Refuting Atheism
Copyright 2007 by Jeffrey Stueber,
all rights reserved
Introduction
I, like
many people, grew up going to a Christian
school, 
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So Darwin meant nothing to me until a later time
when I would engage him.
My first
direct encounter with atheism came in the mid 1990s with a man who went by the
name Lunatic Fringe. I always thought
atheism was some backwoods “hick” belief that was discussed on colleges and
universities, but something nobody actually saw among the populace. Sure, I heard rumors that one of my relatives
was an atheist, but my family was largely Bible-believing folk who wouldn’t
know what to do if they encountered an atheist.
Lunatic shocked me out of my complacence. Here was an atheist that was schooled in the
art of debate (fierce verbal warfare, actually) and I was outmanned at every
turn. I thought I could dispose of him
by simply citing a Josh Mcdowell book on apologetics,
but he always had a rejoinder to every quotation I could muster. I don’t fear him anymore or his beliefs, but
to an unschooled Christian like I was an atheist as he could be
intimidating.
So what is
the core of atheism? The infidels web
site says an atheist “is a person without a belief in
God. . . . To be without a belief in God merely means that the term 'god' has
no importance or possibly no meaning to you. Belief in God is not a factor in
your life. Surely this is quite different from denying the existence of God.
Atheism is not a belief as such. It is the lack of belief.” [1] This is not an isolated comment. Frank Zindler, in a debate with
William Lane Craig, also said atheism has nothing to defend because it makes no
claims of itself. So atheism is given
the façade that it has as much, or little, belief in God as it has in Santa
Claus and little green elves.
However,
Santa Claus and elves are not controversial; God is. Because of this, atheists, contrary to any
suggestions otherwise, hold certain core beliefs that they defend against
religious assault-assumptions that come as rebuttals to certain religious
arguments. The word “god” does have
meaning to them and they are certainly aware of what claims about god are and
do and they are worried, all too much at times, about the dangers of a theocracy. Atheists also have serious convictions about
biological and stellar evolution, convictions that buttress any attempts at
suggesting the universe is anything but accidental.
The Moral Argument
The theistic moral argument supposes there are moral absolutes that we are to obey and moral laws require the existence of a divine lawmaker. Atheists, of course, admit this is a powerful argument and scramble to find a counter to it. They claim that moral knowledge is an adaptation that helps us survive and moral rules are subsequently learned and reinforced by our culture. Richard Taylor, in his debate with William Lane Craig, relates the common evolutionist hypothesis for the origin of morality.
Is the basis for morality natural or supernatural? It is neither. The basis for morality is conventional, which means the rules of morality were fabricated by human beings over many generations. These rules are: to abstain from injury, to abstain from lying, theft, assault, killing, and so forth. These rules were not the invention of God. No one in this room imagines that if there were not a God to tell us these things, we would not know any better. [2]
There is no doubt that our culture reinforces certain moral codes and compels us to obey them. Yet, a fatal flaw in this theory is that not every rule learned in a culture is morally correct and not every moral precept is one learned through trial and error. Nazis learned how to kill Jews in Germany just as Americans once “learned” that it was moral to enslave minorities. We “discovered” that it was immoral to enslave minorities by appealing to absolute moral precepts, not experiences learned through cultural evolution. It would be difficult for an atheist to deny that we have made moral progress in no longer allowing such practices. Obviously those outside the German culture obtained their morals from their culture, but they believe and have a fervent understanding their morality is superior and not just because it comes from their own culture. Clearly moral knowledge must come from something beyond mere cultural conditioning if it is true that one’s morals can be immoral despite their origin in their culture.
This brings up a familiar counter-argument to such atheist relativistic ethics. How is one to judge which moral action is correct between competing cultures? If my friend Sadam is willing to kill a busload of children in my country and his culture allows it but mine does not, am I right or is he? Both of us have learned that whatever actions we condone are allowed in our culture, but both cultures cannot both be making proper ethical judgments in allowing these practices. Killing, as in terrorist acts, and not killing cannot both be morally correct. Clearly the transcendence of moral absolutes allows us to judge other cultures while relativism does not.
This moral
knowledge is so powerful that atheists cannot escape from this knowledge when
they judge god. The assumption here
seems to be that everyone, even god, is subject to these rules. Sinnott-Armstrong
raises a number of counter-theist arguments based on the suffering people
experience. From a Darwinian standpoint,
why should the evil of allowing such suffering be an issue unless atheists
understand that we, and god, are obligated to treat others well and this
obligation is timeless and something by which we will eventually be judged?
The
alternative to such relativistic ethics is theistic absolutism and humanists
have their rebuttal that comes in the familiar form of Paul Kurtz’s rebuttal.
Bringing up the specter of God commanding Abraham to kill his son Isaac, Kurtz
argues, as Taylor does, that our ethics are merely a result of cultural
conditioning and even if God commands us to obey him, that command could
possibly be immoral.
That parents should not kill their children is one
of our highest moral precepts. For
someone to do so would violate all of the norms of human conduct necessary for
living together in a community. We do
not need God to tell us that. Indeed, the very idea that Abraham would have
been willing to kill Isaac is reprehensible. He should have dissented and
remonstrated with God. He should have
attempted to change God’s mind. And if
God refused, Abraham should have refused to obey. Disobedience to divine commandments that are
patently immoral is not sinful, for we learn by experience that moral
principles have a kind of autonomy of their own, quite independent of God. [3]
This, if
anything, clearly shows that humanists do not believe their own words. If ethical precepts are merely what we find
works for a society during a given time period, then this ethical theory is
merely descriptive, not prescriptive.
Such a theory cannot prescribe certain actions because it merely states
our ethics are what we find useful now. It cannot prescribe future actions because we may change our minds in the
future. Slavery was once allowed whereas
we now disallow it, but we did not and could not have argued its immorality
based on what was practiced at that time. Here Kurtz, in appealing to the immorality of
killing children, is appealing to universal time-transcendent ethical
principles that do not depend on our culture’s approval despite his demand that
our ethics come from what our culture finds useful at a specific time period.
Another way
humanists show they do not believe this nonsense is that they demand permission
to do actions that have been condemned for many years. Man-woman marriage and chastity outside
marriage has been praised for years although people at times fall into
adulterous habits. Yet, as I will show
later, humanists demand much wider latitude in their sexual practices that
history has allowed. They also demand the right to abort though in much of our
past this was disallowed as well. Their
arguments for these practices appeal to universal ethical principles, not
time-dependent ones. They demand their “rights” be respected, rights that
apparently transcend human permissions.
If these rights do not depend on our culture’s permission for them, then
where do they originate from and who guarantees them?
I would
surmise that Abraham was willing to obey God because he knew God well enough to
trust Him that he had a reason for demanding he kill Isaac. Biblical ethical principles have always
demanded that we obey God’s commands to not kill others but obey God even when
he demands us sacrifice another human being.
With this
portion of this essay, it should be obvious that morals commands are real, are known, cannot
be the result of cultural conditioning, are binding and universal, are premised
on the assumption mankind has possessions (like rights) that must be
respected. This argues this inborn
information is a command that is information, and information requires a
source. This source must be powerful to
a degree that it can program the information into our genetics and be one that
can judge us for our actions. A divine
being, like the god of Judaism or Christianity, is the only type of being that
can instill such knowledge and hold us accountable for our actions.
The Soul and Human Consciousness
Humanist
Manifesto I is quite clear in its
admission that our consciousness, or “soul” if you want to call it that,
originates through natural processes.
This manifesto, which describes humanism as a religion ("In order
that religious humanism may be better understood . . .@), states as its first few affirmations that
“humanism believes that man is a part of nature and that he has emerged as a
result of a continuous process” and “holding an organic view of life, humanists
find that the traditional dualism of mind and body must be rejected.”
This
assumption of materialism sometimes goes to ridiculous lengths. John Horgan describes Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA, as
someone cheery “when he was skewering some product of wishful thinking” such as
the belief that we humans have free will.
[4] Crick informed Horgan
that the act of picking up a pen involves a great deal of computation and
relates: “What you’re aware of is a
decision, but you’re not aware of what makes you do the decision. It seems free to you, but it’s the result of
things you’re not aware of.” Crick is
the author of The Astonishing Hypothesis,
a book that states all our memories, sorrows and joys are but a vast assembly
of nerve cells and molecules.
Horgan describes Christof Koch,
Crick’s collaborator as tracking down philosopher David Chalmers one evening
after one of Chalmers’ talks where he introduced his information theory of
dualism. Information in the brain does
not make sense unless there is an agent that acts on that information and this
suggests substance dualism even though Chalmers does not endorse it. Koch declared Chalmers’ ideas bunk, asking
“Why don’t you just say that when you have a brain the Holy Ghost comes down
and makes you conscious? How do I even know you’re conscious?”
Another example will do. Robert Lawrence Kuhn assembled a cast of
scientists and philosophers to debate the existence of the mind and the
possibility of its existence not being dependent on the brain. Kuhn is, to put
it mildly, a wonderkind – an author and editor of
more than twenty books not to mention possessing a bachelor of arts in biology,
a doctorate in anatomy/brain research, and a master’s in management. Among Kuhn's guests was Barry Beyerstein (described as a skeptic who does not believe in
anything nonphysical) who at one point in the discussion said:
The brain and the kidneys are both physical organs.
Both have anatomical structures and physiological processes that generate
particular things. And, yes, the output of one is urine and the output of the
other is thought. [5]
This is clearly preposterous. The kidneys output
urine in accordance with their genetic design and location within the body. They
have no choice other than to produce what they are made to produce. The brain
obviously does not work this way. Humans
have choices and free will and can change their brain patterns to some degree
as they see fit.
One should not conclude that this is a mere
non-representative sampling from the world of unbelief; this same reductive
skepticism runs throughout humanist and atheist works: Daniel Dennett [6],
Richard Dawkins, Susan Blackmore, [7]
Steven Pinker, [8] and
others. They simply can’t stomach the existence
of anything immaterial that controls the brain and will wrestle against this
idea and persist regardless of common sense.
There is a sound reason for this.
Once they admit to the existence of a soul, then the existence of other
religious entities and tenets logically follow.
There are
good philosophical arguments for the existence of a soul that controls our body
and medical evidences that reveal themselves in the abilities of victims of OCD
(obsessive compulsive disorder) to control their obsessive thoughts and
actions. There is also evidence in
near-death experiences that show some type of immaterial soul can exist outside
the body.
The Argument to Design
The “argument to/for design postulates that life and
the universe came about through a deliberate divine act and using mathematical
probabilities and the concept of irreducible complexity, we can detect what is
designed and what is not.
The origin of life is one aspect of life
that falls under this discipline. The
difficulty with life forming by chance is the transition from amino acids to
biopolymers, proteins for instance. As
usual, theists are the quickest to cite failed experiments. Alex Williams and John Hartnett cite an
experiment using mineral surfaces as enzyme substitutes. Enzymes, polypeptides which speed up chemical
reactions and overcome hydrolysis, are difficult to produce during via random
processes. An experiment using pyrite as
an enzyme substitute got a small proportion of amino acids to join up, but all
were rapidly hydrolyzed. Ferris and his
colleagues did better and produced chains of 55 amino acids by adhering them to
clay mineral surfaces, but this required 50 operator interventions to make this
work. [9]
Musing on this at work, I thought of a good
analogy to origin-of-life experiments..
Suppose you came upon a stack of playing cards that were shaped like a
house. (I’m referring to the
construction you make by placing cards on their edges and then joining their
sides so they sit on their edges vertically upright) This construction has perhaps 1,000
cards. You suggest this can originate by
chance and you perform many experiments attempting to prove this (like, say,
dropping cards from a position above a table). You notice that in no instance
can you create this deck by chance. Your
experiments would confirm your theories that such a construction cannot
originate by chance rather than confirm it can, although it cannot conclusively
prove this. What it would prove is that
a very sophisticated designer produced that stack of cards. I think it is in this context we should think
of the origin-of-life experiments that have failed.
The other pole to arguments to
design concern the fine-tuning of the Earth and universe. Numerous works have investigated this [10]
and I won’t here go into details except to briefly mention the state of the
research. The existence of our universe
and Earth depend on several finely tuned constants that, if they were not so
finely tuned, life would not exist. Also,
the universe and Earth are designed in such a way that scientific discoveries
are only possible given the finely tuned parameters under which we live. Many of the structures and processes in our
body are also irreducibly complex – meaning that if one or more parts of the
process or structure were not there, it would not work or collapse. The blood clotting mechanism is just one such
example.
Thus begins the argument to/ for design
whether it concerns a divine or human designer, the human genome or a book of
poetry. This is the stuff that copyright
lawsuits are made of – meaning that people must have some sense of the
improbability of a person, by chance, writing the same words as another. And the human genome is no random collection
of molecules but a code that contains instructions to change itself. (If you can envision a computer program that
has instructions to modify itself, you have an idea what is being talked
about.) Talk about our genome usually
admits it is a code although atheists believe this code originated by chance,
yet our everyday experience tells us such things do not and cannot come by
chance. [11]
The
evidence for sophisticated programming in DNA is so obvious that John Koza and others muse that “Evolution is am
immensely powerful creative process” and
“design is what engineers do eight hours a day and is what evolution
does.” Amazingly, we are told, software designers are harnessing some of the
processes that are common in DNA.
This is of interest to me. As a former computer programmer in BASIC, I
understand the incredible sophistication needed to produce a program. If what DNA does is akin to a computer
program, then a clever designer introduced those mechanisms in DNA. Given previous experiments in producing DNA,
experiments that have obviously failed, then it is quite obvious, via my
playing card analogy, that a sophisticated designer who understands these
engineering processes, produced the genetic design. However, the authors do not appear to make
this conclusion. This represents an
example of worshipping the created instead of the creator. [12]
A few
attempts have been made to display Darwinian ingenuity using computers, but
when evolutionists try to prove that Darwinism is true they often mistakenly
confirm a creationist hypothesis. Carl
Zimmer featured an article in Discover
magazine (Feb. 2005) discussing experiments by engineers at the Digital
Evolution Laboratory at Michigan State University in East Lansing producing
computer generated viruses. Countless
creationists have downloaded Avida, the software
program that allows these engineers to track the life of these computer
viruses, hoping to find a flaw in it for reasons I cannot fathom. These experiments confirm that intelligent
creators are responsible for the programming that allows these computer viruses
to reproduce and change, not random processes.
Since an analogy is given between a computer program and a cherry tree,
we might suppose that the same kind of engineering that went into producing
cherry trees (or for that matter, other life forms) went into producing these
computer programs. The difference is
that the computer programs were produced by sophisticated humans and biological
life was engineered by . . . (well, I’ll let you figure that one out).
What science
confirms, via my playing card analogy, is that a clever and very powerful
designer must have brought about the existence of the genetic code in
organisms. Certainly the scientists at
Michigan State University could have confirmed Darwinism by letting some
computer code swirl around in a computer chip until it somehow accidentally
produced a computer program. This they
obviously did not do; they knew better.
The Existence of Religion
Another
gnat in the soul of the atheist is religion, a phenomenon that has persisted
through centuries and has not shown any sign of going away despite atheist and
humanist protests. Atheists have tried their hand at trying to
explain the origin of religion. Recently
Steven Pinker reviewed a few of these after finding that over 90 percent
believe in a god or universal spirit, prompting him to recognize “humanists
have their work cut out for them.” [13]
Religion gives comfort, he says, but this explanation doesn’t explain why the
mind must need comfort from things that are false. Religion can’t be explained by the theory
that it brings a community together, neither can Pinker find that evolution is
the source of moral yearnings. He does
recognize religion has some benefits to those who cause others to believe, but
this doesn’t explain the whole of religious yearnings. He also suggests religion is an adaptation,
but can’t see the adaptive value of religion much less the adaptive value of humor. Could it be people, even humanists, are
religious because it satisfies a deep yearning in their souls that cannot be
wished away?
Richard
Dawkins wrote an essay, published on a secular humanism web site, asking what
religion is good for. The essay is a
masterful work in thought and opens:
AAs a Darwinian, the aspect of religion that catches
my attention is its profligate wastefulness, its extravagant display of baroque
uselessness.@ Does it
relieve stress? His answer is
Ano.@ Is religion
a placebo? He finds it is not. Finally he concludes that evolution has no
survival value and the only value of religion is religion. [14]
Yet,
atheists and humanists are just as religious as their theistic
counterparts. I wrote an essay a short
time ago contending that the modern conception of evolution satisfies the same
spiritual yearnings that are present in traditional religions. This conception accomplishes the task in the
way, for instance, that evolution is treated as a paradigm that explains all reality
including the germination of life and non-life, and morality and consciousness
(much like the explanatory power of religions explain all facets of the world),
that the method of evolution is beyond scientific comprehension and explanation
just as acts of god, that evolution contains a way to achieve the religious
component of “salvation” although in a somewhat different sense than
Christians, for instance, understand salvation. [15] Nontheists would
despise admitting this is true but I find no other option upon reading their
works.
Given the
design arguments and information I’ve surveyed before, it makes sense (although
the evidence is not overwhelming until more research is to be done) to suppose
that a powerful agent programmed our nature to be religious so that we all have
this desire. This desire is as powerful
as the desire for food and we can satisfy it with junk food (chocolate instead
of carrots, for instance) or junk religion (humanist religion centered on
worship of science). This also suggests
there is a true religion out there to be found and people are struggling to
discover what it is.
It is
truly an odd thing to say that we have a desire for something that does not
exist, and our brains are tailored to experience religious experiences that are
certainly beneficial. If evolution were
true and religious beliefs the thing of fiction, I find it odd that the desire
for these beliefs continue to persist.
Rather, they persist because we are by nature religious people hardwired
to be religious. Since it is doubtful
that evolution would produce a desire for something that does not exist, the
origin of religion owes itself to something other than blind chance. The same is true for consciousness. Also, consciousness must have come about at
the same time as the religious impulse since the religious impulse is a desire
for something that is non-natural and it is consciousness that allows us to act
on it. This suggests that whatever
agent, creative being, or ensemble of beings designed us to be religious also
initiated what was necessary for us to be conscious.
So what is
the purpose of a religious impulse that forces us to create a religious creedal
adaptation to satisfy it? If, as I
suggest, the desire for religion is programmed into us, then consciousness is
the necessary ingredient in us to at least give us a chance to pursue whatever
religion we want and perhaps pursue the true one. Religion is certainly not an instinct (like the desire to fly south for the winter)
that must mindlessly obeyed to survive.
Rather, it is an instinct that consciousness allows us to avoid if we
wish and we can pursue junk religions to satisfy our cravings if we wish.
Since
religion is not really needed to survive – as is evident in the many animals
that do fine without it – it must have had to originate at the same time or
immediately after the birth of consciousness.
I say this because it’s obvious that we humans do not seem to be able to
form a coherent picture of reality without some religious predispositions.
Therefore, it seems correct to suppose that humans’ consciousness and religious
tendencies must have originated together since religiousness without
consciousness would be as useful as a chair without legs. It also stands to reason then, that if
religion has a non-natural origin, consciousness does as well. Since our experience with consciousness
includes the moral factor, it also stands to reason that our consciousness must
have come into existence at the same time as our moral sense and our religious
underpinnings since our moral sense is in so many ways dependent on our
religious sense.
This, then,
suggests a master plan in mind for us where all these three factors came
together at once to enable us to exist with a religious and moral sense which
we can respect or disrespect. The only
explanation of free choice to respect or disrespect these desires, then, is
some non-natural, even perhaps supernatural, agent that wishes us to follow
these desires and take into account this knowledge, but be free to not do
it. And, since our moral sense implies
knowledge of an agent that we must obey, and the very purpose of most religions
is to reveal some supernatural agent that has intervened in the world’s
affairs, then it is quite possible that our religious sense pushes us in the direction
of discovering what agent it is that we are to obey and be held accountable to,
but whom we can disobey because we have the free choice to.
I suppose
what I have said here will not convince the most skeptical. Yet, we certainly have a number of phenomenon
that cannot be explained by natural means while these, when taken as a whole,
imply an interaction among them that came from a plan – a very intelligent plan
at that – for us to have a moral and religious impulse and be free to follow it
or not follow it. We also have the
freedom to find out what that agent or being is that created this in us and it
is this freedom that could lead an atheist where he or she would rather not go,
to a belief in a divine being. This is
what motivates them to deny free will, Jesus’ resurrection, evidence of design
in our universe, and our strong absolutist moral sense.
Jesus’ Resurrection
The
resurrection of Jesus validates the Christian religion. Atheists are, of course, quick to dismiss
this resurrection since they cannot stomach anything that violates natural
laws. Since one cannot die and be
resurrected, it follows that the resurrection narratives are a sham.
I have in
my property eight debates [16]
between atheists and theists and have found that none of them make overwhelming
convincing arguments against Jesus’ resurrection. In fact, my own research has led to a firmer
conviction of its truth.
Often dissenters show their true motivation for
discounting Jesus’ resurrection. For
instance, Gurd Ludeman
says, “if you say that Jesus rose from the dead biologically, you would have to
presuppose that a decaying corpse - which is already cold and without blood in
its brain – could be made alive again, I think that is nonsense.” In his debate with Lane Craig, John
Dominic Crossan says:
When I look a Buddhist friend in the face, I cannot
say with integrity: “Our story about
Jesus’ virginal birth is true and factual.
Your story that when the Buddha came out of his mother’s womb, he was walking,
talking, teaching, and preaching . . . that’s a myth. We have the truth; you have a lie.” I don’t
think that can be said any longer, for our insistence that our faith is fact
and that others’ faith is a lie is, I think, a cancer that eats at the heart of
Christianity. [17]
Dissenters such as these and Anthony Flew
and Richard Carrier tend to nibble around the peripheral areas of this debate
rather than attack the main points of the arguments for the legitimacy of the
resurrection of Jesus. When they are not
doing so, they make faulty historical and logical errors in order to bolster
their claims.
There is one last salient point I want to
add to this debate which links the sayings, life, and resurrection of Jesus
with the tales of near-death experiences previously cited. When Jesus communes with the father in an
occurrence often seen as a fulfillment of his promise that he could come in
power and majesty, he is seen as a being of light. Amazingly, this is exactly how Jesus and
other spiritual beings are seen in near-death experiences; they are creatures
that seemingly are made of nothing but light.
Jesus, in His resurrected body, is able to enter a room and leave the
room, disappearing almost magically, merely by desiring to do so. Compare this with the experience of Thetus Tenney, and others whose
spiritual movement transcends spatial dimensions. There is no way for these disciples to have
known what information would come out of near-death experiences. Yet, for all the primitiveness of the
environment in which these Jews lived, at least compared to modern ideas, they
got the spiritual nature of humans exactly
right!
The resurrection of Christ is then also
linked with the moral argument in the fact that people who have these near-death
experiences experience the presence of a being or beings that indicate to them
that they have either lived or not lived according to a set of moral principles
were are obligated to obey. This occurs
in the now famous “life review” which recounts deeds done, right or wrong,
throughout one’s entire life. This makes
sense if there is, in reality, a set of moral principles we are obligated to
obey. Yet, these experiences do not make
sense in a naturalistic nihilistic Darwinian world where no such absolutist
moral principles exist and morals come from culture-derived codes that receive
their only justification from what individual societies deem correct. Does it really make sense to deny the reality
of all these experiences for the sake of an atheistic view of how things should
be?
This brief expose of the attempted
refutations to the resurrection hypothesis is not meant to be exhaustive as no
survey truly can. However, it’s clear
that doubters have an intellectual axe to grind and, as in the other theistic
and atheist arguments I’ve surveyed, are ready to create a philosophical wall
around them to shield them from the unpleasantness of theistic arguments. I do, however, like how Holding puts it when
he says, “when one is forced to rely on such contentions as a spiritual
resurrection, an all-out lie by the Apostles, Jesus surviving crucifixion, the
Apostles being deceived over something they were not expecting and could not
comprehend in the first place, and the possibility of a lesser deity being responsible
for raising Jesus from the dead, I think it becomes quite clear that one can
only avoid Christianity by appealing to an all-out desperation card.” [18] Desperation seems to be the tactic just as it
was with arguments against the existence of a soul, moral absolutes, and
design.
Bias
One cannot
part from this essay without mentioning the obvious bias that exists toward
evolution in atheist and humanist works.
Before my initial research in this area, I had always thought that
discoveries of evolution were made by unbiased researchers who had very little
to gain from accepting Darwinism.
Nothing could be farther from the truth.
The
humanist manifestos make it clear that evolution is favored because of the
philosophical and political ramifications it provides. A great deal of this bias arises from the
predisposition toward sexual freedom.
The manifestos serve up this freedom and, of course, argue for freedom
to abort you child. This is logical; if
you are going to have unrestrained sex, the freedom to abort is necessary. This juxtaposes a feeling that religious
explanations are not worthy of being considered because they are not
intellectually fulfilling. Richard
Dawkins is the writer most often quoted for his blurb stating that Darwin made
it possible to be an "intellectually fulfilled atheist." [19] His writings show that he feels this way as
well. Time magazine published a mini-debate
between he and Christian geneticist Francis Collins [20]
and Dawkins, although claiming his “mind is open to the most wonderful range of
future possibilities, which I cannot even dream about,” clearly is predisposed
to reject any divine intervention in nature.
Dawkins says
What I am skeptical about is the idea that whatever wonderful
revelation does come in the science of the future, it will turn out to be one
of the particular historical religions that people happen to have dreamed
up. When we [he and Collins] started out
and we were talking about the origins of the universe and the physical
constants, I provided what I thought were cogent arguments against a
supernatural intelligent designer. But
it does seem to me to be worthy idea.
Refutable – but nevertheless grand and big enough to be worthy of
respect. I don’t see the Olympian gods
or Jesus coming down and dying on the Cross as worthy of that grandeur. They strike me as parochial. If there is a God, it’s going to be a whole
lot bigger and a whole lot more incomprehensible than anything that any
theologian of any religion has ever proposed.
There’s not much chance that Dawkins will ever find
creationism that will fill his intellectual gut given these philosophical
predispositions and I submit that it is these types of intellectual biases that
pervade all atheist works.
Problems in Evolution
Richard
Dawkins has said that evolution is a fact as the earth goes around the sun. It
therefore stands to reason that evolution should be observable as the earth
going around the sun. This is obviously not true. Frequently it has been said by many an author
that evidence is sparse or missing.
Darwin, in his Origin, admitted that
transitional fossils were missing from his grand scheme of development.
According to the theory of natural selection, he said, numerous intermediate
forms must have existed. Darwin then
asked why we do we not find these connecting links as if truly puzzled by this.
Darwin answered his own question by supposing that the geological record is far
more imperfect than most geologists believe. And so he ushered in decades of
the search for those missing links and evidence for Darwin=s theories.
The situation has not changed to this day. [21]
Jacques Barzun notes that
by 1909 when scientists were celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Darwin=s Origin, evolution was nearly on its “death
bed.” In 1955 John Klotz researched the
evidences for evolution and found little to back up evolutionists= claims. [22] After that,
E. W. F. Tomlin, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, former British
Council Representative and Cultural Attache in Turkey
and elsewhere, and Professor of Philosophy and Literature, wrote an article for
the Encyclopaedia of Ignorance that suggested that
evolution was accepted for philosophical reasons. His conclusion is strongly
stated:
AThe truth is that evolution was an hypothesis which
hardened into dogma before it had been thoroughly analyzed. Hence, it mothered
a number of fallacies.@ [23] This
encyclopedia also features an article by John Maynard Smith, no lightweight in
science, who also highlights what we don’t know about evolution: the rates of mutation and the origin of
sexual reproduction, for instance.
Textbooks like Everett Olson and Jane Robinson’s Concepts of Evolution and Grolier=s 1991
edition of the New Book of Knowledge
reveal little about the methods and evidence for biological evolution. Actually what is written in their pages is
more representative of the lack of evidence of evolution. This comes as no surprise since Ernst Mayr, evolutionist, has recognized what he calls “genetic
homeostasis,” a tendency for species to change but only within limits and not
beyond. According to Macbeth, Mayr regards these results as normal and concludes that
“obviously any drastic improvements under selection must seriously deplete the
store of genetic variability” and this must plague every breeding
experiment. If science shows that
species do not change beyond specific limits and our science reveals gaps in
fossil transitional histories, what are we to make of this fact other than
species have originated without the help of natural processes?
Duane Gish has cited the work of Christian Schwabe
who is called a “maverick” among biologists for contradicting the established
statement by the National Academy of Sciences: “molecular biology validates the
already impressive evidence that all living organisms, from bacteria to humans,
are ultimately descended from common ancestors.” In a recent paper in Trends in Biochemical Sciences, Schwabe states that as a molecular scientist, he should
find evolutionary relationships among animals.
However, “it seems disconcerting that many exceptions exist to the
orderly progression of species as determined by molecular homologies; so many
in fact that I think the exception, the quirks, may carry the more important
message.” [24] In a
review of another of Schwabe’s works, Gert Korthof was even more
blunt: “Schwabe's
hypothesis that all species on earth have an independent but natural origin, is
a remarkable, non-creationist, unorthodox theory of the origin of life. To
describe his theory as a 'multiple origins' theory is an understatement,
because we are talking about a billion living and extinct species. That means a
billion independent origins. Clearly this means a complete rejection of the
fundamental Darwinian principle of Common Descent, which postulates there was
only one origin of life.” Korthof then creates a
table citing fifteen differences between “Schwabe’ism”
and Darwinism. [25] What he also found was that species that are
not very related have DNA that is incredibly similar.
This discovery has been revisited by Conway Morris
who has argued that life, instead of evolving from a common ancestor, has
evolved many different times with anatomical similarities that “converge” on
one another. He differs with Stephen
Gould in his interpretation of evolution as a random event. This position, Morris says, “obscures the
reality of evolutionary convergence.”
Given certain environmental forces, he says, life will shape itself to
adapt although not all things are possible.”
Because there is an optimal shape for swimming through water and “a course and a
direction” to evolution as he says, it is easy to see how dolphins and fish,
despite being distinct beings, can evolve the same shape. [26]
Dembski cites an
example of this convergence in a review of Morris’ Life’s
Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe. The eyes of the octopus and
human are remarkably similar yet, according to evolutionist interpretation of
history, they did not share the same ancestor.
Dembski offers this summary of the situation:
“This is remarkable. Moreover, it is not an isolated,
anomalous fact of biology. Rather, it is the norm. Virtually identical
biological structures and functions keep getting reinvented, and in ways that
cannot be attributed to a common inheritance from a common evolutionary
ancestor. Conway Morris documents this fact at length and with awe. It’s no
accident that `eerie` is one of the most used words in Life’s Solution.” [27]
Reading Morris’ book, one becomes fascinated
by the convergence and the chapters on the origin of life are splendid, chocked
full of information that confirms the difficulties made apparent in the
writings of Robert Shapiro and creation scientists. When Morris, like other
evolutionists, tries to explain the grandeur and creative abilities of
evolution, he falls into the trap of using intelligent-design analogies to
buttress claims about an unintelligent cause.
Polynesians had sophisticated search strategies for navigating the
oceans and this is supposedly how evolution navigates protein space to arrive
at the solutions it has. “No wonder,” he
says, “the arguments for design and intelligent planning have such a perennial
appeal.” Obviously this is so for even
Morris cannot escape this leap of logic in drawing an analogy between
intelligent planning humans who sail the ocean and the intelligence behind the
genetic code. Yet he says that given
enough time, the inevitable must happen.
Despite the brilliance behind life, so brilliant that he must rhapsodize
about it’s efficiency and eeriness, he cannot bring himself to admit an
intelligent creator had a hand in bringing it about. [28]
This is all eerie to an evolutionist but not
to a creationist. Dembski
says Morris belongs to a growing number of science writers who accept evolution
but do not believe it is random. Rather,
it has purpose and direction. This is
certainly a change, but if one cannot accept that species can change beyond
specific limits and evolution is possible, the independent origin of species is
the next step before accepting a miraculous independent creation of animal
life.
Notes