extension, denies that humans have any transcendent value.  This severely devalued concept of human life is what allowed the communists to justify their historically unprecedented killing spree.

The Nazis killed anyone and everyone who they did not feel was worthy to pass on their genes. It seemed to them perfectly justifiable to kill any “survival machines” with what they perceived to be “undesirable” genes.  As Weikart points out, the racist Nazi rationalization for killing comes straight from Darwin.  In The Descent of Man, Darwin writes:

“With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.  We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, the sick;….Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind.  No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man.”

At another point in The Descent of Man, Darwin writes:

“The civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world.”

And exterminating everyone perceived to be “savage” or unworthy of passing on their genes is exactly what the Nazis tried to do.  It is not, then, difficult to see why Weikart was justified in saying that:

“Darwinism by itself did not produce the Holocaust, but without Darwinism…neither Hitler nor his Nazi followers would have had the necessary scientific underpinnings to convince themselves and their collaborators that one of the world’s greatest atrocities was really morally praiseworthy.”

This can be seen in the statements made by Hitler which betrayed his Darwinist views.  Hitler once said:

“The law of selection justifies this incessant struggle, by allowing for the survival of the fittest. Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature.  Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure.”

Hitler also said:

“The stronger asserts his will, it’s the law of nature.  The world doesn’t change; its laws are eternal.”

What one kills “in the name of” is far less relevant than the philosophical factors that facilitate or motivate killing. This is evidenced by the fact that the communists and Nazis were by FAR the most prolific killers in all of human history.  And as time passes, the link between rejecting the Judeo-Christian concept of the sacredness of human life and killing just becomes more apparent.  This is clearly illustrated today in the stark difference between North Korea and South Korea.  North Korea is run by an officially atheist regime that would not exist were it not for the massive slave labor / starvation camps that keep the population in a constant state of fear.  North Korean citizens are routinely thrown into such camps (often to die) for believing in God, of for infractions as minor as sitting on a newspaper photo of the dictator (Kim Jong Il).

Contrast this with South Korea, which has seen an explosive growth in Christianity in recent decades…and which has a human rights record far, far superior to its neighbor to the north.

When it comes to the connection between atheism and unrestrained killing, mathematician David Berlinski hits the nail on the head in his book The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and It’s Scientific Pretensions:

Somewhere in Eastern Europe, a [Nazi] SS officer watched languidly, his machine gun cradled, as an elderly and bearded Hasidic Jew laboriously dug what he knew to be his grave. Standing up straight, he addressed his executioner. “God is watching what you are doing,” he said. And then he was shot dead. What Hitler did not believe, and what Stalin did not believe, and what Mao did not believe, and what the SS did not believe, and what the Gestapo did not believe, and what the NKVD did not believe, and what the commissars, functionaries, swaggering executioners, Nazi doctors, Communist Party theoreticians, intellectuals, Brown Shirts, Blackshirts, Gauleiters, and a thousand party hacks did not believe, was that God was watching what they were doing. And as far as we can tell, very few of those carrying out the horrors of the twentieth century worried overmuch that God was watching what they were doing either. That is, after all, the meaning of a secular society.

–Janna Levin, from the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge University

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A universe with a finite past requires a beginning, which in turn requires a transcendent (or supernatural) cause.  This is why our universe must be eternal for atheism to be valid.  But Big Bang cosmology has shown that the universe is NOT eternal. In  New Proofs for the Existence of God, Robert J. Spitzer (who was assisted by Dr. Stephen Barr of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Delaware) reveals that:

“Prior to Einstein’s publication of the General Theory of Relativity, one could have thought that supernatural design was completely unnecessary because it was believed (in accordance with Newton’s postulates) that the universe existed for an infinite amount of time with an infinite amount of space and an infinite amount of interacting content. Therefore, there would have been an infinite number of ‘tries’ [for randomness to produce an orderly universe] to bring about virtually any degree of complexity.

Standard Big Bang cosmology totally changed these postulates, and reduced the total number of “tries” in the observable universe to a very finite number…..This comparatively small number of ‘total possible mass energy interactions in the universe for all time’ revealed the extreme improbability of high degrees of complexity arising out of the universe by pure chance.”

Further, this book also states that “David Hilbert (the father of finite mathematics) has given new probative force and depth to the argument for the intrinsic finitude of past time (implying a timeless creator) in his article On The Infinite.”

Hilbert (among the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century) said:

“The infinite [as in infinite past time] is nowhere to be found in reality. It neither exists in nature nor provides a legitimate basis for rational thought. The role that remains for the infinite…is solely that of an idea.”

Many other contemporary mathematicians (such as mathematicians Frankel, Rotman, Kneebone, Zermelo, and Robinson) draw the same conclusion.  Mathematicians Rotman and Kneebone state in The Theory of Sets and Transfinite Numbers:

“The conception of an infinite sequence of choices (or any other acts)…is a mathematical fiction—an idealization of what is imaginable only in finite cases.”

But rather than just taking some highly prominent mathematicians at their word, wouldn’t it be nice to understand for oneself just why infinite past time is mathematically impossible?  Fortunately, the mathematical concepts herein are easily accessible to non-mathematicians.  Below is an excerpt from The Case for the Creator by Lee Strobel and features an interview the author conducted with William Lane Craig:

“Let’s use an example involving marbles,” he said. “Imagine I had an infinite number of marbles in my possession, and that I wanted to give you some. In fact, suppose I wanted to give you an infinite number of marbles. One way I could do that would be to give you the entire pile of marbles. In that case I would have zero marbles left for myself.”

“However, another way to do it would be to give you all of the odd numbered marbles. Then I would still have an infinity left over for myself, and you would have an infinity too. You’d have just as many as I would–and, in fact, each of us would have just as many as I originally had before we divided into odd and even! Or another approach would be for me to give you all of the marbles numbered four and higher. That way, you would have an infinity of marbles, but I would only have three marbles left.”

“What these illustrations demonstrate is that the notion of an actual infinite number of things leads to contradictory results. In the first case in which I gave you all the marbles, infinity minus infinity is zero; in the second case in which I gave you all the odd-numbered marbles, infinity minus infinity is infinity; and in the third case in which I gave you all the marbles numbered four and greater, infinity minus infinity is three. In each case, we have subtracted the identical number from the identical number, but we have come up with nonidentical results.”

“For that reason, mathematicians are forbidden from doing subtraction and division in transfinite arithmetic, because this would lead to contradictions. You see, the idea of an actual infinity is just conceptual; it exists only in our minds.”

And lastly, in 2003, physicists Borde, Vilenkin and Guth corroborated to formulate a proof that demonstrates that an eternal universe is not possible. It is known as the BVG theorem. Alexander Vilenkin is very blunt in regard to the implications of this proof:

“It is said that an argument is what convinces reasonable men and a proof is what it takes to convince even an unreasonable man. With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe. There is no escape, they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning.” (Many Worlds in One [New York: Hill and Wang, 2006], p.176).

It should be noted that this proof applies to any proposed “multiverse” or “oscillating universe,” etc. in which our universe may be situated. Astrophysicist Robert Jastrow (the founder of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies) echoes Vilenkin’s above comments:

“The lingering decline predicted by astronomers for the end of the world differs from the explosive conditions they have calculated for its birth, but the impact is the same: modern science denies an eternal existence to the Universe, either in the past or in the future.“

To explore this subject matter in more detail, please read this article.

To evaluate the validity of such an explanation, it is necessary to cross-check it with all of the aspects of the NDE phenomenon that have been repeatedly reported by many experiencers—not just a select one or two aspects.  It is my contention that NDE skeptics’ explanations consistently fall short because they can only be applied to one or two of the reported aspects of the NDE phenomenon instead of the full gamut.  Only an explanation that can account for all of the aspects of the NDE phenomena can be considered a plausible materialist counter-explanation for the NDE phenomenon as a whole.

Below is a list of some of the phenomena that have been, as I said above, repeatedly reported by many  NDE experiencers.  This list has been extracted from Evidence for the Afterlife by Jeffrey Long, MD, www.nderf.org, and www.iands.org. (I have chosen these sources, but many others are available).

1) Lucid death:  NDErs report highly lucid experiences while clinically unconscious or clinically dead.  Such experiences often include witnessing an emergency room crew working on one’s own body after the heart has stopped and brain activity has ceased.  Many conscious experiences have also been reported while an individual was under carefully monitored general anesthesia, which is intended to bring about loss of consciousness.

2) Out of body: Long states that “approximately half of all NDEs have an OBE (out-of-body experience) that involves seeing or hearing earthly events.  Usually the point of consciousness rises above the body.”

3) Blind sight: Long recounts that, “in 1998 Kenneth Ring, PhD, and Sharon Cooper, MA, published a landmark article in the Journal of Near-Death Studies about blind people who have vividly visual near-death experiences….An especially interesting subgroup in this study was made up of case reports from individuals who were born totally blind and had NDEs with the typical elements, including detailed visual content.”  Click on the following links for a couple examples: 1) Born blind NDE #1  2) Born blind NDE #2

4) Life review:  Commonly reported is the phenomenon in which everything significant from the NDEr’s life is reviewed.  This includes experiencing the emotional impact that one’s actions had upon others, from the perspective of the other person.  The review is sometimes in a three-dimensional panoramic view.

5) Reunion with deceased loved ones and with God, angels, Jesus:  The title says it all.  Click here for more detail.

6) Very young children report NDEs: A common retort from NDE skeptics is that NDEs are the result of the dying brain bringing to mind the results of years of religious and cultural conditioning.  But, as Long reminds us, “most five-year-olds have not yet started elementary school, where cultural influences are accelerated…very young children are practically a blank slate when it comes to the subject of death.”  Nevertheless, these very young children (under 5) often report the same encounters with deceased loved ones, God, angels, and Jesus cited above.  In fact, children under five “have had every NDE element that older children and adults have had,” according to Long.

In evaluating the skeptics counter-explanations for the NDE phenomenon, the reader must be careful to examine how well that counter-explanation can be applied to all of the above listed (and other) NDE phenomena.  For example, the eroding-neural-environment-of-the-dying-brain explanation cited above is used to counter #4 above as well as the experience of the bright light and tunnel.  It cannot be applied to the other phenomena above and therefore conveniently ignores them.

The reader is reminded that the philosophical belief system which underlies the NDE skeptics’ explanations (materialism, or the belief that only the material world is real) has been utterly discredited by science.  As evidence of this I provide the following quotations:

1) Max Planck was one of the greatest physicists of the 20^th century, the founder of quantum theory, and the winner of the Nobel Prize in physics.  He said:

“As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.“  Planck also said, “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”

2)  Physicist Richard Conn Henry from Johns Hopkins University reflected Planck’s above statement when he said:

“Why do people cling with such ferocity to belief in a mind-independent reality? It is surely because if there is no such reality, then ultimately (as far as we can know) mind alone exists. And if mind is not a product of real matter, but rather is the creator of the illusion of material reality (which has, in fact, despite the materialists, been known to be the case, since the discovery of quantum mechanics in 1925), then a theistic view of our existence becomes the only rational alternative to solipsism.”

3)  The neurophysiologist Sir John Eccles, who won the 1963 Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine said:

“We have to recognize that we are spiritual beings with souls existing in a spiritual world as well as material beings with bodies and brains existing in a material world.”

“There is for me powerful evidence that there is something going on behind it all. . . It seems as though somebody has fine tuned nature’s numbers to make the Universe. . . The impression of design is overwhelming.”

Physicist Paul Davies, winner of the 2002 Faraday Prize issued by the Royal Society and the 1995 winner of the Templeton Prize.

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“It is relatively unusual that a physical scientist is truly an atheist. Why is this true? Some point to the anthropic constraints, the remarkable fine tuning of the universe. For example, Freeman Dyson, a Princeton faculty member, has said, ‘Nature has been kinder to us that we had any right to expect.’”

Physical scientist Henry F. Schaefer III, five-time nominee for the Nobel Prize, as quoted in his essay Stephen Hawking, the Big Bang, and God.

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“A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.”

–Cambridge University astronomer and mathematician Fred Hoyle commenting on the incredible fine-tuning necessary for life to exist.

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“Had the original energy of the Big Bang explosion been less, the universe would have fallen back onto itself long before there had been time to build the elements required for life and to produce from them intelligent, sentient beings.  Had the energy been more, it is quite possible that the density would have dropped too swiftly for stars and galaxies to form.  These and many other details were so extraordinarily right that it seemed the universe had been expressly designed for humankind.”

–Owen Gingerich, former Research Professor of Astronomy and of the History of Science at Harvard University.

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“Had the resonance level in the carbon been 4 percent lower, there would be essentially no carbon.  Had that level in the oxygen been only half a percent higher, virtually all of the carbon would have been converted to oxygen.  Without the carbon abundance, neither you nor I would be here now.”

“I am told that Fred Hoyle, who together with Willy Fowler found this remarkable nuclear arrangement, has said that nothing has shaken his atheism as much as this discovery.”

–Owen Gingerich, former Research Professor of Astronomy and of the History of Science at Harvard University.

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“The theistic principle is quite straightforward: The reason our universe seems tailor-made for our existence is that it was tailor-made for our existence; some supreme being created it as a home for intelligent life.”

–Cosmologist and astronomer Edward Robert Harrison

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“Astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing, and delicately balanced to provide exactly the conditions required to support life.  In the absence of an absurdly improbable accident, the observations of modern science seem to suggest an underlying, one might say, supernatural plan.”

–Nobel Prize winning astrophysicist Arno Penzias.

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“The exquisite order displayed by our scientific understanding of the physical world calls for the divine.”

–MIT physicist Vera Kistiakowsky

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“As to the cause of the Universe, in context of expansion, that is left for the reader to insert, but our picture is incomplete without Him [God].”

–Astrophysicist and mathametician Edward Milne (winner of the Royal Society’s Royal Medal, the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, and the Bruce Medal)

–Cambridge University astrophysicist and mathematician Fred Hoyle

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“Fred Hoyle and I differ on lots of questions, but on this we agree:  a common sense and satisfying interpretation of our world suggests the designing hand of a superintelligence.”

–Former Harvard University Research Professor of Astronomy and the History of Science Owen Gingerich, who is now the senior astronomer at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.  Gingerich is here reflecting on Fred Hoyle’s above comment.

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The reader of the essay entitled Is There A God (What is the Chance the World is the Result of Chance?) may be interested in knowing some hard numbers with regard to the probability that the universe occurred randomly (i.e. no conscious creator involved).  Oxford University professor of mathematics John Lennox quotes renowned Oxford University mathematical physicist Roger Penrose:

“Try to imagine phase space… of the entire universe.  Each point in this phase space represents a different possible way that the universe might have started off.  We are to picture the Creator, armed with a ‘pin’ — which is to be placed at some point in phase space… Each different positioning of the pin provides a different universe.  Now the accuracy that is needed for the Creator’s aim depends on the entropy of the universe that is thereby created.  It would be relatively ‘easy’ to produce a high entropy universe, since then there would be a large volume of the phase space available for the pin to hit.  But in order to start off the universe in a state of low entropy — so that there will indeed be a second law of thermodynamics — the Creator must aim for a much tinier volume of the phase space.  How tiny would this region be, in order that a universe closely resembling the one in which we actually live would be the result?”

Lennox goes on to cite Penrose’s answer:

“His calculations lead him to the remarkable conclusion that the ‘Creator’s aim’ must have been accurate to 1 part in 10 to the power of 10 to the power or 123, that is 1 followed by 10 to the 123rd power zeros.”

As Penrose puts it, that is a “number which it would be impossible to write out in the usual decimal way, because even if you were able to put a zero on every particle in the universe, there would not even be enough particles to do the job.”

And the only alternative to the universe arising from chance is for it to have arisen deliberately. Deliberate action requires a conscious creator (read: God).  And for those who are still tempted to conclude that our universe is just the result of a very extremely improbable accident, I explain in Why God? Why not just plain luck? why bare probability (chance), alone, can never cause anything….let alone the creation of a universe.