THE UNLIKELIHOOD OF SCIENCE ARISING OUT OF ATHEISM

Physicist Lawrence Kraus insists that:

• The more that we learn about the workings of the universe, the more purposeless it seems.

Meanwhile, mathematician and physicist, Lord William Kelvin, who propounded the first and second Laws of Thermodynamics, asserted:

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

James Joule, the English physicist who discovered the law of the conservation of energy noted:

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

Why would Joule claim such a thing? Perhaps for the same reason that the skeptic and physicist, Paul Davies, wrote:

• 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.

While Kraus insists that only idiots can believe that God created this world, Albert Einstein perceived something very different:

• I’m not an atheist, and I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God.

Meanwhile, Kraus claims that God is irrelevant to science. However, Regis Nicoll claims the very opposite thing:

• Our ability to learn about the universe derives from the fact that it is governed by laws and exhibits a rational order and functional design. (Salvo Magazine, Spring 2016, 33. All of the quotations come from his article.)

In fact, it was the belief in a rational God-given order that had prompted Christian scientists to probe the discoverable laws that govern its workings. Consequently, Johannes Kepler wrote:

• The chief aim of all investigations of the external world should be to discover the rational order and harmony which has been imposed on it by God and which he has revealed to us in the language of mathematics (31).

In contrast to Kepler’s understanding, physicists like Kraus would not have been able to predict that this world, with its immutable and elegant laws, is knowable. Atheism can only account for molecules-in-motion in an ever-changing physical and unknowable world. Consequently, it is unlikely that science would have arisen out of such truncated worldview.

In Kraus’ purposeless, random universe, it would be unlikely to encounter design, order, and knowability – the necessary sine qua non or conditions of science.

QUOTATIONS FROM ATHEISTS WHO HAVE BECOME THEISTS (EXCEPT FOR THE FIRST TWO)

Albert Einstein (Perhaps a non-theist)

·       "The harmony of natural law . . . reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection."

Atheist Nobel Laureate, Francis Crick

·       “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.” 

Former atheist, Sir Fred Hoyle:

·       "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 first quotations)

Former atheist and astronomer Alan Sandage

·       "As I said before, the world is too complicated in all of its parts to be due to chance alone. I am convinced that the existence of life with all its order in each of its organisms is simply too well put together. . . . The more one learns of biochemistry the more unbelievable it becomes unless there is some kind of organizing principle—an architect.

Frank Tipler, mathematical physicist and cosmologist, Tulane (‘The Physics Of Immortality.’)

·       “When I began my career as a cosmologist some twenty years ago, I was a convinced atheist. I never in my wildest dreams imagined that one day I would be writing a book purporting to show that the central claims of Judeo-Christian theology are in fact true, that these claims are straightforward deductions of the laws of physics as we now understand them. I have been forced into these conclusions by the inexorable logic of my own special branch of physics.”

https://jamesbishopblog.wordpress.com/2015/07/06/former-atheists-speak-44-quotes/

-Antony Flew (‘There is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind.’)

·       “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.”

·       “…we have all the evidence we need in our immediate experience and that only a deliberate refusal to “look” is responsible for atheism of any variety.”

-Francis Collins (The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.)

·       “The God of the Bible is also the God of the genome. He can be worshipped in the cathedral or in the laboratory. His creation is majestic, awesome, intricate and beautiful – and it cannot be at war with itself. Only we imperfect humans can start such battles. And only we can end them.” -Rick Oliver Ph.D. in Biology.  He is a member of the American Federation of Herpetoculturalists, the California Science Teachers Association, and the New York Academy of Science. (‘Designed to Kill in a Fallen World.’)

-Lee Strobel (‘Case For Christ: A Journalist Investigates the Toughest Objections to Christianity.’)

·       “It was the evidence from science and history that prompted me to abandon my atheism and become a Christian.”

-Warner Wallace (‘Jesus Is Evidence That God Exists.’)

·       “In the end, I came to the conclusion that the gospels were reliable eyewitness accounts that delivered accurate information about Jesus, including His crucifixion and Resurrection. But that created a problem for me. If Jesus really was who He said He was, then Jesus was God Himself. If Jesus truly did what the gospel eyewitnesses recorded, then Jesus is still God Himself. As someone who used to reject anything supernatural, I had to make a decision about my naturalistic presuppositions.“

-Alister McGrath, theologian, scientist, and a priest (‘Breaking the Science-Atheism Bond’)

·       “Atheism, I began to realize, rested on a less-than-satisfactory evidential basis. The arguments that had once seemed bold, decisive, and conclusive increasingly turned out to be circular, tentative, and uncertain.”

-Sir William Ramsay  (1851 – 1939) was a Scottish archaeologist and New Testament scholar. By his death in 1939 he had become the foremost authority of his day on the history of Asia Minor and a leading scholar in the study of the New Testament:

·       “Further study . . . showed that the book (Acts) could bear the most minute scrutiny as an authority for the facts of the Aegean world, and that it was written with such judgment, skill, art and perception of truth as to be a model of historical statement.'” .  (‘The Bearing of Recent Discovery on the Trustworthiness of the New Testament.’)

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918 – 2008) was a Russian writer, and winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize in literature.

·       “Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” (‘Voice from the Gulag.’)

-Peter Hitchens has published six books, including The Abolition of Britain, The Rage Against God and The War We Never Fought. He also writes for Britain’s The Mail on Sunday newspaper and is a former foreign correspondent in Moscow and Washington. In his book The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith he tells us of his conversion from militant atheist to Christian theism.

·       “I thought this gesture [burning his Bible] was a way of showing that I had finally rejected all the things that I had been brought up to believe, and I went on to behave for the next 20 years of my life exactly as if I didn’t believe in him [God], and that’s how I discovered in the end that what I had rejected was right.” (‘The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith.’)

·       “The current intellectual assault on God in Europe and North America is in fact a specific attack on Christianity – the faith that stubbornly persists in the morality, laws, and government of the major Western countries. . . .The God they fight is the Christian God, because he is their own God. . . .God is the leftists’ chief rival.  Christian belief, by subjecting all men to divine authority and by asserting in the words ‘My kingdom is not of this world’ that the ideal society does not exist in this life, is the most coherent and potent obstacle to secular utopianism. . . . the Bible angers and frustrates those who believe that the pursuit of a perfect society justifies the quest for absolute power.”

·       “…when it comes to the millions of small and tedious good deeds that are needed for a society to function with charity, honesty, and kindness, a shortage of believing Christians will lead to that society’s decay.”

-Philip Vander Elst, a former atheist, is a freelance writer and lecturer who has spent nearly 30 years in politics and journalism, and now works with Areopagus Ministries.

 “So, confronted by all these facts and arguments – philosophical, scientific, and historical – I surrendered my sword of unbelief to God, and asked Jesus to forgive my sins and come into my life during the hot, dry summer of 1976. In the years that have followed, I have never regretted that decision, despite many ups and downs and trials of my faith.”

·       “My atheistic philosophy had allowed me to lose my compassion for others. I no longer had the ability to love anyone, not even myself. I had become apathetic to life itself. For years, I had been dead, but because I continued to walk and talk, I didn’t know it. But now, I was born again and the spirit that was in me, which had allowed me to understand spiritual things, connected with the glorious and perfect higher consciousness of Jesus Christ” (‘From Atheism to Christianity: a Personal Journey’)

-A.S.A Jones was a devout atheist for over 20 years before finally managing to see the biblical truths that had managed to elude him for so long.

·       “I thought that atheism was “smart.”  When my grandmother argued for a first cause, I replied by postulating an infinite regression of causes (my arrogance left me unaware that my response violated modern physics!)  Yet unknown to me, my father’s mother, sister, and the sister’s family were praying for our family.  When I was 13, reading Plato raised for me the question of life after death, but Plato’s answers did not seem adequate.  I began to realize that only an infinite Being could guarantee the hope of eternal life.  Yet if such a Being existed, there seemed no reason why that Being would care about me, even if that Being were perfectly loving enough to give life to some.  I was incurably selfish and undeserving of a loving Being’s attention; it seemed to me that if I pretended to love, it was only for the self-serving purpose of getting that Being’s attention.  Yet shortly before I turned 15, I began to secretly cry out, “God, if You are there—please show me.” (‘Testimony of A Former Atheist, A.S.A. Jones’)

HOW MUCH EVIDENCE OF DESIGN WOULD IT TAKE TO PROVE THAT THERE IS ACTUALLY A DESIGNER?

There will never be enough evidence for those unwilling to weigh it. However, some reluctantly acknowledge that the evidence has already arrived.

Albert Einstein admitted:

• "The harmony of natural law . . . reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection."

Likewise, former atheist and astronomer, Alan Sandage, said:

• "As I said before, the world is too complicated in all of its parts to be due to chance alone. I am convinced that the existence of life with all its order in each of its organisms is simply too well put together. . . . The more one learns of biochemistry the more unbelievable it becomes unless there is some kind of organizing principle—an architect for believers. . . ." (Norman Geisler)

We do a good job distinguishing between what happens formulaically (according to the laws of science) and what's intelligently caused - poems, writing of books, a computer program, the Mona Lisa.

When observe life and all of it's systems necessary for even the most rudimentary forms of life, we observe the unmistakable product of intelligence. The fine-tuning of the universe, DNA, the elegance of the laws of science, and the mystery of consciousness all proclaim something far beyond formulaic causation.

How much more evidence is needed?

Threat, Thugs, and Capitulation

How were Hitler and his National Socialist thugs able to take over Germany? Through intimidation, violence and murder! How were Mao, Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, and Castro able to prevail? Through the same instruments of terror! How is it that Islam is now enjoying the protection of Western media, universities and government despite their many atrocities? How is it that anyone who speaks against the Islamic threat and terror is labeled an “Islamophobe” and silenced? Their willingness to act out violently has made cowards of our Western institutions and has even convinced them that they are performing a righteous act by accommodating to Islam.

How is it that the homosexual agenda has suddenly gained such widespread acceptance, gaining such support that anyone who resists them is termed a “homophobe,” a hater of gays, a denier of human rights? Through intimidation and violence! In fact, I just received a sample of their methods today in the form of two anonymous responses to my blog:

• Oh eat a bag of cock go devour a pound of shit you judgmental homophobic redneck cunt. I hope you sit on a cactus.
  
  
• OH YOU ARE A GIANT DOUCHE FAGGOT YOU ARE A FAGGY QUEENY DOUCHE YOU NEED TO GO FUCK YOURSELF CAUSE NO ONE ELSE TOUCHES YOU!

What did I do to deserve such intimidating messages? Much as the Center for Disease Control, I cited various studies in an essay entitled Homosexuality: the Costs.

Such methods of intimidation are not foreign to the pro-gay community. I began listing some of the many instances of pro-gay intimidation, but I stopped. These few incidents would simply trivialize the extent of their violence. Then I tried to include all the incidents I could find on the web, but I deleted them. There were just too many to read.

However, there is nothing surprising or newsworthy that there have always been thugs and bullies who have resorted to the use of any tactics to get their way. What is more surprising is that our democratic institutions that are supposed to expose intimidation and other forms of criminality have all capitulated, even many on the right.

• Fox Sports Southwest fired football analyst Craig James for supporting traditional marriage. (World, October 5, 2013, 8)

Even more surprising, the Mormons – and they had contributed heavily to the passage of the recently invalidated the 2008 popular vote in favor Propositional 8 in California, limiting marriage to male/female unions – had recently invited a couple to speak in favor of making their church “more welcoming places for our LGBT brothers and sisters”:

• Officially the LDS church says marriage is between a man and a woman and that same-sex relationships are sinful, but the church was a quiet force behind the new Boy Scouts policy to allow into the program homosexual boys. (World, October 5, 2013, 12)

I’m sure that the Scouts always had youth with gay proclivities. However, this ruling opens the door to gay behavior and sets the stage for the anticipated argument:

• The gay youth in the scouts should proportionately be matched with gay scoutmasters.

Meanwhile, the Scouts have already had many problems with sexual abuse. However, what is most shocking is the Mormon capitulation. In the wake of the passage of Prop 8, the pro-gays were able to obtain lists of supporters and harassed them, even desecrating their churches. Instead of challenging this threat, they have conveniently seen the politically correct light.

This reminds me to the advance of Hitler’s National Socialist thugs. Albert Einstein had observed their surprising onslaught:

• Being a lover of freedom, when the [Nazi] revolution came, I looked to the universities to defend it, knowing that they had always boasted of their devotion to the cause of truth; but no, the universities were immediately silenced.  Then I looked to the great editors of the newspapers, whose flaming editorials in days gone by had proclaimed their love of freedom; but they, like the universities, were silenced in a few short weeks. . . . Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler’s Campaign for suppressing truth.  I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration for it because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual and moral freedom. I am forced to confess that what I once despised I now praise unreservedly.

There are no longer many lovers of freedom. They have been silenced by the threat of consequences to their careers, their possessions and even their lives, and the thugs have been encouraged by it.

The Hiding Place of Paradox

People – even smart ones – say paradoxical things. Take Albert Einstein for example:

• The scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation…There is nothing divine about morality; it is a purely human affair. His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection. (The World as I See it, 29)

While Einstein regards “the harmony of natural law” as a reflection of “an intelligence of such superiority,” he dismisses moral law as “a purely human affair” – a thing we made up! Why this sharp distinction?

The moral law is also harmonious. Just consider several observations:

• When we live according to the moral law we find written on our hearts (Rom. 2:14-15), we are healthier and happier, as indicated by many surveys.

• When we violate this internal law, we suffer from guilt, shame, and alienation.

• When we confess that we have violated this law, we feel relieved and relationships are often restored.

Even atheists or agnostics have traditionally recognized this moral law. Buddhists call it “the law of karma” – what goes around comes around. However, they lack an explanation of any mechanism that explains how justice is fairly delivered. (The delivery of justice is no easy thing. It requires understanding and an appreciation of all the facts.)

Also, we can defy physical laws. While flying in an airplane doesn’t cancel out gravity, it certainly allows us to defy its natural consequences. However, morals laws seem to be even more coercive. It would seem that God is investing them with His own transcendent authority, since there isn’t any way to defy their impact. We not only know that rape is wrong, we also know that there is no remedy, like an airplane overcoming gravity, that will overcome the damage that this act inflicts on us (and others).

Even though Einstein was only willing to attribute “an intelligence of such superiority” to the physical laws, why did he fail to follow through with the implications of his observations? In other words, “What kind of intelligence is necessary to account for these incredible, harmonious laws? Do impersonal forces like gravity possess this kind of intelligence!”

Clearly not! As great and awesome as gravity might be, it can do only one thing – attract! It can’t tie my shoes, write a line of poetry, or even scratch my back. In other words, the laws of nature do not seem to be the place to find this intelligence. Instead, as rain comes from clouds, intelligence comes from personal, willful minds.

Why do we often experience an aversion to thinking further about this subject? A dear cousin told me a story that continued to profoundly trouble her. Ironically, it was a story about a miracle, which she had initially attributed to God, even though she’s an agnostic. Initially, she felt great joy that her problem had been so miraculously solved and also that there was a God who was looking out for her. However, immediately after this, she was overcome by a feeling of great dread. It was this feeling that she couldn’t explain. I gave her my interpretation:

• You immediately understood that if there is a God who loves you, He also has expectations for you, and we want to remain the captain of our own ship.

The explanation hit home. She recognized that she had been fleeing from God. Her discomfort was the background radiation.

We live paradoxical lives because we prefer paradox to an encounter with a morally demanding, sometimes even punitive God.

Who is the Real Science-Stopper?

While evolutionists claim that the belief in God is a science-stopper, Albert Einstein thought otherwise:

• I want to know how God created this world.

For Einstein, the belief in God was a science-cheerleader! This belief promised that the incredible artifacts of observed design will be matched by the design and intelligence that we don’t yet observe! It represents the uncovering of buried secrets and points to a supremely endowed universe! In other words, we would expect that the studying of the creation will be richly rewarded.

Let’s contrast this with a faith in naturalism – the belief that the appearance of design and uniformity just happens naturally out of a chaotic nothingness. No intelligence or purpose involved! This has to be a science-stopper. After all, who is motivated to learn more about chaos and nothingness that underlie all reality? Not a very appealing occupation to base one’s life upon! To use an analogy, what would you rather devote your life to study – the workings of intelligence or a series of numbers generated randomly by a computer?

I think that the choice is easy!

Ken Wilbur, Albert Einstein, and World-Centrism

What is ethical? - Compassion that stops at our own household or a compassion that embraces the entirety of nature? Albert Einstein associates a self-centered and myopic compassion with an “optical illusion of …consciousness,” ethical “delusion” and “prison”:

• A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated form the rest, a kind of optical illusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Why should we widen “our circle of compassion?” Einstein insists that ethics restricted to “personal desires” is “delusion,” a failure to see reality as it truly is. Indeed, the concept of “delusion” suggests that there is a condition of “non-delusion,” a higher truth that trumps and transcends a narrow preoccupation with our needs and comforts. However, if this is the case, what is the basis of this higher moral reality, and how do we know that we are actually tapping into it? Perhaps instead, the highest truth is nothing more than the survival-of-the-fittest – me and my genes first! How can I be sure that this represents “delusion?”

New Age guru Ken Wilbur expresses Einstein’s ethics in terms of the stages of “moral development”:

• As we look at infants at birth, they have not yet been socialized into the culture’s ethics and conventions. This is called the pre-conventional stage. It is also called egocentric, in that the infant’s awareness is largely self absorbed. But as young children begin to learn their culture’s rules and norms, they grow into the conventional stage of morals. This stage is also called ethnocentric, in that it centers on the child’s particular group, tribe, clan, or nation, and it therefore tends to exclude care and concern for those not of one’s group. But at the next major stage of moral development, the post-conventional stage, the individual’s identity expands once again, this time to include a care and concern for all peoples, regardless of race, color, sex, or creed, which is why this stage is also called world-centric.

Even if Wilbur is correct about the stages, why should the final stage – world-centrism – represent an ethical improvement over the former stages? The later isn’t necessarily the best, no more than senility is an improvement over adolescence. Perhaps the first two stages might contribute more positively to the evolution of the human race? If there are no universal, immutable, and authoritative moral absolutes – fixed standards of judgment – who can say that self-fixation or the survival-of-the-fittest is morally wrong?

If world-centrism represents a positive step in “moral development,” is there a rationale for this judgment? Perhaps it’s better for our families to be centered upon their immediate needs? And perhaps our purported concerns about the world are simply the reflection of our own psychological need to demonstrate our moral superiority over those of the first two stages? I can’t help thinking of world-centric communism. While expressing flowery idealistic concerns about the world did more to decimate the world than had any other philosophy.

Usually, world-centrism is erroneously defended by pragmatic appeals to its possible benefits for the entire world. Appeals are made to protecting the environment and limiting warfare, starvation and disease worldwide.

However, this argumentation secretly assumes the very thing that it is trying to prove – that “warfare, starvation and disease” are evils, which need to be eradicated or at least reduced. The argumentation fails to answer what makes these things or anything “evil.” Consequently, pragmatic argumentation is deceptive. It rejects the need for transcendent moral absolutes, while it secretly appeals to them and their condemnation of certain “evils.”

There is no way that pragmatic considerations (science, for example) by themselves can coherently call for a moral response. As the skeptic and philosopher David Hume observed, we cannot logically go from what “is” (pragmatism and science) to what “ought to be” (morality). They are separated by an impassable God-created gulf.

Einstein insists that because of “delusion,” the self-centered are missing a vital piece in the puzzle. However, how does Einstein know that they are deluded? We can’t make such a judgment unless we are certain about a fixed moral reality, transcendent moral absolutes – truths that transcend my myopic needs - and an embrace of the Creator, Sustainer and Enforcer of these absolutes. Without this Creator, there can be no basis for transcendent moral absolutes – the very thing needed to declare “world-centrism” superior to “self-centrism.” Without this Creator and His moral absolutes, no one can tell me that their morality is any bit superior to my own. We are left with nothing more than molecules-in-motion.

Without this higher standard, there is no basis to judge one action as better than another. It would be like a math teacher grading math exams without answers that are absolutely correct. Trying to do so without this absolute standard would be disingenuous.

Some might try to appeal to our common moral intuitions as a basis to make such judgments. However, this just passes the buck to another insubstantial source. The question still remains:

• Why should I trust my moral intuitions as an authoritative basis to judge, especially in view of the fact that my feelings change and are largely a reflection of my culture and upbringing? What makes them any more authoritative than the intuitions of the murderer?

Indeed, most of us feel that we are our neighbor’s keeper, but if this feeling is merely a chemical-electrical cerebral reaction, why then heed it? Is there any connection between feeling and moral truth? Not if a superior Being hasn’t designed this glorious connection!

Consequently, I am world-centric because God – the unchanging, all-wise and loving Source of all truth - is world-centric. Jesus taught that we should regard everyone as our “neighbor” and treat them accordingly. This is where the buck stops –absolutely!