More Than a Carpenter (7 page)

While other atheists may have been more recognizable, Flew’s impact was unparalleled. He delivered his famous lecture, “Theology and Falsification,” at the Socratic Club at Oxford, then chaired by C. S. Lewis. It eventually became the most widely reprinted philosophical article for five decades. His many books and lectures set the agenda for modern atheism.

What Do You Think?

In your view, is the scientific evidence in favor of God’s existence, against God’s existence, or neutral? On what do you base your opinion?

Then in 2004, Flew made a shocking announcement: God must exist. Flew now believes that the best explanation for the world is some sort of deity. Why did he change his mind? “The short answer,” writes Flew, “is the world picture, as I see it, that has emerged from modern science.”
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The New Atheists are free to proclaim that science is on their side, but the evidence shows the contrary. Consider two recent scientific puzzles that remain unexplained by naturalistic science, but point strongly toward God.

The mystery of the origin of life

One of the most perplexing scientific problems today is the origin of life. The scientific community is unanimous that this is an unsolved mystery. Harvard chemist George Whitesides once remarked that the question of life’s origin is one of the big scientific questions that has yet to be solved.
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Even Sam Harris admits that the origin of life is still a mystery.
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The problem of the origin of life is fundamentally a problem of information.

With the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953, scientists first understood that the organization and development of living creatures is orchestrated by genetic information. This is why, in a widely cited speech, Nobel laureate David Baltimore referred to modern biology as “a science of information.”

How much information is found in living things? According to Richard Dawkins, the information in the cell nucleus of a tiny amoeba is greater than an entire set of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica.
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Human DNA contains vastly more. Yet DNA does more than just store information. In combination with other cellular systems, it also processes information much like a computer. Hence Bill Gates likens DNA to a computer program, though far more advanced than any software humans have invented.
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Atheists willingly confess that they have no clue how life first emerged. Dawkins recognizes the staggering improbability of the origin of life, but then concludes with an incredible solution: luck. Yes, luck.
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Is this really the most reasonable explanation? Can information emerge from an unguided, irrational, material process?

What Do You Think?

Is luck a credible deduction for the origin of life? Apart from God, can you think of any other reasonable explanation?

The informational content of DNA was one of the primary reasons former atheist Antony Flew changed his mind about God. He concluded: “The only satisfactory explanation for the origin of such ‘end-directed, self-replicating’ life as we see on earth is an infinitely intelligent Mind.”
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If a message with the complexity of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
were to arrive from outer space, it would undoubtedly be accepted as proof of extraterrestrial intelligence. The most reasonable explanation for human DNA—which contains immensely more information than the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
—is a Divine Mind.

Fine-tuning the universe

Imagine you are trekking through the mountains and come across an abandoned cabin. As you approach the cabin, you notice something very strange. Inside, the refrigerator is filled with your favorite food, the temperature is set just as you like it, your favorite song is playing in the background, and all your favorite books, magazines, and DVDs are sitting on the table. What would you conclude? Since chance would be out of the question, you would likely conclude that someone was expecting your arrival.

In recent decades, scientists have begun to realize that this scenario mirrors the universe as a whole. The universe seems to have been crafted uniquely with us in mind. “As we look out into the universe and identify the many accidents of physics and astronomy that have worked to our benefit,” says physicist Freeman J. Dyson, “it almost seems as if the universe must in some sense have known that we were coming.”
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This is why British astronomer Fred Hoyle remarked, “A commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature.”
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Physicists agree that life is balanced on a razor’s edge.

Consider a couple of examples. First, if the law of gravity varied just slightly, the universe would not be habitable for life. In relation to the other forces in nature, gravity must be fine-tuned to one part in 10
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(that’s one part in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000).
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Second, Cambridge physicist Stephen Hawking observed that, “If the rate of expansion one second after the Big Bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, the universe would have recollapsed before it even reached its present size.”
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There are actually nineteen such universal constants that must each be perfectly fine-tuned.
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Clearly, the odds against us being here are vanishingly small. In fact, Oxford physicist Roger Penrose concluded that if we jointly considered all the laws of nature that must be fine-tuned, we would be unable to write down such an enormous number, since the necessary digits would be greater than the number of elementary particles in the universe.
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The evidence for design is so compelling that Paul Davies, a renowned physicist at Arizona State University, has concluded that the bio-friendly nature of our universe looks like a “fix.” He put it this way: “The cliché that ‘life is balanced on a knife-edge’ is a staggering understatement in this case: no knife in the universe could have an edge that fine.”
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No scientific explanation for the universe, says Davies, can be complete without accounting for this overwhelming appearance of design. Some try to explain away the fine-tuning by positing the existence of multiple universes, but the empirical evidence for them is nonexistent. The most economical and reliable explanation for why the universe is so precisely fine-tuned is because a Creator—God—made it that way.

Is Atheism More Moral?

The New Atheists unmercifully attack the evils of religion and the character of the biblical God. Morality can exist independently of God, they loudly proclaim. According to Dawkins, “We do not need God in order to be good—or evil.”
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The New Atheists enthusiastically denounce religion as evil while praising science as good. But this raises an awkward dilemma for the atheist: if there is no God, where do moral obligations come from in the first place? If “there is nothing beyond the natural, physical world,”
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as Dawkins proclaims, then what does it mean to say that evil exists? Since moral values do not have physical properties such as height, width, and weight, how can we say they are real?

The awkward fact for atheism is that it is notoriously difficult to define evil without some transcendent moral standard of good. Evil has traditionally been understood as the perversion of good. Just as crookedness implies a standard of straight, evil implies a standard of good. C. S. Lewis famously said that a bent stick only makes sense in light of the concept of straight. Similarly, there can only be evil if there is first good. But if there is no God (as the New Atheists proclaim), then what is good? Even the late atheist J. L. Mackie recognized that objective morals were unlikely to arise apart from an all-powerful God.

What Do You Think?

Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky famously said that without God all is permissible. What do you think he meant? Can there be a moral standard without God?

The existence of objective moral values is a strong reason for believing in God. Consider this simple argument:

1. If objective moral values exist, God must exist.

2. Objective moral values exist.

3. Therefore, God must exist.

We know objective moral values exist. We don’t need to be persuaded that, for example, torturing babies for fun is wrong. All reasonable people know this. Therefore, since moral values do exist, then God must as well.

In his public debates, Christopher Hitchens regularly challenges his opponents to give a single example of a moral action that atheists cannot do. Of course, there are none. Many atheists are kind, charitable, and hard-working people. But Hitchens’s challenge misses the larger point: how can atheism itself make sense of moral obligations in the first place? If there is no God, how do we ground good and evil? Atheism is silent on this issue. Thus, ironically, one of the most common objections to God ends up being one of the best reasons to believe in him.

Is Christianity a Curse?

The old atheists believed religion was false. The New Atheists believe it is not only false, but evil. Sam Harris calls religion, “the most potent source of human conflict, past and present.”
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The New Atheists repeatedly point to the maltreatment of Galileo, the atrocities of the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the Salem witch trials in past history, as well as the sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests in today’s world as evidence of the cruelty of Christianity.

People have undoubtedly done horrific things in the name of Christ. But why should Christianity take the blame when it is people who are doing the opposite of what Jesus taught? Did Jesus favor burning witches? Did Jesus encourage his followers to torture heretics? Of course not. In fact, Jesus taught the exact opposite. He said to love your enemies (Matthew 5:44), to reach out to those whom society considers untouchable (Matthew 8:3), and to lay down your life for others (John 15:13). If people really did live like Jesus, violence would likely be a thing of the past.

What Do You Think?

If people lived according to the teachings of Jesus, what would the world really be like? Should Christianity bear the blame when people do the opposite of what Jesus teaches?

In
What’s So Great about Christianity,
Dinesh D’Souza demonstrates that the New Atheists grossly exaggerate the crimes committed in the name of religion while rationalizing the vastly greater crimes committed in the name of atheism. For example, Sam Harris estimates the number of people who were killed in the Salem witch trials to be 100,000. What is the real number? Hundreds? thousands? tens of thousands? Actually, it’s fewer than twenty-five.
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But how does atheism fare?

It’s important to keep in mind that the issue is not whether individual atheists can be good people. Of course they can (and many are). The key question is whether atheism, when it is adopted as the prevailing philosophy for a particular culture, is good or bad. When this question is the standard, it becomes clear that no other fundamental worldview has caused as much misery and bloodshed as atheism. Specifically, the number of people slaughtered by twentieth-century atheistic regimes, such as communist China, communist Russia, and Nazi Germany is more than one hundred million people.
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There is no close second place. David Berlinski, a secular Jew who received his PhD from Princeton University, believes that one of the main reasons for such atrocities is the absence of ultimate accountability: “What Hitler did not believe and what Stalin did not believe and what Mao did not believe and what the SS did not believe and what the Gestapo did not believe . . . was that God was watching what they were doing.”
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While Christians have certainly done some bad things, the legacy of Christianity has been overwhelmingly positive. Christians built the first hospitals, started the Red Cross, led the movement to end slavery, invented the university, and pioneered modern science. When we trace the movements that have led to the most profound liberation for humanity, we find the gospel at the heart of almost all of them.

Conclusion

In the final analysis, the only thing really new about the New Atheists is their attitude. Despite the flaming rhetoric, there are no recent findings in science, history, or philosophy that undermine theism in general or Christianity in particular. In fact, precisely the opposite is the case. The more we descend into the interworkings of the cell or ascend to the depths of the universe, the more we can see the fingerprint of God.

Roughly 3,000 years ago the psalmist said it best: “The heavens proclaim the glory of God. The skies display his craftsmanship. Day after day they continue to speak; night after night they make him known” (Psalm 19:1-2). As this psalm so clearly enunciates, God can be known through his creation. Yet as this book demonstrates, he has made himself known specifically through the person of Jesus Christ, who is more than a carpenter. This is not something we accept by blind faith, but through compelling evidence.