book review: against all gods

What’s right and wrong about the new #atheism.

I’ve gotta be honest… I was a little surprised by this title (and subtitle) on a Christian book. But Against All Gods presented a refreshingly honest look at what’s important in the debate between the secular atheist and the Biblical Christian world views.

Focused on the controversy around a proposed course at Harvard about ‘faith and reason’, Johnson and Reynolds applaud the New Atheists for bringing discussion about faith in any religion back into the spotlight. While this book is less about the actual apologetic for the Christian faith, it is about how we talk with each other.

Johnson and Reynolds challenge Atheists (and Christians alike) to ask the right questions about what faith in a God really means. They argue that faith is not the opposite of reason, but it’s what allows us to act when we cannot be absolutely certain about what we believe to be true. Ironically, this is the very thing that keeps science moving forward, especially in areas were there is little (or no) actual evidence to immediately prove a hypothesis. In addition, they show how reason is just as important to Christian belief as it is to science. Essentially, the worlds of science and religion are much closer than many choose to realize.

Phillip E. Johnson is often referred to as the father of the intelligent design movement, and has been at the forefront of the public debate over evolution and creation for many years. John Mark Reynolds is the founder and director of the Torrey Honors Institute and professor of philosophy at Biola University. Together these men make a great one-two punch in the discussion between atheism and religion.

Personally, I’m not a fan of the Christian mentality of, “Bible good – atheist bad”. I need a good book like this every once in a while to help me better understand the discussion between these two conflicting world views. Against All Gods not only leveled the playing field, but it also outlined the rules of engagement that both sides of the argument should play by. This book sharpened, encouraged, and outraged me all at the same time. But most of all, I’m more prepared to talk… and ask the right questions.

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Note: This book was part of my summer reading list.

wordle :: why believe in a god?

After several back-and-forth comments with an atheist (and a few others), my last post (including comments) got up to over 5,600 words pretty quickly. That is some serious content! I encourage you to check out the conversation, but for those of you that prefer not to read the entire post and comments, I thought a wordle would help to provide a good summary…

why believe in a god?

Most definitions of God aren’t scientifically testable. They are philosophical abstractions, logical contradictions, imprecise spiritual notions, or subjective feelings. So there appears no way to show that this or that particular god idea is true or false, or even makes much sense. Moreover, most people don’t even want their god idea to be scientifically testable, since that might result in it being falsified.
                                                — American Humanist Association

I was floored today when checking out the news to see an absolutely blatant and public attack on Christianity (and all religion)! It seems that the American Humanist Association (a group that promotes atheism) is running an ad campaign this Christmas season that challenges people to not believe in a god. The quote above is from the website that people are referred to in the ad for more information.

While I can appreciate the organization’s desire to prompt people to be good and kind to each other, but am amazed at the anti-religious statements that they use to deliver that message. The website does not even tell people about ways that they can help to spread ‘goodness’, but instead simply pushes their anti-religious, secular humanist worldview.

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life on mars?

When we think about the possibility alien life, we usually think about life that comes from a planet in some distant system or other galaxy. But imagine that the one of the planets closest to us had a whole population of other life forms on it. Imagine a completely different race of “people” living there…   so close to home…

Well one of the more popular discussions in science these days is around the possibility of “life” on Mars. The Phoenix Mars Lander (pictured here) is sending information back to earth that is leading some to believe that at least the idea of life on Mars is possible. And that idea is scaring the heck out of Creationists that believe that life on Earth is uniquely created by God. That discussion is the topic of a recent article that I came across, and wanted to share…

The Implications of the Hypothetical Discovery of Martian Life for Intelligent Design
by Casey Luskin

The article does a great job in dealing with what life on Mars really means to those who subscribe to Intelligent Design. The bottom line is that the potential discovery life on Mars does not threaten Intelligent Design as much as people might think. Here is a brief overview of the points that Luskin makes…

1. If there is life on Mars, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it arose there naturally. The assumption of evolutionists would claim that if life exists, then it must have gotten there by blind natural processes. Scientists agree that the odds of this are quite slim, so the question to ask here is, “how do they know that it evolved naturally?”
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2. Building on the first point, life on Mars could have come from Earth. The existence of “Mars rocks” here on Earth as the possible result of meteorite activity means that there is also the possibility of “Earth rocks” on Mars for the very same reason. The possibility exists that impacts on our planet may have sent rocks with Earth life on them deep into space, and then landing on Mars. Life there could literally be interplanetary trash from our own planet.
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3. Even if the ingredients (water, amino acids, and other necessary building blocks) were all there, it doesn’t mean that they come together in the right way for life to evolve. Luskin uses the analogy of putting all of the ingredients of a cake into a bowl not resulting in a cake. The existence of the proper ingredients does not mean that all of the other right conditions exist to make the evolution of life occur from that.

What amazes me the most about this whole thing is the idea of how the evolutionists seem to be guilty of the very thing that they accuse those that believe in Intelligent Design of, and that is being irrational. It is simply not rational to say that life on Mars supports evolution because it could only exist otherwise. The fact is that “life” on Mars can be easily explained in an Intelligent Design model, and is actually less likely in an evolutionary model.

This makes me wonder why evolutionists push so hard to prove something that is less logical. Why do they wholesale reject even the very idea that Intelligent Design could be the answer? But part of the answer to this is based in the idea that they are starting with a completely different worldview than what I have. While there are some variances to some of these, I see worldviews falling into three categories…

• Naturalist – the belief that only the physical exists
• Spiritualist – the belief that only the spiritual exists (the physical is merely a manifestation of what is perceived in the spiritual)
• Biblical Christianity – the belief that both the physical and the spiritual exist

You see, my perspective on the existence of life is founded in the idea that the physical life that we experience was created by a spiritual being. If someone does not believe in the spiritual, then the idea of an Intelligent Designer (God) as a non-physical entity simply is not possible. Therefore, only purely physical explanations can be used to describe the origins of life.

Therefore, when “debating” the origin of life with evolutionists, the issue of the existence of a spiritual world must be dealt with first. This makes me want to write a series of posts on dealing with these worldviews, and how those with the Biblical Christianity perspective can and should interact with those who are starting from opposing perspectives. This is the core issue when talking about the origin of life…

Thoughts? Comment freely…

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