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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

March 13, 2018/by Guest

Mythos, Logos, And Revelation

2. Does God Exist?, Atheism, Philosophy of Science

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

March 10, 2018/by Guest

If You’re Sick of Thoughts and Prayers Because Shootings Still Happen, You Don’t Understand Christianity

2. Does God Exist?, Apologetics for Parents, Legislating Morality, Culture & Politics, Theology and Christian Apologetics

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

March 5, 2018/by Guest

Bart Ehrman & the God of Christmas

2. Does God Exist?, Atheism, Jesus Christ, Theology and Christian Apologetics

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

February 27, 2018/by Guest

Is The Universe A Computer Simulation?

2. Does God Exist?

Por Evan Minton

Some atheists, in an attempt to avoid the conclusion that The Big Bang origin of our universe was caused by a spaceless, timeless, immaterial, uncaused, powerful, supernatural Being (i.e God), have posited that perhaps our universe and everything in it is just a computer simulation being run by aliens in a laboratory. The Big Bang was the launch of the program and the development of the universe by its finely tuned laws were all a part of the program-universe’s code.

If you think I’m making this up, check out this quote from Neil deGrasse Tyson in his award-winning book Astrophysics For People In A Hurry:

“Or what if everything we know and love were just a computer simulation rendered for entertainment by a superintelligent alien species?” [1][2]

I also saw this idea flushed out in a cartoon where a couple of aliens were at this massive particle accelerator. The aliens were your typical little green men, with no hair, giant black eyes, and silvery space suits. And the picture depicts our universe as being the result of an experiment the aliens were doing with the large particle accelerator/collider.

Are these atheists right? Was The Big Bang the result of aliens messing around with a particle accelerator in their universe?[3] Or are we just a simulation in a program by beings more advanced than we are? Refuting this proposal is the aim of this blog post.

ANY UNIVERSE OF ALIENS CREATING A COMPUTER SIMULATION MUST HAVE A BEGINNING

First of all, even if we conceded this idea (which even Tyson only throws out as a bare possibility), it wouldn’t get rid of God. It wouldn’t eradicate the conceptual analysis of The Kalam Cosmological Argument. Why? Because in the universe in which the computer simulating ours exists, that universe must be enduring through time. If this universe is enduring through time, then it must have a beginning and therefore a transcendent cause.

How did I reach this conclusion? From one of the same philosophical/mathematical arguments that lead me to conclude that our universe had a beginning. First of all, we know that these aliens would have to be enduring through time because the aliens are living in a world of cause and effect, of before-and-after relationships. There was a time before these alien scientists were born and a time after they were born. There was a time before they got their degrees in computer engineering and a time after they graduated. There was a time before they built the computer which caused our simulated universe and a time after they ran the simulation. Before-and-after relationships are impossible without time. According to the description of this theory, our alien creature creators are temporal beings. This leads me to my next point.

1: It is impossible to traverse an actually infinite number of temporal moments.

2: If it is impossible to traverse an actually infinite number of moments, then the present moment cannot be reached.

3: The present moment has been reached.

4: Therefore, we have not endured through an actually infinite number of temporal moments (i.e the universe had a beginning).

This is a logically valid syllogism. If the premises are true, so is the conclusion. So, are the premises true? I think they are.

Let’s look at premise 1. If the universe of our alien creators were eternal and beginningless (unlike the universe they simulated), then that means their world endured through an actually infinite number of moments to reach the point in time in which they caused their simulation. Before the day of the simulation, the day before the simulation had to dawn. And before the day before the day of the simulation could dawn, the day before the day before the day before the simulation could dawn. Before that day could dawn, the day before it had to dawn. Before that day could dawn, the day before it had to dawn, and so on and so forth. As you can see, the day in which the alien scientists caused their universe simulation could never have arrived, because there would need to pass an infinite number of prior moments. In fact, no moment in their universe at all could dawn. Before each day in the infinite series of days, there would always have to be a day that had to dawn first.

Getting to the present moment while having to first cross an infinite number of past events is analogous to jumping out of a bottomless pit, or causing a bottomless coffee pot to overflow. No matter how much coffee you pour into the cup, it will never fill up to the brim.

But if an infinite past could not be crossed, then that means the day of the start of the simulation could not arrive. And that means our present day could not arrive. The start of our 14 billion year history could never have occurred (this is premise 2). But clearly, the present moment has arrived (premise 3). We’re here. You’re reading this blog post right now. It is self-evident that the present has arrived. This means that the universe of our alien creators could not have endured forever, but must have a beginning. And since everything that begins to exist must have a cause, it follows that the universe of our alien creators must have a cause.

BUT MAYBE WE’RE IN A SIMULATION THAT’S INSIDE A SIMULATION
At this point, the atheist might respond “Okay, but maybe the universe of our alien creators is a simulation as well. We’re in a simulation that’s inside a simulation. Just like how a nesting doll can be inside of another nesting doll”. This doesn’t solve the problem. It only pushes it back a notch. Are those aliens subject to time? It would seem so if they evolved, were born, grew up, went to universities to get degrees in computer programming, and then created a universe-simulation that would have a universe-simulation within it. In that case, you run into the same problem. That universe must also have a beginning.

But perhaps the atheist could say “Well, perhaps we’re a simulation within a simulation within a simulation?” Again, the same problems apply.

What happens is that in this alien-scientist-creating-a-universe-simulation scenario is that you get thrown into an infinite regress of aliens creating universe simulations which themselves contain aliens that create universe simulations which themselves contain universe simulations with themselves contain universe simulations ad infinitum.

As already explained above, traversing an actually infinite number of things is impossible. Our own simulation could never have arisen if a past infinite number of universe simulations had to come into being first. Before the aliens could simulate our universe, their universe had to be simulated, and before their universe could be simulated, their universe had to be a simulation, and so on ad infinitum. No simulation could ever come to past, and ergo the present simulation (and present moment within the simulation) could never come to be.

WHAT DOES THIS ALL MEAN?

It means that even in a scenario which posits super advanced aliens creating a computer program of a universe, you eventually get traced back to a universe that is not a computer simulation, but nevertheless contains super advanced alien creatures and (wait for it….) had a beginning. In this scenario, we must come to a first universe, the first beginning, and therefore, the first cause.

But what properties would this cause have? It wouldn’t be a team of super advanced aliens since this first-universe is not itself the result of a prior team of alien scientists. The cause would transcend all physical reality, all of space and time, and therefore be immaterial and uncaused. In other words, God rears His holy head again.

God is exempt from the problems the aliens creators would have. He had no beginning and is uncaused, and therefore needs no prior cause to explain Him. God being beginningless wouldn’t imply that He endured through an actually infinite number of moments because God, sans creation of time, existed outside of time. There was no time. Once God flicked the first domino, time began. This is a bit of a heavy subject, and Christian philosopher William Lane Craig has devoted an entire book the to the subject,[4] but I just wanted to point out that being timeless sans creation, God avoids the problems associated with being beginningless in a temporal manner.

CONCLUSION
Unfortunately for the atheists, this alien computer simulation idea only forces God to go upstairs at most. It doesn’t get rid of Him. The conceptual analysis of The Kalam Cosmological Argument still stands.

Notes

[1] deGrasse Tyson, Neil. Astrophysics for People in a Hurry (Kindle Locations 170-171). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

[2] Don’t let this wild idea deter you from getting Tyson’s book by the way. He only mentions the simulation idea in this one place. Astrophysics For People In A Hurry It is a fantastic introductory course in astrophysics. Tyson does not put forth wild theories like this throughout, and he only shows his atheistic sleeve a total of two times. The first in this part of the book, and the second, in the final chapter. It’s an overall religiously neutral work. I recommend anyone who loves science (and is especially not well read in science) to pick up the book.

[3] By the way, this happened in a Doctor Who episode (titled Extremis). I won’t describe what happened in the episode. Watch it yourself. Watch the whole series in fact. It’s an awesome show!

[4] The book is called “Time and Eternity: Exploring God’s Relationship To Time”.

Original Blog Source: http://bit.ly/2ErH4n3

February 18, 2018/by Guest

Should God Reveal Himself More Clearly?

2. Does God Exist?, Atheism

By Al Serrato

God gave us free will so that we can freely choose Him, for freedom of choice is essential to love. But, the skeptic counters, many people do not believe God is real. Why doesn’t God reveal himself more clearly? This question has considerable surface appeal, as it plays on our intuitive sense of fairness. Despite the vast number of people who believe that the evidence for God’s existence, and for Christ’s deity, is more than sufficient to ground a solid faith, there are always others who say they might believe “if only….” And if God really does want all to be saved, why doesn’t He provide them with that extra level of proof?

Before attempting an answer, it’s worth taking a closer look at what the skeptic is really saying: “I’m not interested in what your evidence shows. It’s not enough to satisfy me. I want my personal standard to be met. Satan knew of God’s existence and still rejected Him. Why can’t I get that level of proof?”

This is an odd challenge, because it ignores the objective nature of “evidence” and instead focuses on the subjective nature of a person’s response to it. It moves from considering what conclusions the evidence might support to considering what more could be added to make the conclusion even stronger. In the criminal courts, it is not uncommon to present a compelling case which, after days of deliberations, results in a “hang” and the need for a retrial. Eleven jurors might be completely convinced as to the truth of the charge, but one juror can insist that he needs more evidence. Now, perhaps that one has found something that no one else could see, despite days of discussion; more likely, the lone juror is unwilling to convict – to follow where the truth leads – for other reasons. If he follows the skeptics’ lead here, that juror might say: “I’ve heard of cases in which there is a confession to the crime and still the jury did not convict, so I am justified in voting not guilty here until I get the kind of evidence that I want.”

Like the skeptic in the present challenge, this juror is making a statement, and not an argument. The fact that greater evidence could be produced in support of a claim is a given; it is true for all possible claims at all possible times, because perfect proof is not possible. But this assertion is not an argument that the evidence that was produced is insufficient. In fact, it does not address the weight and convincing force of the evidence at all.

Returning to the original challenge, what is it that would convince the skeptic? The answer: total knowledge of God, the same kind of knowledge Satan may have had. That means the skeptic wants full knowledge of that Being which embodies the ultimate perfections, that Being from whom derives all things good and worthy of praise and apart from whom there is only deprivation and evil for time without end. Full knowledge of that Being would also entail full knowledge of the consequences of accepting or rejecting His offer of life with Him. Satan was some type of spiritual creature; we know little about him, other than that he used his will to oppose God. But we are all human beings, and as such, we have intimate knowledge of man and his nature. Could we really face that level of knowledge? Would it not be apparent to all that the choice to accept God would be coerced and no longer free? Free will would become a mere fiction.

God set the level of evidence of Him in a way that is fitting to our nature. He does not reveal more because what He has revealed is sufficient, which explains perhaps why the vast majority of all who have ever lived have sought in some way for the God they know is there. We are without excuse, the Bible says, for the knowledge of God is written on our very hearts. We may blur that knowledge with the frantic pace of our lives, or silence it with our insistence on having things our way. But what we have been given is enough to ground our faith, if we only use our minds and our ability to reason to assess what has been revealed to us. But for those who choose not to believe, there is freedom to pursue that course, a course marked by self-will and the quest for control.

Yes, the evidence could always be better. But imperfect human beings rely on imperfect knowledge all the time. The evidence we do have is worth considering, and it may well change the course of your life… if only you give it the chance.

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

January 31, 2018/by Guest

The “Hardware” of Life Argument

2. Does God Exist?, Theology and Christian Apologetics

Podcast: Play in new window

By Steve Williams

“I can see the fingerprints of God when I look at you I can see the fingerprints of God and I know its true you’re a masterpiece that all creation quietly applauds and you’re covered with the fingerprints of God”

~from Fingerprints of God, by Stephen Curtis Chapman

The common scientific view of the “hardware of life” (that is, the physical components of living systems) is, as Biologist Richard Dawkins puts it, “the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.” (The Blind Watchmaker, 1986).

Unfortunately, Dawkins (like many others in his field) has succumbed to a logically fallacious assumption that a supernatural explanation is not within the “pool of live options” to explain this appearance of design. Why not? Well, to summarize the common opinions of materialists like Dawkins, it’s “not science”. But what is “Science”?

Louis Pasteur once said “Religions, philosophies, atheism, materialism, or its opposite–none of these is relevant to the matter…I might even add that, scientifically speaking, I am indifferent to them all. The question is purely one of fact”. In other words, science should be “the un-biased search for truth” without philosophical preconceptions. That definition was always the ancient understanding of the term.

Since the so-called “Enlightenment” that swept through Europe in the 1700’s, and especially since the proposal of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution in 1859, however, intellectual activists have been trying to add the qualifying concept of “within naturalistic explanations” to the definition. What that means, in effect, is the addition of a bias to the search for truth.

This bias first “got its legs” from the writings of an apparently bitter atheistic Scottish philosopher named David Hume in the 1700’s. Hume proposed a set of reasons why the supernatural should be ruled be ruled out of consideration as an explanatory mechanism. Not long afterwards, these reasons were shown to be fallacious (we’ll examine this in a later chapter), but at the time, it was as if Europe was eager to unfetter itself from religion, and atheism blossomed somewhat throughout the continent.

Most modern philosophers (even agnostic ones) find Hume’s arguments to be almost laughably illogical, but many atheists unknowingly cite him today as if he was “the Christ” of their belief system. For a full-length treatment of this subject, see John Earman’s book Hume’s Abject Failure, but suffice it to say for the moment that modern humankind has nowhere near a broad enough scope of reality to eliminate the possibility of the supernatural. To the contrary, there are many things in our experience that defy naturalistic explanations.

The philosophical name of the most common scientific form of atheism is “Materialism”, and it claims that not only is there no God, but that there is nothing even like God in the universe. Although it has taken root within the Biological sciences, it has done so to a much lesser extent within Astronomy, Philosophy, and Physics. Many Americans would probably be surprised to know that polls show that the percentage of PhD’ed scientists overall who identify themselves as Christians and who go to church is roughly the same as the percentage in the population at large. Unfortunately, the small minority who identify themselves as atheists is much louder and more aggressive though, so they exert a disproportionate influence on the media, academic standards committees and the like.

Luckily for all who respect unbiased inquiry, many Philosophers who are experts in logic by definition (logic being a subset of Philosophy), have objected vociferously, especially in the past 40 years, to this effort, and have recognized that the scientific method is at stake. As I wrote before, it seems that the key element that catalyzed this mindset since the late 1800’s is Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. Biologists became so enamored with it over the years that they invested heavily in deepening and entrenching their paradigms based on that assumption, and are not willing to consider that major problems have developed within it. Pride in Biology, and a reluctance to admit being wrong might be a factor. One has to wonder if there are spiritual and carnal reasons that admitting the mere possibility of the existence of the metaphysical is so daunting to some. Since Darwinian Evolution seems to be the lynchpin of this type of thinking, let’s take a hard look at it.

The concept of life arising from non-life by random chance is called “abiogenesis”. This concept is the “creation story” of Darwinian Evolution. But what are the odds of the building blocks of life coming together by random chance in a way to provide even the possibility of life? Harold Morowitz, an agnostic Yale University physicist, created mathematical models by imagining broths of living bacteria that were superheated until all the complex chemicals were broken down into basic building blocks. After cooling the mixtures, Morowitz used physics calculations to conclude that the odds of a single bacterium reassembling by chance is one in 10^{100,000,000,000}. (1) Wow! How can we grasp such a large statistic? Well, it’s more likely that one would win the state lottery every week for a million years by purchasing just one ticket each week!

In response to the probabilities calculated by Morowitz, Robert Shapiro, author of Origins – A Skeptic’s Guide to the Creation of Life on Earth, wrote:

The improbability involved in generating even one bacterium is so large that it reduces all considerations of time and space to nothingness. Given such odds, the time until the black holes evaporate and the space to the ends of the universe would make no difference at all. If we were to wait, we would truly be waiting for a miracle. (2)

Sir Frederick Hoyle compared the probability of life arising by chance to lining up 10⁵⁰(ten with fifty zeros after it) blind people, giving each one a scrambled Rubik’s Cube, and finding that they all solve the cube at the same moment!

Biological “Hardware” (Complex Structure) Argument

According to a leading Darwinist, the odds of component parts in close proximity assembling into a single-celled creature are 1 in 10^{100,000,000,000}_.
According to probability theorists, anything with lower odds than 1 in 10⁵⁰is mathematically impossible.
Therefore, the spontaneous generation of life is mathematically impossible.

Regarding the origin of life, Francis Crick, winner of the Nobel Prize in biology for his work with the DNA molecule, stated in 1982:

An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going. (3)

Crick’s assessment of the hopelessness of the spontaneous generation of life on earth led him to subsequently postulate a theory called “Directed Panspermia”, which held that space aliens “seeded” life on earth. As Philip Johnson observed, “When a scientist of Crick’s caliber feels he has to invoke undetectable spaceman, it is time to consider whether the field of prebiological evolution has come to a dead end.” (4)

Ever since the discovery of DNA in 1953, the Darwinian Theory of Evolution has faced increasing challenges yearly as more and more evidence for the complexity of the cell has been discovered. In 1996, Dr. Michael Behe (professor of Biochemistry at Lehigh University) released a book entitled “Darwins’ Black Box”, which detailed an argument against Darwinian Evolution known as the “irreducible complexity” of biological structures and systems. In the 11 years since the publication of the book, it has been attacked from every angle by atheistic scientists, yet its central thesis has only gained strength, as the debate has exposed the weakness of Darwinian counter-arguments, and the naturalistic (atheistic) philosophical biases that lurk behind them.

Have you ever wondered if Charles Darwin himself would still believe in Darwinian Evolution (or macro-evolution) if he knew all of the evidence that has accumulated for and against it up to this time? Well, there is an interesting quote in which Darwin stated his own minimum standard for assessing whether or not his theory would withstand the tests of time:

If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. (5)

In Darwin’s day, it was assumed that cells were very simple. In the last half of the 20th century, however, it has come to light that inside each living cell are vastly complex molecular machines made up of various protein parts. Organs, which are made up of these complex cells, have also been shown to be much more complex than previously believed.

The blueprints for assembling the protein parts for cells and organs in correct timing and order are encoded into our DNA, which is similar to binary computer code, although it is quaternary (having 4 letters instead of 2). The density of the information encoded into DNA staggers the imagination; there is enough information-storing space in a half-teaspoon of DNA to store all of the assembly instructions for every creature ever made, and room left over to include every book ever written!

In addition to the incredible information-storing capacity in DNA, there are machines and systems in biology which vastly exceed mankind’s creative capacity in terms of their complexity. For example, the blood-clotting mechanism requires a sequence of 20 different proteins (each of which has an average chance of 1 in 8.03 x 10 to the 59th power of forming by random chance!) triggering one another like dominoes falling in order, until a fibrin mesh scaffolding is formed for the clot itself.

If you subtract any one single protein (regardless of where in the sequence of 20), this scaffolding fails to form, and no blood clot is possible. Without clotting, any creature with a circulatory system would bleed to death from a tiny wound, similarly to what happens to hemophiliacs.

Now think about how this compares to Darwin’s criterion for his own theory. Macro-evolution requires a mutation for every step, each of which needs to confer an advantage in surviving or creating offspring to be retained by natural selection. Even if we grant the creation of proteins by random chance (which is extremely unlikely), at steps 1, 2 ,3, 4, etc. on up to and through step 19, there is no advantage conferred toward the production of a blood clot until step 20 is completed! If you reduce the complexity by any single component (regardless of where in the sequence the single component is), the system doesn’t work, and has no reason to be retained by natural selection. This is Irreducible Complexity.

Let’s look at another example. The Bacterial Flagellum is a tail-like protein propeller attached to one end of a bacterium that propels the organism through its environment via rapid rotations (like a miniature outboard motor driving a whip in circular motion). It has components that are remarkably similar to a man-made outboard motor, such as a rotor, a U-joint, a stator, a driveshaft, a propeller, bushings, and O-rings.

There are at least 40 different protein parts required for the assembly of a flagellum. Many of the flagellar proteins control the construction process, switching the building phases on and off with chemical triggers at just the right times, and setting up construction in the proper sequence. It is an engineering marvel. If you deduct 1% of the parts, you don’t have a 99% functional bacterial flagellum; it becomes completely dysfunctional, and you have nothing but a hindrance (probably fatal) to any organism attached to it. The following picture hints at its complexity…

Consider the fact that it is conservatively calculated that the odds of this incredible structure forming by random chance is 1 in 10 to the 1170th power. (6) According to probability theorists, anything with a chance lower than 1 in 10 to the 50th power is mathematically impossible, so it doesn’t matter how much time you give it—it simply won’t occur by chance alone.

Just recently, a vastly more complex gear-driven, seven-engine, magnetic-guided flagellar bundle was discovered. Here is an piece on it from www.evolutionnews.org:

Souped-Up Hyperdrive Flagellum Discovered

Evolution News & Views December 3, 2012 5:05 AM

Get a load of this — a bacterium that packs a gear-driven, seven-engine, magnetic-guided flagellar bundle that gets 0 to 300 micrometers in one second, ten times faster than E. coli.

If you thought the standard bacterial flagellum made the case for intelligent design, wait till you hear the specs on MO-1, a marine bacterium described by Japanese researchers in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Edited by Howard Berg, Harvard’s mastermind of flagellum reverse engineering, this paper describes the Ferrari of flagella.

Instead of being a simple helically wound propeller driven by a rotary motor, it is a complex organelle consisting of 7 flagella and 24 fibrils that form a tight bundle enveloped by a glycoprotein sheath…. the flagella of MO-1 must rotate individually, and yet the entire bundle functions as a unit to comprise a motility organelle.

To feel the Wow! factor, jump ahead to Figure 6 in the paper. It shows seven engines in one, arranged in a hexagonal array, stylized by the authors in a cross-sectional model that shows them all as gears interacting with 24 smaller gears between them. The flagella rotate one way, and the smaller gears rotate the opposite way to maximize torque while minimizing friction. Download the movie from the Supplemental Information page to see the gears in action.

Electron micrographs included in the paper show that the model is not unrealistic. These flagella really are tightly packed in a sheath, suggesting that the bundle acts like a gear-driven hyperdrive.

Here we have used electron cryotomography to visualize the 3D architecture of the sheathed flagella. The seven filaments are enveloped with 24 fibrils in the sheath, and their basal bodies are arranged in an intertwined hexagonal array similar to the thick and thin filaments of vertebrate skeletal muscles. This complex and exquisite architecture strongly suggests that the fibrils counter-rotate between flagella in direct contact to minimize the friction of high-speed rotation of individual flagella in the tight bundle within the sheath to enable MO-1 cells to swim at about 300 µm/s. (Emphasis added.)

At microbial level, that’s more than 10 body lengths per second. The authors were clearly excited by this engine, sounding like young men checking out high-performance cars, talking thrust, gear ratios and torque.

MO-1 is a magnetotactic bacterium capable of orienting its cell body along the geomagnetic field lines by using magnetosomes. The MO-1 cell has a flagellar apparatus with two lophotrichous [containing numerous flagella in] bundles. In contrast to peritrichously [flagella all over the cell] flagellated bacteria, MO-1 cells swim constantly in a helical trajectory toward magnetic north, and the trajectory changes from right-handed to left-handed without changes in velocity or direction. The cells are able to swim as fast as 300 μm/s, which is nearly 10-fold faster than E. coli and Salmonella. Although the flagella of the other types of bacteria usually work individually or by forming a loose bundle to produce thrust, the flagellar apparatus of MO-1 is a tight bundle of seven flagella enveloped in a sheath made of glycoproteins. This unique architecture appears to be essential for the smooth and high-speed swimming of MO-1.

They can’t see actual gears, of course, but physics demands that the mechanism of rotation must have something like it:

We hypothesize that, whereas each of the seven flagella has its torque-generating motor, the 24 fibrils counter rotate between the flagellar filaments to minimize the friction that would be generated if the flagella were directly packed together in a tight bundle. A schematic diagram representing our hypothesis is presented in Fig. 6. The flagella are represented as large brown gears and the fibrils are represented as small blue-green gears. The flagella and fibrils rotate counterclockwise and clockwise, respectively, as indicated by the arrows, to minimize friction (Movie S1). Although there is no direct evidence that the fibrils can rotate freely in the opposite direction as the flagellar filaments with which they are in direct contact, we think this is the simplest interpretation to explain the superior function afforded by the complex architecture of the MO-1 flagellar apparatus.

Considering the very tight packing of the 7 flagella and 24 fibrils that are in direct physical contact within the sheath, there appears to be no other way for the flagella to rotate at high speed without the counter rotation of the intervening fibrils. Although the fibrils and the surrounding sheath are in direct contact, the friction between them would be small because of the stocking-like flexibility of the sheath. This design must be playing an essential role in the fast, smooth rotation of the flagellar apparatus that allows the rapid swimming of MO-1.

With powerful evidence of design like this, did the researchers become converts to intelligent design? We can’t know, but would PNAS have printed such a paper without an obligatory tribute to unguided materialistic evolution? Evolution is not mentioned until the last paragraph:

Taken together, these features of the MO-1 flagellar apparatus represent an advanced level of evolution of a motility apparatus. It is also intriguing that the same pattern of an intertwined hexagonal array in two evolutionary distant systems: the basal bodies of flagella and fibrils of the MO-1 flagellar apparatus, and the thick and thin filaments in vertebrate skeletal muscle. Similar architectures of filamentous structures presumably evolved independently in prokaryotes and eukaryotes to fulfill the requirements for two very distinct mechanisms to generate motion: counter rotation and axial sliding.

OK, so the Darwinists got their offering, but it leaves a bad aftertaste: now, they have to believe that advanced mechanisms for generating motion evolved not just once, but twice — completely independent of each other. Thanks a lot, guys. Wait till the intelligent-design movement hears about this.

Oops, too late.

(http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/12/souped-up_flage066921.html).

Going back to our previous subject, what if we just ignored the previously mentioned problems of forming the first cell, and assume that we’re starting the Darwinian process from the bacterial level and advancing to the human level? On page 153 of the book Who Was Adam?, Fazale Rana and Hugh Ross cite one of the world’s most prominent evolutionists, Dr. Francisco Ayala of UC Irvine, as calculating the minimal odds of human beings evolving from the bacterial level to be 1 in 10 to the 1 millionth power. Three physicists, John Barrow, Brandon Carter and Frank Tipler, did roughly the same calculation but included some important factors that Ayala overlooked, and came up with the number 1 in 10 to the 24 millionth power. Again, according to probability theorists, any event with lower odds than 1 in 10 to the 50^th power is mathematically impossible. Therefore unguided Darwinian evolution is mathematically impossible!

Reduced to a propositional argument, it might go like this:

Biological “Hardware” (Complex Structure) Argument

According to leading Darwinists, odds of humans evolving from a single-celled creature are 1 in 10^24,000,000_.
According to probability theorists, anything with lower odds than 1 in 10⁵⁰is mathematically impossible.
Therefore, Darwinian evolution of human beings is mathematically impossible.

Now, these two sets of odds (totaling to 1 in 10^{100,024,000,000}) seem overwhelming to say the least; why would scientists insist that creations like these could have come about by evolution? To re-iterate, it seems that biological science has become dominated by atheistic philosophers. Science is “a search for truth”, but the oligarchy in control in this day and age is trying to change that to “a search for truth by naturalistic (atheistic) means”. To them, the idea of God is unacceptable, so science cannot consider even the possibility that God created this universe and all that is in it.

Take a look at the following quote by prominent Darwinist Richard Lewontin, and consider whether his viewpoint is logically sound. Unfortunately, this quote seems to be representative of how many Darwinists think, and how they want everyone else to think:

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. (7)

One wonders why such a concerted effort is made to deny the metaphysical into the pool of live options. Perhaps the following quote by another prominent Darwinist named Aldous Huxley provides some insight:

I had motives for not wanting the world to have meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption … For myself, as no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneous liberation from a certain political and economic system, and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom. (8)

Now, just for fun, look at the following Bible passage, and think about how it relates to the quotes above:

For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.

For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools. –Romans 1:20-22.

Perhaps this is a good place to ponder a quote from Nobel-Prize winning organic chemist Christian de Duve:

If you equate the probability of the birth of a bacteria cell to chance assembly of its atoms, eternity will not suffice to produce one… Faced with the enormous sum of lucky draws behind the success of the evolutionary game, one may legitimately wonder to what extent this success is actually written into the fabric of the universe. (9)

God has indeed left His signature in nature in its irreducible complexity and fine-tuning. Darwinism has failed repeatedly when tested as an explanation for the existence of life. Hundreds of scientists have recognized this and have signed a document called the “Dissent from Darwinism” (http://www.dissentfromdarwin.org/) to express their disagreement with philosophical naturalism dominating science through Darwinism. We simply need to “have eyes to see, and ears to hear”, and stop listening to atheistic philosophers disguised as scientists, who try to insist that the supernatural or metaphysical is off-limits for science. “Reasonable faith” is going in the same direction to which the evidence is pointing. The teachings of the Bible, understood properly, merge perfectly with science.

This article is chapter 3 From What Your Atheist Professor Doesn’t know (But Should), by Steve Williams

Original Blog Source: http://bit.ly/2Ch6MsY

January 2, 2018/by Guest

How the Ontological Argument Proves the Existence of God

2. Does God Exist?, CrossExamined, Theology and Christian Apologetics

By Al Serrato

The fool has said in his heart, “There is no God.” If this passage from Psalms is correct, then many people today are fools, for they insist that God does not exist. But the ranks of non-believers include many scientifically minded and highly intelligent people, not the sort we would normally consider as foolish. So, what makes such a person a “fool,” and not merely someone with whom we disagree?

Well, let’s begin with a look at the definition of “fool,” which includes “a person who has been tricked or deceived into appearing or acting silly or stupid.” Now, sometimes we trick ourselves, and thereby make fools of ourselves. And other times we are misled. But either way most would agree that someone who holds contradictory views has deceived himself. Imagine a person proudly proclaiming that the prime rib he is about to eat is an important part of his vegetarian diet. Or the person who says that the only medicine that can save him is the one with no ingredients.

But sometimes contradictions aren’t as obvious. Why, then, is it a contradiction to insist there is no God? It doesn’t appear to be contradictory – at first glance anyway. For the answer to that question, we are indebted to St. Anselm of Canterbury, who lived and pondered these questions some ten centuries ago. I can’t do justice to Anselm’s argument in this brief piece, but perhaps some concepts borrowed from Anselm may help make the point.

The first requires consideration of just what the mind does. Anyone who has seen a baby develop realizes that the human mind comes preprogrammed with an “operating system” of sorts. This allows us to acquire language, to reason, to recognize concepts such as fairness and truth and beauty, and other intangible things, and to make use of imagination. This ability for abstract thought lends itself to “got it” moments when a problem that has been puzzling us all of a sudden makes sense. We all use these systems intuitively; of course, there is no other way, since we could never use reason, for instance, to prove the validity or usefulness of reason.

One aspect of this ability for abstract thought is the ability to conceptualize. Food, for instance, can encompass a million different things, but to qualify it must be edible and serve to nourish, and not poison, us. We can call an ashtray “food”, but the underlying thing is not a matter of what we call it, but of what it consists.

So, with this observation in view, consider for a moment not what a definition of God might be, but what the conception of God is. What is it that we are struggling to grasp when we use that term? Anselm’s definition was simply this – God is that being a greater than which cannot be conceived. Whatever attributes God would have – omnipotence, omnipresence, perfect goodness, etc. – if you can conceive of a being with all those attributes plus an additional one, then the latter would be God. So, imagine two beings then – each with exhaustive, infinite powers. One of the two has the attribute of necessary existence, while the other may or may not exist. Clearly, the former – the one with necessary existence – would be the greater. Consequently, to fully conceive of God, we must be conceiving of a Being who can’t not exist, whose existence must always have been and will always continue to be. Anything else simply cannot fit the conception of God.

So, what does that prove? Maybe this conception of God is imaginary. Not so, Anselm would contend. And here’s why: the mind is not capable of conceptualizing something that does not correspond to something real. Now, this premise is a bit harder to get one’s mind around. The normal response to this part of the argument is that we create imaginary things all the time, from unicorns to tooth fairies to Jedi Knights. But each of these things, while imaginary, is the combining of things that are real: a horse and a horn; a person with wings and unusual powers; a warrior with special abilities and unusual weapons. And, moreover, neither a unicorn nor a tooth fairy nor a Jedi Knight would possess the attribute of necessary existence. If a unicorn did exist, it would have to consist of a horse with a single horn in its head; but its existence could have occurred briefly in the distant past, or could arise in the distant future or could not occur at all. We can fully conceptualize such a creature without the need that the creature itself actually exist because the conceptualization does not require necessary existence.

This concept of “necessary” existence is not easily grasped at first. Many skeptics will contend that “existence” is not an attribute at all. Imaginary things don’t actually exist, they will say, so they consist of nothing. This line of argument can quickly devolve into an argument over definitions, with the skeptic insisting that it is nonsensical to consider a thing which does not exist. This assumption allows them to defeat Anselm’s argument – they write “necessary existence” out of the set of characteristics of God – but a moment’s reflection should reveal that this comes at too high a price. I can conceive in my mind of many past historical figures whose attributes I can describe in detail but who do not presently exist, for they have passed away. More importantly, every scientific discovery or invention must first begin in the mind of a person who sees the attributes of the thing before it actually takes form. The automobile, for instance, did not create itself; it first appeared in the mind of an inventor who could see what it would consist of if it did exist and then set about adding “existence” to its attributes.

Letting our minds approach the concept of what “God” must be, the only way to conceptualize Him, is as a necessarily existent being. If we are not seeing Him that way – if we are insisting that there may be a God, but then again maybe not, then we are not yet thinking about God, but about something else, something less than God.

This foray into philosophy can be difficult. Fortunately, there are many other proofs for God’s existence, ones much easier with which to grapple, but this one stands out for its elegance. For if it has merit, then God has embedded within us the means to find Him in the one place we have exclusive and special access to our very minds.

If Anselm is right, then the fool who denies God is saying something like “I believe that the Being who must necessarily exist does not exist.” A rather foolish thing to say, when you see it clearly.

The Bible says that God has written his law on our heart. Perhaps if we probe a bit deeper still, we can also begin to see in its depths the first faint scratching of His signature.

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

December 19, 2017/by Guest

If Evolution is True, Atheism is False

2. Does God Exist?, Theology and Christian Apologetics

By Tim Stratton

Atheists often appeal to evolution in an attempt to explain the primate complexity we observe today without a need for an Intelligent Designer — God! Indeed, many say the reason they affirm atheism is because they believe evolution is true. Since their hypothesis does not include God as a designer, atheists feel justified in affirming that God does not exist and that Christianity is false. With that said, however, if evolution is true, it does nothing to prove that God does not exist or do anything to disprove the historical resurrection of Jesus (the two essential ingredients of “mere Christianity”). Moreover, what atheists fail to comprehend is that by appealing to evolution in an attempt to “prove” atheism, they ultimately prove too much!

Evolution simply means change over time. Most evolutionists and young earth creationists will agree that some things do genuinely change over time (even if they disagree on how much some things change over time). What is important to note is that Darwinian evolution requires a genuine change over dynamic time — at least if one is hoping to explain primate complexity. With that in mind, I contend that if evolution is true, then atheism is false!

Consider this: I believe that some things do genuinely evolve and change over time. In fact, we currently exist in a world in which things are constantly changing right in front of our eyes! That is to say, we exist in an evolving state of affairs (change happens)!

The problem, however, is this: it is logically impossible for a changing state of affairs to be extrapolated into past infinity! In “English” that means that if we currently exist in a changing state of affairs and things are really happening one event after another, then it is impossible for things to happen chronologically in this manner without a first change. If we exist — right now — in a changing state of affairs, then it is impossible to go on and on forever in the past. Logically, there must have been a beginning or a first change.

If there never was a first change, then the present moment — “right now” — would not exist. To help illustrate why the concept of past infinity is incoherent, consider two thought experiments.

Infinite Jumpers & Steppers

First, is it possible for someone, say a superhero with infinite jumping powers, to jump out of an infinitely tall bottomless-pit? Of course not. There is no launching pad or foundation from which to jump. When it comes to things changing over time (evolution), if the hole at ground level represents the present moment and the idea of past infinity means there is no foundation to jump from (a first change over time), then the present moment of change could never be reached. The jumper could never get out of the hole because there is no starting point for him to progress upward. Because the present moment does exist and things do change over time (evolution) it logically follows that a foundation exists for the first change to occur leading to the evolution (change over time) we notice today.

Second, suppose a man walks up the steps to your front porch and rings the doorbell. You answer the door and ask if you can help him. He states, “I have just walked an infinite number of steps and finally completed them right here on your front porch.” Of course, you do not believe him, yet he insists that he has accomplished this feat. You ask for proof and he invites you to join him on a journey to retrace his infinite number of steps. He tells you that once the two of you reach this infinite point, you will then follow those same footsteps all the way back to your front door. You adamantly reject his offer because you realize that if you were to retrace an infinite amount of steps you will never get back home! In fact, you will never turn around to begin your journey home!

Consider the steps involved . . . you would take one step, then a second step, then a third step. Eventually, you would take a millionth step, and eventually a billionth step, and then a trillionth step. Whatever step you were currently taking you could always take one more and count it — never reaching actual infinity. Whenever you decide to turn around to come back home you will be on a countable step. So, if you do ever make it back home, your steps would not be infinite.

Just as it would be logically impossible for you to retrace all the steps this pedestrian claims to have made, it is just as impossible for this pedestrian to traverse an actual infinite amount of steps ending on your front porch. A rational person will know that one who makes such a claim is either delusional or deceptive. The “stepper” must have taken a first step.

Change over time (evolution) has the same problem. If a first change occurred, then it logically follows that a first change resulted from an unchanging, eternal, and beginningless state of affairs. Think of this as a frozen/static state where nothing happens and nothing has ever happened logically prior to the first change (I know this is hard to imagine). This might not seem like a “big deal” but the implications are enormous! This is the case because if things are not changing in a frozen/static state, then nothing would ever happen. This is because if things are not evolving, emerging, decaying, growing, or becoming unstable (which are words implying change over time), then these things would never be able to cause the first change. Change over time cannot account for things starting to change over time. That is to say, if nothing is happening, then nothing can describe or account for the first change that resulted from a static, frozen, and unchanging state! UNLESS…

… a volitional agent existed in this static state who had the power to act.

Other than a volitional agent, what else could cause a change from an unchanging state of affairs? At the least, a volitional agent with the power to act could exist in a static state and then cause something to happen. That is to say, if nothing is happening, but a volitional agent with free will exists in this static state, then this volitional agent can freely choose to act and cause the first change. This is what Aristotle meant by the “Unmoved Mover.”

Volitional agents are personal types of “things” or rather, “beings.” If a being is personal in nature, then this being is the kind of “thing” in which you can have a personal relationship — that is, at least if you are a person! Thus, if you are a person, then it is at least possible that you can have a personal relationship with this unmoved mover!

An Argument from Change Over Time

We can summarize this entire argument in a step-by-step syllogism:

1- Things change over time (evolution).

2- A changing state of affairs cannot be past infinite.

3- Therefore, a first change resulted from an unchanging state of affairs.

4- Only a volitional agent can cause a change from an unchanging state of affairs.

5- Volitional agents are personal.

6- Therefore, this personal agent existed in an unchanging state of affairs.

7- Anything existing in an unchanging state of affairs never began to exist and is eternal with no beginning.

8- Therefore, the cause of the first change (and ultimately the change of affairs in which we find ourselves) is a personal agent who is eternal with no beginning and was in a changeless state of affairs logically prior to causing the first change.

This final deductive conclusion should be eye-opening! Why should this get one’s attention? Because this personal agent who caused things to start evolving and changing over time is God! The Bible does not just note the possibility of having a personal relationship with the Unmoved Mover — God — it explains exactly how you and I can know God personally through Jesus Christ!

Bottom line: If you believe that things actually do evolve and change over time, then you should reject atheism!

Stay reasonable (Isaiah 1:18),

Tim Stratton

Original Blog Source: http://bit.ly/2j7eSMT

December 17, 2017/by Guest

Can Reason Lead Us To A Relationship With God?

2. Does God Exist?, Theology and Christian Apologetics

By Al Serrato

Most atheists feel confident that they have “reason” on their side. As a result, many are surprised when a Christian apologist takes an evidentialist, or reason-based, approach to matters of “faith.” Not long ago, the issue arose in a conversation I was having with a skeptic. I had been laying out the basic philosophical arguments for the existence of a supreme, uncaused being.

Accepting the logic of these arguments, she shifted her challenge, saying: “You want me to use reason to get me to agree that God exists, but then stop using it as soon as I get to that point.” In other words, despite hearing rational arguments about the existence of God in general, she could not fathom that a belief in God in particular – the God of the Bible, for instance – could be based on anything other than wishful thinking. Faith, after all, was simply not rational.

My response went something like this: “Hopefully by now, you see that I am not asking you to abandon reason. The types of argument may vary, and the level of certainty about particular conclusions might also differ, but for everything that historic Christianity affirms, there are good reasons to believe what we believe.” She shook her head in, well, disbelief.

“As it applies to Christianity,” I persisted, “some of what we know about God can be inferred from observations. This is referred to as ‘general revelation.’ Consider what we see of the universe: it is spatially and temporally immense, beyond our ability to understand and grasp; it is well-ordered and predictable, with set laws such as logic and math, physics and chemistry, all operating flawlessly, consistently and seamlessly. It contains examples of breath-taking beauty, such as the inherent beauty of music and nature, and heart-pounding emotion, such as the joy of first love or the miracle of birth. But it is also quite deadly, or at the very least quite inhospitable to humans. Despite its immense size, it appears that we can live only in a sliver of air on a remote planet, and even there, most of the planet is exceedingly dangerous to us. You see, my ability to reason can lead me to some generalities: God must be immensely powerful and intelligent; he must be artistic and love order. He must be capable of great love. But is he … harsh? Uncaring? Why is this creation so dangerous? And, most importantly, what comes next? Reason cannot lead us to any answers here. We see a glimpse of God, but not the full picture.”

She wasn’t sure where I was going, and in a way, neither was I. The next step, to a rational reliance on the words of the Bible, is a big step; in fact, for many, it has been, and remains, too big a step for them to take.

I resumed. “To move to a personal relationship with God – in the specific, not general sense – requires more; it cannot be based completely and exclusively on reason. It does, in fact, depend also on faith, but it is a faith that stems from, and finds support in, reason.”

“You want it both ways,” she countered. “You want to call it reason when it is simply wishful thinking.”

I knew what she meant, and I acknowledged that I was struggling with putting these thoughts into words. “No, there is a difference that you’re not seeing. Believing in unicorns is a function of faith; there is no evidence for them, and no good reason to believe they exist. But if you had actual evidence – from trusted sources – that such animals existed, your “faith” in them might eventually become reasonable. The problem isn’t that believing in exotic animals is irrational; the problem is that believing in such animals when there is no evidence – no reason – to support that belief is irrational.”

I shifted gears a bit, wanting to get on to the point while there was time.

“Now, put yourself for a moment in the position of the creator-God. You want to give people true free will so that they are not mere automatons, and you want them to choose a relationship with you without forcing them to do so. Your problem is twofold: if you make your presence too intrusive, they will believe because they have no real choice, but if you reveal nothing of yourself, they will have no basis to know you. So, what you do is reveal enough of yourself so that they will see your presence. Then you choose a messenger who will convey your intentions. It must be fined tuned this way so that those who respond do so freely and not under coercion. Those who do respond freely will eventually be made perfect; he will work on them to free them from their fallen nature and to remove some of what separates them from him. Those who reject him get what they are seeking – separation from him.”

“Christianity affirms that God chose a particular people to convey this message. He used prophets to speak for him, then sent his son. Much of what I trust in about God comes from the words of that son, Jesus. If Jesus is a reliable source (i.e. that he has a basis to know what he claims to know and that he is honest), then I am justified in trusting what he says. If so, then he is a good source of information about God. If he says that God has offered us salvation and prepared a place for us to spend eternity, I can trust that information if I can trust Jesus. I acknowledge that my confidence that there is a heaven is pure faith – I believe it because Jesus says it. But my trust in Jesus is not based on faith. That would be mere wishful thinking. I believe that Jesus rose from the dead not because the Bible says it, but because the evidence of it is very strong, and the evidence against it is not. I don’t believe Jesus rose from the dead because I have faith, or because the Bible said it; I have faith that what Jesus said was true and that the Bible is trustworthy because I first had proof that Jesus did what he claimed he would do. He fulfilled the prophecies of centuries before, died for us and then rose from the dead.”

“But,” she began, again shaking her head ….

Enough for one day, I concluded. The next step would be to show why what we know about Jesus is reliable. But I had places to go, and she needed more time to think about what we had covered so far.

Original Blog Source: http://bit.ly/2z0YOHc

November 14, 2017/by Guest

Darwin’s Quantum Leap

Mythos, Logos, And Revelation

If You’re Sick of Thoughts and Prayers Because Shootings Still Happen, You Don’t Understand Christianity

Bart Ehrman & the God of Christmas

The God revealed in the New Testament

Ultimate Reality

Is The Universe A Computer Simulation?

Should God Reveal Himself More Clearly?

The “Hardware” of Life Argument

How the Ontological Argument Proves the Existence of God

If Evolution is True, Atheism is False

Can Reason Lead Us To A Relationship With God?

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