Smell the Color 9
Chris Rice wrote a song with that ridiculous title to explain what it’s like to believe in spite of doubt. The title itself is a nonsense phrase for a very obvious reason: “9″ is neither a color nor an odor. You can’t interact with the number 9 at all. You can have 9 pairs of socks, 9 Skittles, 9 chairs, and so forth, but it is impossible to interact with a number in any way. It’s an abstract concept. A necessary one, by the way, but abstract nonetheless.
Which leads me to the point of today’s post. We said last week that, if the universe is matter, energy, and time (at minimum), then whatever caused the universe must be nonphysical and timeless- something or Someone that is truly transcendent. Whoever or whatever existed before and beyond our universe would have to be capable of creating and sustaining a universe intelligently. It would have to be capable of planning the universe and performing actions upon the universe.
Atheists will sometimes say that the universe could be listed among the short lists of things that exist of their own necessity. Numbers have to exist, else the universe would be a place of nonsense. The universe, some would claim, also must exist. The laws of nature exist of their own necessity, perhaps, since our scientific laws are mere descriptions of how matter and energy interacts. But must matter exist? Protons, neutrons, and electrons do not have to be here, nor do they have to exist in their present forms. The scientific laws could have been very different if the subatomic particles that make up our universe were any different at all. Fortunately, most naturalists and atheists don’t resort to this line of thinking, as it’s a very difficult to defend. No, Whoever or whatever created the world must exist of Its own necessity, and It must exist beyond our universe.
Philosophers would point out that only two such categories exist. First, the something: an abstract object, such as numbers. But, as I’ve pointed out, numbers themselves are not capable of interaction, creation, or causation. That’s the entire point of them being abstract rather than concrete. Having ruled out the something (abstract objects/numbers), we are left with Someone. A transcendent Mind that is independent of a physical body is capable of existing outside of, before, and beyond the universe. This is exactly what Christians believe God to be. So in the end, the atheist that uses science as a means to prove God’s irrelevance is using the wrong tool. The answer is not in physics but in metaphysics.
Nobody and Nothing
One of the most memorable parts of Homer’s Odyssey is when Odysseus and his men land on the island where Polyphemus the cyclops lives. They are captured and are doomed to be eaten by Polyphemus, but Polyphemus tells Odysseus he will eat him last if he tells the giant his name. Odysseus tells the cyclops that his name is “Nobody”. Since the cyclops was drinking anyway, he doesn’t think much of the name and falls asleep. Odysseus and his men gouge out the eye of the cyclops, but the cyclops is unable to explain to the other giants what has happened because he keeps shouting “Nobody has hurt me!” While the cyclopes are left believing that Polyphemus is either a fool or drunk, Odysseus and his men escape. Even one-eyed brutes know that nothing cannot do something.
‘If you start asking scientific questions to scientists, you’ll find that they’re loaded with information. A good scientist has a love of knowledge and a virtually insatiable curiosity, well, at least in their field of expertise. They love to find out why something happened, when it happened, and how it happens. I’m very glad that these people are out there finding out the answers to all of these questions. However, I’ve found that many of these folks only have an apparent insatiable curiosity. Let me illustrate…
We’ve developed some pretty good theories about how and why continents, for instance, were formed. We’ve developed theories about how and why our planet was formed. We’ve developed theories for solar systems, stars, clusters of stars, galaxies, and galactic clusters. However, if you try to back it all of the way up to how and why the entire universe was formed, you’ll find a lot of folks reluctant to answer. I’m not talking about simply explaining the Big Bang theory. I’m talking about explaining how we got to a point (no pun intended) of having a singularity that needed to expand. Where did that come from?
“The Big Bang doesn’t have to answer that”, some will say. “It’s only trying to explain what happened to the singularity after it expanded.” Or, if you prefer biology, evolutionists will tell us that life developed through natural selection and random mutation from a “simple” single-celled organism. How that organism came to live originally, however, is a mystery. And there have been no successful explanations, partly because, as many have said, “Evolution doesn’t seek to explain how life was originally created. It only seeks to explain how it has developed since it began.” Every aspect of biological life has an explanation for its existence in terms of purpose and origin, but life itself has no purpose or origin. Everything from subatomic particles to entire galaxies has an explanation for its origin, some role to fill, but the entire universe itself, taken as a unit, has no purpose. Why is that? What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
It’s a logical fallacy to use good, solid science to determine the function and origin of everything in the universe but then turn around and say that the universe as a whole has no function (purpose) or definable origin, or to act as if such an origin does not matter. Yet, I understand why atheists and other naturalists are reluctant to venture a guess into the origin or means by which a singularity came to be. At least when Christians speak of creation ex nihilo there is a God in back of it all to do all of the work. With naturalism, you have to start with nothing. Just try to picture nothing! Even the “void of space” isn’t really a vacuum, isn’t really a void. There’s always a little bit of something there. And there are heavenly bodies, energy, and dimensions to fill up that space. The naturalistic explanation of the universe must not include time, empty space, matter, or energy. You couldn’t even properly imagine it as sheer darkness, for that would require a place for the darkness to exist in. Without space, energy, or time in our description, science can’t even begin to explain what it was like before the universe began. (And I can’t even use the word “before” here in the chronological sense, since there is no time before the universe began. I merely mean it in the descriptive sense.)
Besides all of this, naturalism must assume that the universe is all there is, which means that it is begging the question. Naturalism assumes that observation is the only source of information and that all our observation is accurate and comprehensive, and since nothing beyond our universe can be observed with either instruments or the five senses, then nothing can exist. Of course, the moment something beyond the universe is posed as an explanation for the universe, the naturalist is immediately implying the existence of the supernatural. I suppose you could appeal to the multiverse theory, but you’ve only pushed the problem back a stage or two. Where did the multiverse come from? What created this series or cluster of universes? Then you’re back at the same problem again. If the universe is all matter and energy, then the cause of the universe must be nonphysical and transcendent. That narrows down our options significantly, now doesn’t it?
What Physics Class Taught Me
I signed up for physics class in high school not really knowing what to expect. I’d always loved science classes, and I didn’t expect this one to be any different. It was. God help me, it was. Why it didn’t occur to me that physics would be a lot of formulas and math, I will never know. What I do know is that it took every ounce of mental energy I could muster to survive that year, and survive I did. To this day, I’m convinced that God somehow changed my semester grades when my teacher wasn’t looking.
Perhaps the biggest frustration I experienced with physics class wasn’t the amount of work I had to deal with so much as the fact that I felt like very little of what I was learning really applied to real life. (Ok, I know that that is what students say about practically every class they take, but hear me out.) After all, practically every equation I learned had the wonderful little caveat “in a vacuum” somewhere in the description. We learned about the speed of light in a vacuum, terminal velocity in a vacuum, friction in a vacuum, and so on and so forth. In other words, we learned about how things move and act if there’s no matter to influence it. So nothing work exactly the way an equation said it should because we don’t experience reality in a vacuum. (Happily, I might add, since that would pretty much eradicate life on earth.) This is a great illustration of the point of this particular post: nothing is learned or experienced in isolation.
We’ve discussed already how apologetics is a very biblical concept. Now I want us to focus on why it is so important. It is absolutely true that we are called to be salt and light to a dark and lost world- we should be evangelistic since Christ is the ultimate answer to our world’s problems. It is also absolutely true that God has called us to faith and faithfulness, so our message includes elements of morality and ethics. However, it is also true that we must be aware of the cultural backdrop against which people will hear the Gospel. The Gospel is never heard in isolation, and we must be able to answer the darkness with light. We as Christians must be willing and able to cast down imaginations and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God. That imagination may take the form of the acceptance of sin, the secularist/naturalistic worldview, or belief in false religions. The response by Christians must always be the same. We must be able to give a loving answer concerning the hope that we have.
The sad reality is that Christianity has been relegated to a generic “faith” in our Western culture. It’s just another superstition, something someone believes to make themselves feel good. It’s just a crutch. The goal of apologetics is to answer that perspective. We know that Christianity is not just another generic faith. It’s not the same thing as the New Atheist’s “Flying Spaghetti Monster.” It’s the goal of apologetics to bring Christianity out of the private sphere and into the public sector.
Christians ought to be able to explain their faith in ways that make it an acceptable perspective in academics, law, and courts, regardless of the current perspective on issues such as the “separation of church and state.” I’m not saying anyone will come to Christ simply from apologetics. I am saying that Christians who understand the tenets of our faith and can explain them reasonably will help to create a culture in which Christianity is a reasonable and acceptable thing. The “Moral Majority” has made a fool of Christianity and has lost its power. It will not be political might that rights the wrongs of society. That is the job of biblical Christian demonstrating and explaining a viable faith in a reasonable way.
Sphere Sovereignty
Perhaps the single greatest thought I gleaned from Focus on the Family’s The Truth Project was the idea of sphere sovereignty. Sphere sovereignty is the idea that God has ordained and organized aspects of human existence, and that these aspects of existence are distinct and separate from one another. Examples of spheres include Family, the State, Church, Labor/Arts/Education, Economics/Business, and a personal relationship with God. While each sphere relates to the others in a number of ways, they are not to be organized or controlled by the other spheres.
For instance, God has ordained that marriage consist of one man and one woman, and that is all. The State may recognize marriages, and many people get married in Church by a pastor. However, the State does not have the power to extend the definition of marriage beyond the limit set by God. Similarly, the Church does not have the power to forbid to marry, nor can the Church dictate how marriages must operate, beyond what Scripture has already said. The Church has been given a set of rules concerning the roles of men and women in its function, and the Family has a particular set of rules concerning how Husbands and Wives may relate to each other. However, businesses and governments are not necessarily bound to those same rules concerning the roles of men and women.
I think the reason I like the idea of sphere sovereignty so much is that it is a balanced, rational approach to life. Not too long ago, and in some places today, Ecclesiasticism had a powerful hold over the West. The Church was able to dictate what the State should do, and it assumed the role of mediator between God and Man. This was an obvious mistake. However, since the “Enlightenment” (and I do use that word with a hint of disgust), Secularism has swept through and caused disaster after disaster. Secularists believe that Christianity (among other faiths) has no place in the public square. Church and one’s relationship with God are to be completely separate from everything. Secularism accepts and emphasizes sphere sovereignty, yet denies a relationship between spheres. Neutral secularism does not last long because faith is absolutely necessary in humans.
It is impossible to simply not believe in anything greater beyond ourselves, nor can one ever be truly independent. So the State has, in many places, become a monstrosity that has absorbed- or attempted to absorb- all the other spheres. It attempts to dictate what marriage is, what can be taught or preached about certain issues in Church, how faith may be practiced, where Christian works may be practiced, how religion in the sciences and arts are to be handled, and the list goes on and on. The State has, in many minds, taken on the role of a deity. It is a provider. It is a protector. It is what we owe allegiance to, and in return for our worship, we deserve certain things. What a pitiful thing the welfare State quickly becomes!
It is not just the State that has struggled with secularism, though. In the sphere of human labor, Christianity is rarely accepted. Be careful where you share your faith! Naturalism now grips the sciences, and the Arts are often mired in the clay of the revolting, obscene, and perverse. Families lack guidance, and even the Church struggles against anti-intellectualism, moral poverty, and decay of true worship. Among the many needs the western world has, a return to the idea of sphere sovereignty tops my list. Only then can a truly natural order be restored to a society in chaos. Families, businesses, academics, artists, individuals, and churches must return to what God has said in His Word about social order. I am not talking about theocracy here. I’m talking about conforming our ideology to reality.
Oh, For Crying Out Loud!
I got the title of this post from my favorite line from Stargate: SG-1. Jack O’neill always says it when he gets frustrated by people who waste time on stupidity, wrong-headed thinking, or inane political mumbo-jumbo. Frankly, I’ve noticed a lot of Christians that deserve a good “Oh, for crying out loud,” from the Colonel himself, followed by my second favorite line. My reason for this is that it seems like so many Christians have their heads firmly planted in the sand.
I say this because I have met so many Christians who naively think that they are not responsible for what happens in the world around them. Their attitudes and words, they think, do not influence those around them. Their choice of entertainment, they suppose, is entirely a matter of personal preference, devoid of any deeper meaning and incapable of creating unintended consequences. Whether or not they vote or are involved in government and law (one hesitates to use the word “politics”) is of little consequence. Worldview, apologetics, and philosophy have no meaning to them, and they would just as soon have everyone avoid this area of reality altogether. And, oh, the excuses they use to justify these ideas. Some of them even use Bible verses to bolster their position.
- Involvement in something other than government, law, and other aspects of the public square is not contradictory to concern for evangelism and discipleship. I would also add here that the Great Commission is not the only aspect of Christian responsibility. Otherwise, ditch you family and your job and spend the rest of your (most likely short) life winning folks and getting them into church! Oh, you’d have to revoke your citizenship, too, since that’s a part of human government.
- Abraham, Joseph, Moses, Samuel, Nehemiah, Daniel, Esther, and a host of other men and women of God were directly involved in influencing the course of their nation.
- God gives everyone talents and responsibilities so that they may work. Work is by default a good thing because God intended for us to work. It’s a part of His creation. God’s idea of “work” is not limited to a job, but to that which creates, repairs, maintains, and produces. In a sense, everything except for recreation is work- even voluntary involvement in government.
- We live in a nation that gives us direct access to our leaders. We can vote on the federal and local levels. We can call, email, and write our leaders. Just like Daniel and Esther, you and I have an audience with our leaders. They may not always do what is right, but we are responsible to do our best.
- We live in a capitalist society, for the most part. For this reason, your dollar is your vote for the goods that ought to be produced. When you buy a CD or movie, you tell the producers you want more of that kind of product. “What you applaud you encourage, but beware what you celebrate, ” says Ravi Zacharias. What are you telling Hollywood?
- Jesus didn’t limit His command for us to be salt and light to strictly evangelism, even though that is how we often portray it. No, He says that we must season the earth and light the world so that people will glorify God in Heaven. This can be done in many ways; naming the name of Christ must be done in even the highest places in the nation.
In fact, the use of the word “world” in Matthew 5 is interesting. “You are the light of the world”, Jesus says. The word “world” is from the Greek word “kosmos”. The Kosmos is defined as “constitution, order, and government”, “the human family”, “the universe and all of reality” and “world affairs”, according to my Greek lexicon. Interesting. We are supposed to be a light to law and government. How can we do so without informing those that work in such areas concerning Truth?
Which brings me to my last point. Truth matters. Either it is sacred and therefore must be protected, proclaimed, and defended, or it is unimportant and may be trampled under foot. For this reason, worldviews matter, for they are how people unintentionally interpret reality and Truth. Philosophy matters, for it is how people intentionally interpret reality and Truth. Apologetics matters, because it treats all Truth as God’s truth. There is no direction you and I can go in reality, no sphere into which we delve, in which God has not spoken. His Truth is everywhere. We can use His Truth, His world, His revelation of Himself through the cosmos to speak truth into people’s lives. If your concern is for evangelism and discipleship, you have no choice but to explore the world of philosophy, worldview, and apologetics.
Too many Christians are picking their one area, retreating into their hand-crafted shells of existence. Whether the world ends with a bang or a whimper, they are only concerned with themselves in the end. They do not want to learn. They do not want to expend energy. They’d rather go to task on only their one thing. We need people like Nehemiah in the Bible. He commanded his people to both defend and build. They took up sword and trowel to accomplish the task God had for them. We need to do the same- or get out of the way so someone else can.
I Love Lucy
Lucy, the small australopithecus afarensis, is supposed to be our ancestor. Standing at around three feet tall, she doesn’t look like much. It’s obvious that if we’re supposed to get from a chimp-like creature to our current standing of Homo sapien, there’s going to have to be a lot of changing going on throughout the years. We are supposed to have gone through the Homo habilis stage, followed by Homo erectus, Homo sapiens, and finally Homo sapiens sapiens (that’s not a typo.)
It all sounds so tidy, doesn’t it? Well, it seems that way until one realizes that there is no clear-cut definition of any of these categories, at least not one that is universally accepted by the scientific establishment. There is some degree of consensus, but certainly not the degree one would expect. There’s also little consensus on how long it takes a new species to evolve. Some estimates place it at 250,000 years per new species of human. Lucy is dated at 3 million years. Homo habilis is dated from 2 to 1.5 million years. Homo erectus is dated at 1.6 to .4 million years. Homo sapiens and so forth remain in the present. With so many unknown factors, who can tell what one should believe about evolutionary science? Of course, it gets much more convoluted than that.
The Taung Can No Man Tame
In 1924, Professor Raymond Dart acquired a fossilized skull from the lime works at Taung. He knew it was unique, and determined that it was a young primate which he named Australopithecus africanus. You can see pictures of Taung in many school textbooks due to its fame. Until Lucy was discovered in 1974, Taung was considered to be our oldest evolutionary ancestor, dating around to 2 million to 3 million years old. Then, in 1973, geologist T. C. Partridge rocked the evolutionist’s world. He determined that the cave that the Taung skull came from could not be more than 870,000 years old. Since it could take up to a million years, according to evolutionary theory, for a new species to evolve, going all the way from africanus to modern-day humans in 870,000 years is out of the question. Plus, even evolutionists date true humans back to 750,000 years. There’s no way for africanus to be an ancestor.
So what is an evolutionist to do? They tried to fit the Taung skull into the line of habilis. Of course, some were honest. Phillip Tobias wrote in response: “Although nearly 50 yr have elapsed since its discovery, it is true to say that the Taung skull has never yet been fully analyzed and described.” I guess it stinks for all the people duped by the scientific establishment all those years! Some have seen fit to remove the Taung skull from the line of humans altogether, classifying it as P. robustus.
Monkeying Around with the Family Tree
Fortunately for evolutionists, Lucy was found the year after Patridge dated the cave. The family tree was revised, and A. afarensis (Lucy) replaced africanus (Taung) as our nonhuman ancestor. Africanus was moved to the australopithecine branch of the tree and became the link between Lucy and P. robustus.
In 1985, the famous “Black Skull” was found. Dating back, according to evolutionists, to 2.5 million years ago, it seems to be a blend of P. robustus and Lucy, leaving Taung as the odd man out. So scientists have begun to move Taung back to the line of humans (again), between Lucy (A. afarensis) and H. habilis. The problem, of course, is that Partridge’s dating of the cave makes that impossible. The dating was based on thermoluminescence analysis of calcite and uranium-series dates of 942,000 years ago and 764,000 years ago on limestone. Richard G. Klein of Stanford University writes: “A date for Taung of 2 million years ago or more may seem most unreasonable, but the argument is obviously circular and the true age remains uncertain.”
What is my point in all of this? My point is that there is nothing solid or certain about the supposed family tree. Dating methods aren’t entirely reliable, but even when they are used, they are often ignored or twisted to make the fossil record say what the evolutionists want it to say. Lucy, Taung, and the rest are being moved haphazardly about the family tree just to make one that works. To place your trust in the soft science of paleoanthropology is a mistake. I love Lucy because she is a reminder that there are far more problems than solutions offered up by a Darwinistic interpretation of the fossil record. It needs to be reinterpreted. That’s where the problem lies. The flaws are not with the fakes (like Piltdown Man), the genuine fossils, etc. The flaws are in the way evidence is interpreted and with the scientific establishment’s mad dash to put something believable together.
Aren’t you glad there are much more firm foundations out there?
The Poetry and Artistry of Evolution
You’d probably assume that a blog post about biological evolution would deal with biology or some other related study. However, that’s not where I’m taking this discussion today. Today, I’ll be looking at the poetic and artistic aspects of the Darwinism movement. To be honest, it makes sense that a believable, coherent theory would have elements of the Arts, because humans have a way of describing anything that matters in with particular eloquence. It’s true, we often tell someone we care about simply “I love you,” but we all know there are much more creative ways of saying those three words. The music industry has blossomed thanks to that creativity.
Darwin’s Day in Court
Andrew Hill has written: “Compared to other sciences, the mythic element is greatest in paleoanthropology.” (in American Scientist, March-April 1984) Speaking sympathetically of that same phenomena in the same article, Ian Tattersall admits: “Paleoanthropologists are fond of telling each other ‘Just-So’ stories; and once in a while a little needling of this kind does no harm at all.” Milford Wolpoff is much less forgiving: ” When the only people who can comment are the discoverers or friends of the discoverers, there is no sense of independent observer. We’re not practicing science. We’re practicing opera.” His reasons for making that statement can be found here.
Two books, written by law professors, may be instructive at this point. Norman Macbeth, a Harvard-trained lawyer and non-creationist studied evolution for years and wrote a book Darwin Retried in which he demonstrated that evolution was a religion and was not of high enough quality to stand up in a court of law. Philip E Johnson, a law professor of the University of California, Berkeley, wrote Darwin on Trial. In his book, he came to four important conclusions about evolution:
- Evolution is grounded on naturalism, not scientific fact
- A belief that a large body of empirical evidence supports evolution is nothing but an illusion
- Evolution is a religion
- If evolution had been subjected to a rigorous study of the evidence, it would have been abandoned long ago
In response to Roger Lewin’s description of the Ancestor’s Exhibit in 1984 in which he spoke of the awe and emotion of the experience, Johnson commented:
“Lewin is absolutely correct, and I can’t think of anything more likely to detract from the objectivity of one’s judgment. Descriptions of fossils from people who yearn to cradle their ancestors in their hands ought to be scrutinized as carefully as a letter of recommendation from a job applicant’s mother…. The story of human descent from apes is not merely a scientific hypothesis; it is the secular equivalent of the story of Adam and Eve.”
Raining on Darwin’s Parade
Let’s turn now to Darwinism and graphic media. In the March 1998 edition of Antiquity, David Van Reybrouck, a student of the role of drawings in the propagation of Darwinism has made five observations:
- Illustrations always go beyond the archaeological data
- Illustrations always involve speculation on the part of the fossil discoverers, who advise the artists
- Illustrations involve interpretations that rely heavily on unproven and sometimes doubtful theories
- Illustrations are always nonobjective, yet they are trusted in a visual society such as ours
- Illustrations are used extensively because they sell evolution effectively.
The most blatant lie ever told to help promote evolution is the “parade” of stages in supposed human evolution that we are all familiar with. The origin of this parade- or should I say charade?- of characters is an illustration in F. Clark Howell’s book Early Man, originally published in 1965. The parade was originally on a 36-inch foldout page within the book. What most people don’t realize that the parade is pure propaganda. It doesn’t exist. The original book makes it clear that the parade doesn’t tell an accurate story, and the author and publishers knew it. Evolutionists knew that the apes and ape-like creatures they had theorized did not walk on their back feet. The book clearly states in the text, but not on the chart: “Although protoapes and apes were quadrupedal, all are shown here standing for purposes of comparison.” Sizes of each proposed ancestor were not to scale, and they were shown walking, not simply standing as the author states. These small details make a world of difference when it comes to the believability of the theory. It’s clear deception. Yet it was- and still is, in some cases- included in advertisements and eventually became its own poster in classrooms around the world.
Holding Out for a Hero
Finally, I’d like to call your attention to Misia Landau’s book Narratives of Human Evolution. In her book, Miss Landau makes an interesting assertion: paleoanthropology is storytelling. She compare folk-stories and epics to Darwin, Huxley, Keith, and Haeckel’s descriptions of human evolution. Here’s some similarities she’s noticed:
- The Hero’s Origin- The hero is typically leading a safe and untroubled life. He may be smaller or weaker than others. Think “Frodo Baggins.” In the story of evolution, the hero is a nondescript primate, perhaps living in the trees. Like Frodo Baggins heading out from the Shire with the Ring, the primate leaves the safety of the trees to walk on the ground, perhaps because of a larger brain or changes in the availability of food.
- The Hero Tested- In myths, the Hero is tested by predators, opponents, or his environment. In the Darwinistic myth, similar situations occur. “Indeed, the tests are specifically designed for that purpose: to bring out the human in the hero”, Landau writes.
- The Hero Transformed- Myths and even modern fantasy always add a sacred or magical object- a Ring of Power, the Master Sword, and Invisibility Cloak- to help a man become more than he was. In evolutionary theory, natural selection or a “magic twist” of genetic mutations (those are the words of Jared Diamond, who wrote an article about the movement of modern humans out of Africa in the May 1989 edition of Discover magazine) bestow upon the hero the intelligence or abilities necessary to become more than his ancestors.
- The Hero’s Death- The fatal irony of the average hero is that he dies due to pride through success. Most evolution tales include a warning to humans that we could become like our supposed ancestors if we aren’t careful. Richard Leakey devotes an entire book to that subject entitled The Sixth Extinction.
Frankly, I think J. R. R. Tolkien is a much better writer of this sort of material than the Darwinists. Let’s just leave it to the experts, ok, guys?
Evolution: A Logical Lightweight
At the AAAS convention in San Francisco, Carl Sagan once explained in his lecture “Velikovsky’s Challenge to Science” that science works in this way: “The most fundamental axioms and conclusions may be challenged.” The hypothesis “must survive confrontation with observation. Appeals to authority are impermissible. Experiments must be reproducible.”
That’s a pretty strange statement when you think about it. Evolution isn’t observable. It can’t be challenged in the scientific establishment without some serious ridicule taking place. Evolutionists appeal to the authority of the scientific establishment. There aren’t any experiments that are able to confirm evolution. It’s ironic to me, then, that Sagan would also make a very profound statement in that same lecture: “Not all scientific statements have equal weight.” How right he is. Direct observations of, say, the laws of physics, are far more weightier because of the tremendous amount of data verifying them. Unfortunately, the scientific establishment does not appear to behave this way, and the general public certainly isn’t aware of this concept. What we have are Darwinists acting as the high priests of our society. People- even highly-educated people- believe in Darwinism because scientists can’t be wrong.
How is Darwinism a sort of lesser science? Consider our interest in chimps. We study chimpanzees- their behavior, genetic makeup, and anatomy- because Darwinists believe that we are very closely related to them. Darwinists then use superficial similarities between humans and chimps to prove their assumptions. That is called begging the question in logic. They assume to be true the very thing they are trying to prove. Bereft of anything that Sagan would call a good basis for scientific study, a philosophical assumption has been foisted upon us as science. In reality, such studies on chimps would only attempt to shed light on humanity if evolution had first proven to be a correct assumption. Unlike Darwinism, intelligent design bases its theories on the evidence around us: information provided for our world through physics and DNA as well as the incredible complexity of the universe.
The logical fallacies don’t stop there, however. There’s a difference between historical and scientific evidence. In spite of the fact that scientists have performed numerous experiments on animals in an attempt to prove evolution through mutation, the obvious must be declared: just because mutations can be made to happen or engineered in a lab does not mean that they did happen in the past. That is a logical fallacy. That genetic engineering is possible in the present does not mean that it certainly did happen in the past. Scientists have proven it is possible; they have not proven that it occurred.
Suppose I gave you a pile of hammers and asked you to arrange them in a potential evolutionary sequence. You could start with small ones and work your way to larger ones, arrange them by claw types, group them into families based on what they are made of, etc. You could argue that you showed a pattern from simple to complex. The whole assignment, of course, would be bogus. There was no actual evolutionary relationship between the different hammers. They were designed with a particular function or purpose in mind. Curved and straight claw hammers, sledge hammers, ball pein, mason’s hammers, upholsterer’s hammers, and mallets are different because they are designed that way. Just because scientists can superimpose an evolutionary order on things does not mean that the evolutionary order is fact.
In the Multitude of Evidence there is Safety
We should all be very grateful for what science has allowed us to achieve. The medical fields have provided us with the ability to heal many wounds and diseases previously thought to be untreatable. Technology has allowed us to communicate and travel efficiently. Yes, because of scientific principles and dedicated men and women willing to spend years of their lives researching, writing, and peer-reviewing what has already been written, you and I are able to enjoy very different lives from our forbears. We can be confident in scientific discovery because it is based on solid evidence and a desire to “follow the evidence wherever it leads,” as Carl Sagan once famously said. Would it surprise you, then, to learn how little evidence we have of human evolution?
HIDE AND SEEK
Have you ever seen an actual fossil of a human ancestor? Probably not. I haven’t. The vast majority of the authors of textbooks on paleontology haven’t. Curators of the museums of natural history around the world usually haven’t. Only a very, very small handful of people have ever been privileged enough to see such fossils. I’m not saying there’s a conspiracy afoot. I’m saying that, because they are so rare, so valuable, and so fragile, human ancestral fossils are very unlikely to be on display or studied. In fact, most of us have never even seen a picture of an actual fossil. According to Marvin L. Lubenow, whose book Bones of Contention provided many of the “diving in” points for this series of blog posts, the total number of people who have access to ancestral fossils is fewer than the heads of state in the entire world.
William King, the man who declared Homo neanderthalensis to be a different species than modern-day humans in 1864, never saw the actual fossils. He did so after reading a description of them. Darwin never saw a single human fossil. Thomas Huxley never saw original fossils either, but he took great pains to describe them in his 1863 work Man’s Place in Nature.
People publish vast amounts of research with unverified data! Germany built a two-story museum to celebrate the discovery of Steinheim Man in 1933. Visitors never saw the actual fossil though. They viewed plastic replicas. The actual fossil was kept in a safe set into a stone wall in an old military outpost several miles away. In their article in the October 1995 edition of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Braun, Hublin, and Boucher note: “While it was never described in great detail, this fossil played a central role in various evolutionary models.”
Of course, there is a good deal of politics in this field as well. Teuku Jacob, former curator of Gadjah Mada University, was known for his jealousy of the Homo erectus fossils from Java in his possession. Swisher, Curtis, and Lewin write:
“These fossils, the prized objects of Jacob’s collection are rarely seen, even by professionals in the fossil-hunting business. Scholars with serious research programs have to apply to Jacob for permission even to see them, let alone touch them, for scientific study. And even those few who succeed in obtaining official permission have to wait for Jacob’s final OK, for he alone is permitted to remove the fossils from the safes.”
Donald Johanson, the discover of Lucy, agrees that “only those in the inner circle get to see the fossils; only those who agree with the particular interpretation of a particular investigator are allowed to see the fossils.”
CIRCLING THE WAGONS
There’s one exception to this almost xenophobic protection of the fossils. In 1984, the American Museum of Natural History in New York sponsored an exhibit in which more than forty of the original fossils were brought together for the first- and probably last- time ever. There were special guards over the fossils and the curators that traveled with the fossils. The fossils were placed in special cases. Work on the subway line beneath the museum was halted to avoid vibrating- and possibly damaging- the fossils.
What prompted this gathering of the fossils? In his book Ancestors: The Hard Evidence, Eric Delson tells us that there were those in the scientific community who were concerned about the rising popularity of creationism. Delson, who was a scientist at the American Museum, tells us that creationism was a “great and growing concern” at the museum. The primary purpose, then, was to show professionals and lay people the evidence for evolution, and they avoided making any statement concerning creationism at the museum so that they would not “dignify…creation science.” Their words, not mine. What are these guys afraid of?
BLIND LEADING THE BLIND
Paleoanthropology is in a strange position. Unlike most- if not all- other areas of science, workers in this field rarely have access to the material their science is based on. They are usually one step or so away from the actual evidence. Too often, creationists have been guilty of downplaying the importance of human ancestral fossils. In reality, they are unique and valuable, but because of their value, an insufficient number of scientists have been able to study them in depth.
What do they work with then? They work with casts and descriptions others have written of the fossils. Casts may be reliable if the molds used are detailed enough and if the materials maintain their intended shape. However, casts can be far from ideal. They lack the detail of the original. Becky A Sigmon of the University of Toronto says that there is a general consensus among paleoanthropologists that “casts should not be used as resource material for a scientific paper.” (See her collection of papers on the subject for more information.) She has a good reason for saying this. At the American Museum exhibit in 1984, when the original fossils were to be placed into their mounts (which had been based on the casts available), most of them did not fit. Casts simply aren’t substitutes from the originals. Lubenow further complains that “casts of only a small percentage of the total fossil material and less than half of the most important fossil material are available for study.”
Scientists are then forced to turn to description of fossils in scientific literature, which is the most common form of source material for scientific work. How can a field of science continue to function and inform public opinion if there is so little readily-available information? How can we be expected to believe what few have seen? As John Fleagle of the State University of New York, Stony Brook has said: “The big awkwardness right now is when someone announces they have found a specimen that overturns everything we know, but almost no one has seen it.”
Talk about blind faith! My point is this: if we are to believe that humans evolved in the manner most Darwinists claim, there must be more evidence. Right now, there’s just not enough out there for me to buy into.
A Sticking Situation
Having established that the creation of the universe and subsequent formation of the galaxies are all but impossible to have occurred by chance, we now turn our attention to the formation of the planets themselves. It turns out that getting planets to form naturally isn’t very easy after all. There was a time when planets were supposed to have blasted out of the Sun as the result of another passing star, but anything blasted or sucked off of the Sun would have fallen back into the Sun as soon as the other star passed. That’s gravity again for you; always making a mess of things! So scientists turned to “cold accretion”, postulating that planets could form as dust from a forming solar system began to stick together, form dust bunnies, then “planetesimals”, then eventually establish their own gravity which began pulling more planetesimals together until eventually a whole planet was formed. This is supposedly how the inner planets of our solar system formed.
Oh, but there’s a problem here, and it’s a whopper! How do you get that much dust to stick together? How does that dust turn into the the rock and iron of modern planetesimals? Why don’t cosmic “dust bunnies” form in space today? The answer is that space dust doesn’t turn into dust bunnies, and planetesimals don’t play nice when they meet each other. These meteorites and their kin cruise around the solar system at a cool 100,000 miles per hour, and, when they hit each other, they either bounce off or shatter each other. No planets. No us.
But, one may argue, could not their speed relative to each other be much slower, such as the rubble that makes up the rings of Saturn? That’s a great question, but the rubble around Saturn is not collecting; the chunks of rock and dust around Saturn simply bounce off of each other.
Well, what of the gas giants and ice planets then? Surely we can come up with a way for them to work out? Not a chance. If dust has a hard time sticking together, how do you think gas molecules will handle things? Not very well, as you can most likely imagine, since gasses simply do not “stick” to anything. I know there have been simulations demonstrating the formation of gas giants, but those simulations begin with a “gravitational instability.” The simulation was designed to create planets, something evolutionists don’t believe in. The ice planets are supposed to have formed as ice crystals sticking together, but there’s not as much matter out there and no model can bring about their existence so quickly. Other models assume they formed closer to the sun and then moved further away, but you still run into that pesky problem of getting things to stick together. Back to the drawing board!
Bedtime Stories About the Beginning
So we’ve already talked about the singularity pseudoscience. What happens after that? Well, I’m glad you asked that, because now the story gets even better! By the time we’re through talking about galaxy and star formation, stories about wolves eating grandmothers only to be killed by friendly woodsmen will seem tragically commonplace and dull. Now, where was I….. Oh,yes! The singularity had just finished causing the strangely uniform inflation to expand the universe and produce antimatter-free matter, when it turned to its next task: the creation of galaxies and stars….
The question is, once the gas particles in the universe begin expanding, how do you get them to start collapsing all over the universe without creating a bunch of black holes? In other words, assuming you can get the expansion to stop and the collapsing to start, how do you keep galaxies from collapsing completely? Galaxies won’t form naturally unless the matter begins to collect, and the only thing strong enough to collect the matter is gravity, which shouldn’t be able to work thanks to the supposedly uniform inflation I had mentioned in the last post. Of course, once galaxies begin to form courtesy of gravity, they ought to just keep collapsing in on themselves. What has to step in to keep the galaxies from just shrinking into really big black holes? The plot thickens……
Steven Hawking, in his book The Universe in a Nutshell postulated that dark matter did it. Not just any dark matter, though. His very special brand of magical dark matter formed on a brane world parallel to our own. And I thought I had a big imagination! So far, brane worlds and dark matter (at least dark matter on the order Hawking is talking about) is purely theoretical. No science here so far!
Maybe that’s why Hawking has put galaxy formation on his list of unexplained mysteries in his books published in 1988, 2001, and 2002. J. Trefil wrote in his The Dark Side of the Universe: “There shouldn’t be galaxies out there at all, and even if there are galaxies, they shouldn’t be grouped together the way they are….It is one of the thorniest problems in cosmology.” Marcus Chown, in his article “Let there Be Light” (February 1998 edition of New Scientist) quoted NASA scientists as saying: “We have no direct evidence of how galaxies were formed or how galaxies evolved, whether they formed from aggregations of smaller units or from subdivisions of large ones.” Their problem is that, at best, the Big Bang theory gives us a mass of expanding gas, and that is all.
Of course, then there’s the formation of stars, where we have the same problem with gravity producing more black holes and homogenous gas not wanting to collapse at all. But wait! There’s more! Stars are supposed to have formed, at least in one theory, in hot gaseous clouds vaguely referred to as “star-forming regions.” The problem? Hot gas clouds are more likely to disperse than collapse, so I have a hard time believing that anything like what we see today is actually capable of producing stars. Sure, there are stars in those regions, but that doesn’t mean the stars formed there. They aren’t necessarily new stars. Who honestly cares if stars currently surrounded by vast gas and dust clouds are sucking those clouds in? Any star would suck gas and dust into itself because of gravity. For all we know the stars are old! Lada and Shu wrote and article for Science in 1990, saying: “We have not yet been able to unambiguously detect the collapse of a molecular cloud core or the infall of circumstellar material onto an embryonic star.” No proof there, guys.
This is the second part in a series on the Big Bang. Millions and billions of years have gone by in this little bedtime story, and yet I don’t see any reason for believing a word of it. There’s not one shred of proof, and the objections are virtually insurmountable. I’d rather believe that the cow jumped over the moon than believe this rot, because my “willful suspension of disbelief” has its limits. Just ask my wife about how I felt about “robot heaven” in Transformers 2.
Of Singularities and Pseudosciences
In the beginning there was a singularity. Fortunately for all of us, it expanded (or exploded, depending on who you ask), and our universe is the result. Well, that’s how things would work if the evolutionists had their way. Oh, I know they prefer to use much more scientific terms, but I sometimes have to question why. The things they try so hard to prove using science actually have some very distinct scientific problems.
First of all, there’s the very existence of a singularity from which everything came from. Professor Steven Hawking writes the following in his work A Brief History of Time: “At the singularity, general relativity and all other physical laws would break down: one couldn’t predict what will come out of the singularity….This means that one might as well cut the big bang, and any events before it, out of the theory, because they can have no effect on what we observe.” Thanks, Doc. I’ll just set my bag o’ tools (the laws of physics) aside now because they won’t work in the Big Bang scenario. So what exactly makes this different from a miracle? Once one throws out physics, one is left with metaphysics, in which God is permitted.
The existence of a singularity isn’t the only miracle, however. There’s another great one that big bang cosmologists keep in their bag o’ tricks (since the bag o’ tools known as the “laws of physics” can’t help much here). There’s also inflation, which appears to have properties as varied and mysterious as pixie dust. You see, if inflation didn’t happen, the universe would have collapsed back into a singularity again thanks to a tool of ours known as gravitation. Fortunately, inflation was around to accelerate the expansion of the universe by a thousand billion billion billion times, all very smoothly of course. The Big Bang scenario also predicts the existence of magnetic monopoles, which have never been found, and a non-uniform cosmic microwave background radiation instead of the observed uniform CMBR we see today. Fortunately, we just sprinkle more of the pixie dust inflation and- presto!- the problem goes away. Well, sort of. Inflation is an ad hoc theory in that there is no evidence for its existence, and the inflation rate itself must have been very uniform and fine tuned in order for it to not have looked a lot like a really big, very destructive explosion. I wish I had that kind of faith, my evolutionary comrades.
Then there’s that pesky thing Einstein came up with, what was it? Oh, yeah. E=mc2 (which actually looks squared when I type it even though it just looks like a “2″ when I post) . That’s mass-energy equivalence, meaning that matter and energy are interchangeable. Enough energy can produce matter, and matter can be converted into energy. When particles are created from energy, they are always created in matter/antimatter pairs. Electrons are created alongside anti-electrons (positrons), protons are created alongside anti-protons, neutrinos are created alongside anti-neutrinos, etc. Of course, when matter meets antimatter, the process is reversed. Matter and antimatter annihilate each other and you get a lot of energy. This means that if the Big Bang occurred, the matter formed from the energy of the Big Bang would have very quickly annihilated itself. No galaxies. No stars. No planets. No us. Fortunately, all observable matter in the universe is ordinary, boring ol’ matter. No antimatter galaxies, stars, planets, or people. Big Bang cosmologists try to get around this by saying that- by chance- a small amount (like the mass of the universe) of matter was still left over after the universe nearly annihilated itself, but that seems impossible based on everything we know. What mechanism was in place that skewed the laws of physics and gave existence a chance? None that we know of. It’s all based on assumptions and guesses.
I’d like to come back to the CMBR again. Predictions of the level of background radiation in the universe were way off. It was nearly uniformly 3 degrees kelvin, thanks to the constancy of starlight. I say it was nearly uniform because in 2003, WMAP discovered real variations in the CMBR. I say “real” here because its predecessor, COBE, discovered some years earlier that just turned out to be “white noise.” The problem is, the variations discovered work very nicely in a creationist cosmology, not a big bang cosmology. The Big Bang model predicts that the universe should be uniform, boundless, with no center. Instead, the variations indicated the existence of a cosmic “north and south pole”, and a cosmic “equator” of sorts. Creationists can easily explain this in a model involving the Milky Way positioned near the center of the universe, but such galactocentrism is unpleasant for evolutionists who assume that mankind is not special. Oops again!
The Rape of Chance
Perhaps the most abused factor in evolutionary theory is chance. It is invoked in nearly every aspect of big bang cosmology and Darwinian evolution, even though the average textbook doesn’t actually use the word. Oh, I know that they like to use phrases like “natural selection” and “genetic drift” when dealing with Darwinism, but there’s nothing else out there for the evolutionists to appeal to except for physics when it comes to Big Bang cosmology. It is necessary, of course, because there is no divine mover behind events, and everything that was, is, and will be is the result of Dawkins’ “Blind Watchmaker“. In the most extreme cases, evolutionists assert that anything is possible, even if “anything” is highly unlikely and may have had to occur or exist in one of the many universes they assume to exist. Since the universe (or multiverse) is so vast, everything has likely already occurred somewhere along the line. Hence, however unlikely it is that the universe we see came about on its own, it has obviously done so thanks to the wonders of sheer chance. To the minds of many, this is just one universe out of the infinite universes that are out there (wherever “there” is), and this may be just one iteration of an infinite progression of universes. We just happened to exist in a universe capable of supporting life. The scenario, however, is false. Anything and everything is not possible. Chance cannot, for instance, violate the laws of physics. That severely limits the potentialities of the wonderful world of chance. Therefore, evolutionists prefer to blend together chance and necessity. An object or process is determined to be necessary, and chance is used to fill in the gaps. How did life begin? Well, we know it exists, and we think we know how early earth would have looked, so just identify what is necessary for life to exist, throw in some “chance”, and add a dash of scientific jargon, and you’ve got yourself a working theory! Williams and Hartnett analyze this use of chance in their book Dismantling the Big Bang.
Williams and Hartnett point out that, for starters, chance is not a force. At all. Things may appear to happen randomly, but there are actually a complex set of forces at work. Anything above the quantum level moves according to Newtonian laws of motion. In a sense, “chance” and “necessity” are really describing the same thing: Physics. Necessity is limited to the certain results of the laws of physics. Chance refers to the possible results of the laws of physics. In this way, chance adds nothing to the party at all. One might question why anybody even invited it in the first place.
Secondly, Chance is dualistic in nature. Whenever you measure the probability something will occur, you must also measure the probability that it will not occur. I suppose there is technically a chance that the water vapor rising from my stove will concentrate into a point and burn a hole through my chest. However, there is a much, much greater chance that such an event will never occur. The chance it will not occur is so significant, no one is even concerned about this event taking place. So it ought to be when discussing chance and origins, because the numbers are no where near being in favor of evolution.
Thirdly, chance does not mean that every possibility is equally likely. Even if the universe is vast and has been around for billions of years, it is most certainly not truly infinite, else the Big Bang would be not necessary. Therefore, there are limits. All interaction in the real world will use up space and time. All interaction in the real world will use up energy. Actually, long periods of time going by will actually decrease the likelihood that anything will happen at all, thanks to our dear friend Entropy. It’s a gamble evolutionists try to take, but the odds always favor the house. Just as spending more money at a casino makes it more difficult to win, “spending” more energy early on in the game of existence makes it more difficult to bring our universe into the state it is in today. The universe would have to had scored an “early win”, which is again unlikely, even by evolutionist standards. Somehow, everything turned out just right for us, something skewed nature. And chance doesn’t really help us figure out what that something is.
Finally, Williams and Hartnett point out that chance can only be applied to events that can happen. Chance never makes things happen when they are physically impossible. Consider the “rogue gas” scenario above that burned a whole in my chest. It isn’t just unlikely. It’s impossible because gas molecules operate according to the aforementioned laws of motion. The actually probability of the event I described is therefore a whopping Zero. Chance cannot make impossible events possible.
Starlight, Time, and the New Physics, Part 3
Hartnett assumes that part of the first day of creation included forming the Earth primarily from water, that Genesis 1:1-2 is a literal part of the creation narrative and not just an introductory statement. Frankly, I have no problem with that even though some Christians might. Since water- and a lot of it- is essentially the only thing around, God’s creation of light doesn’t refer to stars or the sun. When God created light, He created gravitational and electromagnetic energy, the potential for light. This caused the Earth “which was without form and void” to form into a sphere under its own gravitation. Therefore, the first day of creation included light through electromagnetic energy as well as time, the laws of nature, and three-dimensional space.
On the fourth day the sun, moon, and stars were created as the Bible states. Then, in Hartnett’s theory, God expanded space itself (“stretched out the heavens”) as Psalms and Isaiah state. The size of the universe was rapidly increased, and galaxies were pulled along for the ride, they receded from earth. This event caused the galaxies to recede and spawn quasars. A particularly interesting view Hartnett holds is that quasars are the direct result of God’s stretching the heavens out. If this is true, when we are viewing quasars, we are watching the immediate result of God’s creative act on the fourth day. So how did the starlight reach earth by the time Adam was created?
When God stretched out space, this caused a time-dilation event on earth. Hartnett states that time would have slowed significantly on earth but remained flowing at the “normal” speed throughout most of the universe. However, Hartnett also states that God accelerated the stretching of the universe only during the creation week (since God’s “stretching” act is referred to only in the past tense). In his view, the universe might not be really expanding anymore or at least the expansion is not accelerating. We are only seeing the after-effects of the universe being stretched. Therefore, we observe redshift in the heavens and not blueshift. We are not still in a dilation field (since it was caused by the acceleration of the expansion) so blueshift is no longer observed, but the light we see that has traveled more than 6,000 light years or so has been redshifted by past expansion.
In summary, Hartnett’s theory dovetails nicely with the Genesis 1 creation account. God creates the universe in literally six earth days (plus one day to “rest”- leave off creating). Though the “evening and the morning” only lasted a day on earth, God stretched out the heavens for roughly 1-3 days, during which time itself moved more slowly on earth than elsewhere in the universe. The result is that billions of years occurred elsewhere while only a total of six days passed on earth. In that time, light traveled from distant galaxies to earth, but it is now redshifted as a result of the initial acceleration of the universe. This theory agrees with the Bible and observable data, and it explains how light could travel so far in such a short time.
Starlight, Time, and the New Physics, Part 2
In the previous post, I had explained a little bit about Dr. John Hartnett’s problems with Big Bang cosmology. However, it’s not like Creationists are problem-free in their claims either. For instance, how did starlight that is millions of light years away make it to earth in around 7,000 years? That’s a problem, for sure. Now, Creationists have come up with some interesting solutions to the problem in the past, but I’ve not been thrilled with any of them.
- Light is slowing down- When God made the world, He made light to travel faster than it is today. As my friend Josh pointed out to me, we’d have a hard time proving that one, and it has some theological implications since God’s emblem in Scripture is light. If light changes in such a fundamental way, then God may change too.
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Creationist Cosmology: Starlight, Time, and the New Physics
Recently I’ve been reading a book entitled Starlight, Time, and the New Physics, which was published in 2007 by Dr. John Hartnett, a professor from the University of West Australia. He has earned a Ph.D. in Physics, and he has published over 120 papers in scientific journals and holds two patents. Shockingly, Hartnett is also a young-earth creationist. The way Darwinists talk, Christians and physicists could never play nice, especially when it came to cosmology and the origin of the universe. What’s funny is that Hartnett has a scientific problem with the Big Bang Theory. Well, actually he has several.
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Starlight, Time, and the New Physics, Part 2
In the previous post, I had explained a little bit about Dr. John Hartnett’s problems with Big Bang cosmology. However, it’s not like Creationists are problem-free in their claims either. For instance, how did starlight that is millions of light years away make it to earth in around 7,000 years? That’s a problem, for sure. Now, Creationists have come up with some interesting solutions to the problem in the past, but I’ve not been thrilled with any of them.
- Light is slowing down- When God made the world, He made light to travel faster than it is today. As my friend Josh pointed out to me, we’d have a hard time proving that one, and it has some theological implications since God’s emblem in Scripture is light. If light changes in such a fundamental way, then God may change too.
- God made light “en route” to Earth during the creation week- So then God lies, right? Because light is information, Josh would also remind us, and God would have to “make up” information that wasn’t real or true. In other words, when we see a star go supernova that was millions of light years away, the star never went supernova in the first place. It’s all a lie. That doesn’t sound like God to me.
- White hole cosmology- Russell Humphreys strikes nearer to the truth with this theory, but it is problematic. For Humphreys, God used a white hole to create the universe. Instead of drawing matter in like a black hole, a white hole would push matter and energy out. Humphreys’ theory states that Earth is at the bottom of a massive gravity well, which results in time passing slower on Earth during the creation week than elsewhere in the universe. The problem with this theory is that the light we see from distant space ought to be blueshifted, not redshifted. As I said, this cosmology is on the right track, but has problems. Humphreys does deserve credit for looking outside the standard Creationist box, though.
The Big Bang cosmology expected that the universe would be unbounded, infinite, and lack a center (homogenous). It would look the same in all directions. However, scientists are discovering that, judging from the Galaxy Redshift Survey, the universe does have a center, and we are strangely near it. It looks the same in all directions (isotropic), but it is far from homogenous. In the aforementioned survey, a pattern emerged, which you can see above. There are more galaxies closer to earth, and they are in an intricate pattern. Interestingly enough, we’re in the center of it. This makes us question whether or not it is unbounded and infinite as well.
Creationist cosmology such as Hartnett’s would predict a universe that is bounded and finite, that God placed the Earth at the center of it, and that it would look the same in all directions (have a variety of stellar and planetary objects) because of God’s wisdom and creativity. As far as we can tell, that’s exactly what we have. But what about the starlight traveling all those light years?
Dr. Hartnett’s solution in Starlight, Time, and the New Physics is to agree with the Bible that the Earth is less than 7,000 years old. However, Dr. Hartnett invokes Einstein’s theories of relativity and asks the question: “By which clocks?” Genesis obviously states the length of time on Earth for each day of creation as being a literal, twenty-four hour period. The Hebrew “evening and morning” formula leaves only one possible conclusion. The days are literal, yet the starlight has traveled much further than we would think possible. Hartnett turned to Scripture and cosmological relativity, and discovered an interesting answer. In Psalm 104:2, Isaiah 40:22, Isaiah 42:5, and Isaiah 44:24, the Bible specifically states that God stretched out the Heavens. What does that mean, though? Hartnett’s answer coming up next week….
Creationist Cosmology: Starlight, Time, and the New Physics
Recently I’ve been reading a book entitled Starlight, Time, and the New Physics, which was published in 2007 by Dr. John Hartnett, a professor from the University of West Australia. He has earned a Ph.D. in Physics, and he has published over 120 papers in scientific journals and holds two patents. Shockingly, Hartnett is also a young-earth creationist. The way Darwinists talk, Christians and physicists could never play nice, especially when it came to cosmology and the origin of the universe. What’s funny is that Hartnett has a scientific problem with the Big Bang Theory. Well, actually he has several.
- Uniformity of Background Radiation- If the universe began 13.7 billion years ago courtesy of the Big Bang, why is the background radiation (the “temperature” of empty space) virtually the same in all directions? Unless Earth really is the center of the universe, or at least very close to it, the temperature of space in one direction of the universe shouldn’t be the same as in the opposite direction. The radiation from each end of the universe hasn’t had time to “blend” or balance each other out, since it should take twice as long (at least) as the universe has existed according to the Big Bang theory for radiation from one end of the universe to make it to the other.
- Galactic Recession- No, I’m not talking about the results of Obama’s stimulus package. To the surprise of most scientists, a survey of the galaxies shows that they are all receding (moving away from) our own Milky Way. It shouldn’t be true that all galaxies are receding unless the Milky Way really is very near the center of the universe. Of course, this idea is unpalatable to Darwinists, since it would make our home planet seem too “special.”
- Dark matter- Galaxies shouldn’t be able to hold themselves together without more mass, so scientists have assumed that unobservable “dark matter” must exist. Therefore, of all the matter and energy in the universe, scientists assume that roughly 21% of the matter in the universe is “dark.” This is compared to the 4% of visible matter that can be observed in the universe. Since dark matter is not visible, its existence has been strictly inferred. Some scientists include brown dwarf stars, which are far too rare to account for all the “missing” matter. Others include theoretical supermassive black holes and axions.
- Dark energy- In 1998, scientists discovered that, contrary to popularly-held belief, the expansion of the universe was accelerating rather than decelerating. In order to explain why gravity wasn’t slowing the rate of expansion, scientists theorized that a phenomenon known as “dark energy” was acting on the universe to increase the rate of expansion. This dark energy is also inferred.
- Quasars- Quasars are star-like phenomena thought to exist near the edges of the visible universe. The reason scientists believe that they come from near the edges of the visible universe is because of redshift. According to scientists, redshift occurs when light is “stretched” as it travels through an expanding universe, or due to galactic recession. Quasars are extremely red-shifted, which means that- according to the Darwinistic scientists- they came from very far away. That theory hit a brick wall a few years ago when scientists discovered a quasar in the heart of a galaxy only 300 million light years away. That’s way too close for comfort! How can the redshift be so high if the quasar is so close?
These problems- and others- could potentially have been resolved by Dr. Hartnett’s new creationist cosmology. His theory is based on Dr. Moshe Carmeli’s work on cosmological relativity. This theory is an expansion of Albert Einstein’s theories of general and special relativity. The difference between Einstein’s relativity and Carmeli’s relativity is that in Carmeli’s equations, cosmic time (t) replaces velocity (v) as the critical quantity, and observed time (13.7 billion years) replaces the speed of light (c) as a constant. You’ll have to go to the link above on cosmological relativity to see some of the equations, however, here’s the basic idea. Carmeli realized that it is possible that the galaxies aren’t merely moving away from us, but that space itself was moving away from us and the galaxies were essentially along for the ride. Carmeli’s equations treat the velocity of this expansion as another dimension of the cosmos. For him, the three dimensions of space, as well as time and velocity, are all dimensions that have to be taken into account when dealing with cosmological origins- 5D. In his equations, there is no need for dark energy or dark matter; this “stretching” of space would account for galactic mass and motion. His book includes a number of appendices explaining his equations in detail, but I’ve just decided to explain in practical terms what Hartnett and Carmeli are describing. This explanation will take a few posts to cover, but I think the possibility of a Creationist cosmology that resolves the problems with Big Bang cosmology and respects the Biblical Genesis narrative will be well worth the wait!
The Right Tool for the Job
The New Atheists would have us believe that Religion and Science are at odds with each other. Why? Well, that’s a complicated question. Christopher Hitchen believes that religion is really about power, and the currency of life is knowledge. Richard Dawkins basically agrees, but he seems to think that religion is about reveling in mystery, not power. “Mystics exult in mystery and want it to stay mysterious,” he writes. (The God Delusion, 126) Hitchens makes his feelings quite clear when he says that medicine only had a chance to advance after “the priests had been elbowed aside.” (God is not Great, 90) Ironically, Hitchens goes on to extol the glories of Louis Pasteur’s medical research with no mention of the fact that Pasteur was a devout Catholic!
Strangely, empirical sciences did not develop in other societies that should have encouraged them. China had a well-developed society, India was a strong philosophical center, and Japan excelled in craftmanship. Why did they not develop an understanding of empirical knowledge? It was in the Christian West that developed empirical science, because the Christian worldview expects that the outside world would be understandable and orderly because it was the handiwork of the Creator. Under Christianity, science flourishes. As the West turns from Christianity, science will cease to flourish. After all, only naturalistic worldviews require scientists to fabricate myths like dark matter and dark energy. Dark matter and dark energy only need to exist if the Big Bang actually occurred. Creationist cosmologies explain the universe without the need for these virtually unprovable theories.
To the point, though. Christianity supports science; it does not inhibit it. Though I’m not a Catholic, the Vatican has done more to support science (especially astronomy) financially over the past six centuries or so than any other institution. As Christianity has traditionally supported the Arts, so it has also supported the sciences. Hitchens and Dawkins seem willfully ignorant of the scientists who were also Christians throughout history. Newton, Pasteur, Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo, Faraday, Bernard, and Heisenberg were all Christians, and the list doesn’t stop there. Apparently they found no conflict between faith and science.
You see, when it comes down to it, faith and science are not opposites nor are they in tension with each other. They are different tools for different jobs. Science does not hold a monopoly on knowledge. Religion merely deals with a completely different form of knowledge. I can know that God is in His Heaven and all is right with the world just as surely as I know empirically that the laws of gravity are still in effect. Philosophy also offers a different sort of knowledge that is neither wholly scientific nor wholly religious. Just as I wouldn’t use a hammer to play a bass drum, science is not able to tell us why we are here or if God exists. It’s the wrong tool for the job. I’m not talking about “non-overlapping magisteria” here. I’m talking about using a tool where it is beneficial. When science is beneficial, use it, and don’t let it be hindered. When religion is beneficial (as it most certainly is when that religion is Christianity), then don’t keep it from the public sphere. Politics, law, education, business, and the home could benefit from Christianity’s influence if anti-religious bigots would simply get out of the way. In this way, the tools will complement each other. After all, how would the bass drum be fashioned if the hammer hadn’t been there first?
God, Probability, and Statistics
As confident as the so-called New Atheists are that God does not exist, you would have thought that science had disproven His existence. In fact, they try to whittle God down to a manageable size by- instead of dealing with Him as a Person- label Him as the “God Hypothesis.” Hypotheses are easy to dismiss. God isn’t.
Richard Dawkins is my favorite of the New Atheists because he is quite reckless at this. Consider his book The God Delusion. Dawkins is a scientist, yet he writes a book on religion and pretends that it is science. In it he writes: “The presence or absence of a creative super-intelligence is univocally a scientific question.” So, of course, because Dawkins is a materialist, Dawkins rules out all non-material existence or personhood. Therefore, in The Wonderful World of Dawkins, God must obey all laws of physics. You would have thought Dawkins were talking about gravity!
In the end, Dawkins decides that God is not a probable Being. I found this to be a bit odd, since Dawkins’ probability and statistics assumed that God was a contingent Being in a universe that forces Him (HIM!) to conform to its unalterable laws. Christianity, on the other hand, proclaims the existence of a God that is necessary, not contingent. Furthermore, probability deals more with the possibility that an event will occur. It measures the ratio of actual occurences and possible occurences of an event. God doesn’t “happen.” He is (hence the name “I AM.”) Dawkins and Christians still aren’t talking about the same Person!
A Room with a View
As I said in a previous post, I’ve been reading a fascinating book by Hugh Ross entitled Why the Universe is the Way it Is. Dr. Ross has a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto and is the president of Reason to Believe ministries. He’s spoken at over 300 colleges and universities. While Ross’ book is by no means exhaustive, it does an excellent job of helping the reader realize how very, very, VERY unlikely it is for us to exist without a Creator. A disclaimer: Ross does seem to believe in some form of theistic evolution, at least to the extent that God allowed the universe to evolve and then stepped in to make humans several billion years later. I prefer to believe that God either created the entire universe with the appearance of age (since He did so with Adam and the rest of life on earth) or that- thanks to general relativity- God’s act of creation actually did some really cool things to the flow of time. I tend to go with the second option, but I’m not going to explain the whole theory in detail at this time. I also see some value in studying whether or not light itself could be slowing down.
Below you’ll see a few reasons why the earth is not only uniquely designed to support life, but also to allow mankind to view the heavens. God wanted us to discover His universe. (Article continues here)
A Room with a View
As I said in a previous post, I’ve been reading a fascinating book by Hugh Ross entitled Why the Universe is the Way it Is. Dr. Ross has a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto and is the president of Reason to Believe ministries. He’s spoken at over 300 colleges and universities. While Ross’ book is by no means exhaustive, it does an excellent job of helping the reader realize how very, very, VERY unlikely it is for us to exist without a Creator. A disclaimer: Ross does seem to believe in some form of theistic evolution, at least to the extent that God allowed the universe to evolve and then stepped in to make humans several billion years later. I prefer to believe that God either created the entire universe with the appearance of age (since He did so with Adam and the rest of life on earth) or that- thanks to general relativity- God’s act of creation actually did some really cool things to the flow of time. I tend to go with the second option, but I’m not going to explain the whole theory in detail at this time. I also see some value in studying whether or not light itself could be slowing down.
Below you’ll see a few reasons why the earth is not only uniquely designed to support life, but also to allow mankind to view the heavens. God wanted us to discover His universe.
- For starters, there’s the atmosphere. It’s clear. If you read up on the atmospheres of other planets, you’ll notice that very few of them have clear atmospheres. If it weren’t clear but still breathable, we’d have no idea what space looked like.
- Then there’s the moon.Where else in the solar system can you witness a complete solar eclipse? Where else can the sun’s corona become viewable to scientists thanks to a perfectly round moon that regularly eclipses the sun? Earth is the only place this is possible because the distance between earth, moon, and sun, as well as the size and shape of all three bodies, is exactly right!
- In spite of how bright it appears, the moon actually only reflects 7% of the light the sun’s light. By comparison, the earth reflects 39%, Jupiter and Saturn’s moons reflect 60-90%, and Neptune reflects 73%. If the moon reflected more light than it did, we would have a hard time seeing much of the universe for most of the year!
- In a similar vein, the other planets are just so positioned that they don’t hinder our view of the night sky. Mars only comes close to earth once every 26 months and reflects only 15% of its light. Venus reflects 65% of its light, but because it lies between the earth and sun, we see very little of its light. If Mars and Venus were switched, Venus would be ten times brighter all night long, and we’d have a hard time seeing anything near its position in the sky. Switch Mars with Jupiter, and viewing distant galaxies would be impossible.
- The dust cloud from the galactic spiral arms that- as I mentioned in the previous post- shield our solar system from lethal levels of radiation also block out much of the light from the rest of the galaxy. Other galaxies are made visible to us.
- Nebulae in our galaxy are relatively dark and very far from us. Things could have been very different. The Orion Nebula (located in Orion’s sword) is the closest “star nursery” to earth, and it blocks out a patch of sky the diameter of two moons. If, however, the Orion Nebula were switched, say, with the Tarantula Nebula, a full quarter of the night sky would be blocked out, and the nebula would be bright enough to cast shadows! We’d have a hard time seeing much in that case!
- Our galactic cluster is small and spread out, ensuring our ability to see many light years beyond our own galaxy.
As I hope you’re beginning to see, God not only cared about our ability to survive on our home planet, but He also wanted us to be able to witness creation. Of course, if you don’t believe that God made it all, all you’re left to say is: “What a wonder that we dwell in a galaxy in which we can see all its wonders!” But who believes in us getting this lucky?
Life Support: It’s All About Location
Recently I’ve been reading Hugh Ross‘ book Why the Universe is the Way it Is, and it has certainly opened up my eyes to the incredible fine-tuning of our universe. Dr. Ross has a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto and is the president of Reason to Believe ministries. He’s spoken at over 300 colleges and universities. While Ross’ book is by no means exhaustive, it does an excellent job of helping the reader realize how very, very, VERY unlikely it is for us to exist without a Creator. A disclaimer: Ross does seem to believe in some form of theistic evolution, at least to the extent that God allowed the universe to evolve and then stepped in to make humans several billion years later. I prefer to believe that God either created the entire universe with the appearance of age (since He did so with Adam and the rest of life on earth) or that- thanks to general relativity- God’s act of creation actually did some really cool things to the flow of time. I tend to go with the second option, but I’m not going to explain the whole theory in detail at this time. I also see some value in studying whether or not time or light itself could be slowing down.
Below you’ll see a list of facts to support the anthropic principle, the belief that the universe exists specifically to support complex life forms:
- If the protons and neutrons (parts of an atom) were packed less densely in our universe, nuclear fusion would take place much more slowly or perhaps not at all. Anything heavier than helium- carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, sodium, potassium- wouldn’t form. If they were more densely packed, all of the hydrogen in the universe would fuse into elements at least as heavy as iron. The elements necessary for life wouldn’t exist.
- The center of the Milky Way Galaxy- or any galaxy for that matter- is the home a massive black hole and countless supernova remnants that spew forth lethal levels of radiation. Additionally, gravity from other stars would disturb the orbit of any planet significantly. Nothing could survive within 20,000 light years of the galactic center. On the other hand, if we were much further from the center of the galaxy, our planet wouldn’t have any of the heavy elements needed for life. I guess we’re “lucky” we live on a planet that orbits a star at just the right distance from the center of the galaxy.
- Even Earth’s location- 26,000 light years from the center- is not free from radiation from the rest of the galaxy. Only by virtue of the fact that our planet exists on the galactic plane between two spiral arms are we shielded from radiation. Furthermore, unlike most stars, our sun doesn’t “bounce” up and down on the galactic plane, so we won’t ever move above or below the spiral arms.
- In spite of what the picture above shows, the solar system is not within a spiral arm of the galaxy. We are actually between two spiral arms, which is fortunate for us since the stars and dense clouds of space emit more radiation and could unleash a severe dust storm, which would be sure to ruin our time on earth.
- Most of the time, anything lying between the spiral arms of the galaxy are eventually overtaken by another spiral arm. Our solar system lies very close to the co-rotation distance. At this distance, our solar system rotates around the center of the galaxy at almost exactly the same rate as the arms on either side. Fortunately for us, we aren’t exactly at the co-rotation distance. If we were, we would be buffeted by gravitational resonance and flung out of our sanctuary in the universe. Not a good experience!
- Of course, we’re also fortunate that the area of our galaxy that makes life possible also overlaps the co-rotation distance. I don’t think that’s a coincidence either!
- Most clusters of galaxies contain 10,000 or more closely-packed galaxies. Ours has only around forty. Little is a good thing, since galaxies tend to collide. We haven’t had a collision with another galaxy (something that can’t be said for our neighboring Andromeda Galaxy), and unlike most other galaxies, we don’t have any giant or supergiant galaxies for neighbors. If we did, we’d get blasted with deadly radiation fairly regularly.
- Our own galactic neighbors do help contribute to the stability of our galaxy. The Milky Way is fed gas and dust by a number of nearby dwarf galaxies. This gas and dust keeps star formation high, which helps reinforce the spiral arm structure. Without it, the spiral structure would collapse.
- If the earth had no moon (click link to hear Patrick Stewart [Jean-Luke Picard] narrate), our axis- and therefore our climate- wouldn’t be stable. Our rotation would be faster, making weather patterns less even. You think global warming is bad! Tides wouldn’t exist, meaning that coastal toxins wouldn’t be removed and nutrients wouldn’t be brought in. Click here to check out a book on this subject.
- The four outer gas giants in our solar system- Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune- act as a defensive team to shield the earth from collisions with comets and asteroids, since their gravitational pull deflects or absorbs impacts. On the other hand, the other inner planets nearest to earth work to break up gravitational resonances from the gas giants to keep earth from changing orbit.
Truly the heavens declare the glory of God.
Next: A Room with a View!
Why I Am Not A Skeptic
There are two basic questions in life that you and I have to answer:
- What do I know?
- What can I know?
When it comes to these two questions, the skeptic and the down-to-earth person with good, old-fashioned common sense are forever at odds. Skeptics believe that anyone who claims to know something to be true has to prove that he can’t be wrong. This is because- to the skeptic- there is no good solution to either question above. They believe that you and I can’t answer one question without knowing the other. If I try to explain how I know something, I also have to explain how I know that I can know it, and vice versa. Life must be very confusing to the skeptic, which is why most become methodists for all practical purposes. I don’t mean the Christian denomination of Methodists. I mean the philosophical sort of methodist. These methodists believe that you have to know what can be known before you can know that you know something. For example, methodists tend to believe that you can only know things if you can observe them with the five senses. (Naturalism, by the way, is a favored perspective for methodists.) Of course, limiting knowledge in this way assumes that you can know things using the five senses, and it requires you to have knowledge of the five senses first. That means they accidentally answered the first question first and have yet to tell us how they knew something without answering the second question. Now they’re confused and embarrassed!
Skeptics also have a strange belief that asking “How do you know?” repeatedly without offering a reason for being skeptical about something is the ultimate endgame for a debate. I’ve stopped answering simple “How do you know?” questions if there’s no argument that follows. They don’t have any substance to bring to the discussion at this point, since they can’t explain how they don’t know!
Skeptics can also try to force a person into becoming a methodist by asking that some “How do you know?” question. They try to get their opponent to answer that second question first. The problem here is that you can know some things without having to necessarily explain how you know it. We teach children many things without explaining how we know they are true. Skeptics don’t see life that way. They would rather avoid error than embrace truth. If there’s a chance you might be wrong, you might as well not believe it. To their mind, the skeptic must be refuted (proved wrong) before they will accept something as knowledge
I prefer using plain old common sense. For those who believe in common sense, there are some very specific things that are simply true whether I know how I know them or not. I know many things- that I ate sushi just before typing this, that I am using a laptop, that 2 + 3 = 5, that kindness is a good character quality, and so forth- without wondering how I knew them or if I really knew them. Are the five senses being used in these cases? Yes, but the five senses are only partially helpful in establish what sushi (especially the sort that isn’t labeled) and laptops are, whether or not numbers are concrete or abstract, or who is kind. My point is that in all of these cases I never answered the second question (mentioned above) first. I simply know them and experience them without “proving” that I can know them. In the end, common sense will help me in establishing “what I can know” built on the platform of “what I already know.”
This isn’t just a philosophical argument with no bearing on the world of matter and energy. What I’m saying has far-reaching implications and illustrations to even the world of science. Scientists must sometimes observe what IS happening without knowing how they know it happens or why it happens. Take, for instance, the discovery of superconductivity by Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, a Dutch physicist. While he was the one who discovered superconductivity in 1911 and awarded a Nobel Prize for it in 1913, it would be another 50 years before quantum physics would begin to explain why and how this occured. Even science does not completely avoid knowing something before proving something.
For the person who practices common sense, the possibility of being wrong is not the same thing as being wrong. Fear of being wrong isn’t a motivating force, and the possibility of being wrong isn’t a good enough reason to label something as “unknowable.” People with common sense are more focused on finding Truth than avoiding anything that can’t be known 100%. The person with common sense doesn’t have to refute a skeptic; he just needs to demonstrate that the skeptic hasn’t proved that his skepticism is true.
In short, I’d rather know what I know and build on from there (common sense) than assume that I don’t know anything (skepticism) and not be able to prove it.
Naturalism: Devalued Existence
In a previous post I had briefly pointed out a few flaws with a naturalistic worldview. It fails to explain the humanity behind being human. Free will, appreciation for beauty, and reason aren’t well-explained in terms of natural causes. Another difficulty with a naturalistic worldview is the devaluing of existence. If our lives are to have objective meaning, there must be some things that are good, right, and beautiful. Those things must be ends in and of themselves, and they must be worth pursuing. There must be people and ideals that are worth living and dying for.
Of course, we must also believe that we can know what is good, right, and beautiful. This also means that we can know what is wrong, evil, and marred somehow. The means of knowing is unsavory to the naturalist. The existence of value and the standard of value are seemingly abstract and not a part of the physical world, which of course blows the naturalistic agenda to bits. Therefore, things and people of value are flatly denied, or the value of everything and anything is readily affirmed. The problem, then, is that if everything has value we still have no basis for evaluating worth in an objective sense. I say that hard work and honesty make a person valuable, but what if you value deceit and slothfulness? Are those character traits truly valuable to individuals or societies? I dare say not! No, the naturalist would rather blithely put that all things lack intrinsic value. It is much easier to say “vanity, vanity, all is vanity” and leave it at that. That’s the sort of world Bertrand Russell believes in.
You are no more valuable than a cockroach or a star or an atom in a naturalistic world. Fortunately we know that reality is far different than the naturalist portrays it. Some things are beautiful, and some are not. Some things are valuable, and others are worthless. Some things are moral, and others are horribly immoral. The naturalistic world required to allow Darwinism to exist as a plausible theory simply cannot be.
MIA: Transitional Forms
Darwinistic "Tree of Life"
Dr. Geoffrey Simmons once wrote that if evolution is the explanation, then evolution has a lot of explaining to do. When it comes to attempting to trace the supposed macro-evolution of present-day flora and fauna through the fossil record, Dr. Simmons is very, very right. If evolution took place through small adaptions that culminated in major changes, one must ask how these changes took place and where all of the “missing links” went. Here’s a few examples of creatures which are too complex for adaptation over millions, nay billions, of years to explain away. And if someone were to theorize a mechanism to bring this adaptation about, there is certainly no fossil evidence for it. As one of my agnostic friends insists, those who assert a claim are responsible to validate that claim…..
- Bombardier beetles fire off hydrogen peroxide and hydroquinone from separate glands in its abdomen. When combined, the exothermic reaction blasts predators at 500 bursts per second. How did the beetles choose those two chemicals out of the thousands available on this planet? Where are the transitional forms that developed the glands, chemicals, and firing mechanisms?
- The various species of whales can dive thousands of feet, adjust the pressure in various parts of their bodies to withstand the crushing weight of the water around them, adjust spermaceti in their heads to regulate buoyancy, store additional oxygen in muscle tissue for extended diving, and hunt by blowing a wall of bubbles to trap krill. How did they develop these abilities? Where are the transitional forms?
- The amoeba- a single-celled organism- can extend a “false foot” in any direction as it moves to attack food or escape a toxin or a predator. It lacks any apparent ancestors, yet is too complex to have been anything like the “simple” single-celled organisms mentioned by the Darwinists.
- Consider also the “migrating” body parts of some types of sea life. Leftvents have anuses that migrate from their left side to mid-line later in life, and flounder’s eyes migrate when they bury themselves in the sand. (Incidentally, one species of leftvent known as “netdevils” consist of females who function as predators and males who function as parasites, since they attach to the females and gain nourishment from their host’s circulatory system.) How did such features adapt? How did one species develop a parasitic and a predatory distinction between genders? And what evolutionary impetus necessitates a mobile anus, anyway?
- Some microbes suck out the chloroplasts of other microbes to create an internal food manufacturing system. The sea slug elysia does the same thing to seaweed. They are animals that depend on photosynthesis and nutrients from their prey for survival. How did they learn to do this?
- Fleas jump many times their body length with an acceleration of up to 100Gs. When they bite, their saliva injects blood thinner and vasodilator to prevent the blood vessel from clotting. How did this adaptation take place?
- Nudibranchs are a type of sea slug that can swallow nerve toxins from sea anenomes and jellyfish and transfer them to their cerata to be used as a defense mechanism. If the ancestors of the nudibranchs had to develop this ability over time, how exactly did that work? Wouldn’t the first wave of ancestors be killed off?
- Cockroaches can survive over nine times the amount of radiation a human can. Their antannae alone have over 130 segments. They have an “extra” brain in their lower abdomens. They can carry a variety of pathogens yet not contract the diseases. They secrete a “suit of armor” upwards of seven times throughout their lifetimes which helps keep moisture in and bacteria out. They have a second set of teeth in their stomachs. Where is the precedent in the insect world for a second brain in the abdomen or a second set of teeth in the stomach? Did the 130-segment antennae develop all at once or gradually? How did they develop the ability to molt and secrete a new coat in such a short time?
How did all of these creatures evolve in the Darwinian sense? Gradual evolution seems nigh on impossible, yet here they are. Few serious scientists believe in punctuated equilibrium, yet if transitional forms do exist thanks to gradual macro-evolution, 99% of them have yet to show up in the fossil record. There is simply no clear-cut evidence for Darwinism in the fossil record. Why then has Darwinism persisted in the scientific community? The religious fervour surrounding Darwinism is curious. One would think the much-vaunted intellects of our day would appreciate some rigorous criticism so that they could more accurately get to the bottom of the “mystery” of how life originated.
Strangely, as James Lovelock pointed out in his book Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, “Things have taken a strange turn in recent years; almost the full circle from Galileo’s famous struggle with the theological establishment. It is the scientific establish that now forbids heresy.” Perhaps Intelligent Design is a better explanation in a scientific sense after all. True, that means postulating the existence of a Being that isn’t strictly detectable in the normal sense, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t evidence for His existence. And, as I’ve pointed out before, the ID vs. Darwinism debate only pits one metaphysical concept against another. Naturalism is a metaphysical concept which is ultimately unprovable by science, and Theism is a metaphysical concept which is just as ultimately unprovable by science. As such, the answer to the question of origins will never be strictly within the realm of science. It is ultimately in the realm of metaphysics that the solution will present itself.
The question is: which concept is there more evidence for? Job had the answer thousands of years ago:
“But ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee; and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee: Or speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee: and the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee. Who knoweth not in all these that the hand of the LORD hath wrought this?” (Job 12:7-9)
How the Church Created Darwin
Some scientists have been quite outspoken concerning their desire to purge religion from their ranks. In fact, a quick perusal of Paul Z. Myers’ blog Pharyngula will make it obvious that religion in general, and Christianity in particular, is to blame for most of the world’s evils. The major complaint against the use of religion in science is that (supposedly) science that seeks out a non-naturalistic cause isn’t very good science at all. I would like to suggest that there is a problem with religion mingling with science. It’s just that I disagree with some scientists on what the religious problem is. You see, modern science’s idea that naturalism alone can explain the universe isn’t just unscientific (springing from the field of metaphysics). It’s also an idea that has its roots in the Church.
Long before Darwin penned his Origin of Species, liberal Christian theology was already moving away from belief in a Creator that is also involved in His creation. Here’s a brief list of their arguments:
- Some theologians believed that God would get more glory if He could simply produce matter, energy, and scientific laws to govern the universe. Cosmological and biological evolution would take place- in their minds- due to laws already put into place. In this view, special divine action should be minimized since Creation revealed a Designer God, not divine intervention. (Thomas Burnet [1635-1715], Anglican cleric, Telluris Theoria Sacra; John Ray [1627-1705], botanist and natural theologian, The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation.)
- Deistic theologians argued that religious belief was solely a product of reason and not an act of faith. The Deists rejected any doctrines that could not be deduced from philosophy or nature. If it could not be deduced, it was not essential for salvation. Ultimately, they rejected the Bible’s concept of an active, providential God. (Matthew Tindal [1657-1733], deist, Christianity as Old as the Creation)
- Other scientists and theologians believed that God’s direct involvement with His creation would result in perfection. Evil as a moral category exists, and- to the mind of the theologically-minded scientists- evil existed in nature in the form of imperfections. To their mind, God clearly did not and does not directly intervene in nature. Looking at the geological records of his day, Thomas Burnet insisted that our world was a creation that was “lying in rubbish.” Philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) wrote that “a perpetual war is kindled amongst all living creatures.” Hume believed that God must be only transcendent and not immanent since such evil exists.
- Finally, a movement within the church sprang up in the 1700s that sought to downplay and disregard the miracles of the Bible. Peter Annet argued against the existence of miracles because he believed that a God of infinite knowledge would not need to intervene. He could simply make things work out right the first time. He also believed that God would create a simple clockwork system that never needed to be adjusted and that God, being immutable, would never need or want to “contradict” His own laws.
The result of the above four movements was that naturalism was accepted first in the Church and then in the Academy. Because the Church was an avid supporter of discovering truths about Our Father’s World, theology dramatically influenced science. Naturalism became a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts. Because the world was interpreted naturalistically by the theologians and then the scientists, all findings were viewed as supporting naturalism. The problem, of course, is that naturalism is not a finding of science. It was presupposed in the theological and philosophical realm and then superimposed on the scientific realm. Philosophical and theological naturalism came before scientific naturalism.
By the time of Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles Darwin, the results of naturalism in the theological realm bore fruit. Here are the words of Erasmus Darwin in his Zoonomia:
“The world itself might have been generated, rather than created; that is, it might have been gradually produced from very small beginnings, increasing by the activity of its inherent principles, rather than by a sudden evolution by the whole by the Almighty fiat. What a magnificent idea of the infinite power of the great architect! The Cause of Causes! Parent of Parents!”
In the 1800s, Charles Darwin’s own Origin of Species made many theological and philosophical arguments for his theory. In the first place, why would God make things “imperfectly” or with a boring pattern? He argued that patterns in species were “utterly inexplicable if species are independent creations.”(Origin, 73-74) He also argued that “the best adapted plants and animals were not created for oceanic islands, for man has unintentionally stocked them far more fully and perfectly than did nature.” (Origin, 398) In other words, Darwin believed that God would include more variety in nature and would put every living thing precisely in a habitat that would cause it to multiply the most rapidly. He also believed that the variety in “important” organs between species and within the same genus was nonsensical in the creationist’s paradigm. (153, 156) Why would God do reinvent the wheel?
Why would God create birds with webbed feet that rarely swam, and why would He create birds with no webbing that stayed mainly in the water? How can this be the product of special creation? (177) What about the “waste” of pollen in trees and plants? (469-470) All of this makes God a “mockery and deception,” says Darwin. (165-166) Note that Darwin says this as a person who believed in God, not as an atheist. He is careful to keep a lofty view of God intact when he argues that speaking of God as a Designer makes God seem too human. We should not “assume that the Creator works by intellectual powers like those of man.” (181-182) It’s fairly obvious to make the connection between the liberal theology in the centuries preceding Darwin and what Darwin believed he saw while writing Origin of the Species. The Church created Darwin.
God IS Great: Christopher Hitchens, Metaphysics, and Teleology
The fifth and sixth chapters of Hitchens’ book God is not Great are an attempt to undermine belief in God as the Uncaused Cause of the universe. Originally, I had intended to treat chapter five’s dealings with metaphysics as a separate article from chapter six’s dealings with argument from design. However, once I read the chapter on metaphysics, I was faced with a serious problem. Hitchens only deals directly with metaphysics in one paragraph of the whole chapter!
I’ve begun to see the beauty of journalism. You can write articles and whole books based on anecdotes and sarcasm alone! Now, I’m a huge fan of both when used with real support, but if Hitchens wants to discuss such a serious issue as the origin of the universe, he had better have more to bring to the table than baseless claims and gross sarcasm. Perhaps he’d be better off as a White House spokesman. (Sorry, couldn’t resist that one.)
Hitchens fails miserably at proving the metaphysical claims of Christians to be false. He mocks them, uses some straw men here and there, takes some quotes out of context, etc. He doesn’t ever deal with real issues. He never quotes Christian apologists of the 21st century. This is, perhaps, the poorest chapter of his book.
Strangely, he also spends very little time dealing with atheistic metaphysics. Every belief system has metaphysical elements. We all must have answers to questions that are non-scientific in nature. After a shoddy attempt to pull the rug out from under Christian metaphysics, Hitchens does little if anything to explain his perspective on the issue of metaphysics.
Hitchens’ only real attempt at metaphysics is one that could have easily been placed in his chapter on arguments from design. He says that because every cause must have a cause, theistic explanations for God are weak. Hitchens makes a categorical mistake here. Christian metaphysics state that whatever comes into being must have a cause. There is a great distinction between the two statements. If God never came into being but simply always is (which, by the way, is the actual claim of Christianity since God is the “I Am”, the high and lofty one that inhabits eternity), then He has no need of an external force or intelligence to bring Him about. Christians simply don’t believe in a created God, for created gods really are a delusion. What really is a tragedy is when intelligent people have no problem believing an infinite regression of causes, such as those who espouse Darwinism.
Hitchens also makes the assertion that the universe could not have been created because there is imperfection in the universe. This seems to be quite the leap to me, and one that ignores the clear marks of design in our world. One of his evidences of the imperfection of the universe is the state of the universe itself. The explosions of stars seems to be evidence of violence to Hitchens, something far more random than a created universe should have. I think it strange that just a few chapters ago, Hitchens talked about the wonder and majesty of the cosmos. Surely he can see that beauty and awe can come from even the explosion of suns! We see very little of the “big picture” in the cosmos so that an argument of this source is really an argument from ignorance. He mocks those who lived centuries ago for their superstitions and false beliefs. Doesn’t he know that people will one day look back on even the likes of Einstein and chuckle to themselves? To argue from lack of knowledge seems foolish.
Secondly, Hitchens makes the assumption that the God of the Bible is a pragmatist. He thinks that because humans see organs or portions of DNA as unnecessary that we couldn’t have been designed that way. Why did God create things as He did? Why did He not do things differently? I suppose there are many different ways God could have done things. The point is that He did them in this way for purposes that we do not know. Rather than assume that we have all knowledge, why not simply admit that we lack true understanding? Isn’t that part of the wonder of God’s universe, to be able to explore, experience, and discover?
Thirdly, Hitchens assumes that because things are unpleasant that they are therefore imperfect. Ears that need cleaning, for instance, are evidence of imperfection in the created order. Seriously? Nowhere in the Bible does God claim to have made a sterile world. Nowhere in the Bible does God claim to have made a world in which there will be minimal to no effort required on our part. God gave us things to do and the means to accomplish those tasks. How is ear wax proof of a world that lacks a Designer? (One could, by the way, make the argument that the existence of earwax is miraculous in itself. Maybe someday…)
Finally, Hitchens completely ignores the Biblical account of the Fall. Things aren’t perfect, and we’d be fools to claim they were. However, assuming that this world is precisely what God intended is equally foolish. Paul speaks in Romans 8 about how the entire creation groans under the crushing weight of human sin. “Man marks the earth with ruin”, as Lord Byron says, and his control no longer stops with the shore. Violence, destruction, and failure to properly care for our Father’s world have ravaged this planet. The results of both Fall and Flood are great and tragic. Everything in this world was thrown about because of man’s fall, and we won’t see a perfect world as God intended it until the Eternal State begins.
On the whole, Hitchens fails miserably to deal seriously with Christian thought and practice. Rather than deal with Christian belief within the Bible itself, he is quite content to deal with historical, marginal Christianity bereft of context. Such a straw man may be easy to knock down, but one is left to wonder how Hitchens would do if he ever came across the genuine artifact.
Evangelical Darwinism
Bertrand Russell
I’ve written a few posts on the religiosity of Darwinism, but now I want to turn my attention toward the “evangelical” aspects of the movement itself. The term “evangelical” is, of course, generally applied to a particular type of Christianity. Evangelicalism emphasizes a variety of means to bringing people to the truth as well as withstanding the advancement of sin or anti-Christian thought: preaching by evangelists, apologetics, sermons (both fiery and compassionate), and public outcry against heresy, apostasy, and immorality.
Strangely enough, Atheism and Darwinism share many of these same traits. They have evangelists: Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and others. These men preach powerful sermons and employ convincing apologetics. They warn the listener of the dangers of religion. They are no post-modernists; they see everything in terms of black and white. In fact, they even go so far as to speak in apocalyptic terms concerning the results of a truly Christian nation. To change one’s mind concerning atheism is viewed as a type of apostasy. Dawkins himself went so far as to refer to Anthony Flew’s “conversion” from atheism to deism as “tergiversation”, a term that is synonymous with apostasy.
In addition to the nature-worship I mentioned at the end of the previous post, they also associate Charles Darwin with Messianic terminology. “Cosmology,” says Richard Dawkins in his debate against John Lennox, “is still waiting for its Darwin.” Stephen Jay Gould is even more explicit in the deification of Darwinin his “Sociobiology: the Art of Storytelling”: “All theories [of natural selection] cite God in their support, and … Darwin comes close to this status among evolutionary biologists.” Michael White echoed Gould in 2002 when he said: “Of course today, for biologists, Darwin is second only to God, and for many he may rank still higher.”
Once again, lest you think that I’m twisting words or “making a mountain out of a molehill”, allow me to quote Darwinist Michael Ruse on the subject:
“Evolution is promoted by its practitioners as more than mere science. Evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion — a full-fledged alternative to Christianity, with meaning and morality. I am an ardent evolutionist and an ex-Christian, but I must admit that in this one complaint — and Mr. Gish is but one of many to make it — the literalists are absolutely right. Evolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution still today.”
Is Darwinism a sufficient faith? I think not. It does not answer the burning questions of the soul. Consider the words of Katharine Tait in her book My Father, Bertrand Russell:
I would have liked to convince my father that I had found what he had been looking for, the ineffable something he had longed for all his life. I would have liked to persuade him that the search for God does not have to be vain. Somewhere at the back of my father’s mind, at the bottom of his heart, in the depths of his soul, there was an empty space that had once been filled with God, and he never found anything else to put in it.
Lest someone accuse Tait of making her case a little too poignant compared to Russell’s own feelings, here is Russell in his own autobiography: “Nothing can penetrate the loneliness of the human heart except the highest intensity of the sort of love the religious teachers have preached.”
Darwinism, atheism, and their ilk are insufficient replacements for true faith in God, for in Him we live, and move, and have our being. Apart from Him, we are left with, in the words of Tait again, “a ghostlike feeling of not belonging, of having no home in this world.”
The Evolution of Pantheism
In my previous post, I contrasted Christianity and Pantheism, the belief that all of Creation is a god. Pantheism has taken on many forms, some of them more complex and articulate than others. Ancient animism, the New Age movement, and the Greek Pantheon all smack of Pantheism in one way or another. In contrast to these belief systems and others, which either attempt to pit various gods or spirits against each other or identify the universe itself as a god, Christianity asserts that God exists uncreated beyond space and time. He may choose to enter our world to accomplish His purpose, but He does not belong to It any more than Picasso belonged to one of his paintings.
Most recently, Darwinism has crept on the scene as the “new” pantheism. In the evolutionary paradigm, lifeless matter and energy somehow- and most scientists are careful enough to inform us that they don’t know how- spawned or created life. Not only did the lifeless universe produce life, it produced information to allow life to reproduce. Where did this information- this DNA- come from? Computer programs, books, magazines, and even Snickers wrappers tell me that an intelligence created them. When I see these things, I know a mind has been at work.
Whether they realize it or not, in the unbelievers’ effort to banish God from their minds, they have replaced Him with something preposterous. They have returned to a sophisticated kind of pantheism. Instead of spirits, gods, or a living universe creating life, they have attributed life to an unliving universe. They have attributed information to a universe without a mind. They have endowed mere matter and energy with god-like creative powers.
Am I going too far in comparing Darwinism to Pantheism? I think not. Consider the words of atheist Carl Sagan in his work Pale Blue Dot:
How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, ‘This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant’? Instead they say, ‘No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.’ A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.
Sagan obviously believes that the universe is far more magnificent than God. Consider also the words of Paul Davies, who believes that mathematics (which he ascribes intelligence, personality, and inherent power to) alone could produce our universe:
There’s no need to invoke anything supernatural in the origins of the universe or of life. I have never liked the idea of divine tinkering. For me it is much more inspiring to believe that a set of mathematical laws can be so clever as to bring all these things into being.
Richard Dawkins has similar things to say. When John Lennox concluded his debate with Dawkins by pointing to the resurrection of Jesus Christ as the focus of the Christian faith, Dawkins responded by saying: “Having proven some case for a deistic God, you fall back on the Resurrection. It’s so petty, it’s so trivial. So unworthy of the universe.”
Darwinists cannot escape the striking beauty, majesty, and wonder of the universe. Without a God to be grateful to and worship, they are only left with an undue reverence for God’s Creation and a desire to attribute intelligence and life to that which is unliving and thoughtless.
As Paul writes in Romans 1:
Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,and changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things. . . .Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever.
Pantheism, Theism, and Dell Computers
3,350 years ago Moses commanded Israel to worship only God and to remember all that He had done for them “lest thou lift up thine eyes unto heaven, and when thou seest the sun, and the moon, and the stars, even all the host of heaven, shouldest be driven to worship them, and serve them, which the LORD thy God hath divided unto all nations under the whole heaven.”
1400 years later, Paul wrote in Romans 1:21-23: “Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things.”
These two men, speaking on behalf of God, reminded their audience to avoid confusing Creation with its Creator. In contrast to the polytheism and pantheism of the ancient cultures, the Jews and Christians recognized only one God Who is distinct from His Creation. Consider the following verses:
- Isaiah 57:15 calls God “the High and Lofty One that Inhabiteth Eternity.”
- Deuteronomy 3:24 says: “O Lord GOD, thou hast begun to shew thy servant thy greatness, and thy mighty hand: for what God is there in heaven or in earth, that can do according to thy works, and according to thy might?”
- John 1:1 tells us that when the universe began, the Word (Logos) already existed.
According to the Biblical paradigm, God exists beyond space and outside of time. In his Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, Werner Jaeger writes that the Word is the Supreme Intellect or Supreme Power “who is stationed outside the world and brings that world into existence by His own fiat. The Greek gods are stationed inside the world ; they are descended from Heaven and Earth…they are generated by the mighty power of Eros who likewise belongs within the world as an all-engendering primitive force….When Hesiod‘s thought [the Theogony]at last gives way to truly philosophical thinking, the Divine is sought inside the world- not outside it, as in the Jewish Christian theology that develops out of the book of Genesis.”
Surely, men such as Xenophanes attributed the existence of our universe to one supreme God, but monotheism rarely existed outside of the Judeo-Christian religion. It was this Judeo-Christian message of monotheism that distinguished the forces of Nature from the Creator of nature. Furthermore, it was upon this foundational belief that the scaffolding of European science was built. Pantheism in its many forms portrayed our universe as mysterious and unknowable because our world was filled with various deities with vast creative and destructive powers. In contrast, believers saw the world as knowable and logical because it was the product of the mind of a reasonable God.
Today, some unbelievers criticize Christianity because they say that it is lazy to believe that God is involved in any way in Creation. They believe that science blended with naturalism is the only way to rightly view the world. However, belief in God as Creator is not the same thing as belief in God as a motivating force in the physical universe.
James Clerk Maxwell knew these truths when he inscribed the following on the doors of the Cavendish Physics laboratory in Cambridge: “Great are the works of the Lord; they are pondered by all who delight in them.” He recognized that the wonder of the universe was meant to point us to a God Who is distinct from his Creation. God is the Creator, not the universe itself.
Perhaps an illustration would be helpful.
Suppose I was completely computer illiterate, but I decided to buy a Dell laptop. I have two options for explaining how my laptop works:
- I could hold to a view that the computer was made to function in a certain way and given all of the parts necessary to fulfill its purpose. In this view, “Dell” is the creator of the computer, but as such he is distinct from the computer components themselves.
- I could also assume that “Dell” was inside the computer causing the various functions of the computer to take place. To do so would be to make the same mistake as the Greeks in their pantheon.
Of course no one is so foolish as to make this second assumption. To figure out the “mechanism” behind the computer, you would have to figure out which parts performed what function. You could also learn about the physics and chemistry behind it if you wanted. However, even those who hold to a “mechanism” view of the computer would still believe in the existence of “Dell the Creator.”
Similarly, Christians do believe that nature’s “mechanisms” should be discovered. However, they also hold that God is the Creator, the Uncaused Cause of reality. There is no conflict in the Christian worldview, for the only other options are pantheism or atheism. Just as “Dell” is not a mechanism of the computer, God is not sitting in some darkened corner of the universe waiting to be discovered nor is He mysteriously guiding the forces of nature. Eternity beyond our universe is His abode. The Creation itself is merely the outworking of His beauty, majesty, wisdom, and power. To truly find Him, He must reveal Himself and Reality somehow. In fact, He has in His Word. (It’s just too bad that Dell doesn’t explain themselves so well in their instruction manuals.)
What Do Scientists Believe?
Given the heated debates of recent years between scientists and Christians, one would think that all- or at least the overwhelming majority- of scientists historically and contemporarily are either atheists or agnostics. Strangely this isn’t the case.
According to Dr. John Lennox, a 1910 survey of 1,000 scientists in America found that 41.8% believed in “a God who answered prayer and in personal immortality” while 41.5% said they did not. The remaining 16.7% were agnostic. Larry Witham, author of Where Darwin Meets the Bible, administered this same survey in 1996 and found that 39.6% believed in “a God who answered prayer and in personal immortality” while 45.5% said no. The remaining 14.9% were agnostic. While the scales have turned marginally in favor of atheism, this is hardly a landslide for atheism.
For the rest of this blog article and perhaps another after this, I’ll let the philosophers and historians of science speak for themselves so that we can see what they have to say about the relationship between science and their worldview. Obviously, I don’t agree with everything these men say. My point is that the same men can look at the same data and reach different conclusions based solely on worldview.
“Science, the system of belief founded securely on publicly shared reproducible knowledge emerged from religion….Only the religious- among whom I include not only the prejudiced but the underinformed- hope there is a dark corner of the physical universe, or the universe of experience , that science can never hope to illuminate.”- Peter Atkins, Professor of Chemistry at Oxford University
“The world needs to wake up from the long nightmare of religion….Anything we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done, and may in fact be our greatest contribution to civilization.”- Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg
“Our science is God’s science. He holds the responsibility for the whole scientific story….The remarkable order, consistency, reliability, and fascinating complexity found in the scientific description of the universe are reflections of the order, consistency, reliability, and complexity of God’s activity.”- Sir John Houghton
“For many years I have believed that God is the great designer behind all nature….All my studies in science since then have confirmed my faith.”- Sir Ghillean Prance
“As I try to discern the origin of that conviction [that the universe is orderly and therefore can be discovered by man's reason], I seem to find it in a basic notion discovered 2,000 or 3,000 years ago, and enunciated first in the Western world by the ancient Hebrews: namely that the universe is governed by a single God, and is not the product of the whims of many gods, each governing his own province according to his own laws. This monotheistic view seems to be the historical foundation for modern science.”- Melvin Calvin
“Modern science must come from the medieval insistence on the rationality of God….My explanation is that the faith in the possibility of science, generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory, is an unconscious derivative of medieval theology.”- Sir Alfred North Whitehead
“The chief aim of all investigations of the external world should be to discover the rational order which has been imposed on it by God, and which He revealed to us in the language of mathematics.”- Johannes Kepler
“The laws of nature are written by the hand of God in the language of mathematics.”- Galileo
“The visible order of the universe proclaims a supreme intelligence.”– Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“Science brings men closer to God.”– Louis Pasteur
“From a knowledge of His work, we shall know Him.”– Robert Boyle
“Subsequent scientific findings are clearly pointing to an ex nihilo creation consistent with the first few verses of the book of Genesis.”- Quantum chemist Henry F. Schaefer III
Why the Water Boils: Procedural vs. Philosophical Atheism
Why is the water boiling? One could explain, in scientific terms, how water molecules behave when they reach a certain temperature. That is certainly one reasonable explanation. There’s another very reasonable explanation: I want a cup of hot tea on a cold morning. Neither of these answers would be wrong. One answer explains how matter and energy behave, while another explains purpose. So it is with science and Christianity. There is no difficulty in reconciling science with religion. They work in different fields to explain reality. Why then do atheists, such as Richard Dawkins, say that the two “sides” are at war with each other? The difference is in the types of atheism.
Leaving God out of the Gaps
The first type of atheism is what D’souza calls procedural atheism. Procedural atheists aren’t really atheists at all, at least not in the sense that we usually think of atheists. Procedural atheists are merely trying to find ways to accurately describe how the universe works. I don’t know a Christian that has a problem with this. No one wants to see a scientist trying to find a cure for disease and just give up, claiming that the disease was a miracle, so no cure could be found. No one wants to hear that it’s impossible to understand how stars are formed because, as a part of God’s miraculous creation, we can’t really know how it works in the first place. Procedural atheism treats nature as if that is all that exists simply because nature is all that science has to work with. There are a many scientists that believe in God that use procedural atheism in their discoveries.
Astronomer Owen Gingerich writes: “Science works within a constrained framework in creating brilliant pictures of nature. This does not mean that the universe is actually godless, just that science within its own framework has no other way of working.” Gingerich later writes: “Reality goes much deeper. A universe where God can play an interactive role…is not excluded by science.”
No “Divine Feet”
Philosophical atheism, on the other hand, is a dogmatic position that believes that the natural universe is all that exists. Often, procedural and philosophical atheism are blended to form a case against a Creator. The philosophical atheist dogma barricades itself into a very small box, shielding itself against any knowledge that does not fit the naturalistic theory. Theists, on the other hand, are entirely willing to admit naturalistic explanations for how something works- our natural laws- while reserving room for supernatural explanations for why something exists and functions.
Philosophical atheists are sometimes unwilling to admit their own bias, but at other times they are astonishingly frank. Physicist Stephen Hawking writes: “Many people do not like the idea that time has a beginning, probably because it smacks of divine intervention.”
[Meanwhile Christians have long believed in a beginning, and Augustine even posited that time itself was an aspect to the created world.]
Astronomer and physicist Lee Smolin rants: “Must all of our scientific understanding of the world really come down to a mythological story in which nothing exists…save some disembodied intelligence, who, desiring to start a world, chooses the initial conditions, and then wills matter into being? It seems to me that the only possible name for such an observer is God, and that the theory (that the universe had a starting point in the Big Bang [ironically]) is to be criticized as being unlikely on these grounds.”
Cut off from any other explanation for origin and purpose, philosophical atheism must now thrive on ludicrous and unprovable ideas. Biologist Franklin Harold writes: “Life arose on earth from inanimate matter, by some kind of evolutionary process. This is not a statement of demonstrable fact, but an assumption. It is not supported by any direct evidence, nor is it likely to be.”
Francis Crick, the man who helped discover the structure of DNA has another alternative to mankind being God’s special creation. He’s serious, folks. In his book Life Itself, Crick theorizes that aliens brought life to our planet from theirs. Really? So if your newborn baby’s skin tone seems a bit green to you….
Richard Dawkins, in his book The Blind Watchmaker, tells us that we should expect gaps in the fossil record. In his mind the absence of evidence for biological Darwinism should be “exactly what we should positively expect.” Later he writes that “we would almost have to accept natural selection as the explanation of life on this planet even if there were no evidence for it.” How very scientific, Richard.
Naturalism as a Faith
Here’s the reality: naturalism and materialism are not the conclusions of the modern scientific community, rather they are premises of the modern scientific community (at least the majority) that have been imposed on nature. Welcome to the Church of Naturalism!
I’ll close with the words of Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin, since they speak for themselves:
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 commitment to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanation, 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.
What Science CAN’T Do
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not a scientist. I don’t have a degree in one of the sciences, I don’t teach science, and I’m not an expert in any particular scientific field. The only “science” I am skilled in is computer science. I do have a love for reading about scientific discoveries, and I have always had a love for astronomy. All that being said, there are a few things that even I, a lowly school teacher, know that science can’t do. I’ve decided to put this in a list form to make this a relatively easy read.
- Science cannot analyze or explain things that are neither matter nor energy.
- Science cannot analyze or explain abstract concepts such as love, truth, and beauty. It may analyze the effects of such concepts on a person physiologically or statistically, but it can’t empirically examine such things.
- Science cannot identify the origin of the universe. If it assumes it was created by the eternal God, then it is assuming a supernatural act which falls outside of the boundaries of science. If it assumes that Darwinism is correct then it is assuming an eternal universe, which is in contradiction to its own natural laws. In either case, an assumption is made.
- Science cannot identify the purpose for the universe.
- Science cannot analyze or explain things that exist outside of our universe. (If you happen to believe in a multiverse, I would further explain that I mean things outside of ALL universes.)
- Science cannot set moral or ethical boundaries (although moral and ethical boundaries can and must be set using the information that arises from science.)
- Science and the scientific process cannot be employed independently of moral and ethical boundaries, biases, and opinions.
- Science cannot prove that something does not exist using inductive reasoning.
- Science cannot state anything with absolute certainty. New information may (and almost always does) arise which changes our understanding of the natural world, which means that we only have maximum certainty that things are true.
- Science cannot prescribe what must always happen in the universe. It can only describe what does generally happen in the universe. Ergo, supernatural events do not “break” the laws of nature. This does not mean that a “God in the gaps” method of looking at the universe should be accepted. It simply means that miracles should not be discounted simply because they have not been observed happening in our world today.
Science is limited by what is physically observable (through the five senses, instruments, or statistical data) in the universe. My point is that there is NO conflict between science and Christianity. I can believe in the law of gravity and the resurrection of Jesus Christ without compromise. The real conflict (if you can call it that) is not between the Christian and the scientist but between the Christian and the materialist. It all comes down to worldviews, not reason.
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