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HAS SCIENCE REALLY MADE GOD REDUNDANT?
They say...
“Although atheism might have been logically tenable before Charles Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”
— Professor Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, 1986, p. 6.
“I have followed the argument where it has led me. And it has led me to accept the existence of a self-existent, immutable, immaterial, omnipotent, and omniscient Being.”
— Professor Antony Flew, There is a God, 2007, p. 155.
Who's right? Could mindless, chance processes produce thinking beings?
IS GOD REDUNDANT?
Why should anyone take belief in God seriously these days? We live in the 21st century — the age of science and technology. We have learned so much about our world, solar system and universe, and humans have even traveled into space.
Many scientists believe the universe began with a 'big bang' billions of years ago, and that life on earth began spontaneously in the early oceans when chemicals combined to form amino acids — the building blocks of life. Once life got going, we are told, gradual changes over millions of years produced the incredible variety of life we now see on earth, including ourselves. And all of this was supposed to be totally undirected, the result of mindless processes.
Astronomers have peered into the farthest reaches of the universe through powerful telescopes, and have observed no sign of God or heaven. How, then, can anyone believe in a spiritual realm? How can a book like the Bible have any relevance today? Some people claim the human race has “come of age”, and has no need for the God hypothesis. Religion was once necessary to explain why things exist, they say, but science can now explain everything. Atheist astronomer Carl Sagan famously said: “The cosmos is all there is, or was, or ever will be.”
Is this true? Has science really made God redundant?
Professor Richard Dawkins has compared belief in God to belief in Santa Claus — something we outgrow. But the analogy is flawed. Former atheist Professor Alister McGrath asked, “How many people do you know who started to believe in Santa Claus in adulthood?” (Daily Mail 9th February 2007)
Did you know.... that most of the founders of our major scientific disciplines were believers in God and the Bible? They believed they were “thinking God's thoughts after Him.” Men like Sir Isaac Newton, who said that our solar system “could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being”, Carl Linnaeus, who invented our modern biological classification system and rejected Darwin's theory, and Michael Faraday, a devout Christian who believed in the absolute truth of the Bible. Lord Kelvin, (left) giving the 1899 Victoria Institute Annual Address, was greeted with applause when he said, “The atheistic idea is so nonsensical that I do not see how I can put it in words.”
Astronomer Sir William Herschel (right), who discovered the planet Uranus (lower right), and also two of Saturn's many moons, commented, “The undevout astronomer must be mad.”
Professor Louis Pasteur (left) conducted experiments which demonstrated that life cannot arise from non-living matter — and no-one has ever proved him wrong. He wrote, “Science brings men nearer to God... The more I study nature, the more I stand amazed at the work of the Creator.”
Former atheists who changed their minds
“My parents brought me up to be an atheist — and they failed miserably!” That's the testimony of Dr A. J. Monty White (right) who holds a B.Sc (Hons) and Ph.D in chemistry. As would be expected, as an atheist he believed in evolution, and when he became a Christian in 1964, Monty believed that evolution was God's method. However Monty is now one of the UK's leading speakers on the creation-evolution controversy, and has authored several books on the subject. How did this happen? His scientific studies convinced him that evolution was scientifically flawed. He says, “I became a creationist by reading evolution textbooks!” Monty's experience certainly disproves Professor Richard Dawkins' claim that people only believe in God because they were brought up to do so.
Professor Antony Flew was one of the English-speaking world's most prominent atheists until Richard Dawkins assumed that role. Antony Flew became an atheist at the age of 15, and argued that one should assume atheism until evidence for a God was discovered. At the age of 80 he renounced his atheism. What convinced him? The “unbelievable complexity” of DNA! In the bookThere is a God, he explains that he reached this conclusion from the scientific evidence alone. “In short, my discovery of the Divine has been a pilgrimage of reason and not of faith.” Although (as yet) he does not believe in the God of the Bible, he does “accept the existence of a self-existent, immutable, immaterial, omnipotent, and omniscient Being.” And he reached this conclusion solely on the basis of science.
INFORMATION = INTELLIGENCE
It was once popular to believe that all that was needed to make life was matter and energy, and that, given enough time, natural forces were sufficient. Modern information theory has dealt a serious blow to this idea, because we now know that a third element is necessary: information. Information comes in various forms, whether on ancient clay tablets, books or DVDs, etc.. There is also coded information in the DNA of every living organism. If the information in just one of the trillions of cells in your own body were written down, it would fill 250,000 books of 230 pages!
All information comes from an intelligence source — there are no exceptions. Mindless evolutionary forces could never have produced the information in DNA.
DNA: Convincing evidence for the existence of God.
It is surprising to find people still asking, “If God exists, then who made God?” This worn-out argument is not as clever as people think, since it presupposes that the God people believe in is a physical or material Being, limited by time and space. However, followers of the three major religions — Christianity, Judaism and Islam — all agree that God is a spiritual Being, who exists outside of time and space. Therefore, the “who-made-God?” argument is irrelevant. Some people are so reluctant to believe in a Creator that they suggest that either the universe itself is eternal, or that it evolved from a previous universe, which in turn evolved from a previous one, and so on, ad infinitum. Why would people rather believe in eternal matter than an eternal Creator? Is it because they don't want to believe in a God to whom they are ultimately answerable? There is ample evidence for the existence of God if we are willing to accept it. The Bible says that unbelievers “suppress the truth... since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain.” (Romans 1:18-19, NIV).
'NATURAL BORN BELIEVERS'
According to Dr. Justin Barrett, a senior researcher at the University of Oxford's Centre for Anthropology and Mind, children are “born believers” in God and do not simply acquire religious beliefs through indoctrination. He claims that young people have a predisposition to believe in a supreme being because they assume that everything in the world was created with a purpose. “Children's normally and naturally developing minds make them prone to believe in divine creation and intelligent design. In contrast, evolution is unnatural for human minds; relatively difficult to believe.”*
So atheists are actually fighting against the way we are made! One of the things which sets humans apart from animals is religion: only humans pray and worship!
*Daily Telegraph 24th November 2008
Atheists often claim that Darwin's evolution theory has made belief in a Creator obsolete, and that all true scientists, and indeed, all thinking people, accept it. This is a myth. Thousands of scientists have serious doubts about evolution, because of its many flaws, and a growing number are Biblical creationists. In the book In Six Days: why 50 scientists choose to believe in Creation* 50 scientists with a Ph.D. have each written a chapter, explaining why they believe in Genesis. They include biologists, physicists, geologists, zoologists, chemists and geneticists. This book shatters the myth!
*available from the address below.
Atheists often point to what they call “bad design” in nature, arguing “an intelligent designer wouldn't have done it like that!” But when they do so, they are straying from science into theology. It's also a very poor argument. If you bought a new car, which broke down due to a design flaw, you would never argue that this meant that no-one had designed it! However, you might want to know why there was a flaw.
We live in a “broken-down” world, but the fault is not with the Designer, who made everything perfect. The Bible explains how human rebellion destroyed the original harmony between God and people, and the whole creation was damaged. We are all natural rebels against our Creator — even to the extent of denying His existence!
But God loves us so much that He has begun a restoration process, starting with humans. He gave His Son, Jesus Christ, who came to earth willingly to reconcile us to God through His death and resurrection. “God was in Christ, making peace between the world and himself.” (2 Corinthians 5:19*). Faith in Jesus brings peace and forgiveness to us now, and a relationship with God that will last forever. “He rewards those who truly want to find him.”(Hebrews 11:6*)
* New Century Version.
