Explain This

There really are very few atheists.  No, I don’t have the results of a poll right here at hand, but it’s still the case that the great majority of nonbelievers identify as agnostic.

There are two kinds of agnostic, those who are unsure whether or not God exists, and those who believe it cannot be known whether or not God exists.  I remember my father telling me, “You can’t know.”  I was not equipped at that time to ask him, “Now, how could you possibly know that I can’t know?”  But unless I am mistaken, most agnostics are of the former kind.

Elsewhere I have argued that everyone knows God exists.  The wonder with which the beauty of nature fills us compels us to confess, “There must be an explanation for all of this.”  Young children have already absorbed the laws of cause and effect and know that every effect has a cause.  The universe is an effect and must have been caused by something outside itself, which cause must have been sufficient to produce the effect in question.  You don’t get an atomic explosion from a firecracker.  It is only when we go to school that we learn that only the foolish and backward doubt that the universe created itself.

But how do they think the universe created itself?  They don’t know.  They don’t even have a theory.  They do speculate, but speculations do not constitute testable scientific theories.

What else does naturalism fail to explain?  Well, pretty much everything.

I have identified eleven features of the universe which demand explanation.  (If you can think of others, please let me know.)  Atheism explains none of them.  Theism explains them all without breaking a sweat.  What are they?

• The fact that the universe had a beginning.
• The fine-tuning of the laws of physics.
• The existence of objective moral values.
• The origin of life.
• Information, the infallible sign of active intelligence.
• Consciousness.
• Reason.
• Language.
• Natural beauty.
• Mathematics – that is, the correspondence between complex math and the physical universe.
• The Resurrection of Jesus.  There is no plausible naturalistic explanation.  Unbelieving philosophers have given up finding one.

Each of these phenomena deserves a book-length treatment, and many books have been written.  But what do you expect?  This is just a blog post.

Even so, I judged that it would be worthwhile to remind you of the cogency of belief in God.  Once one realizes that

The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge (Ps. 19),

one is very near the Kingdom of God.  And when one realizes also that the text of the New Testament has been fully recovered and that the Gospel authors were undoubtedly truthful, one can “endure any misery undismayed, nay rejoicing.”  (Simon Greenleaf, The Testimony of the Evangelists.)