Many of us holdovers from the previous generation are wondering what’s going on in our culture. We see homosexual marriage become the law of the land contrary to all of human history, biology, and the Creation. Socalled transgenders are pushing for the right to use any restroom or locker room they “feel” they want to. Anybody who objects to 50 year old high heeled Bubba peeing in the same restroom as their 5 year old granddaughter is now branded a hateful bigot.
We see the murder of millions of unborn babies being slaughtered every year and being justified as a human right (go figure). White people are self identifying as black, men are self identifying as women. Young people who have never held a job or run a business are now justifying stealing wealth from those who have in the interest of “fairness”. Historians are writing re-imagined history of what they openly admit are versions of history which support their progressive, hate white male Christian free market capitalistic America, social advocacy and educating our children with these lies (Howard Zinn, A People’s History of America). Teachers are reading “My Two Daddies” to 1st graders in public school so children will be able to choose whether they want to identify with the gay or straight lifestyles. Scientist are being fired and legislators are considering legislation which would punish those who question human caused climate change. Suicide rates have increased 60% worldwide in the past 45 years and young people are especially vulnerable Preaching against sexual dysfunction is now being considered a “hate crime”. The lesbian mayor of a large city in Texas is mandating pastors submit all sermons to her office for examination to make sure they are not threatening to the LGBT’s.
What’s going on here? How and why did this happen?
The root cause many of us missed is the paradigm shift in thinking which happened while we were watching “Leave it Beaver” reruns. That shift is the shift from absolute truth to relative truth as the basis for postmodern thinking.
For the modern thinker of the last century most decisions which determined the serious issues of life and death were based on absolute truth. Whether bible believing Christian or not, most questions of ethics and morality were founded in the view that an immutable God had established a universe with fixed values and laws. Laws of logic, mathematics, nature, morality were non negotiable. We didn’t have to debate whether crushing the skull of a baby as it comes down the birth canal was right or wrong. We didn’t have to debate whether we were descended from pond scum via the ape cage at the zoo. Most people understood to one degree or another we were created in the image of God. We didn’t have scientists trying to convince us that something can spontaneously pop into existence from nothing via a fabricated bait and switch quantum fluctuation lie which most cannot understand but will accept as an alternative to Creation. The recent phenomena of Black Lives Matters and political race baiters creating false narratives of “hands up, don’t shoot” and “I can’t breath” lies along with TV “reality” shows making no talent narcissistic fools into modern icons and the Housewives of XYZ fighting like school girls over gossip and parties could never have stood in times of more serious objective thinkers. Now we accept anything on the tube, the newsstand tabloids or the internet as our reality.
As the modern thinker of the past century is passing off the scene we are being replaced by the postmodern, all truth is relative, nothing can be known for sure thinker. No longer are life and death decisions made on absolute standards. Now everything is open to the “conversation” and debate where historically and logically ignorant, poorly educated people discuss how they “feel” about the issues facing society.
No longer is truth “discovered” as the modern thinker would say. Now truth is “created” by the postmodern thinker. People now glory in the fact that they can create and invent their own reality.
Hummmm, sound familiar. I think I’ve heard this before.
Genesis 3:4-6 (ESV)
But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die.5 For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
6 So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate.
So folks, what’s happening is that we have a culture which has made a dramatic and fatal deviation away from truth and reality into a fairytale world of self identified and self created little gods.
We don’t have to look to far back into human history to see how this plays out.
A most important to principle to remember: little gods who obtain great power become devils.
In June 2005 I was in Washington D.C. for a most unusual premiere. A film based on the 2004 book called The Privileged Planet{1} was being introduced to an invitation only group of about 200 at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History.
The Smithsonian was approached several months earlier about allowing their Baird Auditorium to be used for this special showing. They asked to see the film. Several people on the museum payroll viewed the film and said great, let’s show it. The inquiring organization was The Discovery Institute, the leading organization promoting Intelligent Design in the U.S. and abroad. Discovery was given instructions on how to use the Smithsonian logo on the invitation, was asked for a donation of $16,000, and told the premiere was a go.
However, when the invitations went out in late May, the Smithsonian was instantly barraged by calls and emails from disgruntled Darwinians demanding that the premiere be canceled. How dare the prestigious Smithsonian give aid and support to the Intelligent Design Movement by allowing this film on its premises? Never mind that the film has nothing to do with biological evolution and natural selection. People (even some who likely hadn’t seen the film or read the book) were on a rampage.
It didn’t take long for the Smithsonian to withdraw its co-sponsorship of the event although they said they would honor their commitment to allow the film to be shown. In a letter to Discovery they said, “Upon further review, the Museum has determined that the content of the film is not consistent with the mission of the Smithsonian Institution’s scientific research.”{2} Initially, the Smithsonian said Discovery would not be required to make the “donation,” but eventually kept $5,000 for expenses incurred.
As a Fellow of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture I was issued an invitation, and as the storm of controversy raged in TheWashington Post and New York Times, I decided to get myself to Washington for this controversial and special event.
The premiere itself was a bit of an anticlimax after all the fuss. Several local scientists, national TV and newspaper media, a Congressman from Texas, and other local dignitaries were treated to a special showing and question and answer period with the authors, Gonzalez and Richards. The reception was held two floors up in the Hall of Geology, Gems, and Minerals.
Most in attendance were quite impressed . . . and mystified! They were impressed with the quality and premise of the film and mystified how a purely scientific film could be so misrepresented. In what follows, we’ll explore the thesis of the book and film and see what all the fuss is about. For now, just remember science is pursued by people, and everyone has a worldview that can alter dramatically how science is perceived and what counts as science.
Is the Moon Just for Signs and Seasons?
When I was in the seventh grade, I remember standing in my best friend’s backyard with a box over my head in broad daylight. On one end of the box was a small pinhole. On the inside of the box, against the opposite side of the box from the pinhole, was a small piece of aluminum foil. The pinhole, when facing the sun, made a small circle, maybe one-half inch in diameter, on the aluminum foil wall. As the partial solar eclipse progressed, I could watch the progress of the moon shadowing the sun inside the box. I was fascinated that I could safely watch the partial solar eclipse with such a simple device.
You could watch partial solar eclipses on every planet in our solar system with a moon. But earth is the only planet where a full or total solar eclipse can be seen. It turns out that our moon is 1/400th the size of the sun. But the sun is 400 times farther away from earth than the moon. So when the moon comes between the sun and the earth a small portion of earth experiences a total solar eclipse, meaning the sun is fully blocked out by the moon.
When a total solar eclipse occurs, the sun is fully blocked out by the moon darkening the earth and providing a unique glimpse of the sun’s atmosphere or corona. Normally the sun’s corona is overwhelmed by the sun’s brightness, but in an eclipse the moon so completely shuts out the sun that the corona shines brightly for a few minutes. It is then that scientists can measure the light spectrum of the corona which reveals what is burning inside the sun. Otherwise we would not be able to measure the elemental makeup of the sun. So the fact that earth experiences a total eclipse of the sun makes our planet unique in the solar system with respect to what we can learn about what goes on in the sun’s interior.
If that was all that was unique about our moon, we could write it off as a curious coincidence. But the size, shape, and orbit of our moon do more for human life than just give us a glimpse of the sun’s atmosphere every so often. Without the moon, life as we know it on earth would be impossible.
It turns out that our moon is just the right size and distance from the earth that, in conjunction with the gravity of the sun, it causes substantial diurnal [daily] tides which mix the waters of the oceans, evening out their temperature and stirring their nutrients. With no moon, or a few smaller moons, the tides would lessen greatly in intensity, therefore reducing this mixing effect. Life would be limited to the upper few feet of the oceans, and complex life would be hard pressed to survive.
Is Earth’s Atmosphere Just for Breathing?
The book and film, The Privileged Planet, reveal many other earth systems as well that combine to make earth unique for life and scientific discovery.
Take a deep breath. Now exhale! No, this is not the latest Probe Ministries exercise routine. If you did what I just recommended on any other planet in the solar system, you’d be dead right now.
Our atmosphere of mostly nitrogen, oxygen, and just the right amount of water and carbon dioxide provides so much more than breathable air. We so easily take it for granted every time we breathe. Earth’s closest planetary cousins, Venus and Mars, have atmospheres dominated by carbon dioxide. Venus’s atmosphere is so thick you can’t see through it, and it creates surface temperatures as high as 900 degrees Fahrenheit. Mars’ thin carbon dioxide atmosphere contributes to such cold temperatures that carbon dioxide freezes at the poles.
Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards, in their book The Privileged Planet, tell you more than you thought possible about the unique parameters of our atmosphere in allowing life and scientific discovery. Nitrogen, for example, is necessary for life as a critical component of the building blocks of DNA and proteins. Our atmosphere of seventy percent nitrogen also allows for a transparent atmosphere that allows light as we face the sun and dark nights that allow us to see the stars.
Oxygen, of course, is necessary for animal life, and our atmosphere contains just enough to support life and not so much as to poison life. Oxygen is also a transparent gas, keeping our atmosphere transparent for observation of our dark night skies.
Water as well is necessary for life, but water in our atmosphere, along with nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide, creates an atmosphere that is breathable but also is the best atmosphere to transmit light in the visible spectrum. Water also creates clouds over about two thirds of the earth at any one time. Clouds help control our temperature by reflecting some of the sun’s energy back out into space.
Without water in our atmosphere, we never would see a rainbow. Rainbows prompted scientists of the seventeenth century to search for an explanation of the rainbow’s beauty and mystery. This search eventually resulted in understanding the solar spectrum and the effect of prisms in bending light of different wavelengths.
Carbon dioxide is life’s major source of carbon, that versatile and stable element absolutely necessary for life of any kind. If earth were just five percent closer to the sun, however, we would end up much like Venus: nothing but carbon dioxide resulting in a runaway greenhouse effect and totally uninhabitable planet.
Once again, earth is shown to be just right—just right for life and just right for scientific observers. What an amazing coincidence!
More and more, scientists are coming to realize that the earth is not just some insignificant pale blue dot orbiting around an insignificant star. Our planet seems designed not just for life, but for scientific discovery as well.
So the Earth Has Oceans, Crust, Mantle, and Core. So What?
The starship Enterprise from Star Trek used a nifty force field deployed around the ship to protect it from oncoming photon torpedoes. During an attack, those on the bridge were always concerned with how the “shield” was holding. There was great consternation if energy levels dipped low enough to make the shield ineffective.
Our planet earth has a similar protective shield. Earth possesses a magnetic field around it that shields us from the harmful solar wind. Our atmosphere would be slowly stripped away without our magnetic field. This magnetic shield is generated because the earth is just the right size to maintain a hot liquid iron core. The heat from this core convects through the mantle, creating plate tectonics and electricity. The electricity generates our magnetic field. But you have to have the right size planet with a molten metallic core and a crust that weakens somewhat due to chemical reactions with water so it will bend and not break. All this benefits life.
The size of earth is important for other reasons. A smaller planet would lose its atmosphere much too readily, and its interior would cool too quickly, eliminating the protective magnetic field. A more massive earth would retain too much of harmful gases such as methane. On a more massive planet, the thicker atmosphere would make breathing much more difficult.
Earth’s voluminous quantities of water are also extremely necessary for life and even for technological life. Water helps regulate our atmosphere and, of course, provides the perfect soluble medium for life. Water is perhaps the most unique molecule in the universe with its unique solvent properties coupled with the fact that ice floats instead of sinks like all other solid/liquid pairs. This unique feature means that when temperatures are cold enough for water to freeze, only the top layer freezes and life can go on below the ice. If ice sank, then all liquid water would eventually freeze and life would be extinguished in some environments every winter.
In order for earth to maintain its watery oceans it needs to be the right distance from the sun. As noted earlier, if the earth were just five percent closer to the sun we would end up like Venus with thick hot clouds of carbon dioxide for an atmosphere. If we were just twenty percent farther away we would end up like Mars, a frozen wasteland. The heat coming from our just right liquid core also helps maintain our watery home.
All in all earth is a remarkable place for its size, distance from the sun, elemental make-up, size and closeness of the moon, presence of water, stable liquid iron core that generates a magnetic field, and so many other features. The suspicion of design and purpose quickly arises.
Has the Earth Been Designed for Multiple Purposes?
In many circles of academia, the idea that our earth is both designed for life and for scientific discovery is both surprising and resented. For years the notion that we are just an insignificant planet circling an ordinary star, otherwise known as the Copernican Principle, has dominated the physical sciences.
But discovery after discovery has altered that view, and has brought many kicking and screaming to a design perspective. Simon Conway Morris, a paleontologist from England, is quoted on the dust jacket of The Privileged Planet as saying:
The book and film of the same name have been wildly successful and controversial. At the Washington premiere I discussed earlier, scientists and legislators agreed that the thesis the authors propose is deserving of wide discussion.
A father brought his eight-year old son to a showing of the film we sponsored at Probe Ministries. I privately thought he would be too young. They had to leave before the film was done, but they purchased the DVD before they left and finished viewing it at home. As soon as Mom walked in the door, the eight-year old promptly began to explain the intricacies of solar eclipses, the size of the moon relative to the sun, and how these factors were not only a boon for life but also for scientific discovery.
The film does an excellent job of taking sometimes complex scientific concepts and communicating them in a way that most anybody can appreciate. This film deserves as wide a distribution as possible.
But because much of the scientific community remains locked in a purely naturalistic worldview, the perspective of purpose and design will continue to be resisted. However, parents and educators can readily use this excellent resource to simply investigate the facts and help to eventually gain Intelligent Design a much deserved place at the roundtable of scientific inquiry.
One other comment from the dust jacket says it well:
Not only have Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards written a book with a remarkable thesis, they have constructed their argument on an abundance of evidence and with a cautiousness of statement that make their volume even more remarkable. In my opinion, The Privileged Planet deserves very special attention.
Notes 1. Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards, The Privileged Planet (Washington D.C.: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2004). 2. June 1, 2005 entry on Discovery Institute’s blog atwww.evolutionnews.org/2005/06/.
Raymond G. Bohlin is Vice President of Vision Outreach at Probe Ministries. He is a graduate of the University of Illinois (B.S., zoology), North Texas State University (M.S., population genetics), and the University of Texas at Dallas (M.S., Ph.D., molecular biology). He is the co-author of the book The Natural Limits to Biological Change, served as general editor of Creation, Evolution and Modern Science, co-author of Basic Questions on Genetics, Stem Cell Research and Cloning (The BioBasics Series), and has published numerous journal articles. Dr. Bohlin was named a Research Fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture in 1997, 2000 and 2012.
What is Probe?
Probe Ministries is a non-profit ministry whose mission is to assist the church in renewing the minds of believers with a Christian worldview and to equip the church to engage the world for Christ. Probe fulfills this mission through our Mind Games conferences for youth and adults, our 3-minute daily radio program, and our extensive Web site at www.probe.org.
Further information about Probe's materials and ministry may be obtained by contacting us at:
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Atheists often promote themselves as intelligent, logical, scientific, rational, etc. They even had a proposal to call themselves ‘brights’! The aggressive ‘new atheists’, such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and company, like to portray those of us who believe in a supernatural Creator as irrational, unscientific, unintelligent, ignorant, or even ‘needing help’ (Dawkins). The entertainment industry often reinforces these perceptions by portraying ‘religious’ people (Christians particularly, and especially church leaders) as buffoons or hillbillies (almost never as a university professor, for example).
Reality runs against these perceptions. Isaac Newton, the greatest scientific mind of all time, was a Christian believer, as were other founders of modern science. Surveys have consistently shown that people with a strong adherence to the Bible’s authority are the least likely to be superstitious, in contrast to the average de facto atheist.1 Indeed, one atheist expressed his chagrin that “some of the most intelligent and well-informed people” he knew were Christians.2
There is much more to say. Atheists believe that everything came about by purely material processes—the universe, life, mind, and morality. However, do they have a rational, logical basis for this belief?
They actually believe in miracles without any reasonable cause for the miracles. That is, they believe in magic, or the occurrence of things without a sufficient cause. What we commonly call ‘magic’ is actually illusion. For example, a rabbit does not just appear from an empty hat; there has to be a logical physical explanation; a sufficient cause. Illusion needs an illusionist. Stuff does not happen without something to cause it to happen. Even young children understand this law of causation. Magic, where things ‘just happen’, is the stuff of fairytales—there is no such thing.3
Here are five major examples of materialists believing in magic (and there are more), or miraculous events without any sufficient explanation or cause for those events.
1. Origin of the Universe
Materialists (atheists) once tried to believe that the universe was eternal, to erase the question of where it came from. The famous British atheist Bertrand Russell, for example, took this position. However, this is not tenable. The progress of scientific knowledge about thermodynamics, for example, means that virtually everyone has been forced to acknowledge that the universe had a beginning, somewhere, sometime—the big bang idea acknowledges this (ideas like the multiverse only put the beginning more remotely, but do not get rid of the pesky problem).4
Man of faith and science, Sir Isaac Newton.
The big bang attempts to explain the beginning of the universe. However, what did it begin from and what caused it to begin? Ultimately, it could not have come from a matter/energy source, the same sort of stuff as our universe, because that matter/energy should also be subject to the same physical laws, and therefore decay, and it would have had a beginning too, just further back in time.
So, it had to come from? Nothing! Nothing became everything with no cause whatsoever. Magic!
“The universe burst into something from absolutely nothing—zero, nada. And as it got bigger, it became filled with even more stuff that came from absolutely nowhere. How is that possible? Ask Alan Guth. His theory of inflation helps explain everything.”
So proclaimed the front cover of Discover magazine, April 2002.
Physicist Lawrence Krauss, one of the loud ‘new atheists’, has tried to explain how everything came from nothing; he even wrote a book about it.5 However, his ‘nothing’ is a ‘quantum vacuum’, which is not actually nothing. Indeed, a matter/energy quantum something has exactly the same problem as eternal universes; it cannot have persisted for eternity in the past, so all their theorizing only applies after the universe (something) exists.6 Back to square one!
Materialists have no explanation for the origin of the universe, beyond ‘it happened because we are here!’ Magic: just like the rabbit out of the hat, but with the universe, a rather humungous ‘rabbit’! ‘Stuff happens!’
Materialists have no explanation for the origin of the universe, beyond ‘it happened because we are here!’
There are other aspects of the big bang, the ‘mainstream’ model of the universe’s origin, that are also miraculous. The ‘standard model’ has a period of very rapid expansion called ‘inflation’ (which Alan Guth, mentioned above, invented). There is no known cause for the initiation of this supposed expansion, no known cause for it to stop and no physical mechanism for the extremely rapid expansion (many orders of magnitude faster than the speed of light). However, these three associated miracles must have happened or the big bang does not work because of the ‘horizon problem’. More magic!
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). This is not magic, because God, who is eternal and omnipotent, is a sufficient cause for the universe. And He can exist eternally (and therefore has no beginning) because He is a non-material entity (God is spirit, as the Bible says in many places).
2. Origin of stars
According to the big bang, the ‘only game in town’ to explain the origin of stars, there had to have been two phases of star formation. Phase 1 involved the formation of hydrogen/helium stars (which are called Population III stars7). Here is the first problem: how do you get gases formed in a rapidly expanding primordial universe to coalesce together to form a critical mass so that there is sufficient gravitational attraction to attract more gas to grow a star? Gases don’t tend to come together; they disperse, especially where there is a huge amount of energy (heat).8 Hey presto! Cosmologists invented ‘dark matter’, which is invisible undetectable ‘stuff’ that just happens to generate a lot of gravitational attraction just where it is needed. More m9
The Bible tells us that God made the stars on the fourth day of Creation Week.
However, we have countless stars—like the sun—that are not just hydrogen and helium, but contain the heavier elements. Phase 2 supposedly comes in here. Exploding stars (supernovas) from phase 1 produced sufficient pressure to force hydrogen and helium together to make new stars that made all the heavier elements (which astronomers call ‘metals’), including the elements of which we are made. These stars are called Population I and II stars.
Now here is another problem: how do exploding stars, with matter flying at great speed in all directions, cause stars made of all those new elements to form? There has to be a coming together of the elements, not a flying apart. Pieces hitting one another would bounce off rather than coalesce. Most hypotheses involve multiple supernovas from phase 1 in close proximity, such that sufficient material collided together to form enough of a proto-star with sufficient gravity to overcome the tendency to fly apart and attract more matter and so grow a normal star. However, supernovas are not common events, especially multiple ones at the same time in close proximity. Thus, this scenario requires a huge number of very improbable events to account for the vast numbers of the heavier stars.
This is more magic; miracles without a miracle worker.
God made the sun and the stars on the fourth day of Creation Week. Again, this is not magic or superstition, because God is able to do such things.
3. Origin of life
Astrobiologist Professor Paul Davies said,
“How did stupid atoms spontaneously write their own software … ? Nobody knows … there is no known law of physics able to create information from nothing.”10
Not only must the DNA code be explained (how can a coded information storage system come about without intelligent design?), but the incredible machinery that reads the information and creates the components of life from that information has to be explained as well.
Former hard-nosed English atheist philosopher Antony Flew abandoned atheism/materialism because of the growing evidence for such design in living things. He said,
The notorious atheist who changed his mind, Antony Flew.
“It now seems to me that the findings of more than fifty years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument to design.”11
This research,
“has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce (life), that intelligence must have been involved”.12
That is, only an incredibly intelligent designer could account for the information systems in living things.
Well-known American atheist philosopher, Thomas Nagel said,
“What is lacking, to my knowledge, is a credible argument that the story [of cosmic evolution] has a nonnegligible probability of being true. There are two questions. First, given what is known about the chemical basis of biology and genetics, what is the likelihood that self-reproducing life forms should have come into existence spontaneously on the early earth, solely through the operation of the laws of physics and chemistry?”13 (See later for discussion of his second question.)
The scientific knowledge of life grows daily, and as it does the prospects of a naturalistic (materialistic/atheistic) explanation for its origin recede into the distance. The origin of life is another miracle.14 ‘Stuff happens’? More magic.
The origin of life demands a super-intelligent cause, such as the Creator-God revealed in the Bible.
4. Origin of the diversity of life (Design? What design?)
The origin of life is only the beginning of the problem for the materialist. Along with other atheistic biologists, Richard Dawkins has spent his life trying to deny that living things exhibit supernatural design. In the book that ‘put him on the map’, he wrote,
“Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.”15
… how do you get gases formed in a rapidly expanding primordial universe to coalesce together?
The diversity of life is a huge problem. How did a microbe change itself into every living thing on earth, ranging from earwigs to elephants, from mites to mango trees? For almost a hundred years, mutations and natural selection, the mechanisms of ‘neo-Darwinism’, or ‘the modern synthesis’, have been said to explain this diversity of life. However, with our modern knowledge of living things, this has proved useless as an explanation.
In July 2008, 16 high profile evolutionists met, by invitation, in Altenburg, Austria. They had come because they realized that mutations and natural selection did not explain the diversity of life, and they had come together to discuss this crisis in evolutionary biology. The only consensus was that there is a major problem, a crisis.16
Thomas Nagel (continuing from the earlier quote) put it this way:
“The second question is about the sources of variation in the evolutionary process that was set in motion once life began: In the available geological time since the first life forms appeared on earth, what is the likelihood that, as a result of physical accident, a sequence of viable genetic mutations should have occurred that was sufficient to permit natural selection to produce the organisms that actually exist?”17
Think of the supposed origin of humans from a chimp-like ape in six million evolutionary years. Modern comparison of the genomes shows such large differences (of at least 20%) that this is just not feasible, even with highly unrealistic assumptions in favour of evolution.18 Actually, it was not even feasible when the difference was incorrectly trumpeted to be about 1%.19
Materialists have no sufficient explanation (cause) for the diversity of life. There is a mind-boggling plethora of miracles here, not just one. Every basic type of life form is a miracle.
Genesis 1 tells us that God, the all-powerful, all-knowing Creator, made the various kinds of life to reproduce “after their kind”. Here is a sufficient cause, but even the description of the nature of living things to reproduce according to each kind has been confirmed with every witnessed reproductive event (billions of humans alone), and also in the fossil record where the transitional forms are missing20 and ‘living fossils’ testify to consistent reproduction ‘after their kind’ in thousands of species.21
5. Origin of mind and morality
The origin of mind and morality from energy and atoms has long been a problem for the materialist. It is a major theme of philosopher Thomas Nagel’s book, Mind and Cosmos, already referred to.
A fig tree produces figs, not apples. That seems obvious. Likewise, physics and chemistry produce physical and chemical outcomes. However, mind and morality are not just matters of physics and chemistry. Sure, creatures that are physical and chemical have mind and morality, but how did such non-material things arise from the material? This is a serious problem for materialism, and the atheist Nagel candidly admits it, to the extreme annoyance of his atheistic colleagues.22
The famous (and reluctant) convert from atheism to Christianity, C.S. Lewis, put it well when he wrote,
“If the solar system was brought about by an accidental collision, then the appearance of organic life on this planet was also an accident, and the whole evolution of Man was an accident too. If so, then all our present thoughts are mere accidents—the accidental by-product of the movement of atoms. And this holds for the thoughts of the materialists and astronomers as well as for anyone else’s. But if theirthoughts—i.e. of materialism and astronomy—are merely accidental by-products, why should we believe them to be true? I see no reason for believing that one accident should be able to give me a correct account of all the other accidents. It’s like expecting that the accidental shape taken by the splash when you upset a milkjug should give you a correct account of how the jug was made and why it was upset.”23
The origin of life is only the beginning of the problem for the materialist.
The atheist has no sufficient cause to explain the existence of mind and morality. Magic happens!
Why do apparently intelligent people resort to believing in magic—uncaused events—at so many points? By not believing in God they have put themselves into an irrational philosophical corner. Romans 1:21 in the Bible says that when people deny that the Creator-God exists, they end up with ‘futile thinking’. We have seen plenty of that in this article. Richard Lewontin admitted that (leaving God out of the picture), “We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs … ” (he confuses ‘science’ with materialism).24
Where to from here?
God made man “in His image”, a creature with a mind and morality (Genesis 1:27). As such, we are able to think about God and ‘know’ Him. That is the very reason for our existence. Isaiah 1:18 records God speaking to the people of Israel who had turned away from Him,
“Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool.”
Trying to live life as if God does not exist is the ultimate rebellion (sin), and the ultimate folly. The good news is that God is in the forgiving business for those who will admit their error and seek Him:
“Seek the Lord while he may be found; call upon him while he is near; let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts; let him return to the Lord, that he may have compassion on him, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.” (Isaiah 55:6–7).
Jesus Christ came into the world to make possible our forgiveness; see Good news!
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There is ‘black magic’ where Satan is the sufficient cause for the events; for example, the Pharaoh’s magicians in Egypt, where they threw down their staves and they became snakes. Return to text
Grossman, L., Death of eternal cosmos: From the cosmic egg to the infinite multiverses every model of the universe has a beginning,New Scientist213(2847):6–7, January 2012. To say this we assume that the same laws of physics applied at the beginning, and that the Second Law applies to the whole universe (this is consistent with all experimental evidence). This is nothing more than the uniformity of nature in time and space, a foundational principle of science. Paul Davies said, “Yet the laws [of physics] that permit a Universe to create itself are even more impressive than a cosmic magician.” See, The singularity—a ‘Dark’ beginning.Return to text
Davies, P., Life force, New Scientist163(2204):27–30, September 1999. Return to text
Habermas, G., My pilgrimage from atheism to theism: an exclusive interview with former British atheist Professor Antony Flew, Philosophia Christi, Winter 2005; illustramedia.com. Return to text
Famous atheist now believes in God: One of world’s leading atheists now believes in God, more or less, based on scientific evidence, 2004, Associated Press; sciencefindsgod.com. Return to text
Nagel, T., Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False,Oxford University Press, 2012.Return to text
1% difference still adds up to 30 million base pairs (chemical ‘letters’) difference, which is a huge problem for an evolutionary scenario of random mutations and natural selection over supposedly six million years. Return to text
Many of us holdovers from the previous generation are wondering what’s going on in our culture. We see homosexual marriage become the law of the land contrary to all of human history, biology, and the Creation. Socalled transgenders are pushing for the right to use any restroom or locker room they “feel” they want to. Anybody who objects to 50 year old high heeled Bubba peeing in the same restroom as their 5 year old granddaughter is now branded a hateful bigot. 
