by Aaron Brake

Here is a statement that may seem controversial at first but upon reflection the truth of which becomes more apparent:

If God does not exist and there is no life after death, then there is no ultimate meaning, value, or purpose in life.

The question of God’s existence is the most central and important question we can seek to answer. If God does not exist and we do not survive the death of our bodies, life is ultimately absurd. J.P. Moreland provides an illustration which helps bring this truth home:

Suppose I invited you over to my house to play a game of Monopoly. When you arrive I announce that the game is going to be a bit different. Before us is the Monopoly board, a set of jacks, a coin, the television remote, and a refrigerator in the corner of the room. I grant you the first turn, and puzzlingly, inform you that you may do anything you want: fill the board with hotels, throw the coin in the air, toss a few jacks, fix a sandwich, or turn on the television. You respond by putting hotels all over the board and smugly sit back as I take my turn. I respond by dumping the board upside down and tossing the coin in the air. Somewhat annoyed, you right the board and replenish it with hotels. I turn on the television and dump the board over again.

Now it wouldn’t take too many cycles of this nonsense to recognize that it didn’t really matter what you did with your turn, and here’s why. There is no goal, no purpose to the game we are playing. Our successive turns form a series of one meaningless event after another. Why? Because if the game as a whole has no purpose, the individual moves within the game are pointless. Conversely, only a game’s actual purpose according to its inventor can give the individual move’s significance.[1]

As Moreland articulates, if the game of Monopoly as a whole has no purpose, the individual moves within the game have no meaning or value. The only way your moves within the game of Monopoly have significance is if you discover the purpose of the game and you align yourself with that purpose.

As it is with Monopoly, so it is with life. Like the game of Monopoly, the only way our individual lives have any ultimate meaning or value is if life has a purpose behind it, and real purpose requires both God and life after death.

To help think about this, let us suppose that God does not exist. In an atheistic scenario, we as human beings are simply Johnny-come-lately biological accidents on an insignificant speck of dust we call Earth which is hurtling through empty space in a meaningless and random universe that will eventually die a cold heat death. In the big scheme of things, we are no more significant than a swarm of mosquitoes. In a universe where there is no God and no afterlife, our actions are meaningless and serve no final end because ultimately each one of us, along with everyone we know and influence, will die and enter oblivion. There is no difference between living the life of a saint or a sociopath, no difference between a Mother Theresa and an Adolf Hitler. Mention of objective, morality, meaning, purpose, or value is simply incoherent babbling. William Lane Craig frequently refers to this as “the absurdity of life without God.”[2] He states,

Without God, the universe is the result of a cosmic accident, a chance explosion. There is no reason for which it exists. As for man, he’s a freak of nature—a blind product of matter plus time plus chance. If God does not exist, then you are just a miscarriage of nature, thrust into a purposeless universe to live a purposeless life…the end of everything is death… In short, life is utterly without reason… Unfortunately, most people don’t realize this fact. They continue on as though nothing has changed.[3]

The Cure for Apathy?

It seems to me that when we honestly reflect on the absurdity of life without God we cannot at the same time remain apathetic toward the question of God’s existence. God’s existence matters and has tremendous implications for our own existence. Life’s absurdity without God should bother us. It should keep us awake at night. It should jar us out of our apathetic attitude and challenge us to seek answers to life’s ultimate issues. Unfortunately, this is often not the case, especially in our information age where it is far too easy to remain distracted and caught up in the daily busyness of life. Regrettably, many people can simply go on day to day without ever giving a second thought to the most important questions in life.

But if we want to be intellectually honest, and if we are at all concerned with real meaning, value, and purpose, the question of God’s existence demands our attention. We ignore this topic and remain apathetic to it only to our own peril. As Brian Auten has stated, “the wise man seeks God.”[4] For the reasonable person, reflection on the absurdity of life without God should be enough to extinguish any remaining apathy regarding the question of God’s existence.

Perhaps then, apathy (or apatheism) is not something that can be changed directly, i.e., it is not something that can simply be willed away through direct effort. Rather, like our other beliefs, apathy must be changed indirectly. If apatheism is the belief that “the existence of God is not meaningful or relevant to my life,” perhaps reflecting on the absurdity of life without God will be powerful enough to indirectly change apathetic beliefs and help communicate the importance of taking God and other ultimate issues seriously.

The Inconsistent Atheist

I have never met an atheist who lives consistently with the implications of his naturalistic worldview. Though he rejects both God and life after death, he continues to live his life as if his actions have real ultimate meaning, value, and purpose. As Craig stated above, “they continue on as though nothing has changed.” Atheists reject God but still desire meaning, value, and purpose in life, so they indubitably find something to give their devotion to, be it themselves, family, money, pleasure, education, work, social causes, or politics. But neither do any of these subjective pursuits have ultimate significance or objective value in a world without God. In the end, the atheist must borrow from the Christian worldview in order to infuse their own life and actions with real meaning and purpose. This is because atheism and the naturalistic worldview offers no hope and provides no grounding for significance and value. Ken Samples states,

Naturalism as a worldview seems unable to offer the kind of meaning, purpose, and hope that humans require and yearn to experience. Instead, the ultimate fate of the individual, humanity, and even the universe will inevitably be the same regardless of what any person may do. Nothing that anyone thinks, says, or does will change the fact that each individual person, all of humankind collectively, and the universe itself (due to entropy) will someday be utterly extinct, lifeless, and cold. The outcome of naturalism is an inevitable hopelessness.[5]

In other words, naturalism fails the existential test. Honest atheists cannot live happily and consistently with their worldview. If atheism is true, and if atheists honestly reflect on their own eventual non-existence as well as the fact that their actions in this life have no ultimate meaning, value, or purpose, it seems hard to avoid the overwhelming feelings of depression, despair, and dejection. It is no wonder then that some atheists have resorted to nihilism. Christianity, on the other hand, succeeds exactly where atheism fails:

Biblical Christianity, therefore, provides the two conditions necessary for a meaningful, valuable, and purposeful life: God and immortality. Because of this, we can live consistently and happily within the framework of our worldview. Thus, biblical Christianity succeeds precisely where atheism breaks down… Therefore, it makes a huge difference whether God exists.[6]

An Atheist Rejoinder?

Some atheists object at this point: “But I do have a purpose in life. I do have meaning.” In a 2010 debate entitled “Does the Universe Have a Purpose?” skeptic Michael Shermer offers four things that allow people to feel more happy, fulfilled, and purposeful in life, regardless of whether or not God exists:[7]

  1. Deep love and family commitment
  2. Meaningful work and career
  3. Social and political involvement
  4. A sense of transcendency

Later in the debate, Shermer goes on to say,

Don’t you think even if there isn’t a God that you should find some purpose?…Maybe there’s a God, maybe there’s not. Either way, don’t you think you ought to roll up your sleeves and see if you can figure out some useful things to do to give yourself purpose outside of God? Don’t you think that’s worthwhile?…Shouldn’t I be doing these nice things for other people? Shouldn’t I be finding love and commitment to somebody, a meaningful career, helping my social community and being involved in politics, trying to transcend myself and do something outside of myself? Shouldn’t I be doing those things anyway?

But notice that Shermer here completely misses the point, which is this: if there is no God, then there is no ultimate, objective meaning, value, and purpose in life. Sure, you can create subjective meaning and purpose if you so desire. You can live for any personal, subjective cause or reason that makes you happy. You can even do nice things regardless of whether or not God exists. But Shermer offers no account or explanation as to why if there is no God any of these things are objectively good, or why any of these things are objectively meaningful, valuable or purposeful, or why we should pursue these ends as opposed to others that may make us more fulfilled and happy. In the end, it makes no difference, objectively speaking, whether or not you pursue these goals or not because in the end, everything winds up the same anyway: you die, I die, the universe dies, and that’s just all there is to it. Christian theist William Lane Craig offered this rejoinder both to Shermer and Richard Dawkins in the debate:

There has been a major shift in the last two speeches in this debate. Did you see what it was? We’ve argued tonight first of all that if God does not exist, then the universe has no purpose. Our atheist colleagues admit that. But now what they’ve been claiming is, “But look, we can construct a purpose for our lives,” in Richard Dawkins’ words, or in Michael Shermer’s words, “We can develop ways to make us feel better, feeling like we have a purpose.” Now you see this just is to say that we can pretend that the universe exists for some purpose, and this is just make-believe. This is the subjective illusion of purpose, but there is on this view no objective purpose for the universe. And we, of course, would never deny that you can’t develop subjective purposes for your life. The point is on atheism they’re all illusory…But you cannot live as though your life were purposeless and meaninglessness and therefore you adopt subjective illusions of purpose to make your life livable. And that’s why I think atheism is not only irrational; it is profoundly unlivable. You cannot live consistently and purposefully within the context of an atheistic worldview.

Ironically, this debate was entitled “Does the Universe Have a Purpose?” Of course, if atheism is true, there was no ultimate meaning, value, or purpose in the debate. In the ultimate scheme of things it makes no difference whether the debate occurred or not (nor does it matter whether or not you listen to it). By showing up to defend the atheistic perspective, Michael Shermer, Richard Dawkins, and Matt Ridley implicitly acknowledge at least some subjective meaning, value, and purpose in the debate. And if atheism is true, subjective meaning is all it could have. Any ultimate significance is illusory.

Conclusion

Jesus said, “This is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent…and for this I have come into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice” (John 17:3, 18:37).

Real meaning, value, and purpose comes from knowing God and making God known. In response to the question, “What is the chief end of man?” the Westminster Confession answers, “To glorify God, and to enjoy Him forever.” But it isn’t enough to simply understand this purpose and assent to its truth. In order for our individual lives to have real significance, we need to willfully align ourselves with this truth, and that means aligning ourselves with Jesus Christ, the author, and perfecter of our faith (Heb. 12:2).

Notes

[1] J.P. Moreland, The God Question: An Invitation to a Life of Meaning (Eugene: Harvest House, 2009), 34-35.

[2] See William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics, 3rd ed. (Wheaton: Crossway, 2008), chapter 2, and On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision(Colorado Springs: David C. Cook, 2010), chapter 2.

[3] Craig, On Guard, 37.

[4] See his essay “The Wise Man Seeks God” available at http://www.apologetics315.com/2010/05/essay-wise-man-seeks-god-by-brian-auten.html.

[5] Kenneth Richard Samples, A World of Difference: Putting Christian Truth-Claims to the Worldview Test (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2007), 217.

[6] Craig, On Guard, 49-50 (his italics).

[7] This debate is available in its entirety here: http://www.apologetics315.com/2010/11/does-universe-have-purpose-audio-debate.html

 


Original Blog Source: http://bit.ly/2H9itoi

By Evan Minton

One common question atheists often ask Christians like me is why we believe in the God of The Bible as opposed to all of these other gods in all of these made up religions. They will ask “You believe in only one God? Why don’t you believe in Thor, or Zeus, or Athena? You claim all these gods don’t exist? Yet you say your god does? How do you tell the difference?”

Actually, this question is one of the first things that made me doubt my own Christian faith. Years ago, I pretty much had no way to tell between Christianity and other religions? How do I know Yahweh is the one true God? If these others are made up, how do I know my God isn’t? Fortunately, The Lord showed me Christian Apologetics and gave me a good way to discern between them. Now, I’m not going to go into all of the evidence for The God Of The Bible right now. If I did, this blog post would be extremely long, just incredibly wordy. Rather, I’m going to link to these arguments and evidence which demonstrate the truth of Christianity, and when you’re done reading this blog post you can click on those links and study the arguments individually if you’d like. The links will be highlighted in blue.

One way to know is The Big Bang itself. According to The Big Bang, the entire universe popped into being out of nothing! And according to people who have done exhaustive studies of the world’s religions (e.g Hugh Ross), the only beliefs that have God creating out of nothing are Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Deism. All other religions have God or gods creating within space and time that have existed from eternity past. So, the very origin of the universe itself narrows it down to 4 possibilities. Moreover, the origin of the universe demonstrates that the existence of the universe must have been brought into being by a causal agent. A causal agent whose existence is spaceless, timeless, immaterial, powerful, uncaused, supernatural and personal (See The Kalam Cosmological Argument).

If the scientific evidence for Intelligent Design goes through (e.g The Fine Tuning Of The UniverseThe Local Fine Tuning, The DNA Evidence, Irreducible Complexity), you can rule out Deism. Because what arguments like the teleological arguments show is that this God is actively shaping the universe and life to make it’s inhabited by creatures. That rules out Deism and fits better with theism.

Moreover, I might add that the Ontological Argument demonstrates that there exists a being much like the God of The Bible. The Ontological Argument, if it goes through, would demonstrate that there exists a being who is Omniscient, Omnipresent, Omnipotent and Omnibenevolent. This contradicts many gods like Thor and Zeus. The only religions consistent with a being like this are the 3 monotheistic religions. Polytheistic gods like Thor are merely superhumans (Stan Lee took advantage of this fact). But they’re not omnipotent or omnipresent or anything like that. The beauty about the Ontological Argument is that it not only demonstrates that God exists but it puts forth all of his superlative qualities which you can’t derive from other arguments from natural theology.

In fact, arguments from natural theology can tell us not just that God exists, but it can demonstrate a lot of attributes about God. Attributes that The Bible describes Him as having. The Kalam Cosmological Argument shows that God is a spaceless, timeless, immaterial, powerful, supernatural and personal agent. The Fine Tuning Arguments (universal and local) demonstrate that God is incredibly intelligent, at least intelligent enough to know how to fabricate a universe suitable for creatures to inhabit. The other teleological arguments (DNA and Irreducible Complexity) do the same thing. The Moral Argument demonstrates that God is morally perfect since it demonstrates that God is the standard by which we measure people to determine just how good or just how evil they really are. It demonstrates that in the absence of God’s existence, there would be nothing we could objectively call good and evil because there would be nothing to compare it with. Who or what exactly are we comparing Hitler or Bin Ladin to when we call them evil?

The Ontological Argument demonstrates God’s superlative qualities (as I’ve already noted above). If it pulls through (that is, if it meets the 3 requirements for being a good argument, which are: The conclusion must follow from the premises by the laws of logic, all of the premises must be true, and we must have good reasons to think that they’re true), if this argument meets those 3 requirements, it demonstrates that there exists a being that is omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, and necessary in its existence (aseity).

These arguments from natural theology/general revelation, when put together, give us powerful reasons to believe in the existence of a Being that very, very closely resembles the being that The Bible describes as God. Moreover, the beautiful thing about natural theology is that you derive this Being’s existence without appealing to any scripture whatsoever. So the atheist can’t accuse you of circular reasoning (appealing to The Bible to prove The Bible). We can conclude that this being exists just from science, and logic alone.

But if you want to get to Christianity and eliminate the other 2 options, one may want to look at the evidence for Christ’s resurrection. For me, Christ’s resurrection settles everything,. If it can be historically established that Jesus made claims to be God, and then rose from the dead, then that is pretty good evidence that He was telling the truth. The resurrection means that God put His stamp of approval on everything Jesus said and did. It means that He is both Messiah and Lord. Therefore, anything contradictory to Christ’s teachings must be false. I happen to think that the historical evidence for Jesus Christ’s resurrection is very powerful. I admonish you to look at the Cerebral Faith blog posts I wrote on this topic. In PART 1, I give the evidence for the 5 minimal facts; (1) that Jesus died by crucifixion, (2), that Jesus’ tomb was found empty, (4) that the disciples believed they saw Jesus alive after his death, (4), that a persecutor named Paul converted on the basis of what he believed was an appearance of the risen Jesus, and (5) that a skeptic named James converted based on what he believed was an appearance of the risen Jesus. In PART 2, I examine which of the explanations best explains those hypotheses and show that only the hypothesis “God raised Jesus from the dead” best explains the 5 facts while naturalistic explanations fail.

But if you want to dive into studying this topic even deeper, I suggest the books “The Case For Christ” by Lee Strobel, “The Case For The Resurrection Of Jesus” by Gary Habermas and Mike Licona, and also “On Guard” by William Lane Craig (Craig’s book also delves into 4 of the natural theology arguments I’ve listed above, but it also has a chapter on Jesus’ claims to deity and a chapter on the evidence for his resurrection).

So there you have. Reasons why I believe in The Biblical God instead of any polytheistic or pantheistic gods. I hope that whether you’re a Christian like me or an atheist, that you will click on the links above and take the time to read those linked articles. If you’re an atheist, it might make a believer out of you. If you’re a Christian, it will likely strengthen your faith. God bless you.

 


For a fuller treatment on this, check out Evan’s book ‘Inference To The One True God: Why I Believe In Jesus Instead Of Other Gods’.

Original Blog Source: http://bit.ly/2qBOgI7

by Natasha Crain

The famous physicist, cosmologist, and author Stephen Hawking died this week. He was widely known as one of the most brilliant scientists of our time.

He was also widely known as an atheist.

In fact, many of the most famous scientists today are atheists.

This point has not escaped the attention of skeptics who often promote the idea that science and God are in conflict. As supporting evidence of that supposed conflict, skeptics often claim that virtually no scientists believe in God. More specifically, they back up their claim by citing a 1998 research study that showed 93 percent of the members of the National Academy of Sciences (an elite scientific organization in the United States) don’t believe in God. That finding caught the media’s attention, and it’s been continually quoted ever since as a known fact about the relationship of religious belief and scientific professions.

For example, atheist neuroscientist and popular author Sam Harris has written:

Although it is possible to be a scientist and still believe in God — as some scientists seem to manage it — there is no question that an engagement with scientific thinking tends to erode, rather than support, religious faith. Taking the U.S. population as an example: Most polls show that about 90% of the general public believes in a personal God, yet 93% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences do not. This suggests that there are few modes of thinking less congenial to religious faith than science is.

My purpose in this post isn’t to dissect Stephen Hawking’s personal religious beliefs. I only refer to him here because his death has once again raised this subject in popular discussion. My purpose is also not to dissect whether God and science conflict (I address this in multiple chapters of Talking with Your Kids about God). My purpose instead is to look at the question of whether it’s true that scientists don’t believe in God and the implications of the answer.

While we know that truth isn’t determined by vote, statistics get people’s attention—and young people especially trust “expert opinion”—so it’s well worth our time as parents to explore this question. When your kids ask why scientists don’t believe in God (because they’ve heard that’s a foregone conclusion), this is the discussion you need to have.

What Do Scientists Believe about God?

This is the subject of Chapter 12 in Talking with Your Kids about God. In that chapter, I explain in detail the five major research studies that have been conducted on this question (with all corresponding references). I’ll briefly summarize the findings here:

  • James Leuba Study (1914) with Edward Larson and Larry Whitham Follow-Up (1996-98): In 1914, it was found that 42 percent of scientists believed in a personal God. Among the scientists Leuba identified as “greater” (leading scientists), the number dropped to 28 percent. In 1996, Larson and Whitham attempted to replicate the study to see how the scientific developments of the twentieth century may have changed religious views amongst scientists. Their results were almost identical: 40 percent said they believed in a personal God. To replicate Leuba’s attempt to survey a subset of elite scientists, Larson and Whitham surveyed the National Academy of Sciences. In that group, belief in a personal God dropped to 7 percent. This is the specific study so often referenced to demonstrate that scientists don’t believe in God.
  • Religion among Academic Scientists Study (2005-8): Sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund surveyed nearly 1700 scientists at 21 elite universities on their views of religion and science. She found that nearly 50 percent identified with a religious label. Importantly, Ecklund conducted statistical analyses to identify which factors were the most significant predictors of religious beliefs and behaviors. She found the strongest predictor of religious adherence to be childhood religiosity.In other words, those scientists raised with a religious affiliation were more likely to be religious as adults, and those raised without religious affiliation were more likely to be irreligious as adults. Ecklund concludes:

It is an assumption of much scholarly work that the religious beliefs of scientists are a function of their commitment to science. The findings presented here show that indeed academics in the natural and social sciences at elite research universities are less religious than many of those in the general public, at least according to traditional indicators of religiosity. Assuming, however, that becoming a scientist necessarily leads to loss of religious commitments is untenable when we take into account the differential selection of scientists from certain religious backgrounds. Our results indicate that people from certain backgrounds (the non-religious, for example) disproportionately self-select into scientific professions.

  • Pew Research Center Study (2009): Findings suggest that scientists are roughly half as likely as the general public to believe in God or a higher power.
  • Religious Understandings of Science Study (2012-15): Ecklund conducted another study which included 574 scientists. In this survey, 36 percent of scientists said, “I know God really exists and I have no doubts about it,” versus 56 percent of the overall sample.

Let’s now consider the implications of these studies.

  1. It’s not true that 93 percent of scientists don’t believe in God.

This frequently quoted statistic refers to just one of several available studies, and there are two good reasons we shouldn’t consider it to be the representative statistic. First, it’s clear from the other research that this finding was an outlier—the other major studies on this subject suggest that 33 to 50 percent of scientists believe in a personal God, with the numbers even greater if we include those who believe more broadly in a higher power. Second, this study was conducted with a unique group—members of the National Academy of Sciences, an organization of about twenty-three hundred scientists who were elected to membership by other members. We could speculate all day about why these particular scientists are less likely to believe in a personal God, but the bottom line is that this organization is not representative of the broader scientific community. The most that can be said from this study is that 93 percent of scientists who are members of the National Academy of Sciences and responded to the survey don’t believe in a personal God. It’s highly inaccurate to suggest that 93 percent of all scientists are atheists because this is not a representative sample.

  1. Correlation does not equal causation.

In statistics, correlation simply means that two variables tend to move in the same direction—in this case, those who are scientists do tend to be less likely to believe in God. This doesn’t mean, however, that being a scientist necessarily causes someone not to believe in God. (Think of it this way: in some parts of the world, it rains almost every Easter, but that doesn’t mean Easter causes it to rain.) If we determined that becoming a scientist did cause people to drop their belief in God, we might have reason to think there is some inherent conflict between the practice of science and theism. But to the contrary, Ecklund’s Religion among Academic Scientists study showed that the irreligious are simply more likely to become scientists in the first place. The available research does not suggest that scientists become irreligious as a consequence of their occupation, though this is what skeptics typically assume. And if becoming irreligious is not a consequence of their occupation, then the whole topic of what scientists believe about God quickly becomes less relevant.

  1. What scientists believe about God ultimately has no bearing on whether God exists.

While we should explore this subject because it’s often raised as a challenge to the truth of Christianity, we must remember that, ultimately, beliefs aren’t true depending on who holds them. They are true because they correspond to reality. Scientists don’t have any more expertise on the reality of God’s existence than anyone else. 

For more background on these studies and a full conversation guide to use with your kids in discussing this subject, see Talking with Your Kids about God pages 125-132.

 


Original Blog Source: http://bit.ly/2DQI3M6

by Luke Nix

Introduction

Several years ago, when I was struggling with science/faith issues, I stumbled upon astrophysicist Dr. Hugh Ross’ book “The Creator and the Cosmos.” He had released the third edition of the book, and many people were recommending it for those with science/faith concerns. I was already somewhat familiar with Dr. Ross’ name since I had read “The Fingerprint of God” in the mid-90s but had not pursued much more investigation (most of the content was way over my head at the time). I decided to pick up a copy of that new book in the mid-2000s and took the time to read through it carefully. I was astounded at the strength of the scientific case Dr. Ross presented for the existence of the God of the Bible.

The book helped me overcome my struggle with science and paved the way for a deeper and more reasonable faith that I still continue to investigate and communicate to others to help them through their intellectual struggles. Not only can I know emotionally and spiritually that Christianity is true, but I can know it intellectually and reasonably. Of course, I have been blogging for quite a few years regarding how to demonstrate the reasonableness and truth of the Christian worldview, and in doing so, I have been providing my readers with chapter-by-chapter summary-style reviews of many of the books that I read.

A couple years ago I decided to begin going back through some of the apologetics books that I read early on, and “The Creator and the Cosmos” was in my stack. Not too long after I made that decision, though, I found out that Dr. Ross was working on a new edition that would add the most current discoveries to his original case (making it even stronger) and address even more challenges to his case that various scientists have proposed since the book’s third edition was published. I decided to hold off on my review until that new edition had been released. Well, IT IS HERE!!!!! And I cannot be more excited for it! In keeping with my usual book reviews, I will provide a chapter-by-chapter summary then provide my recommendations. If you are reading this review on the Faithful Thinkers blog, I have embedded quotes and videos to enhance the review and better communicate the content of the book. Before I get to the summary, let’s start with this short video from Dr. Ross about how his investigation of the cosmos led him to the conclusion that the personal God of the Bible exists and led him to dedicate his life to Jesus Christ.

                                             
Are you ready to see how astronomers and astrophysicists are discovering every day that “the heavens declare the glory of God” (Psalm 19:1)? 

Let’s begin!

Chapter 1: The Awe-Inspiring Night Sky

Dr. Ross begins by describing how, as a young boy who was fascinated with astronomy, he discovered that people, in general, are intrigued with the study of the cosmos. He explains that this is not an empty curiosity but rather a profound one. If the universe had a beginning, then something must have existed to cause it to begin, and if the universe exhibits great detail in its creation, then the life that ultimately resulted must have a purpose in the mind of its Creator. He notes that the study of the cosmos is not merely a scientific pursuit of knowledge of the physical world, but it is fundamentally a philosophical and theological inquiry. Historically different groups of scholars have claimed superior knowledge of the cosmos. Scientists, theologians, and philosophers have seen their own disciplines as superseding any discoveries or claims from the other two. This has caused a lot of conflict in the academy and has placed unnecessary limits on the fruits of studying the cosmos. Dr. Ross encourages, not a separated study of the cosmos by those in these disciplines but, an integrative approach: one that takes the knowledge of all three and aims to combine their knowledge to discover a more complete and precise picture of the whole. By taking this approach, the study of the cosmos ultimately becomes tied to two of the deepest questions of life: what is the meaning of life and what is my purpose in life.

1 image cosmos

Chapter 2: My Skeptical Inquiry

Dr. Ross takes a chapter to recount his own journey. From the age of seven, he had a fascination with astronomy, and his investigation of the cosmos began. By the age of fifteen, he was convinced that the universe had a beginning, and thus a Beginner. For a short time, he believed that the beginner was unconcerned with His creation (a deistic approach), but his studies of world religions in high school informed him that people all over the world tend to believe that their holy books accurately describe reality, including the origins of the universe. Even though he fully expected that all the world’s religions would get the science wrong, he resolved to objectively investigate the claims of the world’s religions regarding the universe’s origins to test if they even had the possibility of being truly authored by the Creator/God of the universe. One-by-one Ross found errors in the various holy books about the universe, eliminating them from the realm of truth; that is until he started investigating the Bible. It took him eighteen months of nightly study to come to the conclusion that it not only contained no errors regarding the universe, but the Bible accurately described features of the universe that no person of the time of authorship (even the latest possible dates) could have possibly known. In fact, he calculated that the Bible is roughly 10^58 times more reliable than the laws of physics. At that point, he was convinced that the Bible was supernaturally inspired by the same Beginner of the universe, and he surrendered his life to Jesus Christ and spreading the Gospel using the evidence provided by the Creator’s creation.

                                               

Chapter 3: Big Bang–The Bible Taught It First

Roughly twenty-five hundred years before big bang cosmology was proposed through theoretical physics or was evidenced by observing the cosmos, the Bible, against all other cosmologies of the contemporary cultures, claimed that the universe had a beginning and was expanding: the two most fundamental features of big bang cosmology. Dr. Ross cites seven passages in the Old Testament and three in the New Testament that state that the universe had a beginning, and seven passages across both Testaments that unequivocally identify God as the cause of the universe. Eleven different passages claimed that the universe was not static but was expanding, and three of them state explicitly that the expansion was taking place by God’s intervention. What makes these passages truly interesting is that some indicate that the expansion is ongoing by God’s sovereign, providential command, while others indicate that God has completed the expansion. According to big bang cosmology, the laws of physics were set (completed), at the creation of the universe, in such a way to ensure the continual expansion of the universe at the proper rates at the proper times to ultimately prepare a home for humans (see Dr. Ross’ book “Improbable Planet: How Earth Became Humanity’s Home” for the details on this painstakingly engineered and beautifully orchestrated process).

                                                 
And taking the cosmological claims even further, the biblical authors add (several times) that the universe is governed by constant laws of physics since the creation event that included the law of decay (second law of thermodynamics- transfer of energy from hot to cold matter). Dr. Ross uses the passages to argue that the Bible also identifies a third fundamental feature of all big bang cosmological models: a constantly cooling universe. None of these concepts were known or even knowable to the ancients except for through divine inspiration by the Creator of the universe, Himself. The fact that scientists are discovering features of the universe recorded only by the writers of the Bible argues powerfully not only for God’s existence, but that He inerrantly inspired the words of Scripture.
Implications of the big bang family of models are generally misunderstood by many theists who stand against the theory. Dr. Ross concludes the chapter by clearing up a couple understandings of big bang cosmology in an effort to alleviate some of the emotional concern about the theory being in conflict with the Bible or the God of the Bible as the Beginner. For more on resolving a literal and historical reading of Genesis with the scientific discoveries, see Dr. Ross’ books “A Matter of Days” and “Navigating Genesis.”

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Chapter 4: Discovery of the Twentieth Century

All hot big bang models predicted that scientists would discover that the universe and all it contains rapidly expanded from a nearly infinitely small volume with a nearly infinitely high temperature. While theoretical physics predicted that some form of big bang cosmology was correct and other indirect evidences existed pointing to the same conclusion, no signature (evidence of this nearly infinitely hot initial volume) had been discovered, until the early 90s. In 1992 the announcement of the big bang theory’s fingerprint was made: the COBE satellite had discovered direct evidence of the cooling of the universe from its initially hot state. Not only did this discovery establish that the universe began from a near-infinitely hot volume, but it also established that the expansion of the universe was incredibly finely tuned.

Dr. Ross uses the analogy of an oven to illustrate both implications of the COBE observation. When an oven is heated, the space closer to it will be hotter while space further from it will be cooler, and when the oven is turned off for an extended period of time, the temperature throughout the room will normalize. COBE measured outer space to be the same temperature in all directions at the same distances, indicating that a source of heat had existed at some point in time. COBE also measured hotter temperatures at further locations, indicating that the source of heat had been “turned off.” This not only confirmed the universe’s beginning as predicted by big bang cosmology (and the Bible before it), but it also falsified several competing beginningless models. Placing the big bang on even firmer evidential ground was the fact that the measured temperature and temperature differences matched a 1940s prediction of the theory.

On the first impression, it may appear that the uniformity of the temperatures raises a problem: how can stars form if the temperature is perfectly uniform throughout the history of the universe? Interestingly enough, though, the temperatures measured by COBE were not perfectly smooth across directions and distances. The variations were small enough that the implications of a beginning stood firmly yet large enough that stars, galaxies, and galaxy clusters could form, and form at a finely-tuned rate necessary for life. As time went on from the initial COBE discovery announcement, more instruments were used to independently confirm the discovery, and more precise measurements were taken that led to the refining (fine-tuning) of the big bang models and galaxy formation models. Since then, numerous observations continue to confirm COBE’s discovery of these predictions of big bang cosmology. As more and more discoveries are made, science continues to confirm the biblical claim that the universe had a beginning caused by a Beginner outside of time and space. The evidence for God as the Creator is getting stronger every day. Dr. Ross continues the chapter going into detail on numerous discoveries that establish the beginning and fine-tuning of the universe.

                                                    

Chapter 5: Twenty-First Century Discoveries- Part I

The previous chapter only covered the discoveries from the 20th century that establishes the beginning and fine-tuning of the universe, which was enough to place them on powerful evidential grounds. As technological breakthroughs continue, the mound of evidence grows. In the next two chapters, Dr. Ross details discoveries of the 21st century that continue to establish the biblical truth of God as Creator and Designer.

While discoveries of the 20th century established that the universe was expanding, discoveries of the 21st century have revealed the rate of expansion. Using type 1a supernovae discovered in the last 20 years, scientists have been able to establish the expansion rate of the universe during the different epochs of the history of the universe. As technology has advanced, these measurements have revealed an extremely finely tuned expansion, and newer technology is expected to reveal more precision in the coming years. When Albert Einstein originally formulated his theory of relativity, it predicted that the universe had a beginning, but that was in direct contradiction to the popular cosmological models of the time. Einstein did attempt to make his theory compatible with beginningless models by adding a “cosmological constant;” however, the discoveries (discussed in the previous chapters) demonstrated that Einstein’s original theory was correct. However, scientists have placed the “cosmological constant” back into the equations, but using different values than Einstein, not in an attempt to avoid a beginning but, to explain the expansion of the universe and maintain the universe’s beginning. This “cosmological constant” is commonly known as dark energy.

Not only is dark energy a problem for naturalism because it necessarily implies that the universe had a beginning, but it necessarily implies that that beginning was too recent in the past for naturalism to explain the origin of life (see Dr. Ross’ book “Origins of Life” for an in-depth study of this challenge) or the diversity of life we see today. As independent discoveries continue to establish that the denial of dark energy’s existence is irrational, dark energy is providing some of the most powerful evidence, not just for the beginning of the universe but, that the universe’s expansion was finely tuned for life. The same evidence that leads to the conclusion that the universe has a beginning, when studied in more depth also reveals fine-tuning to a level of 1 part in 10^122 (that is 10 with 122 zeros after it). To say that scientists have discovered that the universe is “exquisitely designed” is a most spectacular understatement.

Chapter 6: Twenty-First Century Discoveries- Part II

While a cosmic beginning and the cosmic expansion have been overwhelmingly confirmed in these beginning years of the 21st century, several other predictions of big bang cosmology have been put to the test. Big bang cosmology can be tested by making measurements of the amounts of different elements at different epochs of the universe. Dr. Ross explains several independent studies that have yielded confirmed predictions regarding the abundances of helium and deuterium; however, measurements of lithium abundance have missed the mark, indicating incomplete detailing of the current suite of models. Several possible solutions have been proposed, resulting in more detailed big bang models to be tested as technology advances.

Other ways to test big bang models have also only become available in the 21st century. The spatial separation of galaxies over time has provided another test for big bang cosmology. Over time, the general model predicts that galaxies will be further and further apart from one another. As cosmologists observe galaxies further and further away from earth (further back in time, since it takes time for light to reach the telescopes), the galaxies appear closer and closer together gradually as distance increases. Another test would be the predicted rate of expansion over time. Building upon the discussion in the previous chapter, using the fine-tuning of dark energy, big bang models predict the amount that has elapsed since the creation event itself. The time calculated is roughly 13.78 billion years. To test this age, several other independent methods have been used to determine the age as well, and all are consistent within the error bars (±0.26 billion years). If big bang cosmology were incorrect, the ages discovered using independent methods would differ radically not within the error bars of the initial prediction.

Building further upon those confirmed predictions, more predictions are made and can be tested. Specifically, if we know the rate of expansion and the amount of time of the expansion, then a cooling curve can be derived. Using the latest information and technology, the predicted cooling curve has been tested and confirmed by using two independent methods of observing the variation in temperature of the cosmos at different distances (epochs). This next generation of confirmed predictions (predictions arising from previously confirmed predictions) demonstrates the continued confirmation and shear explanatory power of big bang cosmology and, thus, the existence of a Creator and Designer of the universe, just as the Bible claims.

                                                  

Chapter 7: Einstein’s Challenge

This chapter is a short one, almost an “intermission.” Dr. Ross dedicates some space to discussing Albert Einstein’s equations of relativity and how they implied a beginning. He explained that the cosmology of an eternal universe, which he attributes to Immanuel Kant, was accepted by Einstein; thus Einstein believed that his equations were missing a term that would perfectly counter-act all expansion. After Edwin Hubble observed the galaxies moving away, Einstein conceded and removed his additional term. This, however, did not convert Einstein to a theist; he rather accepted that God was the creator but was impersonal and unconcerned with the affairs of His creatures. His primary objection to a personal God is related to God’s sovereignty and man’s moral responsibility. Dr. Ross laments the fact that Einstein did not get to see his “cosmological constant” reinserted (though, at a different value) or all the fine-tuning evidence that his theories had paved the way for scientists to discover, for these may have intrigued Einstein enough to reconsider Christian theism and seek resolution to his theological concerns that stood as a stumbling block between him and Jesus Christ.

Chapter 8: Closing Loopholes: Round One

Of course, Einstein was not the only scientist to resist a finite universe. Many scientific theories, that depended upon the availability of an infinite amount of time, had already been developed and became part of scientific orthodoxy before big bang cosmology was confirmed. The confirmation of big bang cosmology has turned many of these theories on their heads, and in some cases completely falsified them (13.7 billion years renders naturalistic theories of the origin of life impossible- see Dr. Ross’ book “Origins of Life” for an in-depth study of this challenge). Several different naturalistic models have been proposed in an effort to avoid a singular cosmic beginning. The first competing model is the steady-state model.

Simply put, this model holds that the universe has existed into the infinite past. It attempts to counteract the expansion of the universe by positing that matter is constantly being created. Several tests have been conducted to confirm that this simply is not happening, thus falsifying the steady-state model. Another version of the steady state has been proposed, though. This one holds to the universe existing the infinite past but posits that matter is only created in bursts at specific locations within the universe (quasars). Unfortunately for this quasi-steady-state model, the test that is proposed is fully consistent with big bang predictions as well. In fact, the observed densities of quasars at different distances not only shows the quasi-steady-state model incorrect, they match the specific predictions of big bang cosmology. The same observations serve to falsify one model (quasi-steady-state) and confirm its competitor (big bang); thus observations again confirm that the universe had a beginning, just as the ancient biblical authors recorded thousands of years ago.

Chapter 9: Closing Loopholes: Round Two

Even though observations relegated steady-state models to the abyss, many non-theists still wished to avoid a singular, absolute beginning. They hypothesized that perhaps the big bang was just one of many in an infinite series of expansions and contractions of the universe into the infinite past. This new theory would be able to account for all the same evidence that supports the beginning without there being a single beginning. This model, though, required mechanisms to shrink the universe and cause it to bounce back from the compressed volume (not infinitesimally small, as proposed by big bang cosmology, though). Both theoretical and observational evidence demonstrates that neither mechanism exists. In order for the universe to recompress, it would require a considerable amount of matter more than what exists in the universe (even after accounting for exotic matter).
If no mechanism exists to compress, then no mechanism can exist to reexpand the compressed mass. Compounding the problem is the existence of entropy. Entropy would require that each successive “bounce” would produce a universe smaller and smaller. If the universe had been getting smaller from the infinite past, the size of the universe today would be no different from the fully compressed volume. Thus this “oscillating” universe model, as it is commonly called, fails observationally and theoretically not just on these counts but on others that Dr. Ross details.

There does exist a short period of time after the big bang that no technology can observe (from the beginning to when the universe was 10^-43 seconds old). Theoretical physicists use this period of time in the universe’s history to speculate about exotic physics that may ultimately remove the need for a singular beginning or a beginning at all. However, even though they cannot be directly tested, these theories can be indirectly tested. All theories must result in a universe that exhibits the features that scientists observe today, so these speculations can be tested (negatively tested only; they can only be falsified but never confirmed) by comparing their implications to what exists today. Dr. Ross gives several examples of how these speculative theories have been falsified through indirect testing.

Chapter 10: Science Discovers the Creation of Time

If established, the beginning of time would have one of the most significant theological implications. It would require that time had a creator; something that only the Bible, among the world’s “holy” books, unambiguously claims about our world. In the late 1960s, the space-time theorems of general relativity were proposed by a team including none other than Stephen Hawking. Based upon the extensive testing of general relativity (which Dr. Ross spends the majority of the chapter explaining in detail), these theorems have been well established and indicate the big bang was the beginning of not only space but time, as well.
As mentioned above, many attempts have been trying to avoid the beginning by appealing to unknowns within the first moments of the universe’s existence. The hope, by those who oppose a Creator, is that this period of time would allow for the universe, somehow, to be past infinite in age. However, the space-time theorems of general relativity were extended even further back and being based upon already well-established observational evidence, do prove correct, The implications of this extension is that an absolute beginning is required even beyond the initial moments of the universe’s existence. This means that all models, including oscillating models and multiverse models, eventually would require an absolute beginning at some point in time and that the cause of the universe exists beyond the space-time dimensions (transcendent existence). These are discoveries that no “holy book” saw coming (predicted), except for the Bible.

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Chapter 11: A God Outside of Time, But Knowable

Even though the extended space-time theorems established that the universe had a beginning, that means that whatever (or Whoever) caused the universe also created time. In order for cause and effect relationships to exist, time must also exist. The Bible stands alone claiming that while there is a portion of reality in which our time did not exist (e.g., 2 Tim 1:9; Titus 1:2), the Creator was still operating in cause-and-effect relationships (e.g. John 17:24; Ephesians 1:4; 1 Peter 1:20). Dr. Ross explains that to create God exists in, at least, one more dimension of time (to create the dimension of time that our universe operates within) and possibly in more physical dimensions as well. (Dr. Ross refers the reader to his book “Beyond the Cosmos” for a deeper discussion of this possibility and some of the theological questions it may help to answer.) Big bang cosmology establishes that the Creator is transcendent, which Christianity affirms yet other worldviews deny.

One of the requirements of the time-space theorems is that time always moves forward; Dr. Ross states that this really makes time only half a dimension, which requires that anything that is confirmed to it must have a beginning. Many skeptics often challenge God’s existence by asking if everything was created, then who or what created God. This is answered by recognizing that the Creator is not confined to the time half-dimension, which would require a beginning, but since God is not confined to this half-dimension, He does not require a beginning. Skeptics have proposed other possibilities to avoid time’s beginning (to avoid the universe’s needing a cause), and Dr. Ross concludes the chapter by quickly addressing these alternative hypotheses.

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Chapter 12: A Brief Look At A Brief History of Time

In this chapter, Dr. Ross interacts with the conclusions Stephen Hawking offered in his books “A Brief History of Time” and “The Grand Design.” In the first book, Hawking proposes his and James Hartle’s model that appeals to imaginary time to avoid a cosmic beginning and thus the necessity of a Beginner. Beyond the evidentially unwarranted appeal to imaginary time, the model necessarily requires that sometime in the future, the universe will eventually stop expanding and compress back on itself. However, this model cannot be true because the universe does not possess enough matter to allow such a collapse to take place no matter how distant in the future. There have been several attempts to reformulate the model to accommodate the latest evidence, but all appeals have since fallen short of the evidence.

In “The Grand Design,” Stephen Hawking and co-author Leonard Mlodinow appeal to discoveries of extra-solar planets to demonstrate that the earth is not unique but quite common, and they appeal to the multiverse to avoid an absolute beginning to the universe. The claims, if correct, seem to remove the need for a Beginner or a Designer to explain the current state of our universe. Dr. Ross will reserve an entire chapter on the discussion of the multiverse, but he addresses exoplanets here. He explains that of the 3600+ exoplanets that have been discovered so far, none of them are sufficiently like earth (it must exist in all nine habitable zones- discussed in greater detail his book “Improbable Planet“) to support life more advanced than the hardiest of microbes. Dr. Ross explains that for those expecting to discover extra-terrestrial life, the latest discoveries great disappoint. In order for life to exist on another planet, not only must an exact twin of our planet exist, it must exist in the context of an exact solar twin and an exact solar system twin (that would mean that our neighboring planets’ compositions and locations would have to match, as well).

Not only is there the planetary issue for an environment suitable for the origin of life, but there is also the biochemical challenges. Dr. Ross explains that prebiotic chemistry shuts down in the presence of oxygen yet fatal ultraviolet radiation can only be filtered out by oxygen. This presents a problem for the origin of life on earth because studies into the history of our planet demonstrate that the level of oxygen was more than sufficient to prevent prebiotic chemistry at the time in history that the first evidence of life appears. Dr. Ross spends the remainder of the chapter demonstrating how science has provided problems for Hawking’s views not only in observation of the universe but also regarding ideas of knowledge (epistemology).

Chapter 13: A Modern-Day Goliath

Of course, Hawking’s model is not the only challenge to a beginning and design that exist to this day. As the evidence of a Creator has been mounting over the decades, skeptics have been busy looking in all directions for some possible escape from the biblical claim of a Creator and Designer. Quantum mechanics has seemed to provide some promise to this end in four ways. Various appeals to quantum tunneling, a universe from “nothing,” an infinite multiverse, and observer-created reality have all been attempted.

In the first of these options (quantum tunneling, offered by Paul Davies), the proposed mechanism would have to take place in the physical dimension of time before the dimension of time even existed. This proposal also requires that things popping into existence uncaused is a common feature of reality, yet observations of reality demonstrate the very opposite. The second attempt addressed is the model of Lawrence Krauss. This proposal is dependent upon a “hyper” quantum mechanics that is not constrained by the universe yet requires higher dimensions to operate. Among other issues, the big problem with Krauss’ model is that it requires a second hyper-inflationary event that, when combined with the current inflationary event already required by big bang cosmology, does not produce any universe where life is possible. This failure, though, has caused Krauss to resort to the third option: an infinite multiverse.

Some skeptics believe they can escape an absolute beginning and fine-tuning by appealing to an infinite multiverse. The idea of the infinite multiverse is that if an infinite number of universes exist that exhibit an infinite number of different values for the physical constants, then at least one of them will produce life. Unfortunately, this still does not eliminate the need for God for at least five reasons that Dr. Ross describes in detail. The fourth and final option appeals to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. Dr. Ross explains eight ways in which this interpretation violates logic and reality; thus an alternative is necessary. Quantum mechanics currently has ten interpretations that have been seriously proposed, some of which are perfectly compatible with God as both Creator and Designer. Ultimately, quantum mechanics poses no threat to big bang cosmology or to the biblically predicted discovery of the universe’s absolute beginning caused by a Beginner beyond space and time.

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Chapter 14: The Divine Watch-Maker

The design argument offered by William Paley is one of the most popular. He offers that just as no one would posit that a watch was the product of natural processes because it is unreasonable, so too no one should posit that creatures with similar or greater complexity and specificity are the product of natural processes. This argument has been attacked on several different fronts that Dr. Ross addresses in this chapter. The first is that of David Hume. Hume’s issue with the argument is that organisms are not close enough to a watch in function or configuration for the analogy to be a good one. Dr. Ross responds simply by pointing out that Hume was speaking in a period of time when knowledge of organisms’ functions and configurations was extremely limited. Since then, the discoveries have taken knowledge of the function and configurations of organisms (and their individual cells and molecules) well beyond that of watches; thus Paley’s analogy stands firmly.

Darwin offers that his observation of gradual change between generations of the same species of animals, where bad changes are weeded out by the reduced or inability of organisms to reproduce, explains how such complex organisms could arise from simpler organisms. The admission by Darwinists that their mechanisms cannot come into play until the origin of life takes place means that before evolution can be explanatory of complexity and diversity (from a naturalistic perspective), all origin-of-life issues and challenges must be resolved. The just-right requirements of the origin of life keep pushing the origin of life closer to the current day in cosmic history, yet evidence of complex life keeps pushing the appearance of complexity further back. These two are getting so close to each other as to suffocate any undirected hypothesis for the design found in organisms. Dr. Ross also points out that the Bible alone makes sense of the sudden disappearance of new species from the fossil record shortly before the first appearance of humans. God’s final creation was humans, according to Genesis. Thus the Bible predicts this sudden halt in diversification, yet the evolutionary paradigm predicts the exact opposite.

                                              

Gould believes that the evidence of “bad designs” in nature demonstrated that organisms exhibiting such poor features could not have been designed by an intelligent designer. But this argument fails on two accounts. First, as research has continued into the “bad designs,” scientists have discovered that they are actually good designs by themselves or within the context of the overall system they are part of. Second, the divine design does not preclude natural processes, which may allow for some diversification within the observed limits. Thus challenges to William Paley’s argument do not stand, and, again, the biblical view that a Designer created the universe and all within it stands unfalsified and evidentially and logically sound.

Chapter 15: A “Just-Right” Universe

Illuded to in the discussion on the multiverse is the need for an infinite number of universes of an infinite number of values for the constants of physics to allow for just one of them to produce life. In this chapter, Dr. Ross goes into more detail about the fine-tuning of the laws, components, and processes of this universe necessary for advanced life that warrant the necessity of an infinite multiverse for the naturalist. From the subatomic scale to the molecular scale, the types, varieties, and ratios of the various building blocks of our universe have precise values required for not just for life, but for stars, galaxies, and planets to form. The laws of physics that govern the behavior of these components also must be precisely finely tuned within a large range of possibilities, again, just for stars, galaxies, and planets to form. Dr. Ross describes only a few of these different values in this chapter. The ones that he chose, though, establish firmly why naturalists are compelled to agree with, at least, the appearance of fine-tuning of this universe for life. He mentions that 140 different values have been discovered to be required and precisely finely-tuned; otherwise life would be impossible, over the decades, and the trend continues.

Different skeptics have responded in different ways to the compelling evidence of the fine-tuning. Dr. Ross includes several pages loaded with quotes from various astrophysicists, who have studied the values, who recognize the appeal to intelligent agency (indirectly and directly) to explain the presence of so many features and the precision of the fine-tuning. Of course, not all astrophysicists grant a Designer (of some sort). Some insist on naturalistic explanations. All the arguments for these alternatives to God fall under one (or more) of five different arguments. Dr. Ross takes each one and addresses the essential features that render them untenable as challenges to fine-tuning. The last of the five challenges that Dr. Ross addresses focus on the model presented by Frank Tipler. After demonstrating the various ways that the model fails, Dr. Ross concludes the discussion and the chapter by rejoicing that Tipler eventually accepted the theological implications of big bang cosmology and accepted Christ as a result of the evidence that God put forth in His creation.

                                                 

Chapter 16: Responding to Nonempirical, Nontheistic Models

Given all the physical and empirical evidence of the God of the Bible presented in the pages of this book, many skeptics have resorted to using nonempirical reasons to justify their skepticism. It is common (as discussed above) for the skeptic to appeal to either what is not currently known (other physics) or what is unknowable (complete speculation) to rescue their denial of God from being totally illogical. Some skeptics use circular reasoning in their models to attempt to escape a cosmic beginning (they begin with a cosmological model that precludes a beginning then uses it as evidence of a lack of a beginning). Another tactic is the requirement of 100% certainty or absolute proof (the requirement that all conceivable questions and challenges must be answered) before acceptance of the conclusion of God’s existence is accepted. If this kind of proof were required before we were willing to believe things in everyday life, living and even relationships would be impossible.

A common skeptical challenge to God’s existence is that theists are simply inserting “God” where there is a lack of knowledge- “God” is merely a mechanistic gap-filler to explain how something happened when the “real” mechanism has not yet been discovered. Interestingly enough, naturalists do the same; they insert “nature” where mechanisms have not yet been discovered (examples are given above). Dr. Ross explains that, for both sides, there is no guarantee that the gap in knowledge will be filled or not filled. Ongoing research has revealed natural mechanisms, and ongoing research has revealed the impossibility of natural mechanisms (as described thoroughly above regarding attempts to erase the cosmic beginning). Dr. Ross explains that even if gaps seem to be filled, they are never completely filled, so gaps in our knowledge will always exist.

Even though Dr. Ross has shown throughout this book, when it comes to cosmology the trend of shrinking gaps is on the side of the biblical God while the trend of enlarging gaps is on the side of naturalism, there exists other areas where these trends continue: the origin of life and creating life in the lab. Dr. Ross summarizes some of the latest information in these fields to make his case (more detail can be found in the books “Origins of Life” and “Creating Life In The Lab,” respectively). Dr. Ross encourages the skeptic to recognize and follow where the trend of the evidence is leading: to the biblical God.

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Chapter 17: Earth: The Place for Life

Dr. Ross explains that the universe, as a whole, is not the only scale at which fine-tuning is detectable. Fine-tuning has been discovered at the scales of the galaxy-cluster, galaxy, star, solar system, and planet. The right type and size of a galaxy are necessary. It must be a spiral galaxy (which removes most galaxies in the cosmos from consideration), and it cannot be too big or too small. The galaxy cluster must also not be too densely populated with other galaxies, which would gravitational destruction of the life site, or too sparsely populated, which would prevent the spiral structure of the host galaxy from being maintained for the proper amount of time for life to originate and continue. The host star must also be located at the right spot between the spiral arms of the galaxy and maintain this location as the galaxy rotates, to avoid gravitational disturbances from other stars in the galaxy. This means that two+ star systems are ruled out as well. The mass of the star must be just right, for if it is too massive it would burn too quickly and if it is not massive enough it would flare too much. The mass also affects the zone around the star that the host planet may reside, which if too close or too far has its own set of pitfalls for life.

Because of these constraining requirements for carbon-based life, some scientists have speculated that perhaps carbon-based life is not the only possible type of life. However, the only other elements that have the possibility of being a basis for life are either too rare, too poisonous, or are unstable with a large number of chemical bonds. This means that the life-site must be able to support the origin and maintenance of carbon-based life. Scientists have discovered nine different “habitable zones” (physical locations) that the host site must reside in simultaneously. The only place where life can originate and be maintained is the locations where all nine zones overlap. Dr. Ross lists out each of these zones and refers the reader to his book “Improbable Planet” for a detailed discussion of them.

                                       

Improbable Planet from RTB: MEDIA on Vimeo.

To add to the fine-tuning of the site for life, the planetary neighbors and the moon must also be finely-tuned. The neighboring planets must be the right size and distance to be able to shield the life site from most life-exterminating collisions but not massive enough and/or close enough to interfere with the gravitational orbit of the site around its host star. Yet, they do need to allow one exterminating collider (what created our moon) before life originates in order to set up the site for maintaining life (plate tectonics, delivery of vital poisons, and recycling nutrients). The list of features that must be finely-tuned just goes on and on in this chapter. Outside the work of a purposeful Mind behind this finely-tuned project (that is, life), believing that we are here by natural processes alone scientifically and philosophically defy credulity. It is only the work of a purposeful Creator and Designer, who desires to be known that scientists even exist to discover the power, beauty, and majesty in our cosmos that reflects its Creator. This chapter certainly stands on its own to establish fine-tuning, but for those who wish to go even deeper to discover levels of fine-tuning  beyond the scope of this chapter, check out Dr. Ross’ book-length treatments, “Why The Universe Is The Way It Is” and “Improbable Planet: How Earth Became Humanity’s Home.”

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Chapter 18: Extradimensional and Transdimensional Powers

Throughout this book, Dr. Ross has shown how scientific evidence leads to the conclusion that the Cause of the universe is transcendent and exists and operates outside of time and our familiar dimensions of length, width, and height. The Bible, as explained in the first chapters, identifies God as the Cause of the universe. But the Bible doesn’t stop at describing God simply as the Creator; it reveals much more about God’s character, including some attributes that are difficult to understand. Some of these include His triune nature and His simultaneous distance from and nearness to humanity. Dr. Ross explains that while these concepts may seem impossible to comprehend and thus causes us to doubt His existence, these attributes can make sense within the expanded existence of additional spatial dimensions and at least one more time dimension. Dr. Ross uses these two examples to demonstrate that the apparent difficulties in God’s character or interaction with the universe are not valid reasons to doubt His existence, and our understanding of the Creator’s ability to act within extra dimensions provide a possible way to resolve the apparent difficulties.

Chapter 19: The Point

Dr. Ross concludes by answering the question of why God has chosen this generation to be the beneficiary of all the evidence presented here and not previous generations. He explains that it appears that God gives more evidence-based upon the level of resistance to Him in culture. He explains that with all the extra time and comfort of this generation compared to previous generations, this generation tends to credit themselves with these great accomplishments and ignore the Creator and Sustainer of the universe. This revelation of stronger and stronger evidence of the Creator is presented to counteract the prideful attitude of today’s culture. But not every member of our generation thinks this way. Many are willing to look at the evidence presented and follow it to where it leads with an attitude of humility. Dr. Ross reminds the reader that the Creator will draw near to and reward those who earnestly seek Him (Hebrews 11:6). Christians can use the evidence that God has revealed through the study of the heavens to strengthen their own faith and to show the honest seeker the love and forgiveness of Jesus Christ.

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Reviewer’s Thoughts

As I alluded to in the introduction, this “The Creator and the Cosmos” was an indispensable tool that Christ used to help me resolve struggles that I had between what I heard scientists were discovering about our universe (the big bang) and my Christian faith. Not only has God turn naturalistic and atheistic arguments on their heads, He has demonstrated through His creation that His Word is true, inerrant, and authoritative. I love how Dr. Ross presented the evidence for each one of these. His approach of providing evidence upon evidence upon evidence upon evidence for both the beginning of the universe (what begins to exist must have a beginner) and the design of the universe (what is designed must have a designer) is compelling, to say the least, and his tone with which he presents his case is confident yet humble.

As he concludes his discussion in each chapter, Dr. Ross always brings the reader back to the God of the Bible. He presents the latest discoveries of scientists and shows how they demonstrate God as the Creator. He does not shy away from seemingly powerful challenges and shows how those challenges, when investigated more deeply, either come apart or actually make a case for God even stronger. I love how he concludes the book with a call to both the believer and the unbeliever. To the believer, Dr. Ross encourages them to use the evidence from God’s creation to provide to the unbeliever “a reason for the hope that they have…with gentleness and respect.” He invites the unbeliever to follow that evidence where it leads and surrender their life to their Creator and Savior.

I have always loved watching scientific documentaries that describe how the cosmos works, but I always felt uncomfortable when origins began to be discussed. Since reading “The Creator and the Cosmos” for the first time, I have not watched those documentaries the same. Every time a feature of the universe is described, I now see multiplied evidence of the universe’s beginning, of its intricate fine-tuning for humanity, and of its awesome beauty: all God’s handiwork. This book has turned nearly every scientific documentary into a tool to strengthen my faith and demonstrate to the scientifically minded skeptic the evidence for God as our Creator. This book had a tremendous impact on my faith, my life, and my witness for Christ. Any Christian bookshelf is incomplete without a copy of “The Creator and the Cosmos.”

I want to leave you with one more video. This video traces a prediction of big bang cosmology that Dr. Ross pointed out that would confirm the universe had a beginning (and a Beginner). This prediction was recently confirmed by observational evidence. When pressed by his fellow physicists, listen carefully to anti-theist Dr. Lawrence Krauss’ final response:

                                         
For those who want to continue to mass the evidence for God’s existence from the cosmos, follow up “Creator and the Cosmos” with these books:

For those specifically concerned about big bang cosmology (not evolution) and a literal, historical interpretation of Genesis 1-3, check out these books:

 


Original Blog Source: http://bit.ly/2pBGg8C

By Brian G. Chilton

Last week, notable physicist Stephen Hawking died. Hawking was known for his brilliant work as a physicist, especially working with black holes, the big bang, and for his exploration of the so-called Theory of Everything (a theory that is purported to hold the glue to the four major laws of the universe). In addition, Hawking was known for one additional thing: his atheism. This has led many people to inquire, “Why does it seem that so many notable scientists are atheists?” While I do not believe that all notable scientists are atheistic in their worldview, this does lead one to ask if there are any good reasons for believing in God’s existence.

While I do not claim to hold the brilliance of Hawking, I was one who was led into the mire of agnosticism earlier in life. Tampering with a theistic-leaning-agnosticism, I was open to the idea that God could exist, I only didn’t know if there were good reasons for accepting God’s existence. Furthermore, if God existed, I wasn’t sure that one could know that God was personable and that he could be known in any certain religion. While the latter questions are things I will cover in later articles, suffice it for now, one needs to ask, “Are there good reasons for believing in God?” Among other issues, five major arguments or evidence, if you will, led me to a strong belief in God’s existence. Counting down from the fifth to the first, the following are the issues that led me to become a strong theist.

#5: Moral Argument

If you really think deeply about it, isn’t is strange that the strongest proponents of social change and ethical behavior are those who do not hold to God’s existence? I am certainly not saying that Christians have not led to social change. Charles Spurgeon and John Wesley both vocally opposed slavery. Nevertheless, it is strange that atheists fight for social change because their worldview does not support objective morality. I am not saying that atheists cannot be good people. I have known many fantastic people who adhere to atheism. I am saying that atheism cannot sustain objective morality because if God does not exist, then all of humanity is nothing but random molecules in motion.

If morality is objective—that is, there are things that can be considered right and wrong, then there must be an objective lawgiver. In essence, I have described the moral argument. Think about a speed limit sign. You are driving down the road, and you see a sign with the big numbers 35 on the white rectangular sign. You may not agree that the speed limit should be 35 miles-per-hour. Nevertheless, some lawgiver did. The sign did not magically appear. Rather, someone decided that the particular stretch of the road upon which you are traveling should only maintain that speed. If there are morals, then someone must have set them in place. In addition, morality points to the importance of life. All of this is only true if God exists.

#4: Consciousness Argument (NDEs).

Consciousness argues for God’s existence, especially if the mind is shown to be separate from the body. That is, if there is an immaterial self (otherwise known as the soul), then spiritual entities exist. The mounting evidence in favor of near-death experiences (i.e., NDEs) demonstrates the reality of the spiritual self. While space does not allow for me to fully engage with this issue here, plenty of material is available which describes the reality of these experiences and how it demolishes the concept of materialism (i.e., the idea that only the physical world exists and nothing else). While NDEs do not necessarily prove the existence of God, it does show that the idea of the Holy Spirit, angels, demons, and the like are not as far-fetched as the skeptic might think.

#3: Design (or Teleological) Argument.

My dad used to have a saying that went, “If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, swims like a duck, and flies like a duck; then chances are likely that you are looking at a duck.” The more I learn about the universe, the more I understand how much intricate design the universe possesses. The universe is full of design. Everything from the way gravity and the universal forces operate[1] to the vastness of the universe itself[2] illustrates not only the design found in the universe but that the universe was designed to support sentient beings like us. If something appears to be designed, then it is logical to infer that its design and structure came from a designer.

#2: Cosmological Argument.

The idea of a causal relationship is at the center of science. That is, every effect must have an underlying cause. This is the heartbeat of science. Yet, this heartbeat seemingly flatlines with the atheist notion that the universe somehow spontaneously created itself. Cosmological arguments for God indicate that if the universe had a beginning, then it is rational to imply that a Creator brought forth creation into existence. For creation to bring itself into existence, creation must be considered to be a conscious self-existent thing. How so? Any time a process of decisional action is placed upon a certain thing, that thing is anthropomorphized. That is to say; we make that thing alive. Evolutionists often do this with the process of evolution itself with claims like “Evolution decided this or that.” But, how can a mindless process decide anything?

William Lane Craig has popularized a brilliant argument called the kalam cosmological argument which goes as follows:

“1) Whatever begins to exist has a cause.

2) The universe began to exist.

3) Therefore, the universe has a cause.”[3]

“But, wait,” one may infer, “if there is a multiverse, doesn’t this get around the problem?” Unfortunately, for the materialist, the Borg-Vilenkin-Guth theorem “closed the door on that possibility.”[4] All physical universes, including a multiverse, must have a finite past, meaning that even a multiverse must have a beginning. Thus, one is left with one of two possibilities: either eternal non-existent nothingness (which means the absence of anything including vacuums) brought about something from nothing, or an eternal Someone brought something from nothing. For me, the latter is MUCH more intellectually satisfying.

#1: Information Argument

The last argument is not an official argument. Rather, it is something I call the information argument. It came to me that any process or program must contain information. Information requires a programmer. The universe contains programs and processes that require information. Therefore, the universe must have a Programmer—that is, God. I am not an evolutionist. Nevertheless, even if evolution were true, it seems to me that this process could not have created itself. How does mindless nothingness come up with anything anyhow? It is nothing, and it is impersonal. So, how does mindless nothingness do anything? It can’t. Consider the information found in DNA and the information found in the processes and programs of the universe. To claim that it came from nothing and no one and simply arranged itself would be like Luigi telling Mario that their virtual world needed no programmers. It is utterly absurd!

A cumulative case considering these five pieces of information and much more show—at least to my mind—the absolute necessity of God. I have to agree with Anselm of Canterbury in his 1078 work Proslogion that God is that which nothing greater can be conceived. How true!

Notes

[1] Norman L. Geisler and Frank Turek, I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist (Wheaton: Crossway, 2004), 98-110.

[2] Hugh Ross argues that even the vastness of the universe is important for two reasons: the production of life-essential elements and the rate of expansion. See Hugh Ross, Why the Universe is the Way It Is (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008), 33-34.

[3] William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics, 3rd ed (Wheaton: Crossway, 2008), 111.

[4] Ibid., 150.


Brian G. Chilton is the founder of BellatorChristi.com and is the host of The Bellator Christi Podcast. He received his Master of Divinity in Theology from Liberty University (with high distinction); his Bachelor of Science in Religious Studies and Philosophy from Gardner-Webb University (with honors); and received certification in Christian Apologetics from Biola University. Brian is currently in the Ph.D. program in Theology and Apologetics at Liberty University. Brian is a full member of the International Society of Christian Apologetics and the Christian Apologetics Alliance. Brian has been in the ministry for over 15 years and serves as the pastor of Huntsville Baptist Church in Yadkinville, North Carolina.

Original Blog Source: http://bit.ly/2Ghlshg

By Terrell Clemmons

Last night my 11-year old daughter Sally asked me if I’d like to watch “Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking” with her. How could a mom refuse that invitation? So we cozied up in our jammies and tuned in. It was a great show, and highly educational. But not in the way you might think.

The subject of this, the first installment of a series on the Discovery Channel hosted by Hawking, was Aliens. The show opens with Hawking alone in an empty room in his wheelchair. We hear his computerized voice say,

Hello. My name is Stephen Hawking, physicist, cosmologist, and something of a dreamer. Although I cannot move, and I have to speak through a computer, in my mind, I am free.

Another narrator picks up from there,

Free to explore the universe and ask the big questions. Such as, Do aliens exist?

The question, Hawking says, cuts to the heart of how we see our place in the universe. “Are we alone?” He thinks probably not, even though scientists have been looking and listening out for about forty years to no avail. The narrator continues, speaking for Hawking,

The possibilities are infinite. How do we know where to look?

The answer brings us back home to Earth, where the only known examples of life exist. From there, Hawking explains what is currently known about the origin of life on Earth:

Exactly what triggered life here is still a mystery, but there are several theories.

He presents two. The most common theory is that life began purely by accident in pools of primordial soup. Images on the screen evoke Darwin’s “warm little pond,” teeming with amino acids randomly bumping into one another for eons and eons until just the right combination of circumstances caused just the right bump:

It somehow just happened … the ultimate lucky break that started the chain of life.

That’s the first theory. The other one is an

intriguing idea, called Panspermia, which says that life could have originated somewhere else and have been spread from planet to planet by asteroids.

Let’s pause there. Panspermia, as I pointed out in this article from Salvo 11, falls within the boundaries of Intelligent Design theory (ID), with which regular Salvo readers are familiar.

I explained Panspermia and ID to Sally. It took about one minute, and she grasped it well enough. Then we re-wound the recording to listen again to Hawking’s musings about the first, and “most common,” theory. He admits the improbability of it,

It is extremely unlikely that life could spontaneously create itself, but I don’t think that’s a problem with this theory. It’s like winning a lottery. The odds are astronomical, but … someone hits the jackpot.

“Yes, Sally,” I said, “but that’s because someone outside the system created the lottery, and funded it so that it could be there in the first place.”

Light bulbs went off immediately. “Ah-HAH,” she laughed out loud. “I didn’t think of that, but that makes sense!” We laughed together for a moment then watched the rest of the show.

The point I’d like to make is she’s a 6th grader, and she’s capable of thinking with a free mind, taking in competing theories about something, and, to a certain extent, analyzing them. This is how critical thinking skills are developed. But as this Crosshairs, also from Salvo 11, points out, wherever the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) gets its way, teachers are prohibited from informing students about competing scientific theories concerning the origin of life, including the one offered, though not by name, as a valid theory by no less a science luminary than Stephen Hawking. (The NCSE also opposes students being informed of different views concerning global warming, but that’s another issue for another post.)

Stephen Hawking is an amazing and inspiring man, and we enjoyed watching his show. I’d like to focus on that ideal of a free mind and note two things. First, the NCSE, by intentionally ignoring ID (and vehemently opposing it when active ignorance is no longer an option), limits free inquiry and hinders, rather than advances, science. They do our children a disservice.

Second, while Hawking does believe that alien life likely exists, including the life of superior intelligence, he allows no room for the possibility that that intelligence might be a supernatural being. In so doing, I suggest he limits himself and his scientifically brilliant mind more than he realizes. To limit experimental science to only those things which can be seen, heard, and touched is reasonable. To limit your mind and imagination, in the same manner, hinders free inquiry.

Even a 6th grader can understand that.

This post first appeared in the Salvo Signs of the Times blog. (By the way, a very interesting discussion ensued. If you like open discussions, check it out.)

 


Original Blog Source: http://bit.ly/2pbiEaU

By Terrell Clemmons

The Quantum Leap

Early in 2009, the International Year of Darwin got underway in Shrewsbury, England, the birthplace of Charles Darwin. As part of the celebration marking both Darwin’s 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his seminal work, On the Origin of Species, a sculpture was unveiled in Shrewsbury’s Mardol Quay Gardens. Nearly forty feet high, sixty feet long, and weighing over 200 tons, the structure, named Quantum Leap, resembles a gigantic slinky placed on the ground like an upside down ‘U.’ Darwin coordinator, Jon King, explains, “What we wanted was an iconic structure – something that was big was bold, but something that could be interpreted in different ways.” In an irony apparently lost on its celebrants, the name ‘Quantum Leap’ makes a fitting metaphor for the thinking of contemporary Darwinists.

Charles Robert Darwin began his career in the summer of 1831 when he boarded the H.M.S. Beagle on a four-year surveying mission. The budding naturalist had studied a bit of medicine and divinity at Cambridge, but geology and nature interested him most. During his five-week stay on the Galapagos Islands Darwin was particularly struck by the varieties of plant and animal life on the different islands.

A Paradigm is Born

On return, he took up pigeon breeding and discovered that with selective breeding, he could produce a variety of pigeons from a common rock pigeon. Like any curious scientist, Darwin began to speculate. What if, over time, little changes added up to big changes? And if random variations arose along the way, could not entirely new species come into existence? If the changes had enough time to accumulate, and if changes that failed to meet the requirements for survival died out, then the result could be a multiplicity of organisms adapted to their surroundings. This extrapolation from observed variations among species to adaptation and survival of the fittest came to be known as the Law of Natural Selection.

Darwin later put forth his ideas in On The Origin of Species, which reportedly sold out on its first day of publication in 1859. Though Darwin stopped short of atheism – in his autobiography he called himself an agnostic, and in fact never addressed the origin of life in any of his books, the intimation that life could have freely emerged, independent of any pesky notion of God, took on a life of its own, and within a century Darwinism, or ‘Evolution as the Explanation of Everything,’ would become the reigning paradigm of science.

Questioning the Premise

But is this paradigm itself a scientifically established fact? That was the question raised by a surprise entrant to the creation/evolution debate. Phillip E. Johnson, neither a theologian nor a scientist but a professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley, entered the ring in 1991 with Darwin on Trial, a lawyer-like examination in which he weighed the evidence for Darwinism and found it insufficient to support the conclusion. In Darwin on Trial, Johnson drew out the suspiciously sequestered fact that Darwinism presupposes a naturalistic worldview. Naturalism, as a worldview, says that nature or matter is all there is; the supernatural does not exist or, if it does, is entirely irrelevant to life in the natural realm. Johnson deftly pointed out that naturalism is not a scientifically deduced fact but rather a philosophical presupposition.

The first result of Johnson’s contribution was to expose the atheistic scientists’ philosophical presupposition of naturalism and separate it from their science. Like the lad saying the emperor has no clothes, he identified the philosophy masquerading as science and pointed it out. More far-reaching, though, Johnson gave birth to the scientific movement of intelligent design theory (ID).

The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, and not by an undirected process such as natural selection. ID does not begin with the book of Genesis, nor does it address the question of who the intelligent cause might be, and for that reason, it’s been criticized by some creation scientists, who believe the study of creation shouldn’t be divorced from the Creator.

Three Facts of Life Evolution Fails to Explain

But ID provocatively challenges Darwinism’s overreaching claims. Here are three major problems for which Darwinian Evolution supplies no answer (but ID does):

(1) The Initiation of life. Natural selection says that evolution favors one already existing organism over another, but it says nothing about how those organisms came into existence in the first place. In The Selfish Gene, atheist zoologist Richard Dawkins ponders how the first living molecule might have formed. His speculative language suggests we “imagine” or “suppose” how it “could” or “might” have happened. “It was exceedingly improbable,” he concedes and says science has no idea how it happened. But he’s admitted he’s open to one possibility, that life on Earth was seeded from outer space. Seriously. The theory is called Panspermia, and, setting aside the implied drift from empirical science to science fiction, its mere suggestion reveals the dearth of working theories of abiogenesis, or how life got started without a Starter.

(2) The Information of life. The information content of DNA is mind-boggling. The DNA molecule for the single-celled bacterium E. coli contains enough information to fill a whole library of encyclopedias. Geneticists are still learning how to read the coded chemistry, but evolutionary science has no plausible theory as to how random processes can produce so complex, specific, and detailed a set of instructions.

DNA precipitated the undoing of one prominent atheist’s naturalistic worldview. In December of 2004, Antony Flew, one of the world’s leading philosophers of atheism for half a century, dropped an intellectual bombshell on the scientific community when he announced that he had come to believe there is a God. The 81-year-old British professor said his life had always been guided by the principle of Plato’s Socrates: “Follow the evidence, wherever it leads,” and that he had arrived at this startling conclusion after studying DNA. “The enormous complexity by which the results [DNA] were achieved a look to me like the work of intelligence.”

(3) The Irreducible Complexity of life. An irreducibly complex system is one involving interrelated parts or subsystems, all of which are necessary for the system to function. Given the technology of his day, Charles Darwin believed a simple cell was only a little blob of protoplasm, and he envisioned it emerging spontaneously “in some warm little pond.” Still, he anticipated the potential difficulty of irreducible complexity. “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications,” he wrote, “my theory would absolutely break down.”

Too bad Darwin never met Dr. Michael Behe. A lifelong Catholic, Dr. Behe says he believed the standard story he was taught in school about evolution until he read Evolution: A Theory in Crisisby agnostic geneticist Michael Denton. “I was shocked because I had never heard a scientist question Darwin’s theory before. And here I was an associate professor of biochemistry, and I didn’t have any answers for his objections.” At that point, Dr. Behe realized he’d accepted the Darwinian theory, not because of compelling evidence, but for sociological reasons. “That’s what I was supposed to believe,” he said.

Dr. Behe went on to explore cellular life and ultimately concluded its great complexity could never have come about by random and unguided processes as Darwinism requires. His research culminated in Darwin’s Black Box, in which he describes in elegant detail several microbiological systems, all of them intricately and irreducibly complex.

Questioning the Quantum Leap

“There is something fascinating about science,” Mark Twain, a contemporary of Darwin, once quipped. “One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of facts.”

He could have been referring to the Darwinists. Keep in mind that the starting point one chooses when it comes to the origin of life is not a question of science but of philosophy or, if you will, faith. Ultimately, we choose to adopt one worldview or another, and that involves making a faith choice. Darwin assumed that God – if he existed at all – was irrelevant, and then concluded that natural selection must have been the mechanism by which life developed into its present form. His intellectual descendants effectively consecrated his hypothesis, decreed Darwinism the principle canon of science, and began interpreting all data accordingly.

ID differs from Darwinian Evolution in that it allows for the possibility of an outside agent. It begins from a different philosophical starting point and asks, “Where does the evidence lead?” As technology advances, the three ‘I’s of life – initiation, information, and irreducible complexity – pose ever-growing difficulties for evolutionists. Michael Behe summed up his inquiry this way, “We are told by ‘Science’ with a capital ‘S’ that the universe is just matter and energy in motion. But it turns out that actual evidence of science does not necessarily support that philosophical claim.”

To Behe and other ID scientists, life looks more and more like an outside job.

This article first appeared in The Lookout and was reprinted in Salvo Winter 2009, Issue 11.

 


Original Blog Source: http://bit.ly/2I4cnXb

By Terrell Clemmons

The Wall Street Journal ran an article in its Life & Style section a few weeks back called, “Man vs. God.” They had commissioned Karen Armstrong and Richard Dawkins to address the question, Where does evolution leave God? You can read the article here.

If you’re familiar with an outspoken atheist, Richard Dawkins, you won’t be surprised at his take. Evolution is. God isn’t. End of story.

Karen Armstrong’s response, though, was more artistic. She spoke of two complementary ways of arriving at truth, which the Greeks called mythos and logos. Both were recognized by scholars as legitimate. Logos was reason, logic, intellect. But logos alone couldn’t speak to the deep question human beings ask like, What is the meaning of life? And, Why do bad things happen to good people? For that, she said, people turned to mythos – stories, regardless of whether or not they were true, that helped us make sense out of the difficulties of life. They were therapeutic. We could think of them as an early form of psychology. Here’s what she said:

“Religion was not supposed to provide explanations that lay within the competence of reason but to help us live creatively with realities for which there are no easy solutions and find an interior haven of peace; today, however, many have opted for unsustainable certainty instead. But can we respond religiously to evolutionary theory? Can we use it to recover a more authentic notion of God?

“Darwin made it clear [that] we cannot regard God simply as a divine personality, who single-handedly created the world. This could direct our attention away from the idols of certainty and back to the ‘God beyond God.’ The best theology is a spiritual exercise, akin to poetry.”

Here’s how I understand what she’s saying: Not only is the truth of any religious story irrelevant, it is incorrect to believe any account concerning God as objectively true. To do so is to construct an idol of certainty. How do we know that? Because of the certainty of Darwinian Evolution.

Her response, at the bottom, isn’t very different from the atheist’s. Evolution is. God isn’t. But some of us like to imagine that he is.

The frontrunner in “Man vs. God” according to the Wall Street Journal appears to be unanimous: Man. I’d love to have the platform of the Wall Street Journal, but since I don’t, I’ll just toss out my piece here: God is.

I suggest a third way of knowing truth – revelation. Because if there is a God, he can reveal himself if he so chooses. I like the ideas of mythos and logos. Some people come to believe in God through the portal of mythos. Rituals, stories, and artistic expressions can communicate to the soul in ways words can’t. Others come to know God through the portal of logos. Long time atheist intellectual, Antony Flew renounced his atheism a few years ago after seeing the complex language of DNA. “Intelligence must have been involved,” he said.

But revelation is a whole new realm, and my personal opinion is it only comes to those who want to know. “You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart,” God said. The real question is, Do you want to know?

For all my friends out there who do believe, I’d love to hear how you came to that place.  Logos? Did God later reveal himself to you in a supernatural way? I suspect there are some great stories that are well worth being told. Here’s a platform. Would you tell it? Or if you don’t want it posted, send it to me in an email.

I believe the winner of Man vs. God will ultimately be God. What do you think?

 


Original Blog Source: http://bit.ly/2I5yVGS

By Natasha Crain

In response to the latest tragic school shooting, social media is on the warpath against anyone who dares to offer “thoughts and prayers” for the situation.

Popular articles feature headlines like, “Everyone Is Finally Realizing ‘Thoughts And Prayers’ Are Not Saving Our Kids” and “People Sick of ‘Thoughts and Prayers’ Demand Action After Florida School Shooting.”

The hashtag #thoughtsandprayers is trending on Twitter, with scathing tweets about how worthless thoughts and prayers are.

My own Facebook newsfeed is filled with similar posts and comments.

Scrolling through these articles and social media posts, I can’t help but wonder how many people who make such comments understand the Christian worldview and the role of prayer within it. The online commentary often reflects a serious misunderstanding of what Christians believe.

With that in mind, I’m writing this post for two reasons. First, if you’re a regular reader of my blog, this is an important subject to discuss with your kids. The war on “thoughts and prayers” is one they need to understand given the unfortunate frequency with which this subject is arising. Second, I hope non-Christians will take the time to read this and better understand why being “sick of thoughts and prayers” because shootings still happen doesn’t make sense if you know what Christians believe.

Let’s start here: the phrase “thoughts and prayers” lumps two completely different things together.

The “thoughts and prayers” verbiage became part of our cultural lexicon because people wanted a way to request help and/or care from a mixed audience of religious and non-religious listeners. But just thinking something—no matter how charitable those thoughts may be—does nothing. This is something that Christians and non-Christians should all be able to agree on. “Sending thoughts” is simply an expression of solidarity with no practical consequence.

Now, some people would say, “There’s no difference between those inconsequential thoughts and prayer. Thoughts do nothing, and prayers do nothing. That’s the point.”

If God doesn’t exist, then that’s true. People are praying to a supernatural being who isn’t there. By saying, “I’m sick and tired of thoughts and prayers because they don’t matter,” you’re basically just stating you don’t believe God exists. Fair enough. In that case, it makes more sense just to say, “I don’t believe in God, so I don’t pray as part of my response, but here’s what I think we should do…”

However, there’s no reason to be sick and tired of Christians praying to the God you don’t believe in unless you hold the faulty assumption that Christians see prayer as an alternative to other actions and you’re resentful of that presumed choice. That leads me to the next point.

Christians expect to pray and take other action.

When Christians say, “We’re praying about this,” it doesn’t mean we don’t think anything else should be done. We don’t, for example, say we’re praying over the school shooting, and therefore we don’t need to have discussions about gun control policy, about how to provide for the financial and physical needs of victims, or about school security. Commenting on how prayer won’t do something, but (fill in the blank) action will, betrays the incorrect assumption that Christians think only prayer is needed. Kim Kardashian’s recent tweet is one example of such faulty logic:

Note that some people are complaining specifically about what they see as the hypocrisy of leaders who offer thoughts and prayers and allegedly do nothing else, but that’s another issue. The Bible clearly demonstrates that God asks Christians to pray and take other action.

So what do Christians pray about in a situation like this? A number of things, such as comfort for the victims’ families that God would bring some kind of good from the tragedy, that those who are injured would heal, that the families of the kids who survived would know how to get the help they need, and much more. But for purposes of this post, it’s more important to understand what Christians don’t pray for… 

Christians don’t pray expecting God to rid the world of free will.

Many people, like the Twitter user below, seem to resent that Christians and other theists still believe in God when our past prayers didn’t “work” to prevent school shootings—in other words, could we all just dump this crazy belief in God already?

It’s important to understand why this is a significant misunderstanding of the nature of free will in a Christian worldview.

Christians believe God created humans with the ability to make morally significant choices. We can use that free will to do good or to do evil. If God had chosen to create us without free will, we would simply be robots. Given this nature of our world, it’s hard to imagine how this Twitter user and so many like him envision God eliminating school shootings specifically—through prayer or anything else.

Would God make it so that every time a troubled youth enters a school for such a purpose, they change their mind? Or would He make it, so they accidentally break their gun on the way in? Or would He have them fall and break a leg? Or would He make a vicious dog appear out of nowhere to attack them?

It would be a bizarre world where God completely eliminated the free will to conduct a specific type of evil. Christians don’t pray expecting that as an outcome of prayer because it’s inconsistent with the basic nature of the world we believe God created.

The continuation of school shootings literally has nothing to do with whether or not God exists and whether or not God answers prayer.

There’s, therefore, no reason to look at Christians with contempt for continuing to believe in God after multiple school shootings. We never expected our prayers to eliminate free will.

Furthermore, it should be noted that if God doesn’t exist, there’s little reason to believe people have free will at all. In an atheistic worldview, life is the product of purely natural forces. In such a world, our decisions would be driven strictly by physical impulses—we would be bound by the shackles of physical law.

As biologist Anthony Cashmore acknowledges regarding his atheistic worldview, “The reality is, not only do we have no more free will than a fly or a bacterium, in actuality, we have no more free will than a bowl of sugar. The laws of nature are uniform throughout, and these laws do not accommodate the concept of free will.”

If you don’t believe God exists, then don’t blame the shooter. He would just be acting according to his physical impulses. And don’t blame people for offering thoughts and prayers. They didn’t have a choice.

Finally, if you assume that shootings are evil and something needs to be done, you’re assuming an objective moral standard that only exists if God exists.

I understand the outrage that everyone feels right now. A tragic event like this is evil. But here’s the thing: If you believe that certain actions like killing 17 people at a school are objectively wrong—meaning they are wrong regardless of anyone’s personal opinion—then you believe objective moral standards exist. However, objective moral standards cannot exist unless a higher-than-human moral authority like God exists.

I’ve talked a lot about this moral argument for God’s existence with my kids, and my 9-year-old son came up with an insightful example to illustrate it last week. He loves Rubik’s Cubes and for some reason had been looking at a video with my husband where someone was using an all-black one. A normal cube has different colors on each square, and the challenge is to turn the cube until each side only has one color.

The day after he saw the video, he came to me with a serious face and wide eyes and said, “I think I have an example of what we were talking about with morality. When a Rubik’s Cube is all black, none of the moves matter. You can do anything. But when they have colors, then there is a pattern you’re supposed to do.”

It took me a second and then I realized what a great insight that is! If God doesn’t exist, morality is like the squares on an all-black Rubik’s Cube. There’s no right or wrong way to go; no move is better than another because there is no pattern or standard in place. It’s just your choice. In such a world, school shootings can legitimately be considered good or evil. But if God exists, He provides the colors and the objective standard for how they are to line up; we can see where the pieces should or should not go. In such a world, school shootings are an example of what should not happen. On all-black Rubik’s Cubes, however, there can be no should.

So let’s sum up what Christians believe:

  • God exists.
  • He’s perfectly good, and that goodness is the basis for the objective moral standards by which we can call things good and evil.
  • School shootings are objectively evil.
  • School shootings and other evil actions will always occur in our world because God created us with free will.
  • We don’t expect prayer to eliminate free will because that’s the nature of our created world.
  • We pray for God’s help in the midst of evil.
  • Prayer is in addition to, not instead of, other human action.

There’s nothing here to resent if you don’t believe in God.

In fact, if you believe that shootings are evil and that people have the free will to choose whether to shoot or not, your worldview is actually more consistent with theism than atheism. Maybe you should reconsider prayer after all.

For full conversations to have with your kids on the subjects discussed in this post, see the following chapters in my book, Talking with Your Kids about God:

Chapters 1-6: Evidence for God’s existence

Chapter 23: How do we know God hears and answers prayer?

Chapter 26: Do we really have free will?

Chapter 29: How should we make sense of evil?

 


Original Blog Source: http://bit.ly/2oADJv9

By Tim Stratton 

One of the most well-known New Testament scholars to graduate from Moody Bible Institute is Bart Ehrman. He has a powerful influence on many young minds today as he is a professor at the University of North Carolina and has written many bestsellers about Jesus. What is surprising, however, is that Ehrman is not a Christian! In fact, he has made claims suggesting that he is a happy agnostic who leans toward atheism.

Although I think Ehrman is wrong to “lean toward atheism,” I do respect him. In fact, I would venture to say that he knows the Bible far better than the vast majority of professing Christians found behind the doors of the church today. Although I believe his “reasons” for becoming an agnostic/atheist are philosophically weak,[1] I do believe that Ehrman is fair and charitable most of the time.

In fact, although it is popular to see many internet atheists today claiming that Jesus never existed, Ehrman shows them the foolishness of their ways. This became apparent during a question and answer session when a “Jesus myther” claimed that he did not see any evidence for a historical Jesus. Here is Ehrman’s fantastic response:

“Well, I do. I mean, that’s why I wrote the book. I HAVE A WHOLE BOOK ON IT! There is a lot of evidence; there is so much evidence [for the existence of Jesus]!

I know in the crowds you all run around with it is commonly thought that Jesus did not exist. Let me tell you, once you get outside of your conclave; there is nobody, I mean, this is not even an issue for scholars of antiquity. IT IS NOT AN ISSUE FOR SCHOLARS OF ANTIQUITY!

There is no scholar at any college or university in the western world who teaches classics, ancient history, New Testament, early Christianity – any related field – who doubts that Jesus existed!

Now, that is not evidence, that is not evidence. Just because everybody thinks so doesn’t make it evidence. But, if you want to know about the theory of evolution versus the theory of creationism – and every scholar, at every reputable institution in the world, believes in evolution, it may not be evidence, but if you’ve got a different opinion, you had better have a pretty good piece of evidence yourself.

The reason for thinking that Jesus existed is because he is abundantly attested in early sources. That’s why, and I give the details in my book. Early and independent sources indicate that certainly, Jesus existed. One author that we know about KNEW JESUS’ BROTHER, and knew Jesus’ closest disciple, Peter. He’s an eyewitness to both Jesus’ closest disciple and his brother.

So, I’m sorry. I respect your disbelief, but if you want to go where the evidence goes? I think that atheists have done themselves a disservice by jumping on the bandwagon of mythicism because frankly, it makes you look foolish to the outside world. If that’s what you are going to believe, you just look foolish.”

I could not have stated it better!

The God revealed in the New Testament

Because Ehrman spends so much time in the New Testament (in an attempt to debunk it) he does seem to grasp what it teaches about God’s character. In fact, this past December (right before Christmas) Ehrman offered a lengthy post on his Facebook page that benefits both Christians and atheists. Consider his parting words:

“The God of Christmas is not a God of wrath, judgment, sin, punishment, or vengeance. He is a God of love, who wants the best for people and gives of himself to bring peace, joy, and redemption. That’s a great image of a divine being. This is not a God who is waiting for you to die so he can send you into eternal torment. It is a God who is concerned for you and your world, who wants to solve your problems, heal your wounds, remove your pain, bring you joy, peace, happiness, healing, and wholeness. Can’t we keep that image with us all the time? Can’t we affirm that view of ultimate reality 52 weeks of the year instead of just a few?

I myself do not believe in God. But if I did, that would be the God I would defend, promote, and proclaim. Enough of war! Enough of starvation! Enough of epidemics! Enough of pain! Enough of misery! Enough of abject loneliness! Enough of violence, hatred, narcissism, self-aggrandizement, and suffering of every kind! Give me the God of Christmas, the God of love, the God of an innocent child in a manager, who comes to bring salvation and wholeness to the world, the way it was always meant to be.”

I must admit when I first read these words emotion overcame me as I shouted “AMEN” to Ehrman! He is exactly right about God’s character. The God of Christmas loves all people — including Bart Ehrman and including YOU! God desires a true love relationship with all people and desires the best for all people for eternity (See The Omnibenevolence of God)!

The God revealed by Jesus is the same God who does not want anyone — including Bart Ehrman — to suffer in hell for all eternity. God desires a true love relationship with all people — a “marriage” with each individual (1 Timothy 2:4) — and does not desire anyone to perish (2 Peter 3:9) or be eternally divorced from Him.

However, since true love requires genuine free will, if God desires a true love relationship with all people, He must give all people this freedom to reject His “marriage proposal” or not. When humans use their freedom to love in a backward kind of way, we bring evil and suffering into God’s creation. This is easy to remember because LOVE backward is EVOL.

C.S. Lewis states it well:

God has made it a rule for Himself that He won’t alter people’s character by force. He can and will alter them—but only if the people will let Him. In that way, He has really and truly limited His power. Sometimes we wonder why He has done so, or even wish that He hadn’t. But apparently, He thinks it worth doing. He would rather have a world of free beings, with all its risks, than a world of people who did right like machines because they couldn’t do anything else. The more we succeed in imagining what a world of perfect automatic beings would be like, the more, I think, we shall see His wisdom. (“The Trouble with ‘X,’ God in the Dock)

God is not waiting for you to die so He can send you to hell! No, the opposite is true, God is pleading with you to stop rejecting His love so that you will not be divorced from Him for all eternity (See True Love, Free Will, & the Logic of Hell).

God loves all people, desires the best for all people, and desires all people to love all people all the time! In fact, this seems to be the objective purpose of the human existence — to love all persons and to be loved by all persons (from each person of the Trinity to each person created in the image of God). Jesus made it clear when He summed up the entire Law in two simple and easy to remember commands (Matthew 5:44; 22:37-39):

1- Love God first!

2- Everybody love everybody (from your neighbors to your enemies)!

Ehrman is right; can you imagine what this world would be like if all people actually listened to and followed the teachings of the God of Christmas (aka, Jesus Christ)? If we all followed Jesus’ commands 52 weeks a year, think about the “Peace on Earth and good will toward men” that would follow in the wake of this tsunami of love! It sounds pretty close to heaven to me!

Ultimate Reality

Bart Ehrman does not believe in God, but he says that if he did, he would defend this view of God offered in the New Testament. I encourage him to examine his reasons for his “lack of belief” in God (See Atheism: Lack of Belief or Blind Faith?). I also encourage Ehrman and any others who do not believe in God to consider a plethora of arguments that either deductively concludes the existence of God or point to the probable existence of God. Here are a few to consider as you start your journey:

The Kalam Cosmological Argument

The Argument from Contingency

The Moral Argument 

The Fine-Tuning Argument

The Ontological Argument 

Why God Allows Evil & Suffering (logical problem)

Why God Allows Evil & Suffering (probability version)

The Freethinking Argument 

With all of these arguments in mind, why not promote, proclaim, and defend the God of Christmas? After all, even if all of these powerful arguments for the existence of God turned out to be false, if all the world lived according to the teachings of Jesus Christ 52 weeks a year, then we would have a virtual end to war, starvation, epidemics, pain, misery, abject loneliness, violence, hatred, narcissism, self-aggrandizement, and so much suffering!

I think Jesus was on to something!

Stay reasonable (Isaiah 1:18),

Notes

[1] I could be wrong, but from what I have gathered it seems that Ehrman’s reasons for leaning towards atheism are related to his doubts regarding the inerrancy of the Bible and with the problem of evil. I contend that these are not problems at all for Christianity (See Inerrancy Debate and Lex Luthor’s Lousy Logic).

 


Original Blog Source: http://bit.ly/2EMa9O8