“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 / Materialist point of view is this: Everything must be able to be explained by material causes. And that poses major problems for the promoters of materialism as well as Budhists, Hindus, New Agers and others of the Pantheistic worldview. 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 can be no first, or ultimate cause. There is no design apparent in nature, and therefore no purpose. That has become the creed for some. It is their religion. 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. 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.” But Lewontin actually admits that it is not the compelling nature of the evidence that leads to such a conclusion but rather, a prior commitment to processes “that produce material explanations.”[ii] 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 points out the weakness of tht position. “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] 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 is in place before the evidence is even considered.
Let’s summarize 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. Everything came from undirected mindless processes. And intelligence came late to that party…..therefore there is no design – just Chance. So the Materialist 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. That changed everything.
It all really began during the second decade of the last century. Einstein 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. The Universe was NOT self-existant. Instead it was one giant effect. He didn’t like the implications of his own Theory of General Relativity. So, “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 the fiction wouldn’t stand up.
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. Hubble noticed the light from galaxies shifting a little to the left indicating that they were moving away. It was the Doppler Effect known as ‘redshift.’ The galaxies were flying apart from each other. The Universe was growing. And if the universe was moving apart it had to have had a begininng.[vii] 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.”[viii]
But where did this 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 to explain the spontaneous generation of hydrogen atoms out of the great nothing. So, believers in materialism would have to believe that NOTHING CREATED EVERYTHING. But this violates 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.[ix]
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. Then, in the last 50 years or so , we have seen one of the greatest shifts in scientific thought in history. The Big Bang Theory was formalized by George Gamow in 1946. He held that the universe was the result of an intense concentration of energy. Gamow predicted that through the resultant explosion everything in the universe should be rushing away from each other with incredible speed. Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias confirmed Gamow’s theory in 1965 through the observation of background radiation. Further observations confirmed the that the Universe had to have a beginning. 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.[x] 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.”[xi] 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 scientitsts 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.”[xii]
[i] Richard Dawkins as quoted by Ravi Zacharias, Lessons From War in a Battle of Ideas, posted November 10, 2000
[ii] Philip Johnson, 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] THE EXPANDING UNIVERSE AND HUBBLE’S LAW, The Physics of the Universe,
http://www.physicsoftheuniverse.com/topics_bigbang_expanding.html, 2009
[viii] Norman L Geisler & Frank Turek, I Don’t Have Enough Faith t6o Be an Atheist, Crossway, 2004, pg 79
[ix] Chuck Missler, Atheism Hits a Brick Wall: The First Law of Thermodynamics, http://www.bibleprobe.com/thermodynamics.htm, Viewed February 6, 2015
[x] Elizabeth Howell, How Many Stars Are in the Milky Way?, Space.com, May 21, 2014
[xi] Robert Jastrow, God And The Astronomers, Chapter 1, WW Norton & Company, 1978, Viewed at http://www.unfitnews.com/authors/RJga1InBeginning.html
[xii] 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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