god – Joshualetter

THE OLIVET DISCOURSE A Comment

Thomas Alderman, November 29, 2025

All three Synoptic Gospels – Mark, Luke, and Matthew – contain Jesus’ discourse concerning future events, known as “the Olivet Discourse” because He delivered it while gazing from the Mount of Olives at the magnificent Herodian Temple across the Kidron Valley.

The Discourse poses a number of hermeneutical challenges, but one in particular causes some to stumble. Jesus predicts the destruction of the Temple. He also predicts His own return “in clouds with great power and glory.” But then He emphasizes that “this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened.” Manifestly, the generation living when Jesus spoke has been gone a long time – yet Christ has not returned. Did Jesus make a mistake? Or did the Gospel authors err in recording what He said? And if He or they erred in this instance, where else might they have erred? Is the New Testament reliable at all?

According to William L. Lane, author of the New International Commentary on the New Testament (NICNT) Book of Mark,¹ “In the Gospel of Mark there is no passage more problematic than the prophetic discourse of Jesus on the destruction of the Temple.”² Other scholars concur: Hans Bayer, Professor Emeritus, Covenant Theological Seminary, declares it to be “one of the more difficult things to understand in the Gospels.” At the same time, since the Olivet prophesy is among the most difficult New Testament texts, its vindication, if that were possible, would be of interest to the honest seeker. Many have therefore attempted to rescue the Discourse with various explanations as to how Jesus’ predictions could all have been true. I set myself to understand those attempts in the hope of reaching an opinion on the question.

Timothy and William Paley

Readers of this blog have been favored with the observations of Lydia McGrew, detailing many “unintended coincidences” in the New Testament where otherwise unrelated narratives corroborate each other in surprising ways. (Lydia McGrew, Hidden in Plain View: Undesigned Coincidences in the Gospels and Acts (DeWard, 2017); June 3, 2025 joshualetter post.) McGrew is following in a venerable tradition, of which one of the earliest and greatest exponents was William Paley (1743-1805). Today Paley is more famous for the revival of the argument for the existence of God from design in nature, but he deserves as much credit for his exposition of scripture. Here is one of Paley’s unintended coincidences:

[W]hen I read, in the Acts of the Apostles, that when Paul came to Derbe and Lystra, “behold a certain disciple was there, named Timotheus, the son of a certain woman which was a Jewess;” and when, in an epistle addressed to Timothy, I find him reminded of his “having known the holy scriptures from “a child,” which implies that he must, on one side or both, have been brought up by Jewish parents; I conceive that I remark a coincidence which shows, by its very obliquity, that scheme [collusion] was not employed in its formation.

William Paley, Horae Paulinae (Hardpress 2017, Kindle Location 106.)

If collusion is excluded, and if several accounts are all compatible, the only plausible explanation is that the reason they are consistent is that they all reflect what actually took place. And the greater the number of such accounts, and the more detailed they are, the greater our confidence in that conclusion. At least equally important is the confidence which we thereby also gain in the reporters’ commitment to the truth generally.

Now, memory of the past can be lost, and the past can be misrepresented, but the past itself is fixed. Some of it can be remembered, and some of it can even be documented. For example, Lee Harvey Oswald either acted alone or he did not, and nothing we do or say today can alter the fact. If an account exists which cannot be falsified, we consider that it may be true; but if there are several accounts of the same events and none of them separately, nor all of them together, can be falsified – that is, if combined they all describe a single, coherent set of facts – then absent collusion, our confidence in their veracity climbs, until we begin to say we know what took place.

That is what we find in the New Testament.

I hope to elaborate on that theme in these pages in the near future. In the meantime, Gary Habermas helps us to appreciate the consistently singular quality of the NT writings:

Arguably the best example here is the work of Sir William Ramsay, the famous archaeologist and professor at the universities of Oxford and Aberdeen at the turn of the twentieth century. Trained in nineteenth-century German liberalism at the University of Tubingen and holding to those views, he was a noted archaeologist and authority on the history of Asia Minor. Through his excavation of this region, and contrary to his own opinions on the New Testament, he began to change his view concerning Luke, Paul, and Acts. After decades of research in this area, expressed in several major books on these subjects, he had distinguished himself as perhaps the greatest authority of his day on these subjects. To sum up his research, Ramsay concluded, “Luke is a historian of the first rank; not merely are his statements of fact trustworthy . . . this author should be placed along with the very greatest of historians.” [Gary Habermas, On the Resurrection: Evidences, Kindle Location 891, citing William M. Ramsay, The Bearing of Recent Discovery on the Trustworthiness of the New Testament, 4^th ed. (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1920), 222.]

Maybe it’s not so surprising that both Paul and Luke wrote about Timothy. But this is merely one of a great proliferation of such examples demonstrating the truthfulness and the accuracy of the authors. The impression of veracity will never be felt if all you do is look for anomalies. No, one must look at the endlessly repeated instances of meticulous investigation, research, and reportage, and eventually realize, “All of this really happened!” And then you realize, “I am free, glory to God!”

ps. Listen to “Who Is Theophylus?” with Shane Rosenthal of The Humble Skeptic at https://www.humbleskeptic.com/p/who-is-theophilus

Hidden in Plain View

Lydia McGrew, Hidden in Plain View: Undesigned Coincidences in the Gospels and Acts (DeWard, 2017).

INTRODUCTION

God has providentially, miraculously bestowed upon us many excellent proofs of the veracity of the authors of the Fourfold Gospel of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John. Indeed, the Gospels by every measure show themselves true.

Certainly one of the most important ways God has ordered things so as to assure us of His Word, has been to provide not just one detailed account of Jesus’ ministry, but four accounts. Trial lawyers know quite well that whenever two or more witnesses testify about the same event, it will be nearly impossible for either of them, if false, to escape detection if he is subjected to skilled cross-examination. That is because a manufactured account by definition will clash with what actually happened.

By the same token, if two witnesses to the same event are both truthful, each of their accounts will match reality; and matching reality, they will not be contradictory, though in many cases they might differ in a number of respects. They will fit together like pieces of a puzzle and will constitute a single coherent account. What’s more, the very differences in their accounts will often be such as to rule out collusion.

One consequence of this is that if the testimonies of two witnesses are compatible, then barring collusion, one may be relatively confident that one has uncovered the truth. If one has four witnesses whose testimony is compatible, truth is virtually guaranteed.

In regard to the earlier comment about skilled cross-examination, it must not be overlooked that the Gospel accounts have been subjected to two thousand years of withering cross-examination by biblical scholars, lawyers, historians, and archeologists, and have never been falsified. To the contrary, the more we have learned about Jesus from extra-biblical sources, the more thoroughly the Gospels themselves have been vindicated.

Of course a profusion of witnesses also entails a greater chance of inconsistencies among them, or seeming inconsistencies. This is to be expected, even if the witnesses are truthful. Two witnesses will almost never give identical accounts. If they did, one would immediately suspect collusion. But depending on the complexity of the subject of their testimony, two truthful witnesses will almost always describe events somewhat differently. They may have observed different aspects of the same event, or they may have observed from different locations. But despite such differences, their testimonies will match reality, and, matching reality, upon careful consideration they will also be seen to match each other, providing the investigator with heightened confidence that the truth has become known.

One early proponent of the integrity of the Gospel accounts was William Paley (1743-1805), who observed that “. . . [P]erfection is no accident. It is the effect of truth. Nothing but truth can preserve consistency.”

Now quite recently another biblical scholar has examined the Gospels with this principle in view. Philosopher Lydia McGrew, in Hidden in Plain View: Undesigned Coincidences in the Gospels and Acts (DeWard, 2017), shows that the four Gospel narratives, by providing differing accounts of many of the same events, corroborate each other in surprising detail, negate collusion, and amplify the conviction of the authors’ honesty and accuracy. McGrew provides 41 examples from the Gospels, Acts, and the Pauline Epistles, one of which I propose to discuss here: Jesus’ feeding of the 5,000.

WOE TO YOU, BETHSAIDA!

At Matthew 11:20-24, the Evangelist says that “Jesus began to denounce the cities in which most of his miracles had been performed, because they did not repent. “Woe to you Korazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida!” Jesus said. “If the miracles that were performed in you had been performed in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes.” Why did Jesus denounced woe upon Bethsaida? What “mighty acts” did he perform there?

Matthew doesn’t tell us – there is no other reference to Bethsaida anywhere else in Matthew. We must turn to the Gospel of Luke. Luke 9:10 says that when the apostles returned from their missionary journey, Jesus took them to Bethsaida, and the crowds followed Him there. Jesus preached to them and healed them, and later that day He miraculously fed the 5,000. Is that what Matthew was talking about? Yes it is. But neither Matthew nor Luke tell us anything about the people failing to repent.

We keep looking. Go to the Gospel of John, Chapter 6. After feeding the 5,000, Jesus crossed the Sea of Galilee, and the people followed Him. When they found Him, He told them, “I tell you the truth, you are looking for me, not because you saw miraculous signs but because you ate the loaves and had your fill.” John 6:26.

So what do we have? Luke tells us about the feeding of the 5,000; Matthew tells us where that was done; John tells us of the people’s deplorable spiritual condition: rather than lament their sin, the people are only concerned about their appetites. And Matthew records the denunciation of woe. Each Evangelist provides a part of the story, but they all mesh together perfectly to provide one complete and coherent account.

Now, Mark also records the feeding of the 5,000, but he doesn’t record the location, or the people’s motives, or the denunciation of woe. This shows that Matthew, Luke and John are independent of Mark. The differences among them, in turn, also tend to negate collusion.

But there is more! Why did Jesus, at John 6:5, ask Philip, “Where shall we buy bread for these people to eat?”

He did it to test him, of course; but it was natural for Jesus to ask Philip. Why? John 1:43-44, which records Jesus’ initial call to Andrew, Peter, Philip, and Nathaniel, just happens to mention that Philip, Andrew, and Peter were all from Bethsaida!

And even more. Three Gospels mention the fact that there was grass in the place where the feeding of the five thousand took place (Mark 6.39, Matt 14.19, John 6.10), but only Mark emphasizes its color: “Then he commanded them all to sit down in groups on the green grass.” Does the color of the grass matter? It may not affect the nature of the miracle Jesus was about to perform, but it does enable us to fit the several accounts together. John 6:4 states, “The Jewish Passover Feast was near.” It was springtime! And Mark, describing also the feeding of the 4,000, shows that Jesus “told the crowd to sit down [not on the grass, but] on the ground.” This enables us to distinguish the feeding of the 4,000 from the feeding of the 5,000, establishing that they were probably two separate miracles.

CONCLUSION

Why are there four Gospels?

It takes very little faith, in my opinion, to recognize divine Providence in the fact that we have four independent records of the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. It would be difficult to think of a more powerful means for God to use to ensure that His Truth would become known, than a multiplicity of detailed accounts.

As noted earlier, McGrew has provided dozens more examples of “unintended coincidences” showing the NT text to be richer than many of us realized. My favorites include Jesus before Pilate and Joseph’s tomb. For an enjoyable and encouraging read, I heartily recommend it.

“I tell you the truth, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be condemned; he has crossed over from death to life.”

– Jesus (John 5:24)

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.”

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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 19^th 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 20^th 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.⁵Suffice 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

Part Four: Whatever Happened to Theistic Science?

The 1633 trial of Galileo occurred right in the middle of the Thirty Years religious wars between Catholics and Protestants, which lasted from 1618 to 1648. The causes of the wars were complex, but they started when Ferdinand II, the future Holy Roman Emperor, attempted to enforce Catholic orthodoxy on Protestant Bohemia. The wars then proceeded with complex and shifting sets of alliances. Eventually, Europe was exhausted after decades of sectarian conflict, and was receptive to new ways of ordering relations among the state, the church, and religious minorities. Partly in reaction against efforts to impose religious orthodoxy by the use of force, there arose in the 17^th and 18^th centuries an intellectual movement which became known, somewhat ironically, as “the Age of Enlightenment.” The intellectuals of that era thought they could end such strife by finding a source of moral authority independent of the Bible, and they thought they had found it in the power of human reason.

Human reason did not prove equal to the task. Scholars were enticed into a number of intellectual blunders which set the stage for the embrace of Darwinism and the eventual outright rejection of the former synthesis based on the biblical doctrine of Creation, wherein a rational God had created man a rational being in God’s own image, capable of comprehending an ordered cosmos.

Science and religion: Exploding the Myth of Conflict

A Five-Part Series

Part Three: There is Conflict, but it is Between Naturalism and Science

Naturalism is the view that nature is all that exists. That is, the matter and energy which constitute the physical world exist, but nothing else does. The immediate corollaries of this view, of course, are that the cosmos and everything in it is a single interconnected system of physical causation, and that spirits do not exist, and that includes God.

It may still safely be said, perhaps, that most contemporary scientists are naturalists – although that is changing, since naturalism has been under siege for decades and is showing signs of strain. Certainly most scientists in the fields of paleontology and biology are naturalists. This is in stark contrast to those in the fields of physics and astronomy, many of whom have exclaimed the theistic implications of Big Bang cosmology and the fine-tuning of the laws of physics. The difference is attributable, no doubt, to the fact that astronomers and physicists are not as constrained as biologists are by the dictates of neo-Darwinian orthodoxy.

Here is a representative sample of the views of many astronomers and physicists:

Albert Einstein (1879–1955):

In response to the evidence for the Big Bang, he acknowledged “the necessity for a beginning”¹ and “the presence of a superior reasoning power.”².

Stephen Hawking (1942-2018):

Commenting on the Fine-Tuning of the Universe, he stated that “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.”³.

Cambridge astronomer and atheist Fred Hoyle (1915-2001) (who never accepted Big Bang cosmology):

A “superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology. . . .”⁴.

Physicist Paul Davies (1946- ):

He once promoted atheism⁵ and is still opposed to Intelligent Design theory,⁶ but has conceded that “the laws [of physics] . . . seem themselves to be the product of exceedingly ingenious design.”⁷ He further states: “[There] is for me powerful evidence that there is ‘something going on’ behind it all. The impression of design is overwhelming.”⁸

Design is an activity of mind. Mind is a capacity of persons. The Creator is a person (or rather, three persons). Science is the study of the Creation. All truth is God’s truth.

Clearly, then, a commitment to naturalism is unnecessary for the conduct of good science. But we want to claim much more than that: we want to claim that naturalism actually impedes the progress of science.

Naturalism posits that human consciousness arises out of purely impersonal, mechanistic processes. Somehow (they don’t tell us how, since they don’t know how), it is said, the motions of the atoms in my brain produce the thoughts, beliefs, and intentions which form my mental experience. But thoughts, beliefs, and intentions are mental events, not physical events. Mental events occur only in minds. A mind is not a physical thing.

The naturalist will interject that mental events are embodied in neuro-physiological structures. That may be the case; yet the properties of brain events and the properties of mental events are mutually exclusive. The properties of brain events are physical: magnitude, valence, location, connections among neurons. Mental events have none of those physical properties and possess one property which brain events lack, namely, “aboutness.” Mental events – thoughts, beliefs, intentions – are always about something else.

Thus the mind and the brain, having entirely disparate sets of properties, cannot be the same thing.

A careful distinction must here be made. Naturalism and evolution are not the same thing; yet they are almost always conflated. The reason is readily apparent. Consciousness is something that requires an explanation, and evolution is the only naturalistic explanation for the rise of consciousness which anyone has ever proposed. If you are a naturalist, therefore, your choice is between evolution, as thinly supported by evidence as it is, and no explanation at all. It is thus naturalism, not evidence, which drives naturalists into Darwin’s embrace.

We saw that theism provides an intelligible justification for our confidence in the reliability of the human cognitive capability: our having been created in the image of a rational deity. What is naturalism’s justification? Far from positing a rational source for the human mind, naturalism posits a cognitive faculty formed by undirected, purposeless, mechanistic, impersonal processes. What basis is there for confidence that such processes could result in the formation of a reliable mind?

J. B. S. Haldane, a leading evolutionary theorist of the mid-twentieth century, may have been the first to notice that

If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose my beliefs are true . . . and hence no reason for supposing my brain to be made of atoms.

And no reason to believe that my awareness evolved. Darwin himself worried about this.

There is more. According to naturalism, theism is false; yet belief in God is widespread. According to the Pew Research Center, 84% of the world’s population are religiously affiliated. But theism is false, according to neo-Darwinists. Do false beliefs then have survival value? If not, how can evolutionary theory account for our species’ religiosity, how can we trust our cognitive capacity, and how can we be sure that naturalism is true? Naturalism is thus seen to be not only self-refuting, but an obstacle to the progress of science.⁹

NEXT WEEK: Part Four: What Happened to Theistic Science?

ENDNOTES

¹A. Vibert Douglas, “Forty Minutes with Einstein,” Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada 50 (1956), 100.

²Lincoln Barnett, The Universe and Dr. Einstein (New York: William Sloane Associates, 1948), 106.

³Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam Books, 1998, 1996), 129-131.

⁴Hoyle, “The Universe,” 16.

⁵Paul Davies, God and the New Physics (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), viii, 3–42, 142–143.

⁶https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/jun/26/ spaceexploration.comment. (Page unavailable 12.2.24.)

⁷Paul Davies, Superforce (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), 243.

⁸Paul Davies, The Cosmic Blueprint (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), 203; Paul Davies, “The Anthropic Principle,” Science Digest 191, no. 10 (October 1983), 24.

⁹I have Kenneth Samples of Reasons to Believe to thank for this argument.

Science and religion: Exploding the Myth of Conflict

A Five-Part Series

Part Two: The Scientific Revolution Arose only in the West for a Reason

As we saw in Part One, there are reasons science arose in the West. At the same time there are also reasons why it did NOT arise anywhere else: their theology did not permit it.

Barbour argues that “science in its modern form [arose] in Western civilization alone, among all the cultures of the world,” because only the Christian West had the necessary “intellectual presuppositions underlying the rise of science.”¹ These included, as noted in Part One, the belief in a rational God who created an orderly cosmos and humans in his image as also rational beings precisely because he wished to be known.

Greece.

Ancient Greek philosophy is a case in point. Many Greek philosophers “assumed they could deduce how nature ought to behave . . . based on only superficial observations of natural phenomena or without actually observing nature at all.”². Thus, Aristotle’s conception of the cosmos was based more on his suppositions about the divinity of the celestial objects and his assumptions about what kinds of motions would be suitable to them, given their divine nature. Supposing that a circular motion was most perfect, for example, Aristotle concluded that the orbit of the sun around the Earth must be perfectly circular. (Of course the sun does not orbit the Earth, and the Earth’s orbit of the sun is elliptical, not circular.) He also reasoned that the Earth must be eternal and the center of the universe.

Egypt

Despite Egypt’s technical prowess in building the pyramids, Egyptian mathematics and geometry remained a practical art.

Any possibility for scientific breakthroughs was destroyed by

the polytheistic, animistic precepts central to Egyptian religion. In polytheism, each god governs its domain according to its own rules; uniformity and hence intelligibility are elusive. In animism, likewise, many gods inhabit natural things such as trees and animals.

Eastern pantheistic monism

The Hindu and Buddhist precept that all is One implies that all distinctions are illusory – a real curiosity-killer! The study of nature requires duality: the knower and the thing which is known. They are not the same thing. Just as importantly, classification is an indispensable scientific exercise. E.g., a dolphin is not a porpoise, and a bacterium is not a virus. Study of the Creation entails careful distinctions. But in Eastern thought, to realize one’s oneness with the cosmos is to pass beyond knowledge. This is hardly a view that encourages scientific inquiry.

NEXT WEEK: Part Three: There is Conflict, but it is Between Naturalism and Science

ENDNOTES

¹Barbour, Religion and Science, 27.

²Stephen C. Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis (Harper Collins 2021), 32.

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 20^th-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 16^th, 17^th, and 18^th 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 16^th 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.