……apologies in advanceapologies in advance

Chris Oldfield, Team Geek, UCCF London

Christchurch Apologetics Day, 29 May 2010

Faith heads?Faith heads?

Does faith have reasons by which you can explain it?

or

Does faith have causes by which you can explain it away?

PersuasionPersuasion: Alasdair MacIntyre: Alasdair MacIntyre

An epistemological crisis is resolved by the construction of a new narrative, which enables the agent to understand :

1. Both how he or she could intelligibly have held his or her original beliefs

1. And how he or she could have been so drastically misled by them.

Has science buried God?Has science buried God?

Why should people think this?

Have they have been misled?

What sense Jesus makes?

1.Identify

2.Inquire

3.Invite

1. Identify:1. Identify: where has this idea where has this idea come from?come from?

History of

science

Nature of science

Results of

science

God Faith Conflict

““God”: God”: the re-godding of the re-godding of naturenature

“I can’t understand it…therefore God did it!”

““Faith”: Faith”: the return to the the return to the dark agesdark ages

“Faith is the great cop-out, the great

excuse to evade the need to think and

evaluate evidence!”

Richard Dawkins

““Conflict”:Conflict”: the retreat of the retreat of religionreligion

“those dreadful hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses”

Identify: Identify: where has this idea come where has this idea come from?from?

God is slipperyFaith is an excuseConflict is inevitable

Identify: Identify: the elephant in the elephant in the roomthe room

“Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually

fulfilled atheist”

Why the evidence of evolution reveals a

universe without design

2. 2. Inquire: Inquire: scratching the scratching the surfacesurface

December

1st significant oxygen on earth

17th Cambrian explosion

31st 10:30pm humans appear

Aside: Paley’s watchAside: Paley’s watchIn Natural Theology: Evidences for the Existence and Attributes of the Deity (1802), Paley assumed the natural world as “contrived” as we see it now is the natural world as it was created. Note also the implicit mechanical imagery of design emerging around the Industrial Revolution:

“In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone and were asked how the stone came to be therel I might possibly answer, that for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there forever…But suppose I found a watch...”

Aside: Augustine’s SeedsAside: Augustine’s SeedsIn De Genesi Ad Litteram (408) & De Trinitate (416), Augustine highlighted the fruitful image of seeds prevalent in the creation accounts.

‘In the seed was present invisibly everything that would develop in time

into a tree. We must visualize the world in the same way, when God made all

things together, as having all things that were made in it and with it…[including]

the beings which earth produced potentially and causally before they

emerged in the course of time’

Aside: Darwin’s insightAside: Darwin’s insight‘The old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man’ (Charles Darwin, 1859)

’We knew of old that God was so wise that He could make all things; but behold He is so much wiser than even that, that He can make all things make themselves’ (Charles Kingsley, 1871)

InquireInquire: the basic : the basic argumentargument

1. We have a process/mechanism (NS + mutation)

2. That process does something(suppose that’s true)

3. Therefore there’s no God(who planned it)

InquireInquire: Natural : Natural Selection…Selection…

“the blind, unconscious, automatic process which

Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the

explanation for the apparently purposeful form of all life…has no

purpose in mind”

Inquire: Inquire: Redundant Redundant RhetoricRhetoric

“…it has no purpose in mind; it has no mind, and no mind’s eye; it does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all…”

“…There is at bottom no design, no purpose, no evil

and no good; nothing but blind, pitiless indifference”

Inquire: Inquire: 2 kinds of 2 kinds of explanationexplanation

Scientific explanation about the Process

Personal explanation about the Purpose

Richard SwinburneOxford Philosopher

II PauseII Pause: the God who…: the God who…

Matthew 5:45

Acts 14:15

Exodus 14:21

Psalm 77:19

Psalm 104:10-11

Hebrews 1v3

Questions:Questions:

Q1 (personal purpose):

Is there a creator? Is the Universe here on purpose?

Q2 (scientific process):

Which processes best explain the evidence we see?

Statements of science?Statements of science?“Man is the result of a purposeless and

natural process that did not have him in mind. He was not planned.”

George Gaylord Simpson (Harvard Paleontologist)

Science has no need of purpose…all the extraordinary, wonderful richness of

the world can be expressed as growth from the dunghill of purposeless

interconnected corruption

Peter Atkins (Oxford Chemist)

The essential point of The essential point of CreationCreation

The essential point of creation has nothing to do with the timing or the

mechanism that the creator chooses to employ (that’s another issue), but with the element of design, or purpose. In the broadest sense, a “creationist” is

simply a person who believes that the world, and especially mankind was

designed – exists for a purpose

a question: Q1a question: Q1

Q1: In the beginning…Q1: In the beginning…

Christian:In the beginning was the mind of God (logos cosmos)

Atheist:In the beginning was mindless matter (no logos chaos)

AgnosticI don’t know, I just mind my own business. (logos unknown)

1957: 1957: stupid stupid question!question!‘‘If everything must have a cause, If everything must have a cause,

then God must have a cause. If there then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it can be anything without a cause, it

may just as well be the world as God, may just as well be the world as God, ……There is no reason to suppose There is no reason to suppose

that the world had a beginning. that the world had a beginning. The The idea that things must have had a idea that things must have had a

beginning is really due to the poverty beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination.of our imagination.’’

Bertrand Russell, Why I am Not a Christian

Perhaps…Perhaps…

Perhaps the world is not made. Perhaps nothing is made.

Perhaps it simply is, has been, and will always be there.

A watch without a watchmaker?A clock without a craftsman?

1964…“big bang” cosmology1964…“big bang” cosmology1.The universe is 1.The universe is not eternalnot eternal

2.The universe is 2.The universe is not essentialnot essential

‘thoroughly unacceptable’ (Maddox)

‘it smacks of divine intervention’ (Hawking)

“another put up job? I am inclined to think so. A common sense

interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with the laws of physics, chemistry & biology, and that there are no blind

forces worth speaking about in nature”

Hoyle’s atheism was “deeply shaken”

1988: 1988: goodgood question question‘‘The usual approach of science of constructing a The usual approach of science of constructing a

mathematical model cannot answer why there mathematical model cannot answer why there should be a universe for the model to should be a universe for the model to describedescribe. .

Why does the universe go to the bother of Why does the universe go to the bother of existing? [What] breathes fire into the existing? [What] breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to equations and makes a universe for them to describe? describe?

Is a theory so compelling that it brings about its Is a theory so compelling that it brings about its own existence? Orown existence? Or does it need a creator, does it need a creator, andand if so, does he have any other effect if so, does he have any other effect on on the universe?the universe? …If we find the answer to …If we find the answer to that...then we should know that...then we should know the mind of Godthe mind of God’’

Q1: In the beginning…Q1: In the beginning…

Christian:In the beginning was the mind of God (logos cosmos)

Atheist:In the beginning was mindless matter (no logos chaos)

AgnosticI don’t know, I just mind my own business. (logos unknown)

Q2: Q2: MethodologicalMethodological NaturalismNaturalism

We have a prior 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… we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create

an apparatus of investigation & a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how [counter-intuitive]. Moreover,

that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

Q2: the limits of scienceQ2: the limits of science

“Whatever knowledge is attainable, must be attained by scientific

methods; and what science cannot discover, mankind cannot know”

Bertrand Russell

(i.e. “anything my net doesn’t catch isn’t a fish”)

Q2: the limits of scienceQ2: the limits of science

The existence of a limit to science is made clear by its inability to answer

childlike elementary questions having to do with first and last things –

questions such as “How did everything begin?”; “What are we all here for?”;

“What is the point of living?”

Sir Peter Medawar, Nobel Prize for Medicine, 1960

Q1: Q1: OntologicalOntological Naturalism? Naturalism?

“To say it for all my colleagues and for the umpteenth million time: science simply cannot (by its legitimate methods) adjudicate the issue of God’s possible superintendence of nature. We neither affirm nor

deny it; we simply can’t comment on it as scientists.”

Q1: Don’t be fooled…Q1: Don’t be fooled…

“I thought that I had left the question of the existence of a

supreme being completely open – it would be perfectly

consistent with all we know to say that there was a being who was responsible for the

laws of physics!”

Where does that leave us?Where does that leave us?

Q1 (personal purpose):

Not God of the gaps: John 1:1 might be true

Q2 (scientific process):

Not in conflict: but not crucial for all to answer

Q3 (gospel proclamation):

If John 1v1 might be true, is John 1:10-14 true?

Conclusion: some struggle Conclusion: some struggle too muchtoo much

the conflict (today) is not

between faith and science, but between

the assertion, that the cosmos as it exists

today, is either in a normal or

abnormal condition.

Abraham Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism, 1931In 4th lecture, ‘Calvinism & Science’, p.117

Conclusion: some don’t Conclusion: some don’t struggle enoughstruggle enough

Darwinism is not a problem for the doctrine of Creation but of the Fall

(Romans 5, 1 Corinthians 15)

“Young Earth Creationism” solves ALL these theological problems.

-I do not think these problems are insurmountable, but they are not trivial.

Who thought that life was love indeed

And love creation’s final law

While nature red in tooth and claw

With ravine’ shriek’d against his creed

Lord Tennyson

The real conflict: the ‘The real conflict: the ‘is-oughtis-ought’ ’ problemproblem

what do you see?what don’t you see?

Nature: not the way it’s Nature: not the way it’s meant to be?meant to be?

Read Ecclesiastes 3v18-21

- What does the teacher see?

- What does God want us to see?

the silence of sciencethe silence of science

The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent

contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousand of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all

kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If the universe were

just electrons and selfish genes, meaningless tragedies are exactly what we should expect, along with equally meaningless good fortune.

the silence of sciencethe silence of science

…such a universe would be neither evil nor good in intention…In a universe of electrons & selfish genes, blind physical forces and

genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it,

nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we

should expect if there is at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but

blind pitiless indifference. DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is, and we dance to its

music.

Ok, ok…Ok, ok…

A serious case can be made for some sort of a case for a deistic god perhaps, some god like a great

physicist who adjusted the laws and constants of the universe - that’s all very grand and wonderful, but then

suddenly we come down to the resurrection of Jesus. It’s so petty, it’s

so trivial, it’s so local, it’s so earth-bound, it’s so unworthy of the universe.

Richard Dawkins, in debate with John Lennox

Science didn’t bury God; Science didn’t bury God; love did.love did.

Tis mystery all, the immortal dies

Who can explore his strange design?

In vain the firstborn seraph tries

To sound the depths of love divine

Tis mystery all, immense and free, that thou my

God shouldst die for me

Weep No MoreWeep No More

Rev 21:1-6I heard a loud voice from the throne

Rev 4:11Worthy are you, our Lord and God…

Rev 5:1-14Who is worthy to open the scroll?...

Reductionism example: Reductionism example: GenesGenes

They are trapped in huge colonies, locked inside highly intelligent beings moulded by the outside world, communicating with it by complex processes, through which blindly, as if by magic, function emerges

we are the system that allows their code to be read; and their preservation is totally dependent on the joy that we experience in reproducing ourselves. We are the ultimate rationale for their existence.

D. Noble, The Music of Life: Biology Beyond the Genome (OUP 2006)

They swarm in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by tortuous indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control.

they created us, body and mind;

and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence.

R. Dawkins, The Selfish Gene(OUP 1976)

They are in you and me;

They are in you and me;