What Your Atheist Professor Doesn't Know (But Should)

by Stephen Joseph Williams

Recent studies show that people with religious beliefs tend to live about eight years longer than atheists, so there is yet another reason to take this question seriously.

It follows that if the universe has a cause of its existence, that cause must be a non-physical, immaterial being beyond space and time.

"The infinite is nowhere to be found in reality. It neither exists in nature nor provides a legitimate basis for rational thought. The role that remains for the infinite to play is solely that of an idea." (2)

Anthony Kenny of Oxford University urges, "A proponent of the Big Bang theory, at least if he is an atheist, must believe that the universe came from nothing and by nothing." (4)

Therefore, there must have been a cause which brought the universe into being. And from the very nature of the case, this cause must be an uncaused, changeless, timeless, and immaterial being which created the universe. It must be uncaused because there cannot be an infinite regress of causes--that is to say, there cannot be a series of causes extending backwards in time to infinity past.

Scientists are not in agreement that Quantum fluctuations are uncaused, but even if one were to grant this possibility, they only happen in a sea of fluctuating energy with a rich physical structure and subject to physical laws, which far from being nothing, is within space and is undulating with matter and energy.

The “Big Bang” models, which all have a beginning in space and time, have grudgingly become accepted by well over 90% of scientists despite their inherent metaphysical implications, due to overwhelming evidential support.

Entropy is also a gauge of randomness or chaos within a closed system. As usable energy is irretrievably lost, disorganization, randomness and chaos increase.

Since the order in the universe was at its maximum at the beginning, and has been winding down into increasing disorder since then, the question “who organized it initially?” naturally arises.

Frederick Burnham, a science-historian. He said, "These findings, now available, make the idea that God created the universe a more respectable hypothesis today than at any time in the last 100 years."

Sir Arthur Eddington (British Astrophysicist): "The idea of a universal mind or Logos would be, I think, a fairly plausible inference from the present state of scientific theory."

Dr. Robert Jastrow (Founding director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies): "For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries." (15)

Dr. Frank Tipler (Professor of Math and Physics at Tulane University): "When I began my career as a cosmologist some twenty years ago, I was a convinced atheist. I never in my wildest dreams imagined that one day I would be writing a book purporting to show that the central claims of Judeo-Christian theology are in fact true, that these claims are straightforward deductions of the laws of physics as we now understand them. I have been forced into these conclusions by the inexorable logic of my own special branch of physics."

Dr. Wernher von Braun (German-American Pioneer Rocket Scientist) "I find it as difficult to understand a scientist who does not acknowledge the presence of a superior rationality behind the existence of the universe as it is to comprehend a theologian who would deny the advances of science."

Dr. Frank Tipler (Professor of Math and Physics at Tulane University): "From the perspective of the latest physical theories, Christianity is not a mere religion, but an experimentally testable science."

Well, the answer is that the chances that the universe should be life-permitting are so infinitesimally small as to be incomprehensible and incalculable. For example, Stephen Hawking has estimated that if the rate of the universe's expansion one second after the Big Bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, the universe would have re-collapsed into a hot fireball due to gravitational attraction. (4) Physicist P.C.W. Davies has calculated that the odds against the initial conditions being suitable for star formation (without which planets could not exist) is one followed by at least a thousand billion billion zeroes!

There is no plausible physical reason why these constants and quantities should have the values that they do. Reflecting on this, the once-agnostic physicist P.C.W. Davies comments, "Through my scientific work I have come to believe more and more strongly that the physical universe is put together with an ingenuity so astonishing that I cannot accept it merely as a brute fact." (7)

British Astrophysicist Sir Frederick Hoyle remarks, "A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics."

Robert Jastrow, the head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, refers to this as “the most powerful evidence for the existence o...

Amazingly, our universe was at its “minimum entropy” at the very beginning, which begs the question “how did it get so orderly?”

The secular science community has coined a term for this incredible fine-tuning: the “Anthropic Principle”. Their position, which is clearly steered by atheistic philosophy instead of an honest inference to the best explanation, is that life has evolved within all of these incredibly tight parameters by chance, and that we should not be surprised that the parameters are precise, as otherwise we would not exist to observe them. Christian philosopher William Lane Craig has pointed out that this is an error in reasoning. While it’s true that inasmuch as we are alive, we should not be surprised that we do observe things, we should be surprised that we are alive at all to observe anything. This can be clearly seen by means of an illustration (borrowed from John Leslie): suppose you are dragged before a firing squad of 100 trained marksmen, all of them with rifles aimed at your heart, to be executed. The command is given; you hear the deafening sound of the guns. And you observe that you are still alive, that all of the 100 marksmen missed! Now while it is true that: 1. You should not be surprised that you do not observe that you are dead, nonetheless it is equally true that: 2. Given the fact that 100 marksmen were aiming for you, you should be surprised that you do observe that you are alive. Since the firing squad's missing you altogether is extremely improbable, the surprise expressed is wholly appropriate, though you are not surprised that you do not observe that you are de...

One question that is often raised subsequent to hearing of the fine-tuning of the universe is “if the parameters were different, why couldn’t life have evolved within the different parameters?” The answer to that is that life cannot evolve even under the most ideal of conditions—the irreducible and specified complexity of life has disproven Darwinian evolution (we’ll discuss that in more detail later). Although micro-evolution (small changes within a species or “kind”) has been observed and does occur in nature, it always results in a loss or lateral drift in information. It never results in an increase in information.

Albert Einstein, who is often falsely characterized as having been an atheist, once said of non-believers: “The fanatical atheists are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who – in their grudge against traditional religion as the ‘opium of the masses’ – cannot hear the music of the spheres.” Indeed, Psalm 19:1 observes: “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.” Einstein addressed the inherent hubris associated with God-denial: I’m not an atheist. I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws.

Sir Frederick Hoyle (British Astrophysicist): "A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question."

Dr. Paul Davies (British Astrophysicist, and Professor at Arizona State University): "There is for me powerful evidence that there is something going on behind it all....It seems as though somebody has fine-tuned nature’s numbers to make the Universe....The impression of design is overwhelming". (15) And: "The laws [of physics] ... seem to be the product of exceedingly ingenious design... The universe must have a purpose". (16)

Dr. Alan Sandage (Astronomer at Carnegie Observatories, winner of the Crawford prize in astronomy): "I find it quite improbable that such order came out of chaos. There has to be some organizing principle. God to me is a mystery but is the explanation for the miracle of existence, why there is something instead of nothing." (17)

Dr. John O'Keefe (Astronomer at NASA): "We are, by astronomical standards, a pampered, cosseted, cherished group of creatures.. .. If the Universe had not been made with the most exacting precision we could never have come into existence. It is my view that these ci...

Dr. Tony Rothman (Physicist, former editor of Scientific American): "When confronted with the order and beauty of the universe and the strange coincidences of nature, it's very tempting to take the leap of faith from science into religion. I am su...

Louis Pasteur once said “Religions, philosophies, atheism, materialism, or its opposite--none of these is relevant to the matter...I might even add that, scientifically speaking, I am indifferent to them all. The question is purely one of fact”.

Most modern philosophers (even agnostic ones) find Hume’s arguments to be almost laughably illogical, but many atheists unknowingly cite him today as if he was “the Christ” of their belief system.

Many Americans would probably be surprised to know that polls show that the percentage of PhD’ed scientists overall who identify themselves as Christians and who go to church is roughly the same as the percentage in the population at large.

This is probably a good time to mention that all the evidence indicates that the first cell was about as complex as a modern simple cell.

According to Professor Donald Johnson (who has two earned PhD’s; one in Chemistry and one in Computer and Information Sciences), your body has literally hundreds of quadrillions of computers in it, some operating with triple layers of encryption! Also:  the genetic system IS a pre-existing operating system;  the specific genetic program (genome) is an application;  the native language has a codon-based encryption system;  the codes are read by enzyme computers with their own operating system;  each enzyme’s output is to another operating system in a ribosome;  codes are decrypted and output to tRNA computers;  each codon-specified amino acid is transported to a protein construction site; and  in each cell, there are multiple operating systems, multiple programming languages, encoding/decoding hardware and software, specialized communications systems, error detection/correction systems, specialized input/output for organelle control and feedback, and a variety of specialized “devices” to accomplish the tasks of life. (Dr. Donald E. Johnson – who has earned PhD’s in Chemistry and Computer Science -- via Uncommon Descent).

As Paleontologist J. William Schopf has marveled, “no one had foreseen that the beginning of life occurred so astonishingly early.”

According to a leading Darwinist, the odds of component parts in close proximity assembling into a single-celled creature are 1 in 10339,999,866.

there is enough information-storing space in a half-teaspoon of DNA to store all of the assembly instructions for every creature ever made, and room left over to include every book ever written!

top mainstream scientists estimate that negative mutations outnumber positive ones by about a million to one. How on earth could a sufficient number of germline mutations to effect this orchestral metamorphosis accrue without the destruction of the creature millions of times over?!

Major transitions in biological evolution show the same pattern of sudden emergence of diverse forms at a new level of complexity.

Since no mutation in the history of Biology has ever been shown to add information (yet most will degrade it),

Darwinism needs two things to succeed: 1) random mutations, and 2) natural selection

the same features showing up in unrelated creatures, despite the possibility of myriad choices of evolutionary “pathways” which presumably could be (or could have been) taken. There is no known force which would constrain all of these wildly diverse pathways into the same ending, yet there they are. Since Darwinism is thought to be a “contingent” (non-restricted) process, -- i.e. it shouldn’t tend to go the same way twice -- this has puzzled inquiring minds. Many respected biologists (like the late Stephen Jay Gould, and Simon Conway-Morris) have noted that it’s bizarre that unguided Darwinian evolution would ever have gone down the same mutational paths more than once, or arrived at the same structure more than once, in unrelated creatures.

As Biochemist Dr. Fazale Rana observes, “This pattern, expected by Schopf and other evolutionary biologists, is simply not observed at the biochemical level” (www.reasons.org). Just a few of the many complex biological features without a molecular connection to a common ancestor are the wings of birds and bats, the strikingly similar (yet unrelated) limb structures of bats and flying lemurs, seven distinct structures in the forebrain of parrots, songbirds, and hummingbirds (which structures are genetically unrelated), echolocation in two types of bats: microchiroptera and megachiroptera (the structures of which are genetically unrelated), the eye structure of the cephalopods (nautili, cuttlefish, squids, and octopods) and those of vertebrates, the eye structures and some hunting tactics of the sandlance fish and the chameleon lizard, toothed and baleen whales’ ability to dive deep into the ocean (which are genetically separate), and dozens of other examples. Dr. Rana has a list of over one hundred examples in his book The Cell’s Design.

Fazale Rana and Hugh Ross cite one of the world’s most prominent evolutionists, Dr. Francisco Ayala of UC Irvine, as calculating the minimal odds of human beings evolving from the bacterial level to be 1 in 10 to the 1 millionth power. Three physicists, John Barrow, Brandon Carter and Frank Tipler, did roughly the same calculation but included some important factors that Ayala overlooked, and came up with the number 1 in 10 to the 24 millionth power. Keep in mind that Tipler is Professor of Mathematical Physics at Tulane University, and is well-versed in calculating collective probabilities.

I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that. [The Last Word” by Thomas Nagel, Oxford University Press: 1997].

Another example of “selective reasoning” came courtesy of Harvard Neurobiologist George Wald: One has only to contemplate the magnitude of this task to concede that the spontaneous generation of a living organism is impossible. Yet here we are -- as a result, I believe, of spontaneous generation. To be fair, Wald eventually became an Intelligent Design advocate.

Darwinist named Aldous Huxley provides some insight: I had motives for not wanting the world to have meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption ... For myself, as no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneous liberation from a certain political and economic system, and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom. (8)

Nobel-Prize winning organic chemist Christian de Duve: If you equate the probability of the birth of a bacteria cell to chance assembly of its atoms, eternity will not suffice to produce one… Faced with the enormous sum of lucky draws behind the success of the evolutionary game, one may legitimately wonder to what extent this success is actually written into the fabric of the universe. (9)

The density of the information encoded into DNA staggers the imagination; there is enough information-storing space in a half-teaspoon of DNA to store all of the assembly instructions for every creature ever made, and room left over to include every book ever written! The information content of a bacterium has been estimated to be around 10,000,000,000,000 bits of information -- comparable to a hundred million pages of Encyclopaedia Britannica.

If all the DNA info in the one human body were printed in books, it would be enough to fill the Grand Canyon fifty times over! Moreover, the information would be nothing but gibberish, and would be worthless for constructing proteins unless there was an established language convention to which it conformed.

One is tempted to ask the question “what came first, the chicken (proteins) or the egg (DNA)?”, but in this case, both phenomena would have to arise simultaneously and following the same language convention, or they would both be completely useless. As Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Jacques Monod put it: The major problem is the origin of the genetic code and of its translation mechanism. Indeed, instead of a problem it ought rather to be called a riddle. The code is meaningless unless translated. The modern cell's translating machinery consists of at least fifty macromolecular components which are themselves coded in DNA: the code cannot be translated otherwise than by products of translation. It is the modern expression of omne vivum ex ovo [everything that lives, (comes) from an egg]. When and how did this circle become closed? It is exceedingly difficult to imagine. (2)