Our worldview can either bring reality into sharp focus or
it can distort and prevent us from seeing what is right in front of our eyes.
Atheist Nobel Laureate, Francis Crick, also approached the
evidence with a worldview. However, rather than preventing him from seeing
the evidence, it caused him to reject it:
* “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 to
have been satisfied to get it going."
Why then does he reject the miraculous? Because there is no
place for it within his atheistic worldview, which demands a natural answer.
Meanwhile, when a theist is confronted with the same evidence, he concludes
otherwise.
Former atheist, Sir Fred Hoyle, concluded in favor of an
Intelligent Designer:
* "Biochemical systems are exceedingly complex, so much
so that the chance of their being formed through random shuffling of simple
organic molecules is exceedingly minute, to a point indeed where it is
insensibly different from zero." So, there must be "an intelligence,
which designed the biochemicals and gave rise to the origin of carbonaceous
life." (Norman Geisler is the source of these quotations.)
Why are people unwilling to revise their worldview when
confronted with overwhelming evidence against it? Often, they don't want to.
Atheist Aldous Huxley wrote:
* "I had motives for not wanting the world to have
meaning; consequently, assumed it had none, and was able without any difficulty
to find reasons for this assumption.... For myself, as no doubt for most of my
contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument
of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a
certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of
morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual
freedom." (Ends and Means, 1937, pp. 270, 273, emp. added).
Not everyone rejects God in favor of sexual freedom.
However, Huxley demonstrated, very transparently, that we have reasons for our
worldviews that might have nothing to do with the evidence.
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