Do atheists have faith?
Do atheists believe in miracles?
Well, they would say no.
No, but today we'll reveal five atheist miracles
on Creation Magazine LIVE!
Welcome to Creation Magazine LIVE!
My name is Richard Fangrad.
And I’m Matt Bondy.
This week on Creation Magazine LIVE! our topic
is about atheist's faith in miracles.
Magical events and circumstances completely
outside the realm of science that atheists believe.
Yes, atheists often promote themselves as
intelligent, logical, scientific and rational…
they’ve even proposed, they’ve got this
proposal to call themselves ‘brights’!
The aggressive ‘new Atheists’, like Richard
Dawkins, Sam Harris and company, they like
to portray those of us who believe in a supernatural
Creator as irrational, unscientific, unintelligent,
ignorant, or even ‘needing help’ as Dawkins
suggests.
Yeah, and movies and TV shows often reinforce
these stereotypes by portraying ‘religious’
people, especially Christians, and church
leaders, as buffoons or hillbillies, and almost
never as university professors or scientists,
for example.
Yeah, but does reality does support those
portrayals?
Isaac Newton, the greatest scientific mind
of all time, he was a Christian believer,
as were many of the other founders of modern
science, and there are great many scientists
today who are Christians as well.
Actually, over 65 percent of Nobel prize winners
in the last millennium were Christians while
only 7 percent were atheists or agnostics.
Yeah, and surveys have consistently shown
that people with a strong adherence to the
Bible’s authority are the least likely
to be superstitious.
Of course, that’s because Christians’
faith counters superstitious thinking, like
believing in astrology or ‘luck’ or things
like that.
One atheist said that he was uneasy with the
fact that, quote, “some of the most intelligent
and well-informed people” he knew, were
Christians.
So no, Christians, people who believe the
Bible, are not in general any more irrational
or unscientific than non-Christians.
That’s right.
But today we're actually focusing on what
atheists believe.
Atheists believe that everything came about
by purely natural processes.
So, the universe, life, the mind, morality…
it all developed without a supernatural creator.
But is that belief rational and scientific?
This is gonna be fun.
No, it isn't rational and scientific.
We're gonna cover five areas where they actually
believe in miracles.
And just to define it a little further, they
believe in miracles without any reasonable
cause for the miracles (so of course no supernatural
being capable of performing miracles).
In other words, they believe in magic, that's
beyond miracles; magic, or the occurrence
of things without a sufficient cause.
Yeah, but things don't happen without something
to cause them to happen.
Okay, so the first of these five atheist's
miracles is: the origin of the Universe.
So materialists, or Atheists, once tried to
believe that the universe was eternal, to
erase the question of where it came from.
The famous British Atheist Bertrand Russell,
for example, took that particular position,
but, it just doesn't work.
The progress of scientific knowledge about
thermodynamics, for example, means that virtually
everyone has been forced to acknowledge that
the universe had a beginning, somewhere, sometime.
The big bang idea acknowledges this, and ideas
like the multiverse only put the beginning
more remotely, but don't get rid of the pesky
problem.
Yeah, the big bang attempts to explain the
beginning of the universe.
But, what did it begin from and what caused
it to begin?
Ultimately, it couldn't have come from a matter/energy
source, the same sort of stuff as our universe,
because that matter/energy would also be subject
to the same physical laws, and would therefore decay.
It would have to have a beginning too, just
further back in time.
Yeah, so the atheist's answer is: it had to
come from…
Nothing!
OK, so nothing became everything with no cause
whatsoever.
Now that's not science, that's magic!
I'm not making this up, by the way, this was
actually proclaimed on the front cover of
Discover magazine back in April of 2002.
It says, “The universe burst into something
from absolutely nothing—zero, nada.
And as it got bigger, it became filled with
even more stuff that came from absolutely nowhere.
How is that possible?
Ask Alan Guth.
His theory of inflation helps explain everything.”
Wow, that is quite the theory!
Physicist Lawrence Krauss, one of the loud
‘new Atheists’, has tried to explain how
everything came from nothing; he even wrote
a book about it.
But what he calls ‘nothing’ is a ‘quantum
vacuum’, which is not actually nothing.
A matter/energy quantum something has exactly
the same problem as an eternal universe: it
cannot have persisted for eternity in the past.
So all their theorizing only applies after
the universe (which is obviously something) exists.
Back to square one!
For more details on that, and especially if
you've read his book, there's a book review
that was published in our Journal of Creation,
and it's now online at CREATION.com/krauss-review.
It gives insights on why a universe from nothing
doesn't work.
Materialists have no explanation for the origin
of the universe, beyond
‘it happened because we're here!'.
And that’s often the excuse that ‘we’re
here, so it must’ve happened’.
That's magic: that’s just like the rabbit
out of the hat, but with the universe, that's
one humungous ‘rabbit’!
Yeah, and there are other aspects of the big
bang that are also miraculous, or believed
to have happened without a known cause.
The current ‘standard Big Bang model’ has a period of very fast rapid expansion called 'inflation'.
And that's what Alan Guth, was trying to explain
in that Discover magazine article.
But it's got some problems.
Yes, for example: there is no known cause
for the initiation of this supposed expansion,
no known cause for it to stop, and no known
physical mechanism for the extremely rapid
expansion (which is many orders of magnitude
faster than the speed of light).
But, these three associated miracles must
have happened or the big bang doesn’t work.
Yeah, on the other hand, the Bible says that,
“In the beginning God created the heavens
and the earth” Now this is not magic, because
God, who is eternal and omnipotent, is a sufficient
cause for the universe.
Now atheists like Laurence Krauss don't have
sufficient cause to explain the origin of the universe.
That's one of the five atheist miracles.
And by the way, the reason that God can exist
eternally is because He is a non-material entity.
God is a spirit, as the Bible says in many places.
He's not made of matter and energy, the stuff
that the universe is made out of.
So, He's not subject to the laws of thermodynamics.
Okay, number 2 in the list of five atheist
miracles is, the origin of stars.
According to the big bang, there had to have
been two phases of star formation.
Phase 1 involved the formation of hydrogen/helium
stars.
These are called Population III stars.
Now here is the first problem, in a rapidly
expanding primordial universe, how do you
get the gases that formed to come together
to form a critical mass so that there's enough
gravitational attraction to attract more gas
to grow a star?
That’s right, yeah.
Gases don’t tend to come together without
gravity; they disperse, especially where there
is a huge amount of energy, like heat, for
example.
OK, get ready for more magic.
Here you go, ready?
Introducing ‘dark matter’! - the invisible/undetectable
‘stuff’ that just happens to generate
a lot of gravitational attraction just where
it's needed.
Wow.
Convenient.
But wait, there's more.
There are countless stars—like our sun—that
are not just hydrogen and helium,
but contain heavier elements.
Phase 2 supposedly comes in here.
Exploding stars, the way the story goes, supernovas
from phase 1 produced sufficient pressure
to force hydrogen and helium together to make
new stars that then made all the heavier elements
(which astronomers call ‘metals’), including
the elements that we're made out of.
Now these are called Population I and II stars.
OK, but here's another problem; how do exploding
stars, with matter flying at great speed in
all directions, cause stars made of all those
new elements to form?
There has to be a coming together of the elements,
not a flying apart.
Pieces hitting one another would bounce off
rather than coalesce.
Most hypotheses involve multiple supernovas
from phase 1 in close proximity so that enough
material collided together to form enough
'proto-star' with enough gravity to overcome
the tendency to fly apart.
Then, that attracted more matter and that’s
what grew the normal star, supposedly.
That’s the theory.
Now here comes that magic.
Supernovas aren't common events, especially
multiple ones at the same time in close proximity.
This scenario needs a huge number of very
improbable events to account for the vast
number of the heavier stars.
But the non-theist has to believe this miracle
of probability otherwise we wouldn't be here.
This is more magic; in other words: it's miracles
without a miracle worker.
Ok, back to reality…
Well God tells us in the Bible that He made the sun and the stars on the fourth day of Creation Week.
Again, this is not magic or superstition,
because God is able to do things outside of,
or above, what the natural world does.
God is supernatural.
Now let's take a break and then we'll dive
into number 3 of the 5 atheists’ miracles.
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about the creation/evolution debate, particularly
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and historical science and how they relate
to the topic of origins.
Order your copy today at CREATION.com.
Welcome back.
We're on number 3 of the 5 atheists' miracles.
Five things that atheists are forced to believe
as part of their explanation to get us all here.
Right, OK.
Number 3 is the origin of life.
Astrobiologist Professor Paul Davies said,
“How did stupid atoms spontaneously write
their own software … ? Nobody knows … there
is no known law of physics able to create
information from nothing.”
OK, so he admits the problem that he and others
who believe in evolution, have to believe
as part of their history, leading up to how
we all got here.
And not only does the origin of the DNA code
need to be explained, without intelligent design,
but also the incredible machinery
that reads the information and creates the
components of life from that information.
Former hard-nosed English Atheist philosopher,
Antony Flew, abandoned Atheism and materialism
because of the growing evidence for design
in living things from this area of science specifically.
He was an atheist who gave up believing in
magic, basically.
He said this, “It now seems to me that the
findings of more than fifty years of DNA research
have provided materials for a new and enormously
powerful argument to design.”
He also said this research, “has shown,
by the almost unbelievable complexity of the
arrangements which are needed to produce (life),
that intelligence must have been involved”.
What an admission.
Yeah, that’s right!
Only an incredibly intelligent designer could
account for the information systems in living things.
Well-known American Atheist philosopher, Thomas
Nagel said, “What is lacking, to my knowledge,
is a credible argument that the story [of
cosmic evolution] has a nonnegligible probability
of being true.
There are two questions.
First, given what is known about the chemical
basis of biology and genetics, what is the
likelihood that self-reproducing life forms
should have come into existence spontaneously
on the early earth, solely through the operation
of the laws of physics and chemistry?”
The scientific knowledge of life grows daily;
just grows in leaps and bounds.
And as it does, the prospects of a naturalistic,
in other words materialistic/atheistic explanation,
for the origin of life recede into oblivion.
Yeah, science is telling us that the origin
of life requires something outside of natural
laws that govern the universe.
In other words, science supports Theism.
When you study life and nature, the conclusion
of that study is that life could not have
arisen from nature.
The origin of life demands a super-intelligent
cause, such as the Creator-God revealed in the Bible.
There we go, yeah.
For the Atheist, it's more magic.
They must believe in effects without causes.
That’s magic.
OK, number four in our list of five atheist
miracles is: the Origin of the diversity of life.
You see more magic is needed right after the
magic needed for the origin of life.
The origin of life is only the beginning of
the problem that the materialists have.
Along with the other atheistic biologists,
Richard Dawkins has spent his life trying
to deny that living things exhibit supernatural design.
In a book that ‘put him on the map’, he
wrote this, “Biology is the study of complicated
things that give the appearance of having
been designed for a purpose.”
Wait, should that be a blooper?
Are we doing bloopers here?
No, that's not what he wrote, is it?
That’s what he wrote, it is!
We could mention something here about not
seeing forests and trees and that sort of
thing… just amazing.
Design is just so obvious, I mean just as
God says it is in Romans 1.
His attributes as the Designer, the Creator,
are clearly seen in the things that He’s made.
So much so, that anyone who rejects God has
no excuse.
In other words, they can't say "I didn't know
you existed."
Ultimately everyone knows God exists.
And then Romans 1 goes on to talk about how
people will suppress the truth about God and
elevate nature, the material world, pretending
that it can create itself and other ideas.
Yeah, but it can't.
It can’t create itself without the miraculous.
Now since Christians know that there's a capable
miracle worker, no problem.
But for atheists, things like the great diversity
of life that we see on earth, that requires magic.
How did a microbe change itself into every
living thing on earth, ranging from earwigs
to elephants, from mites to mango trees?
For almost a hundred years, mutations and
natural selection, the mechanisms of ‘neo-Darwinism’,
or ‘the modern synthesis’, have been put
forth to explain the diversity of life.
But, with our modern knowledge of living things,
as science has progressed, this has proved
useless as an explanation.
Yeah, that’s true.
You know in July 2008, 16 high profile evolutionists
met, by invitation, in Altenburg, Austria.
They met because they realized that mutations
and natural selection do not explain the
diversity of life, and they wanted to discuss
this crisis in evolutionary biology.
The only consensus was… yeah, this is indeed
a big problem.
Yes, and we're planning on doing a future episode
about that meeting to highlight what they concluded.
Now we'll summarize a bit of this problem
after a short break.
Did you know that animals have genetic switches?
These are regulatory regions of DNA that control
the genes.
Scientists have noticed that dramatic things
can happen when a genetic switch is mutated.
For instance, a mutated genetic switch can
dramatically alter the appearance of stickleback
fish, or generate a great variety of coat
colours in animals.
Veterinary researcher Dr Jean Lightner has
suggested that God may have created genetic
switches to facilitate variation, the switches
having been created with a propensity to mutate
without negatively affecting other traits.
Modifications to genetic switches are not
examples of ‘evolution in action’, even
though they are often spoken of in that manner.
Indeed, these changes don’t involve new
information—new genes—arising, and evolutionists
cannot explain the existence of the genetic
switches in the first place!
The more we learn about the complexity of
genomes, the more they point to a
super-intelligent master programmer.
To find out more from Creation Ministries
International, visit our website CREATION.com.
Ok, we're on number 4 of 5 atheist miracles,
and that is the origin of the diversity of life.
We quoted Thomas Nagel earlier.
Continuing from the earlier quote, he says,
“The second question is about the sources
of variation in the evolutionary process that
was set in motion once life began: In the
available geological time since the first
life forms appeared on earth, what is the
likelihood that, as a result of physical accident,
a sequence of viable genetic mutations should
have occurred that was sufficient to permit
natural selection to produce the organisms
that actually exist?”
And that’s a good question!
And here's an example to illustrate why this
is such a head scratcher.
Think of the supposed origin of humans from
a chimp-like ape in six million evolutionary years.
Comparison of the genomes show huge differences,
at least 20 percent.
This just isn't feasible, even with highly
unrealistic assumptions in favour of evolution
to generate that amount of difference in that
time frame.
Actually, it wasn't even feasible when the
difference was incorrectly trumpeted to be
about 1% difference.
That still adds up to 30 million base pair
or chemical ‘letter’ differences.
That's a huge problem for an evolutionary
scenario of random mutations and natural selection
over supposedly six million years.
Right, yeah.
Materialists have no sufficient explanation
(or cause) for the diversity of life.
There's a mind-boggling number of miracles
here, not just one.
Every basic type of life form is a miracle.
That’s true.
You know Genesis 1 tells us that God, the
all-powerful, all-knowing Creator, made the
various kinds of life to reproduce “after
their kind”.
And there’s the answer.
So here again is a sufficient cause, which
has been confirmed with every witnessed reproductive
event, billions of humans alone, for example,
and also in the fossil record where the supposed
transitional fossils are missing.
There are thousands of species of fossils
that are supposedly millions of years old,
but they’re identical to those creatures
that are alive today.
So these “living fossils” are clearly
consistent with ‘after their kind’ type of reproduction.
Right, yeah.
And that brings us to number 5 of the 5 atheists’
miracles: the origin of mind and morality.
To get mind and morality from energy and atoms
has long been a problem for the materialist.
A fig tree produces figs, not apples.
That seems obvious.
And physics and chemistry produce physical
and chemical outcomes.
But mind and morality, those aren’t just
matters of physics and chemistry.
Sure, but creatures that are physical and
chemical have mind and morality, but how did
these non-material things arise from the material?
This is a serious problem for materialism!
And Atheist Thomas Nagel, who we quoted from just a few minutes ago, candidly admits it, to the extreme
annoyance of his atheistic colleagues.
Yeah, the famous, and at first reluctant,
convert from Atheism to Christianity, C.S.
Lewis, he put it well when he wrote, “If
the solar system was brought about by an accidental
collision, then the appearance of organic
life on this planet was also an accident,
and the whole evolution of Man was an accident
too.
If so, then all our present thoughts are mere
accidents—the accidental by-product of the
movement of atoms.
And this holds for the thoughts of the materialists
and astronomers as well as for anyone else’s.
But if their thoughts—i.e. of materialism
and astronomy—are merely accidental by-products,
why should we believe them to be true?
I see no reason for believing that one accident
should be able to give me a correct account
of all the other accidents.
It’s like expecting that the accidental
shape taken by the splash when you upset a
milk jug should give you a correct account
of how the jug was made and why it was upset.”
The Atheist has no sufficient cause to explain
the existence of mind and morality.
Having effects without causes requires magic!
And that raises the question: Why do apparently
intelligent people resort to believing in
magic—uncaused events—at so many points?
And the answer is: By not believing in God
they've painted themselves into an irrational
philosophical corner, in a sense.
Yeah, that’s right.
You know Romans 1:21 says that when people
deny that the Creator-God exists, they end
up with ‘futile thinking’.
Now we’ve discussed plenty of that in just
these 5 areas of the atheists creation story.
Yeah, and yet scientists who have swallowed
evolution will admit that they'll believe
it even if it doesn't make sense.
Richard Lewontin, one of the world’s leaders
in evolutionary biology admitted that, leaving
God out of the picture, “We take the side
of science in spite of the patent absurdity
of some of its constructs … ” Wow.
Now note that he confuses ‘science’ with
materialism, and he admits that, when he gives
the reasoning for accepting 'absurdities'.
He says, "…because we have a prior commitment,
a commitment to materialism."
And that, "… materialism is absolute, for
we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door."
So he'll censor out any conclusion that points
to God.
Sad.
G. K. Chesterton, he said, "When men choose not
to believe in God, they do not thereafter
believe in nothing, they then become capable
of believing in anything.”
So, it's not that atheists lack faith.
On the contrary, they will have great faith;
and that faith, as we've seen, lacks a foundation.
Believing that the material universe can produce
all that we see is an example of this 'futile
thinking' that Romans 1 describes.
And we'll be right back.
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So here are the 5 atheist miracles that we
wanted to cover.
Now there are many more that we could have
added, and maybe you can think of some yourself,
but the point here is that Atheism requires
a lot of faith.
Yes, and it requires faith in something that
can't produce the universe and everything in it.
The scientific laws that govern the operation
of the universe are
incapable of producing the universe.
On the other hand, God made man “in His
image”, a creature with a mind and morality.
And because of that, we're able to think about
God and ‘know’ Him.
Yeah, and that really brings us to a conclusion.
We've hammered on a major deficiency in atheism
for a purpose.
The purpose is, firstly to show that atheism
is irrational; that it's incapable of rationally
explaining the existence of the universe,
but more importantly to offer a solution.
That’s right, and the solution is, that
God, who is capable of operating outside the
universe He created, that is, outside of the
laws that He put in place to govern the operation
of the universe, God created the universe.
That's the solution.
Exactly.
But you might say, well I don't believe in God.
I don’t believe He exists.
But your other option is believing in magic;
effects without causes.
Whichever way you slice it, both positions,
both theistic and atheistic take faith.
You can't get away from faith.
The real question is: which faith is more
reasonable.
Yeah, can we offer this suggestion for those
of you who question God's existence: Examine
the evidence for God's existence with an open mind.
We did a show a few weeks ago titled, Does
God exist?
You could start there, that’s a good place
to start.
Isaiah 1:18 records God speaking to the people
of Israel who had turned away from Him.
It says, “Come now, let us reason together,
says the Lord: though your sins are like scarlet,
they shall be as white as snow; though they
are red like crimson, they shall become like wool."
You know, trying to live life as if God doesn't
exist is really the ultimate rebellion, it’s
the ultimate sin, and it's also bad logic.
It's logical to believe that the design we
see all around us is the result of a Designer.
Yeah, and the good news is that God is in
the forgiving business for those who will
admit their error and seek Him.
The Bible says, “Seek the Lord while he
may be found; call upon him while he is near;
let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous
man his thoughts; let him return to the Lord,
that he may have compassion on him, and to
our God, for he will abundantly pardon.”
Yeah, you see Jesus Christ came into the world
to make possible our forgiveness.
How can you ensure that your sins are forgiven?
Just turn to Christ.
And how do you do that?
Well it begins by changing your mind about
God; believing that He is who He says He is
and understanding that Jesus paid the price
for sin on the sinner's behalf through His death.
Yes, but He didn't stay dead.
He rose from the dead, proving that He had
paid the price for sin, and then He conquered death.
Jesus’ death and Resurrection are facts
of history—many have tried to explain away
those events and instead, they’ve become
Christ followers.
Turn to Christ.
That's the next step.
And you can read more details on our website
at CREATION.com/good-news.
Many people, including many scientists, had
to work through some questions about different
details in their minds before becoming Christians.
And maybe that's where you're at.
In that case, explore our website.
There are well over 10,000 articles there that show how creation makes much more sense than evolution.
You know, Christianity, it’s an evidence
based faith.
And science supports scripture.
