Three Questions Atheism Can’t Answer

Zechariah 12:1: “...The LORD, who stretches out the heavens, who lays the foundation of the earth, and who forms the spirit of man within him...”

The three biggest questions the materialist cannot answer, as I see it, are: 1) What was the cause of the universe? 2) How did life begin? and 3) What is consciousness?

Despite all attempts, these questions cannot be resolved from a materialist point of view. Interestingly, they fit nicely with the above-quoted verse from Zechariah. For the first and third questions, this is obvious, but one might wonder how the origin of life equates to laying the foundations of the earth.

But read a book like The Privileged Planet, and you will see how the very existence of life depends on the existence of a world like ours, having very narrow specifications for its distance from its sun, the size of and distance to its moon, the thickness of its crust, the makeup of its atmosphere, the strength of its gravity, etc. So God’s laying the “foundation” of the earth is indeed very closely tied to the existence of life. In any case, it makes for an interesting perspective on Zechariah 12:1.

But speaking of the amazing fine-tuning of our world, let’s look at the skeptic’s counter-argument and answer it. In response to said fine-tuning, the skeptic responds, “Well, there are billions of stars in our galaxy, so the odds that one will have a planet suitable for life are probably pretty good. Nothing surprising there.”

By analogy, we could say it’s like the queen of England saying to herself, “What are the odds that I, out of all people in the world, would be the queen of England? It could have been born someone else, and yet here I am, queen of England! Look at all the things that had to happen just right—I had to be born in exactly, precisely the right place at exactly, precisely the right time into just the right family... The odds are too great for it to have just happened by chance.”

But then Her Majesty thinks to herself, “On the other hand, someone has to be queen (or king) of England, and it just happens to be me! It’s not so remarkable after all.”

That’s the logic of the skeptic’s response. But look at the difference: We know that someone has to be king or queen of England, but do we know that some planet in the universe has to have all the right properties for life, as Earth has? No. We don’t know what the odds are that all the right properties (including the right location within a galaxy, the right type of star, the right types of other planets in the star system, etc.) will come together in one planet. So we are very justified in finding the confluence of all those conditions quite remarkable indeed. Though they don’t constitute proof of God’s existence, on the other hand the skeptic cannot just wave them away by invoking the vastness of the universe.

Of course, explaining the conditions for life is not the hard part for the materialist. Even given those conditions, explaining how life could arise from non-life has proven to be a brick wall, just like the problems of explaining the origin of the universe and our human consciousness of being an experiencing self. Each of these points in its own way beyond the material, to a designer, a non-material cause, or a non-material experiencing mind. To deny this is in fact quite irrational.

Another Evolutionary Just So Story: How the Human Got His Back Pain

I’ve been thinking about something I read (I think) in Richard Dawkins’ pitiful book The God Delusion, about how humans have problems like lower back pain because we evolved from animals designed to walk on all fours rather than bipedally.

In other words, quadrupeds have fewer problems with their lower back; therefore, the lower back must have originally evolved in quadrupeds, and thus humans evolved from quadrupeds.

Well, by the same token you could look at, say, a horse and reason as follows. Since it walks on all fours, its shoulders bear more weight, and probably undergo more stress and have more problems than (for example) a human’s shoulders. Therefore, by Dawkins’ logic, we should conclude that shoulders must have originally evolved for use in bipeds, because they have fewer problems in bipeds--and therefore horses must have evolved from bipeds.

We don’t even have to know whether horses have more shoulder problems than bipeds like humans to examine the logic of this argument and see that it is false. Once more, “rationalism” is unmasked as simple prejudice.

The Suicide of Europe

The long hiatus in posting here is due to my being out of the U.S.A. for three weeks with limited Internet access. During that time my wife and I had an interesting conversation with a very nice woman on a train in Germany. She spoke of how Germany is in trouble because of the declining birth rate among native Germans, which she attributed to causes such as the high tax rate (which makes it difficult to raise a family, or even own a house—she and her husband are both lawyers and cannot afford to own their own home), as well as the attitude among men that they don’t want to get married and have children, because the option of just living with different girlfriends is so easily available to them.

Thus we see European cultures self-destructing because of the humanistic, rationalistic thinking that has led to the liberal welfare state, moral relativism, etc. etc. But maybe that’s a desirable thing for those who see the United States as backward, unsophisticated, and unenlightened. Maybe suicide is what the truly sophisticated really long for.