The Verdict of Reason
Last time out we looked at Worldviews and Truth; both tools that we need to evaluate are arguments going forward. There are several basic worldviews, or ways of looking at reality. These are Theism, Materialism, Deism and Pantheism. And each of these worlviews – and their subsets, (such as Christianity and Islam being subsets of Theism) – must answer five essential questions: Origin, Identity, Meaning, Morality and Destiny. That’s where Truth comes in. The various worldviews are making claims about the Truth; trying to explain reality. Take Christianity for instance. It claims to interpret the world in a ‘real’ way. While faith may be necessary; it is not a blind faith that is required but one based on ‘the way things are.’ It provides an explanation of ‘how the world works.’ And each of these worldviews – including scientific Materialism – must stand the tests of rationality, coherence and internal consistency. They all must be weighed against the evidence. And we’ll see that as we unpack the science of the thing – that is precisely where ‘scientific Materialism’ will face its greatest challenge.
ORIGINS
“The heavens declare the glory of God; And the firmament shows His handiwork.” (Psalm 19:1)
Atheism or Materialism has a real problem. You see the Atheist / Materialis point of view is this: Everything must be able to be explained by material causes. And that’s where ‘science’ itself has seemed to throw up a major road block. [We’ll also find that what scientists now know about the origin of the Universe also poses major problems for Budhists, Hindus, New Agers and others of the Pantheistic worldview. But for now we’ll just concern ourselves with the Materialist point of view.] Another name for Materialism is Naturalism and it postulates that the laws of science are all we need to understand the universe. It holds that there is no first, or ultimate cause. There is no design apparent in nature, and therefore no purpose. The implications of this belief are enormous. If there is no purpose, if all of being is the result of accidental, impersonal forces, then there can be no evil, for there is no morality, for there is no source for such an ultimate morality. Oxford’s Richard Dawkins puts it in startlingly candid terms. “There is at the bottom of it all no good, no evil, no purpose, nothing but blind pitiless indifference. DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is, and we dance to its music.”[i] The Materialist / Scientific way of knowing then sees the entire cosmos, including man himself, as the product of accidental forces. If man is an accident it must necessarily follow that life itself is meaningless. Meaning only exists as we define it. And in modernist thought only science is competent to reveal knowledge and define existence. Writing in the New York Review of Books in January 1997, noted apologist for naturalism, and Professor of Genetics at Harvard Richard Lewontin put the position most succinctly. “The problem is to get them to reject irrational and supernatural explanations of the world, the demons that exist only in their imaginations, and to accept …science as the only begetter of truth. We exist as material beings in a material world, all of whose phenomena are the consequences of material relations among material entities.” Lewontin further admits in the same article that it is not the compelling nature of the evidence that leads to such a conclusion but a prior commitment to processes “that produce material explanations.”[ii] And therein lies the rub. The scientific community has for the most part, established a philosophical theory which rules out anything but matter; attempting to explain the existence of matter by first ruling out any cause for matter.) Dr Philip Johnson writing in ‘Is God Constitutional? (Part 2)’, tackles this very question, “This is best seen in terms of the history of life, where it is axiomatic with evolutionary biologists and chemists that only purposeless, unintelligent material processes were involved in creating the immensely complex and diverse forms of life that exist today.”[iii] As we go on to consider the science of the thing it is essential that we understand this: Materialism by definition excludes the consideration of outside forces. It can only follow then that a creative outside force, i.e. God, must by assumption be excluded. In effect it is saying; ‘When we consider the origin of man and the cosmos we will only consider natural, material causes. Aha! We have found that man is the product of natural material causes alone.’ The assumption that everything is the result of material processes alone is in place before the evidence is even considered.
But there’s a slight problem with this ‘scientific’ view. It is actually opposed to the findings of modern science. So let’s look at the Materialist Worldview. Dr Stephen Meyer explains. In the beginning, in eternity past, there were Particles. Over time, Particles became complex living stuff. Over time, Living Stuff became aware. Then Living Stuff conceived of God. (This of course is directly opposed to the Theistic Worldview which holds that God came first and then came Matter.) So the materialist offers us a Universe in which there is no design, no purpose and of course, no God. Uber-Atheist Richard Dawkins offers that the Cosomos came from undirected mindless processes. And intelligence came late to that party…..therefore there is no design – just Chance. So the Materialit view is that the Universe is: Eternal, Self-Existent, Self-Creating, Self-Organizing and Autonomous from Outside Forces.[iv] And this was the view that was holding sway in the scientific community during the 19th and into the 20th century. Even Einstein believed in the eternal universe. And then scientists began to suspect, then formulate a theory and finally develop several lines of evidence toward a new reality. The Universe had a beginning. They called that generating event: The Big Bang. And that realization changed everything.
It all really began during the second decade of the last century, brought to the forefront by a German scientist with unkempt hair by the name of Albert Einstein. He was working up his Theory of General Relativity and his conclusions were moving him toward a reality that he found personally very uncomfortable. His work with the equations of General Relativity meant “that space-time as whole must be warped and curved back on itself, which in itself would cause matter to move, shrinking uncontrollably under its own gravity. Thus, as early as 1917, Einstein and others realized that the equations of general relativity did not describe a static universe,”[v] and that all time matter and space had to have a beginning. And that’s not how he wanted things to be. Authors Geisler and Turek put it this way. “He wanted the universe to be self-existent – not reliant on any outside cause – but the universe appeared to be one giant effect. In fact, Einstein so disliked the implications of General Relativity – a theory that is now proven accurate to five decimal places – that he introduced a cosmological constant (which some have since called a ‘fudge factor’) into equations in order to show that the universe is static and to avoid an absolute beginning.” This ‘cosmological constant’ was, on his part, a wishful theory that would maintain the fiction of a static universe with no beginning. But subsequent observations and experimentation didn’t support that and he would later own that notion of cosmological constant was “the biggest blunder of my life.” Just a few years later, Arthur Eddington “conducted an experiment during a solar eclipse” that proved both Einstein’s Theory of Relativity – with one caveat however. The universe did indeed have a beginning. What’s more, Willem de Sitter proved that General Relativity absolutely required an expanding Universe.[vi]Then in 1927. Edwin Hubble actually observed evidence for an expanding Universe from his newly built space telescope. This ran against the grain of centuries of scientific thought. As Luke Matin, author of the website Physics of the Universe writes: “Hubble started to notice that the light coming from these galaxies was shifted a little towards the red end of the spectrum due to the Doppler effect (known as ‘redshift’), which indicated that the galaxies were moving away…. Hubble concluded that the galaxies and clusters of galaxies were in fact flying apart from each other at great speed, and that the universe was therefore definitively growing in size.” And if the universe was moving apart it had to have had a beginning.[viii] Geisler and Turek offer this picture. Think of it this way: If the universe is expanding then in your mind go back in time. Imagine the entire cosmos collapsing back on itself. It would eventually shrink to a point where it was “actually nothing. (ie no time, no space, no matter.) In other words, once there was nothing, and then BANG, there was something – the entire universe exploded into being.”[ix]
The implications of this were enormous. Just where did ther first ‘matter’ come from? The First Law of Thermodynamics states that matter can be neither destroyed nor created. Yet it is just such a ‘super-natural’ event that is necessary to explain the spontaneous generation of hydrogen atoms out of the great nothing. A belief in pure materialism necessitates accepting that matter did generate itself out of nothing. This is a notion that runs contrary to the known laws of physics. More pointedly, it forces its atheistic adherents to claim as the basis for all existence that the universe was called into being out of nothing, by no one for no particular purpose and in violation of the physical laws generated by that act of creation.[x]
Think of it, for centuries scientific thought held to the theory of the eternal universe. The universe was always existent. If this model held true then there was no need to accept the idea of a Creator that formed the Cosmos. This idea was the atheist’s greatest friend. The last 40 years or so though have seen one of the greatest shifts in scientific thought in history. Dr. Gerald Schroeder, a scholar in both physics and Biblical interpretation, sees the shift as representing “the most significant change science can ever make toward biblical philosophy.”[xi] The foundation for this change was laid in 1946 by Russian born scientist George Gamow, who proposed the Big Bang Theory. He held that the universe was the result of an intense concentration of energy. He predicted that through the resultant explosion everything in the universe should be rushing away from each other with incredible speed. Work-a-day scientists Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias confirmed Gamow’s theory in 1965 through the observation of background radiation. Later work has cemented the view among cosmologists that the universe must have had a starting point. Materialism requires that the causes go all the way back…..but now science itself was blowing up that pseudo-scientific assumption. And not only was the universe expanding – and not only did it have a beginning – but it is huge beyond human comprehension. There are 100 billion stars – with at least 100 billion planets in our galaxy, the Milky Way alone. And that small to medium size galaxy is only one of 100 billion to 200 billion galaxies in the Cosmos.[xii] The enormity of it all boggles the mind. Those believing in pure Materialism have been backed into a corner.
Consider the words of the agnostic astronomer Robert Jastrow from his book God And The Astronomers. “No explanation other than the Big Bang has been found for the fireball radiation. The clincher, which has convinced almost the last doubting Thomas, is that the radiation discovered by Penzias and Wilson has exactly the pattern of wavelengths expected for the light and heat produced in a great explosion. Supporters of the Steady State theory have tried desperately to find an alternative explanation, but they have failed. At the present time, the Big Bang theory has no competitors.”[xiii] Later in his controversial book, Jastrow explained “NOW THREE LINES of evidence—the motions of the galaxies, the laws of thermodynamics, and the life story of the stars—pointed to one conclusion; all indicated that the Universe had a beginning.” And that left old school scientists facing a very uncomfortable conclusion. “Consider the enormity of the problem. Science has proven that the Universe exploded into being at a certain moment. It asks, What cause produced this effect? Who or what put the matter and energy into the Universe? Was the Universe created out of nothing, or was it gathered together out of pre-existing materials? And science cannot answer these questions, because, according to the astronomers, in the first moments of its existence the Universe was compressed to an extraordinary degree, and consumed by the heat of a fire beyond human imagination. The shock of that instant must have destroyed every particle of evidence that could have yielded a clue to the cause of the great explosion…. For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”[xiv] Next time we’ll take a look at some more lines of evidence.
[i] Richard Dawkins as quoted by Ravi Zacharias, Lessons From War in a Battle of Ideas, posted November 10, 2000
[ii] Philip, The Unraveling of Scientific Materialism, First Things, November 1997
[iii] Philip Johnson, Is God Constitutional?, University of California at Berkley, 1996, http://www.arn.org/docs/johnson/unconst1.htm
[iv] Dr Stephen Meyer, Does God Exist (DVD), True U, Truth Project, Focus on the Family, Part 2
[v]THE EXPANDING UNIVERSE AND HUBBLE’S LAW, The Physics of the Universe,
http://www.physicsoftheuniverse.com/topics_bigbang_expanding.html, 2009
[vi] Norman L Geisler & Frank Turek, I Don’t Have Enough Faith t6o Be an Atheist, Crossway, 2004, pg73-74
[vii] Image taken from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein
[viii] THE EXPANDING UNIVERSE AND HUBBLE’S LAW, The Physics of the Universe, http://www.physicsoftheuniverse.com/topics_bigbang_expanding.html, 2009
[ix] Norman L Geisler & Frank Turek, I Don’t Have Enough Faith t6o Be an Atheist, Crossway, 2004, pg 79
[x] Chuck Missler, Atheism Hits a Brick Wall: The First Law of Thermodynamics, http://www.bibleprobe.com/thermodynamics.htm, Viewed February 6, 2015
[xi] Dr Philip Johnson, The Religion of the Blind Watchmaker, University of California at Berkley, 1996
http://www.arn.org/docs/johnson/watchmkr.htm
[xii] Elizabeth Howell, How Many Stars Are in the Milky Way?, Space.com, May 21, 2014
[xiii] Robert Jastrow, God And The Astronomers, Chapter 1, WW Norton & Company, 1978, Viewed at http://www.unfitnews.com/authors/RJga1InBeginning.html
[xiv] Robert Jastrow, God And The Astronomers, Chapter 6, WW Norton & Company, 1978, Viewed at http://www.unfitnews.com/authors/RJga1InBeginning.html
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