Evidence of Design So Overwhelming Only the Wilfully Obtuse Deny

Is science showing there really is a God?

• ERIC METAXAS
• THE AUSTRALIAN
• DECEMBER 26, 2014 2:38PM

Science is increasingly making a case for the existence of God. Source: Getty Images

IN 1966 Time magazine ran a cover story asking: Is God Dead? Many have accepted the cultural narrative that he’s obsolete — that as science progresses, there is less need for a “God” to explain the universe. Yet it turns out that the rumours of God’s death were premature. More amazing is that the relatively recent case for his existence comes from a surprising place — science itself.

Here’s the story: The same year Time featured the now-famous headline, the astronomer Carl Sagan announced that there were two important criteria for a planet to support life: The right kind of star, and a planet the right distance from that star. Given the roughly octillion — 1 followed by 24 zeros — planets in the universe, there should have been about septillion — 1 followed by 21 zeros — planets capable of supporting life.

With such spectacular odds, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, a large, expensive collection of private and publicly funded projects launched in the 1960s, was sure to turn up something soon. Scientists listened with a vast radio telescopic network for signals that resembled coded intelligence and were not merely random. But as years passed, the silence from the rest of the universe was deafening. Congress defunded SETI in 1993, but the search continues with private funds. As of 2014, researches have discovered precisely bubkis — 0 followed by nothing.

What happened? As our knowledge of the universe increased, it became clear that there were far more factors necessary for life than Sagan supposed. His two parameters grew to 10 and then 20 and then 50, and so the number of potentially life-supporting planets decreased accordingly. The number dropped to a few thousand planets and kept on plummeting. Even SETI proponents acknowledged the problem. Peter Schenkel wrote in a 2006 piece for Skeptical Inquirer magazine: “In light of new findings and insights, it seems appropriate to put excessive euphoria to rest … We should quietly admit that the early estimates … may no longer be tenable.”

As factors continued to be discovered, the number of possible planets hit zero, and kept going. In other words, the odds turned against any planet in the universe supporting life, including this one. Probability said that even we shouldn’t be here. Today there are more than 200 known parameters necessary for a planet to support life — every single one of which must be perfectly met, or the whole thing falls apart. Without a massive planet like Jupiter nearby, whose gravity will draw away asteroids, a thousand times as many would hit Earth’s surface. The odds against life in the universe are simply astonishing.

Yet here we are, not only existing, but talking about existing. What can account for it? Can every one of those many parameters have been perfect by accident? At what point is it fair to admit that science suggests that we cannot be the result of random forces? Doesn’t assuming that an intelligence created these perfect conditions require far less faith than believing that a life-sustaining Earth just happened to beat the inconceivable odds to come into being?

There’s more. The finetuning necessary for life to exist on a planet is nothing compared with the finetuning required for the universe to exist at all. For example, astrophysicists now know that the values of the four fundamental forces — gravity, the electromagnetic force, and the “strong” and “weak” nuclear forces — were determined less than one millionth of a second after the big bang. Alter any one value and the universe could not exist. For instance, if the ratio between the nuclear strong force and the electromagnetic force had been off by the tiniest fraction of the tiniest fraction — by even one part in 100,000,000,000,000,000 — then no stars could have ever formed at all. Feel free to gulp.

Multiply that single parameter by all the other necessary conditions, and the odds against the universe existing are so heart-stoppingly astronomical that the notion that it all “just happened” defies common sense. It would be like tossing a coin and having it come up heads 10 quintillion times in a row. Really?

Fred Hoyle, the astronomer who coined the term “big bang,” said that his atheism was “greatly shaken” at these developments. He later wrote that “a commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with the physics, as well as with chemistry and biology … The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.”

Theoretical physicist Paul Davies has said that “the appearance of design is overwhelming” and Oxford professor Dr. John Lennox has said “the more we get to know about our universe, the more the hypothesis that there is a Creator … gains in credibility as the best explanation of why we are here.”

The greatest miracle of all time, without any close seconds, is the universe. It is the miracle of all miracles, one that ineluctably points with the combined brightness of every star to something — or Someone — beyond itself.  

The Wall St Journal

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From Moscow

7 Reasons Why BioLogos Is A Threat to Classical Christian Education

Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog

December 3, 2014

Before getting into the thicket, let me briefly define my terms and say a few preliminary things about my concerns. First, by BioLogos I mean this particular project as an attempt to harmonize biological evolution and Christian faith. Second, while I believe that this attempt (however well-intentioned) is a threat to every form of Christian education, I am focusing on classical Christian education because that is where my labors have largely been. And third, nothing said here is intended to question the sincerity or niceness of any particular BioLogos brothers and sisters. I believe their vision is destructive, but if a destructive vision is being promulgated here by very nice people, it wouldn’t be the first time.

There are many places where I could launch this discussion, but I think I will start with the historicity of Adam and Eve.

“Genetic evidence shows that humans descended from a group of several thousand individuals who lived about 150,000 years ago. This conflicts with the traditional view that all humans descended from a single pair who lived about 10,000 years ago. While Genesis 2-3 speaks of the pair Adam and Eve, Genesis 4 refers to a larger population of humans interacting with Cain. One option is to view Adam and Eve as a historical pair living among many 10,000 years ago, chosen to represent the rest of humanity before God. Another option is to view Genesis 2-4 as an allegory in which Adam and Eve symbolize the large group of ancestors who lived 150,000 years ago. Yet another option is to view Genesis 2-4 as an “everyman” story, a parable of each person’s individual rejection of God. BioLogos does not take a particular view and encourages scholarly work on these questions.”

1. The first thing to notice is that while encouraging “scholarly work on these questions,” they are not subjecting their own options to any kind of rigorous or logical analysis. So genetic evidence shows that humans descended from a group of several thousand about 150,000 years ago? Now when walking upstream like this, one wonders why they stopped right where they decided to stop.

This is because we could also say that genetic evidence shows that humans descended from about a billion people 200 years ago. And when we greet the several thousand ancestors from 150,000 years ago one wonders (does one not?) whether they had parents, whether they had common ancestors. What possible reason could we have for tracing our human ancestry to its point of origin, but then stopping a few centuries short? I’ll bet with a little scholarly work on this question we could go upstream a little bit further. We might even get to meet our mother Eve and discover just how hairy her back was, and how good she was at picking nits from Adam’s scalp.

2. In attempting to reconcile evolutionary theory with biblical revelation, a false equivalence must first be assumed. Scripture is God’s perfect revelation to man, exquisitely designed for our capacities and condition. Evolutionary theory is not something we “know” in the same way. If someone were to say that their goal was to harmonize “Scripture” on the one hand, with phrenology on the other, we should stop them before the actual work of harmonizing begins. “You do know,” we should say, “that what we know about phrenology is not in the same category as what we know about the epistle to the Romans?” The same thing goes for Swedenborgian Ambien dreams.

If you appropriately assume the certainty of two bases of knowledge, then it is fully reasonable to seek to harmonize them. I am all for it, because all truth is God’s truth. I have no difficulty when someone seeks to harmonize the synoptic gospels with the fact a bowling ball dropped out of plane over the Pacific will fall at 9.8 meters per second squared. Harmonize away, and it won’t take long. But if you want to harmonize Scripture with your view that criminality is determined by bumps on the head with the Pauline view that it is caused by bumps on the heart, then there is an enormous problem. You are just assuming that you have equivalent truths that need harmonizing. But maybe you just have one glaring error that needs rejecting.
On this question, the Academy is a very large, self-authenticating plausibility structure, with the words Echo Chamber stenciled on the door. What you guys know in there is not the same thing as what we know out here. I do feel a need to harmonize what I know with what I know. I feel no need at all to harmonize what I know with what I don’t know.

3. Christian education is the process of teaching our covenant children how to think about the great questions — who are we? how did we get here? where are we going? These questions are woven tightly together, and you cannot radically restructure the one about how we got here without radically affecting all the other great questions. Attempting to do so will only result in the demolition of integrated Christian worldview thinking. But the reason our schools exist is to promote Christian worldview thinking on the part of our students.

4. An essential part of the task of Christian education is to give a biblical account of evil in the world, along with the resident evil that every believer has seen in his own heart. Where did that come from?

“The sciences of evolution and archaeology can provide some insight into these questions [of original sin] but are not equipped to answer them. These questions are theological, and over the centuries the church has considered many possible answers. Some of these options are consistent with the scientific evidence currently available.”

Well, I am very glad these some of these options are consistent (see Journal of Scholarly Handwaving, Vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 17-28), for if they were not consistent with biblical revelation, we would have to abandon them, right? Right? Where did everybody go?

How we came to be sinful is one of the bedrock questions, and students in our schools need something better than “scholars think stuff.” I dare say they do.

Everything comes down to a prohibited tree, and the fact that everyone who reads these words is descended from a man who reached out his hand to take that forbidden fruit. We are descended from our common father, and he represented us well when he defied what God had told him. That is why I find these stirrings in my heart, and that is why I need a Savior.

5. Then there is the matter of physical death. The Bible teaches that death came into the world through Adam (Rom. 5:12). Theistic evolution has to argue that Adam came into the world through death. In the biblical view, Adam is the father of death. In the other view, death is the father of Adam. The difference is a stark one.

BioLogos says this:

“The curse of Genesis 3 was that Adam and Eve, not the animals, should die for their disobedience. Therefore, animal death before the Fall is compatible with Christian doctrine.”

Note in the first place that this doesn’t even solve the presenting problem. If Adam and Eve were the first emerging humans from a crowd of primates, what is the sense of telling them that if they violated whatever our replacement was for the Forbidden Tree, they would surely die? “Die?” they might say. “Everybody dies. My parents just died last year.” Why is it a threat to go through something that has been the way of the world for millions of years already? Why didn’t God threaten them with having to eat breakfast tomorrow, just like always?

Secondly, note that this solution proves far too much. It does not just prove that animal death is “compatible with” biblical doctrine; it proves that animal death is a positive good. If the days of creation are referring to the millions of years of struggle, death, disease, decay, nature red in tooth and claw, then you have to account for the fact that an all-beneficent God looked down on those bloody millennia, and pronounced them all good. And then go get a knife, find a sentient creature, preferably a fluffy bunny for the sake of my illustrative point, and torture it to death. That monstrosity, according to the theology of BioLogos, need have no connection to human sin whatever. It provides no reason for thinking that our world is broken by sin. Fluffy bunnies have always died, man, many of them painfully. God called it good.

And this is why this inconsistency on this point, on suffering and death (natural evil), is tied in with inconsistency on the previous point about moral evil.

6. The clear tendency of the BioLogos outlook is to consider young earth creationism as the ultimate academic faux pas. Young earth creationists are not just in error, they are embarrassing. But students in our schools are being taught any number of embarrassing things — like marriage consisting of one man and one woman, for example. An essential part of our training is to show our students how scholarly tongue clucking is not an argument.

So learning how to resist the academic cool shame on this point is a most excellent exercise. And we can begin by making the arbiters of all intellectual rigor answer the most basic questions about their assertions on time and the age of earth. “You say that the universe is fourteen billion years old, give or take. Where is it that age? Is it the same age at the point where the Big Bang occurred as it is out at the edges? Are there any edges? What clock are you using? What Newtonian balcony are you standing on when you measure the age of the whole universe?”

7. The Lord Jesus spoke of Adam and Eve in a particular way, and His example is normative for all His followers. I must not only follow the Lord’s ethic on marriage, but if I am His disciple I have an obligation to accept His rationale for that ethic.

“And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female, And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh? Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder” (Matt. 19:4–6).

All these thoughts do need to be developed further, and so I believe that from time to time I shall attempt to do so.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From Moscow

Do You Believe in Magic?

Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog

October 29, 2014

Okay, so it is a bit disturbing when the head transubstantiationist says that we need not believe in magic.

Now I grant that his subject was not the Lord’s Supper, but rather creation and evolution, but still. His subject was God’s relationship to the world, which is relevant in all things. We must keep in mind that the pontiff’s remarks were run through the interpretive grid of journalism, which has an enormous capacity to muddle things, but even so, we also have to admit that these comments, taken at face value, are what analytic logicians are wont to call a “dog’s breakfast.”

In their scramble to stay away from boo! words and phrases, respectable theologians can talk almost perfect nonsense about creation and intelligent design. “No, no, I am not a creationist. Well, yes, God did create everything . . .” “No, no, not intelligent design. All the designing occurred earlier.”

What it boils down to is that accomodationist Christians, who are in a state of low tension with the surrounding environment of unbelief, want to keep it that way. Low tension is the way to go, and you can still be in with the right crowd, you can still get invited to the right parties.
This results in the constant efforts of accommodationist Christians to figure out ways of getting their unbelief to look like belief. The unbelievers outside can smell the aroma of a shared disbelief, and the believers inside can be fooled by the words — or, at any rate, not know how to respond to them. They know something is wrong, but are not quite sure how to take it apart.

And of course, the low tension johnnies are all about missional outreach — they say we have to lower barriers for unbelievers so that they are not “put off.” What they are really about is not being put off themselves. Because — when it comes to the growth of religious groups, and to speak as a sociologist would — high tension groups are the ones that grow.

So, to cut to the chase, God created the world, the heavens and the earth. He did it by the blam! method. First there wasn’t anything, and just a few days later, there were fruit trees all over the place. The fruit was just hanging there, like it had been ripening for months, and the tree growing for years, but it had actually been ripening for just a few minutes. A few days later, Adam and Eve, just like in the Sunday School coloring books, came walking through the Garden, hand in hand.

God did this thing. He had a design in it, and He is also intelligent. Put these things together — now follow me closely here — and the result can be called intelligent design. Since it was created, we can also say — unless we want to be intellectually respectable — that it was created.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From Moscow

University-Trained Mole Rats

Blog and Mablog

Douglas Wilson

October 10, 2014

Scripture teaches us that the creation is articulate.

“The heavens declare his righteousness, And all the people see his glory. Confounded be all they that serve graven images, That boast themselves of idols: Worship him, all ye gods” (Ps. 97:6–7).

The created order pours forth speech. Nature is not a dumb mute, vaguely gesturing in the direction of some nameless god, who must have made “all this.”

It is far more than that. The creation pours forth moral speech. In the text cited above we should note that the heavens declare God’s righteousness, and does so in a way that makes it unmistakeable that this righteousness is glorious, and that it humiliates those who pray to their statues. An honest look at the night sky, in other words, not only blows away the pretended rationality of idolatry, but also the pretended morality of it. The heavens declare God’s righteousness, and shames the unrighteousness of every alternative pretense.

When we kick against such heavenly declarations, we do it by demanding to see the argument laid out cold on the table and neatly dissected. But who said it was merely an argument? There are arguments that can be extracted from the experience, and if the experience has touched you, the arguments do make good sense.  But if you expect etiolated scholastic argumentation to do the same thing to your head and heart that a harvest moon rising over a spinney of pine can do then you are pursuing the epistemology of a colony of university-trained mole rats.

Looking to the argument alone is the same thing as not following it.

Scripture testifies to the glory of God everywhere, which is not the same thing as saying that the glory of God is locked up in the sealed container of special revelation. The Bible tells us that God is speaking to us all the time, in all things, in every event. Scripture tells us also that this speech is content rich, full of wisdom, power, goodness, and righteousness.

Pretending that this isn’t so is just that — pretending. To be created is to be in a place where God is never silent, anywhere, or in any blessed thing.

What in the World To Do?

Building, Restoring, and Cleaning

The perspective held by Christians about human society and economy tells one a great deal about their beliefs concerning Jesus Christ and His Kingdom. 

That we all live in human society to one degree or another is inescapable.  Even the foolish Stylites, who committed themselves to a life of isolation from all others, living on poles in the extreme attempt to divorce themselves from human society and the world, could not escape.  The most famous were plagued by tourists coming to gape.

Since living “in the world” is a providential given–a divine decree–the belief we Christians have about the world and our place in it is a vital concern.  Since God has placed us in human society and human economy, we had better get our understanding of it right and in conformity with the Bible. 

R. H. Tawney tells us that there are four distinct beliefs or attitudes about human society and human economy. He presents them as follows:

There are, perhaps, four main attitudes which religious opinion may adopt toward the world of social institutions and economic relations:

1.  It may stand on one side in ascetic aloofness and regard them as in their very nature the sphere of unrighteousness, from which men may escape–from which, if they consider their souls, they will escape–but which they can conquer only by flight.

2.  It may take them for granted and ignore them, as matters of indifference belonging to a world with which religion has no concern; in all ages the prudence of looking problems boldly in the face and passing on has seemed too self-evident to require justification.

3.  It may throw itself into an agitation for some particular reform, for the removal of some crying scandal, for the promotion of some final revolution, which will inaugurate the reign of righteousness on earth.

4.  It may at once accept and criticize, tolerate and amend, welcome the gross world of human appetites, as the squalid scaffolding from amid which the life of the spirit must rise, and insist that this also is the material of the Kingdom of God.  To such a temper, all activities divorced from religion are brutal or dead, but none are too mean to be beneath or too great to be above it, since all, in their different degrees, are touched with the spirit which permeates the whole.  It finds its most sublime expression in the worlds of Piccarda: “Paradise is everywhere, though the grace of the highest good is not shed everywhere in the same degree.”
[R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. (London: John Murray, 1923), p.16f.]

The question is begged, To which of these, dear reader, do you hold?  

The first two options presuppose the Kingdom of God and the redemption of Christ have rejected the creation of God.   Either the creation is intrinsically evil, beyond redemption, or God has chosen not to redeem it, for the manifestation of His own glory.  This would place the creation, the world, human society, economic labour and institutions in the same category as the demonic.  These options do not square with the promise God has made concerning the redemption of the creation itself (Romans 8: 20-23).

The third introduces a new redemptive act, and another redeemer, without which the reign of righteousness will not come.  This presupposes the inadequacy and incompleteness of Christ’s work upon the Cross and His subsequent resurrection, ascension, and enthronement in heaven. 

The final option is the one most squared with God’s revelation concerning His kingdom.  Christ has appeared to destroy the works of the Devil, as far as the curse is found (I John 3:8); He will have every thought, motive, and intention underlying every human action of His people brought captive to Him (II Corinthians 10: 4-6); whatever we do, even down to our eating and drinking, is to be redeemed (I Corinthians 10:31).  How much more, then, every economic and social relationship, every duty, obligation, and commitment to others. 

Thus, in Tawney’s presentation of the fourth option, the letter “s” in spirit is to be read as upper case.  Amidst the scaffolding of the creation itself, the life of the Spirit must arise.  It is the Spirit’s great task to apply the redeeming work of the Son of God to all of creation.  It is our great task to be His faithful servants in this endeavour.  No calling or endeavour could possibly be higher or more noble. 

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From Moscow

Seven Theses on the Age of the Earth

Blog and Mablog

Posted on Friday, March 7, 2014  

By Douglas Wilson 

I recently came to the conclusion that it was time to set down in one place my reasons for approaching Genesis the way I do. I have noticed that the topic has become a matter of increased debate in classical Christian circles — and because schools cannot honestly stay out of it — it matters a great deal what we teach and why. So here are seven theses on the age of the earth.

1. First, the age of the earth, considered in isolation, is neither here nor there. The issue is always what God said, and not how old something is. If the earth is six thousand years old now, it will eventually be one hundred thousand years old at some point, about ninety-four thousand years from now. Will theologians at that time still be required to hold to a “young earth” view? So the issue is not age, or day, or young, or old, but rather the substance of what God actually said. Whatever He actually revealed should be what we use as the foundation for all our subsequent thought. After we have our foundation, we may incorporate truth from other sources — natural revelation included — but we must take care that we never privilege what we think we know over what God actually told us.

2. Therefore, the debate — which is most necessary — should be conducted primarily between Christians who accept the Scriptures as the absolute Word of God, perfect and infallible in all that they affirm.
This is because debate is pointless between parties who are appealing to different authorities. The fact that the debate is now being conducted with many of the participants openly saying that the Bible “has mistakes in it” tells us why we are not really getting anywhere.

3. Once we have limited the participants in this way, we have simplified things considerably. Everyone in the debate would be willing to affirm a flannel graph version of the Flood, giraffe and all, if that is what the Bible taught, and everyone in the debate would be willing to affirm a planet creaky with age, if that is what the Bible taught.

That said, the prima facie evidence for the traditional view of Genesis is very strong (historical Adam, continuous genealogies, etc.). Alternative approaches to the text, such as the framework hypothesis or the gap theory, seem like special pleading in order to make room to shoehorn in a cosmology from elsewhere. We should always smell a rat whenever someone notices an anomaly in the text (e.g. the different creation accounts in the first two chapters of Genesis) and someone else is immediately at your elbow with millions of years he wants to pour in.

I am not saying this because I am automatically categorizing any views contrary to my own as special pleading. One alternative view, grounded responsibly in the text, views the days in Genesis as days of revelation, which Adam was recording as God was teaching him how to write. But even this view would simply require someone to stop affirming “six-day creation,” and is not at all inconsistent with “young-earth creation.” So the prima facie evidence for the traditional view is strong enough for me to consider that the burden of proof lies with those who would question it.

4. The fossil record is a record of death. The fossil record is a graveyard. We have exegetical reasons for believing that this paleontological graveyard was planted after the fall of man. We have a time stamp for Adam in the genealogies, and because of what the Scriptures teach about the nature of death, the recorded deaths of all sentient beings needs to be dated after that point.

I exclude from this consideration the “deaths” of any permitted fruit eaten by Adam and Eve in the garden, the “deaths” of the bacteria in their digestion systems, and so forth. The Bible teaches that Adam introduced death into the world (Rom. 5:12; 1 Cor. 15:21), the Bible gives us an example of the kinds of seed-creatures we are talking about, beasts, birds, fish, and man (1 Cor. 15:38-39), and the Bible teaches that the whole created order groans as it looks toward the final day of liberation (Rom. 8:22). The resurrection of the dead undoes and reverses the Fall into death, and the kinds of creatures found in fossil beds are the kinds of creatures that will be raised. When Adam fell, the creation fell also, and when the sons of God are manifested for what they are, the creation will be restored. So the dislocations that are frequently pointed to as evidence of an old earth are dislocations that Scripture teaches were brought about by the rebellion of man.

5. The next point is related. Independent of any exegetical considerations on this point, there is also a deep theological problem with the view that death antedated mankind. The Bible teaches that Adam produced death. The opposing view has to say that in some manner death produced Adam. But when God pronounced the unfallen creation “good” (Gen. 1:4; Gen. 1:10; Gen. 1:12; Gen. 1:18; Gen. 1:21; Gen. 1:25; Gen. 1:31), this would mean He was “creating” by means of millions of years of nature red in tooth and claw, with countless sentient beings suffering and dying in order to get to the place God was going.

When we describe the kind of creation that God called good, we are affirming something about His character. The view that His “good” included unimaginable suffering without any reason is an insurmountable cliff for any theodicy to climb. The problem of evil has been tough for many apologists with the reason for evil grounded in the rebellion of mankind. But if we are found to be saying that suffering, pain, and anguish are an unfallen good, then this should tie us up in knots. It should also make us a little wary of looking forward to Heaven too much. I don’t want to go to Heaven just to fall into a tar pit.

Death is an enemy (1 Cor. 15:26), and not a good tool that God took out of His good toolbox in order to fashion a good world.

6. The Lord Jesus speaks of an historical Adam easily, and in the same way that He speaks of other historical characters from the Old Testament. There is no good textual reason for dividing Genesis 1-10 from the rest of Genesis, as though the two parts were different kinds of literature. In the same way, the Lord speaks naturally of the first man and woman created at the beginning (Matt. 19:4), and He speaks of them with the same ease that He mentions Moses a few verses later (Matt. 19:8). He does the same with Noah (Matt. 24:37). There are no good reasons why we should not speak in the same way, and impelling reasons for us to insist on speaking that way under His foundational command to “follow me.”

7. I am quite prepared to make dogmatic affirmations from the text of Scripture because I believe that is one of the reasons why the text was given to us — so that we might have light in a dark place. And provided we remember what I mentioned earlier, I am also prepared to receive light from natural revelation and science, and to incorporate it into my understanding of Scripture (say, what an archeologist tells us about the location of Hezekiah’s water supply for Jerusalem).

But there is science and there is science. I am pretty confident that they have figured out the boiling point of water at sea level, and I am grateful for penicillin. But when the Authorities tell me what the temperature was at the center of a particular star, right before the supernova happened, or they entrance me with tales of wormholes, or they dazzle my eyes with string theory, my enthusiasm might be a skosh more tentative. They strike me as men who say they want to read all the works of natural revelation, but who just read the first three words of a ten-volume series, and who then slam it shut because of the need to start lecturing us creationist cornpones.

Time might be one of those complicated things. If God had only created the solar system, and there was nothing else out there, we would be able to get by with everything measured by how many trips around the sun we had taken. And the entire cosmos should be thought of the same way — if God placed it all here at one fell swoop, it does not give me heartburn to thank Him for starlight from a particular star that has no more been to that star than I have. God created the star, the earth, and the entire rope of starlight in between. That should present no more of a problem than God creating both sides of a rock at the same time.

But even on the reckoning of the astrophysicists’ bigbangery, time (about which we are speaking) should be considered complicated enough for them to stop lecturing us in simplistic terms — as though their view allows the cosmos to have one timer on whole thing. Suppose everything that exists all blew out of a volatile little pinprick, and Gabriel has had himself a blast since that time surfing the event horizon — a celestial maverick. We try to tell him that the earth was fashioned six thousand years go. Pah! he replies, singing for joy. I was there, and it has only been a minute.

Books

“Death by Living”

Life is meant to be spent. N D Wilson

[Thomas Nelson, 2013  208 pp., $19.99 ]

Book Review by John Wilson
Books and Culture

September 2013

Pardon me for quoting myself, but here is the way I started a book review for Christianity Today magazine in 2007: “Remember, you read it here first. N. D. Wilson (no relation, I hasten to add) is a name that will soon be widely known. He will write many books, Lord willing, in many genres for our instruction and delight. His first is Leepike Ridge (Random House).”

Six years later, and now in his mid-thirties, Wilson has already written a bunch of books, in several genres, not to mention a bit of screenwriting. His latest, Death by Living, is his second work of nonfiction and (so I think) his best book yet.

“This is a spoken world,” Wilson writes—”from galaxies to inchworms, from seraphs to electrons to meter maids, every last thing was and is shaped ex nihilo. It—and we—all exist as beats and rhythms and rhymes in the cosmic and constant word art of the Creator God. To fully embrace and attempt to apply such a vision is … dizzying.” The ellipses are his, and what he’s attempting is not just dizzying, it’s impossible—but it’s worth trying, again and again, over the course of a lifetime.

Death by living? That’s the fate we all share.

But we can choose to be aware of what’s happening, embracing it rather than hiding from the reality of our own lives. “Life is a story,” Wilson says—once, twice, twenty times.

Now you may be feeling itchy at the invocation of story. Don’t worry: the author is a step ahead of you: ” ‘Story, story, my life is a story,’ says the hipster to his Twitter feed.” Yes, story can be used superficially, evasively, to avoid unpalatable truths, to avoid conflict. (We’re all just telling our stories, you know.) Which is funny, because you can’t have a story without conflict.

So, one of the best stories in this book of good stories is Wilson’s account of a 2009 family trip to Europe (Chapter 4, “Going to Hell in a Seventeen-Passenger Handbasket”). The narrative involves repeated vomiting, in public places, by two-year-old Seamus, then known as “Fatty.” His spectacular displays of discomfort make the family entourage—already hard to miss in countries where the birthrate is well below replacement level—downright conspicuous. All of this is related as if by a master of gross-out comedy (it’s very filmworthy), but the story also includes glimpses of an enfeebled church in what was once the heartland of the Reformation (that’s comedy too, but of a much darker variety) and memories of Wilson’s maternal grandfather (the lives of both of his grandfathers are woven throughout the book).

And I haven’t even mentioned Chapter 8, “The (Blessed) Lash of Time,” which is one of the best treatments of that elusive subject I have ever seen. If I had to pick one part of the book to give to someone as a sampler—here, taste this—it would be this chapter, which also features a magnificent excursus on atheistic scenarios of “a world that is truly and intrinsically and explosively accidental.” (The riff on “nothingness” is particularly delectable.)

“The world never slows down so that we can better grasp the story,” Wilson writes, “so that we can form study groups and drill each other on the recent past until we have total retention. We have exactly one second to carve a memory of that second, to sort and file and prioritize in some attempt at preservation. But then the next second has arrived, the next breeze to distract us, the next plane slicing through the sky, the next funny skip from the next funny toddler, the next squirrel fracas, and the next falling leaf.”

From the ridiculous to the sublime, it’s all here, never far removed from this ordinary moment of death by living: “Life is here. Life is now.”

John Wilson is the editor of Books & Culture.

Calvin’s Daily Devotional

Daily Devotional

September 03

Thine Is My Heart: Devotional Readings from the Writings of John Calvin

by John Calvin (compiled by John H. Kromminga)
Reproduced from the OPC Website

Bible Text:
And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. —Genesis I:28

Devotional:
Now, as I have just before suggested, God himself has demonstrated, by the very order of creation, that he made all things for the sake of man. For it was not without reason that he distributed the making of the world into six days; though it would have been no more difficult for him to complete the whole work, in all its parts, at once, in a single moment, than to arrive at its completion by such progressive advances.

But in this he has been pleased to display his providence and paternal solicitude towards us, since, before he would make man, he prepared everything which he foresaw would be useful or beneficial to him. How great would be now the ingratitude to doubt whether we are regarded by this best of fathers, whom we perceive to have been solicitous on our account before we existed!

How impious would it be to tremble with diffidence, lest at any time his kindness should desert us in our necessities, which we see was displayed in the greatest affluence of all blessings provided for us while we were yet unborn!

Besides, we are told by Moses that this liberality has subjected to us all that is contained in the whole world. He certainly has not made this declaration in order to tantalize us with the empty name of such a donation. Therefore we never shall be destitute of anything which will conduce to our welfare.

Finally, to conclude, whenever we call God the Creator of heaven and earth, let us at the same time reflect, that the dispensation of all those things which he has made is in his own power, and that we are his children, whom he has received into his charge and custody, to be supported and educated; so that we may expect every blessing from him alone, and cherish a certain hope that he will never suffer us to want those things which are necessary to our well-being, that our hope may depend on no other; that, whatever we need or desire, our prayers may be directed to him, and that, from whatever quarter we receive any advantage, we may acknowledge it to be his benefit, and confess it with thanksgiving; that, being allured with such great sweetness of goodness and beneficence, we may study to love and worship him with all our hearts. —Institutes, I, xiv, xxii

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John Calvin was the premier theologian of the Reformation, but also a pious and godly Christian pastor who endeavored throughout his life to point men and women to Christ. We are grateful to Reformation Heritage Books for permission to use John Calvin’s Thine Is My Heart as our daily devotional for 2013 on the OPC Web site. You can currently obtain a printed copy of that book from Reformation Heritage Books.

Antsy Angst

‘Evolution vs. God’ Filmmaker Responds to Atheists’ Calls for Unedited Footage and Delivers a Stinging Message to Richard Dawkins

Evangelist Ray Comfort’s 38-minute “Evolution vs. God” documentary continues to spark debate and angst among the atheist activist community. It’s no surprise that non-believers dismiss the documentary’s contents and deride Comfort’s claim that scientists cannot offer definitive evidence for Darwinian evolution.

TheBlaze spoke with Comfort on Tuesday, who said that this particular project, which premiered on July 9, has been “polarizing,” as he has received many praise-worthy comments as well as a multitude of angry rebuttals. He said there’s been a “love-hate attitude” surrounding the short film.

“Normally with a video you get 20, 30, 40 comments, maybe 100,” he said. “This is at 46,000 comments on YouTube at just over three weeks.”

Logo for Ray Comfort’s “Evolution vs. God” documentary (Photo Credit: Ray Comfort)

As for those who are angry over the film, Comfort was candid. Non-believers, he claims, are simply frustrated that their worldview is being eroded by what’s exposed in “Evolution vs. God.”

“Atheists are very, very angry because this isn’t just a wet blanket on their sinful lifestyle, it’s a Niagara Falls,” the evangelist charged. “There’s a God and there’s moral responsibility and moral absolutes.”

Many of these non-theists — including those at American Atheists, a controversial church-state separatist group — have called for the unedited footage from the movie’s production to be publicly released so that they can assess what, if anything, was omitted.

Comfort told TheBlaze that his team his thinking about doing so, but that he has no moral obligation to release the raw footage. In defending a potential decision not to distribute it, he made the point that media outlets are not generally asked to do the same and that there’s really nothing in the remaining footage that would corroborate critics’ claims. . . .

The filmmaker and Christian leader also took the time to defend his editors, whom he called “men of God and men of integrity” — individuals who he said would “never make somebody say something they didn’t say.” As far as critics go, he believes that the gripes they’ve touted are unfolded.

“They are thinking that the scientists have evidence for evolution and we didn’t want that released, so we cut it out and dropped it on the editor’s floor. That’s just not true — it didn’t happen,” Comfort added.

The evangelist believes that Richard Dawkins, the famed evolutionary biologist who is widely seen as the leader of the atheist activist movement, is worried over the film and what it exposes about evolutionary theory. Dawkins, too, has apparently called for the full, unedited footage to be released.

“I believe he’s in a panic, because it shows him as being a charlatan — a deceiver who has convinced multitudes [to believe] bogus science founded on nothing but blind faith,” Comfort added.

The Christian leader said that he has love for Dawkins and other non-believers (he has even sent the scientist a number of fruit baskets) and that the animosity goes only one way. Niceties aside, Comfort has a strong message for him on the subject of Darwinian evolution.

“I would say come out of hiding. Be open with your flock. They are in disarray. Atheists are furious, they’re angry,” he said. “All they need to do to silence me is give evidence of Darwinian evolution. Step up to the plate, be a man, give evidence for Darwinian evolution publicly…but you won’t because you can’t, because there isn’t any.”

Watch the entire film, below:

Earlier this summer, Comfort told TheBlaze that he has repeatedly challenged Dawkins to a debate in the past, but to no avail. The atheist activist has allegedly refused unless Comfort donates $100,000 to his foundation for non-belief. Obviously, this donation isn’t going to happen, so the two, at least for the time being, won’t be chatting about matters of worldly origin.

“Evolution vs. God” has more than 480,000 views on YouTube. Comfort, the founder of evangelical outreach groups Way of the Master and Living Waters, hopes that everyone will watch the film, including atheists who hold evolutionary theory as gospel.

[Editor’s Note:  We believe the release of unedited footage sometime would be useful.   The video has a lot of sound bites which opens up the possibility of misrepresentation.  Sunlight is always the best disinfectant.  But as it stands, the video is a damning indictment of evolutionism–and its camp followers. JT]

Measuring Standard

What is your authority?

Christians who invoke millions of years cannot make their arguments from the biblical texts.

by Gary Bates CEO, 

Creation Ministries Internationsl–US

Published: 1 August 2013 (GMT+10)

First appeared in a CMI newsletter.

Is the age of the earth an important issue, really?

Pastors often love CMI speakers to take questions as part of our ministry program at their churches. These often flush out the discordant views of some members, surprising the pastors.

Q & A sessions are not always easy for our speakers. We don’t know what’s coming, or whether rabid anticreationists, some with scientific qualifications, are attending, intent on demonstrating the ‘ignorance’ of the visiting creationist. In the hot seat, we now have to be instant ‘experts’ in paleontology, biology, geology, cosmology and even theology. Of course, no one is an expert in all fields, but we do our best to show there are answers!
 
Sadly, the most hostile audience members are usually Christians agitated by our ‘young-earth’ (biblical) presentation.
I’ve come to realize this is because they believe they’ve sorted out the apparent conflict between ‘science’ and the Bible years ago by adding the millions of years somewhere in Genesis. So, who are we to ‘rock their boat?’

Not long ago after the main presentation in a church, we opened the floor for questions. A middle-aged man bolted up (his look of disdain immediately told me I was about to be in the firing line), and sure enough, openly expressed disappointment at my “narrow” view of Scripture. It went something like this.

Questioner: “N. G. [name omitted] is a great apologist. His books are required reading in many seminaries. He has no problem with a billions-of-years-old earth. Who are you to say he is wrong?” [Now please note here that despite his public put-down of my own seeming lack of credentials, he was ‘inviting’ me to criticize another Christian. If I did, it could cause others to lose focus on the question.]

Me: I agree that he is a good apologist. But I think you could actually answer the question for me. For instance, could you show me anywhere in Scripture, if I read it at face value, where I can read the term millions or billions of years? Or, even get the impression—just from Scripture—that the universe or the earth is that old?

Could you show me anywhere in  Scripture where I can read the term millions or billions of years?

Me: “So, the idea of some ancient Earth is not derived from Scripture then? Is that correct?”

Qu: “I suppose.”

Me: “So, even though Mr N. G. can be very good in other areas of apologetics, and can even claim that the Bible is his sole authority; when it comes to deciding the age of the earth, he did not derive his ideas from the Bible, but from outside it. And most importantly, those old age ideas came from people who are not Christians to start with, and are trying to explain the universe without God. Respectfully then, on this issue the Bible was not his authority, and if any Christian says that the universe is billions of years old, then the same applies to them.” [The man sat down as he realized what he had just done].

The age of the earth is not the issue!

The point I am trying to make here is that most people don’t realize what authority they accept when they do this. Many Christians wrongly believe there is overwhelming evidence to prove the earth is old. One of our main goals during presentations is to show that operational science cannot give us ages of things such as fossils or rocks. The ages are derived from interpretations of facts based on beliefs about such things. The lights go on when people realize how they’ve misunderstood this all along.

Doubting the Bible’s history in Genesis causes many to reject the Christian faith entirely. The real issue for Christians is about the authority of God’s Word. In other words, “Did God really say?” (Sound familiar?) Doubting the Bible’s history in Genesis causes many to reject the Christian faith entirely.

One of the most famous apostates was a preaching contemporary of Billy Graham, the famed evangelist Charles Templeton. He died a few years ago, publicly rejecting his former belief in a Savior. And the reason? He’d been taught (like most people) that the fossil record was proof of millions of years of evolutionary history on Earth. He knew that Genesis was foundational to the entrance of sin and death into the world, and saw it as being undermined if there were eons of death before Adam. If only he had been exposed to solid creation teaching that showed the fossil record could be explained as an order of burial from Noah’s Flood. What a tragedy!

“My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge” (Hosea 4:6)

We’ve belabored the awful statistics of our Christian youth going down the same road as Templeton, and for the very same reasons. CMI exists to provide information to ‘stop the rot’. So, please think of someone you know who needs to hear this information, ask to have a creation presentation at your church, or support CMI through prayer or financial means to enable us to keep producing information. It only takes a little effort to be involved.

More Lastrade than Holmes

Vain “Reconciliations”

There are plenty of professing Christians who, to all intents and purposes, are genuine believers.  But they have chosen to lay aside the first eleven chapters of the Bible as authoritative and divinely inspired.  Why have they done so?  Because they consider rationalistic science to be more inspired and more authoritative than the Bible itself.  When science conflicts with the Bible, the latter must give way. 

Others have sought to “reconcile” the teaching of  both the Bible and science.  They have devised all kinds of ingenious pretexts to make the early chapters of Bible say something other than what they actually do say.  Note, it is always the Bible which has to change under such tortuous procedures, never science. 

This is folly indeed.  We all know that science is not neutral.
We know that it is captive to dominant paradigms.  It is always necessarily biased towards certain theoretical pre-interpretations.  Given the rise of an anti-Christian paradigm in the West over the past 250 years, the prejudice against the Scripture is now strong indeed.  Science has cant.  It is now deeply partial when it comes to presupposing its own secularist world view.  Worse, science–at least hard, real science–is weak at the outset when investigating the origins of the universe in general and the world and sentient life in particular because its ability to experiment in a lab is necessarily constricted.  Hard science cannot replicate the conditions of the genesis of the cosmos.  It can only deal with things as they are now and speculate via extrapolation backwards in time. 

But every concession to scientific speculation by Christians brings with it greater contradictions with the text of Scripture.  For example, the day age theory of the six days of creation is an attempt to concede an extremely long period of time during which the cosmos evolved and life began upon earth. Each day represents a geological age in this bizarre rewriting of the text. 

Although the intent is to harmonize Scripture and science, the day-age view is just as much at odds with modern science as any other creationist view.  The geological ages do not harmonize with the days of creation and there are many discrepancies between the two.  [Andrew S. Kulikovsky, Creation, Fall, Restoration: A Biblical Theology of Creation (Fearn, Ross-shire: Mentor/Christian Focus Publications Ltd, 2009),  p.152.]

So, the Christian, trying to reconcile seven days of creation with purported geological time, ends up in a nonsense position–rejected both by the text of Scripture and by the evolutionists.  They have mixed water with wine and got sewage.

A similar devastating series of problems arise from attempts to deny the world wide deluge of the Noahic flood.  Despite there being is an widespread belief in a universal flood testified to by ancient peoples, the attempt has been made to argue that the text of Genesis 6-9 actually teaches a localised flood, restricted to the Babylonian plain.  In discussing some of the contradictions and flaws this “reconciliation” produces, Kulikovsky adds:

Several other objections to a local flood can be raised.  If the flood was only local, then why was there any need to build an ark?  Noah was given many years of warning, so there was ample time to leave the region and travel anywhere on earth.  Why build an ocean-liner sized ark to save eight people when they could have migrated as Lot and his family did after being warned about the impending destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.  The animals would have been all over the earth not just in the Mesopotamian region, so why bother to bring them on board?  If any kinds were unique to this region then they too could have migrated.  Why bring birds on board when they are capable of flying hundreds of miles in a day? 

. . . Furthermore, the fact that the dove released by Noah could find no place to land because there was water over all the surface of the earth (Genesis 8:9) also stands in contradiction to a local flood–especially since doves are capable of flying hundreds of miles without setting down.

In addition, if the flood was only local, God has repeatedly broken His promise never again to destroy the earth and its inhabitants by a flood (Genesis 8:21; 9:11; Isaiah 54:9) since there have been numerous local floods throughout Mesopotamia which have caused great destruction.   [Andrew S. Kulikovsky, Creation, Fall, Restoration: A Biblical Theology of Creation (Fearn, Ross-shire: Mentor/Christian Focus Publications Ltd, 2009),  p.231f.]

 The attempt to ingratiate the Church with Unbelieving mammon ends up exposing God’s Word to ridicule.  We Christians, however, believe the Bible to be true–the inerrant, infallible Word of the Living God, utterly reliable in all that it teaches.  The first eleven chapters of Genesis are overtly and deliberately written in the literary form of Hebrew historical narrative.  They are not Hebrew poetry.  They are not expressions of Hebrew wisdom literature.  They are simple, majestic, straightforward historical narrative.  Consequently, they should be taken at face value and read as an accurate, truthful historical account. 

Moreover, last time we checked there was not one modern secular, Unbelieving scientist present at the time of creation.  That’s a rather debilitating limitation upon a discipline which depends upon empirical observation and experimental repeatability for discovery and verification.  In such conditions, vain speculation always lurks, desiring mastery.  And so it has come to pass.  More Lastrade than Holmes.   

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

That’s A Rabbit, You Doofus

Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Douglas Wilson

Comes now chapter two of Jerry Coyne’s book, called Written in the Rocks. It will take a post or two to deal with this chapter, so patience, all of you.  My first post will address the structure of his argumentation, and later I will look at the time involved in all this — my own variation on what is called Haldane’s Dilemma.

First, we may take as an indicator of how Coyne represents data generally by how he represents the position of his adversaries. He refers to the “creationist prediction that all species must appear suddenly and then remain unchanged” (p. 32). As stated, this is simplistic and wrong, and when he tries to qualify it a moment later, he misrepresents even as he qualifies.

“Even some creationists will admit that minor changes in size and shape might occur over time — a process called microevolution — but they reject the idea that one very different kind of animal or plant can some from another (macroevolution)” (pp. 32-33)

It is not “some creationists admit that changes might happen.” It is all creationists insist changes have happened. Variation within kinds, including significant variation, is not something that any competent creationist denies. Indeed, it is an essential part of the creationist model.

That said, here is the problem with the structure of Coyne’s argument.
Recall the elementary school exercise where the teacher would give you ten vocabulary words and your job was to write a creative little story using those words. But with such an exercise, it is hard to get things wrong, as long as you complete the assignment. The story is yours to write. But suppose the situation were more like what we have before us in the fossil record. Suppose you had a set number of vocabulary words, and your job was to reconstruct the book they came from — War and Peace, say. The fossils we have are the vocabulary words we have to use, and the entire history of all living organisms is the book we must reconstruct. Suppose further that the words we had to work with came down to us entirely and completely by chance, brought to us by wind and tide.

How much do we know? What happens when we hold it up against what we don’t know? Coyne acknowledges part of this, and is oblivious to the other. Here they are — one, two.

“We can estimate that we have fossil evidence of only 0.1 percent to 1 percent of all species — hardly a good sample of the history of life” (p. 22).

Well stated, good start, but . . .

“Nevertheless, we have enough fossils to give us a good idea of how evolution proceeded” (p. 22).

The results of the rest of the chapter are akin to what happened with the Piltdown man — building up quite a story about Mr. and Mrs. Piltdown, and all from the tooth of an extinct pig. There is no dispute that Coyne is using all his assigned vocabulary, and he is doing so creatively and with great ingenuity. He is a learned man.  But the novel he has reconstructed is not War and Peace, but rather Tom Swift and the Alien Robot.

It might be complained that my illustration of a novel is unfair because words don’t have a lineage from earlier words used in the book, and what we have with evolution is a huge, gigantic family tree. Right — and 99% of the tree is missing, and you are trying to reconstruct it, on the supposition that it is a tree, and you don’t even know that, and you are doing it with a dogmatic and serene aplomb.

“No theory of special creation or any theory other than evolution, can explain these patterns” (p. 29).
Oh. Glad somebody told us. There we were, wasting our time . . . Actually, I would be glad to acknowledge that the creationism he has in his mind is not able to explain these patterns, because the creationism he is fighting with in there is unable by definition to explain anything.

So let me change the illustration. You are doing genealogical research of a family over 100,000 years, and all you have is photographs of .01 percent of the noses, and no ancestry.com, no records, no family Bibles, and so on. You don’t even know if it is a family line. Now comparing what you actually know (your nose photographs) with what you acknowledge you do not and cannot know (everything else), could we have a little humility please?

One final comment, not so much an argument.

“Asked what observation could conceivably disprove evolution, the curmudgeonly biologist J.B.S Haldane reportedly growled, “Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian!” (p. 53).

I just want to state for the record that if I ever found one, I wouldn’t bother to take it in, knowing that I could not be believed. “What do you mean Precambrian? That’s a rabbit, you doofus.”

Grave Injustice

An Open Letter to The Commentariat About Christian Education

According to a report in Stuff, [21st May, 2013] the Post Primary Teachers’ Association [“PPTA”] “outed” those organizations which had expressed interest in applying to become a charter school.  Your name, Angela (as PPTA President) was cited in that report. 

In particular you were quoted as opposing a situation where charter schools would be accepting state funding and would be teaching “creationism”.  (We note that “creationism” was undefined, either by you or the report, so we are left somewhat uncertain about precisely what approach to science you were opposing.)   You, Angela were quoted as follows:

PPTA president Angela Roberts said taxpayer cash should not go to schools teaching creationism.  “They have the right to teach that in their school, of course, but they have no right to do that with money for the public education system.”

We appreciate your fulsome defence of an independent school’s right to teach “creationism” because, in that case, the money comes from non-state, private sources–that is, parents and pupils.  You are very clear parents have a right to their beliefs and convictions in such matters and a right to ensure that their children are taught consistently with those beliefs. 

We note that your name, Chris (as Labour education spokesman) was also cited in the piece.  Your defence of parents rights is less fulsome than Angela’s, but at least you are willing to concede it has some weight and force. 

“Those are their beliefs – but the state should not be paying for it. Those parents and kids can choose to believe and to receive a religious education. But not to the exclusion of other sciences, and I think in this case that is really inappropriate,” Mr Hipkins said.

We are not sure what “other sciences” you believe are being excluded by the teaching of “creationism”, but in any event you believe that parents and children have a right to receive the religious education of their choice.  Of course, Christians have a biblical cosmology.  Unbelievers (that is, people who are not Christians) do not.  We are thankful that you are willing to defend the rights of Christian parents and kids to be taught a biblical cosmology as part of their schooling curriculum. 

We would like you to go further.  We would like you to be somewhat more consistent in your respective positions.  We would also like to enlist your help in supporting a just cause long overdue in New Zealand. 

Firstly, we recognize that the state in New Zealand is self-styled as a secular entity, without commitment to any religion.  We Christians realise that this actually makes the state a promoter of a very definite religion in its own right–the religion of secularism–which has its own cosmologies, axiologies, teleologies, and versions of metaphysics (as do all religions).  Secularism has its own appeal to ultimate authorities.  It is most closely allied to atheism, which is very clearly a “non-religious” religion in its own right.  All of that is fine, insofar as it goes.  But we would like you to be candid with us all about this.  The fact is state education system in New Zealand militantly imposes the religion of secularism upon its pupils–as your own remarks in the Stuff article bear witness.  You both know that this is the case, but public acknowledgement and transparency in the matter would help us all and would improve the quality of the debate.  It would also go a long way toward helping us find fairer solutions. 

Secondly, we would like you to clear up a confusion your remarks unfortunately generate.  We have a considerable number of  integrated schools in New Zealand, many of which are religious in nature.  Provided their charter warrants it, such schools are permitted to teach all of their subjects in a manner consistent with their religious beliefs.  They are funded by the state in so doing.  Should we understand that both of you principally oppose this situation and would support a “de-integration” of such schools?

Thirdly, we want to applaud your support of parental and pupil rights to be instructed in schools in a  manner consistent with their religious beliefs.  Angela, you go further and point out that this parental right exists only insofar as parents are paying for the instruction.  We are inclined to agree.  But here’s the nub of the matter.  Christian parents and pupils have money exacted from them through the taxation system to fund an education system that promotes beliefs to which they object–namely, secularism.  You, however, oppose having any of that money channelled back to schools that do not teach all subjects from a secularist perspective.

So Christian parents and their children are in an invidious position.  They are forced to pay for state secularist schools and you both agree that the state secularist education system should not support any other curriculum than those promoting the state’s secularist beliefs in every subject. Hence the militancy we refer to above.  So for Christians (and other religious groups) the state takes, but does not give back.  There is a grave injustice being perpetrated here.  We want to enlist your support in righting this serious wrong. 

There are two very simple, yet effective ways this might be done.   The first would be to introduce a voucher system for parents and pupils who conscientiously object to the enforced imposition of state secularism via state schools.  This voucher would be to the value of the annual per-pupil cost of educating a child in the secularist state system.  It could be redeemed at any registered private school or home school, which would then receive Ministry of Education payments to the value of the voucher.  This would restitute those parents and pupils which have had money unfairly exacted from them to fund a secularist state education system to which they conscientiously object. 

A second way in which this current inequity might be remedied would be to provide a special tax refund to all parents who send their children to registered independent schools or registered home schools to the level of the annual per-pupil cost of educating a child in the state system. 

Since you both express support for parental rights in the matter of teaching according to one’s religious beliefs, and you both object to the state secularist education system funding such teaching (at least in independent or partnership schools), either of the above solutions would remedy the very grave injustice that exists under the current system.  Both alternatives remove the injustice of conscientious religious objectors having compulsorily to fund an education system antithetical to their beliefs even while imposing upon them a double burden of having to fund an alternative education out of their own post-tax means. 

We thank you in anticipation of your response and support in righting this grave injustice in the current system.

Yours, etc.

John Tertullian

(Ed note:  we have sent this letter both to Chris Hipkins and Angela Roberts.  We will publish their replies in due course, if we receive any.)

Founding Rocks, Part VI

Still Speculating After All These Years

It’s worse or better, depending upon your point of view.  Michael J Behe has written a postscript to his book Darwin’s Black Box in which he reviews ten years of controversy since its first publication.  The basic thesis of the book is that molecular biology has now known revealed to the world that living cells are so complex that they imply a designer–an intelligent designer.  This stands in stark contrast to the ruling paradigm: that living cells exist by a process random, brute mutation.

What has happened over the past ten years?  Lots.  Ten years is a long time when it comes to molecular biology.  If scientists thought cells were complex back in the mid nineties, they now realise that are far, far more complex than they thought back then.

Progress in elucidating genomes has been matched by progress in understanding how the machinery of life works.  Most proteins in the cell are now known to work as teams of half a dozen or more, rather than by themselves.  Ten years ago the regulation of the activity of genes was thought to be the job just of proteins.  Now a new, unimagined category of nucleic acids calls micro RNAs have been discovered that helps control many genes.  The mechanisms cells used to construct the cilia and flagella described in Chapter 4 were almost totally obscure when this book was first written.  Today they’re known to be stunningly sophisticated molecular systems themselves, like automated factories that make outboard motors.

In short, as science advances relentlessly, the molecular foundation of life is not getting any less complex than it seemed a decade ago; it is getting exponentially more complex.  As it does, the case for the intelligent design of life becomes exponentially stronger.  [Michael J. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, 10th edition (New York: Free Press, {1996}, 2006), p.256.] 

Why is this increasingly complex molecular cellular structure important?  Because evolutionists believe this enormously complex cell came into existence by random mutation, by chance–a contention that has never been demonstrated experimentally or explained or warranted theoretically anywhere.  It just is, bro!   The often unspoken working paradigm of evolutionism postulates a developmental path that has moved from the simple to the complex.  The smallest life forms were supposed to be the most simple–amoeba in the primordial swamp–then through a process of random mutation cells gradually adapted, changed, evolved and developed into the wonderfully complex being that is us.

It’s a great story, but all pure fabrication.  It turns out that the smallest amoeba are not simple at all, but their cellular composition is incredibly complex.  Moreover, Behe argues that it is irreducibly complex, by which he means that if any one tiny component of a cell were not there, the whole cellular structure would not work; it would fail. 

This, says Behe requires a far more reasonable hypothesis: that the cell of the amoeba and all other living cells were designed to be complex from the get-go.  The simplest cells show a purposeful arrangements of all their constituent parts.  They all work together so that the whole is far greater than the sum of the parts.

It is important to realize that evolutionists also talk about the purposeful design of life.  Listen for a few minutes to one of David Attenborough’s monologues and you will find it laced with descriptions of how everything in nature purposefully works together for certain outcomes.  Attenborough–a committed evolutionist–cannot avoid describing such things with a tone of wonder.  Richard Dawkins agrees:

Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.”  Thus spoke Richard Dawkins on the first page of the first chapter of his classic defense of Darwinism, The Blind Watchmaker.  Let me repeat, Dawkins says that the very definition of biology–the study of things that appear designed. . . . Dawkins doesn’t just grudgingly acknowledge some faint impressions of design in life; he insists that the appearance of design, which he ascribes to natural selection is overpowering. (Ibid, p. 274)

Dawkins believes strongly in a universe that appears to be designed–actually designed, by a blind watchmaker–natural selection.  Which is to say it has been designed by chance.  The bow being drawn has now got exceedingly long.  The more scientists discover about the complexity of molecular cells, the longer and longer the bow gets.  And recall–there is not experimental evidence or explanations of how cells moved, changed, adapted and evolved from simple cells to more complex ones.  It is just a working assertion, albeit an incredible one.

Behe concludes with this valid point:

A crucial, often-overlooked point is that the overwhelming appearance of design strongly affects the burden of proof: in the presence of manifest design, the onus of proof is on the one who denies the plain evidence of his eyes.  For example, a person who conjectured that the statues on Easter Island . . . were actually the result of unintelligent forces would bear the substantial burden of proof the claim demanded. . . . Any putative evidence for the claim that the images were actually the result of unintelligent processes (perhaps erosion shaped by some vague, hypothesized chaotic forces) would have to clearly show that the postulated unintelligent process could indeed do the job.  In the absence of such a clear demonstration, any person would be rationally justified to prefer the design explanation.  (Ibid., p. 265f.)

And that, as they say, is that.  It is the evolutionist who increasingly appears to be irrationally motivated.

Ineffable Glories

Beyond Fear and Wonder

We have a hard time conceptualising the smallness of atoms and, therefore, the number of them.  The Guardian, in a piece entitled 20 Amazing Facts About the Human Body contained the following factoid:

It is hard to grasp just how small the atoms that make up your body are until you take a look at the sheer number of them. An adult is made up of around  7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (7 octillion) atoms.

The number of atoms in the material universe is finite but uncountable.  The number of atoms in just one human body is hard enough to reckon with.  But it gets even more difficult.  Particle physicists–both of the theoretical and experimental kind–tell us that that the standard model of the atom now consists of a dozen or so particles and four forces.  This would suggest that one human body is made up of far more than 84 octillion atomic particles (since there are multiple sub-atomic particles of the same type in each atom). 

All of these particles are behaving in exactly the way they are commanded to behave.  There are two ways to think about these commands.  The first is the dominant view of our time.
  Unbelief postulates the commands that keep all of these atomic and sub-atomic particles in place doing what they should do are impersonal causes that just are.  It is the ultimate “just so” story.  The Bible, however, reveals that the commands are personal: they come from God Himself.  His speaking and commanding keep every atom and every sub-atomic particle, and every force in existence and in place–all the time. 

The Unbelieving materialist–that is, vast majority of human beings upon the planet in our day–have a strange binary view of the situation.  For some bizarre reason they argue that if there is a natural cause of particular matter or a material phenomenon it serves to disprove the existence of God.  Natural causation, therefore, means no divine causation–a remarkably banal idea.  All this does is beg another question which runs something like this: since both Unbelievers and Christians alike acknowledge the existence of natural causes as self-evident, the real point of division between Belief and Unbelief must lie elsewhere.  And it does.  The real point is to explain why natural causation exists at all. 

Christians talk about primary and secondary causes.  We can illustrate as follows.  A man lifts a billiard cue and strikes a billiard ball, sending it careering into another, which then shoots off in a tangential direction. The primary cause (in this illustration) of the balls’ movement is the billiard player; a secondary cause is Newton’s laws of motion.  The Bible reveals that the Living God has created and providentially maintains all things.  He is the primary cause of all things; He also has established and maintains all secondary causes.  The existence of secondary causes is due to the grace and goodness of God.  That is the Christian’s explanation as to why natural causation exists.  Unbelief has no rational explanation.  It’s only recourse is to resort to chance. 

Atoms and sub-atomic particles and the forces which keep them together and control their movements exist, and exist in perfect harmony, because God unceasingly speaks these things into existence.  But there’s more.  Particle physicists tell us that

. . . electrons are confined to specific orbits–as if they run on rails.  They can’t exist anywhere between these orbits but have to make a “quantum leap” from one to another.  

But within those rails the precise orbit or position of each electron appears to be random: influenced and controlled by no secondary cause whatsoever.  This is what led Einstein to grumble about God “playing dice with the universe.”   If this is correct–future experimentation may be able to make predictive sense about the precise path and location of each electron in an atom–it implies that the precise positioning of electrons is subject to no secondary causes whatsoever, but the direct, fiat command of God as the alone cause.  God, of course, does not play dice with the universe. Einstein simply was blind to the One True God who has revealed Himself as the all conditioning Conditioner.   The precise location and path of each electron in the human body, and of all electrons existing in the universe is commanded and known by God at all times.

God is infinite, eternal, and unchangeable.  His greatness and majesty and power is on display without ceasing.  When the Psalmist declared, “I am fearfully and wonderfully made” he was speaking the truth.  But we, in our days, are privileged to apprehend the truth of that statement in ways that the Psalmist could never imagine. 

 

The Cultivated Man

Learning from Paul not Plotinus

The great theologian, Herman Bavinck (1854-1921) once wrote:

Culture in the broadest sense is the purpose for which God created man after His image . . . [which] includes not only the most ancient callings of . . . hunting and fishing, agriculture and stock raising, but also trade and commerce and science and art.

We are accustomed to think of culture as that which is distinct from science, and which refers to music, literature and fine art.   The Biblical framework is much, much broader when it comes to culture.  From the dictionaries, it appears that the word “culture” first came into English in the mid-15th century from Old French, from Latin cultūra  a cultivating, from colere  to till.
  It also had a broader application from around the same time of “cultivation through education”.  Culture as the intellectual component of civilisation came into the language from 1805. 

Always, however, cultivation and culture was association with religious faith.  The word “cult”, meaning not a deviant form of a religion, but the system of religious worship has the same Latin root, colere.  In the Scriptures and the Christian faith, culture maintains this broad meaning and application, as reflected in the quotation from Bavinck above. Culture is the work and activity of cultivating the creation and it embraces all lawful and moral human activity in the world. 

The poet W B Yeats captured the moral component of culture when he wrote:

 “For without culture or holiness, which are always the gift of a very few, a man may renounce wealth or any other external thing, but he cannot renounce hatred, envy, jealousy, revenge. Culture is the sanctity of the intellect.” [William Butler Yeats]

The “cultivated man” is the sanctified man.  On the sixth day of creation, man received his calling to be immersed in cultivation.

Until the sixth day, God has done the work of creation directly.  But now he creates the first human beings and orders them to carry on where he leaves off: they are to reflect his image and to have dominion (Genesis 1:26).  From then on, the development of the creation will be primarily social and cultural.  It will be the work of humans as they obey God’s command to fill and subdue the earth (Genesis 1:28). [Chuck Colson and Nancy Pearcey, How Now Shall We Live? (Wheaton, Illinois: Tyndale House Publishers, 1999), p. 295.] 

 Christians sometimes go astray at this point.  They divide their existence into two spheres: the sacred and the secular.  The latter they share with all men, non-Christian and Christian alike.  The sacred, or spiritual they share with Christians alone.

This notion owes more to Plotinus than Paul.  This world is above all God’s.  He created it out of nothing; He sustains it and all that is in it.  Man is His co-regent, His co-creator, His co-cultivator.  Unbelievers do this out of ignorance and in spite of their rebellion.  They serve Him unconsciously and do His bidding still.  Believers are to work at developing and subduing the creation, conscious that they are God’s servants, doing His bidding, and acting as His co-regents, co-creators and His co-cultivators.  

Sin introduces a destructive power into God’s created order, but it does not obliterate that order.  And when we are redeemed, we are not only freed from the sinful motivations that drive us but also restored to fulfill our original purpose, empowered to do what we were created to do: to build societies and create culture–and in doing so, to restore the created order. (Ibid.)

As we engage in our vocation and many avocations we co-labour with Unbelievers and remain thankful that they are there.  We could not cultivate the world without them.  We are too few.  Eventually, however, Christians will greatly outnumber Unbelievers as the nations are discipled unto Christ.  For the present we are thankful that all men still do His bidding.  But the cultural works of Unbelief are never good enough; they are always incomplete and inadequate because they are not self-consciously done to the glory and praise of the Creator.  

It is a holy thing to dig ditches and drive buses.  It is high culture in action.  Knowing this fills the life of the Christian with a sense of great dignity, purpose and holiness.  All of life is sacred; no part is secular.  The six days of labour are just as holy and devoted as the seventh–even as it was in the very beginning. 

As we contemplate the year to come, let us be thankful that God has called us to another year of holy labour and service to Him.  Let us be thankful that God has called us to be cultivated men and women.

Creation By Divine Command

The Regular is the Miracle

Christians believe in the God Who is the Cause of all causes.  Here is an excerpt from one of the most comprehensive confessions ever made by the Church, written about four hundred years ago:

God from all eternity did, by the most wise and holy counsel of His own will, freely, and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass: yet so, as thereby neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures, nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established. (“Of God’s Eternal Decree”, Westminster Confession of Faith 3:1)

Natural causation exists only because God has ordained and commanded all.  But this confession, this aspect of the undoubted Christian faith, has never been understood by materialists and Unbelievers in general.
  To them god can ever only be nothing more than a warranting concept, a bucket if you will, to hold all that we don’t know and understand about natural causes.  As scientific knowledge increases, and our understanding of natural causation grows, the “bucket”, and therefore god, shrinks.   This is known as the “God of the gaps” theory. 

Materialists cling to it like petulant children because the identification of god with all that we are agnostic about is already required by their materialist pseudo-religion. It is the only god their religion allows them to acknowledge.  For them it is always “matter versus God”.  For the Christian it is always “only matter and natural causes because of God”.  Thus, the dichotomy of matter versus God has only and always been a straw man.  When materialists talk of god they always are making reference to an idol–to a god as they have conceived it to be, not to God as He has revealed Himself to be.

Marilynne Robinson reflects on this circumstance.

For almost as long as their has been science in the West there has been a significant strain in scientific thought which assumed that the physical and material preclude the spiritual. The assumption persists amongst us still, vigorous as ever, that if a thing can be “explained,” associated with a physical process, it has been excluded from the category of the spiritual.  But the “physical” in this sense is only a disappearingly thin slice of being, selected, for our purposes, out of the totality of being by the fact that we perceive it as solid, substantial. We all know that if we were the size of atoms, chairs and tables would appear to us as loose clouds of energy. [Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), p. 9f]

Robinson, of course, is making reference to the astounding discoveries over the last century in particle physics.  It turns out that matter is not “hard” at all.  It is all loose pulsating clouds of energy.  We are all loose pulsating clouds of energy.  Robinson continues:

It seems to me very amazing that the arbitrarily selected “physical” world we inhabit is coherent and lawful.  An older vocabulary would offer the world “miraculous.”  Knowing what we know now, an earlier generation might see divine providence in the fact of a world coherent enough to be experienced by us as complete in itself, and as a basis upon which all claims to reality can be tested.  A truly theological age would see in this divine Providence intent on making human habitation within the wild roar of the cosmos. 

But almost everyone, for generations now, has insisted on a sharp distinction between the physical and the spiritual.  So we have had theologies that really proposed a “God of the gaps” as if God were not manifest in the creation, as the Bible is so inclined to insist, but instead survives in those dark places, those black boxes, where the light of science has not yet shone.  And we have atheisms and agnosticisms that make precisely the same argument, only assuming that at some time the light of science will indeed dispel the last shadow in which the holy might have been thought to linger.  [Ibid.]

Given what we now are learning about the cosmos and the natural order, the old dualism between matter and spirit is exploding to pieces.  This is not to say that men will cease clinging to it with stubborn ferocity.  It is to say, however, that their intractable stubbornness will be increasingly plain.  The material realm’s testimony to the God who created all things is getting louder and more scintillating as our understanding of the material grows.  The chaotic, wild roar of the cosmos makes the plain, the hard, the ordinary, the predictable, and the regular character of the creation appear comprehensively and utterly miraculous. 

Fearfully and Wonderfully Made

The Glory of the Human Being and His Soul

Marilynne Robinson’s meditation on the power and glory of the human soul is worth reading and re-reading.  The wonder, the glory and the majesty of it all has been lost as modern culture has become imprisoned in its materialist caverns.

Modern discourse is not really comfortable with the word “soul,” and in my opinion the loss of the word has been disabling, not only to religion but to literature and political thought and to every humane pursuit.  In contemporary religious circles, souls, if they are mentioned at all, tend to be spoken of as saved or lost, having answered some set of divine expectations or failed to answer them, having arrived at some crucial realization or failed to arrive at it.

So the soul, the masterpiece of creation, is more or less reduced to a token signifying cosmic acceptance or rejection, having little or nothing to do with that miraculous thing, the felt experience of life, except insofar as life offers distractions or temptations.

Having read recently that there are more neurons in the human brain than there are stars in the Milky Way,
and having read any number of times that the human brain is the most complex object known to exist in the universe, and that the mind is not identical with the brain but is more mysterious still, it seems to me this astonishing nexus of the self, so uniquely elegant and capable, merits a name that would indicate a difference in kind from the ontological run of things, and for my purposes “soul” would do nicely.

Perhaps I should pause here to clarify my meaning, since there are those who feel that the spiritual is diminished or denied when it is associated with the physical.  I am not among them.  In his Letter to the Romans, Paul says, “Ever since the creation of the world (God’s) invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made.”  If we are to consider the heavens, how much more are we to consider the magnificent energies of consciousness that make whomever we pass on the street a far grander marvel than our galaxy?

At this point of dynamic convergence, call it self or call it soul, questions of right and wrong are weighed, love is felt, guilt and loss are suffered.  And, over time, formation occurs, for weal or woe, governed in large part by that unaccountable capacity for self awareness.

The locus of the human mystery is perception of this world.  From it proceeds every thought, every art.  I like Calvin’s metaphor–nature is a shining garment in which God is revealed and concealed.  As we perceive we interpret, and we make hypotheses.  Something is happening, it has a certain character or meaning which we usually feel we understand at least tentatively, though experience is almost always available to reinterpretations based on subsequent experience or reflection.  Here occurs the weighing of moral and ethical choice.  Behavior proceeds from all this, and is interesting, to my mind, in the degree that it can be understood to proceed from it.  [Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012),  p.8f.] 

The Distinctiveness of Christianity

World as Gift

David Bentley Hart explains why God’s transcendence over the creation and His immanence within it makes all the difference in the world.  This is one reason why the Christian religion is not one religion amongst a smorgasbord of  faiths, but the One True Faith before which all other religions are idolatrous perversions of the truth.

Christian thought taught that the world was entirely God’s creature, called from nothingness, not out of any need on his part, but by grace; and that the God who is Trinity required nothing to add to his fellowship, bounty, or joy, but created out of love alone.

In a sense, God and world were both set free: God was now understood as fully transcendent of–and therefore immanent within–the created order, and the world was now understood entirely as gift.
  And this necessarily altered the relation between humanity and nature.  This world, it was now believed, was neither mere base illusion and “dissimilitude,” nor a quasi-divine dynamo of occult energies, nor a god, nor a prison.  As a gratuitous work of transcendent love it was to be received with gratitude, delighted in as an act of divine pleasure, mourned as a victim of human sin, admired as a radiant manifestation of  divine glory, recognized as a fellow creature; it might justly be cherished, cultivated, investigated, enjoyed, but not feared, not rejected as evil or deficient, and certainly not worshipped.

In this and other ways the Christian revolution gave Western culture the world simply as world, demystified and so (only seemingly paradoxically) full of innumerable wonders to be explored.

What is perhaps far more important is that it also gave the culture a coherent concept of the human as such, endowed with infinite dignity in all its individual “moments,” full of powers and mysteries to be fathomed and esteemed.  It provided an unimaginably exalted picture of the human person–made in the divine image and destined to partake of the divine nature–without thereby diminishing or denigrating the concrete reality of human nature, spiritual, intellectual, or carnal.

[David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), p.212f.]

Evolutionist Humbug

Creationist Response 

This Is the Creationists‘ Response to Scientist Bill Nye’s Viral Pro-Evolution Video Claiming They Harm Children

The Blaze

Scientist Bill Nye captured headlines last week after he lambasted creationists and proclaimed that teaching evolution is damaging to both children and society. Now, just days after Nye’s controversial Big Think video making these proclamations reached millions, Answers in Genesis (AiG), the Christian ministry behind the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, has responded with a clip of its own.

In an article entitled, ”Time is Nye for a Rebuttal,” Ken Ham, CEO of AiG, tackled Nye’s claims and announced the publication of the counter-video. Of particular note, the Christian ministry leader took offense at the scientist’s purported claim that those who teach creationism are, in a sense, “abusing” children.
“A recent tactic by evolutionists in their battle against creationists, one that is especially used by Richard Dawkins, is to employ an ad hominem argument—that creationists are committing a form of ‘child abuse’ when they teach creation to children,” Ham contended.

Here is the Answers in Genesis video rebuttal to Nye’s absurd allegations of creationist child-abuse:

CMI Creation Station in Canada also put out a vid rebutting Nye’s ridiculous anti-free speech position: