What you need to know about the evolution debate
Tony Watkins
Tony Watkins is the Managing Editor of Culturewatch.org, a part of Damaris. He is the author of Focus: The Art and Soul of Cinema and Dark Matter: A Thinking Fan’s Guide to Philip Pullman.
Writing anything on creation and evolution feels akin to sticking a sign on my back reading, ‘Kick me!’ I’m exposing myself to attack from one side or another – or maybe from every side! What drives me to stick my head above the parapet is a couple of strong convictions. First, I am absolutely convinced that Christians who disagree should be discussing the issues in a loving, gentle, humble way rather than attacking each other. It seems to me that attacking each other is becoming more common as the debate becomes more polarised. My second conviction is that by focusing on controversy, we are missing significant opportunities to communicate the good news of Jesus Christ in a world which desperately needs to hear it.
So here are ten things you need to know about the creation / evolution debate. Wherever you’re coming from on this issue, I would encourage you not to instantly write off things you disagree with, but give them some more thought. If we’re ever going to sort this issue out we have to approach the questions more open-mindedly than perhaps we’ve ever done before.
1. Not all Bible-believing Christians see things in the same way
Christians who love the Bible and believe it to be God’s inspired, truthful and authoritative Word disagree about the timescales of creation. That in itself should make us stop and think.
At one end of the spectrum are people who believe that Creation happened exactly as Genesis 1 appears to describe: God created the world in six literal days, and rested on the seventh. These people are Young Earth Special Creationists. They are ‘young earthers’ because if you do some sums based on the ages of people in the Bible, reigns of kings and so on, you can arrive at an age for the earth of a few thousand years. In the 1600s, Archbishop Ussher gave a date for creation of 4004 BC but many young earthers would now simply say it was a few thousand years ago. They believe in special creation – that is, God acted in very direct, immediate ways to bring about creation.
As we move along the spectrum we find Old Earth Special Creationists. They accept the scientific evidence for an old universe and an old earth, but not for biological evolution. There’s quite a range of views among old earthers. Some people see a vast time gap between verses 2 and 3 of Genesis 1 and believe that, although the earth is a few billion years old, the rest of creation took place in six days. Others point out that Psalm 90:4 indicates that God's view of the passage of time is not like ours. So perhaps each day represents an age – in which case there is no difficulty in accepting much of the scientific evidence concerning the age of the earth, fossils etc. The order in Genesis 1 is very similar to that in the fossil record. Many people adopting this position would think in terms of six acts of special creation separated by immense periods of time.
Others, however, like Derek Kidner in his Tyndale Commentary on Genesis, see the ‘days = ages’ interpretation of Genesis 1 as entirely consistent with the generally accepted scientific view of evolution by natural selection. These people are often known as Theistic Evolutionists because they believe that God is behind the process of evolution. A better term would be Evolutionary Creationists or Process Creationists – they still believe that God is the Creator. Many process creationists see the ordering of days as a literary structure rather than as a reflection of the timeline of creation. They point to the way the first three days describe three stages of separation (light from dark, water above from water below, land from sea), leading to various environments, whereas the next three days describe a filling, or the creation of things to inhabit the environments (lights, birds and fish, land animals and humans).
It is important to remember that all these people believe that God is the Creator because they all believe Genesis 1. The issue is not whether or not they believe the Bible, but what they believe is the right way of interpreting part of it. It is vital that we have respect and humility towards those with whom we disagree.
2. Evangelicals have not always tended to hold to a six literal day model
A common idea is that evangelical Christians have always tended to believe in a six-day creation, and that this was the traditional view of the church until the time of Darwin. In fact, Christians have always had a range of opinions on how to understand the time frame within Genesis 1, and, more recently, have had differing attitudes towards evolutionary theory.
Before the 18th century, of course, nobody had given any thought to how you could discover the age of the earth in any way other than by calculations from the Bible, so the majority of people had no cause to question figures like those of Ussher. Even so, the argument for the days of Genesis 1 not being literal days goes back a lot further. In AD 391 Augustine wrote a commentary on Genesis in which he said that the days of creation were not literal days but were a way for the writer to talk about the whole of creation. He was insistent that, ‘No Christian would dare say that the narrative must not be taken in a figurative sense.’
The response to Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species in 1859, was not divided on Christian / non-Christian lines, as we often assume. Actually Darwin was initially opposed by scientists as well as church people, and he was supported by other Christians, as well as by other scientists. In fact, historian James Moore states that, ‘With few exceptions the leading Christian thinkers in Great Britain and America came to terms quite readily with Darwinism and evolution’ (The Post-Darwinian Controversies, Cambridge University Press, 1979, p.92).This included people like B.B. Warfield, one of the signatories to the document defining the Fundamentals of the Christian faith. Almost all American Protestant zoologists and botanists accepted some form of evolution within a decade or so of the publication of Darwin’s The Origin of the Species. Young earth creationism in its modern sense didn’t take off until the 1920s, and then again in the latter decades of the last century.
3. This issue creates real tensions for some people – especially students
Many young people feel torn during their education – especially further education – because they assume that the evolutionary view of origins they’re learning is not compatible with their Christian faith. This is a key reason for why Ken Ham, executive director of Answers in Genesis, attacks evolution so vehemently. He says: 'People who go to university and college know that if evolution is true in the sense that chance, random processes formed man and he just evolved, then the Bible’s account of history is not true. Then they … say, "Well, we’re not going to trust the message of morality and salvation from the Bible".'
It is an important pastoral issue, but Ernest Lucas, tutor in biblical studies at Bristol Baptist College, has a very different perspective on where the problem lies. He says: 'I’ve seen too many students who’ve had their faith wrecked when they’ve gone to university because they’ve come from a very narrow background and people have said to them, "Unless you toe this line, you’re not truly a Christian." Then when they have found that the scientific evidence they’re faced with means they cannot toe that line, they can often flip over into a rebellion against their background and that often means a rebellion against God and Christianity. That’s tragic.' For Ernest, who has PhDs in biochemistry and Old Testament studies, the solution is to help young people to understand what the early chapters of Genesis really are saying – and what they’re not.
4. Believing in evolution can stop people taking the Bible seriously
Young earth creationists insist with Ken Ham that, “Evolution is one of the big stumbling blocks to people today being receptive to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”
“The gospel itself is founded on the historicity of the events in Genesis,” says Paul Garner of British Creation Ministries. “And if Genesis 1–11 is not historical, if Adam was not a real person, and if there was not a real fall and a real curse, then the whole of the Gospel no longer makes sense.” Young earthers see evolution as inextricably linked with atheism. But it’s not simply about intellectual belief, because beliefs shape actions. For some people, including Ham, belief in evolution is undermining the moral foundations of a once Christian society.
Young earthers see evolutionary creationists as having compromised themselves. David Tyler, secretary of the British Creation Society says, “As Christians they do claim to base their thinking on the Bible and yet, whenever one does get close to the Bible, people pull away and I find them very fuzzy about human death being the consequence of sin … [and] about the historicity of Adam and Eve. I think the modern theistic evolutionists have abandoned trying to get concordance between the Bible and science.”
John Bryant, chairman of Christians in Science, responds: “I think that’s an outrageous statement … We’re not throwing the Bible out, we’re saying you need to read it as a set of books, not as one particular kind of literature. What it needs to tell us is that we are God’s creation and we’re made for relationship with him, and we have a special place in the world. And Genesis does that extremely well. I often ask, ‘Which version of the creation are you reading literally?’ Because there are two, and if you try to dissect them stylistically the second text is older than the first one.”
5. Believing in a literal six-day creation can stop people taking the Bible seriously
John Bryant continues, 'I’ve never been an aggressive "evolutionist" but I’m very distressed to see the whole thing being rubbished now, because I’ve seen the effect that this will have on me attempting to share my faith with students, all of whom are biologists.' The former director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, Professor Sir Ghillean ‘Iain’ Prance echoes this when he says, 'I think it’s not doing us any good to ignore the scientific facts. It’s not helping Christianity that people are denying what we can see are facts, or are trying to distort the facts.'
Bob White, professor of Earth Sciences at Cambridge University, is far from alone in thinking that the much-heralded Intelligent Design (ID) Movement is also deeply flawed: 'It’s God of the Gaps by another route. They don’t have a robust view of God’s actions in the world, so there are two dangers. One is that they say, "This thing is so complicated that it must have been created and can’t have evolved", and that suggests that God only acts at that point in the world and he doesn’t act in all the other things. That’s the implication and it’s bad theology. It’s also a bad way of approaching things because what happens if one day somebody does explain it – where has God gone?'
Denis Alexander, head of the Molecular Immunology Programme at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge, is not sure that Intelligent Design arguments are always very useful in bringing people to faith: 'You don’t end up with the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ; you end up with a heavenly engineer who fiddles around with bits and bobs which didn’t work out by some other mechanism. The worry I have about the ID movement is it gets people as far as Antony Flew perhaps. Flew [for years a prominent atheist philosopher] has been persuaded by the ID argument and has become a Deist (belief in a supreme being). I don’t know if it’s such a great advantage. If it’s a pathway to theism then maybe it is. But it’s really not necessarily such a good thing that people start believing only in a heavenly engineer because it might even prevent them coming to know the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. So I’m not sure that the design argument, even if it’s completely valid, really gets you theologically where you’d like people to go.'
6. Science and the Bible have different agendas, and humans aren’t perfect
One of the reasons for the apparent conflict between science and faith is that we have forgotten that science and theology have different approaches. Science is limited to describing the physical space-time world of matter and energy. It can do no more than understand how things work. Ultimately it can make no comment about why. The Bible can and does comment on the why. It is not concerned primarily about mechanisms, but about meanings. These are complementary, not conflicting, levels of talking about reality. As creator and sustainer of the universe, God stands behind all that we see around us – the laws of physics are his laws.
Science has its ideas about how life came into existence. But it cannot answer some of the most fundamental questions of life: Who are we? Why are we here? Where are we going? These are the kind of questions the Bible is interested in and Genesis introduces the answers. We will miss the point of these wonderful early chapters of Genesis if we come to them with a scientific agenda rather than a theological one. Ernest Lucas says it can only lead to trouble: 'I think that attempts to read scientific information out of it are misconceived and lead to all sorts of problems with distorting it.'
The Bible's main purpose is to reveal God to us and show us how to respond to him, not to satisfy our scientific curiosity. It wasn't written as a science text book and we shouldn't treat it as one. The questions we can and should ask are about bigger issues: 'What is the nature of the world around us?' 'What does it mean to be a human being; what are my responsibilities?' and ‘What has gone wrong with our world?’
7. There are good reasons for believing in Special Creation
Special Creationists take the Bible as their fundamental point of reference. Paul Garner says, 'I always start with the Scriptures. The Bible is the foundational truth on which I base all of my thinking in science, and I think that's where we need to begin. First and foremost, it's what the Bible reveals about the history of the earth and the universe.' Ken Ham agrees saying, 'No apparent, perceived, or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the Scriptural record.'
But Special Creationists also point to scientific evidence to support their case. For Paul Garner evidence for Intelligent Design is key: 'I think when you look at, for example, DNA, it is a highly ordered code and we can recognise the hallmarks of intelligence. There's information encoded in DNA. And information, from all of our scientific observations, is always a product of mind and intelligence.' Another key aspect of Intelligent Design is the 'irreducible complexity' of biological systems. David Tyler adds that 'there are limits to [biological] variation. This runs right across the evolutionary position which is that there are no limits. But it seems to me that the data of science points to limits, and that's where we would identify natural boundaries between groups of animals.'
There are some notable scientists who are Special Creationists, including Andy McIntosh, Professor of thermodynamics at Leeds University; Edgar Andrews, Professor of materials science at the University of London; David Back, Professor of pharmacology and therapeutics at Liverpool; and Professor Terry Hamblin, consultant haematologist at Southampton. Paul Garner, a Fellow of the Geological Society, says that, 'Worldwide there are thousands of scientists at PhD level who would identify with this position, and they cover all field of science – biology and geology, even astronomy and cosmology. I think it's a growing movement'
David Tyler also gives three reasons for believing in Young Earth Special Creation from the non-living world: 'I would point first of all to the uniqueness of the earth … it is something that points to design and a creator. Secondly, the design of the elements themselves to support life, the way that the building blocks of matter fit together to support life. And the third area is the fine tuning of fundamental constants. They are too finely tuned to be chance. They are designed for life.'
However, these latter reasons are actually are shared by Christians right across the spectrum – they support belief in a Creator, not necessarily a particular view of creation.
8. There are good reasons for believing in Process Creation
Denis Alexander says there is an important issue of integrity: 'The task of scientists who are Christians is to describe what God has done in creation, and, as part of their worship, to tell the truth about God's creation. Since Darwinian evolution is the best explanation we have at the moment for the origins of biological diversity, as scientists we should say that. We should tell the truth to the best of our ability, always knowing that science is incomplete and there's always lots more to find out.'
For Ernest Lucas, studying the early chapters of Genesis within their historical context is crucial: 'The opening chapters of Genesis are concerned primarily with teaching us theological truth about God, the nature of God, the nature of the world, our role in the world and so on … I came to that reading of Genesis not from the scientific side but from the years I spent studying ancient near eastern culture and religion.' Similarly, Derek Kidner in his Tyndale Commentary, David Atkinson in the Bible Speaks Today commentary on Genesis 1-11, Gordon Wenham in his Word Biblical Commentary on Genesis 1-15, and French theologian Henri Blocher (among others) reject a literal interpretation of Genesis 1 on the basis of the texts themselves, not on the basis of science.
They still recognise essential historical truths, though. Denis Alexander is clear that God endowed Adam and Eve with his Spirit, and that the Fall was a historical event: 'It seems to me a Fall implies ethical and moral obligations which is difficult to see could have happened without a command from God. That's what God gave in the garden of Eden, he gave specific commands not to do certain things and they disobeyed his commands.'
Most Process Creationists agree with special creationists that there can be no explanation for the origin of life or of the human spirit without God. Iain Prance, one of the world's most eminent botanists, says, 'I'm a believer in evolution because obviously as a scientist who's observing life, I see that it has developed gradually. But there are two things that I think one cannot explain in science. One is the actual beginning of life. No-one's been able to recreate life as such. They've taken bits of what already is life and made other organisms, but they haven't really started it off from the beginning. And the other thing that is certainly true is that at some stage God used a particular organism to give a soul to and created man in his image.'
There are many other notable scientists – world leaders in their fields – who are evolutionary creationists. These include people like Francis Collins, Director of the Human Genome Project; Sir John Houghton FRS, former Director General of the Meteorological Office; Prof. Bob White FRS, Professor of Earth Sciences at Cambridge University; and Malcolm Jeeves, Honorary Research Professor of Psychology, University of St Andrews.
9. Everyone has to live with some tough – maybe unanswerable – questions
For a long time I've suspected that the positions people adopt in this debate have as much to do with the questions we're prepared to live with as with the things we're certain of. This is because many of the issues in creation and evolution are so difficult to completely pin down, and the subject as a whole is too vast for any of us to master every aspect.
For Denis Alexander, 'The biggest challenge is the question of theodicy and how a loving God who loves us and his creation would choose to bring about biological diversity, including humankind, by what seems to us a long and difficult process which involves the extinction of more than 99% of all the species and an awful lot of death and suffering along the way.' That's not a question which only faces the evolutionary creationist though. The special creationist has to contend with the fact that God has still allowed 99% of all species to die, though in their schema it was due to the flood.
John Bryant, on the other hand, doesn't see species extinction as necessarily a problem: 'Is there anything cruel for an individual creature if its species becomes extinct? I can't see that there is … I don't see extinction as a problem that makes God cruel; it's just part of the changing and evolving structure of the universe. There's something very sentimental about people's worrying about it. I would, though, put a very different light on extinctions which have been caused by human activity.'
Death is a tricky question for both ends of the spectrum. What does it mean when God tells Adam that, 'in the day that you eat of [the fruit] you shall surely die' (Genesis 2:17, ESV) when he clearly doesn't? The evolutionary creationist says that God's words refer only to spiritual death – a world without death before the Fall would have been unsustainable as bacteria would rapidly have taken over. The special creationist will agree that Adam does immediately die spiritually, but insists that physical death entered also the world at that point.
Some aspects of this debate will just go on and on until we reach the new heavens and new earth and we just have to live with it.
10. Controversy means we often miss the main points of Genesis 1–3
The tragedy is that this debate divides Christians and alienates non-Christians. But the issue of human origins raises questions of profound significance and the world desperately needs to hear a Christian perspective.
The real conflict is between Christians who believe in a Creator, and atheists who go beyond evolution as a biological mechanism and turn it into a worldview – evolutionism. According to evolutionism, humans are here by chance and have only one purpose – to pass on their DNA. Richard Dawkins says, 'It is every living object's sole reason for living.'
Most people feel that there must be more to life than this. But science cannot come up with any other answers – it's about mechanisms not significance. The beginning of Genesis, however, introduces the most transforming set of answers the world has ever heard. These are the chapters that first tell us about God, our world, human nature and our fundamental problem. People need to hear these particular answers – but they won't while all Christians do is squabble over the mechanics and timescales of creation.
We need to understand clearly what the early chapters of Genesis are primarily about. As we've seen already, it is a mistake to approach them looking for scientific answers – it couldn't possibly be what the writer and first readers understood them to be teaching. Those who have extensively studied the creation accounts in their historical and literary contexts insist that their primary function theological: to give God's people a right view of God, the world and humanity, in contrast to the false views of surrounding pagan nations in the Ancient Near East.
Genesis 1–3 teach us six key things everyone needs to understand:
1. God is the creator of everything. There is a God, and absolutely everything (the heavens and the earth) owes its existence solely to God's will. The universe didn't create itself and it didn't appear by chance.
2. There is only one God. We're unlikely to be tempted into sun or moon worship, but we may look to more contemporary idols like wealth, science, sport, relationships, etc. Nothing within creation is fit to usurp the rightful place of the Creator to whom we owe our life moment by moment.
3. The world reflects its creator. The world is orderly (and therefore understandable by rational human beings) and beautiful as well as functional (Genesis 2:9). Paul tells that creation shows us enough about God that there's no excuse for anyone not to believe in him (Romans 1:20).
4. God is the law-giver. The universe obeys God. He gave us the responsibility of being stewards of the earth. All created things have a divinely appointed role, and they will only fulfil that role if they obey God's instructions.
5. Human beings are God's image bearers. Genesis shows who we really are. The question of what it means to be human is one of the most fundamental there is. But humanity in our postmodern, secularised world is suffering an identity crisis – people are uncertain about what being human means. Atheist scientists deny that we have any purpose beyond passing on our DNA. We are an accident of history. When we die, we rot. There is nothing more. No life has any real value. And we wonder why so many people have a low self-image? Genesis challenges these assumptions and claims we are God's image bearers – the crowning glory of creation. We are like God – even after the Fall, despite all the corruption and wickedness that pervades us. Being made in God's image includes our self-consciousness, our creativity and aesthetic awareness, our moral responsibility and our relational dimension. But over all these is our awareness of the transcendent – our spirituality – because we were made for a relationship with God.
6. Human beings are rebels against God. Genesis 3 tells the tragic story of how everything changed. All these aspects of the image of God are still true of us, but our rebellion has demeaned and warped every one of them. So we live in a world of alienation – from God, each other, our environment and even ourselves. We live in a world of fear and shame and lies. We hide from God and from each other. We are under God's judgment. Incredibly, God still cares for his image bearers, and we see the first sign of God's grace as he seeks out the newly fallen couple – 'Where are you?' (Genesis 3:9) – and the first hint that God will sort this mess out – one will come to crush the Tempter's head (Genesis 3:15). The rest of the Bible is the unfolding story of God's judgment and grace until, finally, we see a stunning picture of redeemed people back in relationship with God in new heavens and a new earth.
The big issues in Genesis 1 are not scientific. How much does it really matter if creation was a quick miracle or a slow one? The questions which Genesis 1–3 addresses are much more profound and important. We see there a God of power and creativity and grace. We see what sort of a world we live in. We see what it really means to be human and we see our need for a saviour. That's what the world needs to hear.
For further reading
Books
Denis Alexander and Robert White, Beyond Belief (Lion, 2004) 0745951414
Denis Alexander, Rebuilding the Matrix (Lion, 2001) 0745912443
David Atkinson, The Message of Genesis 1-11 (Bible Speaks Today) (IVP, 1990) 0851106765
R.J. Berry, God and the biologist – faith at the frontiers of science (Apollos, 1996) 0851114466
Henri Blocher, In the Beginning (IVP, 1984) 0851113214
William Dembski, The Design Revolution: Answering the Toughest Questions about Intelligent Design, (IVP (USA) 2004) 1844740145
William Dembski, Uncommon Dissent: Intellectuals Who Find Darwinism Unconvincing (ISI Books, 2004) 1932236317
Michael Denton, Evolution: a theory in crisis (Woodbine House, 1996) 091756152
Philip Duce, Reading the mind of God – interpretation in science and theology (Apollos, 1998) 0851114628
Phillip E. Johnson, Darwin on Trial (IVP, 1993) 0830822941
Derek Kidner, Genesis (TOTC) (IVP, 1967) 0851118232
Kevin Logan, Responding to the Challenge of Evolution (Kingsway, 2002) 1842911104
Ernest Lucas, Can We Believe Genesis Today? (IVP, 2001) 0851116582
Paul Marston and Roger Forster, Reason, Science and Faith (Wipf & Stock, 1998) 1854244418
Alister McGrath, Dawkins' God: genes, memes and the meaning of life (Blackwell, 2004) 1405125381
Andy McIntosh, Genesis for Today: Creation and Evolution (Day One, 2001) 1903087155
Del Ratzsch, Science and its Limits (IVP, 2000) 0851114660
David Swift, Evolution under the Microscope, (Leighton Academic Press, 2002) 095435890
David Tyler, The Guide: Creation – chance or design? 0852345445
Jonathan Wells, Icons of Evolution, 0895262002
Gordon Wenham, Word Biblical Commentary Genesis 1–15 (Word, 1987) 0849902002
David Wilkinson, The Message of Creation (Bible Speaks Today) (IVP, 2002) 0830824057
David Wilkinson, God, Time and Stephen Hawking (Monarch, 2001) 1854245448
David Wilkinson and Rob Frost, Thinking clearly about God and science (Monarch, 2000) 1854243330
Websites
American Scientific Affiliation – www.asa3.org
Christians in Science – www.cis.org.uk
Answers in Genesis – www.answersingenesis.org
© Tony Watkins 2005 Reprinted with permission. © This article first appeared in Christianity magazine.
Has Science disproved God?
Peter May
Peter May serves on the General Synod of the Church of England and on the Trust Board of the Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship (UCCF). He is a retired GP.
In January 2005, two remarkable events occurred. The first was that Oxford atheist and Darwinian scientist, Richard Dawkins, was publicly asked what he believed to be true but could not prove. This was an interesting question because he is on record as saying that you should not believe anything without evidence. Now he concedes, “I believe, but I cannot prove, that all life, all intelligence, all creativity and all design anywhere in the universe is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection.” He continued, “Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe.” In other words, he admits that much of what he believes, including his fundamental assumptions about the universe, are a blind leap of faith, unsupported by evidence.
The other extraordinary event was that the international doyen of philosophical atheism, Prof. Anthony Flew, now aged 81, publicly announced that he has abandoned his atheism, and had done so on the basis of scientific arguments, which now persuade him that there is a God.
So two of the most prominent atheists in their fields have made startling confessions. The scientist admits that much of his belief cannot be supported by scientific evidence, while the philosopher abandons the very atheism that made him famous, precisely because of the scientific evidence. How much intellectual fun is that?
What Dawkins cannot verify concerns the creation of the universe. What persuades Flew that there is a God is the current scientific evidence about the origins of the universe.
So let us begin at the beginning! This is the Cosmological argument.
First premise is this: What ever begins to exist has a cause.
Philosopher William Lane Craig says it is foolish to try to prove this statement because it is obvious. He quotes Aristotle who said you should never try to prove the obvious with arguments which are themselves less obvious. Does anyone want to deny this obvious premise? Speak now or forever hold your peace, for the logic is simple and compelling:
Whatever begins to exist has a cause
The universe began to exist
Therefore the universe has a cause.
The major scientific evidence that the universe began to exist first appeared in 1929 when the astronomer Hubble was studying distant galaxies and observed the Red Shift. This was a Doppler effect of light. Let me explain briefly the Doppler Effect. We are all familiar with the phenomenon of a car or plane coming in our direction emitting a sound at one pitch which then drops to a lower note as it passes. The reason for this is that the wavelength of the sound it emits appears higher than it is, because the vehicle moving towards us is effectively shortening the wavelength of the sound and increasing its frequency by its movement. Having passed us, it lengthens the wavelength and decreases the frequency by moving away. Longer wavelengths have lower frequencies and therefore lower notes, so the tone drops.
In the same way as different notes have different wavelengths of sound, so different colours have different wavelengths of light. By demonstrating a shift towards red instead of blue, Hubble was able to show that the light from distant galaxies showed they are moving away and not getting nearer, and the further the galaxy the faster it is moving away. Hence the conclusion that the universe is not static, as everyone including Einstein had previously thought, but is in fact expanding.(Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time, p.39)
Further evidence was discovered in 1965. If the universe was static, as many scientists such as Fred Hoyle still believed at that time, there would be no background energy observable in the universe. The discovery of background radiation, existing in the same intensity in every direction, confirmed the view that energy released from an initial explosion causing the universe to expand, was still observable in the system.
On the basis of this evidence, few scientists today dispute the fact that the universe is expanding. By extrapolating backwards into the past, the universe is understood to have originated from an immensely dense ‘singularity’, some unimaginably small, compressed, dense speck which originally exploded to yield everything that there is in the universe.
If you have read Stephen Hawking’s famous book, A Brief History of Time (aBHoT), you will have had your brains teased, not only with black holes, but the fact that not only did all matter and energy originate from this singularity, but so did space and time itself. Hence the title of the book. So we cannot think of this singularity existing somewhere in space – because there was no space. Nor can we ask what happened before the Big Bang, because there was no previous time either.
In other words, it is today generally held amongst scientists that the universe and everything in it actually began to exist at a point of origin estimated now at 13.7 billion years ago and that all matter, energy, space and time originated out of nothing! The philosopher points out that what ever begins to exist has a cause. The scientist points out that the cause of the universe must exist outside of our space-time world and, of course, be unbelievably powerful.
The theological implications, as Charlie Brown might say, are staggering. Desperate theories have been devised to avoid the obvious conclusions. These include for instance the theory that the universe is only expanding at this point in time, but this is just a moment in its history, where the universe oscillates from expansion to contraction to expansion indefinitely. Well, this is an interesting theory but it must be said, it has absolutely no evidence in physics or astrophysics to support it. There are a series of other models proposed, such as string theory with its 10 dimensions, branes and p-branes, which all suffer the same lack of data. The available data only suggests that the universe is expanding from an initial point at the beginning of time, some 13.7 billion yrs ago.
I was recently in debate with some Humanists. One of them made the point that either there had always been a God, or there had always been a universe, and that it was no more obvious to believe in the one than the other. That is no longer considered to be the case. The scientific evidence says the universe has not always existed. It began.
Can we therefore say that God has always existed? Is it meaningful to ask how he came into existence? The answer to both questions is ‘No’, if by such questions we suppose that God has always existed in endless time. We cannot speak about time before time existed. God, if he created the universe, must live outside of space and time. Neither is this a theologically novel idea. The New Testament seems to have alluded to it by saying that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as a day. It was anyway put forward by Augustine in around AD 400. Questions therefore about God’s origin or location are outside our capacity for knowledge and comprehension. Similarly our understanding of eternity can only be grasped in metaphors, whether a banquet on the one hand or a smouldering rubbish dump on the other. This should stop us from imaging Heaven as a space-time world or crudely caricaturing hell as a place of torment in endless time.
The second line of argument that has persuaded Anthony Flew concerns the fine tuning of the Universe, known as the Anthropic Principle. The Anthropic Principle says that the universe has to be more or less as we see it, because if it were different, there wouldn’t be anyone here to observe it.
There are two issues here, which must not be confused. The human observer should rightly regard it as probable that he will find the basic conditions of the universe are finely-tuned for his existence or he would not be there to observe it. However, he should not infer that it is therefore highly probable that such a finely tuned universe should exist. That is a separate matter entirely.
For the universe to exist as it does and allow us to live within it and reflect upon it, requires an astonishing series of coincidences to have occurred, which are quite sufficient in the mind of Anthony Flew to indicate the existence of an intelligent designer.
Stephen Hawking suggested (aBHoT p.123) that it is like a hoard of monkeys hammering away on typewriters and by pure chance eventually producing one of Shakespeare's sonnets. Let’s face it, it just isn’t going to happen.
It is estimated that there are some 50 fundamental numbers or physical constants present at the moment of the Big Bang that must be precisely fine-tuned in the way they were for human life to become possible.
Hawking wrote: “It seems clear that there are relatively few ranges of values for the (fundamental) numbers that would allow the development of any form of intelligent life. Most sets of values would give rise to universes that, although they might be very beautiful, would contain no one able to wonder at their beauty." (aBHoT p.125)
Physicist Paul Davies calculated that in order for planets to exist, the relevant initial conditions had to be fine tuned to a precision of one part in 10 followed by a thousand billion billion zeroes at least. For electromagnetism, he estimated a change of only one part in 10 to the power of 40 would have spelled disaster for stars, like our sun, thereby precluding the existence of planets.
Gravitational force must be what it is, for planets to have stable orbits around the sun. Otherwise if they had a greater force they would fall into the sun and burn up or if weaker, they would escape from their orbit into a very cold, outer darkness. It is estimated that a change in gravity by only one part in 10 to the power of 100 would have prevented a life permitting universe.
If the electric charge on an electron were only slightly different, stars would be unable to burn hydrogen and helium. and produce the chemical elements such as carbon and oxygen that make up our bodies. Similarly, the orbit of electrons in atoms would not be stable, so matter as we know it would not exist.
Stephen Hawking wrote, “If the rate of expansion one second after the big bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, the universe would have re-collapsed before it ever reached its present size.” (aBHoT p.122)
Not only must each of these quantities be exquisitely fine tuned but their ratios to each other must be finely tuned. As William Craig writes: “Improbability is added to improbability until our minds are reeling in incomprehensible numbers.”
Now there are only four possibilities put forward for explaining the fine-tuning of the universe: Multiple Universes, Natural Law, Chance or Design.
The theory of Multiple Universes supposes there are a vast number of quite different universes, allowing the statistical chance that one of them would produce human life. Without a jot of evidence to support it, it is a desperate attempt to deny the existence of God. Ockam’s Razor states that the simpler assumption is always to be preferred.
Natural law implies a physical inevitability that the universe is the way it is; that it would not be possible for the universe not to produce human life. Yet if the universe had expanded just a little more slowly, if entropy were slightly greater or any of these constants been just slightly different, life would not have occurred. As Paul Davies put it, “The physical universe does not have to be the way it is; it could have been otherwise.”
And the chances of the world being as it is, are incomprehensibly small. Which is why Anthony Flew concludes there must be a Designer.
The universe is of course vast. Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, is 100,000 light yrs in diameter and contains 100 billion stars. “Ours is one of about a million million galaxies in the observable universe” (aBHoT p.126). Well might the Psalmist have wondered, “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, or the son of man that you care for him?” (Psalm 8) In such a universe, we seem terrifyingly minute and insignificant. But this view can be turned on its head.
As Barrow and Tipler argued, “for there to be enough time to construct the constituents of living beings, the Universe must be at least 10 billion years old and therefore as a consequence of its expansion, at least ten billion light years in extent.” In other words, in order for God to create mankind, the most complex creature and crowning glory of his creation, he had to make a universe as wonderful as ours. So when we look at the stars, we should not think how insignificant we are but consider how very seriously God takes us, how valuable we are in his sight and what great lengths he went to, in order to make us.
Furthermore, this evidence itself suggests a special relationship between the Creator and human beings. There is not only a Mind behind the creation, but the rational creator has created rational beings, who can reflect upon and understand the mind of the creator. We are told in Genesis that we are made in his Image. As Kepler put it, we are capable of thinking God’s thoughts after him. No other living thing is capable of doing that. Let alone your aspidistra, try telling your cat about this. It is completely beyond his grasp.
Conclusion
I have unpacked just two arguments from science which seem to strongly support belief in a divine creator.
Firstly the evidence that the universe began and the logic that everything that begins has a cause. Secondly we have seen how astonishing it is that the Big Bang should have been so finely-tuned as to be capable of creating a universe supporting human life.
I have touched a third argument, that of Rationality itself. And if I had time, I would explain how mind and consciousness totally confounds modern science and remains the greatest mystery in the planet.
We have considered God’s power and intelligence. But none of this tells us much about the character of God. The Prologue of John’s Gospel concludes: “No-one has ever seen God. He who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.” There is no other claim in the universe like that. No other religion offers anything like it – the sublime claim that the creator of the universe has entered his own creation. The universe tells us that God exists, but Jesus has made him known.
© Peter May 2005
Does Science contradict Religion?
Philip Vander Elst
Philip Vander Elst is a freelance writer and lecturer who has spent nearly 30 years in politics and journalism, and now works with Areopagus Ministries.
The common assumption that science contradicts religion can be illustrated either from your own personal experience, if this is relevant, or by quoting the words of atheistic scientists, philosophers or journalists. Richard Dawkins, for example, has described the idea of God as “a very naïve, childish concept”, and similar comments have been made by many other Darwinian scientists. Harvard geneticist, Richard Lewontin, for instance, stated in a 1997 book review: “The problem is to get [people.] to reject irrational and supernatural explanations of the world, the demons that exist only in their imaginations, and to accept a social and intellectual apparatus, Science, as the only begetter of truth.” Another typical comment is that of Eugenie Scott, of the American National Centre for Science Education, who observed in 1994: “You can’t put an omnipotent deity in a test tube.” Such quotes drive home the charge that science is the only path to objective truth and is therefore in conflict with the subjective feelings and irrational dogmas supposedly characteristic of Christianity.
(1) If science contradicts religion, how do atheists explain the fact that most of the great scientists of the past believed in God and took the Bible seriously? The Institute of Creation Research (USA), for example, lists 31 such scientists together with the scientific disciplines they helped to establish. They include Kepler (astronomy), Pascal (hydrostatics), Boyle (chemistry), Newton (calculus), Linnaeus (systematic biology), Faraday (electromagnetics), Cuvier (comparative anatomy), Kelvin (thermodynamics), Lister (antiseptic surgery), Mendel (genetics), and many other equally famous names.
(2) If religion is an obstacle to science, how do atheists get round the fact that empirical science first arose in Christian Europe, three centuries before the rise of Darwinism? It did so precisely because of the almost universal belief in a Creator God. This gave the founders of modern science the confidence they needed that the natural world was orderly and therefore capable of systematic investigation. They expected to find ‘law’ in Nature because they believed in a Lawgiver. Or, to use another analogy, they assumed that the ‘Book of Nature’ had a readable ‘text’ because Nature had an Author.
(3) Why did the ‘founding fathers’ of modern science believe in God? For one very simple reason: the natural world bears all the hallmarks of intelligent design. To take only a few examples: hands seem designed for grasping objects and making tools; the human body is equipped with an immune system for combating disease; birds have an instinct to build nests for their young and escape winter through migration; eyes and ears have the precise structures required for seeing and hearing; living creatures have the digestive systems they need to process the particular foods their bodies depend on; sexual organs seem designed for reproduction. Is this not powerful evidence for the existence of an Intelligent Designer who created the universe and is the Author of life? That has certainly been the view of most of the great philosophers and thinkers of the past, like Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Aquinas, Bacon, Newton, etc. Even famous sceptics like David Hume (18c.) and John Stuart Mill (19c.) recognised the credibility of the ‘design’ argument (or ‘teleological proof’) for God’s existence – as did Immanuel Kant (18c.), despite his rejection of all the traditional arguments for God’s existence except the moral one.
(4) Atheists commonly reject the design argument for God’s existence because of the problem of evil, arguing that a world marred by death, disease, cruelty and suffering cannot be the creation of an infinitely good and powerful Being. This objection, however, though emotionally powerful, is not a logical one because the reality of evil does not cancel out the extensive evidence of intelligent and benevolent design in Nature. To use two analogies: the existence of badly constructed buildings in one particular area does not disprove the existence of competent architects elsewhere, anymore than the existence of hatred within some families disproves the reality of human love in others. What the problem of evil does is to raise challenging questions such as: why does God allow it? What is its origin? What, if anything, has God done about it? It does not obliterate the many traces of His goodness and creativity in the world around us. Furthermore, part of the evidence for God’s existence and goodness is that very moral standard which enables us to detect evil and complain about it! Atheism, by contrast, cannot make sense of the problem of evil because it cannot explain how we can attach any objective significance to our thoughts and values if we are merely accidental by-products of an ultimately random and purposeless universe.
(5) The advance of science over the last half-century has revealed powerful new evidence that life and the universe are the product of intelligent design, especially in the fields of astrophysics and microbiology. At the cosmological level, it has become increasingly apparent that the physical laws and parameters governing our universe (e.g. the force of gravity, the energy density of empty space, the difference in mass between neutrons and protons, etc.) are so exquisitely fine-tuned to permit the emergence of life, that even the tiniest alteration in any of these laws and parameters would have catastrophic consequences. Astrophysicist, Dr Hugh Ross, for instance, has identified 148 astrophysical parameters that must be ‘just so’ for a planet to exist that can support human life, yet the odds against this happening by chance are, he calculates, many times greater than the total number of stars in the entire universe! Given such facts, even so great an astronomer and former atheist as Fred Hoyle, has written: “I do not believe that any scientists who examined the evidence would fail to draw the inference that the laws of nuclear physics have been deliberately designed with regard to the consequences they produce inside stars.” That and other such observations from Hoyle have prompted Harvard astronomy professor, Owen Gingerich, to comment: “Fred Hoyle and I differ on lots of questions, but on this we agree: a common sense and satisfying interpretation of our world suggests the designing hand of a super-intelligence.” Or to put it even more plainly, consider the verdict of Robin Collins, an American scientist with three degrees and two doctorates in mathematics, physics, and philosophy: “The extraordinary fine-tuning of the laws and constants of nature, their beauty, their discoverability, their intelligibility – all of this combines to make the God hypothesis the most reasonable choice we have. All other theories fall short.”
(6) The realms of microbiology and biochemistry provide equally compelling evidence that life in all its forms is the product of intelligent design rather than unguided natural forces. For example, how do atheists explain the origin and existence of complex biological information systems like DNA, whose chemical structure within every human cell contains the coded instructions for creating the proteins out of which our bodies are built? Each one of the thirty thousand genes embedded in our twenty-three pairs of chromosomes can yield as many as 20,500 different kinds of proteins! Is it likely that this extraordinary biological ‘software’ arose by chance? To quote science writer, George Sim Johnson’s article, ‘Did Darwin Get It Right?’ (Wall Street Journal, 15/10/99): “Human DNA contains more organized information than the Encyclopaedia Britannica. If the full text of the encyclopaedia were to arrive in computer code from outer space, most people would regard this as proof of the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence. But when seen in nature, it is explained as the workings of random forces.” And if this astounding fact were not sufficient in itself to indicate the presence of intelligent design in Nature, Australian geneticist, Michael Denton, points out that the biological information needed to build the proteins for all the species of organisms that have ever lived - a number estimated to be approximately one thousand million – “could be held in a teaspoon and there would still be room left for all the information in every book ever written.”
Illustra Media’s documentary video, Unlocking the Mystery of Life, shows how DNA serves as the information storehouse for a finely choreographed manufacturing process by which the right amino acids are linked together with the right bonds in the right sequence to produce the right kind of proteins that fold in the right way to build biological systems. Detailed study of this “absolutely mind-boggling” procedure helped to convince Dean Kenyon, America’s leading chemical evolutionist, that unguided naturalistic processes could not explain the origin of life, as he had once believed. On the contrary, he argues: “This new realm of molecular genetics [is] where we see the most compelling evidence of design on the Earth.”
(7) Atheism is not only challenged by the cumulative evidence for intelligent design uncovered by the progress of science; it cannot even answer the most fundamental of all questions: why does anything exist in the first place? Is the universe self-sufficient and self-explanatory or does it require an intelligent cause?
The cosmological argument for God’s existence addresses this vital question, and is based on the premise that something cannot come from nothing – a self-evident truth supported by logic and experience. To state the obvious: the absence of something not only cannot at the same time account for its presence; it is also a principle whose truthfulness is constantly confirmed in our daily lives. We never see meals appearing from nowhere, symphonies composing themselves, or babies materialising out of thin air. This means that for anything to exist, it must either be self-sufficient and therefore have always existed (i.e. be self-existent); or it must be the product or effect of something else that is self-existent. Furthermore, the concept of self-sufficiency implies that the self-existent Being supporting the existence of all other beings, must necessarily be an unchanging Being. It must be in full and constant possession of all its properties and attributes, because it cannot call into existence a quality, characteristic, or power, it does not already possess. In other words, we cannot explain the mystery of existence without acknowledging the ultimate necessity of grounding it in a self-sufficient Being whose own existence is necessary, unchanging, and therefore eternal.
Given these self-evident truths, does our knowledge of the universe suggest that it is self-existent? Obviously not, since all organic life has a beginning and an end (animals and humans are born, live, decay and die) and inorganic structures and processes are subject to constant alteration and change. Even if the universe had no beginning but is instead the product of the continuous creation of matter, it still lacks that attribute of self-sufficiency which is the essence of self-existence, since the question that still arises is ‘what accounts for the creation or appearance of matter?’ Where does the ‘stuff’ of the universe continually come from? Why does change occur at all? Who or what brings it about? If, on the other hand, the majority of scientists are right in their belief that space, time, and the universe suddenly sprang into existence through some ‘Big Bang’ cosmological explosion, its lack of self-sufficiency and its inability to account for itself is even more apparent! Either way, the evidence points in the same direction: the universe has an eternal self-existent Creator.
If, then, God is real, what can the cosmological argument tell us about His attributes and character? A great deal. All we have to do, as St. Paul reminds us in Romans 1: 19-20, is look at His creation – at all that He has made. This tells us, first of all, that since the universe and all it contains is unimaginably vast and powerful in terms of its mass, extent, and energy, its Creator must be supremely powerful. Secondly, since the universe contains living, intelligent, and personal beings, and many other hallmarks of design, its Creator must be living, intelligent, and personal. Thirdly, since human beings possess moral awareness and feel guilty when they do wrong, their Creator must be Goodness personified, or ‘holy’, to use the language of the Bible. Finally, since the distance between non-existence and existence is an infinite one, a God who can create an entire universe out of nothing must be all-knowing and all-powerful. At the very least, God must be a Being to whose knowledge and power we can set no limits.
(8) The logical and scientific data pointing to God’s existence is so overwhelming, that an increasing number of scientists are publicly acknowledging the metaphysical implications of both the ‘Big Bang’ and the ‘fine-tuning’ characteristics of the universe. Here below is a sample of their views, beginning with one great name from the past:
Albert Einstein (Nobel Prize 1921): “Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe – a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble.”
Paul Davies (former professor of theoretical physics at the University of Adelaide): “Through my scientific work I have come to believe more and more strongly that the physical universe is put together with an ingenuity so astonishing that I cannot accept it merely as a brute fact. I cannot believe that our existence in this universe is a mere quirk of fate, an accident of history, an incidental blip in the great cosmic drama.”
Sir Fred Hoyle: “A commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in Nature.”
Allan Rex Sandage (famous astronomer, dubbed the “Grand Old Man of Cosmology” by the New York Times, and a former atheist): “It was my science that drove me to the conclusion that the world is much more complicated than can be explained by science. It was only through the supernatural that I could understand the mystery of existence.”
Dr Arno Penzias (Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist): “I invite you to examine the snapshot provided by half a century’s worth of astrophysical data and see what the pieces of the universe actually look like…In order to achieve consistency with our observations we must…assume not only creation of matter and energy out of nothing, but creation of space and time as well. The best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted had I nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms, the Bible as a whole.”
Professor Vera Kistiakowski (professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and former president of the Association of Women in Science): “The exquisite order displayed by our scientific understanding of the physical world calls for the divine.”
Dr Stephen Meyer (a geophysicist with a Cambridge doctorate in origin-of-life biology): “If it’s true there’s a beginning to the universe, as modern cosmologists now agree, then this implies a cause that transcends the universe. If the laws of physics are fine-tuned to permit life, as contemporary physicists are discovering, then perhaps there’s a designer who fine-tuned them. If there’s information in the cell, as molecular biology shows, then this suggests intelligent design. To get life going in the first place would have required biological information; the implications point beyond the material realm to a prior intelligent cause.”
(9) Atheists commonly argue that Darwinian evolution provides an adequate explanation of the appearance of design in Nature, without needing to invoke God as its intelligent cause. The action of natural selection on random genetic mutations supposedly provides a designer-substitute mechanism by which unguided natural forces bring about complex biological change. As a result, it is not only possible that all living creatures evolved from the same simple ancestral organisms, but – Darwinists insist – evolution is a fact in that it has actually taken place, and only religious fundamentalists deny this. These claims do not stand up to critical examination for the following reasons:
The case against Darwinism
(a) While no-one denies the reality of ‘micro-evolution’ (i.e. limited variation within species in response to environmental changes or selective breeding programmes), a growing number of scientists totally reject ‘macro-evolution’ – or, to put it in colloquial terms, large-scale ‘particles to people’ evolution. On October 1st 2001, for example, a hundred scientists published a two-page advertisement in the American magazine, The Weekly Standard, headed “A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism”. In this statement they declared: “We are sceptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.” This list of 100 anti-Darwinian scientists included biologists, chemists, zoologists, physicists, anthropologists, geologists, astrophysicists, and others, with doctorates from such prestigious universities as Cambridge, Stanford, Cornell, Yale, Princeton, Rutgers, Chicago, Berkeley, and other elite institutions. It also included Nobel nominee, Henry F. Schaefer, a world-class chemist, and scientists from the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institute. Nor is this list of scientific critics of Darwinism an exhaustive one. Over 1,000 scientists with post-graduate degrees have belonged to the Creation Research Society (USA) since its establishment in 1963, and by 1993, to take another example, the South Korean Association of Creation Research also had a membership of over 1,000 scientists, the majority with at least a Master’s degree or doctorate, and including 100 full-ranking university professors. There are many other openly-avowed creationist scientists in other parts of the world, particularly in Australia, as well as scientific critics of Darwinism who keep quiet about their dissident views for fear of blighting their professional careers. As American cosmologist, Allex Sandage put it in July 1998: “…there is a reluctance to reveal yourself as a believer, the opprobrium is so severe.”
(b) Darwinian evolution cannot even get off the ground as a non-theistic explanation of life because it cannot account for the existence of our ‘finely-tuned’ universe. It cannot answer the question addressed so convincingly by the cosmological argument for a Creator: why does anything exist at all if something cannot come from nothing?
(c) Darwinian evolution cannot explain the origin and existence of the incredibly complex biological information systems required for the construction of even the simplest living cells. Its designer-substitute mechanism of natural selection and random mutations cannot therefore effect biological change on its own. Living organisms must first exist before they can ‘evolve’ in response to environmental change! To quote Fred Hoyle: “Imagine a blindfolded person trying to solve the Rubik Cube. The chances against achieving perfect colour matching is about 50,000,000,000,000,000,000 to 1. These odds are roughly the same as those against just one of our body’s 200,000 proteins having evolved randomly by chance.” (from his book, The Intelligent Universe, Michael Joseph, London, 1983). Equally devastating is the admission of the Nobel Prize-winning atheist scientist, Francis Crick, one of the joint discoverers of DNA: “An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which had to have been satisfied to get it going.” (Life Itself, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1981, p.88).
(d) Much of the evidence supposedly supporting Darwinian evolution has either been challenged by the progress of science or else involves question-begging assumptions resulting from a prior philosophical bias in favour of atheism or agnosticism. Take, for example, the argument that homology (i.e. similarities of body structure or biochemistry between different species) proves evolutionary descent from a common ancestor. Could this not instead be evidence of common design by a common Creator? Different types of car also share similar features in terms of wheels and engines whilst still remaining the common product of human intelligence. Advances in microbiology, moreover, call into question the notion that genetic similarities between different species implies common ancestry. As molecular biologist and former atheist, Dr Jonathan Wells, points out, similar genes within different species often lead to different bodily features, while different genes sometimes lead to similar features, thus turning the supposed homological ‘proof’ of macro-evolution on its head. To quote his words: “We know some cases where you have similar features that come from different genes, but we have lots and lots of cases where we have similar genes that give rise to very different features. I’ll give you an example: eyes. There’s a gene that’s similar in mice, octopuses, and fruit flies. If you look at a mouse eye and an octopus eye, there’s a superficial similarity, which is odd because nobody thinks their common ancestor had an eye like that. What’s more striking is if you look at a fruit fly’s eye – a compound eye with multiple facets – it’s totally different. Yet all three of these eyes depend on the same or very similar gene.”
(e) In his book, Icons of Evolution, molecular biologist, Dr Jonathan Wells, exposes the weakness of some of the chief arguments and ‘evidence’ habitually trotted out in support of Darwinism in the standard biology textbooks used in colleges and universities. So too does Australian microbiologist, Dr Michael Denton, an agnostic scientist whose detailed, ground-breaking critique of Darwinism, Evolution: A Theory In Crisis, has opened up the scientific debate about origins since its publication in 1986. What these, and other authors, reveal in particular, is the embarrassing fact that paleontology (the study of the fossil record) does not support evolutionary theory, let alone the Darwinian claim that macro-evolution has occurred and is therefore a ‘fact’.
The first problem Darwinian evolution faces is the absence of intermediate forms in the fossil record, a fact which Darwin himself conceded was the gravest and most obvious objection to his theory. As he wrote in The Origin of Species (1859): “Why, if species have descended from other species by insensibly fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms?” The answer, he believed, lay in the incompleteness of the fossil record, a defect he assumed would be rectified by future discoveries. This has proved to be a false hope. Despite the accumulation of at least a quarter of a million fossil species over the past 150 years, the evolutionary ‘gaps’ have not been filled, as many Darwinian scientists themselves acknowledge. To quote Stephen Gould, professor of paleontology, biology, and geology at Harvard: “The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils.” (Natural History, Vol.86, 1977). In a similar fashion, Steve Jones, professor of genetics at London University, and like Gould, an evolutionist and atheist, admits: “The evidence for human evolution is, in fact, still extraordinarily weak…There are no more fossils than would cover a decent-sized table and we know almost nothing about what propelled a hairy and rather stupid ape into a bald and mildly intellectual human being.” (Daily Telegraph, 13/9/95). But in any case, even if there were an abundance of apparent ‘transitional’ fossils, why should this be conclusive evidence for macro-evolution? Could not an intelligent Creator have directly created unrelated creatures with certain shared or overlapping characteristics? After all, points out Dr Jonathan Wells, “…we see strange animals around today, like the duck-billed platypus, which nobody considers transitional but which has characteristics of different classes.”
The second embarrassing paleontological problem confronting Darwinian theory is what biologists call the ‘Cambrian explosion’ – the sudden and inexplicable appearance early in geological history of fossil remains of most of the major types of animal life alive today as well as various kinds that are now extinct. How can this biological ‘Big Bang’ be reconciled with the idea of macro-evolution? To quote geophysicist and origin-of-life biologist, Dr Stephen Meyer: “The Cambrian explosion represents an incredible quantum leap in biological complexity. Before then, life on Earth was pretty simple – one-celled bacteria, blue-green algae, and later some sponges and primitive worms or mollusks. Then without any ancestors in the fossil record, we have a stunning variety of complex creatures appear in the blink of an eye, geologically speaking…All of this totally contradicts Darwinism, which predicted the slow, gradual development in organisms over time…The big issue is where did the information come from to build all these new proteins, cells, and body plans?”
(f) Another powerful objection to Darwinian theory is its inability to offer a convincing solution to the problem of ‘irreducible complexity’ – i.e. the existence of biological organisms and systems comprised of multiple, co-ordinated parts, all of which must co-exist to ensure the proper functioning of that organism or system. As Darwin himself admitted in The Origin of Species: “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.” Precisely such a demonstration has been made by American biochemist, Dr Michael Behe, in his award-winning best-seller, Darwin’s Black Box: the biochemical challenge to evolution. In this book, he argues that many biochemical structures within living organisms are ‘irreducibly complex’, like, for example, those involved in vision and blood-clotting. Behe shows that even the simplest form of vision requires a dazzling array of chemicals in the right places, as well as a system to transmit and process the information. The blood-clotting mechanism similarly needs many different chemicals to work together in order to prevent us bleeding to death from minor cuts. If a simple mousetrap cannot function if any of its component parts are missing, how could an evolutionary process produce infinitely more complex single-cell organisms? As one Darwinian scientist, Franklin M. Harold, has pointed out in his book, The Way of the Cell, (Oxford University Press, 2001, p.205), a single-cell organism is a biological high-tech factory complete with: “artificial languages and their decoding systems, memory banks for information storage and retrieval, elegant control systems regulating the automated assembly of parts and components, error fail-safe and proof-reading devices utilized for quality control, assembly processes involving the principle of prefabrication and modular construction…[and] a capacity not equalled in any of our most advanced machines, for it would be capable of replicating its entire structure within a matter of a few hours.” Not surprisingly, he reluctantly concludes: “…we must concede that there are presently no detailed Darwinian accounts of the evolution of any biochemical system, only a variety of wishful speculations.” (p.329).
(g) Even if we ignore the many difficulties facing Darwinian theory and the lack of convincing evidence for macro-evolution, one compelling reason exists for dismissing it completely: the accidental emergence of complex life-forms does not become more probable by being divided up into many little steps. Since the evolutionary process is ‘blind’ because it has no conscious purpose or ‘target’ at which it is aiming, there is no reason why all the little steps required for the development of the human eye, for instance, should occur at the right time and in the right order. To quote one agnostic scientific critic of Darwinism, Richard Milton, writing in his book, The Facts of Life (Corgi Books, 1992, p.180): “The improbability of step number 2 correctly following step number 1, correctly followed by step number 3 and so on for 100 mutations, is as great as leaping to the 100th step in one go…It does not become any easier for an eye to come into being just because the first of the 100 or 1,000 accidents needed has taken place, even if that first step is a very important general innovation such as light-sensitive tissue.” The next random mutation may be a wrong step, “such as providing eyelids before providing the muscles to move them, thus blinding their possessor.” Even if favourable mutations did accumulate within one species, their survival value could be counterbalanced by favourable mutations within some hostile predator, or else nullified by some harmful change in climate or physical environment. Since, in addition, most mutations are harmful, why should it be likely that enough favourable mutations would accumulate by accident to produce a progressive upward trend in organic evolution?
(h) The final reason for dismissing Darwinian evolution on both scientific and philosophical grounds is that its advocates simply miss the main point in the debate between atheists and theists. They are not only confronted by the extreme improbability that life in all its complexity ‘evolved’ by random and purposeless naturalistic processes; they face an even greater challenge: to explain why it is more probable that life in all its forms emerged on our planet by accident, rather than as the deliberately designed product of an intelligent Creator. Once the issue is seen in this light, the absurdity of denying God’s existence becomes fully apparent. To quote one great British scientist from the past, Lord Kelvin, who made important discoveries in thermodynamics and died in 1907: “Overwhelmingly strong proofs of intelligent and benevolent design lie around us…the atheistic idea is so nonsensical that I cannot put it into words.” (Proceedings of the Victoria Institute, No. 124, p.267).
(i) Many Darwinian scientists have admitted the weakness of the arguments and evidence for macro-evolution. The reason so many of them continue to believe in it is due to the fact that they have a prior philosophical commitment to atheism, agnosticism, or methodological naturalism – i.e. they either reject belief in God in principle, or else they cling to a narrow definition of ‘science’ which rules out intelligent design because it is not in itself a ‘natural’ process which can be put under a microscope or heated in a test-tube. Here below are just a few examples of this:
Dr Scott Todd (an immunologist at Kansas State University): “Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such an hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic.” (Letter in ‘Nature’ journal 30/9/99).
Professor D.M.S. Watson (a leading 20th century biologist): “Evolution [is] a theory universally accepted not because it can be proven by logically coherent evidence to be true, but because the only alternative, special creation, is clearly incredible.” (‘Nature’, 10 August 1929, p.233).
Professor Richard Lewontin (a Harvard geneticist and atheist): “We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs…in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so-stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.” [bold italics in original text]. (The New York Review of Books, p.31, 9/1/97).
Professor George Wald (a Harvard biologist): “There are only two possibilities as to how life arose. One is spontaneous generation arising to evolution; the other is a supernatural creative act of God. There is no third possibility. Spontaneous generation, that life arose from non-living matter, was scientifically disproved 120 years ago by Louis Pasteur and others. That leaves us with the only possible conclusion that life arose as a supernatural creative act of God. I will not accept that philosophically because I do not want to believe in God. Therefore I choose to believe in that which I know is scientifically impossible: spontaneous generation arising to evolution.” (‘Scientific American’ 199, September 1958, p.100).
These quotes are just the tip of the iceberg. For a more comprehensive round-up, see The Revised Quote Book, an illuminating collection of 130 quotes (with original sources) – nearly all from Darwinist scientists – acknowledging the lack of evidence for naturalistic macro-evolution, and published by the Creation Science Foundation (Australia). It is also available from Answers In Genesis (U.K.).
(10) Another feature of life which points to God and cannot be explained by atheist philosophers and scientists, is the phenomenon of human consciousness. How can we explain our emotions, our ability to think and choose, and our capacity for self-awareness and introspection, if we are only material beings put together by random physical processes? By contrast, there are powerful philosophical and scientific reasons for believing in the reality of the soul and its connection with God. These are set out below.
The evidence for the soul and its link to God
(a) Even if there is no distinction between our ‘minds’ and our brains (as philosophical materialists believe), it does not prove the case for atheism since the human brain is far too complex a structure to have arisen by chance. As Dr Michael Denton points out in his critique of evolution (see above), the human brain, weighing just three pounds, has ten billion nerve cells, each sending out enough fibres to create a thousand million million connections. That is equal to the number of leaves in a dense forest covering a million square miles. Is it credible that this extraordinarily complex biological and electro-chemical apparatus emerged by accident rather than as a result of intelligent design?
(b) The very nature of consciousness suggests that there is a difference between the mind and the brain. To begin with, mental states are not identical with brain states since neuroscientists cannot identify the emotions or attitudes of their patients simply by examining the physical events going on in their brains. They can only discover whether these patients are happy or afraid, pessimistic or in love, by asking them what they are feeling. In other words, unlike physical phenomena, the world of thought and emotion can only be reached from the inside. Secondly, our thoughts have an immaterial and transcendent quality which suggests that they are not simply physical entities or events inside our heads. My knowledge that 2 plus 2 equals 4, for instance, or that murder is wrong, does not have any particular shape, weight, or colour. Similarly, my ability to imagine that I am in Devon, sixteenth century London, or some mythical world of my own creation, is not hindered by the fact that my brain actually inhabits my body which at that particular moment is stuck in a lecture room in 21st century Oxford. Consequently, since our thought-life is invisible and not limited by space and time, there is every reason to believe that our minds are independent of our brains.
(c) Another metaphysically significant fact about human consciousness is our consciousness of our own identity. Our thought-life has a unified focus in the sense that we are aware of ourselves as the subjects of our own internal mental experience. We see, hear, think, and feel. We are not simply a jumble of separate and unrelated thoughts, emotions, and perceptions. How then can our self-consciousness be simply the product of a mass of separate electro-chemical events in our brains? To quote American scientist and philosopher, Professor J.P. Moreland: “When you look around [a] room, you see many things at the same time. You see a table, a couch, a wall, a painting in a frame. Every individual thing has light waves bouncing off it and they’re striking a different location in your eyeball and sparking electrical activity in a different region of the brain. That means there is no single part of the brain that is activated by all these experiences. Consequently, if I were simply my physical brain, I would be a crowd of different parts, each having its own awareness of a different piece of my visual field. But that’s not what happens. I’m a unified ‘I’ that has all of these experiences at the same time. There is something that binds all of these experiences and unifies them into the experience of oneself – me – even though there is no region of the brain that has all these activation sites. That’s because my consciousness and my ‘self’ are separate entities from the brain.”
(d) Philosophical and scientific materialists (or ‘physicalists’) typically argue that since death destroys and brain damage impairs mental function, our minds cannot be separate from our brains and therefore there is no reason to believe that we have souls. But this is a very question-begging argument. If human beings are a composite of body and soul, it is obvious that death or disease will dissolve or injure this union of matter and spirit, but that still does not prove the truth of materialism (or physicalism). To believe that it does, is like saying that newsreaders and the human voice don’t exist because our ability to receive televised news bulletins is inevitably disrupted if our television set breaks down. Furthermore, there is plenty of scientific evidence that there is a two-way ‘traffic’ between mind and brain. Our conscious attitudes and activities can alter our brain chemistry as well as being affected by it. As Professor J.P. Moreland points out: “For example, scientists have done studies of the brains of people who worried a lot, and found that this mental state of worry changed their brain chemistry. They’ve done studies of the brain patterns of little children who were not nurtured and loved, and their patterns are different from those of children who have warm experiences of love and nurture. So it’s not just the brain that causes things to happen in our conscious life; conscious states can also cause things to happen to the brain.”
(e) Another powerful argument against the physicalist view that minds are reducible to brains, concerns our ability to think. When we do so, for example, we inhabit a mental world of truths and falsehoods, but no brain state can be ‘true’ or ‘false’ since our brain states are not about anything. They are merely physical phenomena. This in turn raises a further difficulty for atheists and physicalists. How can they explain our ability to reason and obtain knowledge, if our mental activity is solely determined by the physical structure of our brains? We do not, in ordinary conversation, accept the truth of any argument, if it can be shown to rely solely on whim, prejudice, self-interest, or any other non-rational factor. Similarly, we would not trust a print-out from a randomly programmed computer with no mind behind it. But if atheism and physicalism are true, human beings are merely biochemical machines that have emerged by accident within a purposeless and impersonal material universe. This means that all our beliefs and reasonings are simply the inevitable and accidental by-product of a long chain of random, non-rational physical and chemical events. How then can we attach any validity or significance to our thinking processes and values, including the arguments supporting atheism and physicalism? As Professor J.B.S. Haldane, a famous British atheist and scientist, admitted as long ago as 1927: “If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of the atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true…” A similar and more recent comment has been made by Darwinist philosopher, Michael Ruse: “Why should a bunch of atoms have thinking ability? Why should I, even as I write now, be able to reflect on what I am doing and why should you, even as you read now, be able to ponder my points, agreeing or disagreeing, with pleasure or pain, deciding to refute me or deciding that I am just not worth the effort? No one, certainly not the Darwinian as such, seems to have any answer to this…The point is that there is no scientific answer.” (Can a Darwinian be a Christian? Oxford University Press, 2001, p.73).
(f) Our ability to think and know is not the only feature of human consciousness which cannot be explained by atheists and physicalists. They are equally unable to account for our possession of free will. Although free will may be limited or influenced by heredity and environment, we obviously do possess it since it is self-contradictory to deny its existence. Just as we cannot ‘know’ that we know nothing, so we cannot be ‘free’ to decide that we are not free agents. In addition, our freedom to weigh options and choose between alternatives, whether we are job-hunting or selecting food in a supermarket, is constantly confirmed by our own internal experience. But if the reality of free will is undeniable, how can it be reconciled with the physical determinism implicit in the worldview of atheism and physicalism? How can we be free to shape our lives and be creative, if all our thoughts and choices are solely determined by our biochemistry and what C.S. Lewis described as “the meaningless flux of atoms” ?
The only adequate explanation of our ability to think, act, discover, and create, is that our minds are ultimately independent of our bodies and illuminated by the eternal and self-existent Intelligence which brought us into existence and gave us free will; namely, God the Creator.
(g) If the human mind is not reducible to the brain, and therefore has a spiritual origin, it is obviously not a product of evolution. There is, however, a wider reason for doubting the possibility that human consciousness could have arisen by some naturalistic Darwinian process of physical development. If something cannot come from nothing, which is the principle behind the cosmological argument for God, it follows as a corollary that the greater cannot arise from the lesser, since a lesser being or process cannot call into existence a superior power or attribute it does not already possess. This in turn has multiple ramifications. It means that existence cannot spring from non-existence; life cannot emerge from non-life; animal life cannot emerge from plant life; and, finally, self-conscious and rational human beings cannot emerge from unselfconscious animals. To believe otherwise, because oaks develop from acorns, and embryos grow into babies, is to be a victim of an evolutionist’s optical illusion. It is to forget that acorns are dropped by pre-existing oaks, and babies are conceived by pre-existing adult human beings. Above all, it is to forget that the whole natural order has a supernatural origin because it is the product of a Divine Intelligence.
The lack of any convincing Darwinian explanation for the existence of human consciousness is fully recognised by some atheist scientists and philosophers. To quote one of them, Colin McGinn: “How can mere matter originate consciousness? How did evolution convert the water of biological tissue into the wine of consciousness? Consciousness seems like a radical novelty in the universe, not prefigured by the after-effects of the Big Bang. So how did it contrive to spring into being from what preceded it?” Christian philosopher and scientist, J.P. Moreland, summarises the challenge facing atheists and physicalists even more starkly: “How, then, do you get something totally different – conscious, living, thinking, feeling, believing creatures – from materials that don’t have that? That’s getting something from nothing! And that’s the main problem.”
(h) The philosophical case for rejecting physicalism and accepting the reality of the human soul is exceedingly strong in itself, but it is also supported by recent scientific research which indicates that our minds are indeed independent of our brains. An example of this is the work of the father of modern neurosurgery, Wilder Penfield.
“Through my own scientific career, I, like other scientists, have struggled to prove that the brain accounts for the mind,” he writes, but he has had to change his mind after performing surgery on more than a thousand epileptic patients. In the course of this, he encountered concrete evidence that the brain and mind are actually distinct from each other, though they clearly interact. To quote another neuroscientist, Lee Edward Travis: “Penfield would stimulate electrically the proper motor cortex of conscious patients and challenge them to keep one hand from moving when the current was applied. The patient would seize this hand with the other hand and struggle to hold it still. Thus one hand under the control of the electric current and the other hand under the control of the patient’s mind fought against each other. Penfield risked the explanation that the patient had not only a physical brain that was stimulated to action but also a non-physical reality that interacted with the brain.” To quote Penfield’s own summary of his findings: “To expect the highest brain mechanism or any set of reflexes, however complicated, to carry out what the mind does, and thus perform all the functions of the mind, is quite absurd…What a thrill it is, then, to discover that the scientist, too, can legitimately believe in the existence of the spirit.” (The Mystery of the Mind, Princeton University Press, 1975, pp.79 & 85).
Penfield’s conviction that the mind is not reducible to the brain and points to the existence of the soul is shared by two Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientists. One of them, Sir Charles Sherrington, described by the British Medical Journal in 1952 as the “genius who laid the foundations of our knowledge of the functioning of the brain and spinal cord,” declared five days before his death: “For me now, the only reality is the human soul.” The other Nobel laureate, his former student, John C. Eccles, confessed: “I am constrained to believe that there is what we might call a supernatural origin of my unique self-conscious mind or my unique selfhood or soul.” (Both quotes are from The Self and Its Brain, by Karl R. Popper and John C. Eccles, New York: Springer-Verlag, 1977, pp. 558 & 559-60).
A final summary:
Philosophy and science both support the teaching of Christian theology that humans are spiritual as well as material beings, created by God. As American philosopher, Stuart C. Hackett, puts it: “Selfhood…is not explicable in material or physical terms. The essential spiritual selfhood of man has its only adequate ground in the transcendent spiritual Self-hood of God as Absolute Mind.” His conclusion is echoed by two other scholars who have explored the depths of the mind/body controversy: philosopher, Robert Augros, and physicist, George Stanciu: “…physics, neuroscience, and humanistic psychology all converge on the same principle: mind is not reducible to matter.”
An atheist’s startling confession:
At the end of his life, France’s best-known existentialist and atheist philosopher, Jean Paul Sartre, confessed: “I do not feel that I am the product of chance, a speck of dust in the universe, but someone who was expected, prepared, prefigured. In short, a king whom only a Creator could put here; the idea of a creating hand refers to God.” (From The Intellectuals Speak Out About God, edited by Roy Abraham Varghese, Lewis and Stanley, USA, 1984, p.136).
(11) Science does not and cannot rule out supernatural events like miracles. If human consciousness and the existence of an intelligently designed world points to the existence of God, it is obviously absurd to argue that God cannot suspend the ‘laws of nature’ or intervene in His creation at any time and in any way He chooses. That would be like arguing that Shakespeare couldn’t change the ending of any of his plays. In any case, from God’s perspective, there is no distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’ events since they all have their origin in His creative and redemptive will. As C.S. Lewis points out in his book, Miracles, what is striking about Jesus’ miracles, is that they represent the ‘localisation’ and speeding-up of God’s normal activity in Nature. Just as water turns into wine each year through the combined action of sun and rain on the fruit of the vine, so Jesus turns water into wine at a wedding feast. Similarly, just as every year fields of wheat grow from tiny seedlings, so Jesus multiplies a few loaves and fish to feed the five thousand. The really ‘big’ miracles, like the raising of Lazarus from the dead, and the Resurrection of Jesus, underline God’s ability to conquer death since He is the eternal Creator who created the whole universe out of nothing.
Note about sources: Unless otherwise indicated, all the quotes used, with their original sources, are to be found in Lee Strobel’s book, The Case For A Creator, Zondervan, USA, 2004. The reference in paragraph (3) to the fact that even philosophical sceptics like Hume, Mill, and Kant, recognised the strength of the design argument for God, is fully documented (with original sources) in Understanding The Times, by David A. Noebel, Summit Press, USA, 1991, pp. 168, 187-88.
Invitation:
God, then, is not dead. Instead of us being the unintended products of a random and chaotic universe in which life has no ultimate meaning, Christians can testify to the existence of a creative God who is the true and eternal source of life, order, beauty, purpose, and love, and who, moreover, created human beings in His image. Finding out more about this God, who brought us into existence so that we could share His life, and love, and joy, could be the most important and exciting journey of discovery of your entire life. Only in this way will you find the answers to the most important questions of life: why are we here? Why is there evil in the world and what is God’s solution to it? Is there hope for the future? Can I have a personal relationship with God? Are Christians correct in their belief that God once came to Earth and lived an exemplary human life as a first century Jewish carpenter called Jesus of Nazareth, giving hope to the poor, performing mighty miracles of healing and deliverance, and eventually dying a criminal’s death on our behalf in order to cancel the debt owed to His justice by our wrongdoing? In particular, is it true that Jesus Christ rose from the dead three days after his execution, proving by this event that He is God, and that if we accept Him into our lives, we will never again be separated from God in this life or the next?
If you want to explore these questions and test the truth claims of Christianity, follow Lee Strobel’s journeys of investigation in his two books, The Case For Christ, and The Case For Faith. In these two books, published by Zondervan, USA, Lee Strobel, formerly an award-winning legal editor of the Chicago Tribune, and a tough investigative journalist and former atheist, retraces his journey from scepticism to faith by cross-examining expert scientists, philosophers, historians, and theologians. He raises the toughest objections to Christianity. You may be surprised by some of the answers!
Difficult questions you may face:
(1) You say that God exists because the universe must have a cause since it cannot have made itself. But if everything must have a cause, surely God too must have a cause, so who made God? If, on the other hand, God does not require a cause, why should the universe need a cause? Either way, your cosmological argument for God collapses!
(2) You say that the ‘Big Bang’ appearance of the universe from nothing points to the existence of God. Why shouldn’t something come from nothing? Just because we have never seen this happen in normal life doesn’t mean it could never happen!
(3) The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in modern physics suggests that sub-atomic events have no apparent cause. Why then does the universe need a cause?
(4) You say that God must be all-knowing and all-powerful to have created the universe from nothing. Does that mean that God can make 2 plus 2 equal 5, or make a round square? If the answer is no, He is not all-powerful, which weakens your claim that God is the Creator.
(5) If God is all-knowing, He must be able to predict all our future choices and actions. How then can you argue that we have free will, and that our possession of free will points to God’s existence and creativity as the ultimate source of human consciousness?
(6) You say that the evidence of intelligent design in Nature points to the existence of God as the Intelligent Creator. Does that not imply that God is also responsible for all the design flaws in the natural world, like deadly viruses, malaria-bearing mosquitoes, and earthquakes? If so, how can we believe God is really intelligent and good? Atheism makes more sense.
(7) You say that atheism can’t be true since it doesn’t explain our capacity to think and reason. Surely that is a fallacy. Even if our thoughts have an accidental physical origin, we can still use the rules of logic to examine arguments and determine whether they are valid or not, so we can still reason!
(8) You say that our minds are independent of our brains because machines don’t have consciousness. How then do you explain the fact that computers can process information, analyse data, and perform mathematical calculations, more accurately and rapidly than human beings? Does this not prove that computers can think and that therefore we too are machines – only biological ones? And is this not compatible with atheism?
Possible answers:
(1) This objection misses the point. The cosmological argument does not say that everything must have a cause, only that everything that begins to exist must have a cause. Consequently, since the universe is not self-sufficient or self-existent (see paragraph (7) of ‘prosecution’ section), it must have an intelligent Creator who is self-sufficient and therefore self-existent.
(2) The fact that we have never seen something come from nothing is itself powerful evidence against its feasibility, even if we ignore the logical contradiction of believing that the absence of something could ever account for its presence. Do any of you, for example, seriously worry that a horse will materialise out of thin air and deposit a pile of droppings on your bedroom carpet while you are out with friends or attending a lecture? Of course not! Even if you could imagine such a possibility, is it more rational to believe that something can come from nothing rather than the opposite? Even the most famous of all philosophical sceptics, David Hume, declared in a letter to a friend in 1754: “I never asserted so absurd a proposition as that anything might arise without a cause.”
(3) The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states that scientists cannot simultaneously measure, and therefore determine, both the movement and the location of a sub-atomic particle like an electron. This is because the very process of measurement disturbs the position of a sub-atomic particle. The ‘indeterminacy’ involved, however, relates to the position of the human observer rather than to the sub-atomic events in themselves. Consequently, many philosophers and scientists dispute the notion that sub-atomic events arise without cause. In any case, no physical investigation can prove the absence of causation, since causality is a metaphysical concept based on the self-evident truth that something cannot come from nothing, an assumption not only supported by daily experience, but one which also underlies all scientific research. To believe otherwise is equivalent to saying that Dickens’ novels appeared from nowhere because no-one saw Dickens, or anyone else, writing them!
(4) The reason God cannot make 2 plus 2 equal 5, or a round square, is because such actions would be logically contradictory and therefore meaningless. To point this out, consequently, is not to limit God’s power in any meaningful way, but simply to say that nonsense remains nonsense even when it is talked about God! Is your trust in airline pilots seriously shaken by the self-evident truth that they cannot simultaneously fly their planes and stay at home watching television?
(5) The supposed conflict between God’s all-knowingness (or omniscience) and human free will is an old philosophical issue, but the dilemma is more apparent than real. In the first place, it is simply not true that predictable behaviour is, for that reason, not free. Anyone who knows my taste in food, for instance, can predict with 100% accuracy that I will always prefer cream in my coffee rather than milk, but I would have no difficulty in switching to milk if my ability to choose freely between them were suddenly challenged by a stranger in a restaurant. Secondly, as the eternal and self-existent Creator of space, time, and the universe, God dwells in eternity and therefore doesn’t ‘foresee’ or ‘predict’ future events in the way we think. Instead, He sees all things and events in His eternal present. It is only when God communicates with time-governed human beings (for instance, in the Bible) that the language He has to use gives the impression that He too is imprisoned in time.
(6) The existence of viruses, mosquitoes, natural disasters, and other apparent ‘design flaws’ in Nature – including death and suffering in the animal kingdom generally – does not disprove the existence of a good and intelligent God for three reasons. First, the apparent ‘design flaws’ do not cancel out the evidence of intelligent and benevolent design elsewhere in Nature (e.g. the way in which parent animals feed and protect their young). This still requires explanation. Secondly, our possession of an internal moral standard by which we condemn the objectionable features of the natural world, itself points to the existence and goodness of God as the source and ground of our moral consciousness. Thirdly, God tells us in the Bible that His original creation has decayed and deteriorated because evil entered the world and spoiled His original design. To quote origin-of-life biologist and philosopher, Dr Stephen Meyer: “Based on the biblical account, we would expect to see both evidence of design in nature as well as evidence of deterioration and decay – which we do.” As for some of the other supposed ‘design flaws’ in the natural world ‘identified’ by evolutionist scientists like Richard Dawkins and Stephen Gould (e.g. in the structure of the eye and the panda’s thumb), these are not only emphatically disputed by many scientists, but are also based on faulty reasoning. To quote Dr Stephen Meyer again: “People make a lot of claims about bad biological design, but sometimes the entire picture is changed when you hear the rest of the story. For instance, people claim a design is bad because they look at only one parameter and claim it could have been better designed. However, engineers know all designs require optimizing a whole suite of parameters, and so trade-offs are inevitable to create the best overall result. [To use the illustration of a laptop computer]…the engineer isn’t supposed to be creating the best screen, the best memory, and the best keyboard – he’s supposed to be producing the best computer he can, given certain size, weight, price, and portability requirements. Could the screen be bigger? Yes, but then portability suffers. Could the computer have more memory? Sure, but then the cost goes too high.”
(7) The argument that atheism is compatible with our human capacity to reason because we can use the rules of logic to analyse people’s statements and beliefs regardless of their accidental biochemical origin, simply misses the point. It does so because it conveniently overlooks the fact that our discovery and use of these rules of logic is itself an inevitable and unintended by-product of a long chain of non-rational causes reaching back from our individual biochemistry to the accidental emergence of life on Earth, and before that, the ‘Big Bang’. In other words, the physical determinism implicit in atheism is just as destructive of the truth-claims of logic as it is of free will and moral judgement. Since, however, we cannot employ reason to discredit reason, we must instead reject the truth-claims of atheism.
(8) It is a fallacy to think computers are like human minds because they perform apparently ‘mental’ operations like information processing, logical analysis, and mathematical calculation. As Dr Raymond Tallis, professor of geriatric medicine at the University of Manchester, points out in his book, Psycho-Electronics, (Ferrington, U.K., 1994), it is the human beings who use the computers who are the ones really analysing, calculating, and processing information. To believe otherwise is equivalent to saying that electric kettles ‘boil’ water and scissors ‘cut’ paper. Without the initiative and intervention of willing, acting, and interpreting human agents, computers and kettles are just inert and purposeless bits of machinery. Secondly, the idea that computers are similar to human minds overlooks the true nature and complexity of human consciousness. When we think, process information, and calculate, we not only do these things; we are also aware of the fact that we are doing them. This self-awareness, moreover, gives us our sense of identity and our knowledge that we are persons capable of forming intentions and taking purposeful action. Do computers have this autonomy and self-awareness? Obviously not, since even the most sophisticated computer is merely a programmed and artificial extension of human intelligence with no inner life of its own. Its operations have no inherent meaning or purpose except to the human minds interpreting its data and determining their use. To be the true equivalents of human minds, computers would have to possess motives, emotions, free will, creativity, and the capacity for introspection.
Not surprisingly, Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist, John C. Eccles, has stated that he is “appalled by the naivety” of those who foresee computer sentience. In his opinion, “[There is] no evidence whatsoever for the statement made that, at an adequate level of complexity, computers also would achieve self-consciousness.”
Since computers are not minds, minds are not reducible to brains and are therefore not machines. But even if they were, that would still be incompatible with atheism since sophisticated machines like computers are clearly the product of intelligent design. God cannot be excluded from the picture either way!
Recommended reading (anti-Christian):
Atheism: The Case Against God, by George H. Smith, Prometheus Books, 1989.
The Blind Watchmaker, by Richard Dawkins, W.W. Norton, 1986.
Pro-God and pro-Christian books:
The Case For A Creator: a journalist investigates scientific evidence that points towards God, by Lee Strobel, Zondervan (USA), 2004. An outstanding and readable collection of interviews with top scientists and philosophers setting out the evidence for God in every area of science.
Scaling the Secular City: A Defence of Christianity, by J.P. Moreland, Baker Books (USA), 2003.
Reasonable Faith, by William Lane Craig, Crossway, revised edition, Wheaton, Illinois, USA, 1994.
God? A Debate Between A Christian And An Atheist, by William Lane Craig and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Oxford University Press, 2004.
The Essentials of Theism, by D.J.B. Hawkins, Sheed & Ward, 1949 (worth getting secondhand).
Apologetics and Catholic Doctrine, (the first three chapters), by Archbishop Michael Sheehan, Saint Austin Press (revised edition), London, 2001 (A very readable and lucid exposition of the philosophical arguments for the existence of God and the soul).
The Design Revolution: Answering the Toughest Questions about Intelligent Design, by William Dembski, InterVarsity Press, USA, 2004.
Handbook of Christian Apologetics, by Peter Kreeft and Ronald K. Tacelli, InterVarsity Press, USA, 2003.
Miracles, by C.S. Lewis, Fount-Collins paperback, U.K.
Icons of Evolution, by Dr Jonathan Wells, Regnery, USA, 2000.
Refuting Evolution, by Dr Jonathan Sarfati, Answers In Genesis, Australia, 2002.
Darwin on Trial, by Phillip Johnson, InterVarsity Press, USA, 1993.
Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, by Dr Michael J. Behe, Touchstone, USA, 1996.
© Philip Vander Elst