Darrell Epp

  “In the absence of any other proof, the thumb alone would convince me of God’s existence.” 

                                  –Sir Isaac Newton

 

     I agree with him. If I take a moment to admire it, the way it grasps, the way it swivels and pivots through so many planes and angles, it also seems to me to suggest the handiwork of an intelligent hand.

     Of course the prevailing view says that, no, the thumb is not the result of God’s handiwork, it’s the result of time plus chance, and millions of years of random mutations. I think that view requires quite a bit more mental gymnastics than Newton’s. Let’s turn the thought experiment around. Say an atheist and his friend were walking on a small uninhabited island. They find a pencil on the ground. The atheist says, “Wow, I guess someone must have been here, at some time in the past.” His friend says no, you can’t jump to that conclusion, the pencil does not prove that someone built the pencil and then left it on the island, the pencil is most likely the product of natural random forces, like wind, gravity, erosion, and plate tectonics. The atheist says that’s nuts, that for whatever reason, his friend is going to great lengths to deny the truth that was quite plainly staring them in the face. I think the atheist would be quite right in saying that.

      Or how about reasoning by analogy? Let’s say that every time to encounter a certain phenomenon, the cause is always x. You encounter the phenomenon again but the cause is obscured, and based on past experience you assume to cause is, again, x. Take written information. Think of every time you have encountered it: a recipe, a poem, a stop sign, an ad, a piece of graffiti. Every time you encountered written information, you automatically concluded that it was the result of an intelligent hand, and not natural forces like erosion. Well guess what? Furled around the nucleus of your every cell is a strip of written information ten atoms wide and two metres long, a hundred million miles of DNA in every human individual. On this strip of written information, using an alphabet of only four characters—adenine, cytosine, thyamine, and guanine—is written the recipe to make you, all the endless details that comprise your person, including the recipe to make your brain, which is, by the way, by far the most complex object in the known universe. So here you have again a piece of written information that just happens to be the most complex piece of written information ever observed. Wouldn’t it be reasonable to make the same assumption that you made every other time you encountered a piece of written information, that it is the result of not time plus chance, but is the result of an intelligent hand?

     Last year I had a very enjoyable conversation with a friend about this topic. He was  unimpressed with the argument I put forward in the previous paragraph, and concluded that I don’t understand how evolution works and the way scientists use the terms ‘random’ and ‘chance.’ My friend is a very bright guy so I concede I could just be missing something here, and he is quite right that the talk of ‘random’ and ‘chance’ mutations is a big red flag for me. Here’s why: whatever those words mean to a scientist, which I admit I am not, to me they are pretty much synonymous with ‘meaningless.’ You know, if something’s random, it’s devoid of any recognizable pattern. And however God created the world, however God created you, there was nothing meaningless about it. On the contrary, human life, and your life personally, are just bursting with meaning, in my view.

         One canard that has become cliched from over-use is ‘If there is a loving and all-powerful God, why is there so much nastiness and pain in the world?’ That’s a valid question (and one that deserves a serious lengthy response. I recommend curious readers seek out The Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis, Where Is God When It Hurts by Philip Yancy, and the books of Ravi Zacharias for thoughtful discussions of those sorts of problems) but no one ever seems to point out that the obverse of that question is just as valid a question. Why does the atheist never have to answer the challenge of: ‘If there is NOT an intelligent and all-loving God at work in the cosmos, why should the cosmos be full of so much beauty? Why am I able to experience joy, or pleasure, or satisfaction?’ I really don’t think the problem with belief in God is a problem of lack of evidence. On the contrary, I think one can see evidence for His existence everywhere one looks, whether one examines the thumb, the Horsehead Nebula, Saturn’s rings, or the ingenuity and imagination of humans who deny His existence. 

     After a long and fascinating career and millions of published words, Christopher Hitchens finally has a blockbuster hit on his hands with God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. I marvel at the title. What’s the word that professors love writing in the margins of poorly-footnoted essays? Oh yes: ‘Prove?’ Religion poisons ‘everything,’ every single time, does it? What about the Chartes Cathedral, or the Sistine Chapel, or John Milton’s poetry, or the food and medical assistance provided to the poor by the Samaritan’s Purse Christian charity group, for example? Does Hitchens’ book demonstrate, chapter and verse, how the achievements on my hastily-assembled list were ‘poisoned’ by the religious devotion of the men who accomplished them? Er, no, it does not. There is not a pimply-faced undergrad in all the land who’d be allowed to get away with such a loosey-goosey thesis statement.

     One effective, if underhanded, method of winning an argument is to frame it in your own terms before the debate has even begun. This is what the celebrity atheists like Hitchens, Dawkins, Dennett and Harris have managed to do by marketing their movement as a battle between science and faith. I wonder how they manage to get away with it; so much of their house of cards is built on illogic and cheap shots that would cost them major points in a formal debate club, but nobody ever seems to call them on it. Firstly, science vs. faith is a dichotomy made useless by its falseness: of course there have been many great scientists who also had great religious faith, and of course there are many people who aren’t scientists who have no faith. So what?

       Their inaccurate description of the debate is a clever rhetorical feint that lets them beg the question and stake out the high ground: here are the atheists on this side, the sophisticated geniuses of science and reason and intelligence and truth, and here are the religious people on the other side, the uneducated, simple-minded superstitious Okies. Look at all the crazy things religious people believe! Aren’t we special for having moved beyond all that? As Hitchens says ‘The telescope and the microscope have made God obsolete.’ Now I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I don’t know how telescopes and microscopes can help an individual answer questions like ‘Why was I born?’ or ‘What is the purpose of my life?’ or ‘What is right?’ or ‘What is wrong?’ or ‘Why?’ Hopefully Hitchens’ next book will flesh out that assertion in greater detail.

      The atheists’ rhetoric is so weak it’s fascinating to see it possess such strong media ‘legs.’ ‘Religion poisons everything’ and ‘atheists are the smart kids in this debate’ are counterfactual and ahistorical statements. Rembrandt van Rijn was a man of great religious devotion, and also history’s greatest painter. Sir Isaac Newton was a man of great religious devotion, and also history’s greatest scientist. Fyodor Dostoyevsky was a man of great religious devotion, and also history’s greatest novelist. Beethoven was a man of great religious devotion, and also arguably history’s greatest composer. For the thesis of the celebrity atheists to hold water, these four men must be viewed as pitiful deluded simpletons, a leap which requires a far greater leap of faith than I can personally muster. Far from ‘poisoning’ their lives, their religious faith inspired their awesome accomplishments. And Crime and Punishment isn’t just inspired by Christianity: it’s about Christianity. The Brothers Karamazov isn’t just about religious experience: reading it is a religious experience. My prediction: people will still be admiring the ‘Ode to Joy’ and reading Crime and Punishment long after today’s atheist bestsellers have been recycled back into pulp. God, and the God-shaped hole inside of you, can’t be wished away as easily as some folks might like.

      And here’s a nifty piece about the transformational effects of globalization…on 17th century Holland.

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2008/02/02/robert-fulford-on-johannes-vermeer-a-portrait-of-globalization.aspx

And here’s David Frum on Durban 2.

http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/columnists/story.html?id=4783a54f-a69a-4e6f-af1d-b331745ddcfb&k=59132&p=1

And here’s Allen Abel touring John McCain’s high school, where his nicknames included–sigh–’McNasty’ and ‘the Punk.’

http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=313991&p=1

   

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