Fear and Trembling

I recently had the chance to comment on an atheist web site that prides itself on requiring testable hypotheses in order to gain any knowledge. I formed one of Alvin Plantinga’s arguments into hypothesis testing format. The point is that arguments for God’s existence are based on verifiable, testable data and that science assumes the validity of higher-ordered mental functions in the experimentation process. The comment is reproduced below with some modifications and some links included. This will be an observational study using the data we find in the known universe. The null hypothesis is that our faculties of reasoning which allow us to develop higher-order beliefs arose from chance guided by natural selection. The alternative hypothesis is that our faculties of reasoning which allow us to develop higher-order beliefs arose from a process guided by God or an event brought about by God. This is a valid way of describing the problem at hand. We have data in the known univer...

A recent Christianity Today article gives this quote from Alvin Plantinga: …if you are a naturalist and think that we have come to be by evolutionary processes, then you will think that the main purpose of our cognitive processes, our mental faculties, is survival and reproductive fitness, not the production of true belief. Evolution doesn't give a rip about whether your beliefs are true. It only cares whether or not your actions are adaptive, whether they contribute to your fitness. From the point of view of evolution together with naturalism, you wouldn't expect that our faculties would be really adjusted to truth or aimed at truth. They would just be aimed at fitness. But if this is true, if our minds are aimed at mere survival, not at truth, then it's not probable that our minds should be reliable—that is, produce an appropriate preponderance of true over false beliefs; and if that is so, then one who believes both naturalism and evolution should reject the though...

Great book and article here . The Second Law of Thermodynamics ,that entropy is increasing, points to increases in disorganization and decreases in usable energy in the universe. How does evolution explain that organized entities arise from disorganized matter? The arguments at the link are detailed and show that evolutionary explanations are inadequate.

An interesting Christianity Today article discusses why Darwin rejected Christianity, and the facts may surprise you. It may have been more of an emotional reaction than an unbiased reflection on the facts.

A very interesting article, “Is Richard Dawkins still evolving?” by Melanie Phillips ( The Spectator.co.uk ; Thursday, October 23, 2008), notes an interesting statement in Richard Dawkins’ last debate. It seems Dawkins recently made the statement: “A serious case could be made for a deistic God.” The article is a very interesting read. Here’s an excerpt from the article: ...I asked Dawkins whether he had indeed changed his position...He vehemently denied this and expressed horror that he might have given this impression. But he also said other things which suggested to me that some of his own views simply don't meet the criteria of empirical evidence that he insists must govern all our thinking. For example, I put to him that, since he is prepared to believe that the origin of all matter was an entirely spontaneous event, he therefore believes that something can be created out of nothing -- and that since such a belief runs counter to the very scientific principles of verifiable e...

Thanks to Answers in Genesis for a good short article and for this picture.

It seems that human evolution has come to an end. See posts here and here .

I wanted to reprint a letter to the editor I found while going through some old files of mine. Please note that this basic argument can apply to many scientific theories that claim that evens happen “by chance.” May evolutionists and scientists use that type of language. Dear Sir or Madam: William M. Montante’s article titled “Journey to a Definition of Chance” appearing in the August 2004 issue of Professional Safety hinted at a very important point about chance. However, it failed to adequately express the main philosophical issue. “Chance” is spoken of at many points in the article as if it were a tangible being that has the power to cause something, namely an accident. Some examples are the phrases “through which chance can act,” and an “outcome [that is] chance dependent” (page 39). Chance is an abstract concept. As such it has no existence. It is not a thing, no-thing, nothing. It cannot cause anything since it has no existence in reality. It has no being, and hence no po...

The Intelligent Design (ID) movement makes much of the argument from irreducible complexity. Dr. Michael Behe has become famous for a simple example, the mousetrap. He points out that the mousetrap will not perform its function without all of its parts. The wooden base, the metal hammer, a spring, a catch and a metal bar to hold back the hammer are all necessary parts. One component by itself will not catch a mouse. Mainstream evolutionary science has a counter-argument. To paraphrase Dr. Kenneth Miller, if you disassemble the mousetrap, each component can serve as something useful on its own. If we take away the catch and metal bar, we have something left that can serve as a paper clip. The spring could make a simple two-section key chain. The wooden base makes a paperweight. Evolutionary processes like random mutation and natural selection can combine and retain the useful parts as the complicated evolves to perform the complex function. The useful parts are combined into the mousetr...

I have been reading an interesting book by Victor J. Stenger that I would like to interact with over my next few posts. (Stenger, Victor J. God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does not Exist , Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2007). To quote Stenger: “The people performing the study, that is, those taking and analyzing the data, must do so without any prejudgment of how the results should come out.” (24) Is there any such thing as an unbiased person? Can anyone claim to be completely objective in his or her pursuit of truth? Greg Bahnsen notes that : …a person's most fundamental beliefs (or presuppositions) determine what he or she will accept as evidence and determine how that evidence will be interpreted. … Our presuppositions about the nature of reality and knowledge will control what we accept as evidence and how we view it. Even more interesting is Stenger’s reference to computer simulation. Computer programs help us understand “how simple systems can se...

I have been reading Christopher Hitchens’ new book: God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Twelve, 2007). Hitchens skillfully builds a wall of rhetoric around his firmly entrenched atheism. He walls himself off from Christianity with subtile and effective insult. Unlike Richard Dawkin’s recent book, it is more difficult to pin down an actual argument against the Christian faith in God is not Great , but I would like to answer a few points. ... there would be no ... churches in the first place if humanity had not been afraid of the weather, that dark, the plague, the eclipse, and all manner of other things now easily explicable. And also if humanity had not been compelled, on pain of extremely agonizing consequences, to pay the exorbitant tithes and taxes that raised the imposing edifices of religion. (p. 65) In this short passage, he refers to two ad hominem arguments. Men like Sigmund Freud and Ludwig Feuerbach developed the first in the past. It has been calle...

Next in Dawkins’ book, The God Delusion , we find a discussion of the teleological argument, or argument from design. Stated the way Dawkins does, the argument goes from evidence of design in the universe and in living things to the existence of an ultimate designer. On page 139-140, he says: It is clear that here on Earth we are dealing with a generalized process for optimizing biological species, a process that works all over the planet, on all continents and islands, and at all times … This is a recurrent, predictable, multiple phenomenon, not a piece of statistical luck recognized with hindsight. And, thanks to Darwin, we know it is brought about: by natural selection. In Dawkins’ world, life appears and evolves into increasingly more complex organisms by a “process.” I am not a biologist. I am not a chemist, or a physicist. I am, however, an industrial engineer. Another name for industrial engineering is “process engineering.” I have spent a considerable portion of my life in the ...