The Godevidence.com site is a tremendous online resource! If you happened to listen to the podcast that Piltdown Superman put up on this blog yesterday, you are fully prepared to read the argument made by Scott Youngren in the article below.
I also love the quote Scott referenced from C.S. Lewis:
“If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have
found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the
universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it
was dark. Dark would be without meaning.”
Now think about what you know and why you know it. No doubt in grade school you were taught how to count with visual aids. Two blocks added to two blocks (or apples or whatever) were shown to be four blocks. Very simple, easy to see and understand. What we understand as being proven scientifically is often just a marker left on the marathon that is the advancement of human knowledge.
Darwinist evolution is nothing like this at all. While science DID prove using the scientific method that nothing is created or destroyed in the natural world, that all of the natural world is running downhill and that life does not come from non-life, the so-called "science" of evolution breaks these laws without shame in order to advance a religion-based philosophy of Naturalism. To pretend that Darwinism is scientific at all is a sham, a fraud and a crime against the human mind! I can assert that with good conscience because the Laws of Thermodynamics and the Law of Biogenesis remain intact and Darwinism must be at odds with these laws. Darwinism is not scientific at all, it is an hypothesis that is used to prop up anti-God morality and for the pleasure of atheopaths. Evil men who wish to do things God forbids have always sought to pretend that there is no God so they can entice others to join them in their evil practices.
By: Scott Youngren
“The
common belief that… the actual relations between religion and science
over the last few centuries have been marked by deep and enduring
hostility… is not only historically inaccurate, but actually a
caricature so grotesque that what needs to be explained is how it could
possibly have achieved any degree of respectability.”
–Cambridge University historian of science Colin Russell
“Just because science hasn’t explained something yet doesn’t mean that we should just give up and say, ‘God did it.’”
-A comment made, in various versions, by multiple atheist commenters to this website.
——————————-
The cartoon above provides a good depiction of how many (perhaps
most) atheists perceive God. They perceive him as an explanation for
natural phenomena that competes with scientific explanations, and that
serves to fill gaps in scientific understanding. But this perception is
completely flawed and misguided.
Atheist Dan Barker (Public Relations Director for the Freedom From
Religion Foundation) and Christian (philosophy professor) Richard Howe
publicly debated God’s existence at the University of Florida in 1997.
Barker comments:
“All through human history, we’ve had…questions
[such as these:]. What causes thunder? What causes the lightning? I
don’t know, there must be a big Thor [Norse God] up there that does it.
[audience laughter] But now, now we’ve learned about electricity. Now we
don’t need that Thor anymore. We’ve erased that God, right? And as the
line moves up, answering more and more questions, the gods disappear. We
still have a lot more questions up here and we no longer put a God down
here… He’s living in gaps, and the gaps are getting smaller…”
And, among atheists, Barker is certainly not alone. A review of
comments made by atheists at this website (or virtually any other
website where God’s existence is debated) will quickly reveal that many
(perhaps most) atheists consider God and science to be competing
explanations for natural phenomena, such as thunder and lightning, or
the phenomenon of life. God, according to this atheist view, is only
necessary to fill gaps in current scientific understanding….”the God of
the gaps.” Eventually science will fill the last of these gaps and then
there will be no longer be any need for God whatsoever.
But when atheists make such arguments, they commit what is known in
philosophy as a “category mistake” or a “category error.” Oxford
University mathematician John Lennox provides excellent commentary on
this logical fallacy as it relates to the above described atheist
reasoning in
God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?:
“…In some quarters the very success of science
has also led to the idea that, because we can understand the mechanisms
of the universe without bringing in God, we can safely conclude that
there was no God who designed and created the universe in the first
place. However, such reasoning involves a common logical fallacy, which
we can illustrate as follows. Take a Ford motor car. It is conceivable
that someone from a remote part of the world, who was seeing one for the
first time and who knew nothing about modern engineering, might imagine
that there is a god (Mr. Ford) inside the engine, making it go. He
might further imagine that when the engine ran sweetly it was because
Mr. Ford inside the engine liked him, and when it refused to go it was
because Mr. Ford did not like him. Of course, if he were subsequently to
study engineering and take the engine to pieces, he would discover that
there is no Mr. Ford inside it. Neither would it take much intelligence
for him to see that he did not need to introduce Mr. Ford as an
explanation for its working. His grasp of the impersonal principles of
internal combustion would be altogether enough to explain how the engine
works.”
“So far, so good. But if he then decided that his
understanding of the principles of how the engine works made it
impossible to believe in the existence of a Mr. Ford who designed the
engine in the first place, this would be patently false – in
philosophical terminology he would be committing a category mistake. Had
there never been a Mr. Ford to design the mechanisms, none would exist
for him to understand. It is likewise a category mistake to suppose that
our understanding of the impersonal principles according to which the
universe works makes it either unnecessary or impossible to believe in
the existence of a personal Creator who designed, made, and upholds the
universe. In other words, we should not confuse the mechanisms by which
the universe works either with its cause or its upholder.”
“The basic issue here is that those of a scientistic [not to
be confused with “scientific”] turn of mind like [prominent atheists]
Atkins and Dawkins fail to distinguish between mechanism and agency. In
philosophical terms they make a very elementary category mistake when
they argue that, because we understand a mechanism that accounts for a
particular phenomenon, there is no agent that designed the mechanism.
When Sir Isaac Newton discovered the universal law of gravitation he did
not say, ‘I have discovered a mechanism that accounts for planetary
motion, therefore there is no agent God who designed it.’ Quite the
opposite: precisely because he understood how it worked, he was moved to
increased admiration for the God who had designed it that way.”
Lennox’s above comments call attention to a grave oversight that is
pervasive in atheist reasoning: Citing a natural mechanism behind a
natural phenomenon is NOT equivalent to explaining the ultimate source
for that phenomenon. In Lennox’s words, “We should not confuse the
mechanisms by which the universe works either with its cause or its
upholder.” Put more simply, it is impossible to cite a natural mechanism
as the
source of the natural world because natural mechanisms are
an aspect of the natural world. An
aspect of something cannot be cited as
the cause for that something.
Citing a natural mechanism behind a natural phenomenon is NOT equivalent to explaining the ultimate source for that phenomenon.
Moreover, Lennox’s above critique calls attention to an even more basic problem prevalent in atheist thought:
The persistent confusion of scientific and ontological questions. God is an answer to ontological questions, NOT scientific questions.
A little review of terminology is in order. The Oxford Dictionary
defines science as “The intellectual and practical activity encompassing
the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and
natural world through observation and experiment.”
Ontology is the branch of philosophy which discusses the nature of
being, existence, or reality. And the Oxford Dictionary defines
philosophy as “The study of the fundamental nature of knowledge,
reality, and existence, especially when considered as an academic
discipline.”
Any time a natural mechanism is cited as the cause of a natural
phenomenon, a scientific explanation has been proposed….but an
ontological explanation for
the source of this mechanism has
NOT been proposed. These are two separate questions. In simpler terms,
science discusses questions of intermediate (or natural) causes, and
ontology discusses questions of fundamental (or ultimate) causes.
Science cannot study the premises upon which science is based. Questions that are of a fundamental nature cannot be answered by science.
As
an illustration, consider the question of why 2 + 2 = 4. Such a
question cannot even be subjected to scientific study because it
discusses a FUNDAMENTAL mathematical premise. Will a scientific
experiment conducted sometime in the future finally reveal to the world
why 2 + 2 = 4? Of course not, because such a fundamental mathematical
premise is something which
underlies science and is therefore
meta-scientific. Scientific inquiry can
contribute to ontological reasoning, but it cannot
replace ontological reasoning.
For further illustration, consider the following breakdown of the topic of evolution:
Scientific question: What accounts for the diversity of life on Earth?
Proposed scientific answer to the above question: A
mechanism known as the random mutation of genes and the natural
selection of reproductive offspring is responsible for the
diversification of life (Darwinism).
Ontological question: What is the source of this above mentioned mechanism? (Please read
Why Evolution Cannot Be Used To Rationalize Atheism and
Riddles for Atheists for a more thorough exploration of this topic).
Atheist answer to the above ontological question: ??????????????? (
Atheist commenters to this website are encouraged to furnish any answers they wish).
Theist answer to the above ontological question: A
conscious and intelligent being, God, is the fundamental ground of
reality, and the mechanisms we experience in nature are the product of
this being.
As I discuss in my essays titled
God Is Real…Why Modern Physics Has Discredited Atheism and
The Ultimate Cart Before the Horse (Why Atheism is Illogical),
theism holds God to be the fundamental ground of reality, whereas
atheism is rooted in the materialist worldview, which holds that
inanimate matter is the fundamental ground of reality. Citing inanimate
matter as the fundamental ground of reality leaves some very significant
unanswered questions. Regarding this point, Albert Einstein wrote (also
cited in
Riddles for Atheists):
“You find it strange that I consider the
comprehensibility of the world (to the extent that we are authorized to
speak of such a comprehensibility) as a miracle or as an eternal
mystery. Well, a priori, one should expect a chaotic world, which cannot
be grasped by the mind in any way… the kind of order created by
Newton’s theory of gravitation, for example, is wholly different. Even
if man proposes the axioms of the theory, the success of such a project
presupposes a high degree of ordering of the objective world, and this
could not be expected a priori. That is the ‘miracle’ which is
constantly reinforced as our knowledge expands.”
Please note that Einstein says this “miracle” is “constantly
reinforced,”
rather than diminished, “as our knowledge expands.” If inanimate matter
is the fundamental ground of reality, why is the universe
comprehensible rather than chaotic, and why is it so ordered, rather
than disordered? Citing a natural mechanism or a physical law does
NOTHING to answer such questions because three fundamental, ontological
questions remain unanswered: 1)
Where do natural mechanisms and physical laws come from? 2)
If matter is the fundamental ground of reality, how can matter be compelled to do anything, much less follow a physical law (or “regularity” if you prefer)? 3)
Why these laws and not laws that allow for chaos and disorder?
The theistic model places consciousness (God’s consciousness) as the
fundamental ground of reality, which is much in line with modern physics
(as demonstrated in
God Is Real…Why Modern Physics Has Discredited Atheism).
And if God’s consciousness is the fundamental ground of reality, and
our world is a manifestation of this consciousness, it is immediately
clear why there is such a “high degree of ordering of the objective
world.” But if matter is the fundamental ground of reality (as with
atheism) the question of where this ordering comes from is completely
unanswered.
Further, NO AMOUNT of “the study of the structure and behavior of the
physical and natural world” will ever by itself answer such fundamental
questions as
why there even exists a physical and natural world, for us to study, in the first place. In his book
The Limits of Science, Peter Medwar (an Oxford University immunologist who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine) writes:
“That there is indeed a limit upon science is
made very likely by the existence of questions that science cannot
answer, and that no conceivable advance of science would empower it to
answer…I have in mind such questions as:
How did everything begin?
What are we all here for?”
And David Bentley Hart incisively lays down the distinction between
scientific and ontological explanations, as they relate to God, in his
book
Atheist Delusions:
“Even if theoretical physics should one day
discover the most basic laws upon which the fabric of space and time is
woven, or evolutionary biology the most elementary phylogenic forms of
terrestrial life, or palaeontology an utterly seamless genealogy of
every species, still we shall not have thereby drawn one inch nearer to a
solution to the mystery of existence.”
“Even the simplest of things, and even the most basic principles, must first of all be,
and nothing within the universe of contingent things (nor even the
universe itself, even if it were somehow ‘eternal’) can be intelligibly
conceived of as the source or explanation of its own being.”
In summary, atheists who argue that scientific explanations are an
alternative to God either confuse, or deliberately conflate, science and
ontology. We are not dealing with a “God of the Gaps,” but rather, as
Lennox puts it, we are dealing with a “God of the whole show.” Atheists
frequently try to frame the debate as God vs. science so as to distract
attention from the inadequacy, or rather bankruptcy, of their
ontological reasoning.
Scientific questions demand scientific answers, and ontological
questions demand ontological answers. Therefore, answering such
ontological questions as why there is such a “high degree of ordering of
the objective world,” and why the world is comprehensible rather than
chaotic (as Einstein marvelled at), by saying, “I don’t know, but
science may someday figure it out,” simply has no value. Scientific and
ontological explanations can and must interact, but science cannot by
itself
produce an ontological explanation
because the scientific method cannot examine fundamental presuppositions
that underlie science. Extra-scientific, and therefore
philosophical/religious reasoning is a necessary part of the explanatory
equation*.
*Please read
I Believe in Science! Why Do I Need Religion?! for a further exploration of the necessity for extra-scientific, and therefore philosophical/religious reasoning.
categories
Philosophical Arguments For God - ,
Philosophy - Philosophical Arguments For God
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In the US, organized prayer in schools was banned in 1963 because of an activist Supreme Court which did not care to follow the Constitution. In 1973 came legalized baby-murdering, Now the spread of same-sex so-called marriage has led to widespread moral chaos! Just look at what happened in Massachusetts!
Do
you know who I am? It doesn't matter who I am or what schools I
attended. It is all about the information and about truth. I have a
few health issues but I do have my "assault keyboard" and I am still able to fire a few virtual bullets. Evolution is a threat to both the social and scientific health of our world. Those who proclaim it tend to be as ruthless to their opposition as were the Spanish Inquisitors in the name of a government that was unholy and greedy for power and money. Here in the USA we have not yet put non-Darwinists on a rack or burned them at the stake, but the career of a scientist who does not toe the evolution line? Darwinists gladly burn their careers instead.
We do not need God to be removed from society,
we need Darwinism to be cast from our minds instead. Science was begun by Christians and Theists in the first place as a belief in a God with a Logical Mind gave them impetus to investigate the means and methodology by which the entire Universe worked. It was a belief in God that was the basis for the foundation of the sciences we are familiar with today...God does not need gaps! But we need to get rid of the holes in our heads and get back to honoring God and doing the best you can...