Tag: John C. Lennox

Most science textbooks on cosmology credit Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson with the discovery that the universe began with a hot big bang creation event. While Penzias and Wilson were the first (1965) to detect the radiation left over from the creation event, they were not the first scientists to recognize that the universe is expanding from an extremely hot and compact beginning. Over time, energy and matter has become less and less dense. In fact, the universe is significantly cooler than it was at the moment of creation.

Theoretically, the idea of a “big bang” does not negate God’s creation of the universe. Of course, physicists and theologians constantly bicker about the origin of life and the universe. This is part of the problem. The “bickering.” Most physicists do their research from the mentality of a zero-sum proposition. In other words, they believe science and religion cannot both be right. One is true only through the complete annihilation of the other. Science has its realm—observing and explaining the physical elements and all that we can see—whereas religion is concerned with the spiritual, the metaphysical. They say never should the two meet. This ignores the idea that all truth is God’s truth.

The Big Bang and the Expanding Universe

In 1946, George Gamow calculated that only a universe expanding from a near infinitely hot beginning could account for the existing abundance of elements. In 1912, Vesto Slipher observed the shift of spectral lines of galaxies, indicating their velocities relative to ours. In 1929, observations made by Edwin Hubble (after whom the Hubble Telescope is named) established that the velocities of nearly all galaxies result from a general expansion of the universe. Beginning in 1925, astrophysicist and Jesuit priest Abbe Georges Lemaitre was the first scientist to promote the idea of a big bang creation event. The first theoretical scientific evidence for a big bang universe dates back to 1916 when Albert Einstein noted that his field equations of general relativity predicted an expanding universe.

Not surprisingly, many big bang theories exist. They share three fundamental characteristics: (1) a transcendent cosmic beginning that occurred a finite amount of time ago; (2) a continuous, universal cosmic expansion; and (3) a cosmic cooling from an extremely hot beginning. All three of the fundamental characteristics of the big bang were explicitly taught in the Bible two to three thousand years before scientists discovered them through their astronomical measurements. Moreover, the Bible alone among all the scriptures of the world’s religions expounds these three big bang fundamentals. Scientific proofs for a big bang universe, thus, can do much to establish the existence of the God of the Bible and the accuracy of the words of the Bible.

The term big bang is problematic. It’s not a “bang” per se. This expression typically conjures up images of a bomb blast or exploding dynamite. Such event would unleash disorder and destruction. Instead, this “bang” represents a very powerful yet carefully planned and controlled release of matter, energy, space, and time, the behavior of which must occur according to specific fine-tuned physical constraints and laws of physics. This type of power and precision exceeds the ability of the human mind.

This begs the question, Why, then would astronomers retain the term? The simple answer is that nicknames, for better or worse, tend to stick. In this case, the term came not from proponents of the theory, but rather from the mind of Sir Fred Hoyle. He coined the expression in the 1950s as an attempt to ridicule the big bang, which was at odds with his “steady state” theory. Steady-state theory is a scientific hypothesis that the universe is always expanding but maintaining a constant average density. Its proponents believe matter is continuously created to form new stars and galaxies at the same rate that old ones become unobservable as they increase in velocity and distance from the center of the galaxy. Such a universe would have no beginning or end. Hoyle objected to any theory that would place the origin or cause of the universe outside the universe proper—outside the realm of scientific inquiry. It seems he wanted to side-step any hint of a metaphysical explanation for the physical universe.

What the Bible Says About a Transcendent Universe

To transcend means “to exist above and independent from; to rise above, surpass, succeed.” By definition, God is the only truly transcendent Being. The LORD God Almighty (Hebrew, El Shaddai) created all things on the earth, beneath the earth and in the heavens above, yet He exists above and independent from them. We see this in Hebrews 1:3a, which states, “The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word” (NIV).

Being transcendent, God is the incomprehensible Creator existing outside of space and time and thus is unknowable and unsearchable. Neither by an act of our will nor by our own reasoning can we possibly come to understand God. God wants us to seek to know Him, yet how can the finite possibly know and understand the infinite when our minds and thoughts are so far beneath His. In Isaisah 55:8-9, God says, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, [a]s the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (NIV).

As you might guess, scientists see this Christian tenet as ill-advised at best. It is said that Christians believe in a “fairy tale” story of Creation, and that they hide behind metaphysics, completely unaffected by the so-called “lack of physical evidence” to prove that a Supreme Being spoke all of Creation into existence.

Creation and the Militant Atheist

A militant atheist is one who displays extreme hostility toward religion—with a particular disdain for Christianity. The difference between them and the average skeptic who simply does not believe in God is that they intend to propagate their atheism throughout society. In fact, it is their sincere desire to stop all reference to religion, God, Christ, Christianity, Allah, Islam, or Buddha. Their main aim is to quash any public mention or display of religion or its icons and reference to the subject matter in any public school or college. In addition, they hold all religion to be harmful. Interestingly, militant atheism first popped up during the French Revolution and the Cultural Revolution, and in the Soviet Union.

The militant atheist, Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011) likened parents forcing their theistic beliefs to their children as a form of child abuse. He believed parents have no right to “indoctrinate” their sons and daughters with the notion of a Supreme Being. He expressed four irreducible objections to faith: (1) that it wholly misrepresents the origin of man and the universe; (2) that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum of servility—an excessive willingness to serve or please others—with the maximum of solipsism, which means anything outside one’s mind is outside the realm of human comprehension, (3) that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression; and (4) that it is ultimately grounded in wishful thinking.

Hitchens said we are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe, but believes these should be limited to the arts, music, and literature. They have no place in the scientific inquiry into the origin of life and the cosmos. In fact, he believed that serious moral and ethical dilemmas should be relegated to the likes of Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Schiller, and Dostoyevsky, not in the “mythical morality” of holy books and scriptures. Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and soul.

“I suppose that one reason I have always detested religion is its sly tendency to insinuate the idea that the universe is designed with ‘you’ in mind or, even worse, that there is a divine plan into which one fits whether one knows it or not. This kind of modesty is too arrogant for me.”—Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

Hitchens believed that man can live a moral and proper life without religion. In fact, he said when man accepts that this life on Earth is all there is, that we live only once (with the exception of living on through our progeny), we will behave better rather than worse. First, this is far from true in reality. One only has to watch the nightly network newscasts to see that man cannot simply “get alone” to avoid wasting time, life, love,or relationships. Violence is but one symptom of this problem. Christianity, of course, teaches that man is born in sin, with an innate tendency to seek what the individual wants at any cost, and that this aspect of sin nature will prevent man from acting ethically and fairly on his or her own power. Simply put, Hitchens believed religion is man-made. I concur. Christianity, however, is not necessarily just a religion; instead, it is about relationships: with God the Father, with Jesus Christ, and with one another.

Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, Virus of the Mind, and The Blind Watchmaker, among others, said, “I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.” He believes faith is “the great copout;” merely an excuse to evade the need to think and to evaluate evidence. Hebrews 11: 1 tells us, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (NKJV)[emphasis mine]. Dawkins is not shy in his condemnation of Christianity, stating, “It is a horrible idea that God, this paragon of wisdom and knowledge, couldn’t think of a better way to forgive us our sins than to come down to Earth in his alter ego as his son and have himself hideously tortured and executed” [emphasis mine].

Dawkins seems tremendously militant about his atheist views, stating, “Religion is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness.” He went over the top when he invoked the memory of 9/11, stating that many atheists saw religion as “senseless nonsense,” with belief systems that lack physical evidence to back their claims. He said if people need “a crutch” to get through life, where is the harm? He concludes, “September 11th changed all that.”

Not All Scientists Deny the Existence of a Supreme Being

The universe is, of course, tangible. We can observe it (at least as far as current technology permits). But there is an infinite and transcendent aspect to the universe as well. The tangible is typically explored by obstinate observers and exasperated experimenters. These “scientific” individuals come to the search with preconceptions, biases, and presuppositions. But no matter their extensive education (at and beyond the master’s degree level), these individuals are sentient beings with limited understanding, bound by time and space, and can only peripherally comprehend what they observe. Moreover, they are saddled with trying to prove a negative: God does not exist! We all know how difficult it is to prove a negative.

Albert Einstein once said, “Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature, and you will find that, behind all the discernible concatenations, there remains something subtle, intangible, and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion.” Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking ultimately concluded that there is no God. For me, it’s a matter of science’s failure to completely and thoroughly demystify nature and the cosmos. I agree that we know many things as a result of scientific inquiry. For example, we know why the sky is blue: Among the wavelengths of light in our sun’s spectrum, blue oscillates at the highest frequency and is, therefore, scattered quite nicely by the molecules of air in our atmosphere. Because the blue wavelength bounces off air in all directions, the sky appears blue.

We also have come to understand how gravity works. Newton understood gravity to be a force exerted by objects in space, but Einstein proved that it is a property of space: the curvature, or what he called “warping” of spacetime. Perhaps this is why Gene Roddenberry coined the term “warp speed” relative to escaping the pull of gravity on space ships in order to travel faster than the speed of light. Einstein said this warping is similar to bouncing on a trampoline. He believed that massive objects warp and curve the universe, resulting in other objects moving on or orbiting along those curves. The predictions of Einstein’s theories have been validated time and time again. Now, 100 years after the formulation of his theory of gravity, another one of its predictions—the existence of gravitational waves—has been directly measured, despite Einstein’s belief that we’d never be able to do this.

Darwin’s Black Box

The term “black box” is a whimsical reference to a device that does something, but whose inner workings remain mysterious—sometimes because the workings can’t be seen, and sometimes because they just aren’t comprehensible. When Leeuwenhoek first saw a bacterial cell he essentially revealed a black box (the cell) within a black box (the organism itself). The cell theory was promulgated in the early nineteenth century by Matthias Schleiden and Theodor Schwann. It was Schwann who concluded that cells or the secretion of cells compose the entire bodies of animals and plants, and that in some way the cells are individual units with a life of their own. Schleiden added, “The primary question is, what is the origin of this particular little organism, the cell?”

The question of how life works was not one that Darwin or his colleagues were able to answer. They knew eyes were for seeing, but wondered exactly how sight works. How does blood clot? How does the body fight off disease? What was the smallest “unit” of life? Things began to open up a bit when Justus von Liebig showed that the body heat of animals is due to the combustion of food at the cellular level. From this discovery, he formulated the idea of metabolism, whereby the body builds up and breaks down substances through chemical processes.

A Fine Example

To Darwin, vision was a black box. Today, however, after the work of numerous biochemists, we have a better understanding of sight. Michael J. Behe, in his book Darwin’s Black Box, recounts the biochemistry of how a human is able to experience vision:

When light first strikes the retina, a photon interacts with a molecule called 11-cis-retinal, which rearranges within picoseconds to trans-retinal. (A picosecond is about the time it takes light to travel the breadth of a single human hair.) The change in the shape of the retinal molecule forces a change in the shape of the protein rhodopsin, to which the retinal is tightly bound. The protein’s metamorphosis alters its behavior. Now called metarhodospsin II, the protein sticks to another protein called transducin. Before bumping into metarhodopsin II, transducin had tightly bound a small molecule called GDP. But when transducin interacts with metarhodopsin II, the GDP falls off, and a molecule called GTP binds to transducin. (GTP is closely related to, but critically different from, GDP.

GTP-transducin-metarhodopsin II  now binds to a protein called phosphodiestrerase, located in the inner membrane of the cell. When attached to metarhodopsin II and its entourage, the phosphodiesterase acquires the chemical ability to “cut” a molecule called cGMP (a chemical relative to both GDP and GTP). Initially, there are a lot of cGMP molecules in the cell, but the phosphodiesterase lowers its concentration, just as a pulled plug lowers the water level in a bathtub… Trans-retinal eventually falls off of rhodopsin and must be reconverted to 11-cis-retinal and again bound by rhodopsin to get back to the starting point for another visual cycle.

The Odds of Random Life

Donald Page of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Science has calculated the odds against our universe randomly taking a form suitable for creating life as one out of 10,000,000,000 to the 124th power—a number that exceeds human imagination. Sir Fred Hoyle believed the odds of the random formation of a single enzyme  from amino acids (necessary for life itself) anywhere on Earth are one in 10 to the 20th power. He believed this tremendous chance-happening is rooted in the fact that there are approximately two thousand enzymes, with the chance of obtaining them all in a random trial only one in 10 to the 40,000th power! Say what? This is an outrageously small probability that would not likely occur even if the entire universe were made up of organic soup. Nothing has yet been stated relative to DNA and where it came from, or of the transcription of DNA to RNA, which even atheist-minded scientists admit cannot be mathematically computed. Nor has anything been said of mitosis or meiosis. It would seem any chance of the random ordering of organic molecules in a manner consistent with formation of life is zero.

Replacing Darwin

Nathaniel T. Jeanson, in his amazing book Replacing Darwin: The New Origin of Species, stated the following in his Afterward:

In the beginning… God created “kinds” of creatures—the original min. Representing creatures somewhere between the rank of sub-genus and order, these min contained millions of heterozygous sites in their genomes. As they reproduced, shifts from heterozygosity to homozygosity led to diverse offspring… after the creation of these min, their population sizes were dramatically reduced. At least for the land-dwelling, air-breathing min, their population sizes were reduced to no more than fourteen individuals. In some cases, their populations declined to just two. However, because this population bottleneck was so short, the heterozygosity of the Ark passengers would have been minimally affected. For sexually reproducing min, a male and female could have possessed a combined four copies of nuclear DNA. These copies could have been very different, preserving a massive amount of speciation potential.

If you’re familiar with Noah’s Ark, you’ve probably heard the phrase “two-by-two,” as if Noah brought animals on board the Ark only in groups of two. For some animals, Noah brought at least seven male and seven female individuals of that animal (see Genesis 7:1-3). Some biblical scholars agreesuspect that “seven” might refer to pairs (rather than to individuals), implying that Noah brought fourteen individuals (7×2=14) of these types of animals.

There has been a fundamental misunderstanding among most scientists (and atheists, for that matter) of both science and Christian faith. First, we must remember that some important scientific theories have yet to be tested—for example, Stephen Hawking postulated that black holes rotate. Second, Christianity can be tested. We have already been successful at the factual level regarding Christian doctrine standing up to atheistic scrutiny. The reliability of the biblical documents and evidence for the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus has stood the test of time. In addition, Christianity is observable and testable at the individual level.

The Nature of Science

I’ve heard it said that science doesn’t say anything, scientists do. For a scientist to claim he or she can disprove the existence of God—trying to prove a “negative”—is like saying a mechanic can disprove the existence of Henry Ford. In fact, it would be more accurate to state that theism supports science, not that science supports theism. Scientists are responsible for collecting data and interpreting it properly. This is not the function of science; rather, it is the responsibility of the scientist. They function as judges of the data. Science itself is a tool, not a judge. Even in jurisprudence, the jury is the trier of the facts. Because if this, we are presented with a dilemma. Qualitative data is inherently necessary when doing science, but each scientist comes to the lab with certain preconceptions and biases.

James W. Sire (2015) explains what is meant by a worldview. He states it is “…a set of presuppositions (assumptions which may be true, partially true, or entirely false) which we hold (consciously or subconsciously, consistently or inconsistently) about the basic makeup of our world” (p. 19). David Entwistle (2015) warns us that assumptions and biases affect data interpretation. He said, “…what we see depends, to some degree, on what we expect and are predisposed to see.” (p. 93) Our ability to know is both dependent upon and limited by the assumptions of our worldview. This is problematic in science, especially because a person’s worldview is not just a set of basic concepts, but a fundamental orientation of the heart.

Accordingly, atheists and theists are not really arguing over the data, nor are they bickering over the vast majority of scientific issues. Instead, they are butting heads over contrasting worldviews. In order for science to be fair and balanced, scientists must take a forensic approach similar to that of a detective reviewing evidence at a crime scene. You can certainly imagine what happens if a detective approaches a homicide absolutely convinced about who committed the murder and why. Little-to-no investigation of exculpatory evidence or alternative suspects would be entertained. This would frequently lead to the wrong conclusion and conviction of the wrong individual.

Richard Lewontin, a Darwinist from Harvard University, addressed the philosophical biases that plague science. He wrote the following in The New York Review of Books:

Our willingness to accept accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a-priori adherence to the material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanation, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute for we cannot allow a divine foot in the door [emphasis added].

Here’s my thought on this matter. If nature behaved in an erratic and unpredictable manner then life and science would be impossible. Laws of nature must point to a Law Giver. Most atheists have come to believe that God is no longer necessary. They think God and the laws discovered  through scientific study are diametrically opposed. Militant atheists take this viewpoint further, insisting that belief in God actually derails scientific progress. They believe “God” merely fills in the gaps in data until we “figure it all out.” In other words, who needs faith when we can empirically prove the whys and the means for how the physical world operates.

John C. Lennox, a mathematics professor at Oxford University and accomplished Christian apologist, noted that when Sir Isaac Newton discovered the universal law of gravitation he did not say, “I have discovered a mechanism that accounts for planetary motion, therefore there is no agent God who designed it.” Rather, because he understood how it worked, he was even more in awe of God who designed it that way. Granted, the prestige of science and technology is indeed impressive. But there’s more “code” and intricate functionality in just one of our forty trillion cells than in the latest iPhone.

Revisiting the concept that we all bring our preconceptions and biases to the table when taking on a subject, it is important to note that before doing science scientists frame their own philosophical rules for doing science. How can this not have a deciding impact on what they see or don’t see? Should scientists be open to only natural causes, or are intelligent or metaphysical causes worthy of consideration. While doing science, scientists rely on the orderly laws of nature, the law of causality, and the theory of knowledge known as realism when conducting an experiment or empirical investigation. After doing science, scientists must decide what is good evidence. What counts as evidence is not evidence itself—a philosophical value judgment must be made. Moreover, they must remain honest and open-minded throughout the entire process.

References

Behe, M. (2006). Darwin’s Black Box. New York, NY: Free Press, Div. of Simon and Schuster.
Entwistle, D. (2015). Integrative approaches to psychology and Christianity, third edition. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books.
Jeanson, J. (2017). Replacing Darwin: The New Origin of Species. Green Forest, AR: New Leaf Publishing Group.
Sire, J. (2015). Naming the elephant: Worldview as a concept, second edition. Downers Grove, IL: Inter Varsity Press.