The FAQA

1. You’re a scientist and you believe in God and Jesus Christ?

Yes. You can read the story of how I converted from atheism to Christianity here.

2. Were you really an atheist?

Yes.

I’m often told that I wasn’t really an atheist, because I became Christian. This is how people without a solid foundation cope with someone who has rejected similar beliefs. I’m not saying only atheists do this. People of all beliefs, including Christians, do this, because the existence of apostates makes those with tenuous beliefs feel uncomfortable. Nevertheless, the truth is that I rejected atheism after being raised atheist by ex-Catholic socialist atheist parents in a secular country (Canada). Later, when my father embraced libertarian principles, he introduced me and my brother to Objectivism — an explicitly atheist philosophy — which formed the basis of my worldview for many years.

My brother and I both went on to reject atheism and convert to Christianity while getting our science doctorates. My mother, who died several years ago, had gradually drifted back to belief. My father began to shed his atheism with the death of his own father, and after a long, deliberate, and agonizing process, he finally became Christian in 2017. For years before that, he was mystified as to how he managed to produce two Christian children.

3. Are you a young earth creationist?

No. Given the multiple lines of evidence, I believe the universe and the Earth are billions of years old.

4. What is your repeatable, scientific evidence for God?

What is your repeatable, scientific evidence for your objective existence as a human being? Seriously. On what basis do you assert your own existence as a person reading these words as opposed to a brain in a vat hallucinating all of this as “real”? When you figure out why I’m asking this, you’ll know why #4 is not a legitimate question.

5. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Astronomer Carl Sagan popularized this statement decades ago. Atheists like to repeat it in reference to the supernatural, because it sounds right. However, there are two major problems with it.

1. It’s a statement about believability, not about proof.

You realize this when you see how people try to defend ECREE. I had a fellow explain it to me this way. “Tell me you have a red car,” he said, “and I’ll believe it without question. Tell me you have a flying red car, and I’m going to need to see it.”

People who believe ECREE are really talking about their own personal baseline for believability. It has little to nothing to do with establishing the truth of a claim.

If we need to establish the truth that you have a red car — say, for a court case, where demonstrating that you own a red car may be crucial for determining someone’s guilt or innocence — you’re going to need to produce the same evidence as for the flying red car. You wouldn’t respond to a request for proof from the judge with, “Well, your Honor, the claim that I own a red car is ordinary, so you should just believe it.” You’d produce the document proving it. Probably an official, verified government document stating that you own the car in question. The amusing thing is, if someone produced such a document for the ownership of a flying red car, most of you would probably consider that “extraordinary,” despite the fact that it’s of the exact same nature as the proof of ownership for the ordinary red car. And, the question would be unequivocally settled in either case by simply showing the judge the car.

This is why I like to distinguish between casual belief and actual belief. If someone, whom I have no reason to mistrust, tells me he has a red car, and it doesn’t really matter whether the claim is true or not, I’ll probably casually believe it. If it matters for some reason, then I wouldn’t — I’d need proof before I would actually believe him. I guarantee it’s the same for you.

2. How do you determine what’s ordinary and what’s extraordinary?

Extraordinary means “out of the ordinary.” So, what makes a claim “ordinary”? If we define ordinary as normal, usual, or commonplace, then that’s a problem. Even if we accept the illogic of Sagan’s statement, it works against the atheist saying ECREE. Why? Because the vast majority of people who have ever lived and who are currently living claim the supernatural exists. Therefore, by definition, this is an ordinary claim, and whoever is saying the supernatural doesn’t exist is the one making an extraordinary claim.

6. So, why do you believe in God?

I came to believe in God mostly through my work in science. I was convinced by:

1. The teleological argument. The universe seemed to me far too logical and intelligible to be the product of a random cause. (Twenty demerits to anyone who falsely claims this is an argument from incredulity.)

2. The Kalam Cosmological Argument (KCA) combined with a logical inference that the cause of the universe must be personal led me to belief in the Abrahamic God.

The KCA goes like this:

That which begins to exist has a cause.
The universe began to exist.
Therefore the universe has a cause.
I was also convinced by:

3. Objective morality and justice. God is the most philosophically satisfying basis for morality and justice in the world.

None of this proves God exists, but it is a rational basis for belief in God.

These arguments are why I gave up on atheism and accepted the existence of God. If this evidence doesn’t convince you of God’s existence, that’s okay. If you’d like to talk about the details, that’s fine. But if you think these arguments don’t count as evidence for God, I’m sorry to say that you and I have nothing to discuss. If after reading this you still insist there’s no evidence for God, please just google cat pictures or something, and don’t waste your time or mine by contacting me.

7. There’s no evidence for God.

See #6. There are other compelling evidences for God, including:

The fine-tuning argument
Life / consciousness
Near-death experiences
The ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ

8. Why the God of the Bible and not some other god?

See #6 and #7. The KCA + personal cause ruled out most everything except for the God of the Abrahamic religions — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. So, I picked up a Bible and started reading. After spending a couple of years investigating the claims of the OT, I continued to the NT and spent another year investigating its claims. I found Lee Strobel’s book, The Case for Christ, helpful in this process. When the NT held up to scrutiny, I realized I had no choice but to accept it as true.

I didn’t realize at the time that the KCA + personal cause also included Zoroastrianism and Sikhism. Zoroastrianism is an ancient and relatively obscure religion of Iran. Sikhism is a young religion (15th century) from the Punjab region of India, and is the ninth largest religion in the world. Both are intriguingly similar to Christianity in some ways, but differ significantly in others. Had I known that these two religions also hold to a transcendent, immaterial, and timeless God, it would have changed nothing in terms of my trajectory towards Christianity. I was persuaded that Christianity is not only supported by evidence and reason, but that it is the best explanation for evil in the world. That has not changed.

9. So, if you believe the universe and Earth are billions of years old, do you think Genesis is figurative?

I hesitate to use the words literal and figurative in this context, because they miss so much. Genesis, for all it simplicity of prose, is actually quite nuanced, layered, and complex. Nevertheless, I think Genesis is ultimately telling us a straightforward narrative about God’s creation and development of the universe, meaning God did these things or caused them to happen, and they were done in the order described by Genesis.

10. How do you square a ‘straightforward’ Genesis with a universe that’s billions of years old?

Read Chapters 3 and 4 of Gerald Schroeder’s The Science of God or go through my slide show here.

11. Do you write scientific papers about God’s involvement in the universe?

No. As far as my scientific work goes, I agree with Laplace, who famously said “I have no need of that hypothesis.” (It doesn’t mean what you think it means.) I don’t need to invoke God to explain why black holes and galaxies behave the way they do. I invoke physical laws to do that. This is not to be confused with the origin of those laws and the universe described by them, which is a different matter.

12. Everyone is born an atheist … babies are atheists until they’re indoctrinated.

I never understood why this is supposed to be a compelling argument, even when I was an atheist. First, we have no idea what babies believe until they can tell us. But we do know they’re illiterate and incontinent little savages until they’re indoctrinated to read, use a toilet, and treat other people with respect. Just because something is natural doesn’t mean it’s good.

If hard indoctrination was really required to force people out of their natural atheism, most people on earth would be atheist, and atheists in secular countries would never produce religious children. But consider how easy it is for most people to overcome their “innate” atheism. More than 90% of the world’s population believes in the supernatural, even though it supposedly doesn’t exist. The prevalence of religious belief is such a problem for people who use this argument that they’ve had to come up with peculiar evolutionary tics to explain it away. The law of parsimony applies here.

13. Religion is a product of where you were born, your family, etc.

Many, if not most (meaning > 50%) people adopt the dominant belief system of their family, community, university, or society. So what? That number certainly includes all atheists, who adopt atheism because of where they were born, where they went to university, and the communities they live in — it’s why I was an atheist for most of my life.

14. We’re all atheists, I just believe in one less god than you.

The rest of the quote goes, “When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you’ll understand why I dismiss yours.”

The first part is a nonsense statement. It’s like telling a computer programmer that there’s no difference between 1s and 0s, it’s just that 0 is 1 less than 1. As atheists frequently point out, there’s a world of difference between theism and atheism.

The second part of the statement shows a failure to understand the nature of God vs. gods. God is held by those of the Abrahamic religions to be the creator of the universe. He is therefore the creator of all things. If God exists, he must necessarily be outside of his own creation, which means he is outside of space, time, and material existence. God is therefore by definition transcendent, timeless, and immaterial.

To my knowledge, the only religions that believe in a transcendent, timeless, and immaterial God are the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), their offshoots (e.g. the Bahá’í Faith), Zoroastrianism, and Sikhism. All other religions hold to very different deities, none of which are creators. You can read through the various pagan mythologies to see that they invariably skirt the issue of the creation of the universe and deal instead with the establishment of the divinity of earthly rulers or the creation of a new world, land, or empire. Such is the case with the Mesopotamian and Egyptian creation myths that predate the writings of Moses, as well as others like the Greek, Roman, and Viking myths.

For more discussion:

The Uniqueness of Genesis
Which god is the Creator?
God vs the gods
15. Which of the thousands of gods do you believe in and why?

This might surprise you, but the answer is: most of them. I strongly suspect that many of the pagan gods actually exist in some form, as lesser divine beings created by God. See the work of Old Testament scholar, Michael Heiser, to understand why. And see #14 to know why I only worship and obey the God of the Bible.

16. Atheism is just a lack of belief.

There are only two possibilities: God exists; God doesn’t exist. If you reject the former, you implicitly accept the latter.

Some people aren’t sure and lean towards disbelief. They’re more appropriately referred to as agnostics. However, if “atheist” is in your profile bio, if you make it part of your identity, if you lurk on Twitter looking for religious hashtags and categories, it’s not just a lack of belief for you. You’re not fooling anyone by claiming otherwise.

17. Atheism isn’t a positive position. Whoever makes the claim that something exists has the burden of proof.

See #16. If you say “God doesn’t exist,” you’re still making a positive statement.

Don’t confuse positive statements with affirmative statements. “Positive” (philosophy) and “affirmative” (grammar) are not the same thing. “God doesn’t exist” is not an affirmative statement, but it is a positive one. If you make this statement, then the burden of proof is on you.

Or is it?

Have you actually thought about the origin of the claim about who has the BOP? Who or what dictates with whom the BOP lies? See here for a compelling discussion on why, in dialectical matters, the burden of proof lies with no one.

Resource: https://sixdayscience.com/about-us/faqs/faqa/

This is one hell of a load of bullshit

Lets assume the universe was created. There was absolutely nothing in that article that stated why his/her god is actually the right one. None. It could be god or gods.
The post practically dodged the talking about the Bible.
The christian faith is centred on gospel of Jesus and Jewish history as narrated in the bible. The account of Jesus's life and all his theological teachings stem directly from the Genesis creation narrative, Noah flood, Israelite exodus, and Babylonia exile down to the birth of the so called messiah. But since it is found that many of the accounts have no basis in history, how come Christians still hold onto their faith? In the face of reality, vividly exposing that the accounts and narratives from Genesis till the end is fiction, and the characters captured in the entire bible are legends, on what exactly are Christians rooting their faith? Are Christians really trusting on folktales to bring them heaven/paradise they hope for?

The bible accounts, as interesting as it sound have no single basis in history. The creation story, many churches have accepted that it is metaphoric or philosophical which shouldn't be taken as happening at a historic time or place. The catholic and many Christian denominations admitted that the story of Adam and Eve is more allegorical, specially designed for theological purposes, without any basis in history. The Noah and the global flooding account too have no basis in history. Up till this moment, not a single shred of evidence have been found to buttress there was any global flooding on this planet. The global flooding and ark narration have so many parallels which further exposes the mythical nature of the account, having no basis in history. Up till date, no single shred of evidence have been presented that Noah or his Ark existed.

One of the story I loved back then as a child is the Exodus. The account detail Israelis enslavement in Egypt, emancipation by Moses, sojourn through the wilderness and the military campaign that rounded up Canaan. Findings have shown that the whole Exodus is pure work of fiction, not having any fact. There is no Moses, Israelite were never in or enslaved in Egypt, Pharaoh and his people were not plagued by any Yahweh, the Red sea was not parted, the wildernesses sojourn have no basis in history, and Canaan was not overran by Israel military forces. Archaeological evidence revealed that all the accounts about Israel in the bible is myth.

The monarchy reign of David and Solomon in the United kingdom of Israel is all false. Archaeological findings expose that Israel is a small clan in Canaan, having no king. There is no evidence or traces of the Solomon temple. The captivity by Babylon is more reconstructions of facts though. However, the bible rather provides half truth laced with propaganda which makes the whole account unacceptable as historical fact.

The Jesus account is majorly work of fiction. While many would argue that there is a historical personality known as Jesus as recorded by Apostle Paul, Gospels, and non Christian sources like Josephus and Tacitus, the fact remains that these are not eye witness account which can easily be dismissed. The earliest manuscript that recorded the person of Jesus is written somewhere around 60yrs after Jesus crucifixion. The gospel of Matthew, Luke and John all copied from accounts in the book of Mark. The authorship of the gospel of Mark is a subject if debate. However, the general consensus among the scholars is that whoever wrote the gospel of Mark is not providing an eye witness account but simply relaying heavily distorted traditions.

The Zombies invasion and the wingless ascension of Jesus is a popular incidence which would supposedly be witnessed by many people, but no one expect in the gospels wrote about it. Josephus and Tacitus mentioned that a person called Jesus or Christ but left out the major events recorded in the gospel. Josephus original writings has not been found, and scholars argued that the word 'Jesus' found in the Testimonium Flavianum is Christian interpolation. Tacitus was born 25yrs after the death of Jesus. None of this writings provided an eye witness account. They are majorly tradition with no factual basis.

The gospels have loads of inconsistency and contradictions. Apostle Paul admitted he learned the creed. As a matter of fact, Paul's sister and nephew were converted Christians before he converted. He also confessed he met with James and Peter for days, many years after his conversion. So it is nothing new, Paul converted base on tradition he was told to.

At a point, Paul questioned the basis of his faith, exactly what I wanted Christians to do. Apostle Paul, who didn't met Jesus or witnessed his death queried if Jesus truly died and resurrected. He questioned the historicity of Jesus crucifixion, noting with doubt that his faith and missionary job is in vain if peradventure there is no Jesus that died and resurrected. The inquiry furthermore buttressed that Paul only knew the traditional story of Jesus, and not the historical fact. Reason he added that one should find and stick to truth only.

My questions to people who are Christians, how do you keep onto faith knowing that all the narration recorded in the bible have no basis in history? Where exactly is the confidence of hope drawn from knowing that the Bible stories are fables having no substances in history? How can you strongly trust that a Jesus who never exist as accounted would take you to heaven/paradise? What is the basis of your faith; historical fairies or historical facts?