Tag Archive for: Scientist

By Matthew Slama

In the guide to Expression of Uncertainty in Measurement from JCGM, it defines uncertainty as meaning doubt. It specifically defines uncertainty of measurement as meaning doubt about the validity of the result of a measurement.

I recently presented at a technical conference on methods of computing measurement uncertainty and was thinking about the applicability of these concepts to other areas of knowledge. We don’t see doubt and uncertainty in science the same as we do in religion. In religion, it is often viewed as a bad thing. But in science, it is often viewed as a good thing. The reason for this is in scientific endeavors; you are trying to achieve an end result – knowledge. In the scientific community, when one realizes that there is uncertainty, that is not the end. You do not just drop everything and realize you can’t go anywhere. That would be antithetical to the human tour de force or spirit. No, when we arrive at some level of doubt or uncertainty, we create a new test, we develop new methods, we try harder, we think smarter. We realize that we want to know something and use our innovative and inventive mind to reach that goal. When we have spent that effort, we end up with more confidence and more certainty in our end goal – knowledge.

But in the religious community for some reason, we think that if we have doubt it is something unpardonable and we must stop doubting. So instead of taking some guidance from the thinking faculties that God gave us (reason), we take our guidance from the pre-enlightenment era. This is a cultural affliction in many believing groups and has caused many to fall away. I have seen it first-hand.

  • Why has religion not followed up with science in terms of how we behave and respond to uncertainty or doubt?
  • Why is it that we don’t see uncertainty or doubt in religion as a stepping stone to the next breakthrough in our lives?
  • Why do we not plunge forward with the resolve that investigating uncertainty and doubt will result in something better, something stronger, or something greater?

I think that this is from the sinful nature of man – slothfulness and fear.

I should note that the scientific community is far from perfect… I have seen this slothfulness and fear time and time again in the scientific community. I’ve seen organizations run tests with no uncertainty analysis and make decisions off faulty data. They didn’t address the doubt or rather uncertainty that they had their measurement. I’ve seen this go sour many times and cost corporations millions of dollars. It’s because people didn’t do the due diligence of finding out what their uncertainties really are. I get it. I really do. It’s difficult to be prudent. It takes a lot of effort to survey the weak points in our systems. Sometimes it takes great humility. It’s hard to put together one’s uncertainties and find out what and where you need to improve

However, I see clients that do the hard work of finding out where there are uncertainties are then address these areas of uncertainty. These corrective actions result in measurement and knowledge that has lower uncertainty and results in moving forward in confidence that they’re making the right decision for their product development. I think it’s time we do the same in the Christian church community.

To do this, we need communities that are able to open up and share the struggles that they’re going through in their relationship with God. It takes asking the hard personal questions.

  • Do I know the core concepts of Christianity? Write down a core Christian concept without consulting a guide. How did you do?
  • Can I defend my faith? Look up a common Atheist, Muslim, or Jewish attack on Christianity and answer it without consulting a guide. Afterward find a theological solution and learn it
  • Why do I think that Christ is God? Describe a historical fact that gives credence to the authenticity of Christ as God without consulting a guide
  • Are there emotional issues I have that prevent me from Evangelizing? Go and share Christ with someone. If you are too afraid, find out why. Ask why am I scared? Create one action step to work on that “why” and do it.
  • What emotional issues am I bringing into my faith? Take the survey howwelove.com to find any childhood links that shape how we love and receive love. Anxiety can also drive mad amounts of doubt. This and other mental illnesses can shape very impoverished views of God.
  • What distortions of Christianity do I believe? Think of our cultural Christianity that did not exist in 1st or 2nd century Christianity. Think of how our country’s wealth shapes our thinking. Are you in the 1% of the world? ~43% of Americans are ( data from ASEC data 2017-2018)
  • What habitual sins do I need to talk with someone about? Find a close friend, pastor, or counselor to confess and work through sins and emotional baggage.

That only happens in small groups and communities that are showing the love of God because it takes a lot of patience and love to work through other people’s issues (and our own). We need to work on these things if we want to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.”

Yes, it is difficult, but it’s totally worth it.

This week, ask yourself one of the questions above and ask a friend a question. You might be surprised.

Recommended resources related to the topic:

Doubt by Gary Habermas (DVD)

Emotional Doubt by Gary Habermas (CD)

The Great Apologetics Adventure by Lee Strobel (Mp3)

So the Next Generation will Know by J. Warner Wallace (Book and Participant’s Guide)

Why Science Needs God by Dr. Frank Turek (DVD and Mp4)

Science Doesn’t Say Anything, Scientists Do by Dr. Frank Turek (DVD, Mp3, and Mp4)

How Philosophy Can Help Your Theology by Richard Howe (DVD Set, Mp3, and Mp4)

 


Original Blog Source: http://bit.ly/2WuiL1p

By Terrell Clemmons

Jon Headley has a confession to make. “I’m a 30-year-old man, but until a few years ago, I had no real understanding of the theory of evolution.”

“Ah,” the ex-Christian continues after relieving himself of this confessional burden, “it feels good to get that off my chest.” And with that, the musician and producer expounds upon his religious deconversion in a lengthy Medium.com essay titled “How I Learned to Trust Science: On the difference between dogma and evidence.” “I was taught that capital-S Science was our enemy,” Headley writes, and that there were “three big lies that Science had introduced to the world [that were] especially dangerous.” These are the Big Bang, an old earth, and evolution. As a kid, he was ready to argue with any science teacher because “I was sure of what I believed.”

But in truth, he now confesses, “I didn’t know s***.”

The essay starts out with a potentially helpful dismantling of what might be called “packaged” religion—that is, religious teachings pre-assembled somewhere up the hierarchy and disseminated with the expectation that they will be accepted on church authority. As he explains his upbringing, Headley paints a picture of insulated social groupthink, with the whole package propped up by confirmation bias.

He brings this up to compare and contrast “two foundational ways of looking at the world.” He was raised to look at the world by way of religion, he says, which is based on authority, dogma, and assumptions. The problem with this way, he continues, “was that I had been handed a set of beliefs, and I had never questioned them fully for myself.” By contrast, he now looks at the world by way of the scientific method, the key idea of which goes like this: “Any hypothesis about the world must be tested and proved by repeated experiment.”

He’s right about the problem he identifies with his first way, but sadly, after starting out so well, his second way leaves him in a place that is arguably worse. This is because, while the key principle of proving hypotheses by experimentation is reasonable and works well in the practice of science, it’s highly problematic when taken as the primary way of knowing truth about the world—which is what he has done.

Headley’s second way is what’s called scientism, and he is far from the only one succumbing to it. In Scientism and Secularism: Learning to Respond to a Dangerous Ideology (Crossway, 2018), J. P. Moreland defines scientism as “the view that the hard sciences—like chemistry, biology, physics, astronomy—provide the only genuine knowledge of reality.” Whether expressed in the strong form, which says that science and its methods provide the only valid route to knowledge, or in some weaker form that allows other ways of knowing to have some lesser validity (as long as they bow to science), scientism has become a part of the pseudo-intellectual air we breathe. I say “pseudo” because scientism isn’t intellectual, but is rather, at its very core, intellectually unsound.

From the Ivory Towers to the Streets

We’ll return to that point momentarily, but first, let’s look at a few scenarios that demonstrate how deeply this assumption of scientism has become embedded in the substrate of public life:

  • In academia: Sir A. J. Ayer, knighted professor of philosophy at Oxford University, taught that a proposition can be meaningful only if it’s true by definition (for example, “A = A”) or if it’s empirically verifiable, meaning testable by the scientific method. This is the reigning paradigm in Western education.
  • In government: Robert B. Reich, who served under Presidents Ford, Carter, Clinton, and Obama, said in 2004 that “the greatest conflict of the 21st century [will be] between those who believe in science, reason, and logic and those who believe that truth is revealed through Scripture and religious dogma.” Reich’s prognostication reflects the false narrative that knowledge through science and knowledge through revealed religion are inherently in conflict.
  • On the streets: The inaugural annual March for Science took place on Earth Day 2017, with an encyclopedic display of smarmy slogans such as, “Science is our Future,” “Science is Real,” “Defiance for Science” (complete with the raised-fist symbol for Communism), and “Science is the most precious thing we have.”

Celebrity scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson especially tipped his scientistic hand when he was asked about the politics of climate change in the era of Trump. He defended the authority of science to the point of expressing his exasperation with those who resist bowing to it: “What will it take for people to recognize that a community of scientists are learning objective truths about the natural world?” he asked CNN anchor Fareed Zakaria.

An emergent scientific truth, for it to become an objective truth, a truth that is true whether or not you believe in it, it requires more than one scientific paper. It requires a whole system of people’s research all leaning in the same direction, all pointing to the same consequences.

Do you hear the intellectual imperialism in that little sermonette? The high priesthood of science (with himself as a figurehead, of course) learns and then dictates to the rest of us what is objectively true. (This from a man who also wrote, “After the laws of physics, everything else is opinion,” but I digress.)

Hollywood got the memo. In the wake of the 2017 hurricane season, actress Jennifer Lawrence said it’s “scary to know—it’s been proven through science that human activity—that climate change is due to human activity and we continue to ignore it and the only voice that we really have is through voting.” Has Ms. Lawrence tested and proved the climate catastrophe hypothesis by experiment? No, as Derek Hunter clarifies in Outrage, Inc. How the Liberal Mob Ruined Science, Journalism, and Hollywood (Broadside Books, 2018); “an exhaustive search of the Internet could find no record of Lawrence studying meteorology or weather or even studying beyond high school.” No, she believes in climate change based on the authority of science.

Similarly, what Headley has done, apparently blithely unaware, is merely exchange one way of knowing based on a claim to authority for the same way of knowing, only based on a different authority. Instead of “believing Religion,” he now “believes Science.” (On the upside, though, with this way you can announce your enlightened state of consciousness with a $35.00 t-shirt or $19.00 coffee mug from MarchForScienceShop.com, but again, I digress.)

Disambiguating Science from Scientism

In defense of the scientific-method way, Headley writes, “Science begins with no assumptions.” But this is utterly false because the very practice of science is itself based on several assumptions, and those assumptions are not scientific but philosophical.

Moreland identifies six presuppositions that underpin the empirical sciences. Here are the first four:

  1. A natural world exists independent of any mind, language, or theory. In other words, reality consists of real entities and objects outside of observers. (We’re not in the Matrix.)
  2. There is a rational order to the structure of that world.
  3. Objective truth about that world exists.
  4. Human sensory and cognitive faculties are capable of discovering and grasping truth about that world.

The remaining two have to do with ethical, mathematical, and logical truths, and Moreland shows how all six are necessarily a priori assumptions underlying the scientific enterprise that science itself cannot justify because they are philosophical, not scientific, in nature. “Just as the structure of a building cannot be more reliable than the foundation on which it rests,” he writes, “so the conclusions of science… cannot be more certain than the presuppositions of science.” Thus, in the end, scientism ends up being a foe, rather than a friend, of science.

This should suffice to demonstrate that scientism is unreliable as a comprehensive epistemology (“epistemology” means “way of knowing”), but it gets worse for Headley and his epistemological kin. Moreland identifies two more criticisms of scientism, the most devastating one being that scientism is, itself, self-refuting. Here’s how: Scientism asserts that the only propositions that are even capable of being true are scientific propositions. But as we have already seen, scientism is not itself a scientific proposition but is rather a philosophical proposition about science. Thus, on its own terms, scientism is incapable of being true.

But we’re still not done. There is one more coup de grace to be dealt. Scientism denies the existence of true, reasonable beliefs outside of science. And thus, all those moral posturings by Tyson and the marchers for science (and for “climate justice” and for whatever other “justice” cause you might see on a political placard) are rendered null and void according to scientism.

This is no laughing matter. Not only does scientism throw the very foundation of such essential values as human rights under the hegemonic steamroller of “Progress… because Science,” but it also blinds people to potentially liberating and more comprehensive paradigms for conceptualizing reality.

Astrophysicist Robert Jastrow conceded before his death in 2008 that the evidence he saw from Big Bang cosmology implies a creator, and that he found it hard to believe human life is “all a matter of atoms and molecules.” But because of what “my science tells me,” he could not incorporate the concept of a creator into his understanding of reality. It was a situation he found unsatisfactory. “I feel I’m missing something. But I will not find out what I am missing within my lifetime.”

Indeed, given his epistemological constraints, he could not. With apologies to 1970s music fans, Jastrow was so close, and yet so far. Since he couldn’t know God through the methods of science, he found himself, by his own admission, “in a completely hopeless bind.”

Restoring the Mind by Restoring Philosophy First

Whatever Headley was told in his youth about science, being an enemy is false. None of the empirical disciplines we call science are anyone’s enemy. Neither are the Big Bang, an old earth, or evolution. It is the untested, unproven presumption of scientism that is the free mind’s enemy and the dogma that should be dropped.

Still, Headley’s essay raises important questions for parents and churches about how to apprehend and propagate truth in an information-glutted society. Authoritative claims to knowledge won’t cut it (and never should have, anyway) in the absence of other reasons to believe.

“Religion often attracts people by selling certainty,” Headley says, but we don’t know anything for certain. Instead, he recommends “a large dose of humility.” Because “we are all human beings, with limited and treacherous brains, trying to figure out an infinite and complex universe that is way bigger than we are.”

And that, indeed, is excellent advice. All of us would do well to take this wise counsel and direct it toward the self-appointed, certainty-selling high priests and priestesses of scientism.

Recommended resources related to the topic:

Why Science Needs God by Dr. Frank Turek (DVD and Mp4)

Science Doesn’t Say Anything, Scientists Do by Dr. Frank Turek (DVD, Mp3 and Mp4)

Oh, Why Didn’t I Say That? Does Science Disprove God? by Dr. Frank Turek (DVD and Mp4)

Stealing From God by Dr. Frank Turek (Book)

 


Terrell Clemmons is a freelance writer and blogger on apologetics and matters of faith.

This article was originally published at salvomag.com: http://bit.ly/2kr7HUi

By Bob Perry

Bill Nye, “The Science Guy” used to host an enjoyable and informative TV program for kids. In the last few years, however, Bill Nye has entered into a different realm. Apparently, he fancies himself an arbiter of all truth; the man who can quite literally save the world. But if you have any interest whatsoever in seeking that truth in a coherent, consistent, intelligent way, please watch this two-and-a-half-minute video. As you do, think about what he is saying. And don’t just focus on his defense of Evolution. Listen to his method of reasoning. It really is beyond me how someone who is considered a scientific sage could ever deliver such a rambling string of nonsense. But he doesn’t stop there. He goes on to admonish anyone who dares to disagree with him. And if you do, he wants you to shut up and leave the education of your children to real scientists… like him.

The Actual Bill Nye

There are a few facts you should know about Mr. Nye that are directly applicable to the content of this video. For starters, one would think that the media’s favorite “science guy” would be … Oh, I don’t know … an actual scientist. In fact, given the topic of this video, we might assume that our “science guy” would have some kind of background or advanced degree in the biological sciences. Bad assumption.

Bill Nye has nothing of the kind.

Mr. Nye’s education consists of a B. S. in Mechanical Engineering from Cornell University. While he was a student there, he took an astronomy class from Carl Sagan. Thus ends the list of Bill Nye’s scientific credentials.

After college, Nye was hired by the Boeing Aircraft Company in Seattle, Washington. There, he developed a hydraulic pressure resonance suppressor. But that wasn’t what gained him his notoriety. His real fame came after he won a Steve Martin look-alike contest and started doing stand-up comedy in Seattle nightclubs in 1978.  Since then, he has received two Honorary Doctorate Degrees. But these weren’t awarded for scientific work. They were conferred on him for giving a couple of college commencement addresses after he became “Bill Nye, The Science Guy.”

You can’t make this stuff up.

Ridicule Is Not an Argument

I want to be fair here. Just because Bill Nye’s resumé as a “science guy” is lacking, it doesn’t mean we should dismiss him out of hand. We need to look at his arguments. But we also need to recognize the difference between an argument and an assertion. Anyone can make assertions. But no one should accept those assertions unless they are supported by evidence, logic, and sound reasoning. Mr. Nye gives none of these. He simply offers a diatribe that completely collapses when you take the time to think about what he’s saying. So, let’s look at Mr. Nye’s case.

What Does He Mean by ‘Evolution’?

The “science guy” starts off by lecturing us about how ridiculous it is to not believe in “evolution.” The problem is, he never defines what he means by the word. Does he mean that species change and adapt to the environment? If so, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a single person who doesn’t believe that. But there are several other definitions of evolution. Which one must we accept?

Let’s assume that Mr. Nye subscribes to the most comprehensive definition of evolution. This is what I refer to as Big ‘E’ Evolution. It’s the idea that all life is the result of a purposeless, materialistic process that began by a random accident. That process can account for every imaginable life form, from the first self-replicating, single-celled organism to you and me.

Let’s break down his argument.

Truth Doesn’t Depend On Geography

First, he offers us this:

“Denial of evolution is unique to the United States … we are the world’s most advanced technological society … people move to the United States because of our general understanding of science.”

This first assertion is baseless and demonstrably false. I know of plenty of folks who live all over the world who do not accept ‘Evolution.’ They do so because they have not seen any credible evidence to support the most comprehensive view of evolution Mr. Nye subscribes to. But let’s say Mr. Nye is correct. Let’s pretend the only people who don’t believe in Evolution are Americans. What does this prove?

Nothing.

Where someone lives does not determine the truth content of what they believe. And the claim that people immigrate to the United States because of our general understanding of science is ridiculous on its face.

Denying Evolution Holds People Back?

But what of Bill Nye’s second assertion? Here, he claims that:

“When you have a portion of the population that doesn’t believe in Evolution, it holds everybody back.”

How, exactly, did Mr. Nye come to this conclusion? My undergraduate education is in Aerospace Engineering. I learned how to design airplanes and then how to fly them. I don’t accept Evolution. So how is it that I am “holding everybody back”?

To show the absurdity of it, let’s turn this one around. Suppose I claimed that those who do accept Evolution are holding everybody back. Would that be a valid argument against Evolution? Not in the least.

Misapplying Metaphors

So far, Mr. Nye’s comments have only demonstrated some flaws in basic logic. But then he takes things further and detonates a suicide vest on any trust we should have in him as a “scientist.”

“Evolution is the fundamental idea in all of life science … [Not believing in it] is analogous to doing geology and not believing in tectonic plates … you’re just not gonna get the right answer. Your whole world is just gonna be a mystery instead of an exciting place.”

Whatever one thinks of the concept of Evolution, there is one fact about it that we all agree on. Evolution is a process that explains the emergence and diversity of life on Earth. It is a noble attempt to explain how life emerged from the chemical elements that existed on the early Earth. It is a theory about how those chemicals combined and interacted with one another to produce complex biological systems that live and grow and reproduce.

The heart of Evolution is a process, not the parts that are used by the process.

So, let’s look at Mr. Nye’s comments in that light. He mentions tectonic plates. Tectonic plates are enormous slabs of rock in the Earth’s crust that slide and rub against one another to cause earthquakes. Geology is the study of the process that moves those plates around. So, Mr. Nye is confusing the plates with the process that moves them. He doesn’t seem to understand that he is equating completely non-analogous categories of things. Parts are physical things. But the processes that act on those things are something completely different. It seems to me a “science guy” would comprehend the difference.

A “Complicated” World

Building on his last point, Bill Nye begins his transition to questioning the character and motives of those who disagree with him;

“Once in a while, I get people who don’t really — who claim — they don’t believe in evolution. My response is, ‘Why not?’ Your world just becomes fantastically complicated when you don’t believe in evolution.”

Notice that Mr. Nye believes that no one could really disbelieve in Evolution. They only “claim” to do so. And he never offers any examples of the responses he receives to his “Why not?” question. Who is he asking? Why does he dismiss them? We can’t really know how to evaluate their answers unless we know the actual reasons they are giving. The fact that Mr. Nye doesn’t accept their responses is hardly a reason for us to reject them. After all, we’ve already demonstrated that his reasoning in support of Evolution is flawed.

But there’s another question. Why would someone’s rejection of Evolution make their world “fantastically more complicated”? Once again, the conclusion does not follow.

Using Young Earth Creationist Logic

Mr. Nye’s next point is pretty fantastic all by itself. And let me be clear. I am not taking a stand one way or the other about the age of the universe here. I am simply pointing out how Mr. Nye is using the same logic as a young earth creationist when he says this:

“Here are these ancient dinosaur bones … radioactivity … distant stars … the idea of deep time … billions of years … if you try to ignore that your worldview just becomes crazy.”

Here, Mr. Nye says that rejecting Evolution is the equivalent with believing in a young universe. Or, conversely, believing in an old universe means that you accept Evolution. But, once again, he is confusing categories.

Evolution is a theory about biology. The age of the universe comes from the study of cosmology. These are completely different areas of study! All one would have to do to show that Mr. Nye’s assertion is false is declare themselves to be either an “old universe, non-Evolutionist,” or a “young universe Evolutionist.” Voila!

This is the same false equivalence most young-Earth creationists use against those of us who believe the universe is old. I wonder how Mr. Nye would react if someone pointed out to him that his thinking is exactly like the young-Earth creationists he abhors.

Questioning Your Parenting

Finally, Bill Nye makes it personal. He wants you to know that if you disagree with him, your status as a parent is in question:

“I say to the grownups, if you want to deny evolution and live in your world that is completely inconsistent with the universe, that’s fine … but don’t make your kids do it … because we need them … we need engineers who can build things and solve problems …”

Once again, Mr. Nye demonstrates his failure to understand basic logic when he ties belief in Evolution to our ability to produce “engineers who can build things and solve problems.”

It seems fairly obvious that one can be a perfectly competent airplane designer and not have any opinion about Evolution. In fact, a highly competent engineer can be completely ignorant about the concept of Evolution. Mr. Nye proved that himself when he designed a hydraulic pressure resonance suppressor for Boeing.

But beyond that, Mr. Nye has stepped out of a scientific critique (if you could consider him to have ever been inside one). In his arrogance, he assumes he has the right to tell you what you should be allowed to teach your children.

The Totalitarian Impulse

This is the totalitarian impulse. It’s a mindset that thinks some people can determine what other people should be allowed to think. Those of us who honor scientific objectivity, free thought, and academic tolerance need to recognize this kind of talk when we hear it. People who think like this are the most intolerant kinds of people in the world. They are destroying the concept of free thought in the academy. It is intellectual dishonesty writ large. And it can become dangerous for those who don’t think the “right way.”

Mr. Nye insists that you need to believe in Evolution. If you don’t, you must be overcome because our society needs “… scientifically literate voters and taxpayers.”

Be careful what you wish for, Mr. Nye. If scientific literacy suddenly became a prerequisite for voting, it looks to me like a certain “science guy” would have to stay home on election day.

 


Bob Perry is a Christian apologetics writer, teacher, and speaker who blogs about Christianity and the culture at: truehorizon.org. He is a Contributing Writer for the Christian Research Journal and has also been published in Touchstone, and Salvo. Bob is a professional aviator with 37 years of military and commercial flying experience. He has a B.S., Aerospace Engineering from the U. S. Naval Academy, and a M.A., Christian Apologetics from Biola University. He has been married to his high school sweetheart since 1985. They have five grown sons.

Original Blog Source: http://bit.ly/30bWkij

By Terrell Clemmons

The Wall Street Journal commissioned Richard Dawkins and Karen Armstrong to respond independently to the question, “Where does evolution leave God?” Their answers became an article in the Life & Style section called Man vs. God.

Richard Dawkins said of Darwinian evolution, “We know, as certainly as we know anything in science, that this is the process that has generated life on our own planet.” Evolution, Dawkins concluded with his characteristic wit, is God’s “pink slip.” In other words, since science says Evolution is, we say God isn’t. (I discussed Dawkins’s argument for the non-existence of God in an earlier Salvo article.)

Karen Armstrong’s response was more artistic. She spoke of two complementary ways of arriving at truth, which the Greeks called mythos and logos, both of which 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.

“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.”

Not only is the veracity of any religious story irrelevant, she seems to be saying, 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 bottom, isn’t much different from the atheist’s. Evolution is. God isn’t. But some of us like to imagine that he is.

Notice the source Dawkins and Armstrong consult for certain truth: Science. Why? Because Science proclaims what is.

The questions I’m pondering and posing are (1) At what point do the proclamations of science become imperialistic? and (2) At what point does an appropriate respect for science morph into worship?

 


Original Blog Source: http://bit.ly/2w17uJN

By Terrell Clemmons

The Man for Whom Science Proved Religion

Dennis Garvin grew up the second of three sons born into a Norman Rockwell setting in the Berkshire Mountains of upstate New York. After graduating valedictorian of his class at The Citadel military college in South Carolina, he went on to graduate with honors from VCU School of Medicine in Virginia and serve thirteen years in U.S. Air Force. By the time he reached his mid-30s, he’d met every one of his life’s goals. He had a family with children he loved. He was a successful physician with a good practice in Roanoke, Virginia. And, much to his own delight, he’d acquired a nice, four-degree-long, academic tail that certified him as a really smart dude. So why, having achieved so much, did he feel so empty?

It wasn’t depression; his life was full and active. No, the existential ennui was more akin to that of Alexander the Great, who surveyed the breadth of his domain and wept that there were no more worlds to conquer. And when he looked within, he saw a life of black and white. His wife at the time, by contrast, seemed to have access to a joy he didn’t. Her life looked to him like it had color. What was with that?

Raised in a Unitarian Universalist household, Dennis was a committed atheist. But, having adopted the ethics of his liberal feminist mother, which dictated tolerance as the supreme virtue, he had no particular hostility toward Christianity. So, with a semblance of open-mindedness that way, the rational scientist in him started getting curious.

This was, philosophically speaking, new territory for him. But the time was ripe. A lifelong Darwin devotee, he’d started to realize that there were a great many cracks in Darwin, chief among them for him being altruism. He could explain away just about any human behavior except that, and it bugged the ever-living snot out of him. Worse, it had begun to dawn on him that he’d long parroted the phrase “science disproves religion,” but never actually questioned it. This was downright shameful for a man who called himself a scientist.

So he set out in all honesty to reexamine his assumptions. The primary one he’d accepted a priori was atheism. Okay then, he started out, let’s just say that there is a God. How would he have gone about doing what he did? Since the Bible, the book of Christianity had been the first thing he’d dismissed, that was where he went first in pursuit of an answer.

A Dangerous Book

As he read, he became increasingly and utterly astonished to find that the Bible – the book he’d dismissed out of hand as a stupid fairy tale – was probably one of the most precise books of quantum physics he’d ever run into. This was not at all what he had expected, and as a scientist knowledgeable in modern physics, it started to turn his whole epistemological orientation on its head. Dennis had long been fascinated with the study of light, and to him, the quantum physics of light precisely explained the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. That brought him to his knees.

There was an evangelistic factor at work during this time too. His wife had introduced him to some people with Campus Crusade for Christ. Now Dennis had a stockpile of well-honed verbal projectiles designed to destroy belief in God or revealed religion in any form. He wasn’t just your nice, garden variety atheist. He was a predator, the kind of atheist Christian parents don’t want their children to meet when they go away to college. He relished destroying the faith of the poor miserable souls, and with his scientific credentials and the academic tail to back them up, he was pretty darn good at it.

But the good folks at Campus Crusade for Christ took his infantile flak like fearless soldiers. He’d lob one objection. But what about Christ? Somebody would say. He’d throw another. But what about Christ? He ranted and raved about Isis, Osiris, and the Christ figure mythologically reborn every winter and how Christianity was just mythology writ large. Patiently, they listened. And then came back with, Okay, but what about the God who loves you? Eventually, he ran out of arguments. The science had brought him to his knees. Through Campus Crusade, he became a new creature in Christ.

A Violent Man, Conquered by God

It’s highly unusual in America for anyone to come to Christian faith after the age of 35. For someone to do so on the burden of science is nearly unheard of. But for Dennis Garvin, that was how it happened. All that took place nearly thirty years ago, and since then some things about life haven’t changed all that much. He’s still a family man, though two grandchildren have been born into the mix. He’s still a physician, though medical missionary work has been added to the schedule. And still a pure scientist applying aspects of accepted scientific knowledge to biblical concepts, he’s taken up writing and teaching to disseminate the findings.

Another thing hasn’t changed. The good doctor still covets a good argument. Never one to do things by halves, the “really smart dude” who’s now fully graduated into an intellectually sound Christian compares himself in all humility to the apostle Paul, who had a confrontational style as the murderous Saul of Tarsus, then went on to preach the gospel with an equal confrontational punch. But where Paul went on to preach the faith he once tried to destroy, Dennis takes pleasure in destroying the faith he once preached, aspiring to be the kind of Christian atheist professors and materialist scientists don’t want their students to meet.

“I have a take-no-prisoners mentality,” he says about them – not meaning the garden variety atheists, for whom he feels a brotherly sympathy, but the profiteering and predatory wise guys who pass themselves off as intellectually superior in order to destroy. Certainly he recognizes the command to love our enemies, but that doesn’t necessarily translate into playing nice with people who aren’t nice.

“I know those SOBs because I was an SOB. And I know what makes them think. I’ve got street credibility. And I can tell them, based on my credentials and my study, that anybody who retains a faith in atheism is an idiot. And they’re welcome to be idiots, but don’t dress themselves in intellectual propriety.”

“The big secret about atheists, the big fear of all atheists, is that they fear to look intellectually stupid in front of their contemporaries. They don’t mind if you pull their pants down in front of a bunch of other religious Neanderthals or people that they can label as such. But if you can go into their cave and, in front of their contemporaries, pull their pants down, you have done something. And that’s what I want to do.”

It’s not about scoring a win. It’s about exposing and choking off a predator that comes to kill.

A Violent Man Conquered by God

André Trocmé was a Huguenot pastor in the French mountain village of Le Chambon when Germany invaded France in 1940. As far as the war was concerned, Trocmé was a non-combatant pacifist. But when the Nazis demanded loyalty oaths and complicity with the deportation of Jews, he defied them openly. “We have Jews. You’re not getting them,” stated an open letter to the Vichy minister dispatched to Le Chambon in 1942. A man who knew which war was worth dying for, he was often described as un violent vaincu par Dieu – a violent man conquered by God. “A curse on him who begins in gentleness,” the pastor wrote in his journal. “He shall finish in insipidity and cowardice, and shall never set foot in the great liberating current of Christianity.”

Like Pastor Trocmé, Dr. Garvin is by profession a servant of healing. Also, like him, he knows which battle is worth taking a bullet for. That’s why, for the sake of a generation subjected to smug SOBs with big egos and long academic tails, he stands not only ready but eager to enter the ring and do violence for the sake of the Truth.

 


Terrell Clemmons is a freelance writer and blogger on apologetics and matters of faith.

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

You can’t put honesty in a test tube.

“Science” doesn’t say anything—scientists do.

Those are a couple of the illuminating conclusions we can draw from the global warming e-mail scandal.

“You mean science is not objective?” No, unless the scientists are, and too often they are not. I don’t want to impugn all scientists, but it is true that some of them are less than honest.  Sometimes they lie to get or keep their jobs.  Sometimes they lie to get grant money. Sometimes they lie to further their political beliefs. Sometimes they don’t intentionally lie, but they draw bad scientific conclusions because they only look for what they hope to find.

Misbehavior by scientists is more prevalent than you might think.  A survey conducted by University of Minnesota researchers found that 33% of scientists admitted to engaging in some kind of research misbehavior, including more than 20% of mid-career scientists who admitted to “changing the design, methodology or results of a study in response to pressure from a funding source.”  Think of how many more have done this but refuse to admit it!   (The researchers said as much in their findings.)

Outright lies and deception certainly seem to be the case with “Climate-gate.”  The exposed e-mails reveal cherry-picking; manipulating data; working behind the scenes to censor dissenting views; doubting what the measurements say because they don’t fit their pre-determined conclusion.   Matt Drudge headlined this yesterday as the “Greatest scandal in modern science.”

I actually think there is another great scientific scandal, but its misrepresentations are not quite as obvious.  In this scandal, instead of outright lies, scientific conclusions are smuggled in as philosophical presuppositions.  Such is the case with the controversy over the origin of life and new life forms.  Did natural forces working on non-living chemicals cause life, or is life the result of the intelligent activity?   Did new life forms evolve from lower life forms by natural forces or was intelligence needed?

Dr. Stephen Meyer has written a fabulous new best-selling book addressing those questions called Signature in the Cell.   Having earned his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in the philosophy of science, Dr. Meyer is at the top of the science food chain.  In our August 8th radio interview, he told me he’s been working on his 600+ page book—which isn’t short of technical detail—for more than a decade.

What qualifies a man who has a Ph. D. in the “philosophy of science” to write on the origin of life or macroevolution?  Everything.  What some scientists and many in the general public fail to understand is that science cannot be done without philosophy.  All data must be interpreted.  And much of the debate between Intelligent Design proponents (like Dr. Meyer) and the Darwinists (like Oxford Professor Richard Dawkins) is not a debate over evidence—everyone is looking at the same evidence.  It’s a debate over philosophy.   It’s a debate over what causes will be considered possible before we look at the evidence.

Scientists look for causes, and logically, there are only two possible types of causes—intelligent causes or non-intelligent causes (i.e. natural causes).   A natural cause can explain a geologic wonder like the Grand Canyon, but only an intelligent cause can explain a geologic wonder like the faces of the presidents on Mount Rushmore.  Likewise, natural laws can explain why ink adheres to the paper in Dr. Meyer’s book, but only an intelligent cause can explain the information in that book (i.e. Dr. Meyer!).

How does this apply to the question of the origin of life?  Long after Darwin, we discovered that “simple” single-celled life is comprised of massive volumes of DNA information called specified complexity—in everyday terms, a complicated software program or a really long message.  Richard Dawkins admits that the information content of the “unjustly called ‘primitive’ amoeba” would fill 1,000 volumes of an encyclopedia!

What’s the cause of this?  Here’s where the philosophy comes in.  Dr. Meyer is open to both types of causes.  Richard Dawkins is not.  Dr. Meyer’s book explains why natural forces do not appear to have the capacity to do the job, only intelligence does.  However, Dawkins and his Darwinist cohorts philosophically rule out intelligent causes before they look at the evidence.  So no matter how much the evidence they discover points to intelligence (as a long message surely does), they will always conclude it had to be some kind of natural cause.   In other words, their conclusion is the result of their philosophical presupposition.

While Dawkins has no viable natural explanation for life or the message contained therein, he says he knows it cannot be intelligence.  That philosophical presupposition leads to what appears to be an unbelievable conclusion:  To believe that 1,000 volumes of an encyclopedia resulted from blind natural forces is like believing that the Library of Congress resulted from an explosion in a printing shop.  I don’t have enough faith to believe that.

“This is a ‘God of the gaps’ argument!”  Dawkins might protest.  No it isn’t.  We don’t just lack a natural explanation for “simple” life—1,000 encyclopedias worth of information is positive empirically verifiable evidence for an intelligence cause.  Consider the cause of the book The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, for example.  It’s not merely that we lack a natural explanation for the book (of course we know that the laws of ink and paper couldn’t have written the book).  It’s also the fact that we know that messages only come from minds.   Therefore, we rightly posit an intelligent author, not a blind natural process.

Why is it so hard for Dawkins and other Darwinists to see this?  Maybe they refuse to see it.  Maybe, like global warming “scientists,” they have their own political or moral reasons for denying the obvious.  Or maybe they’ve never realized that you cannot do science without philosophy.  As Einstein said, “The man of science is a poor philosopher.”   And poor philosophers of science may often arrive at false scientific conclusions.  That’s because science doesn’t say anything—scientists do.

This column appeared on Townhall.com on November 25.