بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم
God’s Not Dead
Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty
By: Rice Broocks
1 God’s Not Dead
· However, Daniel Dennett, one of the so-called Four Horsemen of Atheism, has admitted, “There is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination.” [Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (New York: Touchstone, 1995), 21.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 245-247). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· “If God is dead,” said Malcolm Muggeridge, “somebody is going to have to take his place,” and that somebody else is usually man himself. [Malcolm Muggeridge, A Third Testament: A Modern Pilgrim Explores the Spiritual Wanderings of Augustine, Blake, Pascal, Tolstoy, Bonhoeffer, Kierkegaard, and Dostoevsky (New York: Ballantine, 1983), 32.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 263-265). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· As the lead singer for Bad Religion stated in his book Anarchy Evolution: If people ask me about my worldview, I say that I am a naturalist. When most people hear that word, they think of someone who spends a lot of time outdoors watching birds and admiring landscapes—and I suppose that description applies to me. But I think of naturalism as a philosophy rather than a lifestyle. From a philosophical perspective, naturalists believe that the physical universe is the universe. In other words, there are no supernatural entities or forces acting on nature, because there is no empirical evidence for anything beyond or outside of nature. [Greg Graffin and Steve Olson, Anarchy Evolution: Faith, Science, and Bad Religion in a World Without God (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), 5–6.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 294-300). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· “Scientists follow the evidence wherever it leads.” (Plato, Republic, 394d.) Unless, of course, it leads to God. [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 303-304). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· To say that nothing exists outside the physical world is a statement of faith. There is no way that anyone can prove that is true. [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 304-305). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· God deserves the recognition for all He has created. Knowing that a Creator exists changes everything in our outlook and worldview. It should inspire us to honor Him more than we would honor any woman or man for any human achievement. It should also cause us to seek Him, to earnestly desire a relationship with Him. [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 389-391). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
2 Real Faith Isn’t Blind
· Albert Einstein would concur, “The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.” [Albert Einstein, Physics and Reality, trans. Jean Piccard (Lancaster, PA: Lancaster, 1936).] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 478-479). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· They believed the universe was crafted by a purposeful God who created humanity in His image, creatures who could (to borrow Johannes Kepler’s famous phrase) “think God’s thoughts after Him.” To Kepler, “The chief aim of all investigations of the external world should be to discover the rational order which has been imposed on it by God, and which he revealed to us in the language of mathematics.” [Johannes Kepler, Defundamentis Astrologiae Certioribus, Thesis 20 (1601).] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 480-483). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· Keynote speaker Richard Dawkins called for this bitter tone and tactic from all present. “Mock them, ridicule them in public, don’t fall for the convention that we’re far too polite to talk about religion. Religion is not off the table. Religion is not off limits.” [Richard Dawkins, speech at the Reason Rally, Washington DC Mall, March 24, 2012, quoted in Charlie Spiering, “A Rally Without Faith,” Crisis Magazine, March 27, 2012.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 492-494). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· In a review of Daniel Dennett’s book Breaking the Spell in the New York Times, literary critic Leon Wieseltier wrote, “Scientism, the view that science can explain all human conditions and expressions, mental as well as physical, is a superstition, one of the dominant superstitions of our day; and it is not an insult to science to say so.” [Leon Wieseltier, “The God Genome,” New York Times, February 19, 2006.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 586-589). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· Linguist Noam Chomsky, by no means an advocate for religion, nonetheless pointed out the limits of science: Science talks about very simple things, and asks hard questions about them. As soon as things become too complex, science can’t deal with them. . . . But it’s a complicated matter: Science studies what’s at the edge of understanding, and what’s at the edge of understanding is usually fairly simple. And it rarely reaches human affairs. Human affairs are way too complicated. [“Science in the Dock: Discussion with Noam Chomsky, Lawrence Krauss & Sean M. Carroll,” Science & Technology News, March 1, 2006.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 589-593). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· Mathematics allows us to send probes into outer space as well as into our own bodies. “The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. We should be grateful for it and hope that it will remain valid in future research.” [Eugene Wigner, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,” Communication on Pure and Applied Mathematics 13, no. 1, February 1960, 1–14.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 610-612). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· “The notion that the only rational beliefs are those that can be confirmed by scientific observation, experiment and measurement is yet another self-refuting proposition, since it is a statement that itself cannot be confirmed by scientific observation, experiment and measurement.” [Phillips, The World Turned Upside Down, 321.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 622-625). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· But ‘What is the purpose of the universe?’ is a silly question. It has no meaning.” [Richard Dawkins, interview by Tony Jones, Q&A, ABC Australia, April 9, 2012.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Location 633). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· Dawkins’s opening statement said that his motivation for getting into science was the why question. “My interest in Biology started with the fundamental questions of our existence. Why we are all here.” [Dawkins vs. Lennox: The God Delusion Debate.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 635-636). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· The late Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard spoke about faith and science being “non-overlapping magisteria.” This means they are two distinct, equally valid spheres of existence. [Stephen Jay Gould, Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life, The Library of Contemporary Thought (New York: Ballantine, 1999), 4–6.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 639-640). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· Albert Einstein gave insight into his view that both realms of religion and science are valid: Science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration towards truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion. To this there also belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to reason. I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound faith. The situation may be expressed by an image: Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind. [Albert Einstein, Out of My Later Years (New York: Citadel, 1956), 26.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 655-660). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
4 There Was a Beginning
· A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics. —FRED HOYLE, “THE UNIVERSE: PAST AND PRESENT REFLECTIONS” [Sir Fred Hoyle, “The Universe: Past and Present Reflections,” Engineering and Science, November 1981, 12.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1013-1016). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· The best data we have [concerning the Big Bang] are exactly what I would have predicted had I nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms, and the Bible as a whole. —ARNO PENZIAS, NOBEL LAUREATE IN PHYSICS [Malcolm W. Browne, “Clues to Universe Origin Expected; The Making of the Universe,” New York Times, March 12, 1978.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1017-1019). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· Stephen Hawking commented, “Almost everyone now believes that the universe, and time itself, had a beginning at the Big Bang.” [Stephen W. Hawking and Roger Penrose, The Nature of Space and Time (Princeton: Princeton University, 1996), 20.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1024-1026). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· as atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell argued, “the universe is just there, and that’s all.” [Bertrand Russell and Frederick Copleston, “A Debate on the Existence of God” in The Existence of God, ed. John Hick (New York: Collier, 1964), 175.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1029-1030). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· Robert Jastrow, captured the tension of the big bang theory in his book God and the Astronomers. When a scientist writes about God, his colleagues assume he is either over the hill or going bonkers. In my case it should be understood from the start that I am agnostic in religious matters. . . . However, I am fascinated by the implications in some of the scientific developments of recent years. The essence of these developments is that the Universe had, in some sense, a beginning—that it began at a certain moment in time. [Robert Jastrow, God and the Astronomers, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton and Norton, 1992), 9.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1047-1052). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· Stephen Hawking noted this discomfort in his bestseller A Brief History of Time: “Many people do not like the idea that time has a beginning, probably because it smacks of divine intervention.” [Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time: The Updated and Expanded Tenth Anniversary Edition (New York: Bantam, 1996), 49.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1056-1058). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· Astronomer Fred Hoyle came up with the term big bang out of ridicule. The thought of a beginning to him was tantamount to slipping in the concept of a Creator: At first sight one might think the strong anticlerical bias of modern science would be totally at odds with western religion. This is far from being so, however. The big bang theory requires a recent origin of the universe that openly invites the concept of creation, which so-called thermodynamic theories of the origin of life in the organic soup of biology are the contemporary equivalent of the voice in the burning bush and the tablets of Moses. [Sir Fred Hoyle, The Intelligent Universe (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1983), 237.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1058-1063). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· Nothing isn’t really nothing in Krauss’s view. “For surely ‘nothing’ is every bit as physical as ‘something,’ especially if it is to be defined as the ‘absence of something.’ It then behooves us to understand precisely the physical nature of both these quantities. And without science, any definition is just words.” [Lawrence M. Krauss, A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (New York: Free Press, 2012), xiv.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1116-1119). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· Allan Sandage, winner of the Crawford Prize in astronomy (equivalent to the Nobel Prize), remarked, “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.” [Allan Sandage, quoted in J. N. Willford, “Sizing up the Cosmos: An Astronomer’s Quest,” New York Times, March 12, 1991, B9.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1140-1143). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· However, in his latest work, ironically titled The Grand Design, Hawking emphatically stated that the universe could literally pop into existence without God, ultimately as a consequence of the laws of nature. “Because there is a law like gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. . . . Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.” [Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design (New York: Bantam Books, 2010), 180.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1147-1151). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· In any case, even in a universe with no miracles, when you are faced with a profoundly simple underlying order, you can draw two different conclusions. One, drawn by Newton himself, and earlier espoused by Galileo and a host of other scientists over the years, was that such order was created by a divine intelligence responsible not only for the universe, but also for our own existence, and that we human beings were created in his image (and apparently other complex and beautiful beings were not!). The other conclusion is that the laws themselves are all that exist. These laws themselves require our universe to come into existence, to develop and evolve, and we are an irrevocable by-product of these laws. The laws may be eternal, or they too may have come into existence, again by some yet unknown but possibly purely physical process. [Krauss, A Universe from Nothing, 142.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1176-1182). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· This evidence is so compelling for the presence of an intelligent designer that atheists, such as Dawkins, admit it’s a problem. “The physicist’s problem is the problem of ultimate origins and ultimate natural laws. The biologist’s problem is the problem of complexity.” [Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design (1986; New York: Norton, 1996), 15.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1188-1191). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· Hugh Ross described in The Creator and the Cosmos the example of the ratio of the number of electrons to the number of protons in the universe: “Unless the number of electrons is equivalent to the number of protons to an accuracy of one part in 1037 or better, electromagnetic forces in the universe would have so overcome gravitational forces that galaxies, stars, and planets never would have formed.” [Hugh Ross, Creator and the Cosmos: How the Latest Scientific Discoveries of the Century Reveal God (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2001), 150.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1210-1213). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· Oxford mathematician John Lennox would say that we are using “realms of precision far beyond anything achievable by instrumentation designed by humans.” [John C. Lennox, God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? (Oxford: Lion Hudson, 2009), 71.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1217-1219). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· “The universe in some sense must have known we were coming.” [Freeman Dyson, Disturbing the Universe (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), 250.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1232-1233). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· Sir Fred Hoyle noted the amazing unlikely appearance of life in its most basic elements, such as carbon. Would you not say to yourself, “Some super-calculating intellect must have designed the properties of the carbon atom, otherwise the chance of my finding such an atom through the blind forces of nature would be utterly minuscule.”? Of course you would. . . . A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect 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. [Hoyle, “Universe: Past and Present Reflections,” 8–12.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1233-1238). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· Paul Davies, a physicist as well as an agnostic, echoed the sentiments of Hoyle: Scientists are slowly waking up to an inconvenient truth—the universe looks suspiciously like a fix. The issue concerns the very laws of nature themselves. For 40 years, physicists and cosmologists have been quietly collecting examples of all too convenient “coincidences” and special features in the underlying laws of the universe that seem to be necessary in order for life, and hence conscious beings, to exist. Change any one of them and the consequences would be lethal. Fred Hoyle, the distinguished cosmologist, once said it was as if “a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics.” [Paul Davies, “Yes, the universe looks like a fix. But that doesn’t mean a god fixed it,” Guardian, June 25, 2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/jun/26/spaceexploration.comment (accessed September 20, 2012).] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1239-1244). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· Cosmologist Edward Harrison has made this deduction: The fine-tuning of the universe provides prima facie evidence of deistic design. Take your choice: blind chance that requires multitudes of universes or design that requires only one …. Many scientists, when they admit their views, incline toward the teleological or design argument …. Here is the cosmological proof of the existence of God—the design argument of Paley—updated and refurbished. [Edward Harrison, Masks of the Universe: Changing Ideas on the Nature of the Cosmos (New York: Collier Books, 1985), 252, 263, 286.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1260-1265). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· Robert Jastrow, formerly of NASA, was willing to follow the evidence, even if it led to God: and under circumstances that seem to make it impossible—not just now, but ever—to find out what force or forces brought the world into being at that moment. Was it as the Bible says, “Thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundations of the earth, and the heavens are the work of thine hands”? No scientist can answer that question. [Jastrow, God and the Astronomers, 9–10.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1281-1285). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
5 Life Is No Accident
· If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. —CHARLES DARWIN, ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES [Darwin, On the Origin of Species: By Means of Natural Selection, ed. Thomas Crawford (New York: Dover Thrift, 2006), 119.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1303-1306). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· The illusion of design is so successful that to this day most Americans (including, significantly, many influential and rich Americans) stubbornly refuse to believe it is an illusion. —RICHARD DAWKINS, “THE ILLUSION OF DESIGN” [Richard Dawkins, “The Illusion of Design” in Biological Anthropology: An Introductory Reader, ed. Michael Alan Park (New York: McGraw Hill, 2007), 30.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1307-1310). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· In a symposium in New York in May 2004, Flew was asked if his recent work on the origins of life pointed to intelligence behind creation. He declared that it did and retold the story in his book. Yes, I now think it does . . . almost entirely because of the DNA investigations. What I think the DNA material has done is that it has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce (life), that intelligence must have been involved in getting these extraordinarily diverse elements to work together …. It is all a matter of the enormous complexity by which the results were achieved, which looked to me like the work of intelligence. [Anthony Flew, There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind (New York: HarperOne, 2008), 75.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1314-1320). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· As Bill Gates said, “Human DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software ever created.” [Bill Gates, The Road Ahead, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin, 1996), 228.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1332-1333). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· When Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, he sparked a revolution in how the scientific community would view this. “Darwinism removed the whole idea of God as the creator from rational discussion.” [Julian Huxley, “At Random: A Television Preview” in Evolution After Darwin, ed. Sol Tax (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1960), 45.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1351-1353). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· Dawkins explained how this theory caused him to leave the Christian faith and embrace atheism: “At about fifteen I recognized that there was no good reason to believe in any kind of supernatural Creator. My last vestige of religious faith disappeared when I finally understood the Darwinian explanation for life.” [Richard Dawkins vs. John Lennox: The God Delusion Debate, University of Alabama at Birmingham, October 3, 2007 (Birmingham: New Day Entertainment, 2007), DVD.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1353-1356). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· Einstein, on the other hand, who was fully aware of evolutionary theory, said the scientist’s “religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.” [Albert Einstein, The World as I See It, trans. Alan Harris (1948; New York: Wisdom Library, 2000), 29.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1356-1359). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· Darwin’s explanation that all things have a natural cause made the belief in a creatively superior mind quite unnecessary. He created a secular world, more so than anyone before him. Certainly many forces were verging in that same direction, but Darwin’s work was the crashing arrival of this idea and from that point on, the secular viewpoint of the world became virtually universal. [Jared Diamond, “Foreword,” in Ernst Mayr, What Evolution Is (New York: Basic, 2001), vii.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1365-1368). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· “Life on Earth evolved gradually beginning with one primitive species—perhaps a self-replicating molecule—that lived more than 3.5 billion years ago; it then branched out over time, throwing off many new and diverse species; and the mechanism for most (but not all) of evolutionary change is natural selection.” [Jerry A. Coyne, Why Evolution Is True (New York: Penguin, 2009), 3.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1373-1376). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· Natural selection is the blind watchmaker, blind because it does not see ahead, does not plan consequences, has no purpose in view. Yet the living results of natural selection overwhelmingly impress us with the appearance of design as if by a master watchmaker, impress us with the illusion of design and planning. [Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design (1986; New York: Norton, 1996), 29.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1378-1381). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· As Darwin wrote, “Science as yet throws no light on the far higher problem of the essence or origin of life.” [Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 305.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1410-1411). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· This argument leads smart men like Dawkins to say absurd things like, “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of being designed for a purpose.” [Dawkins, Blind Watchmaker, 1.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1444-1445). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· Nobel Laureate Francis Crick, who initially discovered DNA, would say, “Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but evolved.” [Francis Crick, What Mad Pursuit: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery (New York: Basic, 1988), 138.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1446-1448). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· In their book Evolution from Space, Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe argue that the probability of life arising on earth on its own is on the order of one chance in 1040000. [Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, Evolution from Space (London: Granada Publishing Ltd., 1981), 20.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1454-1456). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· They said it was the same probability that a tornado could blow through a scrapyard and piece together a Boeing 747 airplane, full of gas, ready to fly. [Fred Hoyle, in “Hoyle on Evolution,” Nature,” vol. 294, 12 November 1981, 105.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1457-1458). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· Their point was that since life couldn’t have arisen on its own, it must have come from outer space. [Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, Evolution from Space, 28.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1458-1460). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· Dr. Daniel Came of Oxford, who is an atheist as well, responded sharply to Dawkins on this central tenet of his book: Dawkins maintains that we’re not justified in inferring a designer as the best explanation of the appearance of design in the universe because then a new problem surfaces: who designed the designer? This argument is as old as the hills and as any reasonably competent first-year undergraduate could point out is patently invalid. For an explanation to be successful we do not need an explanation of the explanation. One might as well say that evolution by natural selection explains nothing because it does nothing to explain why there were living organisms on earth in the first place; or that the big bang fails to explain the cosmic background radiation because the big bang is itself inexplicable. [Daniel Came, “Richard Dawkins Refusal to Debate Is Cynical and Anti-Intellectual,” The Guardian, October 22, 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/oct/22/richard-dawkins-refusal-debate-william-lane-craig?CMP=twt_gu.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1469-1475). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· “a little learning is a dangerous thing!” [Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (New York: Oxford University, 2012), 27.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1481-1482). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· Dawkins tried to explain: It is grindingly, creakingly, crashingly obvious that, if Darwinism were really a theory of chance, it couldn’t work. You don’t need to be a mathematician or physicist to calculate that an eye or a haemoglobin molecule would take from here to infinity to self-assemble by sheer higgledy-piggledy luck. Far from being a difficulty peculiar to Darwinism, the astronomic improbability of eyes and knees, enzymes and elbow joints and all the other living wonders is precisely the problem that any theory of life must solve, and that Darwinism uniquely does solve. It solves it by breaking the improbability up into small, manageable parts, smearing out the luck needed, going round the back of Mount Improbable and crawling up the gentle slopes, inch by million-year inch. Only God would essay the mad task of leaping up the precipice in a single bound. [Richard Dawkins, Climbing Mount Improbable (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 77.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1500-1507). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· The cover article explained, “In a burst of creativity like nothing before or since, nature appears to have sketched out the blueprints for virtually the whole of the animal kingdom. This explosion of biological diversity is described by scientists as biology’s Big Bang.” [J. Madeleine Nash, “When Life Exploded,” Time, December 4, 1995, http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19951204,00.html (accessed September 21, 2012).] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1601-1603). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· Indeed, while most people cling to the notion that evolution works its magic over millions of years, scientists are realizing that biological change often occurs in sudden fits and starts. . . . All around the world . . . scientists have found the mineralized remains of organisms that represent the emergence of nearly every major branch in the zoological tree. [[J. Madeleine Nash, “When Life Exploded,” Time, December 4, 1995, http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19951204,00.html (accessed September 21, 2012).] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1605-1607). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· “These difficulties and objections may be classed under the following heads: First, why, if species have descended from other species by fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms? Why is not all nature in confusion, instead of the species being, as we see them, well defined?” [Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 95.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1609-1611). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
6 Life Has Meaning And Purpose
· We now know that we are more insignificant than we ever imagined. If you get rid of everything we see, the universe is essentially the same. We constitute a 1 percent bit of pollution in a universe . . . we are completely irrelevant. —LAWRENCE KRAUSS [Lawrence Krauss, lecture, “A Universe from Nothing,” Oxford University, Oxford England, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjaGktVQdNg (accessed September 21, 2012).] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1642-1644). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· Richard Dawkins is the first to say that we should accept the truth of our situation regardless of how good or bad it is: “Nature is not cruel, only pitilessly indifferent. This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous—indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose.” [Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (New York: Basic, 1995), 112.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1697-1700). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· This posture is voiced clearly by Lawrence Krauss: “The universe is the way it is, whether we like it or not. The existence or nonexistence of a creator is independent of our desires. A world without God or purpose may seem harsh or pointless, but that alone doesn’t require God to actually exist.” [Lawrence M. Krauss, A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (New York: Free Press, 2012), xii.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1714-1716). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· Greg Graffin of the band Bad Religion articulates this faulty position: “However, people make a big mistake if they conclude from the anarchy of the physical world that life has no meaning. I draw just the opposite conclusion. The purposelessness of the natural world emphasizes the tremendous meaning inherent in the human world.” [Greg Graffin and Steve Olson, Anarchy Evolution: Faith, Science, and Bad Religion in a World Without God (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), 4.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1742-1745). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· So in the atheistic worldview: • Life came from no-life. • Meaning came from non-meaning. [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1745-1747). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· As legendary Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould affirmed, “Moreover and more important, the pathways that have led to our evolution are quirky, improbable, unrepeatable and utterly unpredictable. Human evolution is not random, it makes sense and can be explained after the fact. But wind life’s tape to the dawn of time and let it play again—and you will never get humans a second time.” [Stephen Jay Gould, quoted in David Friend, The Meaning of Life: Reflections in Words and Pictures on Why We Are Here (New York: Little Brown, 1991), 33.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1809-1812). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· Christopher Hitchens addressed his audiences as “my fellow primates.” [“The True Core of the Jesus Myth: Christopher Hitchens @ FreedomFest,” YouTube, April 11, 2009, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMo5R5pLPBE.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1813-1814). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· Richard Dawkins claims he is “an African ape” and that we are all African apes as well. [Richard Dawkins, A Devil’s Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), 23.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1814-1815). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· “It appears that our own species, in particular, is the product of a remarkable event of quantum [massive changes taking place quickly] speciation.” [Steven M. Stanley, The New Evolutionary Timetable: Fossils, Genes, and the Origin of Species (New York: Basic, 1981), 139.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1832-1833). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
Differences Between Humans And Animals
· Transcendent thought means that we as humans are able to think about thinking. It is called metacognition. [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Location 1880). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· We appreciate the aesthetic values of beauty, art, and other concepts such as nobility and honor. [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1885-1886). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· Dawkins admits this as well: “We are hugely different from other animals in that we have language, we have art, we have mathematics, philosophy. We have all sorts of emotions that other animals probably don’t have.” [Richard Dawkins, interview by Craig Ferguson, Late Late Show, RTC One [Irish television], September 18, 2009.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1886-1888). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· “Human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world.” [Noam Chomsky, Language and Mind, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 59.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1891-1892). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· Humans have not only the mental capacity for creating tools but also an advanced visual system to learn about the outside world. We have hands uniquely designed for complex, intricate motor tasks. We have the ability to take the world around us and make new things, such as iPhones. [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1900-1902). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· As Michael Denton wrote in Nature’s Destiny, “In addition to our brain, our linguistic ability, and our highly developed visual ability, we possess another wonderful adaptation, the ideal manipulative tool—the human hand. No other animal possesses an organ so superbly adapted for intelligent exploration and manipulation of its physical surroundings and environment.” [Michael Denton, Nature’s Destiny: How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe (New York: Free Press, 2002), 241.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1902-1905). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· As humans we are able to act beyond our instincts. There are certainly herd instincts and tribal taboos within the animal world, but nothing that compares with human morality. [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1910-1912). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· “There is an enormous difference between life and intelligent life. I don’t mean clever crows or dolphins, but minds capable of self-awareness and of developing advanced technologies—that is, not just using what’s at hand but transforming materials into devices that can perform a multitude of tasks.” [Marcelo Gleiser, “We Are Unique” in John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking (New York: HarperCollins, 2012), 4.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1921-1924). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· You are a unique entity, a human being with a unique set of fingerprints and DNA. You are able to think objectively about your existence and uniqueness. Animals can be owned without any moral implications, but persons cannot be owned. In addition, we have the unique abilities to refer to ourselves as self and to make free decisions. [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1926-1928). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· Besides wanting and choosing and being moved to do this or that, [humans] may also want to have (or not to have) certain desires and motives. They are capable of wanting to be different, in their preferences and purposes, from what they are. Many animals appear to have the capacity for what I shall call “first-order desires” or “desires of the first order,” which are simply desires to do or not to do one thing or another. No animal other than man, however, appears to have the capacity for reflective self-evaluation that is manifested in the formation of second-order desires. [Harry G. Frankfurt, “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,” The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 68, no. 1 (January 14, 1971), 5–7.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1929-1933). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· Only humans have the capacity to develop complex cultures that advance over time. [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Location 1936). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· Humans structure their collaborative actions with joint goals and shared commitments. [Michael Tomasello, “How Are Humans Unique?” New York Times, May 25, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/magazine/25wwln-essay-t.html?_r=0 (accessed September 22, 2012).] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1941-1942). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· As Donald wrote in the prologue, “This book proposes that the human mind is unlike any other on this planet, not because of its biology, which is not qualitatively unique, but because of its ability to generate and assimilate culture. The human mind is thus a ‘hybrid’ product of biology and culture.” [Merlin Donald, A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), xiii.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1944-1946). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· Naturalists reduce consciousness to merely the firing of neurons within the brain. We are not, however, merely brains, but we have brains. There is an eternal dimension we possess that lasts beyond physical life. [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 1948-1949). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
· Gary Habermas and J. P. Moreland, Beyond Death: Exploring the Evidence for Immortality (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2004).
· Kevin Favero, Science of the Soul: Scientific Evidence of Human Souls (Edina, MN: Beaver’s Pond Press, 2004).
Conclusion: Seeking God
· There is enough light for those who desire only to see and enough darkness for those of a contrary disposition. —BLAISE PASCAL [Blaise Pascal, Pascal’s Pensées (Radford, VA: Wilder Publications, 2011), 120.] [Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Locations 3241-3243). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.]
الحمد لله الذي بنعمته تتمّ الصَّالِحات