Why Should We Believe Atheists on the Subject of God?
Logic and evidence both point to the existence of God, whatever atheists may thinkNoting a recent article by philosopher Steve Meyer at The Federalist, neurosurgeon Michael Egnor comments,
The public square is replete with books and articles written by atheist scientists claiming that cosmology or genetics or evolution properly understood disproves the existence of God. These atheist scientists profoundly misunderstand the implications of their science; they couldn’t be more wrong. As in his new book, The Return of the God Hypothesis, Dr. Meyer points to three particularly clear advances in modern science.
Michael Egnor, “The God Hypothesis Versus Atheist Science Denial” at Evolution News and Science Today (April 5, 2021)
The three arguments he addresses are
● The Big Bang: “The existence of a moment of beginning of our universe in an almost incomprehensibly massive burst of light and energy is astonishingly consistent with beliefs about the creation of the universe from the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions.”
Incidentally, the idea that this universe has always existed fails logically. In that case, absolutely everything would already have happened an infinite number of times. Including the fact that we never existed. But we do. So, if the universe we live in rules out our never existing, it cannot be infinite backwards in time. Modern science is learning more about the beginning, which supports the existence of God.
● Cosmic fine-tuning: “Dr. Meyer also discusses the remarkable fine-tuning of the physical constants in the universe that is necessary for the existence of life. If any of these physical values were even slightly different, mankind would not have appeared. It is as if Someone were expecting us and rigged the physics of the universe to make sure we were created.”
The typical response from naturalist atheists (people who believe that physical nature is all there is) is to claim that there is a vast set of universes out there, in most of which we could not have been created. But there is no evidence for this vast set of universes.
Egnor notes elsewhere that the concept of a multiverse is not even logical: “Universe” means everything, so “other universes” makes no sense.”
That is, if these “other universes” aren’t part of the whole, they don’t exist. If they are, they must obey the laws of physics — or else it is the atheist’s responsibility to both prove their existence and to come up with some reason why they don’t obey those laws. The merely alleged existence of other universes is not an argument against what we observe.
● Biological information: “The third scientific discovery of the past century that unequivocally points to God is the discovery of the enormous information encoded in DNA. The genetic code is quite analogous to a computer code and even to a language — it has punctuation, for example. It is a blueprint for life, and every blueprint presupposes a designer.”
In contemporary culture, DNA is sometimes described as “software,” but the fact is, no code writes itself. If Alphafold, the big new protein sorter, is a product of design, maybe our bodies are too. A Egnor notes, Carl Sagan wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Contact (1985), later a movie (1997) in which signals of a blueprint, signifying intelligence, come from outer space. But DNA “is exactly the kind of evidence for intelligent design that Sagan affirmed in his novel. His atheism blinded him to this reality.”
He concludes, “It is a scandal that atheism has such an emotional and intellectual hold on so many scientists that it corrupts their science and leads them to deny what is obvious to any objective scientist.” Many must hope the blindness is not too costly.
You may also wish to read these pieces by Michael Egnor: God’s existence is proven by science Arguments for God’s existence can be demonstrated by the ordinary method of scientific inference. If we approach the arguments logically, as the ancient philosophers did, we will see that it is more certain that God exists than that anything else does.
and
We don’t live in a multiverse because the concept makes no sense Neurologist Steven Novella and philosopher Philip Goff, both atheists, agree that there are many universes besides the one we live in. Atheists use the multiverse concept to counter the fact that our universe appears fine-tuned to allow life like ours. But is it a valid concept?