How You Can Know that the Global Warming Scare is a Hoax

Let’s take a look at the track record for doom-and-gloom prophecies like the current global warming scare. In the 1960’s we had overpopulation, with Paul Ehrlich’s bestselling book The Population Bomb predicting hundreds of millions of people dying from starvation in the next 20 years. Wrong.

In the seventies we had global cooling. The earth was overdue for another ice age, and measurements showed that it was coming. Wrong.

In the eighties we had nuclear doomsday about to break upon us, with the movie The Day After, and demands for nuclear freeze and unilateral nuclear disarmament. But the apocalypse never happened. Also in the eighties we had talk of global economic collapse because of mounting world debt. Wrong and wrong.

And in the nineties we had predictions of widespread catastrophes because of Y2K. Wrong again.

So the track record for doomsday prophecies is one of constant failure. There’s no reason to assume that the global warming panic is any different. Now that was easy, wasn’t it?

An Incredibly Stupid Howler from Richard Dawkins

Trying to read some parts of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion that I hadn’t read yet, I found this:

In pages 87-92 he discusses the idea that God speaks to people and compares it to hallucinations and insanity and quotes Sam Harris saying, “...while religious people are not generally mad, their core beliefs absolutely are.”

Then in the very next section Dawkins dismisses C. S. Lewis’s Liar/Lunatic/Lord trilemma by saying, “A fourth possibility, almost too obvious to need mentioning, is that Jesus was honestly mistaken.”

So to Dawkins, it’s insane to think that God talks to you, but perfectly sane to think that you are God (when you're not)! As I said before, the guy is a hoot.

Dawkins' Ultimate Boeing 747 Argument Crashes and Burns

In his recent interview with Richard Dawkins, the BBC’s William Crawley raises the point that Dawkins’ “Ultimate Boeing 747” argument against the existence of God means that no amount of evidence for design in the universe could ever count for God’s existence. God (or a Designer), on Dawkins’ view, would always be at least as complex and in need of explanation as the things he designed; therefore, inferring such a God/Designer is futile. To Dawkins the only valid explanation is a reductionist one, in the highly peculiar sense of reducing the need for explanation. A designer is “as difficult” (Dawkins’ words) to explain as the appearance of design itself. Therefore inferring a designer is invalid.

Dawkins agreed with Crawley that this was his position. But note that in saying this he contradicts his famous statement that Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. If no amount of apparent design can ever warrant the inference of a designer, then the advent of Darwin’s theory didn’t change anything. Inferring the existence of God was already invalid.

Further, look at how Dawkins’ argument would work when applied in other areas of science (Dawkins claims that the existence of God is a scientific question): whoever first posited the existence of atoms was being irrational—if atoms exist, then they must surely raise as many questions in need of explanation (“What are atoms made of?” “How do the parts of atoms behave?” etc.) as the questions they answered. On Dawkins’ view, atoms are not a valid explanation (i.e. one that reduces the number of questions needing explanation) at all. In fact, atomic theory ended up opening the whole Pandora’s box of quantum mechanics!

Even evolution itself fails Dawkins’ test. A bird is a complex creature, but the long lineage of posited ancestral species leading from primordial cell to bird, together with the processes causing that lineage to evolve, is vastly more complex. Not only do we now have each organism in that series to explain (what factors caused it to evolve, etc.), but we have the processes of evolution itself to explicate. Dawkins' criterion of explanation in fact excludes almost all of science.

Even if we change our definition of reductionism to a more reasonable one than the one Dawkins uses, there are problems. For example, we could stipulate that reductionism means not a reduced need for explanation, but simply the explaining of a complex entity in terms of entities that are each less complex (no matter how many are needed). But we could then ask, why is this reductionism the only kind of explanation that can ever be counted as explaining something? Sure, if we look at a field like chemistry, where we explain things by breaking them into constituent parts, of necessity the parts will always be less complex than the whole.

But in another field, where we are explaining things in terms of their historical causes (this is the type of endeavor evolution is involved in), it’s irrational to expect that a historical cause or antecedent must always be simpler than its effect. Is my father less complex in makeup than I am? No. Were the builders of the pyramids less complex than the pyramids? No.

Oops. I just mentioned an example of intelligent design. That’s the one kind of explanation that evolutionists want to exclude at all costs.

Mr. Dawkins, Say Hello to Logic

Just for fun, let’s analyze a quote by Richard Dawkins from his Web site:

"We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further."

Clearly he’s saying that atheists are more reasonable than other people because they take the logic of atheism to its completion. Now the only way this idea can make any sense is if you hold the following hidden assumption:

ASSUMPTION: Rejecting gods is a good thing in and of itself.

If you believe this, then of course rejecting one god more than most people reject is a good thing. Forget whether there are true god(s) or false gods. Rejecting any god is good in and of itself.

By the same token we could say that because rejecting scientific theories is sometimes a good thing (because some have been shown to be false), it follows that rejecting scientific theories is good for its own sake. So the more we reject, the better! To paraphrase Dawkins’ quote:

We all reject lots of scientific theories that have been put forth (in the past), but some of us just go further and reject all scientific theories!

So sad, so pathetic. I guess my expectations of atheists are too high. It probably comes from my studying philosophy in college. When I go to an atheist publication, I guess I unconsciously expect something challenging like Flew’s invisible gardener parable, or on the other side, Anselm’s ontological argument for God’s existence, both of which are equally invalid, but which really challenged me when I encountered them in college days.

But we have to remember: Richard Dawkins is a zoologist trying to do philosophy. Most Internet atheists are not trained philosophers either. Not that you have to be a trained philosopher to be able to think clearly. But maybe these people could at least take a class in informal logic or something. I mean, next thing you know, we’ll see some Hollywood director trying to do historical research into tombs from the time of Christ! The sad thing is not the shabby thinking and theorizing these people do, it’s the extent to which they’re given a platform.

Most shocking of all, though, is that I so often experience the same dashed expectations when I study the writings of someone like Dawkins on evolution, an area where he is a bona fide expert. Somehow I expect to find challenging arguments in favor of evolution—and occasionally I have. But very often they’re as lame as any Internet atheist’s disproof of God. But in this case, it’s not due to lack of expertise. No, the cause is very different, and quite obvious to anyone who is able to attain some objectivity in looking at the matter. It’s simply that a materialist metaphysics has come to overshadow the scientific facts. But that’s another story.

James Cameron’s Lost Cause

What to say about the much-hyped documentary “The Lost Tomb of Jesus”? It claims that a tomb was found with ossuaries bearing inscriptions like “Jesus, Son of Joseph,” and “Mary.” Why it’s just like the Bible says—Jesus was the son of Joseph and Mary! So it must be the Jesus of the Bible that’s buried there!

But there’s more. Also found in the tomb were a Matthew and a “Judah, son of Jesus.” Yup, just like the Bible...um, doesn’t say. There’s no mention in the gospels of a Matthew who’s related to Jesus, or of Jesus having a son. The film also claims that another Mary buried in the same family tomb was Jesus’ wife, and that she was the Mary Magdalene of the gospels. Again, a clear contradiction of the Bible’s portrayal: no one identified as Jesus’ wife ever shows up in the gospels, not when he was crucified, not after his death, never.

So if the names in the tomb don’t fit with the names of the Bible, why claim that it’s the Jesus of the Bible? Well, you see, the Bible just got some of its facts wrong. The real truth is the story Cameron has made up based on some names in a tomb. Names that were extremely common in Jesus’ day and can be found in many other tombs. Okay, so it’s really just a bunch of bunk, but hey, it got a lot of publicity, and Cameron and the Discovery Channel probably made loads of money off of it. In the process selling their souls by promoting a blasphemous hoax. I think the Bible has something to say about that as well.

Here are some places where I have found interesting further discussion:

http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/who-exactly-doesnt-think-there-is-a-war-on-between-materialists-and-non-materialists/trackback/

http://atheismsucks.blogspot.com/2007/02/james-camerons-scholarship-gets.html

The Scientific Failure of Man-Centered Rationalism

The ancient Greeks came so close to inventing modern science—and yet they never quite got there. What prevented them? Perhaps the answer lies in the attitude expressed by Protagoras, one of the earliest of Greek philosophers: “Man is the measure of all things.” Ancient Greek science was rationalistic, but it was a human-centered rationalism. When Aristotle sought scientific explanations, he derived them solely from his own reason. Science was to be pursued in the same way as philosophy—simply by thinking about things, not by experimentation. Or as Everett Ferguson says in Backgrounds of Early Christianity, for the Stoics “the universe is orderly. Problems in understanding it are logical problems and can be solved if one works on them.”

Now contrast Protagoras’s statement of man being the measure with the Bible’s declaration in Isaiah 55:8-9: “‘For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways,’ declares the Lord. ‘For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts higher than your thoughts’” (NASB).

If you realize that the Creator of the universe thinks differently than you might think, then you don’t assume that your own thoughts will reveal to you the principles of the universe. You have to go out and try to find those principles in nature itself. Though modern science surely has roots in ancient Greek science, perhaps it was the biblical world view of Christian Europe that provided the missing element necessary for science as we know it to emerge. Man-centered rationalism, as opposed to God-centered rationalism, is doomed to failure.

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.