"Is Atheism Dead" Book Reviews?

Faith & Science Conversation
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I think all of that is an entirely appropriate response. And I’m sure Metaxas is repeating what many others before him have noticed. I know I tell my high school chemistry students about the huge difference that hydrogen bonds make for water in particular (as opposed to H2S or H2Se or H2Te) for its liquid temperature range. And that’s only scratching the surface of what you and Metaxas are referring to with the 109.5 degree angle math. Life as we know it is extremely contingent on so many highly detailed things indeed! And I join you in praising our Creator for all of it.

The significant turn is made when people want to then begin conscripting all these contingencies in the service of apologetic proof to wield in a nearly weaponized sense. It doesn’t work well (or at all) as proof against the determined skeptic. One can always find (it seems) internally consistent narratives to see creation in both its in-workings and out-workings. It has never worked well (or at all) to find and isolate some bit of it to identify as “the God bit”; and it would be exceedingly strange (theologically and biblically speaking) if someone actually did. But we would have no way of knowing that they did, as in we couldn’t distinguish it from a myriad of other things that equally are still in want of full explanation.

But meanwhile - yeah! What an intricately amazing creation this is, and there is much to praise the Creator for.

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62

I was composting as you posed.

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63

Acts 2:36 may be the ‘weapon’ of all ‘weapons’

For those who have not seen it before, the verse follows three types of evidence: the testimony of Scripture, eyewitness testimony, and the self-evident testimony of the Spirit.

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64

You must have – I don’t see your earlier reply. XD

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I nominate it as the “mother of all ironies” to turn the cross into a weapon.

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The catch for me has always been the “life as we know” it part. There is no way to know if a different type of life could exist if the hydrogen bond angle was just a little different. Of course, it wouldn’t be our kind of life.

And this is just the fine tuning argument limited to one thing. If you really want to go back you have to say without the Big Bang life wouldn’t exist. Everything after that just falls out from the physics.

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67

That’s a fair point I’ve seen raised before. I’d also say that there is nothing inherently irrational about supposing the beginning of this universe originated from a process like a black hole in another universe. What is inherently irrational is supposing there could be an infinite number of universes.

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68

The problem that I have with science-based apologetics is that by attempting to weaponise the subject, it can seriously undermine your ability to understand it properly.

I say this from painful experience. In my final year at university, the one option that I chose for that very reason was a course on the formation of stars and galaxies. I chose this particular course because I was looking for evidence that “secular scientists” were making things up when they spoke about the age or the size of the universe and I wanted ammunition with which to expose them. I would actually cycle to lectures and supervisions in the subject thinking to myself that I was on some sort of “ammunition gathering exercise” for the purpose.

For example, one of our lecturers on one occasion described cosmology as a subject where “27\pi^4 is of order one.” My immediate thought was to interpret it as if it were an admission that cosmologists don’t care about accurate and honest measurements but just hand-wave things in ways that you don’t see in any other area of science. I’d completely missed the point that he wasn’t talking about accuracy but about scale – the distances, volumes and periods of time on cosmic scales are so massively humungous that in some situations the difference between 27\pi^4 and 1 pales into insignificance.

That particular course was nothing short of a disaster. On that paper in my finals, I achieved not only the lowest score in my entire time at university but what was probably my lowest score in any exam paper ever. It pulled my final results right down, shipwrecked my ambitions to do a PhD, and left me with little more understanding of the subject than when I first started. And how much ammunition had I gathered? One single, solitary, badly misunderstood, and utterly useless quote mine.

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69

Pretty impressive, but we also must wonder why humans weren’t given the ability to breathe under water as well as on land. After all, water covers about 70% of the earth’s surface, and people drown in devastating floods every year. What is the thinking behind that?

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Partly I agree with you. When I graduated Stuyvesant High School (A science HS in NYC) it seemed logical that in starting out life as a young man the most important question was “Does God exist?”. Growing up Catholic, I had some knowledge but science, back in 1971 seemed to not support this. I wished I had some good apologetics back then to help sort it out. Instead, I found philosophy, Kant and Hegel and later at City College in NY, Berkeley and Hume and wasn’t even sure you could know anything.

When I was in my Residency in Psychiatry and joined the Psychoanalytic Division and was on the couch for 5 years with a pretty good Freudian, I became an atheist.

I think the love of science is a search for the truth, laying aside our prejudices as much as possible. It was science that led me back to exploring faith, eventually coming to faith as a Christian.

So I think Science is important to at least open up the possibility or plausibility of a Creator. I remember one day, reading a Bible in my hotel room and at the beginning the Gideon’s had placed some recommendation. One was Psalm 19 which was called “The Twofold Revelation of God”. That is, that God reveals Himself in Creation as well as the Bible. “The heavens declare the glory of God…”

The second thought, though is from CS Lewis and a great book, “The Great Divorce”. Lewis is amazing and in a child-like fantasy about a bus-trip from hell (sounds like NYC or a bad day in London) to heaven we meet Lewis the theologian. This Oxford Don gave a number of dialogues between those whose complex psychological and spiritual struggles resulted in their desire to stay in hell, including one Bishop, if I recall correctly.

These arguments sound a little like the dialogues I read in Biologos. Lewis though wrote something in Mere Christianity which is for me of great interest. He says that of all the sins of mankind, Pride is the worst. “All the other sins come from Satan” he writes, “But pride comes from hell for it is pride that made Lucifer into Satan”.

When I think of all my sins, and God’s great mercy, I remember this terrible one and remember how little I know. So for most people these arguments are useless, pride can keep one trapped eternally. But they are not for every person. There are those whose pride is broken and sometimes, the sledge hammer that shatters it is science.

Just a thought.

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71

I am married to a mermaid. Well, after 42 years of marriage, she has confessed she wishes she were a mermaid. I call her my mermaid sometimes. But I have to say, I think there is something there that is quite possible and amazing.

When I was in college I wanted to be a marine biologist. A friend of mine from Stuyvesant and then City College did become one and worked with Phillipe Cousteau. I was jealous. I remember snorkeling off the barrier reef in Key West. I have never seen such beauty as I saw there. Schools of hundreds of deep blue tang, yellow tang, brain corrals the side of Volkswagen’s with feather worms waving out of them. Blue sea fans like forests shimmering in the light which broke through. Surely God did not mean for all of this to be only enjoyed here.

I believe someday, we will be able to swim and be there, maybe breathing under water. Maybe the Lord will help us provide better technology, but I don’t think so. If the Bible is true, we will live eternally.

I think of this verse, 1 Corinthians 2:9. “But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.”

Maybe, like my wife, you will swim under water with the tang and dolphins. We’ll all be mermaids and mermen, then!

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72

You’re dancing around the issue. The issue is, if God designed water, why not give humans the ability to breathe under water? Didn’t that problem occur to God?

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Too bad you got the Freudian treatment. Had you worked with a Jungian you would be much less likely to have fallen for atheism but also less likely later to embrace Christianity as the only viable alternative. Since you’re happy with the result I suppose you should thank your old analyst for the detour through atheism.

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Thank you Mark

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  • The word that comes to my mind is “Grace”. The encounter between a human being and an entity that exudes “grace” is one in which the grace originates in “The Other”, flows outward from “The Other” and inundates the human, filling him and overwhelming him.
  • In mid-October, I underwent an endovascular stent implant graft. As I regained consciousness in the Intensive Care Unit and the effects of heavy anesthesia faded away, I knew that something profound had taken place while I was unconscious although I had no memory of what it was that had occurred during surgery. But with consciousness came a growing powerful and overwhelming surge of gratitude: gratitude for anything, everything, and to everyone around me. The gratitude that I experienced evoked tears of joy. The friendly voice of a nurse or the touch of hands rolling me over to wipe my butt or do something to or for me, even the quiet presence of an attendant sweeping the room that I was in moved me to tears. In the charismatic community that I once was a member of, we called it “the gift of tears”. I never experienced it in those days, but I had heard about it. In the hospital and for months afterward, I experienced it daily and for the most trivial of reasons. The gift was so frequent and constant, I told God to lighten up, I was concerned that the gratitude I experienced was going to kill me. It wasn’t “ecstasy” or “bliss”, it was just extraordinary gratitude–filling up and overflowing-- for everything and always, to God my Father through Jesus Christ.
  • “The gift” has dissipated, but it doesn’t take much to turn on the tap again. I easily and readily understand Peter’s "falling at Jesus’ feet calling Him ‘Lord’.
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76

    :+1:   

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77

The old scriptural addage: “There is nothing new under the sun…” may ironically apply to science (or our attitudes towards it, within it, wrestling with it, leaning on it…) So I suspect that people today with all the more updated science than what you had in 1971 are still engaged in exactly the same wrestling match as you were back then. I don’t think there will ever be anything new under the sun in that regard. The best we might hope to do is recognize and respect their journey as having also been our own, and to offer such encouragement along the way as we can.

What you observe (or quote Lewis observing) about pride is spot on.

And yet it might also be a quite enduring pride that is forged in the tongs of science as well.

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78

Frank, at one time Eric and Phil Vischer were friends. I think Eric may have worked for Phil during his Veggie Tales days. In Phil’s 500th podcast of The Holy Post, he seems to have changed his regard for Eric. I trust Phil.

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79

Yeah, because Phil is a woke compromiser now. I heard he even did a silly song with Francis Collins for BioLogos once.

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81

Hi, Blaine. I’m not a historian, and so look forward to learning more from you or others here who perhaps know more about some of these you list than I do. But I feel I can speak to at least some of these in a bit more detail.

You might notice that I had qualified the liberalism/conservatism spectrum as being social and not economic. Obviously some in that list are/were communists who do hail from the economic left. That doesn’t mean they weren’t very socially conservative in some other, even extreme ways.

For example, Hitler hated gays and sent them to concentration camps too - he was anti-pornography, anti-tobacco, thereby checking some of those boxes that conservatives very much like (as Putin does even now). Mussolini, as a fascist, is practically the very definition of far-right (though again - I’m just repeating what has seemed to me to be ‘common knowledge’ and am curious if or how that might be challenged.)

One significant asymmetry we could note also is that military dictators (which would be practically all of them I should think) are using threat of law and even force to enforce their values on others, whereas the left is trying to just be more morally libertarian, in trying to keep government out of the business of legislating social moral norms (unless they are economic morals - that would probably be the one place the left is in favor of legislated morality). As one history teacher friend of mine once put it (also acknowledging how oversimplified this is): the left wants big economic government and small social government. The right wants big social government and small economic government.

But of course I was setting the economic perspective aside there and just concentrating on the social side.

[It may also be worth noting that homosexuality was illegal under Castro, and only just recently has been legalized in Cuba. … It would seem that if you were deemed a deviant of any kind from established social norms, then you should count your histoical blessings that you don’t (yet) live under the shadow of an autocrat. You would probably be thankful to live in a more socially liberal, democratic country. Do you know of exceptions to this? ]

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