Goodbye atheism

We hope you enjoy your visit.

You're currently viewing our forum as a guest. This means you are limited to certain areas of the board and there are some features you can't use. If you join our community, you'll be able to access member-only sections, and use many member-only features such as customizing your profile, sending personal messages, and voting in polls. Registration is simple, fast, and completely free.

Goodbye atheism; Why a scientist believes in God
Topic Started: Mar 2 2009, 04:32 PM (22 Views)
DrMcK	Mar 2 2009, 04:32 PM Post #1
Newbie Posts: 4 Group: Members Member #174 Joined: March 2, 2009	GOOD-BYE ATHEISM When I was a 'mid-teenager' I began to think that perhaps there was more to life than sport, money and girls After all, one day I would grow old and then all my physical fitness would go. Also I would die some day and lose everything else that I had spent my life getting, so what was the point of it all? Of course I was an atheist at that time and regarded all Christians as “banana-brains - soft in the head”! So I thought there must be another answer, but what? Perhaps evolution was the answer. Maybe we were all part of a great long chain of human history, making our own contribution to the onward and upward progress of the species. Perhaps each individual life was a stepping stone in the evolutionary progress of mankind towards ever greater perfection. This seemed sensible to me - a youthful optimist. However, as I began to learn more about history and current national and world affairs, it became difficult to believe that mankind was getting better. For example, the horrible cruelty of the 'games' of the ancient Romans where living human beings were torn to pieces by lions as entertainment, was no worse than the cruel torture of prisoners of war in, for example, the Second World War. Was there less cruelty now than there had been thousands of years ago? Was there less greed, less war, less hunger, less suffering, less poverty? Were the so-called civilised nations sharing their abundant wealth and excess food with the poor countries? On the contrary, the reality was that the crime figures in the so-called developed countries were getting worse. Globally there was little real progress towards stopping war, abolishing human rights violations, reducing famine, fighting poverty etc. Most political leaders seemed to be pre-occupied with personal gain rather than the good of the people. The political label attached to them seemed largely irrelevant as communist leaders were much the same as capitalist leaders: the people at the top had vast personal privileges, power and wealth. In every country it was the same. It seemed that those at the top did not really care about the ordinary people but fed them half truths and promises. It therefore seemed to me that there was no evidence to support the prediction of evolution that mankind was improving morally. Another problem was that I had no answer to basic questions. If we are just atoms and energy, nothing else. then: 1. Where did the laws of physics come from (how did atoms manage to write the laws governing their behaviour)? 2. Where did energy and matter come from (how did absolutely nothing make everything)? 3. Where did intelligence come from (how did atoms learn to think for themselves, and where does a brain composed of cells become a mind)? 4. Where did information come from (how did atoms learn amazing things like the genetic code which controls DNA)? 5. How did life begin (how did atoms learn to reproduce themselves)? 6. How did we get our sense of morality (how did atoms decide what is right and what is wrong)? 7. Why do we appreciate beauty (what is the evolutionary value for the survival of the species in loving music and fine art)? 8. Why do the constants which control the laws of physics have values which are so finely tuned that the Universe is exactly what is required for human life? 9. Why do the majority of human beings believe in a god if there is no God? 10. Why do we question why we are here at all? The questions went on and on. As a believer in a purely material universe, I held that everything was composed of atoms and energy, controlled by force fields. As I learned more science, so I understood that all matter was atoms and that atoms were just tiny regions of intense energy. Also atoms were almost entirely vacuum. This was true of everything from stars to planets to mountains, to animals to cells. There was no soul, no supernatural part to mankind. We were just bodies. This meant, logically, that I myself was just an energy field, shaped and moved by force fields, and nearly 100% empty space. My personality was just an energy field pattern governed by equations. Friendship and love were illusions. I also learned that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, so energy has always been in existence. But this left the question “How did energy begin?” I had once mocked Christians with the question "Who made God"?", but now I had a similar question about who made energy , and science had no answer to the question "How did it all get started?". Also, how did chaotic energy manage to order itself into physical laws? The whole of science proceeded on the assumption that the universe was ordered – had laws, patterns which could be observed and deduced from evidence – and was therefore not just any old universe, but a Cosmos. As for the development of life, could evolution really be true if it had only random accidental mutations as its main process and almost all of these were destructive? What about irreducible complexity: fully-formed organs, and even whole organisms simply jumping into history with no intermediate stages? On and on went the list. I realised that believing in atheistic evolution needs a lot of faith - maybe even more faith than Christians need to believe that God created it all. At least belief in God logically explained life, order, emotions, purpose, evidence of design, beauty, patterns and natural laws! A living, loving, planning, artistic-scientific God of order could certainly be the origin, but a blind belief in everything starting from nothing led nowhere. The difference seemed to be that Christians admitted they needed faith, whereas atheists pretended that everything had a scientific answer and could be explained logically without any need for God. When I asked for an explanation of how everything began, atheism answered, “In the beginning, nothing”. The Bible answered, “In the beginning, God”. Where am I now? Well, some 40 years on, the hair has gone grey and I have retired from my career in university physics teaching. It seems ever clearer to me now that atheism is a belief in pointlessness. The big questions of why are still far beyond science. As the philosopher Leibniz put it starkly, “Why is there something, rather than nothing?” Cosmologists have given us the big bang, biologists have given us evolution, but still we are left wondering why there was a bang when there was nothing there in the beginning to bang with, and also pondering how the originally perfect (increasingly damaged by mutations) double helix and human genome made themselves. As Richard Dawkins has written from a purely atheistic view, “The Universe has no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.” This is perfectly logical, and the true picture of life in an atheistic universe which began from nothing, is nothing, and will return to nothing –pointless. The Christian alternative is that we were designed and created by a loving, holy God whom one day we shall meet personally, and the whole point of this short life is to prepare us for that meeting. Global warming shows what happens when we disturb the fine tuning of creation which atheism requires us to believe came about by chance, thanks to countless billions of amazing coincidences. Strictly speaking atheism invites us to believe not in a God of design, but in a gambler’s great goddess – Lady Luck. The “blind faith” of Christians, so mocked by atheists, has been replaced by a blind faith in chance, and more blind faith that the Cosmos is mainly composed of cold dark matter-energy which cannot be seen or measured. Quite simply, man cannot live by reason alone. Emotion, intuition, faith, imagination all play their parts. Faith is a part of all our lives: Imagine taking a journey on any form of transport without faith – faith in the ability of an unknown driver, faith that the technology will not fail, faith that there will not be an accident. Without faith we would never leave home, and as most accidents happen in the home… Despite the atheist’s slogan that no mature thinking scientifically literate person could even believe in God, many eminent scientists do have such a belief, indeed a recent survey showed that about 40% of professional scientists do – including this writer. What do you think?



1 user reading this topic (1 Guest and 0 Anonymous)


« Previous Topic · Why am I a Christian? · Next Topic »