I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist (22 page)

The chairman said, “A what?!”

“A critical thinking consultant,” Pete repeated.

“What exactly does a critical thinking consultant do?” the chairman persisted.

“Well, we’re already running late, and I don’t want to take up the committee’s time,” Pete reasoned, “but you’ll find out during the week.”

As the week progressed, the committee debated various topics, such as diversity, tolerance, human rights, and other controversial issues. At one point, when they were discussing psychology standards, Pete noted that the standards did not contain a definition of personhood. This was a gaping hole in the psychology curriculum; so Pete submitted the following definition based on a section of Mortimer Adler’s book,
Haves
Without Have-Nots:
²⁰

Course: Psychology / Topic: Uniqueness

Standard: Evaluates the uniqueness of human nature and the concept of personhood.

1. intellect / conceptual thought

2. freedom to choose / free will

3. ethical responsibility (standards)

4. moral accountability (obligations), and

5. inalienable rights of personhood.

As soon as this standard was placed on the table, an educator sitting across from Pete—who had made it known that she was an atheist—was about to challenge this standard. Before she could do that, Pete stopped her and said to the group,

If anyone were to disagree with this standard, they would be doing the following:

1. That person would be engaging me in conceptual thought (as in 1 above).

2. That person would be exercising his/her “freedom” to do so (as in 2 above).

3. That person must think that there is an ethical responsibility to teach what is right/true (as in 3 above).

4. That person is seeking to hold me morally accountable to teach the truth (as in 4 above ).

5. That person has the right to disagree with my position (as in 5 above).

So if one were to disagree with these criteria, that person would actually confirm the validity of each point of these criteria.

The group became rather quiet for a moment. Then the chairman spoke up and said, “Now we know what a critical thinking consultant does!” With that he told the committee secretary to include the standard in the recommendations.

With a little critical thinking, we see that the Darwinian worldview collapses not only from a lack of evidence but also because Darwinists must borrow from the theistic worldview as they attempt to make their case. Intellect, free will, objective morality, and human rights as well as reason, logic, design, and truth can exist only if God exists. Yet Darwinists assume some or all of these realities when they defend their atheistic worldview. They can’t have it both ways.

D
ARWINISTS
H
AVE THE
W
RONG
B
OX
T
OP

In the introduction we said that a worldview is like a box top that allows you to place the many pieces of life’s puzzle into a complete, cohesive picture. If you have the right box top, then the pieces make sense in light of the complete picture.

But what happens if you keep discovering pieces that don’t fit the box top you have? Common sense would tell you that you’ve got the wrong box top, so you need to look for the right one. Unfortunately, the Darwinists won’t do this. The evidence strongly indicates that they have the wrong box top, but they refuse to consider that’s even possible (much less look for the right one). Their preconceived box top shows a picture without intelligent causes. Yet, as they themselves acknowledge, they’ve discovered many pieces to the puzzle that have the clear appearance of being intelligently designed. In effect, they’re trying to fit theistic pieces into their atheistic/materialistic puzzle. How do they do this?

Instead of discarding the wrong box top and finding the right one, Darwinists simply insist that the pieces aren’t really what they appear to be. They try to fit every piece—from the precisely designed universe to the information-rich single cell—into a puzzle that doesn’t have those pieces in it. In doing so, they disregard observation, which is the very essence of the empirical science they claim to champion. As they themselves admit, Darwinists are philosophically committed to their box top regardless of what the puzzle pieces look like.

How do you find the right box top to the puzzle of life? Arriving at the right box top is not a matter of preference (you like atheism, I like theism). No, it’s a matter of objective fact. By using the self-evident first principles of logic and the correct principles of scientific investigation, we discovered in chapters 3 and 4 that this is a theistic universe. If this is a theistic universe, then naturalism is false. If naturalism is false, then Darwinists may not be interpreting the evidence correctly.

Having the right box top is important because it provides the right context for interpreting the evidence. The context is the larger environment in which the evidence appears. If you have the wrong context, you may come to the wrong conclusion about evidence you are observing. For example, if I tell you that I just witnessed a man slashing open the stomach of a woman with a knife, you’d probably assume that man did something wrong. But look what happens when I reveal to you the context—the environment—in which this incident took place: we were in a hospital delivery room, the man was a doctor, and the baby’s heart had just stopped. What do you think about the man now? Once you understand the environment, your entire view of the evidence has changed: you now consider the man a hero rather than a villain, because he was really trying to save the baby’s life.

In the same way, the evidence from biology must be interpreted in light of the larger known environment. As we’ve already discovered, the larger known environment is that this is a theistic universe. There’s actually an immaterial, powerful, and intelligent Being beyond the natural world who created the universe and designed it precisely to allow life on earth. In other words, we already know beyond a reasonable doubt that the Designer is part of the box top, because the evidence shows that he has already designed this awesome universe with amazing complexity and precision.

In light of the fact that this Designer exists, when we see biological systems that even Darwinists like Richard Dawkins recognize “give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose,” maybe we ought to conclude that
they really were designed for a purpose.
As William Dembski points out, “If a creature looks like a dog, smells like a dog, barks like a dog, feels like a dog, and pants like a dog, the burden of evidence lies with the person insisting the creature isn’t a dog.”
²¹
Since the universe is created and designed, then we should expect life to be created and designed as well. (At least it’s
possible
that life was created by intelligence. Ruling out that possibility beforehand is clearly illegitimate.)

So the conclusion that life is the product of an intelligent Designer makes sense because it’s not a lone piece of evidence. It’s consistent with other scientific findings. Or, to continue with our jigsaw puzzle metaphor, it’s a piece that fits perfectly with the other pieces of the puzzle.

S
UMMARY AND
C
ONCLUSION

Since we’ve covered a lot of ground in this chapter, let’s sum it up with a few short points:

1. Life does not consist merely of chemicals. If that were the case, mixing the chemicals of life in a test tube would produce life. Life clearly consists of more than chemicals; it also includes specified complexity (which comes only from a mind). Therefore, materialism is false. (There are numerous additional reasons why materialism is false, including the fact that reason itself would be impossible in a materialistic universe.)

2. There are no known natural laws that create specified complexity (information). Only intelligence has been observed creating specified complexity (e.g., “Take out the garbage—Mom, “Drink Coke,” Mount Rushmore, etc.).

3. The simplest life consists of amazing specified complexity—equivalent to 1,000 complete sets of the
Encyclopedia
Britannica.
Einstein said, “God doesn’t play dice with the universe.”
²²
He was right. As Phillip Gold said, “God plays Scrabble!”
²³

4. Science is a search for causes that is built on philosophy. There are only two types of causes, intelligent and natural, but Darwinists philosophically rule out intelligent causes before they even look at the evidence. That’s why when Darwinists look at those 1,000 encyclopedias—despite observing and recognizing their obvious design—they assert that their cause must be natural. But if “Take out the garbage—Mom” requires an intelligent cause, then so do 1,000 encyclopedias.

5. Spontaneous generation of life, which Darwinism requires to get the theory started, has never been observed. It is believed in by faith. And in light of the strong cosmological and teleological evidence that this is a theistic universe (and for many other reasons), the Darwinian belief in naturalism (or materi-alism) is also an article of faith. Hence, Darwinism is nothing more than a secular religion masquerading as science.

The skeptic may say, “Wait a minute! You’re moving much too fast. What makes you think that Intelligent Design is scientific? Isn’t ID just another case of the ‘God-of-the-Gaps’ fallacy—prematurely bringing God into the picture because you haven’t found a natural cause yet? Why should we give up looking for a natural cause? In fact, it seems like ID is just that Bible-thumping, six-day creationism being smuggled into the public debate under a new name. And what about the evidence for the evolution of new life forms that you have yet to mention?”

Answers to these and other Darwinist claims are coming in the next chapter. Not only will we address those claims, but we will also provide more pieces to the puzzle that confirm that the Intelligent Design people, not the Darwinists, have the right box top.

6

New Life Forms:
From the Goo to You
via the Zoo?

“In grammar school they taught me that a frog turning
into a prince was a fairy tale. In the university they
taught me that a frog turning into a prince was a fact!”

—RON CARLSON

IN THE MOVIE
Contact,
Jodie Foster plays a scientist who is part of the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) research team. SETI, which is a real organization, has scientists who scan space for unmistakable signs of intelligent life. What constitutes an unmistakable sign of intelligent life? A message. That’s right, something like “Take out the garbage—Mom.”

In the movie, Foster gets extremely excited when her antenna picks up radio waves that appear to have an intelligent pattern, “One, two, three, five, seven, eleven . . . those are primes!” she exclaims (meaning prime numbers). “That can’t be natural phenomena!”

Indeed, random radio waves can be naturally produced, but those that contain a message always have an intelligent source. Prime numbers, from one to 101 in order, constitute a message that only comes from an intelligent being.

Foster is so confident that ET has been found, she goes public with her discovery. Government and military officials then converge on her facility. “If this is such an intelligent source, then why don’t they just speak English?” one official asks with a hint of derision.

“Because math is the only universal language!” Foster fires back.

Of course she’s right. In fact, alphabets, and thus language itself, can be ultimately reduced to numbers. This is why the English alphabet is mathematically identical to the genetic alphabet of DNA and why the comparison of cell information to encyclopedias is a one-to-one relationship rather than just an analogy.

While Foster and her colleagues later discover a more complicated message embedded in the radio waves, they are absolutely certain the prime numbers alone prove that the message came from intelligent life. Why are they so certain of this? Because repeated observation tells us that only intelligent beings create messages and that natural laws never do. When we see a sequence of prime numbers, we realize that it requires an intelligent cause just like the messages “Take out the garbage—Mom” and “Mary loves Scott” do.

Ironically,
Contact
was based on a novel by the late Carl Sagan, an ardent evolutionist who believed in spontaneous generation and who was instrumental in starting the real SETI program. The irony lies in the fact that Sagan was absolutely convinced that a simple string of prime numbers proves the existence of an intelligent being, but the equivalent of 1,000 encyclopedias in the first one-celled life does not.
It takes a lot
of faith
not
to believe in God. More than we have!

Moreover, it was Sagan who wrote this about the human brain:

The information content of the human brain expressed in bits is probably comparable to the total number of connections among the neurons—about a hundred trillion bits. If written out in English, say, that information would fill some twenty million volumes, as many as in the world’s largest libraries. The equivalent of twenty million books is inside the heads of every one of us. The brain is a very big place in a very small space. . . . The neurochemistry of the brain is astonishingly busy. The circuitry of a machine more wonderful than any devised by humans.
¹

Actually, Sagan probably
under
estimated the brain’s information content at twenty million books. Nevertheless, the figure is still stunning. To conceptualize it, picture yourself at center court of Madison Square Garden several hours before a basketball game. You are the only one in the arena, and you are looking at almost 20,000 empty seats all around you. How many books would you have to stack on
each seat
in order to fit twenty million books in that arena?

You would need to stack 1,000 books
on each and every seat
to fit twenty million books in Madison Square Garden. Think about that. The roof is not high enough to allow that many books; you’d have to blow off the roof and keep stacking! That’s how much specified and complex information is between your ears. Sagan was indeed right that the brain is a very big place in a very small space, and it’s something immeasurably more sophisticated than anything humans have ever created.