UNANSWERABLE CHALLENGES CONFRONTING ATHEISM

Even agnostics have a problem with Big Bang cosmology, simply because it claims that the universe had a beginning, and therefore requires a Transcendent, beyond-the-universe Cause. In “Unbelievable: 7 Myths About the History and Future of Science and Religion, Michael Newton Keas cites agnostic/atheist George Abell as an example:

• “I was brought up heathen,” he declared. Did this affect his work as an astronomer? Indeed, for he admitted a bias against the idea of the universe’s origin in a big bang, or cosmic singularity, with its implications favorable to theism: “Philosophically I was attracted to the steady-state theory, because it’s philosophically easier to envision an infinite universe, infinitely old, than one with such a singularity. On the other hand, I have to admit that the observations don’t look very favorable to a steady-state universe.” The steady-state theory, which denied a cosmic beginning, was widely regarded as falsified by the time of Abell’s 1977 interview. Virtually nobody defends it today.

In order to maintain their worldview, the atheist must ignore far more than the Steady State Theory. Here are just a few examples:

• Freewill
• Consciousness as an extra-material phenomenon
• The existence of consciousness apart from a living body
• The fine-tuning of the elegant laws of science apart from ID
• The apparent absence of juke DNA
• Tremendous gaps in the fossil record
• The inability to explain the origins of life, matter, time, and space naturalistically
• The continuous failures of constructing the Darwinian tree of evolution
• Explaining material development in light of the law of entropy

These are only a few of the many challenges to the naturalistic/materialistic paradigm. Some atheists have found these challenges so invalidating of their worldview that they have exchanged the atheist paradigm for a theistic one. For one example, in "There is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind," Antony Flew concluded that DNA requires an intelligent cause:

• “It now seems to me that the findings of more than fifty years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument to design.”

• “I now believe there is a God…I now think it [the evidence] does point to a creative Intelligence almost entirely because of the DNA investigations. What I think the DNA material has done is that it has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce life, that intelligence must have been involved in getting these extraordinarily diverse elements to work together."

According to the late Flew, one need not abandon science in order to adopt theism. One merely has to listen to what science has been saying.