Tag Archives: Theism

Commentary

Hugh Ross debates Lewis Wolpert on scientific evidence for a Creator

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From the 2012 Unbelievable UK conference, Peter Byrom (BirdieUpon) reports on a great debate on science and Christianity.

Excerpt:

I had the great pleasure yesterday of attending the debate “Does the universe show evidence for a creator?” at Imperial College, London. Arguing in the affirmative was astrophysicist Hugh Ross of Reasons To Believe,  a science-faith think tank from the USA; arguing the negative was Lewis Wolpert, Emeritus Professor of biology and British Humanist.

[…]But, onto the debate itself! A good turn-out. The lecture theatre was packed. It was hosted by Imperial College’s Christian Union, but a decent number of atheists and sceptics showed up too – which is quite something given that AC Grayling was giving a lecture in the next room (he passed by me earlier as I was editing my latest Dawkins-critical video on my laptop… I don’t think he noticed)!

This is where it gets interesting. Hugh Ross went first, and outlined for 20 minutes his Creation Model, arguing that the Bible – and only the Bible – contains consistent, scientifically accurate predictions about the cosmos, the empirical data for which is only being discovered recently in the modern age. His case is essentially that the more we discover about the universe, the more the evidence for design and a transcendent creator piles up and confirms what the Bible has been telling us for the past thousands of years. Of particular note were passages from Jeremiah and Romans, which Hugh claims tell us about the expansion of the universe and the law of entropy. Alongside we have the opening of the Bible, that in the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth – the Big Bang is this beginning. When this was discovered, a great many scientists were reluctant to accept it, fearing that an absolute beginning of space and time gave too much leverage to those who believe in theistic creation.

It was fascinating also to hear Hugh cite an article written by atheist physicists called “Disturbing Implications of the Cosmological Constant”. In this article, its atheist authors were forced to concede that this particular cosmological constant left them no choice but to invoke a transcendent causal agent. Their solution? To “do a Daniel Dennett”: conclude that this cosmological constant must, therefore, surely be false (!)

Go read the whole thing at Apologetics UK blog! It’s great when we have smart guys to give us a ringside report.

Videos

The return of William Lane Craig videos to Youtube

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A while back, the channel that hosted many of Dr. Craig’s debates was shut down. But nothing to fear, it’s back up now, and being managed by Reasonable Faith.

The full list of 900 videos is here, and there is also a list of 97 playlists for longer videos. You can find even more videos on ChristianJR4’s Youtube channel.

One of the nice things about the channel’s new management is that they do not allow comments on Youtube. I think that is a wise decision, and I hope they stick with it. You won’t hear the same quality of argument at the lay-level of atheism that you hear at the lay-level of Christianity. Lay atheists typically don’t try to make formal arguments against God’s existence based on evidence, whereas more of the Christian rank and file have read basic stuff like Lee Strobel books and they sound pretty much like a William Lane Craig clone, if given the opportunity to debate. Unless you go to the level of a Peter Millican or a Walter Sinnott-Armstrong or a Paul Draper, you’re not going to hear anything compelling from most atheists.

Here’s a new lecture on the moral argument that I found, which I had not seen before.

Details:

Is morality objective? Or is it subjective and relative? Is there such things as moral absolutes? Dr. William Lane Craig answers these questions and argues that if objective morals exists, then God exists.

The lecture was given at the First Baptist Church of Colleyville, Texas in their “Faith and Reason” class. Churches seem to be getting more and more into this sort of thing these days, and that’s a good thing. If you just watch the first video, and see the church leader charge his flock to get ready to think carefully about apologetics, it’s a good thing. I feel encouraged by it, but it’s becoming more common for churches to take the intellectual approach, even as thinking is dying in the secular world.

The play list is here.

Here are the 5 parts:

Part 1 of 5:

Part 2 of 5:

Part 3 of 5:

Part 4 of 5:

Part 5 of 5:

The total time is one hour and 7 minutes, and there is Q&A at the end.

By the way, now may be a good time to mention that in the last year, the two leading atheistic web sites on the web, Common Sense Atheism (#1) and Debunking Christianity (#2) have both ceased operations, except as archives of past activity. My take on this? I think that atheism as a worldview is dying out because it is just too difficult for them to defend a worldview that is contradicted by cosmology and astrophysics. At the very least, the good scientific evidence we have from the origin of the universe, the fine-tuning, the origin of life, the galactic habitability, the stellar habitability, the Cambrian era fossils, etc., show that there is at least a deistic God.

There are still fair-minded agnostics and open-minded atheists who haven’t heard anyone make the case for theism to them out there. And that’s something for Christians to address with their evangelistic efforts. But for atheist activists who know about the scientific evidence from William Lane Craig debates and elsewhere, atheism is no longer a viable worldview. I think it remains as a non-rational personal preference, but it’s not something you can really argue rationally with anyone who follows the progress of science. The only question to decide now is which version of monotheism is true: deism, Christianity, Judaism or Islam. Since Islam is extremely easy to disprove on historical grounds, there are only three live options: deism, Christianity and Judaism.

Commentary

Melanie Phillips: The real intolerance comes from secularism

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Here’s a great post by conservative British journalist Melanie Phillips. (I think she is Jewish, by the way)

Excerpt:

I have a rather different take on this great division of our age. My view is that while we may be in a post-biblical — and post-moral — age, we have not disposed of belief. Far from it. We have just changed what we believe in. Our society may have junked the Judaeo-Christian foundations of the West for secularism. But this has given rise to a set of other religions. Secular religions. Anti-religion religions.

These are also based on a set of dogmas. They proselytise. They involve faith. But unlike the Judaeo-Christian thinking they usurp, these secular anti-religions suspend truth and reason. What’s more, I would say that it was the Judaic foundations of the West which, far from denying reason, gave the world both reason and science in the first place.

God has been pronounced dead, and in his place have come man-made ideologies — in which people worship not a divine presence but an idea.

These ideas, which brook no dissent, give rise inescapably to intolerance and indeed to tyranny. Indeed, they are far more tyrannical in their effect than the God of the Hebrew Bible who gets such a bad press for being so authoritarian. In fact, he has a truly terrible time getting his way. His people are always complaining, refusing to do what he tells them, blaming him for everything and always, always arguing with him. But ideologies which represent the will of man bend everything to the governing idea, which cannot be gainsaid. There can be no argument with them.

Rather than being rational, I suggest these are irrational; not tolerant at all, but deeply illiberal; not open to other ideas, but as dogmatic as any medieval pope. Indeed, these atheistic ideologies are reminiscent not just of religion but of medieval persecutions, witch-hunts and inquisitions.

Let me illustrate all this with an anecdote. After a debate in which he took part some time ago, I pressed Richard Dawkins on his belief that the origin of all matter was most likely to have been an entirely spontaneous event — which meant he therefore surely believed that something could be created out of nothing. Since this ran counter to the scientific principle of verifiable evidence which he tells us should govern all our thinking, this itself seemed to be precisely the kind of irrationality which he scorns.

In reply, he acknowledged that I had a point but said that the alternative explanation — God — was more incredible. But then he remarked that he was not necessarily averse to the idea that life on Earth had been created by a governing intelligence — provided, however, that such an intelligence had arrived on Earth from another planet. Leaving aside the question of how that extra-terrestrial intelligence had itself been created in the first place, I put it to him that he appeared to be saying that “little green men” provided a more plausible explanation for the origin of life on Earth than God. Strangely, he didn’t react to this well at all.

However, Dawkins is not the first scientist to have suggested this. It is a theory which was put forward by no less than Professor Francis Crick, one of the discoverers of DNA.

A committed atheist, Francis Crick found it impossible to believe that DNA could have been the product of evolution. In 1973, Crick and the chemist Leslie Orgel published a paper in the journal Icarus suggesting that life may have arrived on Earth through “directed panspermia”. According to this theory, micro-organisms were supposed to have travelled in the head of an unmanned spaceship sent to Earth by a higher civilisation which had developed elsewhere some billions of years ago. The spaceship was unmanned so that its range would be as great as possible. Life started here when these organisms were dropped into the primitive ocean and began to multiply. Subsequently, Crick abandoned this theory and returned to the idea of the spontaneous origin of life from purely natural mechanisms.

How can someone so committed to reason be so irrational as to entertain such a fantasy?

What I found great about this article is that even though Melanie Phillips is a popular columnist, she actually deals with evidence when talking about God. So often on Christian blogs, you can read tons of posts that are really just inside baseball for Christians. It’s just pablum or lists of todos. The right way to talk about God is by talking about the evidence. Even Melanie Phillips sees that. Why don’t we?

I think we need to be very forthright when speaking with atheists and call them out for what they are. They are the people who hate astrophysics, and despise the Big Bang cosmology. They are the believers in the unobservable, untestable multiverse. They are the believers in the unobservable, untestable aliens who seed the Earth with life. They are the believers in the as-yet-undiscovered Cambrian precursor fossils. They believe that material processes can somehow produce creatures that have free will and consciousness. They are the ones who think that right and wrong are purely arbitrary – matters of opinion that are decided one way or the other in different times and places. They are the ones who believe that when you die, you are not accountable for anything you’ve done, and nothing that you’ve done has ultimate meaning. Let’s be up front about all of that, and hold them accountable for their anti-science, anti-morality, anti-human views. And let’s hold them accountable for running away from debates with their tails between their legs – like that coward Richard Dawkins did.