Category: Philosophy

Be Ready!

Apologetics Tools are now available!

Here are concise summaries of several recent posts to joshualetter, designed to be easily remembered so as to equip believers to be ready to address many of the concerns often raised by those who are seeking the truth.

Suggestions welcome!

SEVEN PRACTICAL APOLOGETICS TOOLS

1. The pioneers of modern science were virtually all Christians and were scientists specifically because of their religious beliefs.  In particular, they were scientists because they believed in a rational God who created an intelligible universe and man as a rational being capable of comprehending that universe.  For more information, see Thomas Alderman, Science and Religion: Exploding the Myth of Conflict, (a five-part series)(go to www.joshualetter.com and search for “exploding”).

2. The universe had a beginning and must therefore have had a cause outside itself.  That cause had to be timeless, immaterial, and inconceivably powerful.  More info: joshualetter.com, subject index: The Cosmological Argument for God.

3. The laws of physics are incomprehensibly fine-tuned for life.  The most plausible explanation (if not the only plausible explanation) is that they were intended to be that way by a cosmic designer.  More info: joshualetter.com, subject index: The Fine-Tuning of the Universe.

4. Objective moral values exist.  The most plausible explanation is that they are rooted in the character of a good Creator.  More info: joshualetter.com, subject index: The Moral Argument for God.

5. Jesus’ disciples were transformed by His post-Resurrection appearances from cowering fugitives to fearless evangelists.  Many of them died for their proclamation; none recanted.  The best explanation is that they truly encountered the risen Christ.  More info: joshualetter.com, search field, “minimal facts.”

6. The authors of the New Testament were honest and had ready access to the eyewitnesses of the events in the life of Jesus.  More info: joshualetter.com, search for “honesty.”

7. While it is true that many errors were introduced into the New Testament in the course of being manually copied, scholars have succeeded in identifying and correcting virtually all of those errors – as even skeptical New Testament scholars have acknowledged.  More info: joshualetter.com, search for “recovery.”

Find this helpful? Share it with your friends!

Questions? Contact us at:  

editor.joshualetter@thomasowensalderman.com

What About Laplace’s Protoplanetary Disc?

Today I was thinking about one of the arguments for naturalism (atheism) that I discussed in a recent oral presentation.

Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827) was a French scholar who contributed to the eclipse of theistic science in the 19th Century by observing that the origin of the solar system could be explained mechanically.  Under the force of gravity, a “proto-planetary disc” formed, and as it collapsed and became denser and denser, it clumped together, forming a system of star and planets.

My only comment at that time was that that was all very fine, but where did Laplace suppose the gravity came from?

And that, of course, remains a perfectly good critique; but today it dawned on me that there is a lot more that can be said.  Readers of this blog know about stellar nucleosynthesis, whereby the elements of the periodic table (oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, iron, chromium, etc., etc.) are by-products of the fusion reactions still taking place in the stars.  When the stars reach the end of their life cycle, they collapse and explode, spreading these elements into space, where they become the material for another generation of stars, which continue the process.  Eventually all 90 naturally-occurring elements are formed and spread abroad in space.  It was those materials which formed Laplace’s proto-planetary disc, which became our sun and our home, the Earth.

They also became our food source.

What is even more wonderful is that as that magnificent cosmic process produced our planet, it at the same time assembled all the elements we need for all our bodily functions; and we take those nutrients into ourselves whenever we consume plants grown in the soil or the animals that consume them.

Now, while the majority of our bodies are made up of common elements like oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen, some “exotic” elements are present in trace amounts: silicon, fluoride, iron, zinc, copper, lithium, manganese, iodine, cobalt, chromium, selenium, and molybdenum.  In large proportions many of these elements would be extremely toxic to us, but are required in very small quantities for proper bodily function.  And that is what we have: lots of carbon for our muscles and bones, and trace amounts of copper, zinc, selenium, and iron, essential for healthy hearts. Why did stellar nucleosynthesis produce all the elements in exactly the right proportions that we needed in order to thrive?

And there is more!  Our planet has a surfeit of iron and uranium, much more than is typical of most planets.  And it’s a good thing, too, as it is the molten iron core of our planet which produces the magnetic field which surrounds the Earth and deflects the solar wind which otherwise would strip away our atmosphere, and it is the uranium whose decay produces the heat that keeps that iron core molten so that it can circulate and produce that magnetic shield!

Glory to God!

Science and religion: Exploding the Myth of Conflict

A Five-Part Series

Part Five: Twentieth Century Physics and the Recovery of Theistic Science

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth.

– Genesis 1:1

The author of the Book of Genesis was very clear about it: there was an absolute beginning.  But Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC) didn’t get the news.  He taught that the universe was eternal, and that view prevailed in Europe until the early 20th Century.  What happened then is one of the most fascinating stories in the history of science, and one of the most important.  What is most significant about the story for our immediate purposes, is that it demonstrates that science and religion are allies in the search for truth, and not adversaries.

In 1915 Albert Einstein published his General Theory of Relativity (GTR), by which he explained gravity as a distortion in the fabric of space-time under the influence of massive objects.  How this happens is beyond the scope of this paper (which is fortunate, seeing that it is beyond my comprehension too).  What concerns us is that Einstein’s GTR mathematical equations implied that the universe is not static (and hence not eternal), but is either expanding or contracting.  Einstein himself found that idea repugnant, and he eliminated it by introducing a “fudge factor,” or rather a “cosmological constant” into his equations.

In 1922 Alexander Friedmann showed that Einstein’s original equations were correct, and Einstein acknowledged the fudge factor to be his “biggest blunder.”  Then in 1929 Edwin Hubble produced the first empirical confirmation of GTR by observing that the distant galaxies are moving away from us; indeed, he saw that the farther away the galaxies are, the faster they are receding.  Thus Hubble showed that as between a contracting or an expanding universe, we definitely occupy an expanding one.

Then in 1931 Georges Lemaitre showed that by extrapolating the expansion of the universe backward in time, it could be shown that the universe began from a “singularity” in which all the material of the universe was concentrated into an infinitely dense and hot, infinitesimal mathematical point, strongly suggesting an absolute beginning.

Not everyone was convinced; and it was not until 1965 that Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson found the radiation (the “cosmic microwave background radiation,” or CMBR) that was left over from the creation event, confirming Big Bang theory.  For this they were awarded the Nobel Prize.

The fact that many scientists did not immediately embrace what has become known as “Big Bang” cosmology illustrates beautifully the unavoidable interrelatedness of science and religion.  An absolute beginning has obvious theistic implications.  Since the universe began to exist, it must have had a cause.1  The cause must have been spaceless, timeless, and inconceivably powerful and intelligent.  This would not necessarily be a personal God, but it does indicate a Creator of some kind.  Many scientists were slow to acknowledge this.  William Lane Craig states that the history of twentieth-century theory is a long series of failed attempts to falsify Big Bang cosmology:

With each successive failure of alternative . . . theories to avoid the absolute beginning of the universe predicted by the Standard Model, that prediction has been corroborated. It can be confidently said that no cosmogonic model has been as repeatedly verified in its predictions and as corroborated by attempts at its falsification . . . as the Standard Big Bang Model.

Moreover, leading theorists have pronounced the matter closed.  Craig puts it this way:

A watershed of sorts appears to have been reached in 2003 with Borde, Guth, and Vilenkin’s formulation of their theorem establishing that any universe which has on average over its past history been in a state of cosmic expansion cannot be eternal in the past but must have a spacetime boundary. . . . [T]he Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem . . . single-handedly sweeps away the most important attempts to avoid the absolute beginning of the universe, especially the darling of current cosmologists, the eternal inflationary multiverse.  Vilenkin pulls no punches: “It is said that an argument is what convinces reasonable men and a proof is what it takes to convince even an unreasonable man.  With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe. There is no escape, they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning.”2

Why, then, has a segment of the scientific community struggled so mightily to avoid the beginning?  It seems sufficiently apparent that they are bringing their prior metaphysical (i.e., religious) commitments to bear upon their science, which confirms again the interrelatedness of science and religion.

Atheism is as much a religious viewpoint as is theism.  Both address the perennial religious questions: Who am I, Where did I come from, Where am I going, Why are people so selfish, and What can we do about it?  It is the questions themselves which qualify a viewpoint as religious.3

It is impossible to separate completely science and religion from each other.  What matters is that when we practice science, we do it well, and when we practice religion, we do it well.  That entails avoidance of doing religion and calling it science.

The Fine-Tuning of the Laws of Physics

The Twentieth Century produced two more blockbuster scientific discoveries that re-establish the plausibility of theism and of theistic science: the discovery that the laws of physics have been “fine-tuned” to an astonishing degree so as to produce a universe hospitable to life; and the elucidation of the DNA molecule.

In 1961 Robert H. Dicke discovered that gravity and electromagnetism must be fine-tuned for life – that is, that they have very precise values, and that if they did not have exactly those very values, there would be no life anywhere in the universe.  Hawking has stated, “It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in just this way, except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us.”4  In the ensuing decades, scientists have learned that almost everything about the physical cosmos is fine-tuned.5 Suffice it to say, anyone who is not flabbergasted at the astonishing fine-tuning of the cosmos, is not paying attention.  

DNA

In addition to the Big Bang and the Fine-Tuning, Twentieth Century science has made one more discovery having sweeping implications, and that is the discovery of the mind-boggling complexity of living things.

The human body has roughly 30 trillion cells and twenty thousand different kinds of proteins.  Proteins carry out all of the life functions of the organism, from respiration to metabolism to digestion to the immune system, to name a few.  Proteins also build and maintain the system in which the instructions for fabricating all of these proteins are contained in the three billion base pairs of DNA, not to mention the system for communicating those instructions to the ribosomes, where all the proteins that the body needs are manufactured.  The complexity is overwhelming.  One way to gain a deep appreciation of this would be to read Fazale Rana’s Fit For a Purpose.6  The impression of design is unavoidable.  Rana shows that cellular functions take place at the atomic and the subatomic levels, one proton at a time, one electron at a time, performing precisely their instructions from DNA.

Conclusion

It makes my head spin when I consider that until 1929 scientists believed that the universe was static and eternal.  It spins faster when I recall that the Big Bang was presented to me in high school in 1965 as a commonplace fact, as if we had always known the universe had an absolute beginning.

Did I mention that until 1924 we thought the Milky Way was the only galaxy?  Do you remember when you first learned there are billions of galaxies, each containing billions of stars?  I don’t.  People weren’t talking about it much when I was growing up.  We’re still not talking about it.

Listen.  If there was a beginning, then there is a Creator.  If there is a Creator, naturalism is false.  This is news!  The whole project of investigating nature needs thoroughgoing reform.

But there is much more than that.  There was a beginning, and there is a Creator.  Who cares about naturalism?  There is a Creator!  Who is this person?  Did he, as the Bible teaches, take human form, walk the planet, and promise me eternal life?

I know that He did.

Thomas Alderman

December 3, 2024

ENDNOTES

1I have previously demonstrated this necessary causal relationship.  See Part Four, fn 2.

2William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith (Crossway 2008), 139-140.

3I have also addressed this question in a previous post.  See joshualetter.com June 13, 2015 blog post, “The Definition of Religion.”

4Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam Books, 1 1998, 1996), 129-131.

5I have discussed this topic at length also.  See joshualetter.com June 28, 2018 blog post, “The Existence of God: Four Philosophical Arguments,” pp 18-27 at https://joshualetter.com/2018/06/28/the-existence-of-god/

And see joshualetter.com January 27, 2023 blog post, “The Heavens Declare the Glory” at https://joshualetter.com/category/philosophy/the-existence-of-god/

And see joshualetter.com July 26, 2022 blog post, “Water: Designed for Life,” at https://joshualetter.com/?s=water.

And see reasons.org Design Compendium at https://reasons.org/explore/publications/articles/rtb-design-compendium-2009.

6Fazale Rana, Fit For a Purpose (Reasons to Believe Press, 2021).  Rana is the Executive Director of Reasons to Believe.

Science and religion: Exploding the Myth of Conflict

A Five-Part Series

Introduction

The myth that there is some inherent conflict between faith and reason, or between religion and science, dies hard; but for at least twenty years, philosophers of science have attacked the myth so many times and so effectively that we now happily see it gasping for breath.  So it may seem like piling on, but it is important that the truth of the matter be discoverable in these pages.

Perhaps the most important reason for the myth’s tenacity is that while there is no inherent conflict between science and religion – indeed, they are, on the contrary, close allies in the search for truth – there is conflict between science and religion as practiced, in two very important ways.  First, many scientists impose a metaphysical naturalism upon their research.  The essence of naturalism is the presupposition that reality consists of matter and energy and nothing else – the immediate corollary being that any imagined spiritual or supernatural entity (such as God) is just that: imaginary, unreal.  Thus naturalism is the equivalent of atheism.  In such a view, the causes of all natural phenomena must themselves be physical, which is to say, impersonal.  What other sorts of causation might there be?  Personal causation: design.

Accordingly, it must be emphasized that this scientific naturalism, as it is often called, constitutes a religious idea.  Any assertion as to the ultimate nature of reality is, by definition, religious.  The mere fact that naturalism answers the question, Is there a creator? in the negative does not make it any less religious.1

Please note also that naturalism does not arrive at this doctrine by any scientific or empirical means; rather, it does so a priori – that is, rather than make an effort to establish the truth or falsity of its atheism by observation, naturalists simply declare the matter in the negative, and pronounce it closed.  This places it in direct conflict with science, which, properly conceived, seeks evidence of the causes for natural phenomena, and follows that evidence to its conclusion, whether it leads to the personal or to the impersonal.

This is well-illustrated by the methods employed in the sciences of archaeology, forensic science, and the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence.  In each of these, researchers seek to determine whether an ancient artifact, or a fatal injury, or a signal from space, may be the result of the activity of a conscious agent acting purposefully.  If the data indicate that the artifact, or the death, or the signal, bear the hallmarks of design, then the activity of a conscious agent is inferred.  So is design a meaningful category in astronomy but not in biology?  Why or why not?

There is, of course, a difference between the inference to personal causation in archeology, on the one hand, and the inference to personal causation in biology, on the other hand.  In practice, such an inference in archeology generally invokes a human agent, whereas such an inference in biology obviously invokes a non-human agent; and there are very few candidates for the non-human agent– most people can think of only one, that being a divine creator.  But for the naturalist, the only permissible inference is to the impersonal, because to the naturalist only the impersonal exists; and this is how naturalism comes into conflict with science.  Is it even possible that a personal creator exists?  Big Bang cosmology powerfully says that it is possible.  Does science, then, not wish to know about this creator?  Wouldn’t that be anti-scientific?  The term science comes from the Latin for “to know.”  Thus, there is indeed conflict between science and religion, but it is not between science and biblical religion: it is between science and naturalistic religion.

The scientist who imposes his naturalism onto the data may be correct some of the time, just as the theist who imposes his theism onto the data may be right part of the time.  But the naturalist who rushes to an atheistic conclusion is just as unscientific as the theist who rushes to a theistic conclusion.  The solution, obviously, is to make oneself conscious of one’s biases, guard against them by remaining open to either type of causation, and to follow the data wherever they lead.

The other source of conflict arises out of the insistence on the part of many Christians on a wooden exegesis of the Book of Genesis.  Their commitment to a literal understanding of the six days of creation places them in direct conflict with many recent and seemingly solid scientific findings.  How can we see light from stars millions of light years away if the universe is only 6,000 years old?  Why do radiometric dating and Antarctic ice cores reflect an ancient Earth?  Ken Ham, a leading Young Earth proponent, himself acknowledges that Young Earth Creationism has no answers to such questions.2  Young Earth Creationism then becomes the straw man ripe for attack by the advocates of naturalism who find it convenient to ignore the existence of the other major exegetical school, namely, Old Earth Creationism, which makes a much more robust (and successful) effort to reconcile the science and the biblical text in ways that are faithful to both.3

Leaving those matters to one side, I propose, in a five-part series, to comment on a more pertinent question, namely, whether science and religion are necessarily at odds when practiced rightly.  In this connection I wish to emphasize four simple truths.

First, it was theists who invented modern science.  That is, it was Christian and Jewish scientists who did so, and they did so not merely as an expression of their religious faith but as affirmations of particular biblical doctrines as to the nature of God, the nature of the Creation, and the nature of man.  It was their belief in those doctrines which incited their inquiries.

Second, there is a reason why modern science gained no foothold in areas of the globe where non-biblical religions were observed: namely, their religious doctrines were not conducive to the systematic investigation of the cosmos.  Indeed, some of their beliefs actively discouraged scientific inquiry.  

Third, the precepts of atheism/materialism4 likewise provide no warrant for expecting the study of nature to be fruitful.  Indeed, if the scientific community were to apply its metaphysical assumptions consistently to the scientific enterprise, the latter would come to a screeching halt.  It is only by borrowing from the earlier, theistic consensus that the project continues at all.

Fourth, while it is true that the church badly mishandled the Galileo affair, that dispute had almost nothing to do with cosmology and everything to do with the politics of the time.  Only decades later was it re-interpreted as evidencing enmity between science and religion.  That reinterpretation, together with a long series of ideological blunders on the part of leading intellectuals, resulted in the widespread embrace of scientific materialism which now causes so much confusion.

Fifth, monumental discoveries in 20th-Century physics – the Big Bang, the fine-tuning of the laws of physics, and DNA – have resoundingly restored the scientific plausibility of theistic science.

Part One: The Biblical Basis for the Scientific Revolution

It is no surprise, of course, that the founders of modern science were predominantly Christian, since in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries almost everyone in the West was a Christian or a Jew.  If one searches the web for lists of Christians who were important in the development of the sciences, one finds the names of hundreds who lived from the 16th century forward.  For example, if one goes to the web page

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christians_in_science_and_technology

and searches the page for the word “father,” it appears 17 times, and we learn that Christians were considered the “fathers” of the following fields of science:

Empiricism and the scientific method

Botony

Parasitology

Chemistry

Microbiology

Physiology

Taxonomy

Paleontology

Genetics

Surgery

Special mention is merited in the following instances, with whose names and accomplishments many readers will also be familiar:

Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543), showed that the Earth orbits the sun (heliocentrism), rather than the sun orbiting the Earth as previously believed.

Francis Bacon (1561–1626), “Considered among the fathers of empiricism and is credited with establishing the inductive method of experimental science via what is called the scientific method today.”5

Galileo Galilei (1564–1642)

Johannes Kepler (1564–1642)

Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)

Robert Boyle (1627–1691), father of modern chemistry

Isaac Newton (1642-1726), discoverer of gravity, classical mechanics, and the calculus

Michael Faraday (1791–1867)

James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879)

Louis Pasteur (1822–1895)

Lord Kelvin (1824–1907)

Arthur Eddington (1882–1944)

Georges Lemaitre (1894–1966)

Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976)

Wernher von Braun (1912–1977)

Alan Sandage (1926–2010)

Freeman Dyson (1923–2020)

John Polkinghorne (1930–2021)

Owen Gingerich (1930–2023)

Francis Collins (b. 1950)

Paul R. McHugh (b. 1931)

Kenneth R. Miller (b. 1948)

Hugh Ross (b. 1945)

Pat Gelsinger (b. 1962)

James Tour (b. 1959)

Christians, all.

The same web page informs us that:

According to 100 Years of Nobel Prizes, a review of Nobel prizes awarded between 1901 and 2000, 65.4% of Nobel Prizes Laureates have identified Christianity in its various forms as their religious preference.  Overall, 72.5% of all the Nobel Prizes in Chemistry,65.3% in Physics, 62% in Medicine, 54% in Economics were either Christians or had a Christian background.

What’s more, among the early founders, it was their theology which inspired their science.  They considered their scientific endeavors to be expressions of their faith.  According to Stephen C. Meyer, Robert Boyle, the founder of modern chemistry, regarded devotion to the study of nature, like devotion to the study of scripture, as “an act of Piety,” especially since he thought God desired “to have his Works regarded and taken Notice of.”6

Their belief in a rational God and in an orderly, purposeful universe was conducive to scientific inquiry.  The divine logos creates an orderly universe – intelligible and sacred, but disenchanted (not magical).  Humans, likewise, having been created in the image of a rational God, are also rational creatures who therefore have the mental capacity to apprehend the order which God has implanted in nature.  Thus the astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), for example, could say that “God wanted us to recognize natural laws, and God made this possible by creating us after his own image so that we could share in his own thoughts.”7

Isaac Newton wrote, “This most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.”8  According to Oxford University historian of science John Hedley Brooke, “For Newton, as for Boyle and Descartes, there were laws of nature only because there had been a [divine] Legislator.”9

British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) argued that “There can be no living science unless there is a widespread instinctive conviction in the existence of an Order of Things.  And, in particular, of an Order of Nature.”10  Whitehead particularly attributed this conviction among the founders of modern science to the “medieval insistence upon the rationality of God.”11  Meyer comments:

Other scholars have amplified this observation.  They insist that modern science was specifically inspired by the conviction that the universe is the product of a rational mind who designed the universe to be understood and who also designed the human mind to understand it.  As historian and philosopher of science Steve Fuller notes, Western science is grounded in the belief that “the natural order is the product of a single intelligence from which our own intelligence descends.”  Philosopher Holmes Rolston III puts the point this way: “It was monotheism that launched the coming of physical science, for it premised an intelligible world, sacred but disenchanted, a world with a blueprint, which was therefore open to the searches of the scientists.  The great pioneers in physics – Newton, Galileo, Kepler, Copernicus – devoutly believed themselves called to find evidences of God in the physical world.”  The astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) exclaimed that “God wanted us to recognize” natural laws and that God made this possible “by creating us after his own image so that we could share in his own thoughts.”12

The “Two Books” metaphor reinforced this view.  The idea is that scripture is one book and nature another book.  Both books having the same author, there can be no contradiction between them.  If they seem incompatible, it is because we have not yet understood one or the other or both.  Galileo specifically affirmed that in some cases it might be our interpretation of scripture which must give way.  (The Pope was prepared to do exactly that in Galileo’s case, until Galileo offended the Pope.)  “The metaphor of the book of nature . . . implied the legitimacy of scientific endeavor, since it affirmed that nature supplied a secondary source of authoritative revelation about the character and wisdom of the creator.”13  

These ideas were not made up out of whole cloth, but were based on clear scriptural warrant.  Thus, in his letter to the Roman Christians, the Apostle Paul wrote:

. . . [W]hat may be known about God is plain . . because God  has made it plain. . . .  For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.

And in Psalm 19, David writes:

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.

There is no speech or language

where their voice is not heard.

Their voice goes out into all the earth,

their words to the ends of the world.

And in Psalm 104, the Psalmist writes:

O Lord my God, you are very great;

you are clothed with splendor and majesty.

He wraps himself in light as with a garment;

he stretches out the heavens like a tent

and lays the beams of his upper chambers on their 

waters.

The idea of divine sovereignty and freedom further justified interest in nature.  The understanding of God’s freedom to create or not, or, creating, to create whatever He will, spurs inquiry into what He may actually have done.  This is another way in which biblical teaching encouraged an empirical epistemology, which relies on observation and experiment, in contrast to the Aristotelian tradition of relatively abstract speculation.

Finally, the belief in human fallibility and depravity “engendered caution about trusting human conjectures and hypotheses unless they were carefully tested by experiment and observation.”14

NEXT WEEK: The Scientific Revolution Arose only in the West for a Reason

ENDNOTES

1For a fuller discussion of the religious character of non-theistic belief systems, see Joshualetter, “The Definition of Religion, June 13, 2015 blog post, https://joshualetter.com/2015/06/13/the-definition-of-religion/.

2Ken Ham, “Young Earth Creationism,” in Four Views on Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design (J. B. Stump ed., Zondervan 2017), 17-48, 41-42.

3The reader is encouraged to visit the website, reasons.org.

4I use the terms naturalism and materialism interchangeably.  Naturalism, again, is the view that nature is all there is; materialism is the view that matter and energy are all there is.  Naturalism is the term which one encounters more often.

5https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christians_in_science_and_technology.  (Last visited 12.2.24.)

6Stephen C. Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis (Harper Collins 2021), 48.

7Meyer, 36.

8”General Scholium,” in Mathematical Priciples of Natural Philosophy (1687) in Great Books of the Western World, Robert M. Hutchins, ed. (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, n.d.), 369.

9Brooke, “Science and Theology in the Enlightenment,” 9.

10Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 3-4, emphasis in original.

11Id, 12.

12Meyer, 36.

13Meyer, 48.

14Meyer, 38.

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.)

Postscript to the Cosmological Argument

As children growing up, each of us at some point becomes aware of the laws of cause and effect.  Every effect has a cause, and each cause must be sufficient to produce the effect in question. 

Then when in childhood or adolescence we become aware also of the beauty and power of nature, most of us will say to ourselves, “There must be an explanation for all of this.”  What we see is this magnificent natural world, and we know intuitively that it must have a cause, and that the cause must itself be colossal.

Not only that; but we have also by this time learned to distinguish objects and events that are designed from those which result from impersonal forces such as wind erosion, earthquake, or chemical reactions.  We may not be able to articulate exactly how we make such distinctions, but every child can accurately tell a slab of marble from a statue.  (We will elucidate the precise criteria for design in a future post.)  Finally, we also have understood by this time that design invariably signals personhood – that is, it implies intention, which is an activity of mind, and only of mind.  Put it this way: design is a mental activity — and we know this as children.

But then the child returns to her classroom and does not consider the matter further for months or years, until her next experience of nature, and again she tells herself, “There must be an explanation for all of this.”  Even then she does not pursue the inquiry in any deliberate way; and before long her elders begin teaching her that her intuition is not true, that it is irrational and superstitious, and that science shows that everything is the unintended result of impersonal forces.

But it is perfectly rational to apply the laws of cause and effect to the universe itself – why wouldn’t we? – and perfectly rational to infer mind from design.

Anything which exists either had a beginning or it didn’t, and if it did, then it either had a cause or it didn’t.  The evidence of science overwhelmingly shows that the universe did have a beginning.  What is irrational is to suppose that anything could come into existence, uncaused.

What we all need is someone to confirm that our childhood intuition was and is true.

Those who confirmed that intuition for me are men such as William Craig, Michael Behe, Hugh Ross, J. P. Moreland, John Lennox, and Stephen Meyer.  I thank my God for each one.

A Little Deeper Into the Cosmos

More on the Cosmological Argument for the Existence of God

Why is there something rather than nothing?

If anything exists, then an uncaused being exists.  How do we know this?

Something does exist: the universe; and the universe either had a beginning or it didn’t.  If it didn’t, then it has an infinite past, and neither has a cause nor can it have a cause, and that would end the inquiry.

But we happen to know that the universe did have a beginning, and since it did not create itself, it must have had a cause outside itself.  Thus there exists, in addition to the universe itself, at least one other being – specifically, whatever it was that caused the universe to exist.

Either the cause of the universe was itself uncaused, or it was preceded by an infinite regress of caused causes.  An actual infinite regress of caused causes is impossible.  Therefore, the universe was caused by an uncaused cause.  QED.

What kind of being is this uncaused cause of the universe?

Big Bang cosmology entails that space and time themselves came into existence with the matter and energy of the Creation event.  Therefore, the cause of the universe must be:

     Uncaused

     Spaceless

     Timeless

     Immaterial

     Stupendously powerful

Other observations enable us to add to the list of divine attributes.  The fine-tuning of the universe shows that the First Cause has crafted the constants of physics to achieve a particular purpose, namely, a universe hospitable to complex life.  Purpose is a mental activity: only minds have purposes.  Therefore the First Cause is a personal being.  The fine-tuning demonstrates also that the First Cause is transcendently intelligent.

Why does the universe exist?  Why is there something rather than nothing?  Because God caused the universe to exist.  Then why does God exist?  I do not believe there is an answer to that question.  God does not exist for a reason: he just is.  He is the uncaused cause.  He, and only He, contains in Himself the explanation of His own existence.  As He said to Moses: “I am that I am.  Tell them that I am sent you.”

So to someone who asks, “If God created the universe, then who created God?” the proper response is to point out that the answer is obvious, but that it is the wrong question.  The question is not who created God, but how can it be that God exists, uncaused?  What is the reason for God’s existence?  And the only answer I know of is that He just exists.  He and He alone contains within himself the explanation for his own existence.

And we are in awe once again, and our hearts overflow with gratitude.

Many philosophers maintain that the reason God exists is that He is the necessary being.  I’m not clear on what that means.  Wouldn’t it be possible that nothing at all exists?  Then God would also not exist, right?  Then He doesn’t exist by any sort of logical necessity.  In what sense, then, is he the necessary being?

I suspect the answer is that if God did not exist, then nothing would exist.

So my answer to the question how we know God exists is that we know it from the fact that something that is not God exists and had a beginning.  Everything else follows by logical necessity.

The Heavens Declare the Glory

Several people who follow this blog have been complaining about the recent dearth of posts.  Mea culpa!  I repent!

Here is a fascinating special case of the fine-tuning of the universe.

There are 90 naturally-occurring elements in the periodic table – elements like hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, and many others.  Every physical thing in the universe is made up of these elements or of combinations of these elements.

Each element has distinctive properties, and the properties of all the elements, taken together, result in our physical world –the Earth, the Earth’s atmosphere, the iron that drives the Earth’s magnetic field, the water that makes life possible, the sun, the moon, the stars, our bodies.

It makes me weep to realize the wisdom and power displayed in the Creation.

Where do these elements come from?

I learned several years ago that there have been three or four generations of stars.  The first generation, formed at about 100 million years after the Creation event, consisted only of the lightest elements, hydrogen and helium.  During the lifetime of those stars, they produced heavier elements by a process of fusion – that is, by combining lighter elements to form heavier ones under extreme heat and pressure.  When these stars reached the end of their lifespans, they collapsed, and then they exploded, spreading those heavier elements throughout the cosmos.  Then under gravitation the debris from the explosion of those stars formed a second generation of stars, which likewise produced even heavier elements, collapsed, and exploded.  (They are still exploding; they are called “super-novas.”)  Our sun is an instance of at least a third-generation star, if not a fourth.

Recently it was learned that iron is the heaviest element formed in this manner – by fusion within the first generations of stars.  Now cosmologists have discovered how the heaviest elements were formed.

Most massive stars (say, 10 times the mass of our Sun) exist in binary systems with a twin.  When they die, they explode, but their cores remain, and they collapse to a diameter of only 10 to 12 kilometers, forming the densest objects in the universe other than black holes – so dense that the protons and electrons combine, forming neutrons; and hence they are called “neutron stars.”

The twin neutron stars then circle each other for eons until at last, under their mutual gravitational attraction, they fall into each other.  When they collide, they annihilate in the most spectacular events ever observed.  But after the collapse and before the explosion, they form the heavy elements by a process called “rapid neutron capture,” or the r-process.  Then the explosions again spread these heaviest elements throughout the universe.  Some of them ended up in Earth’s soil.  We ingested the plants that drew those elements out of that soil, and those elements keep us alive by performing vital life functions, from the regulation of brain development to the formation of strong bones.

You can read more from Scientific American at https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-star-collisions-forge-the-universes-heaviest-elements/

Glory to God!

The Cosmological Argument for the Existence of God is Virtually Conclusive

I cannot leave this argument alone.  Every time I sit down to write about the teleological argument for the existence of God (the argument from design), my thoughts turn to the cosmological argument instead.  Here is my latest effort to reduce the argument to its essence.

There are only four possible explanations for the existence of the universe:

  1. The universe is past-eternal;
  2. The universe had an uncaused beginning;
  3. The universe was caused by a caused cause; or
  4. The universe was caused by an uncaused cause.

We can eliminate the first three explanations.

If the universe is past-eternal, then it did not have a beginning.  If so, then it did not have a cause, but just is.  God may or may not exist, but an uncaused universe does not require it.

Empirical science has shown, however, that the universe did have a beginning.  This leads to two more possible explanations for its existence: either it had a caused beginning, or it had an uncaused beginning.  If the universe had an uncaused beginning, then God may or may not exist, but as noted above, an uncaused universe does not require it.

But an uncaused beginning is unlikely because it would violate the laws of cause and effect.  At the very least, it would seem to do so: there is no plausible basis for maintaining that the universe could have had an uncaused beginning. 

The universe, then, must have had a caused beginning.  If so, then again there are two possible explanations for its existence: either the cause itself had a beginning and hence a cause, or the cause itself did not have a cause and hence was past-eternal.

A caused cause is merely one element in an infinite series, unless the series itself has a beginning; and it can only begin with an uncaused cause.  An actual infinite series is impossible and absurd.  Therefore the series of causes must “end” (begin) with an uncaused cause, which uncaused cause must be past-eternal.

(Every caused universe is past-finite and every past-finite universe which can be actualized is caused.  Every uncaused universe which can be actualized is past-eternal and every past-eternal universe is uncaused.)

Thus three of the four possible explanations for the existence of the universe have been excluded: a past-eternal universe; an uncaused beginning; and a beginning brought about by an infinite series of caused causes.  The remaining explanation, that the universe was brought into being by an uncaused, past-infinite cause, must be true.