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I’m going to actually make an argument for the truth of religion. And the argument I’m going to make—well, I call it the presuppositional argument but it’s an argument that requires a little bit of explanation.
Imagine if you’re a detective and you approach a crime scene and all the evidence points to a suspect but it turns out he couldn’t have done it. Why? Because the body was dumped in one location and he was in a completely different location. And then it hits you as a detective, “Wait a minute, perhaps the guy had an accomplice.” Now, you don’t know that he did. But the assumption that he did suddenly makes sense of all the other facts that were previously mysterious. Suddenly you see how the crime was committed to its very detail.
If this seems like a little bit of an unusual way to argue, I want to emphasize that this is precisely the way in which scientists argue when faced with new phenomena. For example, scientists looking at galaxies out there have noticed that the galaxies hang together and yet when you measure the amount of matter in them there’s not enough gravity to hold the galaxies together, they should be flying apart. And so scientists presuppose that there is some other form of matter (they call it dark matter) that must be there exercising a gravitational force so even though we can’t see the dark matter (it’s detectable by no instrument) it explains what we do see. The presupposition of dark matter clarifies the matter that is in front of us.
Now what I’m going to try to do is adduce some puzzling facts about life and then ask whether the presupposition of God explains those facts—explains those facts better than any rival explanation.
Christopher Hitchens has spent a lot of time telling us about evolution, and evolution as an effort to explain the presence of life on the planet. But of course evolution does not explain the presence of life on the planet. Darwin knew that. Evolution merely explains the transition between one life form and another. That’s very different from accounting for life itself.
Consider, for example, the primordial cell. If you read Franklin Harold’s book The Way of the Cell (this is a biologist at University of Colorado in Boulder) he describes the cell as a kind of supercomputer. It is of a level of complexity—even Richard Dawkins, in his work, describes the cell as a kind of digital computer. Now the cell can't have evolved because evolution presupposes the cell. Evolution requires a cell that already has the built-in capacity to reproduce itself. So how did we get a cell? The very idea that random molecules in a warm pond through a bolt of lightning assembled a cell would be akin to saying a bolt of lightning in a warm pond could assemble an automobile or a skyscraper. It’s preposterous. Richard Dawkins knows it’s preposterous and, therefore, when asked, “How did we get life originally?” he said, “Well, maybe Aliens brought it from another planet.” It’s ridiculous, but it’s, in a way, the best explanation he could come up with other than Intelligent Design. So there we go, we have the mystery of the cell.
But evolution raises further puzzles because evolution depends upon a universe structured in a certain way. Evolution depends on a sun that’s eight light-minutes away. Evolution depends on the constants of nature. If I were to pick up a pen and drop it, it would fall at a known acceleration to the ground, gravity. The universe has a whole bunch of these constants, hundreds of them. Scientists have asked what if these constants, on which evolution depends, what if these constants were changed just a little bit? What if the speed of light were a little slower or a little faster? This question is addressed by Stephen Hawking in his book A Brief History of Time. He says that if you change these constants of nature at all (and he’s talking about the rate of expansion of the universe) he says if you change that, not 10% or 1%, but one part in a hundred thousandth millionth million, we would have no universe, we would have no life, not just Homo sapiens, no complex life would have evolved anywhere. In other words our very existence here is dependent upon the fine-tuning of a set of constants in nature. We’re not talking about just on earth, but the entire universe. This argument, that is sometimes called the anthropic principle of the fine-tuned universe, this has put modern atheism completely on the defensive. Why should the universe be structured in precisely this way and no other way? What is the best explanation? Is there an atheist explanation? I’d like to hear it. Continued in Post #2
Imagine if you’re a detective and you approach a crime scene and all the evidence points to a suspect but it turns out he couldn’t have done it. Why? Because the body was dumped in one location and he was in a completely different location. And then it hits you as a detective, “Wait a minute, perhaps the guy had an accomplice.” Now, you don’t know that he did. But the assumption that he did suddenly makes sense of all the other facts that were previously mysterious. Suddenly you see how the crime was committed to its very detail.
If this seems like a little bit of an unusual way to argue, I want to emphasize that this is precisely the way in which scientists argue when faced with new phenomena. For example, scientists looking at galaxies out there have noticed that the galaxies hang together and yet when you measure the amount of matter in them there’s not enough gravity to hold the galaxies together, they should be flying apart. And so scientists presuppose that there is some other form of matter (they call it dark matter) that must be there exercising a gravitational force so even though we can’t see the dark matter (it’s detectable by no instrument) it explains what we do see. The presupposition of dark matter clarifies the matter that is in front of us.
Now what I’m going to try to do is adduce some puzzling facts about life and then ask whether the presupposition of God explains those facts—explains those facts better than any rival explanation.
Christopher Hitchens has spent a lot of time telling us about evolution, and evolution as an effort to explain the presence of life on the planet. But of course evolution does not explain the presence of life on the planet. Darwin knew that. Evolution merely explains the transition between one life form and another. That’s very different from accounting for life itself.
Consider, for example, the primordial cell. If you read Franklin Harold’s book The Way of the Cell (this is a biologist at University of Colorado in Boulder) he describes the cell as a kind of supercomputer. It is of a level of complexity—even Richard Dawkins, in his work, describes the cell as a kind of digital computer. Now the cell can't have evolved because evolution presupposes the cell. Evolution requires a cell that already has the built-in capacity to reproduce itself. So how did we get a cell? The very idea that random molecules in a warm pond through a bolt of lightning assembled a cell would be akin to saying a bolt of lightning in a warm pond could assemble an automobile or a skyscraper. It’s preposterous. Richard Dawkins knows it’s preposterous and, therefore, when asked, “How did we get life originally?” he said, “Well, maybe Aliens brought it from another planet.” It’s ridiculous, but it’s, in a way, the best explanation he could come up with other than Intelligent Design. So there we go, we have the mystery of the cell.
But evolution raises further puzzles because evolution depends upon a universe structured in a certain way. Evolution depends on a sun that’s eight light-minutes away. Evolution depends on the constants of nature. If I were to pick up a pen and drop it, it would fall at a known acceleration to the ground, gravity. The universe has a whole bunch of these constants, hundreds of them. Scientists have asked what if these constants, on which evolution depends, what if these constants were changed just a little bit? What if the speed of light were a little slower or a little faster? This question is addressed by Stephen Hawking in his book A Brief History of Time. He says that if you change these constants of nature at all (and he’s talking about the rate of expansion of the universe) he says if you change that, not 10% or 1%, but one part in a hundred thousandth millionth million, we would have no universe, we would have no life, not just Homo sapiens, no complex life would have evolved anywhere. In other words our very existence here is dependent upon the fine-tuning of a set of constants in nature. We’re not talking about just on earth, but the entire universe. This argument, that is sometimes called the anthropic principle of the fine-tuned universe, this has put modern atheism completely on the defensive. Why should the universe be structured in precisely this way and no other way? What is the best explanation? Is there an atheist explanation? I’d like to hear it. Continued in Post #2
