Atheists: What Evidence Would You Need To See?

There are several intelligents atheists and skeptics who have responded to posts on this blog in recent weeks.  I appreciate the spirited and mostly respectful debate, as well as the contribution of several theists and Christians.  I’d like to pose a question to the atheists and skeptics and ask everyone to comment.  Here it is:

What evidence would you need to see for you to be reasonably convinced that a theistic God exists?

I look forward to your responses.

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Who Really Commits the "God of the Gaps" Fallacy?

Who Really Commits the “God of the Gaps” Fallacy?

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The following is adapted from chapter 6 of I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist:

The God-of-the-Gaps fallacy occurs when someone falsely believes that God caused the event when it really was caused by undiscovered natural phenomena. For example, people used to believe that lightning was caused directly by God. There was a gap in our knowledge of nature, so we attributed the effect to God. Darwinists assert that theists are doing the same thing by claiming that God created the universe and life. Are they correct? No, for a number of reasons.

 

First, when we conclude that intelligence created the first cell or the human brain, it’s not simply because we lack evidence of a natural explanation; it’s also because we have positive, empirically detectable evidence for an intelligent cause. A message (specified complexity) is empirically detectable. When we detect a message like “Take out the garbage, Mom” or 1,000 encyclopedias we know that it must come from an intelligent being because all of our observational experience tells us that messages come only from intelligent beings. Every time we observe a message, it comes from an intelligent being. We couple this data with the fact that we never observe natural laws creating messages, and we know an intelligent being must be the cause. That’s a valid scientific conclusion based on observation and repetition. It’s not an argument from ignorance, nor is it based on any “gap” in our knowledge.

Second, Intelligent Design scientists are open to both natural and intelligent causes. They are not opposed to continued research into a natural explanation for the first life. They’re simply observing that all known natural explanations fail, and all empirically detectable evidence points to an intelligent Designer.

Now, one can question the wisdom of continuing to look for a natural cause of life. William Dembski, who has published extensive research on Intelligent Design, asks, “When does determination [to find a natural cause] become pigheadedness? . . . How long are we to continue a search before we have the right to give up the search and declare not only that continuing the search is vain but also that the very object of the search is nonexistent?” Consider the implications of Dembski’s question. Should we keep looking for a natural cause for phenomena like Mount Rushmore or messages like “Take out the garbage-Mom”? When is the case closed?

Walter Bradley, a coauthor of the seminal work The Mystery of Life’s Origin, believes A there ­doesn’t seem to be the potential of finding a [natural explanation] for the origin of life. He added, AI think people who believe that life emerged naturalistically need to have a great deal more faith than people who reasonably infer that there’s an Intelligent Designer.” Regardless of whether or not you think we should keep looking for a natural explanation, the main point is that ID scientists are open to both natural and intelligent causes. It just so happens that an intelligent cause best fits the evidence.

Third, the Intelligent Design conclusion is falsifiable. In other words, ID could be disproven if natural laws were someday discovered to create specified complexity. However, the same cannot be said about the Darwinist position. Darwinists don’t allow falsification of their “creation story” because, as we have described, they don’t allow any other creation story to be considered. Their “science” is not tentative or open to correction; it=s more closed-minded than the most dogmatic church doctrine the Darwinists are so apt to criticize.

Finally, it’s actually the Darwinists who are committing a kind of God-of the-Gaps fallacy. Darwin himself was once accused of considering natural selection “an active power or Deity” (see chapter 4 of Origin of Species). But it seems that natural selection actually is the deity or “God of the Gaps” for the Darwinists of today. When they are totally at a loss for how irreducibly complex, information-rich biological systems came into existence, they simply cover their gap in knowledge by claiming that natural selection, time, and chance did it.

The ability of such a mechanism to create information-rich biological systems runs counter to the observational evidence. Mutations that aren’t neutral are nearly always harmful, and time and chance do the Darwinists no good, as we explained in chapter 5. At best, natural selection may be responsible for minor changes in living species, but it cannot explain the origin of the basic forms of life. You need a living thing to start with for any natural selection to take place. Yet, despite the obvious problems with their mechanism, Darwinists insist that Natural Selection covers any gap in their knowledge. Moreover, they willfully ignore the positive, empirically detectable evidence for an intelligent being. This is not science but the dogma of a secular religion. One could say that Darwinists, like the opponents of Galileo, are letting their religion (or at least their philosophy) overrule scientific observations.

 

Dr. Frank Turek (D.Min.) is an award-winning author and frequent college speaker who hosts a weekly TV show on DirectTV and a radio program that airs on 186 stations around the nation.  His books include I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist and Stealing from God:  Why atheists need God to make their case

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Obscuring Clear Statements with "Clarifications"

Thomas Sowell continues his brilliant insights into the current presidential campaign.  Speaking of Barack Obama’s comments on how average folk in small towns are “bitter” and “cling to guns or religion,” Sowell points out:

In politics, the clearer a statement is, the more certain it is to be followed by a “clarification,” when people react adversely to what was plainly said.

Obama and his supporters were still busy “clarifying” Jeremiah Wright’s very plain statements when it suddenly became necessary to “clarify” Senator Obama’s own statements in San Francisco.

People who have been cheering whistle-blowers for years have suddenly denounced the person who blew the whistle on what Obama said in private that is so contradictory to what he has been saying in public.

However inconsistent Obama’s words, his behavior has been remarkably consistent over the years. He has sought out and joined with the radical, anti-Western left, whether Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers of the terrorist Weatherman underground or pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli Rashid Khalidi.

Obama is also part of a long tradition on the left of being for the working class in the abstract, or as people potentially useful for the purposes of the left, but having disdain or contempt for them as human beings.  (Read the complete column here.)

Perhaps Obama made those statements– which were given at a supposedly private function–  because he actually believes them.  His voting record and associations seem to suggest that is the case.  I have not heard him clearly apologize or retract the sentiment behind the statement.  If he believes what he said, at least we know the truth.  No further “clarifications” are necessary.

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Forward this Column or Get Stuck on Stupid

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Dr. Mike Adams is at it again talking about the work we’re doing here at CrossExamined.org:  Forward this Column or Get Stuck on Stupid.  Thanks Mike for making Christian Apologetics mainstream!

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Is Intelligent Design Science? If not, Neither is Darwinism

The discussion on this blog has lately turned to the question of whether or not Intelligent Design is science (see comments on recent posts).  To generate some more discussion, I offer the following post adapted from Chapter 6 of I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist:

The Darwinists= claim that Intelligent Design is not science cannot be determined from science itself.  Science requires philosophical assumptions, and Darwinists philosophically rule out intelligent causes before they look at the evidence. As we have seen, science is a search for causes, and there are only two types of causes: intelligent and nonintelligent (natural). But, of course, if your definition of science rules out intelligent causes beforehand, then you=ll never consider Intelligent Design science.

The irony for the Darwinists is this: if Intelligent Design is not science, then neither is Darwinism. Why? Because both Darwinists and Intelligent Design scientists are trying to discover what happened in the past. Origin questions are forensic questions, and thus require the use of the forensic science principles we already have discussed. In fact, for Darwinists to rule out Intelligent Design from the realm of science, in addition to ruling out themselves, they would also have to rule out archaeology, cryptology, criminal and accident forensic investigations, and the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI). These are all legitimate forensic sciences that look into the past for intelligent causes. Something must be wrong with the Darwinists= definition of science.

Table 6.2 shows the difference between empirical science and forensic science:

Empirical (Operation) Science             Forensic (Origin) Science

Studies present                                         Studies past

Studies regularities                                 Studies singularities

Studies repeatable                                  Studies unrepeatable

Re-creation possible                              Re-creation impossible

Studies how things work                       Studies how things began

Tested by repeatable experiment        Tested by uniformity

Asks how something operates              Asks what its origin is

 

Examples:                                                 Examples:

How does water fall?                                     What=s the origin of a hydroelectric plant?

How does rock erode?                                 What=s the origin of Mount Rushmore?

How does an engine work?                         What=s the origin of an engine?

How does ink adhere to paper?                 What=s the origin of this book?

How does life function?                               What=s the origin of life?

How does the universe operate?                 What=s the origin of the universe?

What about God of the Gaps?  Next post.

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Who Made God?

The following is from I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist, pages 92-93:   In light of all the evidence for a beginning of the space-time universe, the Beginner must be outside the space-time universe. When God is suggested as the Beginner, atheists are quick to ask the age-old question, “Then who made God? If everything needs a cause, then God needs a cause too!”

As we have seen, the Law of Causality is the very foundation of science. Science is a search for causes, and that search is based on our consistent observation that everything that has a beginning has a cause. In fact, the question “Who made God?” points out how seriously we take the Law of Causality. It’s taken for granted that virtually everything needs a cause.

So why then ­doesn’t God need a cause? Because the atheist’s contention misunderstands the Law of Causality. The Law of Causality does not say that everything needs a cause. It says that everything that comes to be needs a cause. God did not come to be. No one made God. He is unmade. As an eternal being, God did not have a beginning, so he ­didn’t need a cause.

“But wait,” the atheist will protest, “if you can have an eternal God, then I can have an eternal universe! After all, if the universe is eternal, then it did not have a cause.” Yes, it is logically possible that the universe is eternal and therefore ­didn’t have a cause. In fact, it is one of only two possibilities: either the universe, or something outside the universe, is eternal. (Since something undeniably exists today, then something must have always existed; we have only two choices: the universe, or something that caused the universe.)

The problem for the atheist is that while it is logically possible that the universe is eternal, it does not seem to be actually possible. For all the scientific and philosophical evidence (SURGE– Second Law, Universe is expanding, Radiation Afterglow, Great galaxy seeds, Einstein’s GR– radioactive decay, and the Kalam Cosmological Argument) tells us the universe cannot be eternal. So by ruling out one of the two options, we are left with the only other option–something outside the universe is eternal.

When you get right down to it, there are only two possibilities for anything that exists: either 1) it has always existed and is therefore uncaused, or 2) it had a beginning and was caused by something else (it can’t be self-caused, because it would have had to exist already in order to cause anything).  According to overwhelming evidence, the universe had a beginning, so it must be caused by something else– by something outside itself.  Notice that this conclusion is consistent with theistic religions, but it is not based on those religions– it is based on good reason and evidence.

So what is this First Cause like? One might think you need to rely on a Bible or some other so-called religious revelation to answer that question, but, again, we don’t need anyone’s scripture to figure that out. Einstein was right when he said, “Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.” Religion can be informed and confirmed by science, as it is by the Cosmological Argument. Namely, we can discover some characteristics of the First Cause just from the evidence we’ve discussed in this chapter. From that evidence alone, we know the First Cause must be:

  • self-existent, timeless, nonspatial, and immaterial (since the First Cause created time, space, and matter, the First Cause must be outside of time, space, and matter). In other words, he is without limits, or infinite;
  • unimaginably powerful, to create the entire universe out of nothing;
  • supremely intelligent, to design the universe with such incredible precision (we=ll see more of this in the next chapter);
  • personal, in order to choose to convert a state of nothingness into the time-space-material universe (an impersonal force has no ability to make choices).

These characteristics of the First Cause are exactly the characteristics theists ascribe to God. Again, these characteristics are not based on someone=s religion or subjective experience. They are drawn from the scientific evidence we have just reviewed, and they help us see a critically important section of the box top to this puzzle we call life.

(The book then goes on to build the case that this is the God of Christianity.)

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Google: Religious Pro-Lifers Need Not Apply

Seems like the Google we all love has some very one-sided rules when it comes to advertizing.  While Google accepts ads in support of abortion, they don’t allow “abortion and religion-related content.” This is from the UK’s Daily Mail:

[Google’s]  Dublin-based advertising team replied: “At this time, Google policy does not permit the advertisement of websites that contain ‘abortion and religion-related content’.”

Google does, however, accept adverts for abortion clinics, secular pro-abortion sites and secularist sites which attack religion.

The Christian Institute has now started legal proceedings against Google on the grounds that it is infringing the Equality Act 2006 by discriminating against Christian groups.

It is seeking damages, costs and the permission to publish its advertisement.

Mike Judge, Christian Institute spokesman, said: “For many people, Google is the doorway to the internet.

“If there is to be a free exchange of ideas then Google cannot give special free speech rights to secular groups whilst censoring religious views.

“To say that religious sites with material on abortion are ‘unacceptable content’ (while) advertising pornography is ridiculous.”

Funny how making this ad hoc connection to religion only seems to muzzle one side– the pro-life side (how many religions do you know that would advertize in support of abortion?).   Google’s values aren’t nearly as good as their search engine.

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Christians Beware: Intellectual Predators at College

When it comes time for college, parents often think they’re sending their children off to a religiously-neutral site to learn objective facts about the real world.  Unfortunately, they’re far more likely to drop their child into one of the most liberal, anti-Christian environments anywhere on American soil.  That’s where some college professors act as intellectual predators, purposefully seeking to undermine the faith of young Christian students.

Some professors make no effort to hide this. Professor Richard Rorty, who taught at Wellesley, Princeton, the University of Virginia and Stanford, admitted that he and many of his colleagues are actively trying to destroy the faith of Christian kids in college.  He warned parents to recognize that as professors “we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable.”  He said that we professors “arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own.”

Rorty followed that wake-up call to parents with an overt poke in the eye.  He claimed that students are fortunate to find themselves under the control “of people like me, and to have escaped the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents.”

”Did you hear that parents?  According to Rorty and his like-minded colleagues, you and your Christian views are dangerous.  That’s why they are intent on mocking your religious beliefs to the point that your children are too embarrassed to admit them.  They want your children to abandon your “homophobic” beliefs and adopt their way of thinking.  That way, your kids will turn out more like them than like you.

Professor Steven Weinberg, of MIT, Harvard, and now the University of Texas, harbors the same anti-religious agenda expressed by Rorty.  An atheist and physicist, Weinberg said, “I personally feel that the teaching of modern science is corrosive of religious belief, and I’m all for that.” If scientists can destroy the influence of religion on young people, “then I think it may be the most important contribution that we can make.”

I thought imparting truth was the most important contribution a professor could make.  Not for Weinberg—it’s his anti-religious agenda.  In fact, his anti-religious agenda is so overriding that it distorts his interpretation of the evidence.  The discoveries of modern science don’t point away from God, but directly to Him. Unfortunately, few college students know this, which allows Weinberg to spin the evidence the other way.  In doing so, he accomplishes what he believes is the most important contribution of a college professor– destroying the parent’s religion in the eyes of their children.

These two professors are not atypical.  A recent survey shows that professors are five times more likely to be atheists than the general public.  It also found that 53% of college professors view Evangelical students unfavorably.  In fact, Evangelicals are, by far, the most disliked religious group on campus (Muslims were not liked by 22% which means that in the United States of America, professors are two and half times more likely to dislike an Evangelical student than a Musllim student).

No wonder 75% of Christian kids leave the church in College.  It’s anything but a religiously-neutral environment.  Equip yourself or your child before attending.

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"Designer Wouldn’t Have Done it that Way" Argument Backfires

The following is an excerpt from I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist  (page 160-161):  Darwinists have long argued that if a designer existed, he would have designed his creatures better. Stephen Jay Gould pointed this out in his book The Panda=s Thumb, where he cited the apparent sub-optimal design of a bony extrusion pandas have for a thumb. The problem for the Darwinists is that this actually turns out to be an argument for a designer rather than an argument against one.

First, the fact that Gould can identify something as sub-optimal design implies that he knows what optimal design is. You can=t know something is imperfect unless you know what perfect is. So Gould=s observation of even sub-optimal design implies an admission that design is detectable in the panda=s thumb. (By the way, this is another reason the Darwinists are wrong when they assert that Intelligent Design is not science. When they claim something isn=t designed correctly, they are implying they could tell if it were designed correctly. This proves what ID scientists have been saying all alongCID is science because design is empirically detectable.)  Second, sub-optimal design ­doesn=t mean there=s no design. In other words, even if you grant that something is not designed optimally, that ­doesn=t mean it=s not designed at all. Your car isn=t designed optimally, yet it=s still designedCit certainly ­wasn=t put together by natural laws.

Third, in order to say that something is sub-optimal, you must know what the objectives or purpose of the designer are. If Gould ­doesn=t know what the designer intended, then he can=t say the design falls short of those intentions. How does Gould know the panda=s thumb isn=t exactly what the designer had in mind? Gould assumes the panda should have opposable thumbs like those of humans. But maybe the designer wanted the panda=s thumbs to be just like they are. After all, the panda=s thumb works just fine in allowing him to strip bamboo down to its edible interior. Maybe pandas don=t need opposable thumbs because they don=t need to write books like Gould; they simply need to strip bamboo. Gould can=t fault the designer of that thumb if it ­wasn=t intended to do more than strip bamboo. Finally, in a world constrained by physical reality, all design requires trade-offs. Laptop computers must strike a balance between size, weight, and performance. Larger cars may be more safe and comfortable, but they also are more difficult to maneuver and consume more fuel. High ceilings make rooms more dramatic, but they also consume more energy. Because trade-offs cannot be avoided in this world, engineers must look for a compromise position that best achieves intended objectives.

 

For example, you can=t fault the design in a compact car because it ­doesn=t carry fifteen passengers. The objective is to carry four not fifteen passengers. The carmaker traded size for fuel economy and achieved the intended objective. Likewise, it could be that the design of the panda=s thumb is a trade-off that still achieves intended objectives. The thumb is just right for stripping bamboo. Perhaps, if the thumb had been designed any other way, it would have hindered the panda in some other area. We simply don=t know without knowing the objectives of the designer. What we do know is that Gould=s criticisms cannot succeed without knowing those objectives.

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God and the Astronomers

God and the Astronomers

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Since the post Darwinists Have a Lot of Explaining to Do asks atheists to offer causes for at least ten truths about reality, I thought I would present my perspective on each of those truths.  We’ll start with the origin of the universe out of nothing.  The following is an excerpt from I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist (p. 84) and follows a section about the evidence that the universe began with a Big Bang out of nothing.  I appreciate your comments.

 

So the universe had a beginning. What does that mean for the question of God’s existence? The man who now sits in Edwin Hubble’s chair at the Mount Wilson observatory has a few things to say about that. His name is Robert Jastrow, an astronomer we’ve already quoted in this chapter. In addition to serving as the director of Mount Wilson, Jastrow is the founder of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies. Obviously his credentials as a scientist are impeccable. That’s why his book God and the Astronomers made such an impression on those investigating the implications of the Big Bang, namely those asking the question “Does the Big Bang point to God?” Jastrow reveals in the opening line of chapter 1 that he has no religious axe to grind. He writes, “When an astronomer writes about God, his colleagues assume he is either over the hill or going bonkers. In my case it should be understood from the start that I am an agnostic in religious matters.”

In light of Jastrow’s personal agnosticism, his theistic quotations are all the more provocative. After explaining some of the Big Bang evidence we’ve just reviewed, Jastrow writes, “Now we see how the astronomical evidence leads to a biblical view of the origin of the world. The details differ, but the essential elements in the astronomical and biblical accounts of Genesis are the same: the chain of events leading to man commenced suddenly and sharply at a definite moment in time, in a flash of light and energy.”

The overwhelming evidence for the Big Bang and its consistency with the biblical account in Genesis led Jastrow to observe in an interview, “Astronomers now find they have painted themselves into a corner because they have proven, by their own methods, that the world began abruptly in an act of creation to which you can trace the seeds of every star, every planet, every living thing in this cosmos and on the earth. And they have found that all this happened as a product of forces they cannot hope to discover. . . . That there are what I or anyone would call supernatural forces at work is now, I think, a scientifically proven fact.”

By evoking the supernatural, Jastrow echoes the conclusion of Einstein contemporary Arthur Eddington. As we mentioned earlier, although he found it “repugnant,” Eddington admitted, “The beginning seems to present insuperable difficulties unless we agree to look on it as frankly supernatural.”

Now why would Jastrow and Eddington admit that there are “supernatural” forces at work? Why ­couldn’t natural forces have produced the universe? Because these scientists know as well as anyone that natural forces– indeed all of nature– were created at the Big Bang. In other words, the Big Bang was the beginning point for the entire physical universe. Time, space, and matter came into existence at that point. There was no natural world or natural law prior to the Big Bang. Since a cause cannot come after its effect, natural forces cannot account for the Big Bang. Therefore, there must be something outside of nature to do the job. That’s exactly what the word supernatural means.

The discoverers of the radiation afterglow, Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias, were not Bible-thumpers either. Both initially believed in the Steady State Theory. But due to the mounting evidence, they’ve since changed their views and acknowledged facts that are consistent with the Bible. Penzias admits, “The Steady State theory turned out to be so ugly that people dismissed it. The easiest way to fit the observations with the least number of parameters was one in which the universe was created out of nothing, in an instant, and continues to expand.”

Wilson, who once took a class from Fred Hoyle (the man who popularized the Steady State Theory in 1948), said, “I philosophically liked the Steady State. And clearly I’ve had to give that up.” When science writer Fred Heeren asked him if the Big Bang evidence is indicative of a Creator, Wilson responded, “Certainly there was something that set it all off. Certainly, if you are religious, I can’t think of a better theory of the origin of the universe to match with Genesis.”  George Smoot echoed Wilson’s assessment. He said, “There is no doubt that a parallel exists between the big bang as an event and the Christian notion of creation from nothing.”

Robert Jastrow suggested the same when he ended his book God and the Astronomers with this classic line:  “For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”

 

Dr. Frank Turek (D.Min.) is an award-winning author and frequent college speaker who hosts a weekly TV show on DirectTV and a radio program that airs on 186 stations around the nation.  His books include I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist and Stealing from God:  Why atheists need God to make their case

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