The New Republic
Seeing and Believing by Jerry A. Coyne
The never-ending attempt to reconcile science and religion, and why it is doomed to fail.

Reposted from here

Saving Darwin: How to be a Christian and Believe in Evolution
By Karl W. Giberson
(HarperOne, 248 pp., $24.95)

Only A Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul
By Kenneth R. Miller
(Viking, 244 pp., $25.95)

I.

Charles Darwin was born on February 12, 1809--the same day as Abraham Lincoln--and published his magnum opus, On the Origin of Species, fifty years later. Every half century, then, a Darwin Year comes around: an occasion to honor his theory of evolution by natural selection, which is surely the most important concept in biology, and perhaps the most revolutionary scientific idea in history. 2009 is such a year, and we biologists are preparing to fan out across the land, giving talks and attending a multitude of DarwinFests. The melancholy part is that we will be speaking more to other scientists than to the American public. For in this country, Darwin is a man of low repute. The ideas that made Darwin's theory so revolutionary are precisely the ones that repel much of religious America, for they imply that, far from having a divinely scripted role in the drama of life, our species is the accidental and contingent result of a purely natural process.

And so the culture wars continue between science and religion. On one side we have a scientific establishment and a court system determined to let children learn evolution rather than religious mythology, and on the other side the many Americans who passionately resist those efforts. It is a depressing fact that while 74 percent of Americans believe that angels exist, only 25 percent accept that we evolved from apelike ancestors. Just one in eight of us think that evolution should be taught in the biology classroom without including a creationist alternative. Among thirty-four Western countries surveyed for the acceptance of evolution, the United States ranked a dismal thirty-third, just above Turkey. Throughout our country, school boards are trying to water down the teaching of evolution or sneak creationism in beside it. And the opponents of Darwinism are not limited to snake-handlers from the Bible Belt; they include some people you know. As Karl Giberson notes in Saving Darwin, "Most people in America have a neighbor who thinks the Earth is ten thousand years old."

The cultural polarization of America has been aggravated by attacks on religion from the "new atheists," writers such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, who are die-hard Darwinists. Outraged religious leaders, associating evolutionary biology with atheism, counterattacked. This schism has distressed liberal theologians and religious scientists, who have renewed their efforts to reconcile religion and science. The "science" is nearly always evolutionary biology, which is far more controversial than any area of chemistry or physics. Francis Collins, director of the Human Genome Project, wrote The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief; the philosopher Michael Ruse produced Can a Darwinian Be a Christian? (his answer is yes); and there are high-profile books by theologians such as John Haught and John Polkinghorne. The Templeton Foundation gives sizeable grants to projects for reconciling science and religion, and awards a yearly prize of two million dollars to a philosopher or scientist whose work highlights the "spiritual dimension of scientific progress." The National Academy of Sciences, America's most prestigious scientific body, issued a pamphlet assuring us that we can have our faith and Darwin, too:

Science and religion address separate aspects of human experience. Many scientists have written eloquently about how their scientific studies of biological evolution have enhanced rather than lessened their religious faith. And many religious people and denominations accept the scientific evidence for evolution.

Would that it were that easy! True, there are religious scientists and Darwinian churchgoers. But this does not mean that faith and science are compatible, except in the trivial sense that both attitudes can be simultaneously embraced by a single human mind. (It is like saying that marriage and adultery are compatible because some married people are adulterers. ) It is also true that some of the tensions disappear when the literal reading of the Bible is renounced, as it is by all but the most primitive of JudeoChristian sensibilities. But tension remains. The real question is whether there is a philosophical incompatibility between religion and science. Does the empirical nature of science contradict the revelatory nature of faith? Are the gaps between them so great that the two institutions must be considered essentially antagonistic? The incessant stream of books dealing with this question suggests that the answer is not straightforward.



The easiest way to harmonize science and religion is simply to re-define one so that it includes the other. We may claim, for example, that "God" is simply the name we give to the order and harmony of the universe, the laws of physics and chemistry, the beauty of nature, and so on. This is the naturalistic pantheism of Spinoza. Its most famous advocate was Einstein, often (and wrongly) described as believing in a personal God:

The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I am a devoutly religious man.

But the big problem with this "reconciliation," in which science does not marry religion so much as digest it, is that it leaves out God completely--or at least the God of the monotheistic faiths, who has an interest in the universe. And this is unacceptable to most religious people. Look at the numbers: 90 percent of Americans believe in a personal God who interacts with the world, 79 percent believe in miracles, 75 percent in heaven, and 72 percent in the divinity of Jesus. In his first popular book, Finding Darwin's God, Kenneth Miller attacked pantheism because it "dilutes religion to the point of meaninglessness." He was right.

A meaningful effort to reconcile science and faith must start by recognizing them as they are actually understood and practiced by human beings. You cannot re-define science so that it includes the supernatural, as Kansas's board of education did in 2005. Nor can you take "religion" to be the philosophy of liberal theologians, which, frowning on a personal God, is often just a hairsbreadth away from pantheism. After all, the goal is not to turn the faithful into liberal theologians, but to show them a way to align their actual beliefs with scientific truths. Theologians sometimes suggest a reconciliation by means of naturalistic deism, the idea that the creation of the universe--and perhaps the laws of physics--was the direct handiwork of a deity who then left things alone as they unfolded, never interfering in nature or history again. For the faithful, this has been even more problematic than pantheism: it not only denies miracles, virgin births, answered prayers, and the entire cosmological apparatus of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and much of Buddhism, but also raises the question of where God came from in the first place.

No, a proper solution must harmonize science with theism: the concept of a transcendent and eternal god who nonetheless engages the world directly and pays special attention to the real object of divine creation, Homo sapiens. And so we have Karl Giberson and Kenneth Miller, theistic scientists and engaging writers, both demolishing what they see as a false reconciliation--the theory of intelligent design--and offering their own solutions. Giberson is a professor of physics at Eastern Nazarene College, a Christian school, and has written three books on the tension between science and religion. He is the former editor of Science and Spirit, a magazine published by the Templeton Foundation. (Saving Darwin was also financed by Templeton.) Kenneth Miller, a cell biologist at Brown University, is one of the most ardent and articulate defenders of evolution against creationism. He is also an observant Catholic. Miller's new book, Only a Theory, is an update of Finding Darwin's God. Both books offer not only a withering critique of intelligent design, but also a search for God in the evolutionary process.

Together, Saving Darwin and Only a Theory provide an edifying summary of the tenets and the flaws of modern creationism, the former dealing mainly with its history and the latter with its specious claims. If these books stopped there, they would raise a valuable alarm about the dangers facing American science and culture. But in the end their sincere but tortuous efforts to find the hand of God in evolution lead them to solutions that are barely distinguishable from the creationism that they deplore.



As recounted by Giberson, the history of creationism in America has itself been an evolutionary process guided by a form of natural selection. After each successive form of creationism has been struck down by the courts for violating the First Amendment, a modified form of the doctrine has appeared, missing some religious content and more heavily disguised in scientific garb. Over time, the movement has shifted from straight Biblical creationism to "scientific creationism," in which the very facts of science were said to support religious stories such as the Genesis creation and Noah's Ark, and then morphed into intelligent design, or ID, a theory completely stripped of its Biblical patina. None of this has fooled the courts. In 2005, a federal judge in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania rebuffed an attempt to introduce ID into the classroom, characterizing the enterprise as disguised creationism and branding its advocates liars. (Miller was an important witness for the prosecution, supporting the rejection of ID.) But of course this has not settled matters. Creationists have returned with appeals to our sense of fair play, urging schools to "teach the controversy"--and never mind that the controversy about evolution is not scientific, but social and political.

What is surprising in all this is how close many creationists have come to Darwinism. Important advocates of ID such as Michael Behe, a professor at Lehigh University (and a witness for the defense in the Harrisburg case), accept that the earth is billions of years old, that evolution has occurred--some of it caused by natural selection--and that many species share common ancestors. In Behe's view, God's role in the development of life could merely have been as the Maker of Mutations, tweaking DNA sequences when necessary to fuel the appearance of new mutations and species. In effect, Behe has bought all but the tail of the Darwinian hog.

Yet other forms of creationism remain. Many IDers are also "young-earth creationists," taking a Biblically based stand that the earth is about six thousand years old. (The evangelist Ken Ham's $27 million Creation Museum in Kentucky depicts a Triceratops wearing a saddle!) Others believe that the distribution of animals on our planet is explained by Noah's Ark. Still others claim that while some species evolved, many others were created by God. Understandably, creationists prefer to hide these differences, deceptively implying that they are philosophically united.

But regardless of their views, all creationists share four traits. First, they devoutly believe in God. No surprise there, except to those who think that ID has a secular basis. Second, they claim that God miraculously intervened in the development of life, either creating every species from scratch or intruding from time to time in an otherwise Darwinian process. Third, they agree that one of these interventions was the creation of humans, who could not have evolved from apelike ancestors. This, of course, reflects the Judeo-Christian view that humans were created in God's image. Fourth, they all adhere to a particular argument called "irreducible complexity." This is the idea that some species, or some features of some species, are too complex to have evolved in a Darwinian manner, and must therefore have been designed by God. Blood clotting in vertebrates, for example, is a complex sequence of enzyme reactions, involving twenty proteins that interact to produce the final clot. If any were missing, the blood would not clot. How could something this sophisticated have blindly evolved?

Easily, says Miller. In a devastating dismantling of ID, he takes the "scientific" claims of ID seriously and follows them to their illogical conclusion. In clear and lively prose, Miller shows that complex biochemical pathways are cobbled together from primitive precursor proteins that once had other functions but were co-opted for new uses. And ID turns out to be simply a "god of the gaps" argument--the view that if we do not yet comprehend a phenomenon completely, we must throw up our hands, stop our research, and praise the Lord. For scientists, that is a prescription for the end of science, for perpetual ignorance.

Miller brilliantly exposes ID for what it is: a farrago of theological assertions and discredited scientific claims designed to inveigle a religious view of life into the biology classroom. IDers have no defined program of scientific research. Although they spend huge sums of money on public relations, they have not produced a single scientifically refereed paper supporting the empirical claims of their "theory." Miller correctly concludes that "the hypothesis of design is compatible with any conceivable data, makes no new testable predictions, and suggests no new avenues for research." One of Miller's keenest insights is that ID involves not just design but also supernatural creation. After all, the designer has to do more than just envision new creatures; he must also place them on Earth. And if that is not creationism (a label that IDers loudly reject), I do not know what is.

For Giberson, ID is not just bad science (or more strictly, not science at all), it is also bad theology:

The world is a complex place, and there is much about the universe that we still don't understand. We are centuries away from closing the many gaps in our current scientific understanding of the natural world, But it is the business of science to close gaps, and it has long been the central intuition of theology to find a better place to look for God, Promoting "design" in isolation from God's other attributes is a dangerous and ultimately self-defeating way to get God back into science.

Rather than reconciling religion and science, then, ID puts them in further conflict, damaging both in the process. That is why so many theologians as well as scientists have testified against ID in court.



If ID is an abysmal failure as science, why do so many people continue to press for its adoption in schools? The obvious answer is that ID preserves our status as God's favorite species and seems to imbue the universe with purpose and meaning, while evolutionary biology does neither. In other words, ID, like all forms of creationism, is an extension of religion. This has been recognized by every judge who has ruled on the issue since the Scopes trial of 1925. Curiously, though, Giberson and Miller avoid this issue when tracing the roots of creationism. Instead of singling out religion, they blame two secular movements, populism and atheism.

For Miller, a peculiarly American brand of rugged individualism and distrust of authority has had conflicting effects. First, it has produced America's scientific superiority. Miller notes that in the last three decades, Americans have won about 60 percent of all Nobel Prizes in the sciences.

Is there something in the American character that bore the seeds of this conflict [evolution versus creationism] and provided fertile ground in which it could flourish? I think there is, and I'm not ashamed of that. In fact, I'm downright proud of it, America is the greatest scientific nation in the world, Disrespect--that's the key. It's the reason that our country has embraced science so thoroughly, and why America has served as a beacon to scientists from all over the world. A healthy disrespect for authority is part of the American character, and it permeates our institutions, including the institutions of science. Scientists in this country, whether American by birth or choice, have been allowed to dream of revolutionary discoveries, and those dreams have come true more often in this country than in any other.

But this is a two-edged sword.

If rebellion and disrespect are indeed part of the American talent for science, then what should we make of the anti-evolution movement? One part of the analysis is clear. The willingness of Americans to reject established authority has played a major role in the way that local activists have managed to push ideas such as scientific creationism and intelligent design into local schools.

Giberson agrees:

Americans have never been eager or even willing to be led by intellectual elites. A simple commonsense argument by someone you trust is worth more than the pompous pronouncements of an entire university of eggheads. America is a nation that loves cowboys, and cowboys don't need experts telling them what to think.

But do we really owe our leadership in science to our inner John Waynes? Surely there are other--and equally American--factors: freedom from religious persecution, and money. Our scientific community has been immensely enriched by recent immigrants, especially Jews who fled the Nazis. More important, after World War II our government began funding scientific research at a furious rate, a largesse that attracted hosts of foreign scholars. And even though we have dominated the Nobel Prizes since then, in earlier years we were completely eclipsed by Europe. Until 1930, for example, Americans won only four Nobel Prizes in all of the sciences, while twenty-nine went to Germany and fifteen to the United Kingdom. Germans and Britons can hardly be accused of "disrespect for authority"!

The resistance to evolution in America has little to do with populism as such. Our ornery countrymen do not rise up against the idea of black holes or the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. It is evolution that is the unique object of their ire, and for this there is only one explanation. The facts are these: you may find religion without creationism, but you will never find creationism without religion. Miller and Giberson shy away from this simple observation. Their neglect of the real source of creationism is inexcusable but understandable: a book aiming to reconcile evolution and religion can hardly blame the faithful.

Yet it is acceptable, it seems, to blame the faithless. For Giberson and Miller, the main aggressors in the "science wars" are the atheists. Books by the "new atheists," they contend, have inflamed religious moderates who might otherwise be sympathetic to evolution, driving them into the creationist corner. In Finding Darwin's God, Miller explained that "I believe much of the problem lies with atheists in the scientific community who routinely enlist the material findings of evolutionary biology in support [sic] their own philosophical pronouncements." And Giberson concurs:

Critics of creationism were often rude and dismissive and appeared to have agendas that went beyond the truth of various claims about the natural history of the earth, These famous critics failed to grasp that creationists are also committed Christians and many of them are reasonable, generous, and motivated by the noblest of intentions. Thoughtful Christians sense something disingenuous about the mean-spirited lambasting that accompanies what should be a civil argument about science.

So the obstacle to understanding is not religion, it is those aggressive atheistevolutionists who won't shut up. But consider this: it is Richard Dawkins who, more than anyone else, has convinced people of the reality and the power of evolution. It is the height of wishful thinking to claim that if he and his intellectual confreres simply stopped attacking religion, creationism would disappear.

Giberson levels another common criticism at evolutionary biologists. Many of us, he claims, see our science as a religion, a kind of Darwin-worship that purports to explain everything, including meaning, purpose, ethics, and religion itself: "The idea that science should be a religion on its own runs like a subterranean reservoir through the writing of these popularizers, gurgling beneath the surface and bubbling into view every time the conversation gets to the now-here-is-what-it-all-means phase." Yes, some scientists (and science writers) have gone overboard with evolutionary psychology, asserting that Darwinism can explain every facet of human behavior. But no serious scientist wants evolution to become anything like a religion, or even a source of ethics and values. That would mean abandoning our main tool for understanding nature: the resolution of empirical claims with empirical data. We do not have "faith" in Darwinism in the same way that others have faith in God, nor do we see Darwin as an unimpeachable authority like Pope Benedict XVI or the Ayatollah Khamenei. Indeed, since 1859 a fair number of Darwin's ideas have been disproven. Like all sciences, evolution differs from religion because it constantly tests its assumptions, and discards the ones that prove false.



III.

In Finding Darwin's God, his earlier book, Miller proclaimed a universal theism: "Remember, once again, that people of faith believe their God is active in the present world, where He works in concert with the naturalism of physics and chemistry." Giberson clearly agrees. And where do they find the hand of God in nature? Unsurprisingly, in the appearance of humans.

Giberson and Miller assert that the evolution of humans, or something very like them, was inevitable. Given the way that evolution works, they claim, it was certain that the animal kingdom would eventually work its way up to a species that was conscious, highly intelligent, and above all, capable of apprehending and worshipping its creator. This species did not have to look perfectly human, but it did have to have our refined mentality (call it "humanoid". One of Miller's chapters is even titled "The World That Knew We Were Coming." Giberson notes that "capabilities like vision and intelligence are so valuable to organisms that many, if not most biologists believe they would probably arise under any normal evolutionary process, So how can evolution be entirely random, if certain sophisticated end points are predictable?"

Reading this, many biologists will wonder how he can be so sure. After all, evolution is a contingent process. The way natural selection molds a species depends on unpredictable changes in climate, on random physical events such as meteor strikes or volcanic eruptions, on the occurrence of rare and random mutations, and on which species happen to be lucky enough to survive a mass extinction. If, for example, a large meteor had not struck Earth sixty-five million years ago, contributing to the extinction of the dinosaurs--and to the rise of the mammals they previously dominated--all mammals would probably still be small nocturnal insectivores, munching on crickets in the twilight.

Evolutionists long ago abandoned the notion that there is an inevitable evolutionary march toward greater complexity, a march that culminated in humans. Yes, the average complexity of all species has increased over the three-and-a-half billion years of evolution, but that is because life started out as a simple replicating molecule, and the only way to go from there is to become more complex. But now complexity is not always favored by natural selection. If you are a parasite, for instance, natural selection may make you less complex, because you can live off the exertions of another species. Tapeworms evolved from free-living worms, and during their evolution have lost their digestive system, their nervous system, and much of their reproductive apparatus. As I tell my students, they have become just absorptive bags of gonads, much like the students themselves. Yet tapeworms are superbly adapted for a parasitic way of life. It does not always pay to be smarter, either. For some years I had a pet skunk, who was lovable but dim. I mentioned this to my vet, who put me in my place: "Stupid? Hell, he's perfectly adapted for being a skunk!" Intelligence comes with a cost: you need to produce and to carry that extra brain matter, and to crank up your metabolism to support it. And sometimes this cost exceeds the genetic payoff. A smarter skunk might not be a fitter skunk.



To support the inevitability of humans, Giberson and Miller invoke the notion of evolutionary convergence. This idea is simple: species often adapt to similar environments by independently evolving similar features. Ichthyosaurs (ancient marine reptiles), porpoises, and fish all evolved independently in the water, and through natural selection all three acquired fins and a similar streamlined shape. Complex "camera eyes" evolved in both vertebrates and squid. Arctic animals such as polar bears, arctic hares, and snowy owls either are white or turn white in the winter, hiding them from predators or prey. Perhaps the most astonishing example of convergence is the similarity between some species of marsupial mammals in Australia and unrelated placental mammals that live elsewhere. The marsupial flying phalanger looks and acts just like the flying squirrel of the New World. Marsupial moles, with their reduced eyes and big burrowing claws, are dead ringers for our placental moles. Until its extinction in 1936, the remarkable thylacine, or Tasmanian wolf, looked and hunted like a placental wolf.

Convergence tells us something deep about evolution. There must be preexisting "niches," or ways of life, that call up similar evolutionary changes in unrelated species that adapt to them. That is, starting with different ancestors and fuelled by different mutations, natural selection can nonetheless mold bodies in very similar ways--so long as those changes improve survival and reproduction. There were niches in the sea for fish-eating mammals and reptiles, so porpoises and ichthyosaurs became streamlined. Animals in the Arctic improve their survival if they are white in the winter. And there must obviously be a niche for a small omnivorous mammal that glides from tree to tree. Convergence is one of the most impressive features of evolution, and it is common: there are hundreds of cases.

All it takes to argue for the inevitability of humanoids, then, is to claim that there was a "humanoid niche"--a way of life that required high intelligence and sophisticated self-consciousness--and that this niche remained unfilled until inevitably invaded by human ancestors. But was its occupation really inevitable? Miller is confident that it was:

But as life re-explored adaptive space, could we be certain that our niche would not be occupied? I would argue that we could be almost certain that it would be--that eventually evolution would produce an intelligent, self-aware, reflective creature endowed with a nervous system large enough to solve the very same questions we have, and capable of discovering the very process that produced it, the process of evolution, Everything we know about evolution suggests that it could, sooner or later, get to that niche.

Miller and Giberson are forced to this view for a simple reason. If we cannot prove that humanoid evolution was inevitable, then the reconciliation of evolution and Christianity collapses. For if we really were the special object of God's creation, our evolution could not have been left to chance. (It may not be irrelevant that although the Catholic Church accepts most of Darwinism, it makes an official exception for the evolution of Homo sapiens, whose soul is said to have been created by God and inserted at some point into the human lineage.)

The difficulty is that most scientists do not share Miller's certainty. This is because evolution is not a repeatable experiment. We cannot replay the tape of life over and over to see if higher consciousness always crops up. In fact, there are good reasons for thinking that the evolution of humanoids was not only not inevitable, but was a priori improbable. Although convergences are striking features of evolution, there are at least as many failures of convergence. These failures are less striking because they involve species that are missing. Consider Australia again. Many types of mammals that evolved elsewhere have no equivalents among marsupials. There is no marsupial counterpart to a bat (that is, a flying mammal), or to giraffes and elephants (large mammals with long necks or noses that can browse on the leaves of trees). Most tellingly, Australia evolved no counterpart to primates, or any creature with primate-like intelligence. In fact, Australia has many unfilled niches--and hence many unfulfilled convergences, including that prized "humanoid" niche. If high intelligence was such a predictable result of evolution, why did it not evolve in Australia? Why did it arise only once, in Africa?



This raises another question. We recognize convergences because unrelated species evolve similar traits. In other words, the traits appear in more than one species. But sophisticated, self-aware intelligence is a singleton: it evolved just once, in a human ancestor. (Octopi and dolphins are also smart, but they do not have the stuff to reflect on their origins.) In contrast, eyes have evolved independently forty times, and white color in Arctic animals appeared several times. It is hard to make a convincing case for the evolutionary inevitability of a feature that arose only once. The elephant's trunk, a complex and sophisticated adaptation (it has over forty thousand muscles!), is also an evolutionary singleton. Yet you do not hear scientists arguing that evolution would inevitably fill the "elephant niche." Giberson and Miller proclaim the inevitability of humanoids for one reason only: Christianity demands it.

Finally, it is abundantly clear that the evolution of human intelligence was a contingent event: contingent on the drying out of the African forest and the development of grasslands, which enabled apes to leave the trees and walk on two legs. Indeed, to maintain that the evolution of humans was inevitable, you must also maintain that the evolution of apes was inevitable, that the evolution of primates was inevitable, that the rise of mammals was inevitable, and so on back through dozens of ancestors, all of whose appearances must be seen as inevitable. This produces a regress of increasing unlikelihood. In the end, the question of whether human-like creatures were inevitable can be answered only by admitting that we do not know--and adding that most scientific evidence suggests that they were not. Any other answer involves either wishful thinking or theology.

Miller opts for theology. Although his new book does not say how God ensured the arrival of Homo sapiens, Miller was more explicit in Finding Darwin's God. There he suggested that the indeterminacy of quantum mechanics allows God to intervene at the level of atoms, influencing events on a larger scale:

The indeterminate nature of quantum events would allow a clever and subtle God to influence events in ways that are profound, but scientifically undetectable to us. Those events could include the appearance of mutations, the activation of individual neurons in the brain, and even the survival of individual cells and organisms affected by the chance processes of radioactive decay.

In other words, God is a Mover of Electrons, deliberately keeping his incursions into nature so subtle that they're invisible. It is baffling that Miller, who comes up with the most technically astute arguments against irreducible complexity, can in the end wind up touting God's micro-editing of DNA. This argument is in fact identical to that of Michael Behe, the ID advocate against whom Miller testified in the Harrisburg trial. It is another God-of-the-gaps argument, except that this time the gaps are tiny.



Miller raises another argument also used by creationists and theists as proof of celestial design: the so-called "fine tuning of the universe." It turns out that the existence of a universe that permits life as we know it depends heavily on the size of certain constants in the laws of physics. If, for example, the charge of the electron were slightly different, or if the disparity in mass between a proton and a neutron were slightly larger, or if other constants varied by more than a few percent, the universe would differ in important ways. Stars would not live long enough to allow life to emerge and evolve, there would be no solar systems, and the universe would lack the elements and the complex chemistry necessary for building organisms. In other words, we inhabit what is called a "Goldilocks universe," where nature's laws are just right to allow life to evolve and to thrive. This observation is called "the anthropic principle."

At first glance, its explanation appears trivial. As Miller says, "Taking as a starting point the observation that you and I are alive, at least in the immediate present, it's obvious that we must live in a universe where life is possible. If we didn't, we wouldn't be here to talk about it. So, in a certain sense the fact that we live in a life-friendly universe merits little more than a big 'Duh.'" True. But this raises a deeper question: why do the constants of the universe just happen to have those life-promoting values? The answer given by creationists is that this is no accident: a beneficent God (or an intelligent designer) crafted those physical laws precisely so that somewhere in the universe intelligent life would evolve--life so intelligent that it could work out the laws of physics and, more important, apprehend their creator. This answer--known as the strong anthropic principle--is scientifically untestable, but it sounds so reasonable that it has become one of the biggest guns in the creationist arsenal. (It is important to grasp that anthropic principles concern the conditions required for the existence of any life, and say nothing about the inevitability of complex and intelligent life.)

Also, scientists have other explanations, ones based on reason rather than on faith. Perhaps some day, when we have a "theory of everything" that unifies all the forces of physics, we will see that this theory requires our universe to have the physical constants that we observe. Alternatively, there are intriguing "multiverse" theories that invoke the appearance of many universes, each with different physical laws; and we could have evolved only in one whose laws permit life. The physicist Lee Smolin has suggested a fascinating version of multiverse theory. Drawing a parallel with natural selection among organisms, Smolin proposed that physical constants of universes actually evolve by a type of "cosmological selection" among universes. It turns out that each black hole--and there are millions in our universe--might give rise to a new universe, and these new universes could have physical constants different from those of their ancestors. (This is analogous to mutation in biological evolution.) And universes with physical constants close to the ones we see today happen to be better at producing more black holes, which in turn produce more universes. (This resembles natural selection.) Eventually this process yields a population of universes enriched in those having just the right properties to produce stars (the source of black holes), planets, and life. Smolin's theory immensely raises the odds that life could appear.

The idea of multiple universes may seem like a desperate move--a Hail Mary thrown out by physicists who are repelled by religious explanations. But physics is full of ideas that are completely counterintuitive, and multiverse theories fall naturally out of long-standing ideas of physics. They represent physicists' attempts to give a naturalistic explanation for what others see as evidence of design. For many scientists, multiverses seem far more reasonable than the solipsistic assumption that our own universe with its 10,000,000,000, 000,000 planets was created just so a single species of mammal would evolve on one of them fourteen billion years later.

And yet Miller seems to favor the theological explanation, or at least gives the anthropic principle a theological spin:

The scientific insight that our very existence, through evolution, requires a universe of the very size, scale, and age that we see around us implies that the universe, in a certain sense, had us in mind from the very beginning, If this universe was indeed primed for human life, then it is only fair to say, from a theist's point of view, that each of us is the result of a thought of God, despite the existence of natural processes that gave rise to us.

Miller equates the faith of religious believers with physicists' "faith" in a naturalistic explanation for physical laws:

Believers , are right to remind skeptics and agnostics that one of their favored explanations for the nature of our existence involves an element of the imagination as wild as any tale in a sacred book: namely, the existence of countless parallel simultaneous universes with which we can never communicate and whose existence we cannot even test. Such belief also requires an extraordinary level of "faith" and the nonreligious would do well to admit as much.

Well, physicists are not ready to admit as much. Contrary to Miller's claim, the existence of multiverses does not require a leap of faith nearly as large as that of imagining a God. And some scientific explanations of the anthropic principle are testable. Indeed, a few predictions of Smolin's theory have already been confirmed, adding to its credibility. It may be wrong, but wait a decade and we will know a lot more about the anthropic principle. In the meantime, it is simply wrong to claim that proposing a provisional and testable scientific hypothesis--not a "belief"--is equivalent to religious faith.



IV.

The most common way to harmonize science and religion is to contend that they are different but complementary ways of understanding the world. That is, there are different "truths" offered by science and by religion that, taken together, answer every question about ourselves and the universe. Giberson explains:

I worry that scientific progress has bewitched us into thinking that there is nothing more to the world than what we can understand, Science has perhaps gotten as much from the materialistic paradigm as it is going to get. Matter in motion, so elegantly described by Newton and those who followed him, may not be the best way to understand the world, I think there are ways, though, that we can begin to look at the creation and understand that the scientific view is not all-encompassing. Science provides a partial set of insights that, though powerful, don't answer all the questions.

Usually the questions said to fall outside science include those of meaning, purpose, and morality. In one of his last books, Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life, Stephen Jay Gould called this reconciliation NOMA, for "non-overlapping magisteria": "Science tries to document the factual character of the natural world, and to develop theories that coordinate and explain these facts. Religion, on the other hand, operates in the equally important, but utterly different, realm of human purposes, meanings and values--subjects that the factual domain of science might illuminate, but can never resolve." Gould offered this not as a utopian vision, but as an actual description of why the realms of science and religion do not overlap. As a solution to our perplexity, this is no good. In a spirit of pluralism it ignores the obvious conflicts between them. Gould salvaged his idea by redefining his terms--the old trick, again--writing off creationism as "improper religion" and defining secular sources of ethics, meanings and values as being "fundamentally religious."

The NOMA solution falls apart for other reasons. Despite Gould's claims to the contrary, supernatural phenomena are not completely beyond the realm of science. All scientists can think of certain observations that would convince them of the existence of God or supernatural forces. In a letter to the American biologist Asa Gray, Darwin noted:

Your question what would convince me of Design is a poser. If I saw an angel come down to teach us good, and I was convinced from others seeing him that I was not mad, I should believe in design. If I could be convinced thoroughly that life and mind was in an unknown way a function of other imponderable force, I should be convinced. If man was made of brass or iron and no way connected with any other organism which had ever lived, I should perhaps be convinced. But this is childish writing.

Similarly, if a nine-hundred-foot-tall Jesus appeared to the residents of New York City, as he supposedly did to the evangelist Oral Roberts in Oklahoma, and this apparition were convincingly documented, most scientists would fall on their knees with hosannas.

Scientists do indeed rely on materialistic explanations of nature, but it is important to understand that this is not an a priori philosophical commitment. It is, rather, the best research strategy that has evolved from our long-standing experience with nature. There was a time when God was a part of science. Newton thought that his research on physics helped clarify God's celestial plan. So did Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist who devised our current scheme for organizing species. But over centuries of research we have learned that the idea "God did it" has never advanced our understanding of nature an iota, and that is why we abandoned it. In the early 1800s, the French mathematician Laplace presented Napoleon with a copy of his great five-volume work on the solar system, the Mechanique Celeste. Aware that the books contained no mention of God, Napoleon taunted him, "Monsieur Laplace, they tell me you have written this large book on the system of the universe, and have never even mentioned its Creator." Laplace answered, famously and brusquely: "Je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothese-la," "I have had no need of that hypothesis." And scientists have not needed it since.

In a common error, Giberson confuses the strategic materialism of science with an absolute commitment to a philosophy of materialism. He claims that "if the face of Jesus appeared on Mount Rushmore with God's name signed underneath, geologists would still have to explain this curious phenomenon as an improbable byproduct of erosion and tectonics." Nonsense. There are so many phenomena that would raise the specter of God or other supernatural forces: faith healers could restore lost vision, the cancers of only good people could go into remission, the dead could return to life, we could find meaningful DNA sequences that could have been placed in our genome only by an intelligent agent, angels could appear in the sky. The fact that no such things have ever been scientifically documented gives us added confidence that we are right to stick with natural explanations for nature. And it explains why so many scientists, who have learned to disregard God as an explanation, have also discarded him as a possibility.

This brings us to the second reason why Gould's explanation does not cohere. It is all well and good to say, as he did, that religion makes no claims about nature, but in practice it is not true. Out of the thousands of religious sects on this planet, only a handful do not have adherents or dogmas that make empirical claims about the world. Here are some. Jesus was born of a virgin and, after crucifixion, came back to life. After Mary's death, her physical body was transported to heaven. The Prophet Mohammed ascended to heaven on the back of a white horse. After death, every being is reincarnated in some other form. The god Brahma emerged from a lotus flower that grew from the navel of Vishnu, and, on Vishnu's command, created the universe. God listens and responds to prayer. Sea mammals come from the chopped-off fingers of the Inuit god Sedna. You will gain wealth and happiness if you send money to the ministry of Creflo Dollar.

Those are the dogmas. To see what the faithful actually believe, consider that more than 60 percent of Americans believe in miracles, the virgin birth of Jesus, his divinity and resurrection (Giberson and Miller are among them), the survival of the soul after death, and the existence of Hell and Satan. Regardless of what liberal theologians claim, most of us are not deists or Unitarians. And if you think that Americans see the Bible as mere metaphorical poetry, I invite you to visit a gospel church in Wasilla, Alaska, or on the South Side of Chicago.

Many religious beliefs can be scientifically tested, at least in principle. Faith-based healing is particularly suited to these tests. Yet time after time it has failed them. After seeing the objects cast off by visitors to Lourdes, Anatole France is said to have remarked, "All those canes, braces and crutches, and not a single glass eye, wooden leg, or toupee!" If God can cure cancer, why is He impotent before missing eyes and limbs? Recent scientific studies of intercessory prayer--when the sick do not know whether they are being prayed for--have not shown the slightest evidence that it works. Nor do we have scientifically rigorous demonstrations of miracles, despite the Vatican's requirement that two miracles be proven for canonizing every saint. Holy relics, such as the Shroud of Turin, have turned out to be clever fakes. There is no corroborated evidence that anyone has spoken from beyond the grave. And what about the ancient "foundational" miracles, such as those supposedly performed by Christ, Buddha, and Mohammed? We were not there when they happened, so we cannot test them. But at least we can apply the same standards to these as we do to other Biblical or Koranic claims.

Like Giberson, Miller rejects a literal interpretation of the Bible. After discussing the fossil record, he contends that "a literal reading of the Genesis story is simply not scientifically valid," concluding that "theology does not and cannot pretend to be scientific, but it can require of itself that it be consistent with science and conversant with it." But this leads to a conundrum. Why reject the story of creation and Noah's Ark because we know that animals evolved, but nevertheless accept the reality of the virgin birth and resurrection of Christ, which are equally at odds with science? After all, biological research suggests the impossibility of human females reproducing asexually, or of anyone reawakening three days after death. Clearly Miller and Giberson, along with many Americans, have some theological views that are not "consistent with science."

What, then, is the nature of "religious truth" that supposedly complements "scientific truth"? The first thing we should ask is whether, and in what sense, religious assertions are "truths." Truth implies the possibility of falsity, so we should have a way of knowing whether religious truths are wrong. But unlike scientific truths, religious ones differ from person to person and sect to sect. And we all know of clear contradictions between the "truths" of different faiths. Christianity unambiguously claims the divinity of Jesus, and many assert that the road to salvation absolutely depends on accepting this claim, whereas the Koran states flatly that anyone accepting the divinity of Jesus will spend eternity in hell. These claims cannot both be "true," at least in a way that does not require intellectual contortions.

Assertions about God's nature also differ among faiths. Giberson explains, for example, that "centuries of Christian reflection on the nature of God have highlighted various characteristics of God: justice, love, goodness, holiness, grace, sovereignty, and so forth." But to those of other faiths, God can be vengeful, as Yahweh was in the Old Testament. Jews cannot imagine an incarnated God, the Word made flesh. Hindus, like ancient Greeks, accept multiple gods with different personalities. To deists, god is apathetic, while many theologians in all the monotheistic faiths claim that we cannot know anything about God's attributes. So which of these many characterizations is "true"? Anything touted as a "truth" must come with a method for being disproved--a method that does not depend on personal revelation. After all, thousands of people have had delusional revelations of "truth" with horrifying consequences.



Perhaps what we mean by "religious truths" are "moral truths," such as "Thou shalt not commit adultery." These rules are not subject to empirical testing, but they do comport with our reasoned sense of right and wrong. But for almost every "truth" such as this there is another one believed with equal sincerity, such as "Those who commit adultery should be stoned to death." This dictum appears not only in Islamic religious law, but in the Old Testament as well. (It seems wrong, by the way, to call these truths religious. Beginning with Plato, philosophers have argued convincingly that our ethics come not from religion, but from a secular morality that develops in intelligent, socially interacting creatures, and is simply inserted into religion for convenient citation.)

In the end, then, there is a fundamental distinction between scientific truths and religious truths, however you construe them. The difference rests on how you answer one question: how would I know if I were wrong? Darwin's colleague Thomas Huxley remarked that "science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact." As with any scientific theory, there are potentially many ugly facts that could kill Darwinism. Two of these would be the presence of human fossils and dinosaur fossils side by side, and the existence of adaptations in one species that benefit only a different species. Since no such facts have ever appeared, we continue to accept evolution as true. Religious beliefs, on the other hand, are immune to ugly facts. Indeed, they are maintained in the face of ugly facts, such as the impotence of prayer. There is no way to adjudicate between conflicting religious truths as we can between competing scientific explanations. Most scientists can tell you what observations would convince them of God's existence, but I have never met a religious person who could tell me what would disprove it. And what could possibly convince people to abandon their belief that the deity is, as Giberson asserts, good, loving, and just? If the Holocaust cannot do it, then nothing will.

The idea of multiple universes may seem like a desperate move--a Hail Mary thrown out by physicists who are repelled by religious explanations. But physics is full of ideas that are completely counterintuitive, and multiverse theories fall naturally out of long-standing ideas of physics. They represent physicists' attempts to give a naturalistic explanation for what others see as evidence of design. For many scientists, multiverses seem far more reasonable than the solipsistic assumption that our own universe with its 10,000,000,000, 000,000 planets was created just so a single species of mammal would evolve on one of them fourteen billion years later.

And yet Miller seems to favor the theological explanation, or at least gives the anthropic principle a theological spin:

The scientific insight that our very existence, through evolution, requires a universe of the very size, scale, and age that we see around us implies that the universe, in a certain sense, had us in mind from the very beginning, If this universe was indeed primed for human life, then it is only fair to say, from a theist's point of view, that each of us is the result of a thought of God, despite the existence of natural processes that gave rise to us.

Miller equates the faith of religious believers with physicists' "faith" in a naturalistic explanation for physical laws:

Believers , are right to remind skeptics and agnostics that one of their favored explanations for the nature of our existence involves an element of the imagination as wild as any tale in a sacred book: namely, the existence of countless parallel simultaneous universes with which we can never communicate and whose existence we cannot even test. Such belief also requires an extraordinary level of "faith" and the nonreligious would do well to admit as much.

Well, physicists are not ready to admit as much. Contrary to Miller's claim, the existence of multiverses does not require a leap of faith nearly as large as that of imagining a God. And some scientific explanations of the anthropic principle are testable. Indeed, a few predictions of Smolin's theory have already been confirmed, adding to its credibility. It may be wrong, but wait a decade and we will know a lot more about the anthropic principle. In the meantime, it is simply wrong to claim that proposing a provisional and testable scientific hypothesis--not a "belief"--is equivalent to religious faith.



IV.

The most common way to harmonize science and religion is to contend that they are different but complementary ways of understanding the world. That is, there are different "truths" offered by science and by religion that, taken together, answer every question about ourselves and the universe. Giberson explains:

I worry that scientific progress has bewitched us into thinking that there is nothing more to the world than what we can understand, Science has perhaps gotten as much from the materialistic paradigm as it is going to get. Matter in motion, so elegantly described by Newton and those who followed him, may not be the best way to understand the world, I think there are ways, though, that we can begin to look at the creation and understand that the scientific view is not all-encompassing. Science provides a partial set of insights that, though powerful, don't answer all the questions.

Usually the questions said to fall outside science include those of meaning, purpose, and morality. In one of his last books, Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life, Stephen Jay Gould called this reconciliation NOMA, for "non-overlapping magisteria": "Science tries to document the factual character of the natural world, and to develop theories that coordinate and explain these facts. Religion, on the other hand, operates in the equally important, but utterly different, realm of human purposes, meanings and values--subjects that the factual domain of science might illuminate, but can never resolve." Gould offered this not as a utopian vision, but as an actual description of why the realms of science and religion do not overlap. As a solution to our perplexity, this is no good. In a spirit of pluralism it ignores the obvious conflicts between them. Gould salvaged his idea by redefining his terms--the old trick, again--writing off creationism as "improper religion" and defining secular sources of ethics, meanings and values as being "fundamentally religious."

The NOMA solution falls apart for other reasons. Despite Gould's claims to the contrary, supernatural phenomena are not completely beyond the realm of science. All scientists can think of certain observations that would convince them of the existence of God or supernatural forces. In a letter to the American biologist Asa Gray, Darwin noted:

Your question what would convince me of Design is a poser. If I saw an angel come down to teach us good, and I was convinced from others seeing him that I was not mad, I should believe in design. If I could be convinced thoroughly that life and mind was in an unknown way a function of other imponderable force, I should be convinced. If man was made of brass or iron and no way connected with any other organism which had ever lived, I should perhaps be convinced. But this is childish writing.

Similarly, if a nine-hundred-foot-tall Jesus appeared to the residents of New York City, as he supposedly did to the evangelist Oral Roberts in Oklahoma, and this apparition were convincingly documented, most scientists would fall on their knees with hosannas.

Scientists do indeed rely on materialistic explanations of nature, but it is important to understand that this is not an a priori philosophical commitment. It is, rather, the best research strategy that has evolved from our long-standing experience with nature. There was a time when God was a part of science. Newton thought that his research on physics helped clarify God's celestial plan. So did Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist who devised our current scheme for organizing species. But over centuries of research we have learned that the idea "God did it" has never advanced our understanding of nature an iota, and that is why we abandoned it. In the early 1800s, the French mathematician Laplace presented Napoleon with a copy of his great five-volume work on the solar system, the Mechanique Celeste. Aware that the books contained no mention of God, Napoleon taunted him, "Monsieur Laplace, they tell me you have written this large book on the system of the universe, and have never even mentioned its Creator." Laplace answered, famously and brusquely: "Je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothese-la," "I have had no need of that hypothesis." And scientists have not needed it since.

In a common error, Giberson confuses the strategic materialism of science with an absolute commitment to a philosophy of materialism. He claims that "if the face of Jesus appeared on Mount Rushmore with God's name signed underneath, geologists would still have to explain this curious phenomenon as an improbable byproduct of erosion and tectonics." Nonsense. There are so many phenomena that would raise the specter of God or other supernatural forces: faith healers could restore lost vision, the cancers of only good people could go into remission, the dead could return to life, we could find meaningful DNA sequences that could have been placed in our genome only by an intelligent agent, angels could appear in the sky. The fact that no such things have ever been scientifically documented gives us added confidence that we are right to stick with natural explanations for nature. And it explains why so many scientists, who have learned to disregard God as an explanation, have also discarded him as a possibility.

This brings us to the second reason why Gould's explanation does not cohere. It is all well and good to say, as he did, that religion makes no claims about nature, but in practice it is not true. Out of the thousands of religious sects on this planet, only a handful do not have adherents or dogmas that make empirical claims about the world. Here are some. Jesus was born of a virgin and, after crucifixion, came back to life. After Mary's death, her physical body was transported to heaven. The Prophet Mohammed ascended to heaven on the back of a white horse. After death, every being is reincarnated in some other form. The god Brahma emerged from a lotus flower that grew from the navel of Vishnu, and, on Vishnu's command, created the universe. God listens and responds to prayer. Sea mammals come from the chopped-off fingers of the Inuit god Sedna. You will gain wealth and happiness if you send money to the ministry of Creflo Dollar.

Those are the dogmas. To see what the faithful actually believe, consider that more than 60 percent of Americans believe in miracles, the virgin birth of Jesus, his divinity and resurrection (Giberson and Miller are among them), the survival of the soul after death, and the existence of Hell and Satan. Regardless of what liberal theologians claim, most of us are not deists or Unitarians. And if you think that Americans see the Bible as mere metaphorical poetry, I invite you to visit a gospel church in Wasilla, Alaska, or on the South Side of Chicago.

Many religious beliefs can be scientifically tested, at least in principle. Faith-based healing is particularly suited to these tests. Yet time after time it has failed them. After seeing the objects cast off by visitors to Lourdes, Anatole France is said to have remarked, "All those canes, braces and crutches, and not a single glass eye, wooden leg, or toupee!" If God can cure cancer, why is He impotent before missing eyes and limbs? Recent scientific studies of intercessory prayer--when the sick do not know whether they are being prayed for--have not shown the slightest evidence that it works. Nor do we have scientifically rigorous demonstrations of miracles, despite the Vatican's requirement that two miracles be proven for canonizing every saint. Holy relics, such as the Shroud of Turin, have turned out to be clever fakes. There is no corroborated evidence that anyone has spoken from beyond the grave. And what about the ancient "foundational" miracles, such as those supposedly performed by Christ, Buddha, and Mohammed? We were not there when they happened, so we cannot test them. But at least we can apply the same standards to these as we do to other Biblical or Koranic claims.

Like Giberson, Miller rejects a literal interpretation of the Bible. After discussing the fossil record, he contends that "a literal reading of the Genesis story is simply not scientifically valid," concluding that "theology does not and cannot pretend to be scientific, but it can require of itself that it be consistent with science and conversant with it." But this leads to a conundrum. Why reject the story of creation and Noah's Ark because we know that animals evolved, but nevertheless accept the reality of the virgin birth and resurrection of Christ, which are equall

christians are not particularly bothered. It seems athiests are the ones with this problem. Good luck.

davidylan:

christians are not particularly bothered. It seems athiests are the ones with this problem. Good luck.

Ostrich and sand come to mind.

huxley:

Ostrich and sand come to mind.

true. considering its athiests who continously struggle to force science as having answers to everything . . . its surprising most christians are not much bothered. You've how many threads here now? 50? And you think we're the ones with problems with religion? Have a rethink bro.

davidylan:

true. considering its athiests who continously struggle to force science as having answers to everything . . . its surprising most christians are not much bothered. You've how many threads here now? 50? And you think we're the ones with problems with religion? Have a rethink bro.

Yes, you are right. I have a problem with religion just as a surgeon has a problem with a cancerous growth.

huxley:

Yes, you are right. I have a problem with religion just as a surgeon has a problem with a cancerous growth.

Bad analogy. A surgeon only bothers about one when he sees it. You on the other hand seem to have an obsession with religion. Best of luck trying to remove it.

davidylan:

Bad analogy. A surgeon only bothers about one when he sees it. You on the other hand seem to have an obsession with religion. Best of luck trying to remove it.

Like a surgeon, I have seen and recognised the cancer that is religion. And like a surgeon, I will do my utmost, however small that may be, to excise this cancer from the body of humanity.

huxley:

Like a surgeon, I have seen and recognised the cancer that is religion. And like a surgeon, I will do my utmost, however small that may be, to excise this cancer from the body of humanity.

A surgeon removes a cancer out of genuine compasion . . . your own attempt to remove the "cancer" of religion seems more like a self-seeking goal to placate a troubled soul.

davidylan:

A surgeon removes a cancer out of genuine compasion . . . your own attempt to remove the "cancer" of religion seems more like a self-seeking goal to placate a troubled soul.

Are you placating yyour troubled soul when you tell Moslems that they are worshipping the devil in Mecca? The problem with you is that you fail so see that people genuinely disbelieve in your God or the other Gods, there is a big difference between lack of belief and being angry at your God or the other Gods(you personally believe that those that disbelieve are angry, thats why you assume they are troubled), there are over 750 million atheist and non believers world wide(more than protestants) do you believe that all of us are troubled? are Christians troubled when they go around telling Moslem that they worship the wrong deity? I say this because there was a day you challenged me(on another thread) to take an oath and dare the bibleGod to do something bad to me personally because deep inside of you, you had this belief that somewhere inside of me I couldn't, perhaps you thought that I was just angry at the bibleGod and hid my anger as disbelief. After I showed you that I truly do not believe that the bibleGod exist by going ahead and taking the oath daring the bibleGod to take my life the next minute if he can to your surprise(nothing happened to me because he is imaginary), you came along with the stupid Christian mantra that the bibleGod loves me (he should take his love and shove it up his ass I don't need it). Just the way that Moslem are not troubled when they go around telling Christians that they are worshipping man not Allah, that's they same way that we atheist are not troubled when we go around trying to remove the cancer that is called religion. Any way you have been made to believe that a person that is without Jesus is already condemned and troubled. Apart from belief in the afterlife which their is no evidence of whatsoever and which Christians for example do not have a coherent and unanimous conception of , what advantage does Christianity or Islam offer to its adherents? is it more knowledge? more money and power? longer life? happiness, comfort and fulfilment? children?

@bindex,

If you are this passionate about the non existence of God or Allah, do you care to boldly wage your finger at a nearby mosque while their prayers are going on to tell them what you feel about their Allah? and come back to tell us the result, that is if you live to tell the story.

OLAADEGBU:

@bindex,

If you are this passionate about the non existence of God or Allah, do you care to boldly wage your finger at a nearby mosque while their prayers are going on to tell them what you feel about their Allah? and come back to tell us the result, that is if you live to tell the story.

I can see that you are more passionate than me when it comes to showing the non existence of Allah judging from your numerous post on the Islamic thread, do you also care to go and tell them about how 40 Moslems converted to Christainity at a near by mosque as you have besen posting here on nairaland and come back and tell us the story? that's if you live to tell the story

OLAADEGBU:

@bindex,

If you are this passionate about the non existence of God or Allah, do you care to boldly wage your finger at a nearby mosque while their prayers are going on to tell them what you feel about their Allah? and come back to tell us the result, that is if you live to tell the story.

So in a nutshell Olaadegbu, Allah is the true supreme being and not God & Jesus Christ since you have not told us what will happen to Bindex if he attempts the same in a church during prayers.

bindex:

I can see that you are more passionate than me when it comes to showing the non existence of Allah judging from your numerous post on the Islamic thread, do you also care to go and tell them about how 40 Moslems converted to Christainity at a near by mosque as you have besen posting here on nairaland and come back and tell us the story? that's if you live to tell the story

Ovamboland:

So in a nutshell Olaadegbu, Allah is the true supreme being and not God & Jesus Christ since you have not told us what will happen to Bindex if he attempts the same in a church during prayers.

That tells you the difference between Yahweh and Allah, Yahweh is merciful, even to those who don't deserve it.  His mercy was displayed when He gave His only begotten Son to die for our sins so that we can be forgiven and  be adopted as joint heirs with His Son.  Allah, on the other hand has no son and Mo. is his prophet.  Allah sees mercy as a form of weakness and so he will deal mercilessly with any of his slaves that falls out of line as he only loves his muslim slaves that tow the line.  Bindex is currently on Allah's hitlist, who as an apostate has to be dealt with for going AWOL   That is why I am challenging Bindex to put his money where his mouth is and confront any of Allah's slaves and tell it to their faces there in Abuja that Allah does not exist, that he is the figment of man's imagination.  Bindex himself knows that he dare not reveal his thoughts about Allah especially where he lives otherwise he will not live to tell the story.

OLAADEGBU:

That tells you the difference between Yahweh and Allah, Yahweh is merciful, even to those who don't deserve it. His mercy was displayed when He gave His only begotten Son to die for our sins so that we can be forgiven and be adopted as a joint heirs with His Son. Allah, on the other hand has no son and Mo. is his prophet. Allah sees mercy as a form of weakness and so he will deal mercilessly with any of his slaves that falls out of line as he only loves his muslim slaves that tow the line. Bindex is currently on Allah's hitlist, who as an apostate has to be dealt with for going AWOL That is why I am challenging Bindex to put his money where his mouth is and confront any of Allah's slaves and tell it to their faces there in Abuja that Allah does not exist, that he is the figment of man's imagination. Bindex himself knows that he dare not reveal his thoughts about Allah especially where he lives otherwise he will not live to tell the story.

You guys never fail to amaze me, why do you guys keep bandying the lie that you worship a merciful deity? What is the difference between Allah and the God of the Bible? You said that Allah see mercy as a form of weakness eh? What about the Christain God? remember he onced used to live inside a wooden ark as the story goes and any body that goes near the ark gets killed instantly. The bible God was adviced by people like David in the bible to reconsider some of his evil acts and yet you say he is merciful? By the way if we are to go by what you stated it was never the bibleGod's intension for all to go to his imaginary heaven.

Mathew 7:13 & 14

13Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: 14Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.

Now, if biblegod is not willing that any should perish, why should any perish. If it is not his will, then how can it happen?

Yet, as we see from the words of Jesus in Matthew, "few there be that find it (life)". How can "few find it", if it is bibleGod's will that none perish? I don't believe in heaven and hell by the way I am just trying to point out how senseless it sounds going by the biblical narrative.

Bible Question:I am an atheist. I want you to prove to me that there is a god in the world. I believe that science is god. So do not prove that God exists from the Bible, because I know that Jesus said He was god. Can you prove that for me?

Bible Answer: This week I read a surprising article in Forbes ASAP. I would like to quote it at length for you and then answer your question. Forbes Magazine is a non-Christian publication.

It's too easy, with the benefit of modernity, hindsight, and all that, to regard science as the most fearless, objective, apolitical, democratic, and open-minded of human endeavors - the seeker of truth. Never mind anything by divine right . . .

Throughout the 16th century, as it gradually dawned on everybody that Columbus hadn't, after all, hit some island off Japan or India (where he was headed at the time) but that he had in fact come across an entirely new continent, everything epistemological hit the fan. For a comfortable 2,000 years, life, the universe, and everything had been what Aristotle . . . said it would be . . So what was [America] doing there?

Things got rapidly worse in the first decades of the 17th century, as people like Galileo started seeing other centers of attraction, such as Jupiter circled by its moons. To compound the felony, sailors started coming back across the Atlantic to Europe with hundreds of new American animal and plant species that were not described in Aristotle's list . . .

In the desperate search for some way to bail out the sinking ship or shut the stable door, a couple of quick thinkers came up with some solutions. One was a French engineer named Rene Descartes who . . . suggested that the only way to find truth was to go on doubting until you stripped away all dubious elements so as to arrive at a point where what remained was so self-evident that it was beyond doubt. That would be truth.

The other guy, an English legal eagle by the name of Francis Bacon, opted for correlation and analysis as a means of certainty. Amass enough evidence and you were halfway there. His admirers then came up with a Royal Society for doing this stuff, with correspondents all over the place sending in cards and letters filled with their observations. The Royal Society motto, "Take Nobody's Word for It," generated a procedure for making sure other people were seeing what you were seeing, known as "witnessing." If enough people agreed they were all witnessing the same thing, then it was a "matter of fact."

In the late 19th century, at the University of Nancy, France, the recent discovery of X-rays convinced people that other rays should be there too. Sure enough, once some guy demonstrated N rays (named after the town), they became a hot ticket to a Ph.D. And, no doubt, somebody got a degree, in N-ray studies. Then one day some American, who hadn't heard about these rays, said the truth was he couldn't see them. Sure enough, when everybody looked closer, nor could they. Collapse of theory.

This kind of collapse riddles the history of the so-called truth finding sciences. Here's a list of the greatest hits of scientific theory collapse. For centuries it was known that disease came from miasma, a foul air emanating from marshes and putrescent materials and such creepy stuff . . . Until 1884, when Louis Pasteur discovered germs. For centuries electricity was a fluid . . . until 1820. It was a well-known fact rotten apples spontaneously generated little worms and grubs found inside them . . . until 1767. The atom was indivisible . . . until 1877 . . . Light was particles until 1801, when it became waves; until 1905, when it became particles again; until 1924, when it became both. And my all time favorite, the one that really makes my point: Space and time were absolutes until 1886, when Ersnt Mach introduced the insidious concept of relativity and set the stage for Einstein.

In the end, the can of worms Columbus opened with his trip to India is this: There is no truth to find. Truth is what you want it to be . . . (James Burke, Forbes ASAP, October 2, 2000).
While I disagree with the author's summary it is clear that he made is point. The theories of science are constantly changing because science is a constant search for truth. Science is an art form that seeks truth. It is art form because scientists create hypothesizes, test those hypothesizes, change the tests when the tests when prove to be inadequate and discard the theories if they are wrong. Science is not truth. It is only man's guess at the truth until something proves it to be wrong.

We Would Need To Be God! Neither science nor I can prove that God exists. You cannot prove He does not exist. Neither of us can prove He does or does not exist because we do not see Him. In order to prove that, you or I would need to know every part of the universe and everything about the universe because God could be anywhere. We would also have to know everything about the other dimensions of time and existence. In short, we would need to be god to know everything and be everywhere at the same time because God might move. Then we would be god if we could know everything and be everywhere at the same time. Science is inadequate for the task.
It cannot tell us how the stuff that caused the "big-bang" came into existence or where it came from - how anything got started. That is a problem for science if it really is the god of truth. Science cannot tell me why 4,000 or 2,000 year old prophecies in the Bible came true. It cannot tell me how 700 - 500 year old prophecies came true predicting the exact week in which Jesus would die. Or, why 1,000 year old prophecies were accurate about Jesus' birth, life and His death.

What Is Truth? Our experience is not a measure of truth. Atheism says there is no god. Did science prove that? If so, what is the name of the test for determining that god does not exist? Our experience does not prove or disprove god. I have heard men and women claim their god has done something wonderful for them in their life. People are always using experience as proof that god is real or their religion is correct. How do they know? How can they be sure it was their god and not mine? My God may have lovingly done them a favor! How do we determine truth? I started my quest for truth by determining which sacred book could be validated as truth. The Christian Bible passed the test of fulfilled prophecy. Its has hundreds of prophecies - they came true! This is the test of truth no other sacred book can match. When it speaks, it speaks truth! It states that God is Jesus Christ.

Conclusion:Science is not fool proof! It is constantly changing as one theory after another is being revised and updated because we do not really know - we are learning. Evolution is no exception. Science is only as good as the human mind and that is faulty, biased and guilty of serious errors. May I suggest truth can be found in a supernatural book - a sacred book - the Bible. It has been proven to be accurate when it speaks to history and prophecy. It predicted Jesus' birth and death, including the week in which He would die. It predicted His return to life, and historical records witness to the life, death and miracles of Jesus. Jesus is God! God only asks us to believe in Jesus!

http://www.neverthirsty.org/pp/corner/read/r00180.html

Janssen:

We Would Need To Be God! Neither science nor I can prove that God exists. You cannot prove He does not exist. Neither of us can prove He does or does not exist because we do not see Him. In order to prove that, you or I would need to know every part of the universe and everything about the universe because God could be anywhere. We would also have to know everything about the other dimensions of time and existence. In short, we would need to be god to know everything and be everywhere at the same time because God might move. Then we would be god if we could know everything and be everywhere at the same time. Science is inadequate for the task.
It cannot tell us how the stuff that caused the "big-bang" came into existence or where it came from - how anything got started. That is a problem for science if it really is the god of truth. Science cannot tell me why 4,000 or 2,000 year old prophecies in the Bible came true. It cannot tell me how 700 - 500 year old prophecies came true predicting the exact week in which Jesus would die. Or, why 1,000 year old prophecies were accurate about Jesus' birth, life and His death.

You believe that the bibleGod exist yet you agree that you can not prove his existence? , You can not also tell us how the bibleGod came into existance can you? As to the 700 year old prophecy predicting the exact week Jesus will die is nothing but a farce, the other prophecies about Jesus birth, life and death are all disputable going by the original torah's account that the story was copied from into the bible, read the original hebrew torah once again and you will undertand what i am talking about. You will see that words like young woman and virgin were intentionally changed by the gospel wroters. Here is what mazaje wrote in one of his post regading this "prophecy".

Why Jews do not believe in Jesus

The requirements for the messiah are as follows (per the Jewish bible.) I use either the Stone edition or JPS. They are pretty identical and Jews accept either edition as accurate.
1. He must be from the seed of David through Solomon
2. He will be anointed King of Israel (the word messiah means anointed, nothing more and nothing less)
3. He will return the Jewish people to Israel
4. He will rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem
5. He will bring peace to the world and end all war
6. He will bring knowledge of god to the world

All of the authentic Jewish messianic prophecies are empirically verifiable. The entire world will be able to see and verify the above.

Some things he will not be:
He will not be a deity
He will not need 2 visits to accomplish his mission
He will not die for our sins
He will not be pierced ( in reference to the mistranslation of Psalm 17 explained below)

About Jewish tribal law:
If your mother is Jewish, you are Jewish
If your father was a Kohen (Priest), you are a priest (birth only, no adoption allowed)
If your father was from the tribe of Judah, you are from the tribe of Judah (birth only, no adoption allowed)

Sources for the messianic criteria are from Isaiah 11:6, Talmud Yad, Melachim 11:4, Num 24:17, Deut 17:15 Lev 24:10 Ezra 10:2,3 Gen 49;10 Num 1:18-44 24:14 and Lev 24:10
No sources for the "nots" as these are absent from the Jewish OT.

For my reference to the messiah not needing to be pierced, I refer to Psalm 22:16 (17 in Jewish bible)

Dogs have compassed me; the assembly of the wicked have enclosed me; they pierced my hands and my feet. (King James version)
Dogs have encompassed me. A company of evildoers has enclosed me; like a lion, they are at my hands and my feet. (JPS jewish bible)

Notice that when the original words of the Psalmist are read, any allusion to a crucifixion disappears. The insertion of the word "pierced" into the last clause of this verse is a not-too-ingenious Christian interpretation that was created by deliberately mistranslating the Hebrew word kaari as "pierced." The word kaari, however, does not mean "pierced," it means "like a lion." The end of Psalm 22:17, therefore, properly reads "like a lion they are at my hands and my feet." Had King David wished to write the word "pierced," he would never use the Hebrew word kaari. Instead, he would have written either daqar or ratza, which are common Hebrew words in the Jewish scriptures. Needless to say, the phrase "they pierced my hands and my feet" is a Christian contrivance that appears nowhere in the Jewish scriptures.

Bear in mind, this stunning mistranslation in the 22nd Psalm did not occur because Christian translators were unaware of the correct meaning of this Hebrew word. Clearly, this was not the case. The word kaari can be found in a number of other places in the Jewish scriptures. Yet predictably, the same Christian translators who rendered kaari as "pierced" in Psalm 22 correctly translated it "like a lion" in all other places in the Hebrew Bible where this word appears.

Now on to another mistranslated messianic passage from the OT.
Isaiah 7:14 does not support Matthew's claim that Isaiah is referring to Jesus' virgin birth, It should be said at the outset that the word "virgin" does not appear in the seventh chapter of Isaiah. The author of the first Gospel deliberately mistranslated the Hebrew word ha'almah as "a virgin." This Hebrew word ha'almah does not mean "a virgin." It means "the young woman," with no implication of virginity. Most modern Christian Bibles have corrected this erroneous translation, and their Bibles now correctly translate this Hebrew word as "the young woman." If Isaiah had wanted to spefically say virgin, he would have used betulah, a common word used in other areas of the OT that only means virgin.
Isaiah 7:14.

The seventh chapter of the Book of Isaiah begins by describing the military crisis that was confronting King Ahaz of the Kingdom of Judah. In about the year 732 B.C.E. the House of David was facing imminent destruction at the hands of two warring kingdoms: the northern Kingdom of Israel and the Kingdom of Syria. These two armies had laid siege to Jerusalem. The Bible relates that the House of David and King Ahaz were gripped with fear. Chapter seven relates how God sent the prophet Isaiah to reassure King Ahaz that divine protection was at hand. The Almighty would protect him, their deliverance was assured, and these two hostile armies would fail in their attempt to subjugate Jerusalem. In Isaiah 7 we read,

, : "Let us go up against Judah and provoke it, and annex it to us; and let us crown a king in its midst, one who is good for us." So said the Lord God, "Neither shall it succeed, nor shall it come to pass . . . ." ' " The Lord continued to speak to Ahaz, saying, "Ask for yourself a sign from the Lord, your God; ask it either in the depths, or in the heights above." Ahaz said, "I will not ask, and I will not test the Lord." Then he said, "Listen now, O House of David, is it little for you to weary men, that you weary my God as well? Therefore the Lord, of His own, shall give you a sign: Behold the young woman is with child, and she shall bear a son, and she shall call his name Immanuel. Cream and honey he shall eat when he knows to reject bad and choose good; for, when the lad does not yet know to reject bad and choose good, the land whose two kings you dread, shall be abandoned."

It is clear from this chapter that Isaiah's declaration was a prophecy of the unsuccessful siege of Jerusalem by the two armies of the Kingdoms of Israel and Syria, not a virgin birth more than 700 years later. If we interpret this chapter as referring to Jesus' birth, what possible comfort and assurance would Ahaz, who was surrounded by to overwhelming military enemies, have found in the birth of a child seven centuries later? Both he and his people would have been long dead and buried. Such a sign would make no sense.

We see, in II Kings 15-16, that this prophecy was fulfilled when these two kings were suddenly assassinated. With an understanding of the context of Isaiah 7:14 alone, it is evident that the child born in Isaiah 7:14 is not referring to Jesus or to any future virgin birth. Rather, it is referring to the divine protection that Ahaz and his people would enjoy from their impending destruction at the hands of these two enemies, the northern Kingdom of Israel and Syria.

Finally, if Isaiah's words are the substance of a dual prophecy as some Christains claim, at what age did the baby Jesus mature? Which were the two kingdoms during Jesus' lifetime that were abandoned? Who dreaded the Kingdom of Israel during the first century when there had not been a Kingdom of Israel in existence since the seventh century B.C.E.? When did Jesus eat cream and honey? Why wasn't Jesus named Immanuel? Does any of this make any sense? It doesn't because this argument of a dual prophecy was born out of the desperation of Christians and essentially makes a mockery out of the book of Isaiah.

Conclusion:Science is not fool proof! It is constantly changing as one theory after another is being revised and updated because we do not really know - we are learning. Evolution is no exception. Science is only as good as the human mind and that is faulty, biased and guilty of serious errors. May I suggest truth can be found in a supernatural book - a sacred book - the Bible. It has been proven to be accurate when it speaks to history and prophecy. It predicted Jesus' birth and death, including the week in which He would die. It predicted His return to life, and historical records witness to the life, death and miracles of Jesus. Jesus is God! God only asks us to believe in Jesus!

You can not use the bible to prove its assertions. Talking about prohecy remember that there are a lot of other prophecies that were not fullfilled in the bible? so what does that tell you?

bindex:

You guys never fail to amaze me, why do you guys keep bandying the lie that you worship a merciful deity? What is the difference between Allah and the God of the Bible? You said that Allah see mercy as a form of weakness eh?

When Jesus said love your enemies and to pray for those who persecute you, do you think Allah and his slaves buys into that and not see it as a form of weakness?  You don't believe?  Put it to the test, by going to both places of worship on their holy days and give them a piece of your mind that you have been spewing here, and come back to tell us of your findings, but make sure you first go to a bible believing church before you go to the mosque because if you start with the mosque you may not be around to check the church out.

What about the Christain God? remember he onced used to live inside a wooden ark as the story goes and any body that goes near the ark gets killed instantly. The bible God was adviced by people like David in the bible to reconsider some of his evil acts and yet you say he is merciful? By the way if we are to go by what you stated it was never the bibleGod's intension for all to go to his imaginary heaven.

Mathew 7:13 & 14

13Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: 14Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.

Now, if biblegod is not willing that any should perish, why should any perish. If it is not his will, then how can it happen?

Yet, as we see from the words of Jesus in Matthew, "few there be that find it (life)". How can "few find it", if it is bibleGod's will that none perish? I don't believe in heaven and hell by the way I am just trying to point out how senseless it sounds going by the biblical narrative.

One of the reasons why Yahweh is still forbearing and giving us a long rope is because of the sacrifice of His Son that has protected and prevented us from being consumed.  We can still enjoy His mercy while we are still physically alive in this world as the blood of Jesus Christ has been shed to protect us from the wrath of God, having paid for the eternal justice of God.  But if you die in your sins and unbelief then you will see the other side of Yahweh, who is a consuming fire, and this is a fearful thing that you cannot afford to gamble your soul with.

Yahweh has given us the freewill as free moral agents to choose between the narrow way and the broad way as both have their respective destinations.  If you freely choose the broadway of evolution theory, organised religion and other interests that the majority of the populace get into as opposed to having a personal relationship with Yahweh through Jesus Christ His Son, then know that your freedom of choice has its own responsibilities which you and you alone can be blamed for the consequences of your choice.  Yahweh has shown His greatest Power by allowing His Son to be killed for yours and my sins and the wisest thing for you to do is to accept His free gift of eternal life by accepting Jesus Christ as your Personal Saviour and Lord, then you will be set on the narrow road that leads to life eternal.  That is His will for your life but it is up to you to choose what He has chosen for you, He will not impose on you what you don't want for yourself.

OLAADEGBU:


Yahweh has given us the freewill as free moral agents to choose between the narrow way and the broad way as both have their respective destinations. If you freely choose the broadway of evolution theory, organised religion and other interests that the majority of the populace get into as opposed to having a personal relationship with Yahweh through Jesus Christ His Son, then know that your freedom of choice has its own responsibilities which you and you alone can be blamed for the consequences of your choice. Yahweh has shown His greatest Power by allowing His Son to by killed for yours and my sins and the wisest thing for you to do is to accept His free gift of eternal life by accepting Jesus Christ as your Personal Saviour and Lord, then you will be set on the narrow road that leads to life eternal. That is His will for your life but it is up to you to choose what He has chosen for you, He will not impose on you what you don't want for yourself.

I realize from your posts that any arguments against your belief in God will not change your mind in any way. So rather than try and point out the reasons you should not believe in God, I would like you ask you about your opinion of certain situations and how your religious beliefs apply to them.

For example:

A child is born in a small village in eastern Mongolia. The child's parents are farmers. The chance of this child recieving an education beyond primary school is very slim. The child's parent's beliefs are based on Taoism for the most part because that is how they were brought up but they are not too strict about it. They bring up their child the same way and with the same principles and beliefs. Most of the other villagers there believe in the same principles.

This person grows up to be a farmer and lives a modest life. This person never harms anyone or commits any crimes. In fact, there is nothing extraordinary about this person. This person lives pretty much the same life as the parents did,  and most of the villagers for that matter. In the end, the person dies of old age.

This person was never aware of Christianity as a religion. This person was not aware of a Christian God,The Bible or Jesus. A Mongolian version of the Bible was never made available to this person. That person was simply ignorant of the fact that Christianity even exists and is practiced by hundreds of millions of people.

Since this person was never baptized, nor went to church, nor did any of that which your God requires. . . . would this person be condemned to hell?

If so, would you agree that this is an extremely unfair situation for this person?

The word of your God has simply not reached that part of the world. Widespread belief of your God is not happening there. In fact,  it's not happening in most of the world.

If your God is the only God and the God everyone should believe in. . . [b]shouldn't every person in the world be given at least a chance to believe?[/b]Well aren't you such a lucky fellow to have been born into a family with the correct set of beliefs. I assume your parents and immediate family are also Christians. Am I wrong?

bindex:

Are you placating yyour troubled soul when you tell Moslems that they are worshipping the devil in Mecca? The problem with you is that you fail so see that people genuinely disbelieve in your God or the other Gods, there is a big difference between lack of belief and being angry at your God or the other Gods(you personally believe that those that disbelieve are angry, thats why you assume they are troubled), there are over 750 million atheist and non believers world wide(more than protestants) do you believe that all of us are troubled? are Christians troubled when they go around telling Moslem that they worship the wrong deity? I say this because there was a day you challenged me(on another thread) to take an oath and dare the bibleGod to do something bad to me personally because deep inside of you, you had this belief that somewhere inside of me I couldn't, perhaps you thought that I was just angry at the bibleGod and hid my anger as disbelief. After I showed you that I truly do not believe that the bibleGod exist by going ahead and taking the oath daring the bibleGod to take my life the next minute if he can to your surprise(nothing happened to me because he is imaginary), you came along with the stupid Christian mantra that the bibleGod loves me (he should take his love and shove it up his ass I don't need it). Just the way that Moslem are not troubled when they go around telling Christians that they are worshipping man not Allah, that's they same way that we atheist are not troubled when we go around trying to remove the cancer that is called religion. Any way you have been made to believe that a person that is without Jesus is already condemned and troubled. Apart from belief in the afterlife which their is no evidence of whatsoever and which Christians for example do not have a coherent and unanimous conception of , what advantage does Christianity or Islam offer to its adherents? is it more knowledge? more money and power? longer life? happiness, comfort and fulfilment? children?

You know me by now . . . i could care less (after plenty of warnings) if 90% of the world's population stopped reading the bible . . . life is all about choice, salvation is also a personal choice. My only problem is why those who cry so loudly that they dont believe in God spend way too much time talking about Him.

Would anybody who has read the substance of the post care to comment about it? I thought it was a tour de force in literary and scientific criticism. Jerry Coyne writes very captivating on the science of evolution and a tranchant critic of the ID'iots. Here, he turns his attention to the theistic evolutionists. I am a great admirer of the scientific work of Ken Miller having followed his heroic role in demolishing the ID'iots at the Dover trial in 2005, and read his book Finding Darwin's God.

The first part of FDG is worth a read but the second part where he attempts a reconciliation of science and theism can be thrown into the bin.

I just received Jerry Coyne's latest book, Why Evolution is True. Have read the first 5 chapters and am enjoying it no end. Anyone interested in finding out the truth about our place in the biosphere would do well to acquire a copy.

davidylan:

You know me by now . . . i could care less (after plenty of warnings) if 90% of the world's population stopped reading the bible . . . life is all about choice, salvation is also a personal choice. My only problem is why those who cry so loudly that they dont believe in God spend way too much time talking about Him.

I wonder why Christains spend a lot of time and money telling the world that Allah is the wrong deity even though they don't believe in his existence. I don't see they pay as much attention to buddah, sango, krisna and the rest of the other Gods.

bindex:

I wonder why Christains spend a lot of time and money telling the world that Allah is the wrong deity even though they don't believe in his existence. I don't see they pay as much attention to buddah, sango, krisna and the rest of the other Gods.

Christians dont spend as much time . . . the only reason we bother about islam AT ALL is because it is essentially built as a repudiation of everything christianity. Islam is in essence simply christianity upside down with a few minor changes to make it look original.

Your analogy falls flat.

davidylan:

Christians dont spend as much time . . . the only reason we bother about islam AT ALL is because it is essentially built as a repudiation of everything christianity. Islam is in essence simply christianity upside down with a few minor changes to make it look original.

Your analogy falls flat.

Christains dont spend as much time according to davidylan?  , a look at the islamic thread will show you other wise, I repeat Christains spend too much time talking about Allah a deity they believe does not exist. Christainity is also in essence Judaism with a lot of changes to make it look original.

bindex:

Christains dont spend as much time according to davidylan? , Christainity is also in essence Judaism with a lot of changes to make it look original.

you just love to talk dont you?
Christianity isnt Judaism . . . they are completely poles apart.
Judaism = old covenant (salvation in the blood of bulls and goats)
Christianity = new covenant (salvation in the blood of Jesus Christ)

Dont just type because ur brain tells you to, try understanding what it is you have to say.

davidylan:

you just love to talk dont you?
Christianity isnt Judaism . . . they are completely poles apart.
Judaism = old covenant (salvation in the blood of bulls and goats)
Christianity = new covenant (salvation in the blood of Jesus Christ)
Dont just type because ur brain tells you to, try understanding what it is you have to say.

This makes it more absurd. I wonder why an almighty deity needs the blood of animals to soothe his ego  from living inside a man made wooden ark to needing the blood of donkeys, bulls and goats to make him smile and feel good. you forgot to include human blood because the bibleGod use to accept human scarifice too. Now he decided to shed his own blood after being tired of consumming the blood of humans and animals. What a deity. By the way Judaism is not what you erronously defined. Judasim does not equal any old covenat as Christains will like us to believe it is a religion on its own and is still existing today but according to the christain narrative it is the old covenant but in reality it is not, even after the Christains(like the moslems) stole their entire religious narrative from the Judaism. The original hebrew Tanakh is quite different from the old testament text of the bible from where most of the stories were copied from.

Judaism (from the Greek Ioudaïsmos, derived from the Hebrew יהודה, Yehudah, "Judah";[1] in Hebrew: יַהֲדוּת, Yahedut, the distinctive characteristics of the Judean eáqnov)[2] is a set of beliefs and practices originating from the saga of the ancient Israelites, as embodied and codified in the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), as later further explored and explained in the Talmud and other texts. Judaism presents itself as the covenantal relationship between the Children of Israel (later, the Jewish nation) and God. As such, many consider it the first monotheistic religion although many aspects of Judaism correspond to Western concepts of ethics and civil law. Judaism is among the oldest religious traditions still being practised today, and many of its texts and traditions are central to other Abrahamic religions. As such, Jewish history and the principles and ethics of Judaism have influenced various other religions, including Christianity and Islam. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judaism

bindex:

This makes it more absurd. I wonder why an almighty deity needs the blood of animals to soothe his ego from living inside a man made wooden ark to needing the blood of donkeys, bulls and goats to make him smile and feel good. you forgot to include human blood because the bibleGod use to accept human scarifice too. Now he decided to shed his own blood after being tired of consumming the blood of humans and animals. What a deity. By the way Judaism is not what you erronously defined. Judasim does not equal any old covenat as Christains will like us to believe it is a religion on its own and is still existing today but according to the christain narrative it is the old covenant but in reality it is not, even after the Christains(like the moslems) stole their entire religious narrative from the Judaism. The original hebrew Tanakh is quite different from the old testament text of the bible from where most of the stories were copied from.

good. you really dont need to sweat this stuff.
If you think its absurd then abandon it.

davidylan:

good. you really dont need to sweat this stuff.
If you think its absurd then abandon it.

OK

bindex:
Judasim does not equal any old covena[/b]t as Christains will like us to believe it is a religion on its own and is still existing today but according to the christain narrative it is the old covenant but in reality it is not, even after the Christains(like the moslems) [b]stole their entire religious narrative from the Judaism. The original hebrew Tanakh is quite different from the old testament text of the bible from where most of the stories were copied from.

I didn't think that this thread would turn out to be this interesting. Sure, most Jews would disagree that there is that much of a connection between christianity and Judaism. A lot of scholars would more readily link christianity to Greek philosophy and pagan beliefs with a Jewish veneer, rather than pure judaism in itself. From that point of view one would have to disagree that Christians 'stole their entire religious narrative from . . . judaism'.

For instance the virgin birth of Jesus (the God) from the Theotokos (Mother of God) was finally established as christian doctrine in 431 at the council of Ephesus called by Theodosius II. It is incredibly hard to imagine that the influence of Ephesus which happened to be the epicenter of the Cult of Artemis, the virgin Goddess who was at the same time the Mother of the World, had no bearing on the discussions.

As for the opening post, Huxley man, that post is way way way tooo longgggg. Next time just try distilling the ideas into short paragraphs (you can even put bullet points if you like) and then post the link in case anyone else wishes to read further. I'm further dissuaded from ploughing through it cos if I did and then responded, the chances are you wouldn't bother to respond to the response, you'd rather just go and open another christian bashing thread.

Pastor AIO:

I didn't think that this thread would turn out to be this interesting. Sure, most Jews would disagree that there is that much of a connection between christianity and Judaism. A lot of scholars would more readily link christianity to Greek philosophy and pagan beliefs with a Jewish veneer, rather than pure judaism in itself. From that point of view one would have to disagree that Christians 'stole their entire religious narrative from . . . judaism'.

For instance the virgin birth of Jesus (the God) from the Theotokos (Mother of God) was finally established as christian doctrine in 431 at the council of Ephesus called by Theodosius II. It is incredibly hard to imagine that the influence of Ephesus which happened to be the epicenter of the Cult of Artemis, the virgin Goddess who was at the same time the Mother of the World, had no bearing on the discussions.

As for the opening post, Huxley man, that post is way way way tooo longgggg. Next time just try distilling the ideas into short paragraphs (you can even put bullet points if you like) and then post the link in case anyone else wishes to read further. I'm further dissuaded from ploughing through it cos if I did and then responded, the chances are you wouldn't bother to respond to the response, you'd rather just go and open another christian bashing thread.

I thought the article does not merit being distilled into little titbits, much as I was inclined to do just that. I thought this was a touchstone of popular scientific/philosophical criticism and it deserved to be read in full. It took me quite a while to read, but that efforts was well and truly rewarded.

Give it a go; you will not regret it. We might even find something to talk about

bindex:

A child is born in a small village in eastern Mongolia. The child's parents are farmers. The chance of this child recieving an education beyond primary school is very slim. The child's parent's beliefs are based on Taoism for the most part because that is how they were brought up but they are not too strict about it. They bring up their child the same way and with the same principles and beliefs. Most of the other villagers there believe in the same principles.
This person was never aware of Christianity as a religion. This person was not aware of a Christian God,The Bible or Jesus. A Mongolian version of the Bible was never made available to this person. That person was simply ignorant of the fact that Christianity even exists and is practiced by hundreds of millions of people.
Since this person was never baptized, nor went to church, nor did any of that which your God requires. . . . would this person be condemned to hell?If so, would you agree that this is an extremely unfair situation for this person?

Valid question. An important one too,since, you know,most of mankind fall into that category. Christianity has a bewildering array of doctrines and beliefs,you'll find few points of which we ALL agree. And Christianity at its crudest and most absurd is to be found on African shores. It doesn't help that some Christians are absolutely certain they know the mind of God and exactly how he's going to judge humanity. They fling vague pity at those who are not fortunate enough to believe as they do, but look forward very much to honeyed meadows and heavenly bell service. You do realize, however, that you made an important distinction there?You talked about someone who never heard of Christ,as opposed to someone who did.

I was most unsatisfied with the answers I got about that very same question, until I came across a website that furnished answers which are, at the very least,interesting. Um,it's sort of long.

http://biblestandard.com/questions/QA_d.htm

Dead—God’s Provision For The Unsaved.
Question (1974)—Will the unsaved dead have a chance to be saved to everlasting life?

Answer.—Obviously, all of Adam’s race have not been given the opportunity in this life to benefit from these three great favors. Most people have died without ever hearing of them, let alone deriving therefrom their intended blessing. This is manifest from many facts. All the heathen who died before Christ came, and almost all of them who have died since He came, never heard of God’s love for them unto salvation, of Christ’s death for them unto salvation, and of the Spirit’s work for them unto salvation, and therefore never benefited therefrom; for there is no salvation possible apart from hearing and accepting the Gospel. Many hold that these as a result have been condemned unto eternal torment; and they even affirm of those of them who died before Christ came and of the majority of the Jews who died before Christ came, that though He later died for them, yet they will never get any benefit therefrom, but that at the time of Christ’s death for them were irretrievably lost in eternal torment. From such a standpoint, what possible purpose could He have had in dying for them; if beforehand they were irretrievably lost? But not only the vast majority of the heathen never heard of these three favors; but many others likewise have died in the same condition. Three-fourths of the human family died in infancy, and therefore never derived the blessings of these favors. Many others died in childhood, not enjoying these blessings. Untold numbers of insane persons lacked them also, while Judaism and Mohammedanism have blinded many other billions to these favors. Sectarianism has darkened these subjects so that still other billions have been so confused on these matters as to have gotten but little of the intended blessings there from. Thus we see that the vast majority of the race died in ignorance of the only name under heaven whereby we must be saved, if saved at all—Acts 4: 12.

Therefore, in this life they had no opportunity of obtaining the blessings that these three favors vouchsafe every human being. Nor can they obtain these blessings while dead; for the Scriptures expressly teach that in death there is no change or reformation, or opportunity of salvation: “In the place where the tree falleth, there shall it be” (Eccl. 11: 3). There is no change in the death state for the good reason that “there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom in the grave” (Eccl. 9: 10). It being a condition in which nothing is known, seen, felt, done, received, or endured (Eccl. 9: 5, 6), there can be no change there. Consequently, for the billions who have died without Christ, without hope and without God in the world, as strangers from the covenants of promise (Eph. 2: 12), in ignorance or confusion as to the only name whereby salvation is possible, if they are to have an opportunity at all to obtain the benefits of God’s grace for all, Christ’s death for all and the Spirit’s work for all, in order to their salvation, this must be after they are awakened from the dead—during our Lord’s Second Advent and the Judgment Day, i.e., during the Millennium. And it is to make possible to the billions of earth’s non-elect, who died without having had such an opportunity, that God must have made some kind of arrangement such as we believe the Millennial Kingdom will be, in order to give all a fair chance for gaining everlasting life.

Let us not be misunderstood; we are not advocating a second chance. Emphatically we say that the Bible does not teach a second chance for the individuals of the human race. Aside from the fact that they lost their first chance collectively in Adam, they would not have an individual chance at all unless that chance, wrecked by Adam before his descendants were born, would be followed by another chance, which would be the first chance for the individuals of the human race to gain salvation. But while we do not teach a second chance for the individuals of the human race, apart from Adam and Eve, we do not teach less than one chance for each individual. The difficulty with those who seek to make the above teaching opprobrious by calling it a second chance, is that they do not teach even one individual chance for everybody. They claim that whoever did not have an opportunity to obtain salvation in this life will get none at all. Therefore they teach that the overwhelming majority of the race will never get a chance at all, despite the Biblical teachings that God’s love, Christ’s death and the Spirit’s work are for all men in order to salvation! And to them this means that these untold billions are at death handed over to fireproof or otherwise torture-proof devils for eternal torment! Theirs is the opprobrious doctrine, not ours.

We teach, in harmony with the Bible, only one individual chance for all Adam’s descendants. We further teach according to the Bible that a small number of the race, the Church of the Firstborn, gets that chance in this life, that all who make shipwreck of the present opportunity to gain life are everlastingly lost, and that all others are debarred from the present salvation, because they lack the necessary kind of faith to qualify them for becoming of Abraham’s pre-Millennial Seed. We also teach, according to the Bible, that all the rest—the non-elect—will get their chance—their first individual, not their second individual, chance— after the elect are all in the Kingdom with our dear Lord Jesus Christ. Unless some such arrangement should prevail, it would be impossible for the practical application of God’s love, Christ’s death and the Spirit’s work, to all for salvation. And God is too practical, as well as too wise, just, loving and powerful, not to have arranged a feasible way of realizing for all an opportunity for those whom He in the present life excluded from opportunity of the elective salvation with the express purpose of giving them one later (Rom. 11: 30-32). Such an opportunity we must all recognize is fair and Godlike, and therefore is certainly to be expected from God’s love, Christ’s death and the Spirit’s work for all men unto salvation. ’74-70

Interesting,no? If it deeply offends our sense of justice that someone who's never heard of Christ should be 'eternally condemned' after death, shouldn't it offend God much more,if he is everything that we say he is, good,merciful,just?

The relationship between modern atheism and logic is a precarious one. Beginning with the assumption that there is no God, and, hence, no absolute exists to serve as the basis for any other absolutes, the blight of relativism infected all fields of knowledge. Subsequent history has demonstrated that the spread of relativism is irresistible once the premise of atheism is assumed.

Premise: Since there is no God,

Conclusion: there are no absolutes.

Premise: Since there are no absolutes,

Conclusion: everything is relative.           

The first field of relativization was ethics. The Ten Commandments, the Golden Rule and all other moral absolutes were jettisoned. With great joy, atheistic philosophers proclaimed that there were no moral absolutes. Ethics became a matter of personal preference instead of an issue of “absolutes.” Morality was reduced until it had no more significance than a personal preference for vanilla over chocolate.

Joseph Lewis wrote in 1926, “There is in reality no absolute standard by which we judge…. In the final analysis our guide in moral affairs should be that which gives to the individual the greatest possible happiness.”1

The Encyclopedia Americana comments, “Since there is no God, man is the creator of his own values.”2 John Hick declares, “There is no God; therefore no absolute values and no absolute laws.”3

The poverty of relativism is demonstrated by its inability to condemn evil on an objective basis-when the existence of God was denied, the existence of good and evil was also denied. Its adherents must therefore depend on other bases of morality.

When confronted with the question (given his commitment to relativism), “On what grounds would you condemn the acts of Hitler?”, the great infidel logician Bertrand Russell committed an obvious logical fallacy. He said that Hitler was wrong because “most people agree with me.”4 This is the fallacy called argumentum ad populum, in which something is considered true just because many people agree to it.

When Russell was finally forced to tell how he distinquished between good and evil, he said, “by my own feelings.”5 This is the logical fallacy known as argumentum ad hominem (circumstantial) in which something is said to be true simply because of the circumstances of the person. Russell was saying, “Because of my personal feelings, Hitler was wrong.” Of course, if Russell’s reasons were valid, Hitler could have argued on this same basis that he was right in killing six million Jews. His feelings and happiness were in complete accord with his actions!

At first people naively assumed that relativism could be contained in the realm of ethics. But relativism like a cancer could only grow until it had infiltrated all fields of knowledge. One by one, every area of knowledge has been infected and consumed by relativism. Several examples will illustrate this point.

Relativism and History

Modern views of history have become relativistic. The idea that it is possible to have objective knowledge of the past has now been replaced by an agnostic approach to history which assumes no objective knowledge is possible. History, no longer a matter of historical facts, has been reduced to the level of subjective interpretation by the process that modern atheism unleashed.

Premise: Since there is no God,

Conclusion: there are no absolutes.

Premise: Since there are no absolutes,

Conclusion: everything is relative.

Premise: Since everything is relative,

Conclusion: history is relative.             

Relativists view history as a matter of personal interpretation. No one can really know what happened in the past. History is therefore only relative, subjective interpretations which arise out of a historian’s personal preference. The Soviets write history one way and the Americans write it another way, but it makes no difference in the end, for no one really knows what happened in the past. No one appeals to historical facts anymore because there are no absolutes in history.6

In this sense, modern atheists state that Jesus of Nazareth was not historical, i.e., His existence and teaching are not to be viewed as facts of history, but rather as the products of subjective interpretations. To be consistent, this principle should also hold true for Socrates, Napolean, Isaac Newton and Abraham Lincoln. After all, they are no more historical than Jesus. Each historian presents his subjective conception and not objective history. Thus all history is reduced to personal preference and interpretation.

Relativism and Science

The process of relativism has begun to erode confidence in the reality of scientific absolutes. What were once viewed as objective scientific laws which man discovered by observation and experimentation have now been relativized. This was unavoidable once atheism was adopted as the beginning assumption.

Premise: Since there is no God,

Conclusion: there are no absolutes.

Premise: Since there are no absolutes,

Conclusion: everything is relative.

Premise: Since everything is relative,

Concusion: science is relative.             

In one debate with an atheist, I asked, “What is a scientific ‘law’ or ‘law of nature’ to you?” He replied that a “law” is a statement written on a piece of paper which represents the ability of the human mind to order reality according to its wishes. There are no objective or absolute laws per se in the universe, so the order that we see in the world is a projection of our minds. There are no scientific absolutes.7

It was, of course, inevitable that once the laws of God were jettisoned, the laws of nature would soon follow. Western science was originally built upon the assumption that an orderly God had made an orderly universe which ran according to laws He had placed in it at creation. These laws were absolute because they were the laws of an absolute God. On one occasion, Einstein was asked how he knew the speed of light in a vacuum was the same everywhere in the universe. He replied, “God does not play dice with this world.” His answer was the same as that which Isaac Newton would have given. All scientific absolutes depend on the existence of an absolute God who upholds them throughout the universe.

The rise of relativism in quantum mechanics and modern physics has called all absolutes into question. Not even mathematics has been spared. Now there are no absolutes in math. Lee Carter, who wrote a handbook for atheists to use when debating theists, asserts:

There are, then, no such things as eternal and necessary truths of arithmetic and geometry…. There are many possible systems of arithmetic and geometry…. But such mathematical propositions are only statements about the system we have set up.8

Carter is saying that 2 + 2 = 4 is true only because we arbitrarily set it up that way. We could make 2 + 2 = 55 if we wanted. There are no absolutes in math because everything is relative.

Science is now being defined in terms of subjective preference and cultural bias. The cancer of relativism has destroyed the soul of science.9 The full implications of the relativization of Western science, however, are just beginning to manifest themselves. We now face an acute shortage of math and science teachers in the public schools. Students graduate from high school unable to solve the simplest mathematical problems. Very few young people have any desire to enter science as a career. The Western world’s edge on technology has almost disappeared. The ultimate economic consequences of this decline may prove catastrophic for the Western world.

Relativism and Logic

The last bastion of absolutes was logic. But this too has been consumed by the same irresistible progress of unbelief that destroyed absolutes in all other fields.

Premise: Since there is no God,

Conclusion: there are no absolutes.

Premise: Since there are no absolutes,

Conclusion: everything is relative.

Premise: Since everything is relative,

Concusion: logic is relative.               

Modern atheists are somewhat schizophrenic at this point. On the one hand, when confronted by a theistic argument that is logically valid, Carter advises young atheists to say, “Actually, logic is whatever people find to be convincing; and just as our concepts of nature have changed over the years, so have our concepts of the laws of logic.”10 He then dismisses Aristotle’s law of contradiction “as childish sophistry” and goes on to relativize all logic by claiming that logic is a matter of personal preference. What is logical to me may not be logical to him. It is all relative.

On the other hand, when trying to refute the theistic proofs, the same modern atheists will suddenly reverse themselves and appeal to the absolute laws of logic. For example, when refuting theism, Carter will point out the invalid use of tautologies and other laws of logic (which he has declared relative).11 On one page, he considers Aristotle’s logic as “childish sophistry,” while on another he employs it as the absolute truth!

Modern atheists never seem to realize that if there are no absolutes, then they cannot say theism is absolutely wrong. If there are no absolutes in history, science or logic, then it is impossible to say that history, science or logic refute Christianity. If everything is relative then theism is historically, scientifically and logically true to those who want it to be true. Atheists cannot objectively say that theism is false, for they deny objectivity. The irrational character of unbelief manifests itself most clearly in this issue. For example, how can atheists insist the law of contradiction to be invalid when they must use it to deny its validity? To declare “the law of contradiction is false” proves that the law is true.

If everything is relative, then all the arguments ever developed against the theistic proofs are invalid because they try to show that the theistic proofs are objectively or logically false. For if, as they claim, there is no objective truth, then there is no objective nontruth!

If modern atheists were consistent, they would say, “If the theistic proofs are logically valid to you, they are logically valid. If they are not logically valid to me, then they are not logically valid. It makes no difference. Logic is purely a matter of personal preference.” But modern atheists are not consistent because they would be out of business if they were. They would never get any royalties because they would never write books. They could never obtain any teaching positions because they would have nothing to teach their students.

The idea that truth is like a lump of formless clay which can be molded any way one desires does not provide any ammunition against theism. Where then do the atheists derive their arguments? They must temporarily function on the very theistic base they are trying to refute. They must argue as if there were absolute truth. They must appeal to absolute laws in science, history and logic. If they don’t do this, they can’t argue. But to do so shows that their atheism, materialism and relativism are fideistic (relying on faith alone) in nature because their beliefs cannot be “proved” unless they adopt theistic methodologies. When they appeal to absolutes to prove that there are no absolutes, they reveal that their position is fideistic.

Another problem faces unbelief at this point. By its assumption of relativism, it has placed itself beyond verification or falsification. Since there are no absolutes to appeal to, atheists cannot prove their position nor can others disprove it. Since verification and falsification are two of their chief arguments against theism, on the basis of what they themselves believe, atheism is erroneous.

When someone points out the logical errors in their system, they can reply, “Logic is relative. I simply don’t accept your rules of logic. I made up my own rules today and I am logical according to my rules. There are no absolutes in logic.” The same fate awaits any attempt to point out the numerous historical or scientific errors in atheistic writings. The errors are dismissed as unimportant because “Everything is relative” or “It is only your personal opinion.” In this way, the atheist cannot be refuted.

Of course, even if someone says there are no absolutes, he cannot live without absolutes. For instance, he must pay the proper amount at the check-out counter. Imagine him trying to convince the retailer that “everything is relative” and thus he will give the clerk one dollar for an item marked 25 dollars, and demand 150 dollars in change! In the same vein, who is going to jump off a ten-story building because the law of gravity is only relative?

The statement “Everything is relative” is not only unlivable, it is self-refuting, because it is always given as an absolute. (One student countered his infidel professor who had just said that everything was relative by asking him if he were absolutely sure of that!) “Everything is relative” is like the statement “Everything I say is a lie”; if everything I say is a lie, then the statement itself is a lie. My declaration means I must actually be someone who tells the truth. But if I always tell the truth, then how can I say that everything I say is a lie? The proposition is nonsense because it refutes itself.

The theist, however, is not fideistic because his faith is open to verification or falsification. When he states that the Bible is historically true, he means that it can be either verified or disproven by archaeological evidence. When the infidel Sir William Ramsey decided to disprove the reliability of the Bible, he went to the Middle East to do archaeological research. If the Bible were true he would find the evidence for such cities as Lystra, Derbe, etc., which were unknown at that time. But, on the other hand, if such cities never existed, then the Bible was false. His discoveries verified the reliability of the Bible so strongly that he later became a Christian.12

Of course, most modern atheists will not accept any refutation from objective facts, even if they are empirical evidence from archaeology. In one of my radio debates with an atheist, the atheist argued that Nazareth did not exist because it was not mentioned by Josephus or the Talmud. I pointed out that:

1. She was arguing from silence, which is a logical fallacy. She was being irrational in her argument.

2. Neither Josephus nor the Talmud attempt to mention every city, town and village in Israel. Why should they mention a small village such as Nazareth?

3. Nazareth was mentioned in the New Testament which was written in the first century according to the empirical and internal evidence.13

4. The Nazareth Stone, bearing a decree by Claudius, was discovered in 1878. It can be dated a.d. 41-54.14

The atheist’s response was instructive. She did not care if she was illogical in arguing from silence. As to the archaeological evidence I offered, she responded that “anybody can dig up a stone and call it whatever they want.” She simply swept aside the archaeological evidence!

While someone can say that the laws of logic are relative and need not be followed, he must nonetheless use those laws to say it. Logic is essential to human thought and communication. The law of contradiction has an ontological (based upon an analysis of the nature of being) basis in the nature of the God who “cannot lie,” and in the nature of man who was made in God’s image. Since modern atheism is fideistic in nature, it has therefore become the task of the theists to defend logic, reason and science.15

Of course, there is an appearance of reason in modern atheistic writings. When the typical modern atheist is refuting the theistic arguments, he will appeal to logic, reason and science because the arguments he is using came from the eighteenth and nineteenth century philosophers who believed in such absolutes. But when forced to defend his relativism, the modern atheist reveals that he believes there are no absolutes in logic, reason or science!

Modern atheists are thus in a hopeless situation. The only way they can refute the theistic proofs is by using old Kantian arguments which are based on absolutes which atheists no longer accept. It is a classic Catch-22 situation.



This is an excerpt from The New Atheism and the Erosion of Freedom by Robert Morey

There are two good things in life: freedom of thought and freedom of action. In the whole world man is the only being that is condemned by its nature to be free as well as to be religious. So by nature man is endowed with the power of the will just as he is equally endowed with religious tendency.Freewill in the simplest term means the freedom to make choice. Moreover.....

http://www.scharticles.com/philosophical-look-religion-freewill-light-james-william/